Moving the Needle: Techniques for Translating Research into Progress

um and with that I would like to present or introduce rather our first uh presenters so we've got Heidi carrion from J.M smucker who is going to be joined by Kathy Wilcox and Joe Watson from switch Innovation lab they're going to be talking to us about moving the needle techniques for translating Research into progress I'm going to shut up I'm going to let the experts do their thing um I'm very excited about this one so I can't wait to see it myself I'll Circle back um as as we're uh sort of coming to the tail end and I'll help to lead any any q a or or discussions that evidence to throughout I'll stop sharing hopefully you guys can begin doing so all set all right well in my role at smucker I'm Heidi carrion um and I actually work for the James smucker company um and we have a food division a coffee Division and a pet division um I actually work in food which is Jiff peanut butter brand um smucker jelly and then also I'm smack around cross the bowls I spend most of my time on across the balls these days but in my role at smucker I've been lucky to work with Kathy and Joe from switch Innovation lab on a couple of engagements and I've always found their way of thinking to be such an inspiration um combining organizational behavior with design thinking principles and they always push our team to think differently so I thought it'd be fun to collaborate with them on this message today and like Bill said our topic is moving the needle techniques for translating Research into progress so I'm sure that everyone listening today has had a really good idea or if you haven't I'm sure that you've at least seen a good idea I'm sure everyone here has maybe seen a product or a message or something on the market and thought hey that was my idea they beat me to it have you ever felt like somebody has ever stolen your idea and taking your idea along with the credit so how is it that ideas become company strategy um so one thing that I have done a lot of is like I said I work for um the smucker company and um I work on I work in the GIF brand for my first year and one thing that um I really did a lot of work on was um this new branding campaign so for years for years um choosy moms have chosen Jiff and this is our campaign for almost 40 years there's an evolution back in the 70s where I moved from choosing mothers choose GIF to choosy moms but for most of my lifetime this has been our message so two years ago we upended this message we actually hired ludicrous and our message now is Jiff is so good the ludicrous changed his flow for it and this is a campaign to start out with some social listening about how rappers these days sound like some of them are rapping with a mouthful of peanut butter so we captured that and we did some more consumer research and decided this was a really good way for Jiff brand to become culturally relevant so this movement started with some solid research by the end of the day what we learned is that a big change like this need a big Champions at a high level so when you think of ideas they're free and frankly they're plentiful execution is everything and you can say something silhouette consumer research it doesn't cost a lot to execute a research project but the actual execution at the end can be daunting whether it's a feature or a product or ad copy whatever it is at the end of the day it can be a challenge so as researchers we all work on a variety of projects and sometimes um we're completely agnostic to the results the um the choice can be either A or B and we don't really care we just need to pick a Direction sometimes we have skin in the game thinking about think back in your career about how many times that you've had a direction that you really wanted to execute on like maybe you ran a brainstorming session and um a really good idea came out of that and you contributed to it greatly and you want to see that move forward or maybe it's something an analysis you did you have an Insight that you really want to see um to the light of day a mini is a connection you have or a relationship maybe a lot of reasons why you want something to move forward or sometimes it can be less personal like maybe like your company's Innovation team really needs to make progress and there's some nay Sayers you need to convert or maybe the brand team has some edgy new messaging kind of like this here and it might ruffle some feathers and you really need senior level championship for any of these though how is it that you move the needle how do you make progress and more importantly for everyone listening today like how can you you personally in your career and in your organization how can you associate yourself with projects that move forward yeah so as it turns out we have a number of tools available to us in our job whether it's the actual work we're doing or communication skills or our networks both formal and informal and today I want to talk about how to use or how to maybe rethink some of these tools so I've been lucky in my career to work in a variety of settings I've worked on the supply side with over 50 clients I work for a startup I work in the fashion industry with Bath and Body Works and delimited or can the adhesives industry and now I'm in the wonderful world of peanut butter and jelly and my rule hasn't always been consumer research but the Common Thread is that in every role I've had I've executed ideas some more successfully than others and that's what I want to share with you today some of the strategies that I've used some techniques that I've used that have helped me move progress forward allowed me to be successful so here's the hard truth nobody loves your ideas and I can soften that a little bit maybe say nobody loves all of your ideas but what people do love what they can really get behind is our ideas often need to bring people along on the journey and for them to be in the room and feel the energy for them to really understand and to come come along with you on a collective Journey so we can arrive at our ideas together so