Devoted to how insight is developed, shared and acted on

Share this article :

Other articles you may be interested in:

Jumping Jack

Welcome to the 14th pen-portrait in our series about different types of internal clients.

The person
Jack is an Operations Manager who genuinely wants to deliver the best service possible to customers. To his credit, he is therefore very willing to take on board anything that the Insight team can tell him.

The problem
However, despite his apparent openness, Jack is sometimes too keen. He doesn’t always listen to the whole story. For instance, he may hear a complaint or a suggestion from a customer and will then want to leap on it straight away to take action. He often fails to realise that this one suggestion or complaint actually contradicts the underlying truth of what is happening.
 
Ultimately, he’s the kind of person who will attend a single focus group and then base all of his conclusions upon what he saw and heard there. He will ignore the findings from all of the other groups that he didn’t attend.
 
The solution
To cope with Jack’s ‘eager to please’ nature, you need to adopt a two-pronged approach:
 
1) Education - The first aspect is to educate him if you can: 
  • Play upon his enthusiasm for research and insight and offer to give him a mini-master class
  • Explain the difference between various types of research, and especially between qualitative and quantitative
  • Make a point of talking about representative samples, outliers, and the value (but also the pitfalls) of using anecdotes from individuals
2) Diplomacy – If it’s still in his nature to leap on things without due consideration, then you’ll need to be very diplomatic:
  • Take particular care when presenting results to him
  • Think about the key conclusions that you want to communicate, and make sure those are emphasised first
  • Support your conclusions with the evidence (this is good practice anyway!)
Don’t fall into the trap of presenting all the evidence first before reaching the conclusions. If you do this, Jack will have already jumped to his own conclusions as you presented the data. He will have picked on individual snippets that seem to resonate, and is then very likely to disagree with or ignore the conclusions you have reached in favour of his own.
Leave a comment on this article Your Name:
Your Email:
Your Message: