Articles

By Cynthia D. Harris, 8:28 Insights and Lizzy Martinez, Delta Air Lines

 

There is a brief moment on a Delta Air Lines flight that millions of passengers probably take for granted: You board, find your seat, put on your headphones and start watching something on the seatback screen. You don't have to wait for takeoff. You don't have to wait for the flight to reach cruising altitude. The experience simply begins. However, that wasn't always the case. 

 

“Enabling in-flight entertainment much earlier is a direct result of insights work we did,” explains Lizzy Martinez, General Manager, Customer Research of Delta Air Lines. “We discovered that the anxiety level of passengers remained elevated until they reached their seat. So, we focused on that moment where they began to relax to see what could be done to extend their sense of relief and satisfaction.”  

 

And just like that a new “bar” had been set for the airline industry and a valuable point-of-difference was established for Delta.   

 

What is so beautifully demonstrated in Lizzy’s example is that while insights work may inform a customer-experience improvement, the truth is… that same insight is likely invisible to many customers. And if we are not careful as an industry, some of the most powerful insights may also become invisible inside our organizations. The insights team’s work succeeded because the learning made its way into the business, an action was taken and woven into the customer experience itself. 
 

Can the Organization Actually Absorb the Insight? 

As an industry, we may be defining successful insights too narrowly. Our profession spends considerable time talking about methodologies, technologies and increasingly faster ways to get answers. Perhaps we need to spend more time asking whether we are getting answers to questions the organization can actually use. 

 

It’s one thing to answer the question you were given. It’s another to recognize that the question itself may need to change. That matters even more now, when technology makes it possible to get to an answer faster than ever. Speed is useful. Access is useful. But neither tells us whether we asked the right question in the first place, whether the answer holds up under scrutiny or whether it informs a critical business decision.  

 

This is where the insights industry must think beyond insights generation and toward a capability Cynthia Harris describes as Insights Enablement: the organizational capability to ask the right questions, recognize which insights are worth using, and create the conditions for those insights to influence decisions. 

 

This requires human judgment. Researchers are rightly trained to appreciate ambiguity. Human behavior is complicated, context matters and almost every answer contains nuance. But curiosity is most useful to an organization when it moves teams forward. Our responsibility as insights professionals cannot end at explaining all of the shades of gray; we also have to help decision-makers understand what those nuances mean for the choice in front of them. 

 

Organizational-learning scholars have studied a similar challenge for decades. In their foundational 1990 work, Wesley Cohen and Daniel Levinthal introduced the concept of absorptive capacity: a firm's ability to recognize the value of new information, assimilate it and apply it commercially. They argued that this capability is critical to innovation. 

 

Cohen and Levinthal’s idea has significant implications for insights professionals especially in today’s ever-evolving landscape. A strong finding does not automatically become a strong insight simply because it appeared in a beautiful presentation. An organization must be capable of recognizing why the learning matters, connecting it to what it already knows and incorporating it into the decisions people make. This is partly an insights challenge, but it is also an organizational one that insights professionals are uniquely well positioned to help solve. 

 

The most rigorous research in the world will have limited influence if the people receiving it do not trust the work, cannot connect it to the business question or encounter it at a moment when the organization is unwilling or unable to hear it.  

 

Conversely, when learning is absorbed successfully, something interesting happens: its origin can begin to fade from view. The insight becomes a strategy, a product choice, an operating principle or a customer experience. People who join the organization later may not know where the thinking originated. They simply inherit a better way of doing something. 
 

And while that is an unequivocal success, it nevertheless illustrates a visibility problem for our profession. 

 

The project shouldn't end with the recommendation 

The Insights Association has been explicit about the growing pressure on insights organizations to communicate business impact. Its Insights Imperative initiative articulates that the future belongs to organizations that combine technological capability with deep human understanding. And that deep human understanding must also include knowing how to use insights to influence forward-thinking (and sometimes scary) decisions inside organizations. 

 

While the Insights Association continues to do the work of protecting our ability to perform insights work effectively, it is also incumbent on us as insights professionals to ensure we articulate the value of insights. We are all a part of an ecosystem that is evolving at a rapid pace and we all play a part in ensuring its viability for the future. 

 

One relatively simple place to begin is to extend our definition of when the work is finished. Too often, suppliers deliver the recommendation, internal teams circulate the presentation, and everyone moves to the next project. What frequently goes undocumented is what happened afterward: 
 

• Was the recommendation accepted? Modified? Rejected? 

• Did the work influence an investment, product, experience or strategic priority? How? 