I'm a qual researcher at heart and I've done a lot of one-on-one interviews um in homes and businesses and hospitals and even on farms I did reproduct tape for several years and I found that meeting the characters or the consumers that are actually using your products on a daily basis is the number one way to drive progress in fact some of my favorite stories start out with I was doing some in-home interviews and one time in a very normal Suburban neighborhood I actually met someone who was a a snake breeder he actually had a spare bedroom that he converted into a snake room where he had like shelves with tanks and over 40 snakes that were um having babies in the snake room so I'm not sure what that does to your property values but I met this character doing these interviews other things I've learned is that Northeast Ohio where we are actually is a hotbed for um saltwater fish keeping for some reason I don't know the reason is we have a very active Community here and people meet up on a regular basis at the zoo and do what's called frag swap so they bring a fragment of coral from their tank and they trade it or sell it to other people to increase the biodiversity of their tank so there's just a lot of really interesting things you can learn I've actually um spent some time in Charlotte as well maybe a lot of you are from um my the parent company of the duct tape company is sure tape actually located in Hickory North Carolina so Charlotte seemed to be a place we did quite a few interviews and I've even done some interviews with pay cab drivers in uptown Charlotte so you never ever know what you're going to find when you um step inside a consumer's world what's hidden behind that door and there's so many interesting things that can be learned in one-on-one consumer interviews I think I think it's a shame these aren't prioritized more in companies um with covet I know we really stopped doing a lot of in-home research but we're back we should be doing it now I think that's just the greatest way to encourage involvement so I would encourage you if you are in a position where you can facilitate any kind of consumer action or one-on-one interviews invite your boss or invite your boss's boss or invite the marketing director invite high level people to join you and even more than invite try to plan around their schedules to make sure you have a high level of involvement one thing that I found to be pretty effective actually is to hold the interviews maybe in a different city where people have to actually get on a plane or commit to going with you um and you have them for the day I think that's a really good way to get people to come with you versus having them locally close to your office where they're trying to squeeze it in amongst various other commitments of the day so one of my best um in-home interview experiences happened this actually was in the Charlotte area um this was as an interview that was attended by my vice president and several of my r d counterparts so I worked in research and development for an adhesive company for the duct tape company and the r d chemists weren't really people that normally cut the consumer in the front of their their minds so this was a super eye-opening interview that I took them on we got to this home um and one of the suburbs of Charlotte and this man answered the door he was having a really rough day he um had recently moved into this house so it wasn't really fully settled and had this dog that probably need to be put down that day or the next day having a rough time with him and he just had so many stories of how um he'd use duct tape to save the day in the past he actually had recently gone through a divorce they used to own this Farm where he had all these different things he cobbled together with duct tape he also used to race Motocross so he had told us several different ways actually it was new information to us about how duct tape can be used um with drive with Motocross drivers to secure their number um on their shirt but also to make a barrier between their pants and their boots to keep the mud and the dirt out while they're riding so it's a lot of new information to us but more than that it was empathy building um I can't say that a certain an actual product idea came out of this interview this day we always had this shared experience that we could refer back to um so that was actually a really positive experience but one thing that I really want to um impress upon you is if you're taking non-consumer researchers into an in-home interview you need to be very intentional about how you're preparing them um one thing that's really hard especially for r d chemists is to watch somebody misuse their product and not try to correct them so and even worse sometimes you find them turning into sales people and trying to have um try to convince the interviewee that this is actually not the right Branch we're using something else that's the worst thing that can happen so my advice is you need to be very very intentional and even set some ground rules when you're taking non-researchers into a research into a home even a business as well but really in homes I have a set of guidelines that I've put together it's pretty simple four views and four don'ts and I'm going to go through these but first of all the most important thing about meeting a consumer one-on-one is that they are the expert we are there to listen we are Observers I like to give roles usually like a mouth eyes and ears and I was just at the mouth because I was the interviewer but then someone would be the ears and they'd be in charge of like taking notes and truly listening and then someone else would be the um the eyes they would be the one that's taking pictures and making sure the camera set up okay so it helps to Define roles but most importantly we're there to listen next and moderators know this and maybe other people have learned this as well but one very important skill you have to learn is to be comfortable with the silence because it's not comfortable one thing that I've learned and I've been taught actually but