Editor’s Note: In the fall of 2022, GreenBook’s IIEX Health event took place in Philadelphia, bringing both useful and inspiration content to insights and analytics professionals spanning the healthcare, pharmaceutical, medical, and wellness industries. Attendees found the content so valuable that we wanted to make much of it available to all who could not attend this in-person event. Don’t forget to sign up for the upcoming IIEX Health event now!
If you aren’t in those industries … how might you apply the learning within your own? At GreenBook, we believe that IIEX is more than a conference series. It’s a mindset. These are the forums in which the most important insights innovations are revealed, demonstrated, debated, and championed. What starts at the events drive change in our world. It is in that spirit that we bring you, directly, some of the poignant content we heard at IIEX Health.
Enjoy our On-Demand Video
Join Sarah DaVanzo, chief data officer at Pierre Fabre Group, to discuss three ways to unlocking different forms of insight. Discover how these ideas can help organizations understand the work they’re doing and also think about ways they can develop their skills and competencies. Click to view the video (courtesy of Civicom).
View more 2023 IIEX Health content!
Whether you were able to attend, or you were not, join us online to see what was shared by some of the biggest brands, the newest startups, and expert-level researchers across healthcare, pharma, and consumer experience. Here’s just two of the amazing sessions you’ll find on-demand:
Online you’ll find other fantastic sessions by speakers from Pierre Fabre Group, Novartis, Hinge Health, and more! If you want to stay on top of the trends in the healthcare industry — one of the largest spends in market research — you won’t want to miss IIEX Health!
Not familiar with the Insight Innovation Exchange (IIEX)?
Ten years ago, GreenBook embarked on a simple idea: Could we create opportunities for market research leaders to share ideas and collaborate to define the future of insights?
If there was something new to our industry — a company, methodology, or platform — that didn’t exist 10 years ago and is now considered a “best practice” … well, you probably saw it first at an IIEX event.
What starts here will change our world!
Transcript
(Transcript courtesy of TranscriptWing)
Susan: So, our next speaker is Sarah DaVanzo. She is the chief data officer with Pierre Fabre Group.
Sarah DaVanzo: Correct.
Susan: Did I do that well?
Sarah DaVanzo: Perfect.
Susan: Sarah is an entrepreneur. She’s been an agency leader, a corporate executive. She’s been in this space for a very long time. She’s worked internationally. She spent a long time at L’Oréal. She’s the founder of a nonprofit called Curious Futures, which is a collective of professional futurists and she’s going to talk to us about a concept and an idea that’s really close to all of our hearts, what’s the future of this business, what’s the future of insights.
As a super forecaster, I discovered that at one point, Sarah described her own shiny new object, her superpower, as being someone who has strategic imagination and applied curiosity. So, tell us about our future.
Sarah DaVanzo: Thank you, Susan. What a great intro, thank you so much. So, now for something completely different, okay? So, I’m getting you ready for your CBD drink. Join me in 20 minutes downstairs. Before I begin, I want to actually highlight three aspects about me – thank you for the gracious introduction – that you need to know for the context of what we’re going to be talking about. As you see, this is a chapter of three chapters of the future of insights and there’s a trifecta of me that you need to understand. One is I’ve been in the data and insight and foresight field for 30 years and much of that is across 22 countries. I was overseas for two decades and that’s an important point because how do you do the work we do across cultures.
Okay, that’s the first thing. Second thing is that a lot of the work I’ve been doing has been with startups, agencies, vendors and now, corporate enterprise. Each one of those, if you will, entities, have a different way of approaching insights, right?
The third thing is very important is that I love my job and I am an educator and coach on the side. I’m going to share with you three projects that I did on the weekends during COVID. Okay, so that’s where this is heading.
Let’s start off with a little background on the projects. All three of them are completely different. They are different, but they’re similar. There’s a Venn diagram of where they intersect and I’ll bring it all home in the last 20th minute, but they represent acting, experimentation – I wanted a three-letter word – experimentation, working with awe in the world of insights, so how do we inspire magic and awe and discovery, and art.
