How does the way we present our findings change the way they're understood?

Sarah DaVanzo, Chief Data Officer at Pierre Fabre, joins GreenBook's host and Head of Content, Karen Lynch to discuss her zine "Insights Alchemy". Sarah embarked on creating a beautiful artifact to adress the apparent ambiguity of the term 'insight' with varying definitions in the industry. The convergence of insights, art, and science result in a beautiful handbook where metaphor shows how we might refine and perfect the craft of insights.

You can reach out to Sarah on LinkedIn.

Check out the mentioned QRCA article here.

Many thanks to Sarah for being our guest. Thanks also to our producer, Natalie Pusch; our editor, James Carlisle; and our host, Karen Lynch.

Hello, everybody. It’s Karen Lynch hosting yet another episode of the GreenBook Podcast. Thank you so much for joining us today. I’m really excited to be hosting again. As you know, the occasions where I get to do this are few and far between, but it’s always a pleasure to join you.

Karen, is so great to be here. Thank you so much. It’s always a pleasure, every time I see you and [laugh] collaborate with you on some project. It’s always—it turns into magic. So, thanks. It’s a pleasure.

Oh, I’m so glad. Thank you. And I feel the same very much a mutual admiration for one another. Sarah, what did I leave out of that introduction? What can you tell our readers a little bit about your background by way of introduction?

Well, thanks. Um, I think, you know, as you rightly pointed out, my current role is running the data activation office, which really is a culmination of a career in branding and marketing and insights. You know, if you think of, kind of a pyramid of, you know, at the bottom of the base of the pyramid—maybe it’s a Maslow’s type hierarchy of intelligence or knowledge—but the very bottom of it is, you know, the data, the facts. And then you move up the pyramid to, you know, kind of information, and then ideally, intelligence, and then hopefully, then there’s insight, and I think that the mother lode at the top of the pyramid, you know, at the very top, the pinnacle, would be foresight, to be able to predict. And I think what you’ve encompassed is in my area—it’s not very common—but in my department of the data activation office, we have four buckets of intelligence.

Awesome, awesome. Thank you so much for that. It’s great to have that level of understanding about how you’re organized. And it begs the question for me is, how did you get there, to that place where you can sit on top of all of that and weave all those threads together for your organization? Tell me some of the formative points in your career that brought you to today.

Well, thanks. So, I guess it really is having dabbled in all of those areas throughout my career. I’d say probably the most hacked area that I didn’t have formal training is the BI. So, I sit with other BI holders or chief data officers, you know, as a member of the, you know, International Society of Chief Data Officers, who tend to come from, you know, computer science, IT, and more of an infrastructure and software side of things as opposed to an intelligence side of things. So, that’s the area where I’m greenest [laugh] and the area where maybe my perspectives are a little less traditional.

I’m an old dog. I’ve been around the block [crosstalk 00:06:20]—

The way you speak, it sounds like you’ve had a century-long career, you’ve done so much. And you know, you are not that seasoned. So, I just love everything that you’ve accomplished. And it sets the context for this conversation, which brings us to insight science. And taking a step back to this article that you had penned, you had written it in such a future-forward, creative way where you were acting as if you were in the year 2030 and accepting an award for insight science. So, give our audience a little bit of a feel for what you mean by insight science now that we have the context of your background and what you do.

Mm-hm. Thank you. And before I go there, I just want to say I—again, back to what I said at the beginning, thank you for working with me and partnering with me to give the latitude of creativity. And we’ll talk more about magic and creativity in just a second because I know that’s where we will go because that was part of my—the speech recently, you know. But the point is that the article was, first of all, using strategic foresight as part of a conversation around insight.

So, this is one of those moments where I’m sitting here thinking, if I wasn’t recording this with you, I would be fast and furiously writing notes because there’s so much that you just said that feels like gold that I want to follow up on. Talk to me a little bit more about design fiction. It’s actually the first time I’ve heard that phrase, so I am incredibly curious, yeah.

So, it’s a great tool. It’s a great tool for insights professionals, you know, who are wanting to think about the future, I.e., be a foresight professional. And so, design fiction is you design something—you could write something or create something—that’s fictional, but it tends to be sci-fi, meaning there’s a science or technology behind it, okay?

Awesome, awesome. Thank you for bringing that to mind. Actually, it’s reminding me of another speaker that I’m talking with it we hope to have on the podcast soon, who is working in cultural intelligence, driving some inclusion efforts in their organization, and hopefully projected out to the world. So, thank you for that little nugget as well.