then learned it firsthand as well is that um when people when you give people a chance to talk and you're not filling every second every moment with more words it gives them a chance to reflect what they just said someone will tell me something and then they'll stop and be like well actually that one time I didn't exactly do it that way that way and here's why so when you allow house for some silence um in the interview process um that's when you get the really good insights so you need to make sure that everyone allows for silence to happen it allows the consumer or the interviewee to really guide the discussion and reflect on what they're saying as they're saying it foreign the word why can be really intimidating sometimes so think about how to phrase questions in a different way maybe more like tell me about this or describe that more to me don't point out inconsistencies per se and don't say well why did you say that because I can come across as kind of intimidating and put people on a little bit of a defensive position it's better to ask them to describe things further and finally then again this really isn't for the consumer researchers in the room this is for people that are not researchers going into a home with you but remember that you are guests in in this interviewees home don't ask to use the bathroom don't pass out business cards offer to take your shoes off or being invited into the space and need to make sure we're respecting their space as we would if we were guests anywhere as far as the don'ts they're simple too but first of all don't correct misinformation I mentioned before how my r d chemist peers had a hard time watching people misuse things or talk about things in the wrong way but that's actually really important because the interviewee is the one guiding this journey we're just there to learn from them so don't correct misinformation and don't try to educate or sell the way they're doing it is the way it's done um I've seen in the past people misusing products and it actually led to some really good product ideas and realizing though how people how we thought people were using products really may not be the most intuitive so if you're correcting people as you go then you're never going to get to those insights so don't try to educate or sell don't ask questions throughout I said before the role that I usually had was mouth because I was the interviewer and usually I told my partners that I would give them time after each chapter in the interview in the discussion guide to pause and see if they had questions about that specific topic but it can be really intimidating to have questions coming from five people so don't ask questions throughout I will give you time um we can ask questions and finally I always find it kind of interesting how uninterested interviewees are about where you're from and what your day job is but it is as a rule of thumb don't talk about the competition um we are way more invested in our brand than the interviewee ever will be so don't talk about competitors don't talk about your brand either unless that's something you're really trying to learn about that day so in a nutshell here's the four dues and the four don'ts and again these aren't necessarily for people on the call today these are for this is advice to give for other people that might be coming with you into this kind of unknown setting so even if you um can't get your vice president or your marketing director to join you in in-home interviews um you can drive engagement in other ways in your company you can schedule touch points early and often and make sure they are on board the work you're doing and they're learning it as you go um you can make sure you're giving time for discussion in your presentations your presentations when you're live with people in the room shouldn't be a monologue you should be giving time for people to digest and ask questions to you give time to give feedback on your research documents and maybe even take that feedback once in a while um you should try to take opportunities whenever you can to present your findings in larger meetings um I can't see for everyone's company or organization but I know my company has different town halls um throughout the year where it's really open invitation so I can present things to people that wouldn't normally have visibility to what I'm working on so take this opportunities if you can alright so I just talked about the importance of higher level involvement and I want to switch gears and talk a little bit about getting more people involved in what you're working on kind of a democratization of research of sorts so I found that you can really Drive engagement by setting up or using if you already have these in your company internal panels every company has people who are just regular consumers that would love to get free stuff and try it and give you feedback maybe for a little bit of pay or a gift card and I really think that if you're not using your consumers in this way you're letting an important resource go to waste now with internal panels are they biased sure they know your brand for the most part can you extrapolate to genpop no you shouldn't do that of course and can you use this information in sales meetings I wouldn't do that either but they're inexpensive and they're easy and a fantastic way to get some user Behavior at the top of the funnel before you've actually invested real dollars into research or even before it's an actual project so one thing I've learned both using internal panels is that you need to be really intentional put some effort into maintaining them and here's kind of the four things that I have learned about that can contribute to success with the internal panel so first of all establish a Cadence when you first set them up or start using them maybe you have to be on the Hiatus for a while but make sure people know when they can expect to hear from you it's just going to be a weekly engagement is this going to be like a once every six months engagement um set of cadence and make sure you stick to it and maybe this