Unleashing the power of research across your organization

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Research happens every day in an organization. If there isn’t one already, we should create a bumper sticker that says, “research happens.”

So, what does it mean to democratize research across an organization??

“When I talk about democratizing research, what I'm really talking about is the need for us as researchers to recognize that there are many people in an organization who participate in learning and decision making,” said Behzod Sirjani , founder of Yet Another Studio and former researcher at Slack and Facebook.

“In almost every company, the founder is really the first researcher. And so I think there's an opportunity for us to use our skills and our expertise to support and scaffold a lot of that learning and decision making that goes on,” Behzod said.

In this week’s Insights Unlocked episode, UserTesting’s Lisa Lloyd talks with Behzod about democratizing research, as well as measuring research’s impact, how to tackle diversity and inclusion in research practices, overcoming resistance to research, and creating a go-no-go decision making framework.

When it comes to democratizing research, researchers should look to support and elevate the collective learning and decision-making process. It's not about offloading undesired tasks, Behzod said, but embracing a holistic view of organizational needs and finding areas where researchers can help teams do their work better.

For example, “Teaching salespeople how to do better discovery interviews or ask probing questions,” Behzod said. Or “working with customer success to build out survey templates for pre-training or post training evaluation; areas where together we are trying to drive organizational outcomes.”

This approach isn't about researchers saturating every customer interaction; it's about maximizing their contribution where it matters most.?

Democratizing research involves researchers recognizing their broader role in an organization's learning and decision-making ecosystem. And, most importantly, it means ensuring research is woven into the fabric of the entire organization.

Listen and subscribe to Insights Unlocked for more episodes.