This is where it gets really interesting because we talk a lot about diversity and I’m going to talk a little bit more about it in about minute 15, but the point is is that diversity of mind, cognitive diversity for the work we do is so critical. So, these three examples I’m showing are actually three ways to unlock different forms of insight and I go back to this point of being an educator. I’ve been teaching insights work and foresight work for a better part of two to three decades now. So, this is didactic about what I’m using for the teams that I work with and league right now around the world, across cultures to help them understand the work we’re doing and also think about the way that we can develop our skills and our competencies.
So, let’s rock and roll. First chapter. So, this is from a white paper. I’ll give you a QR code at the end if you’re interested in reading the 70 pages, but I’m going to give you a little bit of a highlight. The white paper was conducted during COVID amongst us, people from all over the world who were insight professionals, who I actually conducted a whole series of workshops with, Miro boards, quantitative research and also a section of futurists. So, 24 futurists who look at the future to talk about what’s the future of insights. That literally was the premise of the study.
What’s interesting is building off of this morning’s conversation about AI. What we did was we did normal like SurveyMonkey surveys and Miro boards and all kinds of in-depth interviews and conversations, but what we ended up with was ultimately – you’ve heard this today – text, 59,000 words of text and fed it through a different kind of AI, which would be very complementary to what we actually did – what we spoke about this morning – this was an emotion recognition AI.
So, Quantiphi is the company, I’ve collaborated with them. I was doing work for DARPA and the US government in two jobs ago. We became collaborators and they volunteered their services and Quantiphi looks at specifically emotion. It’s for health services. They’re looking for suicidal tendencies, read the text of humans, right? So, we thought, “Okay, let’s analyze what all these insights professionals actually say to these questions and see whether we can get some insight,” and that’s what the white paper is largely about.
Anyway, some of the conclusions are the number one predictor of the future of insight is new sources of data. That’s what we said. That was the number one outcome with new sources of data is the future of what we do. What I didn’t tell you is what I do at Pierre Fabre. I’m the chief data officer, which is data, insight, intelligence, foresight, right? It’s all of that connected and there are four stacks: business intelligence, all of the data that comes from the company, sales, call center, HR, surveys, anything that comes out of the business of the company, that’s BI; market intelligence: category, competition, retail channel, what’s happening in the business and market environment; the third layer is human intelligence.
I’ve got all the consumers, the patients, the shoppers, the doctor, anything that’s a human and we’re collecting intelligence; and then lastly is cultural intelligence. What’s important for that is that we’re making the connections across all four stacks and that is an example of the future of insight in terms of the more data points, the more you can correlate. You can actually uncover very interesting insights about patients when I look at call center, when I look at sales, when I look at market and you correlate it altogether.
The next thing that came out of this study was that the quality of insightful people – the first, number one, quality is curiosity. So, you are all curious, the curious class, right? The very curious people because you’re here, you’re sitting here in my weird-titled presentation and you’re analytical, which means you’re critical thinking, but we self-select. So, that’s what the whole purpose of the three examples I’m sharing with you is that there’s a whole world of people who are not necessarily analytical critical thinkers that we can leverage our cognitive diversity for the work that we do.
Seventy seven percent of the insights professionals believe curious people are more insightful. So, curiosity was the kind of the motherload, that’s what we were trying to go towards and 10% percent admit never having thought about defining the word insight out of the insight – I thought that was funny. I don’t know if anyone think it’s funny. I think it’s still super funny. That 10% never even thought about defining the work that they’re in consumer insights, but what was fascinating is what – this is where the emotion comes in. When we looked at the emotions, they got really angry when we asked them the question.
So, there’s a defensiveness because perhaps we haven’t thought about it, it’s very hard, but that’s what leads me to the next couple of points is that there isn’t universal language. There’s not a glossary for the work that we do and it became very frustrating to those who are surveyed that there wasn’t a universal term. What is the difference between a need state, attention, a job to be done, a consumer insight, a shopper insight, a digital insight. So, there’s an opportunity for growth in our industry.
