Whether you’re reading this as part of an agency insight team, a client-side insight team, or a business professional seeking advice, we can all agree that collaboration is a soft skill and a significant goal to attain. You are likely also struggling to initiate any meaningful collaboration with stakeholders or decision-makers, and are looking for a little help on how to overcome this challenge.
As much as we don’t like to believe it, true connection and collaboration between teams and stakeholders can only happen under a particular set of circumstances:
There will be a smattering of other aspects to this collaborative opportunity that are unique to your particular business, stakeholders and project, but generally speaking the elements above are required for the success of any collaborative opportunity uncovered. As with any general elements to success, there will be barriers to overcome. Now we need to look at how to identify and break down those barriers within your business.
Collaborative opportunities are best identified and facilitated when everyone has all the information on hand. A little simplistic, but looking for any collaborative opportunity when you only have half the information you need (or less) is akin to looking for noxious gases in a coal mine with a ferret instead of a canary - right idea, wrong execution, and will lead you into risky situations without the right knowledge or tools to get back out again.
So how do we identify where information silos lie? Insight teams are typically pretty adept at understanding where some of these silos might lie already, with their experience with stakeholder communication, knowledge of insight activation in the business, and the transferrable investigative skills from their research arsenal can be applied to uncover where in internal communications processes are failing.
But even those insight experts who aren’t able to close that feedback loop to understand where insight activation occurs within the business can use that information to identify where the communication stops through reverse engineering. Failing that, spending the time to conduct an audit of decision-making processes throughout the organisation will not only uncover where there are failed internal connection opportunities, but also shine a light into where new collaborative opportunities are being missed. Once this is identified, then we can work on fixing them.
As much as we like to say we aren’t self-absorbed, it is an unfortunate truth that we are often so focussed on our own daily lives, our own priorities and strategies, that we simply do not pay attnetion to things that don’t have a direct impact on our particular goals and miss the bigger picture. Taking this further, through this narrow focus, this puts us at risk of overlooking the impact of our actions on the overarching strategies and moves at play. This is true for stakeholders too.
Adding a lack of stakeholder engagement to the challenge of information silos, means that not only do insights get lost easily, but the only people who seem to see this as an issue are insight teams.
We need to show stakeholders the bigger picture, connect all of their goals, priorities and actions to the impact they have throughout the business to remind them of what it is they’re working towards and how customer insight and collaborative opportunities can help them achieve this goal. Once informational silos are eradicated from the step above, this should become easier as stakeholders will interact with other teams more and see more of their impact themselves. But reminders every now and then won’t go amiss, and these interactions will uncover new opportunities for to share their expertise, their own insights and make time to work towards their shared goals together.
Once the foundation is set from the previous two steps, the role of insight experts is to then maintain this connection and willingness to collaborate. As more information gets shared around the organisation organically, there is unfortunately a greater chance of misinformation also being shared, and misinformation will either reinforce or start to create new barriers by devaluing insights and collaboration attempts.
Knowledge of any kind should be a continually evolving concept. To make the best decisions, we must make sure that our knowledge of the situation is up to date, right? If we are too stuck on what we think we know, there can be no room for improvement or evolution. If we can identify outdated customer myths and the circumstances or people that perpetuate this outdated information, then we stand a chance at eradicating them. This will give stakeholders the space needed to communicate more and take in new information to act upon.
Seeking any source of misinformation actively is a time-consuming task, but I would argue a worthwhile one. And there are ways in which you can involve stakeholders in this endeavour so that the onus isn’t just on insight experts to deal with this barrier. For example, planting Insight Advocates in each team, or converting a decision-maker or two into Insight Advocates in each team will mean that there are people with the correct insights that can correct any misinformation at the moment it is uncovered.
To implement the measures explored above and achieve a better level of customer understanding, you’ll need to right tools. As much as the end goal is to deliver better customer outcomes, to stand a chance at identifying and removing internal barriers to collaboration, we need to turn our sights away from understanding customer behaviour more towards understanding stakeholder behaviour.
A decision-making audit, such as the one mentioned in the first step, can be found in FlexMR’s free Customer Salience Toolkit for your convenience, and will be essential to bettering not only your understanding of your stakeholders but also the processes they follow, the policies they adhere to, and the other foundational operational measures they are bound by. But the rest of the tools required for this, are more soft skills. The skills needed to employ the right tactics to create or enhance internal connection are well within the purview of any insight team, as they use the same methods to engage customers in vital market research experiences.
All this to say that while creating collaborative opportunities might seem daunting in the face of the barriers in front of us, the methods and tools to break them down are already at our fingertips.