The One Audience Insight Teams Fail to Research

The Ideation Mutiny

I vividly remember an ideation workshop early in my career, when I was assigned to co-moderate a series of breakout sessions to ideate new B2B printing solutions. Our team presented our hard-earned insights from ethnographic and contextual interviews with business owners as the basis for ideation. The presentation was beautiful, the insights solid, and the thought starters creative. And then it all went south.

The product team tasked with coming up with new ideas mutinied. They refused to participate. I still remember an irate project manager asking, “Why should my team give you any more of our time? We’ve done this over and over — and nothing ever comes of it. The ideas go nowhere.”

What followed was a master class in organizational deescalation as our client took the podium and began unpacking the organizational challenges that historically rewarded inertia. But the damage was done, and the ideation went nowhere. I remember wondering how we moved from so promising a start to so dismal an end.

The Real Failure

What I’ve come to learn is that this wasn’t a failure to align the team in the workshop. It was what happened before the workshop. Or, more specifically, what didn’t happen. Our client had invested in the quality of the methodology and the depth of the insights, both necessary table stakes. But she focused on them at the expense of considering the broader organizational ecosystem to identify how the insights would — or wouldn’t — generate energy for new ideas.

Any insights initiative lives in an ecosystem of competing and complementary needs, priorities, prior frustrations, the institutional memory of initiatives that hadn’t gone anywhere. When we ignore this ecosystem, we risk credibility. And our colleagues’ goodwill.

And so these questions — perhaps not voiced quite so vehemently — persist. We see it in presentations to multitasking stakeholders only half paying attention to the presentation. Too often, this is due — at least in part — to insight teams’ failure to do the organizational work to understand the ever-evolving context and really internalize the perspectives of internal clients.

Turning Our Curiosity and Empathy Inward

Insights professionals know we’re valuable. We see the quality of the insights that we bring to the table. We experience the “a-ha!” moments when everything clicks into place. And we bring outside perspectives, experiences, and ways of thinking that our organizations need.

We understand, instinctively, that you can’t design something that resonates with an audience you haven’t taken the time to understand.

And yet insights teams routinely accept this in their own practice, treating internal clients as a captive audience rather than as consumers worth understanding on their own terms.