Eight percent mentioned – this is interesting. Only 8% said that diversity was actually improves insight and 19% mentioned a bias. Clearly, there’s a lack of self-awareness. Our industry needs not only physical diversity of the people, the humans, but also absolutely the data diversity and even the way in which we analyze the data and intelligence. I’ll speak more of this in a second.
Twenty-seven said that the biggest insight killer was lack of time. So we’re now – it’s about speed, we’re trying to get out, we have to do research and then 68% that the real-time machines because I know that’s what my management expects these days is that we automate insights collection and strategic foresight prediction, but that’s what’s killing a lot of the big a-ha moments and so we need to figure out a way to mitigate this, right?
Now, when asked, “What is it that you actually do for a living?” The majority said, “I connect the dots.” I’d like to propose something different. Aren’t we about gestalt? It’s about seeing what’s not in the dots, right? If it’s just connecting dots, it’s just seeing pattern recognition. I don’t think we’re just pattern recognizers, right? So, how do you train people or teach people or coach people to be able to see the missing intelligence? I have an idea for that.
Number two, the next point is the process for insight discovery is a checklist. That’s the number one process. When we ask, “How do you – how would you teach it? How do you impart the skills of an insights professional?” Checklist. I don’t know if you all think that’s a good idea, but I would think that we’d hope we’d have a little bit more than just checklist in terms of methodology. Writing ourselves, okay? We are very confident about our ability to be insightful, that’s what the data shows and we’re kind of okay about finding really game changing insights, but other research I’ve done over the past 12 years now, I’ve been conducting research on curiosity in American culture and got two TED Talks on it. You can see it online if you’re interested, but our curiosity as a court nation is declining and the people who are most confident about their curiosity are the least curious. Okay, so I’ll leave it at that.
Sixty-four percent of respondents say the insightfulness is a learned muscle and this is like the payoff for this section of this chapter. Yes, it’s learned. We can exercise it and that’s where most of this is about was I use these materials with my teams to try to train them to think differently especially across cultures about how do you mind for insights.
So, chapter two. Chapter two, this is a metaphor. It’s nothing but a metaphor. A way to reframe the insights when I get a newbie in the market or the newbie on the team, especially when English isn’t the first language to explain ways of thinking about the business. Think about an insight like a butterfly, it evolves, right? You find a nugget of something and it evolves.
Number two, you get little ones and little things that are not so important. You’ve got really big ones that are going to make big change and they’re going to be game-changing and yes, we have to organize them. There has to be some taxonomy to organize them and we got to look deep into them, the why? So, the reason why the butterfly looks to the colors is because of scales. That’s what’s giving the color of a butterfly is the refraction of different scales. So, understanding the why and – well, it’s a metaphor. Understand ecosystem, have some kind of organizing principle around the end of – the butterfly or the insight, try to understand the environment for which the insight came from.
The language, this goes back to we don’t have universal language of defining what is – need attention. I’ve actually had a number of our very large, of who you all know, vendors in market research come up with definitions and they were all over the place. It was not even universal within some of the largest research firms in the world.
Then dissecting, this is where we could provide some skill like how to write an actual insight for our concept. So, providing the guidelines of how we dissect the sentence of attention statement or an insight statement and looking historically. This is where backcasting can come in.
So, looking at the history of where that insight come from because really, nobody cares about an insight today. I’m sorry, my leadership wants what’s the future. I can’t do something right now. I’m going to have a product in the market in 18 months. I’m going to do an advertising campaign in three months or whatever. I need to have the future of that insight and the future state, and measurement, we wouldn’t be anywhere without measuring the impact of the insight.