particular month you don't really have anything you need to learn about but you can always just send out something like take a picture of your laundry room and you can you can make up things to make sure that you are actually meeting the commitment that you made to them with the Cadence we need to make sure you have a regular interaction with the people and it's what you committed to in the first place next automate these days you should not be doing data entry there's so many tools available um sorry monkey momentum Google forms to name a few this should not be labor intensive for you to collect information from your co-workers um so make sure you're automating as much as you can on the front end one thing that's really um helpful and a really useful use of internal panels is to ask for media ask for pictures ask for video but again I can be pretty honorous to go through on the back end so I've I've found that it makes it much easier to make a template in the beginning um where I mean it can be simple it's the PowerPoint slide with image goes here and the blurb goes here maybe three different images but when you ask for information to be given back to you in that format it makes it so much easier on the back you can just throw those into your appendix um and basically the report with that part of the report can write itself so make sure you're not setting yourself up to receive 50 emails of different random pictures um if you're doing this but make sure you have a template people can easily fill out and finally show gratitude um that's one thing that I found to be probably the most important of all of these is to make sure that you are recognizing people that are helping you out like this um on a regular basis it doesn't have to be difficult I work for a company where we had shirts made and we had a um annual breakfast it doesn't have to be that elaborate um it can be as simple as everyone's name on a slide in a company-wide meeting um it could be nice to even give your panelists kind of feedback back on how many decisions you use information to make this year and what decisions were made that can be kind of helpful at least to have people feel like their feedback matters make sure you're showing gratitude and I assure you that no matter how you do it showing gratitude will pay dividends um in the end so even more than the um value that you get I'm doing internal panels now lots of people in different areas of your company will know what you're working on and they'll be able to relate to you in a different way and it's a fantastic way to receive visibility um and just allow more people in the company to know what you're what you're working on all right so now I've talked about the importance of getting you know higher level involvement with consumer interactions and then the value of using internal panels for making sure that your um you have visibility throughout the company next I want to move on to how you're delivering your message so one of the most frustrating things that I've encountered is having great research in a PowerPoint and that's where it lives forever have you ever spent weeks maybe a month living with research and doing careful analysis and then at the end you just email the PowerPoint deck to everyone that you need to in the company please don't do this for one thing you need to take some credit for how you're spending your time but even bigger if research represents progress then don't you want to be associated with that so I would encourage you to think about how you're delivering your message there is a level of Showmanship needed maybe it's just brushing up on your presentation skills or practicing or simplifying your message but consider your audience first and foremost and I like to think of this in terms of snorkeling and scuba diving if you're presenting to a high level an executive team you should think about snorkeling you're just going to hit the high points and where we're going with this skim the surface however if you are maybe presenting to a more technical crowd like I usually am because I'm actually in r d I need to be scuba diving my counterparts care about how the questions were asked why we decided to ask it that way versus a different way what are we actually learning what do we still need to learn so in that case I don't even call them presentations it's more data decks there's more deep Dives but we're scuba diving together so those are two very different presentations Styles you think about snorkeling versus scuba diving so you need to think about who you're going to be delivering your message to in the end and make sure you're meeting that need there's never there's usually not a one-size-fits-all solution and it can vary organization to organization but just think about and think about how you need to meet the needs of the the people you're going to be presenting to so next we're going to talk about um not just presentation formats but presentation skills so over to you Joe thank you Heidi Okay so this guy's terrified um how many I'm sure we've all had that experience where we've been in the audience and the presenter is clearly uncomfortable so it could be you're in a high school graduation and the poor kid is on stage and they use the word um more than any other word that they're trying to say or it's somebody who's got a set of index cards and they're just kind of reading and delivering in a monotone and their hands are shaking so much that we can't even pay attention to anything that they're saying because we're just focused on that or it's that kind of deer and headlights look of somebody who has clearly forgotten their script or Worse not even prepared at all and so what do we feel in these moments right it's not necessarily judgment it's anxiety we feel terrible for these for this poor person on stage and despite our Collective binge watching of reality TV we kind of really don't enjoy a good train wreck at least not in real time as a presenter melts down right before our very eyes so in these moments what we really want to feel is comfortable we want to be at ease