Tips for consulting teams turning research themes into insights
A practical approach
Welcome to another Tips edition.
What? Shaping insights
My last post adapted Braun & Clarke's Thematic Analysis (TA) method to Consulting.
This post explores step five. The art and science to carve actionable insights from research themes. A team's skill being to synthesise a chaotic array of data into a narrative clients can act upon.
At this stage, your team has conducted vertical and horizontal analysis of their data i.e., what is/ isn't said. As well as a comparative analysis to find recurring topics, phrases or sentiment. Within or across different data sources.
This results in a thematic map. An aide for the team to envision the overarching story of the data and its supporting pillars.
Whiteboards are a go-to in this phase. A visual tool to collaborate on themes.
Consultants have diverse thinking styles (visual, spatial, and verbal), howver, Verbal thinkers often dictate discussion. This limits creativity, so teams need to be mindful that their approach embraces neurodiversity in the team.
The actual steps for turning themes into insights are:
Align on thematic mapping. Ensure the team understands and agrees with the relationships and grouping.
Decide the story of each theme: Review the collated data extracts for each theme. Ensure stories are coherent, consistent, don’t overlap and go beyond summarising the data extracts. They should explain what's interesting, why and what action to take.
Decide the overarching story, and how each theme fits. In relation to the project's hypothesis/ problem statement/ key questions. The aim is to be able to concisely argue the "so-what" of the whole recommendation.
Decide the lens to challenge, refine and communicate each theme as an insight. This is where seasoned consultants bring in frameworks and/ or past experience. As lens to guide or challenge the data interpretation, and to help shape the unfolding story. Giving the team clarity on how to tell the narrative makes the process much easier. But it's important to test options so insight generation isn't constrained too soon.
Review sub-themes. If any. Decide if they are additive to the overarching story. Do they sit together? Do they change the interpretation of any quantitative data? Sub-themes should add weight, structure and hierarchy that enriches the narrative.
Title the insight: Decide on the most concise and impactful title for each insight. Make it punchy and instantly understandable.
Note: Steps 2 - 5 are iterative rather than linear. The order may also vary if the project is top-down (validating a hypothesis) vs bottom-up (letting the data speak).
So what? Manage data, Framing
Adapting Braun & Clarke gives teams clarity on what they should do, and when. A strategy to navigate information overload.
The reality of consulting projects means teams will fluctuate between stages. This creates a problem of data everywhere (spreadsheets, docs, whiteboards etc).
Frameworks such as SWOT, Five Forces, Value Chain, 8 sources of waste, Ishikawa, etc., provide 'lens' to interpret qualitative data. Tying relevant models plus your firm’s own homebrew frameworks into the analysis at the right time, provides both an accelerator and a benchmark.
What next?
Solutions like Discy AI transform the process. Giving teams the ability to:
Accurately code more data;
Work in the data as they please;
Easily query the data as they craft insights.
Particularly when the model is trained on consulting data. This makes it easier to build trust and refine insights with the client. It also makes it viable to use more in-depth QDA techniques in the constrained timelines of consulting projects. E.g., Grounded Theory and IPA. To build a bottom-up strategy or to better examine stakeholder perspectives.
Continuing to help consultants craft insights is a big focus of the next period for us. A big element of which is the narrative. Which we'll cover in a future post. Our next post however will share take-aways from our next Webinar: AI in Consulting, Hope, Hype or Heresay.
Key Tips:
Check your process embraces neurodiversity. and varied perspectives
Frameworks focus the team. Experiment early with these lens to challenge interpretations/ inform insights. Guard against the law of the instrument. A cognitive bias to over rely on a familiar tool.
Use AI technologies to drive accurate data coding, and support theme refinement. With most solutions this entails trial & error to describe the right prompts (primers, persona, task, context, format and tone) for your needs.
Use sub-themes to give structure and hierarchy to complex insights. Do not overload a theme with too many ideas. The goal is to identify what aspect of the data each theme captures.
Use concise and impactful titles to convey the essence and relevance of each insight.