Yeah, thank you. So, a couple things. One is I’ve been in pharma at multiple points in my career. So, it seems to be a space where I keep getting drawn back to because I like life sciences, I like life [laugh], I like humans, I like the idea of wellness and health and it to me, that seems, you know, pretty important. And so, there are remarkable differences and unique qualities to this field, especially where it’s related to insights.

Yeah, absolutely. In my previous life as a facilitator, and for those of you who don’t know, who are listening, before I joined to GreenBook, I was a moderator and a facilitator and I often worked with organizations to facilitate their own ideation processes, what’s coming next for their innovation pipeline and how can they move into that space. So, diversity of thought was always one of my prerequisites for, if we’re doing this, let’s make sure we get not just your team in the room, but cross-functional teams, and individuals from different walks within the company, hey, let’s fold consumers in, to kind of co-create that process with you so that you are, you know, bringing in some experts perhaps from whatever niche that you’re in. So, I’m all-in for diversity of thought. So, it’s bringing us to this next part that I want to cover in this conversation, that concept.

Well, it was really just, you know, being locked up in Covid, right, thinking, okay, wouldn’t it be great if the world was more insightful and we had a better [laugh] handle on how to get insight, right? So, I thought, okay, well, let’s talk—let’s see what we can do, you know, as foresight practitioner. I thought, what if we also showed how these two communities—insights professionals and foresight professionals—you know, can work and should work maybe together so they’re not two separate silos as they tend to currently be? It’s almost as if, like—there often incorporations different departments, different functions, the types of you know, skill and learning that you go through, the methods that are used, you know, it’s surprising to me that there’s not more overlap in the Venn diagram of insight and foresight. So, I surveyed 155 insights professionals from around the world just by reaching out on LinkedIn, you know, and then talked to, you know, as I s—a quarter of, you know, 24 futurists.

I think it’s part of the role too, for sure. And I’m drawing such a correlation in my brain to the world of creative problem solving that I’ve lived in where we have learned and are taught how to apply your imagination, deliberate creativity, how it’s a skill that can be—it is dormant in all of us and it can be brought to the surface with the right tools and training and skills and practice. Creativity is a muscle that we need to exercise in our work worlds to solve problems, but also yes, to go to this place where we can understand what an insight is. What I thought was really interesting in some of the data that you shared about this space of insightful people and curiosity is that people didn’t necessarily think of themselves as insightful. People in our field didn’t really think of themselves as insightful. So, this is a gap in their either in their confidence or in their training.

Let me qualify that. I think that they did—there was—in some ways, there’s a little hubris about their insightfulness and curiosity. But it wasn’t—there was also a humility. As I think that—let me clarify your point—when the research became really clear that there wasn’t a—51% said they wanted coaching to improve their insightfulness and would be open to a curiosity training, even, you know, if there were skills and tools. And so—and as you know, I work on that on [laugh] side-by-side projects, we’re all about how to cultivate curiosity, and you know, people, communities, enterprises, and so forth. And so—and I do know that it can be measured and it can be cultivated. So, I thought that was fascinating that there’s certainly room to grow. So, that shows both—it shows humility and that’s the first step to being a more curious person is being humble, right?

Another really interesting thing that you shared, a data point that you shared, just about the tension around insight and insight definition, you talked a little bit about the emotions associated with that for people. And what stood out to me is that there’s a connection to anger. And I’d love for you to explain that because I think that will resonate with our listeners who feel some feels when it comes to defining an insight.

Okay, so what we found with the AI, okay, as we fed the—what was it—59,000 words, from the qual of the research from the futures and insights professionals—again, it’s all available on a white paper on insightscience.com—if the listeners are interested, they can read it. But the point is that from the AI—specifically it was emotion recognition AI—and from the syntax of the language, we were able to ascertain that there was a very high degree of anger and fear when the insights professionals were asked about, “Can you define an insight?” Like, wow, right? You know, and that goes back to the point I was making is because there isn’t a universal definition [laugh] of—you know, in our field, that there’s still a lot of ambiguity around some of the certainly processes, the glossary of terms and so forth, in our field because it could be market research, it could be insights professionals, it could be strategic planners, there’s, like, all these kind of nuances of the industry, and more.