we want to innately know okay the presenter has it that they've got complete control I can relax I can pay attention to what they're actually saying you know what this might actually be interesting I might actually learn something and this is really Our obligation as presenters and without this kind of fundamental Baseline whatever research whatever information we're trying to convey it's not going to be heard and let alone absorbed so let's all please just recognize that we have an obligation we have to be prepared we have to be polished it's the only way that we're going to properly convey all of this fantastic information that we've gathered so if we think of this really as kind of the Baseline what comes next it's a performance we have to put on a show and look we're I'm not talking about a Vegas Review here and we're definitely not asking you to do anything that's just not authentic but the fact is that performance is one of the most authentic ways that you can actually connect with your audience and it's through this connection that your message has the meaning and impact that you're looking to achieve so this right here is Maggie Rogers fantastic singer if you've not checked out of work I strongly encourage you um but she goes on to explain this connection in a really powerful way Shane said in a recent interview this idea of Performing or entertaining it just never really felt right to me and I always kind of shied away from it because it has this sort of connotation of putting something on and I think we we often feel that about the word performance right but then she realized when I'm singing I'm so connected I'm connected to that audience and it means so much when other people they come and they say hey this really resonated that performance really connected with me we you know we felt really in tune with what you were doing on stage and it makes me feel like I'm part of the community so look research presentations maybe are not quite like singing but I think that they're more similar than you might think you've put your blood your sweat your tears into this research it's meaningful to you in the same way that a song is Meaningful to an artist and in order to kind of Honor that work appropriately we have to consider how are we going to perform it and look it's not song and dance and you know unless that's your thing go for it but it's in a way that will allow you to get that some same sort of connection with your audience and it even helps to make that internal language shift so I'm going to encourage you to do that right now think about the next presentation that you have or the next meeting that you're going to right consider it like this isn't I'm not presenting anymore I'm performing and just even that that subtle language shift can really change how we approach this um and in some ways it really shifts the attention back to the audience it can take that pressure off because now I'm worried about facilitating that connection and that performance and it's letting me make the song or in this case the research really speak directly as I facilitate that connection and now I'm going to turn it to Kathy she's got some more to stay on this thank you so um in the spirit of preparation and performance we thought we would share a little bit of our practices um that uh hopefully will will help will help you when you walk into your next room so um first off our practice is to literally before we go into a conversation is to step into the hallway we take a few breaths and we literally will say to each other you know are we ready for the performance let's go and then that is really our trigger that is our grounding our way of grounding ourselves and our intention reminding ourselves of what we're there to do and to get fully present in the moment fully present in in our objective and being ready to really connect with our audience and similar like Maggie Rogers at switch we also initially really struggled with this concept or the idea of performance um when historically we had thought about performance much as Maggie did that it was fake or not authentic or that we were playing a role but once we were able to shift our focus and and really think of a performance as as critical as a critical element to connecting and actually connecting with our audience it truly opened our thinking to consider just more possibilities more possibilities in every room that we walk into and so today we carefully consider you know our stage the environment in which we are are performing and how we can use that environment to bring the story or to bring the content to life to truly immerse people in the story that we we are trying to tell in order to move things forward so we might ask some questions like you know how can we more ex more fully expose the audience to the information how can we immerse them in the data the content or the story in a maybe a non-traditional way how can we fully leverage the environment by paying attention to sound or light and utilizing key visuals what can we do to Prime their brain so they're actually ready to receive the content so they're ready to maybe think about things differently or to be creative or be inspired so in order to create those conditions for a more successful performance where the participants and the performers are more likely to be in the right mindset to be inspired to be creative we take into consideration you know many aspects of the surroundings and how we might leverage those things and leverage our senses to enhance the story the first thing we consider is our environment how can we get people out of the conference room out of their traditional their expected environment and get them into the Real Environment um and so wherever possible we move people out of their usual whether it's the conference room the boardroom their office building how do we get them out of their their comfort zone in order to spark or open them up to new information so when we consider the environment it's important to consider what type of room might reinforce the story you're trying to share or the data