• Did it uncover something that changed how people inside the organization thought about the customer? 

• Six months later, is the organization still using the learning? 

 Answering those questions is essential to ensure the value of the insights function is well known. Remaining committed to investigating these questions helps us grow as researchers and puts us in a position to challenge our own thinking. And that accountability loop is also necessary as we challenge teams to question their own paradigms and push for an improved future. 
 

Knowing the impact of insights work should no longer be a luxury but a core operating principle of anyone doing the work.  

What this means for insights teams on both sides 

Suppliers and client-side insights professionals have different vantage points, but both have a role in making insight more usable and its contribution more visible. This is especially important as the traditional boundaries around who “does insights” continue to change. The “democratization” of insights can be enormously valuable. But democratizing the ability to generate information is not the same thing as democratizing the ability to recognize a meaningful insight, evaluate its quality, and use it responsibly.

TIPS FOR:

Insights Suppliers	Client-Side Insights Pros
Interrogate the question before racing toward the answer. A technically sound answer to the wrong business question has limited value.	Connect the work to the decision it is meant to inform. Teams should understand why the research exists and what will happen differently depending on what is learned.
Design for use, not just delivery. Think early about who will need to act on the learning and what they will need in order to do so.	Bring decision-makers into the work early. Involve stakeholders ultimately responsible for acting on the insights to help shape the implications and build ownership of what comes next.
Push beyond interesting findings. Curiosity and nuance matter, but clients also need help understanding what the learning means for the decision ahead.	Create the conditions for insight to be heard. Credibility, timing, organizational context, and stakeholder trust all affect whether learning is absorbed.
Follow up after delivery. Ask what happened with the recommendation, what was used, what wasn’t and why. That feedback improves both the partnership and future work.	Track impact beyond the final presentation. Capture where research informed decisions, changed thinking, reduced risk or improved an experience… even when the outcome cannot be expressed as a single ROI number.
Understand the business, not only the research brief. The better a supplier understands how decisions actually get made, the more useful the work can become.	Close the loop with business partners. Insights teams should not be solely responsible for proving impact; the people who acted on the work should help document how the learning was used.

 

The Next Advantage is Knowing How to Use Insight Well 

For Cynthia, Managing Director of 8:28 Insights, this is where the idea of Insights Enablement becomes important. “Insights Enablement is broader than teaching people how to conduct research. It is about building an organization's capacity to identify meaningful questions, recognize strong insights, appropriately interpret what is learned and create the conditions for that learning to influence decisions.” 
 

That capability becomes increasingly important in an environment where almost anyone can access a research platform, query a dataset or generate an AI-powered answer. The competitive advantage is no longer access to an answer. “Data is ubiquitous,” Cynthia often says. The competitive advantage of the future is knowing which questions deserve to be asked, which answers deserve to be trusted and how to move meaningful human understanding through an organization well enough that somebody can actually use it.  

 

Great insights may eventually become invisible. The customer may never know the research that improved an experience, and over time even the organization may forget where the original learning came from. But, that should not mean the impact disappears with it. 
 

As our industry becomes faster, more democratized and more technology-enabled, the value of insights will increasingly depend on more than our ability to produce answers. It will depend on our ability to ask better questions, recognize which insights are worth acting on, and help those insights take hold inside the organization.  

 

That is the opportunity ahead of us: not simply to generate insight, but to build organizations that know how to use it well. 
 

And if we want the value of this profession to remain clear, we have to get much better at following the work beyond the final presentation and telling the story of what happened next. 

 

About the Authors 

 

 

Cynthia D. Harris, MBA is the Managing Director of 8:28 Insights, a human insights and strategy collective focused on helping organizations better understand people and turn that understanding into stronger decisions. Across nearly two decades, Cynthia has worked on both sides of the insights equation, including brand, marketing, innovation and consumer insights roles at organizations including Procter & Gamble, McCormick, Bath & Body Works and Abbott Nutrition. Today, her work increasingly focuses on Insights Enablement: helping organizations strengthen how they ask questions, identify meaningful insights, socialize learning and put insight to work across the business. Cynthia holds an MBA from The Ohio State University. 

 

Lizzy Riggs Martinez is General Manager, Consumer Insights & Advisory at Delta Air Lines, where she works at the intersection of human psychology, customer understanding and organizational strategy. Her work focuses on helping the organization better understand the people it serves and translate that understanding into stronger customer experiences and business decisions. Lizzy is a graduate of the University of Georgia’s Master of Marketing Research program and has built her career around connecting human understanding to action inside organizations.