Now, ideally, we’re trying to figure out how to apply the insight, how to make stuff from the insight. That’s the motherload. It’s not just, “Here’s your report.” We need to actually say, “Okay, and here’s how you can translate that and make something,” but oftentimes, we spend a lot of time running around, chasing insights, finding insights and I’ll conclude with – I tell my team, “No, no, no, no, no, no. Attract them. Create an environment, create the situation where the insight comes to us. Don’t go changing. Hence, this is an example of illustrative – our project, I guess, I don’t know what you call it – that is used for teaching insights within the organization.
Chapter three, Insight Alchemy. I spent a long time in the gold industry doing insights and marketing and it occurred to me, there’s a lot of metaphor here. Again, metaphor to teach across cultures. Back in COVID, when I was doing nothing on the weekends, I made a little – our project, if you want to go to the website later, you can see a little video. It’s with a very, very, very trendy Brooklyn printing house that uses a Japanese printing style and a German risograph designer. Anyway, TMI on the art background, [Laughter] but what we did was we synthesized a lot of the examples, metaphors from the gold industry and alchemy that can be used in the insights world. In this context, gold, not the butterfly, is the conceit for an insight and we, as alchemists, are insights professionals.
What could we learn from alchemy? First of all, we can learn from the knowledge and this is a concept that’s used in the gold industry, very much the Pyramid of Enlightenment, it’s the same thing. We start with the data and then we’re trying to extract information and intelligence. Ideally, it’s insight and foresight potentially and wisdom. There are lots of different, if you will, mashups. The alchemy is mixing different insights together to create some kind of new output.
The management of insights and some kind of knowledge management system is pretty important to be able to have control over what you’re mixing. In addition, very much like the gold industry, very little value for getting the raw data out of the ground, but it’s the working and the crafting of the insight statement as you move up, if you will, the trajectory of value, the margin increases just like in the gold industry. The jeweler commands the value, not the miner and that’s interesting because we, insights people, often don’t like to charge the money for that jewelry, that beautiful piece of object of written insight work.
What’s another metaphor? Well, do you know that gold is everywhere? It’s left on the floor, it’s in the mine dumps, it’s in the oceans. We can go back and I was a part of this when I was in South Africa, they were finding gold in all of the scrap and all the trash. How often have you gone back to your old insights? How often do we do that to actually reclaim what we’ve actually done? So, again as a metaphor, can’t we go back to some of our old work and see whether the insights are now new, fresh and relevant?
Then the future of insight, very quickly. So, simplifying the complexity. The futurists that I interviewed in this space said to be really powerful. We saw some beautiful examples today of simplifying research, simplifying the data visualization, the output and I can’t tell you how powerful and important that is, simplifying complexity. In addition, the idea of meta. We didn’t talk a lot today about – we did talk about quant and large numbers of doing research with lots of words, text and so forth, but really, how are we able to harness meta intelligence and looking across in larger data sets and especially harnessing some of the platforms that we have whether it’s Delphi or whether there are other platforms to be able to collectively harness the collective intelligence. I think there’s an opportunity there.
There’s also this idea here, Debbie, just an example of the 25 futurists, as well Spencer, we have foresight people and we have designers and how often do we leverage the design community and the strategic foresight community in our work. Oftentimes we don’t. So, just as a reminder that the future can also be bringing in creative thinkers and creative makers.
Another vision of the future of insight is essentially that combination of foresight and insight, being able to project the future, behavior of the consumer or whatever the dynamic is that you’re looking at, right? So, bringing in – just like in alchemy, you always have gold and silver together. They’re always mined together. They’re always creating some kind of electrum together, so we want to bring in the foresight skills.
Wrapping it up, we have this idea of extrasensory intelligence and experiencing insight or again, what might someone who’s an artist, how they interpret the data, how can you actually conduct experiments, research that maybe is an experiment or an art installation using synesthesia and all of our senses to interpret the data and also analyze the data. So, you have a diversity of data analysts as well.
So, to wrap it up, this is a little gift. This is your periodic table of [Laughter] insight discovery. It kind of summarizes everything that’s in the little booklet. It’s kind of fun, it’s a little crib sheet and we can have one taken home, use it, pin it or whatever, but I want to give this with you because we’re all scientists at heart too and so the periodic table probably should resonate.