Yeah. And it’s good to level set on that. I know that one of my previous employers had a very solid working definition of an insight, and when I had heard it—and I’ll share it with everybody. It was, “An insight is really an unexpected human truth that you can act upon.” And what I did with that was, I took it in and I felt comfort in having something solid when I was writing reports or when I was trying to, you know, look at findings and see what could jump out at me as an insight because my personal pet peeve in research was always that’s a finding, not an insight. Let’s be clear. Like, there’s something else going on with the insight. So anyway, so I settled on this definition in my soul, really, for my practice to be able to say, this is how we’re defining it in our organization and it was absolutely a guiding principle.

Right. And I think the operative word in that definition which is really interesting, is ‘unexpected’ because, you know, there’s going to be a level of a spectrum of unexpectedness. You know, how many of the times—like, come on, how many pieces of research have you read and you’re like, “Yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep.” There’s nothing that makes you real—like, or not a lot—that makes you go, like, “Wow, that’s a connection I haven’t made,” or, “That’s an inference, you’re triangulating information that is, you know, really fresh.” You know, because insight, when you break it down, it’s inside seeing [laugh], right?

Yeah, awesome. Awesome. So Sarah, let’s move into kind of the second chapter of your talk, which talk about looking inside of something, right, you went into a metaphorical chapter where you—it was so beautiful, also, for those of you who weren’t there; it’s just a beautiful portion of the program, where you went into the language of butterflies and there was a lot of great imagery around the magic of butterflies, and even that metamorphosis on some level of the world of butterflies. So, talk to us a little bit about that metaphor.

I think a lot of us in this industry would know that the power of metaphor. Metaphor and frameworks are just exponentially unlocking, right? Because all of a sudden, it pushes one’s thinking. If you take that metaphor really hard, you start to then have to push your own thinking about how you’re applying it, right, and you think of things in a new light. So, I use it in my teaching, I use it in my coaching, and I’ve used in my business all the time, right?

Yeah. I do, I do. And I again, this is why I was intrigued by it. I love picturing, you know, butterflies just swarming all around and how many there can be. Like, that’s one of my favorite kind of just pictures. And of course, I’m somebody who planted a butterfly bush just to bring them to me—

[laugh]. That’s great.

So, let’s move into chapter three of your talk, right, for the sake of time because I want to be mindful of yours and our listeners. But what you moved into after that beautiful segue was something even more magical, if you can believe it, which was insight alchemy. Like, even Susan Griffin had joked because this is really what was catalytic for your book. So, while her joke was while some people were, you know, home during the pandemic, learning how to make sourdough bread, you know, you were out there, you know, writing a book on insight alchemy. And as sort of like a keepsake—one part keepsake, one part reference, one side—part teaching aid. So, talk to us a little bit about that. And then the gold as a part of it.

Okay, thanks. Okay, so first of all, backing up the IIEX Health talk had three parts. The first part was all—the first chapter—was all about action, acting, right, behavior. The second was about awe, which was the butterfly. Okay? And the third was about art.

Well, I’m sure they will, especially considering—again, going back to the beginning of this conversation—at least half of the insights professionals out there likely feel like they could gain some capabilities to become more insightful, certainly, this way of thinking, and some of the tips from this, you know, kind of gold metaphor, to you know, not discard the dust and to, you know, make time to be a craftsman, et cetera, et cetera. Hopefully, that will help them move into that direction. I do have to share with people who were not at the event, we had this periodic table that Sarah just mentioned, we had 50 copies of it, paper copies, and it was already like, “No, no, we only need to do 50.” Because we often at conferences, if there’s papers, they are left behind. Not one of these was left behind. Everybody took every last one, some people were taking photographs of it because they knew there weren’t enough. They wanted it. It was the hottest commodity. Maybe second to the, you know, to the CBD that was being added to the drinks at the cocktail hour—

Hopefully they were mixed. [laugh].

Sarah, this has been so great. Before we wrap, is there anything you wish I’d asked you that we hadn’t gotten to? This is kind of your final moment.

Just that, back to this point of cognitive diversity, data diversity, you know, are we using—are our teams that are analyzing the data, collecting the data, communicating the data, really, truly, representing of the inclusivity? And I mean, you know, not only obviously ethnicity and race and age and gender, but do we have people who are physically challenged or have disabilities? Do we have people who are representing different kinds of perspective politically on the spectrum? Do we have rural and urbane, you know, market research is involved? I know it’s hard.

Excellent. That’ll be our follow-up conversation. And it does remind me of, in your excursion to the world of nature and natural sciences, there is nothing more beautiful than biodiversity. And if you follow anything on social media that has to do with biodiversity, you get just image after image of our vast beauty in our world and what can we learn for it. So, I’ll hold on to that metaphor as we move forward as well.