Being a good intelligence steward
The report was never the (whole) job.
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Perspicacity noun /pur-spi-kas-i-tee/
🔮 the quality of having a ready insight into things; shrewdness.
Yeah, it’s been 4 years since my last issue. Which is a funny gap for a guy whose whole essay this month is about following your work through to the end.
Anyway, welcome back.
– Kurt
Gathering quality intelligence is great, but then it’s about stewarding that intelligence through to the decision it informs.
A few years ago I ran the first real brand tracking practice for a company that hinged its whole identity on a super lofty category label. It was THE term that showed up in every press release, every product launch, in every second sentence out of the CEO’s mouth on earnings calls.
So, we did the work. Multiple markets, clean methodology, the whole rigamarole. And it came back saying (pretty plainly i might add) that the market didn’t see the company the way the company saw itself. Only a tiny slice of people who’d heard of them reached for the lofty label that was being used. Most of them were actually filing the company somewhere more ordinary in their minds. Then I went and talked to some of the Gartner and Forrester analysts who covered the category, and they were saying the exact same thing from the other side: the company was missing the things that would have made the claim true.
A gap like this really has two potential fixes: 1- drop the word, because the product hasn’t earned it; or 2- build the product up until it HAS earned it. So, I brought it to leadership. I made the case. I had the perception data, the analyst transcripts, a clear and (I thought) convincing story about the gap. Yeah, both fixes would have had a cost, but either would have closed that gap. Problem was neither happened; they kept the word, kept shipping the thing that didn’t live up to it, and hoped that it all worked out.
It didn’t work out. The market closed the gap itself. A couple years later, the company got swallowed, folded into something bigger, and the magical, sprawling, category-redefining future it had been trying to sell shrank into a feature buried inside another company’s product. Right about where the research said it would land. I WAS RIGHT. But it didn’t matter, not even a little.
For a long time, I told this as a story about someone else’s bad judgement. I was right, they didn’t listen. THE. END. It’s a comfortable story, but in the end I’ve also come to realize that it’s mostly wrong. Ya ya the work was “correct,” but the work also died, and part of what I controlled was done badly. I handed over evidence and expected a wise decision to be made; I forgot the stewardship that turns evidence into Intelligence.
Somewhere along the way, our profession picked up this belief that our job is done when the report is good enough (or great, whatever, the point still stands). You ran a clean study, you found something true, something surprising, you designed it all pretty. Done. Quality of work = quality of analysis.
I gotta say, I don’t think that’s the job. The job is to inform a wise decision. The report, the presentation, the crosstab, they’re all ways to do that, BUT they’re not the thing you’re responsible for. Your responsibility is to inform a decision worth making.
It helps to look at the word a lot of us (me included) have started using (no shade, love the word and think we should keep using it): Intelligence. Consumer intelligence, market intelligence, brand intelligence, competitive intelligence. We reach for it because it sounds a notch more serious than “research.” But the word has a history, so let’s learn about it.
Sherman Kent, the dude who built the analytic side of the CIA, organized the entire discipline around one premise: intelligence exists to inform the decision-maker. He got in this famous argument back in the 40s with his colleague Willmoore (what a name) Kendall, about exactly how close the analyst should sit to the person deciding. Kent wanted distance, to protect objectivity. Kendall thought distance made the whole thing useless, that intelligence nobody acts on is just expensive trivia.
Seventy-five years later we’re still having the argument; personally, I’m with Kendall. Once you decide that the decision is the job, you’ve signed up to be a steward of the work, not just a producer of it. You own how it travels after it leaves your hands, not only whether it was right or good when it left them.
We’ve all sat through the fifty-slide deck. Every slide is interesting enough. The analyst is sharp, the charts are well-labeled (!), each finding is genuinely worth knowing. You get to the end and the room goes quiet and everyone is (as professionally as possible) drowning. Heaps of info, no idea what to do with it. The meeting ends, people drift back to their desks or inboxes or whatever, and nothing happens.
A steward runs that room different. They don’t flip through slide by slide dictating what’s on the screen. They tell you what the work means, why it matters for the decisions you’re trying to make, and what they’d do about it; because *GASP* the researcher has opinions too?! Sometimes they’ll suggest how you might consider feeling about it, which sounds presumptuous until you remember that might just be what the client was hoping for when they commissioned the thing. Yeah the deck is still there, we’ve just finally stopped pretending that it was the (whole) point.
