Why good insight dies in stakeholder meetings – and four ways to keep it alive
I started my career in tracking research. Once a month I'd walk into a financial institution and present a 40-slide deck on their brand perceptions. Every month we faced a conundrum: we were quietly relieved when the numbers hadn't moved much. Equally disappointed (and somewhat bored) when they hadn't gone up.
What I didn't see at the time, and can see now with more years of doing this, is that those decks were dying in the room. Not because the work was bad – it wasn't – but because all we were doing was showing the numbers. The findings. The insights. Without the commercial reality that would have made any of it land with the people who could actually act on it.
McKinsey's Periscope team surveyed more than 200 senior insights professionals on this exact problem. The headline: an overwhelming majority believe customer insight should be a true thought partner for the organisation. Despairingly, only 23% say their company is actually there. The other 77% know the work is good. They also know it isn't getting used.
Insight that doesn't reach the decision-maker isn't insight. It's a slide.
There are four specific moments at which strong customer insight goes missing on the journey from research room to commercial decision. Each one has a fix.
1. It gets buried in the deck
The first place insight goes missing is the slide that delivers it.
Most insight reports are designed for the room they're presented in, not the room they need to travel to. The decision-maker – the CEO, the commercial director, the brand director – often never sits in the room where the research is presented. The deck becomes the artefact that travels in their place. And if the deck is too long, too dense, or doesn't lead with the implication, the insight stops at the next-level-down stakeholder who did attend the meeting. The CEO ends up with a forwarded email, the deck attached, and a one-line summary written by someone who heard the findings second-hand.
The fix: A two-page (or one-slide) executive summary written for the decision-maker who was not in the room. Lead with the implication, not the method. State the commercial choice the research creates, not the percentages it produces. This is the version of the deck that needed to exist alongside those 40-slide trackers – and that nobody, including me, was making.
2. It gets buried in qualification
The second place insight goes missing is the meeting after the meeting.
Strong findings often arrive with edges. They imply uncomfortable choices: kill a product, reposition a brand, accept that a segment is leaving. Internal stakeholders – often with the best of intentions – qualify, hedge, soften and "balance" the finding in the days after it lands. A chain of forwarded emails, each one a little gentler than the last. By the time the insight reaches the decision-maker, the edges have been sanded off and the action it implied has gone with them.
The fix: Have the decision-maker in the room from the start – preferably from briefing, certainly at debrief. The qualification cascade can't run if the person whose decision the insight is about heard it directly. Insight teams should be designing the commissioning conversation as carefully as the research itself; the question of who attends which session is part of the research design, not an afterthought.
3. It gets buried in the operating model
The third place insight goes missing is the calendar.
Most insight is delivered on a research timeline – when fieldwork finishes – not on a commercial decision timeline. By the time the report is ready, the planning cycle has closed, the launch window has passed, or the budget decision is already in motion. The insight is technically excellent. It is also too late to be used.
And when insight lands after the decision has already been made, it does one of two things. It validates – which feels useful but is really just the comfort of being told you were right. Or it doesn't validate, in which case it gets quietly set aside, because the decision is already moving and reversing it is more expensive than ignoring the finding. Either way, the insight has stopped doing the job it was commissioned to do.
The fix: Map the commercial decision moments backwards from the calendar – the planning meeting, the launch readiness gate, the board meeting – and reverse-engineer the insight delivery date to land before the moment, not after it. This is what we mean by the Unite phase of [our Truth Is Human Method](INTERNAL LINK – method page): aligning on the decision the research is being commissioned to inform, before fieldwork begins.
And size the deliverable to the time available. If there isn't time for a fully comprehensive report, take a page from early-stage start-ups: an agile, discursive, collaborative deliverable that gets to a working answer fast, in the room, with the people who need it. A perfect 60-slide report two weeks late is worth less than a working hypothesis on three slides and one in-person conversation, on time.
4. It gets buried in translation
The fourth place insight goes missing is the language it's delivered in.
Insight is most often spoken in the language of the team that commissioned it. The same finding – say, that customers are leaving because the renewal experience feels transactional – arrives in marketing as a brand-relationship problem, where it sounds important. By the time anyone considers showing it to commercial, ops or finance, the finding is still wearing its insight-team clothes: cohorts, drivers, satisfaction scores, attitudinal segments. None of which describe an action the pricing director, the contact centre lead or the CFO can take.
The decision about renewal pricing sits in commercial. The decision about contact volume sits in ops. The decision about lifetime-value modelling sits in finance. The same insight, untranslated, lands in none of those rooms.
The fix: Identify the three or four functions the finding has commercial implications for, and translate the insight into each one's language separately. Same finding, three different briefings, three different commercial moves enabled. The translation isn't about dumbing the work down – it's about restating the implication in the operating vocabulary of the function that has to act on it. Read more on the case for commercial-truth alignment in the research brief itself here.
What changes
In every one of these four moments, the insight existed. The research was sound. What failed was the distribution, the audience in the room, the timing of the delivery, or the language it travelled in.
Our Truth Is Human ® Method is built to guard against this – the Unite phase locks the commercial decision before fieldwork begins; the Growth phase translates the human truth into the commercial language each function needs to act on it. But you don't need a method to start. You need to decide that finishing the research isn't the finish line.
No human truth ignored is a discipline, not a slogan. The discipline is everything that happens after the research is finished.
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We help organisations build the insight-to-action discipline that stops good work going missing. If that's a conversation worth having, email me directly or book a 30-minute call.