In conclusion, technological, yes. We are leaning into technology because in the world of insights, anything that is plugged into a wall is a form of intelligence. Whether it’s a nest, whether it’s an app in your phone, whether it’s a smart home, anything. Anything that uses technology is a source of new data, ergo, intelligence, insight and foresight. Two, biology. I happen to work for a sustainable company so we use biology all the time. Going to AskNature.com looking for systems thinking and systems in nature that we can apply to human behavior.
You saw the question I asked about epidemiology and that was where that comes from is always thinking about biological systems and metaphors in our work that we can possibly leverage. Then finally, alchemy. This is magic. What can we do to create new frameworks for thinking about the work we do, but also inject some fun, some art, a little magic, right?
So, thank you very much. The paper, white paper can be downloaded for free there and the video on our project, Insight Alchemy, can be watched there. Thank you.
[Applause]
Susan: Wow. I’m suddenly very excited about the future. Anybody have any questions?
Sarah DaVanzo: Okay, sure. I don’t know if anyone wants – I’ll just put them here. Maybe someone may want it.
Susan: Okay.
Sarah DaVanzo: I don’t know if anyone wants it, but [Laughter]…
Female: Thank you. That was a very, very insightful presentation. I’d love if you could speak a little bit more around diversity in research and insights. Any thoughts about it and where it’s moving into the future?
Sarah DaVanzo: Thank you. Cognitive diversity we talked about.
Female: Right.
Sarah DaVanzo: I mentioned that. Data diversity. Actually, thanks for seeing that up because my nonprofit, Curious Futures, looked at the actual composition of the foresight. The foresight is very close to the insight community and unfortunately, okay, of all of the 123 papers that were being circulated around governments and investment cap, investment to community and education, 53% of them unfortunately were male, okay? That’s not surprising. I’m sorry, I got that wrong. Fifty three percent of them were in their middle age, over 65% were actually male, 100% were White, 100% were secondary education and 100% were essentially developed markets. What does that mean? That means that the people who are interpreting the data about the future – I like to think about it like cats and dogs.
Actually, how about dogs and all the other animals in the world? So, people with disabilities or challenges, it could be physical or emotional or cognitive are not being represented. People on the gender spectrum are not interpreting the data, nor are they conducting the data, nor are they even being asked the questions, right? We have people who might have been prisoners, we have prostitutes and sex workers, we have anybody in the marginalized communities. We don’t have representation, believe it or not, in the community – in our industry of conservatives. There are actually more socialists in our industry than there are conservatives in our industry.
We don’t have a full spectrum of even ideological and political viewpoints. I think bringing a big message would be to think about your vendors. There are vendors like yourself and insights in color that specifically talk about researchers that have a diverse background and also, just making your own internal checklist. [Laughter] That’s what we use of, “Next time I go into a project, who do I want on the team to bring that cognitive and physical human diversity to the team?”
Female: I think that it has worked so far with [Unintelligible]…
Sarah DaVanzo: I’m sorry?
Female: I think it’s worked so far in this industry as a [Unintelligible].
Sarah DaVanzo: No, it hasn’t worked, no, no, no, no, because think about – okay, I’ll use the foresight world. If you go to Curious Futures.com you’ll see what that predicts for the year 2030 and I will guarantee you, everybody looks at that and goes, “That’s not the world that I see, nor that I want to be in, okay? So, what’s not working is – our job is we have an incredible ethical responsibility of getting it right whether it’s insight or foresight because you are driving the captains of industry, you’re driving business, you are driving government, you’re driving nonprofits, you’re driving investment and if you are painting a picture of this is how the world is and it is not accurate, I’m sorry, it’s self-fulfilling prophecy. You’re creating the path to that world. So, our ethical responsibility is to get it right and I don’t believe we are getting it right, certainly not cognitive diversity. Any other questions? Thank you.
Susan: Thank you so much. This is fantastic. We’ve got a networking break now. We will start…