Alright, so this is where a certain kind of researcher might start getting nervous (understandably). “The second I start telling the client what I’d do, haven’t I given up being objective? Doesn’t the integrity of the research rely on my not having a horse in the race?”
Yay tension! Let’s pick at it.
If you fall in love with the recommendation you’re about to make, you will, without noticing, start bending the analysis towards it. Risky, and a common way good intelligence goes bad.
The problem is, some people hear “stay objective *finger wag*” and end up retreating all the way back to just-the-facts land. Lay out the numbers, keep quiet about what they mean, let the client sort it out. Just push down that strong plausible take you’ve built by living in the data for weeks, for indeed you MUST protect your objectivity by handing the client a stack of true things with none of the read that would make them at all useful.
Let’s find a middle ground. Bring your read into the room with everything you’ve got. Bring on the conviction, a clear recommendation, the reasoning underneath it all. AND never once push for the verdict. You ARE arguing for your perspective to be understood and weighed, NOT for the decision to land your way.
A little free advice here though: know where your read runs out. You’re the most useful person in the room on the evidence. You’re often not the most useful person on the final decision, because the decision also runs on the P&L and politics and a million other things the client knows about their own business that you don’t yet (but you should learn about their business, it’s important!).
Want to be seen as a strategic partner rather than a vendor? Here’s the move.
When we hand over the deck and leave, we’ve just assigned them hours of new work. Now they’ve got to figure out which findings matter for the decision in front of them, or for the room they’re presenting to next, and hopefully recycle the rest into something useful too. That distillation we’re (knowingly or unknowingly) delegating to them means we’re doing the professional equivalent of not sharing the mental load. And honestly, that kind of distillation is often work we’re better suited for than they are, at least if/once we’ve bothered to learn their business well enough to do it.
Leaving it on their desk is the vendor move. Doing it for them, because you actually understand and share responsibility for the outcome they’re chasing, is a heck of a lot more strategic partner-like. This, however, depends on knowing their business as well as they do. Not the campaign KPI. The BHAG the company is trying to pull off. I know, it’s hard. It’s hard to stay current on the state of every client’s business and their objectives and connect your narrow slice of work to the big thing they’re after. So many of us don’t, which is exactly why the few who do are the ones who get called back for another gig.
K, so what should you do today?
Tell your team what they’re actually responsible for. Not the report (though they still need to do that). The decision. I’ve watched what that one sentence does. Their eyes come up off the slides, they get curious about the business and the market and the world our little bit of research is sitting inside; and all of the sudden that whole universe of context became their job, and that’s a lot more intriguing than building some slides.
A few concrete things, if you want them:
Write a team charter. Not the company’s mission, yours. What the team is for, how you work, how you connect with everyone around you. Put the reason for being in writing, and make that reason the decision, not the deliverable. Bonus: offer to templatize it for other teams to emulate, help the whole company operate with clearer perspectives!
Get into the rooms where the decisions happen (or at least the deliberation before the decision), which is much easier said than done, so stop asking for a seat and EARN one instead. Show up to the decision-maker well before the meeting with a real POV on the decision they’re facing. Offer to do a pre-read. Invite them into the work and get them bought in early.
Consciously build your team’s business context instead of just hoping it’ll accumulate on its own. Put the earnings call and the 10-K and the trade press in front of them as a habit. Maybe even rotate who owns staying current on which client and have them report back to the team at a regular cadence.
Write the case study early, like right after the project. Use something rigid like STAR (situation, task, action, result). Situation will mean you need to understand the context around the decision and what’s at stake, Task will mean you have a clear understanding of the decision your work was meant to inform, Action is where you can gush about the excellent work you did, and Result stays blank at first. A blank Result section is obviously super uncomfy, but you come back to it later and fill in what really happened, what changed, and what impact your work had.
So, back to that unnamed company from earlier that mislabeled itself. For years I filed that under someone else’s bad call. But what really happened was that I squandered the strategic fork I had in my hand: the claim had outrun the product and there were two real choices, walk it back or build the product up to meet it. For a CEO staking the company on a growth story, that’s the conversation I should have had. Instead, I brought him a perception problem, which probably sounded like marketing fussing over a word, and he waved it off. I made my case, lost, and went back to my desk feeling dejected but right.
I don’t know if any of it would have worked. He was committed, and maybe the answer was always going to be no. Either way, I mistook having gathered good intelligence for being done, and shirked my responsibility to be a good steward of the intelligence. Won’t happen again.
If you have a friend or colleague who would find this interesting, please be a pal and share.
– Kurt