you're trying to connect with for example if we're working with a manufacturing client maybe that means that we move the conversation out of the boardroom and onto the shop floor and maybe it's their shop floor maybe it's someone else's shop floor depending on what we're trying to communicate if we're working with a retailer who's really um uh excited about trying to connect with their Shopper in a different way maybe we take them to an environment like a museum who also is connecting with with people walking through their door but doing it in a really different way what can we learn or how can the data be interpreted differently in this new and different environment when we're working with an executive team again we're looking at ways that we can use the environment to prompt maybe New Perspective um about a given topic or a given challenge maybe we take them into the museum what can we how do we see the world differently a challenge differently standing in a museum or standing in the woods and you know take them to a cottage in the middle of the woods what now do we see differently just by that environment or maybe we just move them to a carefully curated office space to help them see things differently and Tackle or tackle a challenge in a new way so regardless of the audience or the topic we also look for opportunities to get people outside so we typically incorporate longer breaks so they can step outside we encourage the fresh air and movement during those breaks so they can really clear their head and get ready for whatever is next in the conversation as we consider the environment that we are creating and curating we always consider technology and we consider the technology and whether it adds value or doesn't add value so oftentimes at switch we don't we try not to use technology because we understand that the barriers that sometimes it creates um and really evaluate you know what is the value that it's still that it's delivering here always we encourage our participants to put the technology down so that they can be fully engaged in the conversation in the insight and the input um so wherever possible we ask people close the computers put the phones away let's really get engaged in the data or the content that we're trying to share removing technology has proven to be really helpful in helping people to get in the room and so in addition to the environment as a whole we consider other elements as well and one that we love to think about is light wherever possible we look for rooms or environments and where that has natural sunlight and we truly try to leverage the benefits of Sun so exposure to sunlight we know this it can increase your levels of serotonin in the brain which improves our mood it inspires creativity and similarly just the warmth of sun helps us to relax the body and the mind giving us an openness to imagination and creativity so we work to Leverage The Power of the sun wherever possible additionally we look for ways to leverage sound sound is such a powerful and a powerful tool and it can evoke emotion it can be effective at stress relieving and it can improve and increase the energy in the room so we think about you know what is our objective how might sound help to Prime our audience or Inspire them in the room we'll often use what's called solfeggio frequencies if you haven't heard of a selfie of frequency we encourage you to just look it up it's really pretty fascinating science and some frequencies are known to increase creativity reduce stress hormones and improve concentration you probably have heard them in yoga class or in a spa that you visited and they really are pretty are pretty very fascinating and certainly something that we try to leverage when it makes sense so we are often experimenting with sound and how it can enhance the experience for the audience again to get them ready for whatever the story is that we're trying to share and finally we use key visuals and the phrase a picture is worth a thousand words certainly applies here as we look at the opportunity to move the conversation forward move a research research conversation forward so there's tremendous power in visuals to evoke emotion to bring words to life and certainly to simplify a concept um often we use uh visuals to Prime new thinking and greatly expand the pool of sources to draw inspiration from so we recently had this really cool opportunity working with the International Space Station National Lab and specifically with their leadership team to help or to reimagine their mission and their Vision moving forward super exciting opportunity to really think about outer space I mean really really fun stuff so just for a second think about when you think about outer space what images come to mind I think for many of us we we pull up all kinds of things from our childhood and from you know just walking out in the in the world today so we really wanted to um create and create an inspiring environment for this team when we brought them together and so as as the ISS leadership team prepared for a full day of thinking and for any of you who have been involved in this type of Mission Vision directional work it is a heavy day we wanted to provide inspiration to start the day off and on an energized foot so um we wanted to remind them also of all the possibilities and Imagination that space has inspired since human beings you know first looked up at the stars we covered the walls and filled the environment with banners related to space and pop culture and amazing and the amazing science and progress that has been made possible by the work of the ISS National Lab over the years so these visuals did more than just provide inspiration they provoked conversations and storytellings from storytelling by the participants as they entered the room so as people entered the room with their coffee and just walked around and connected and looked at these visuals they talked and we listened to the stories that they were that they were telling each other and connecting in a way that they had not connected before as peers they made meaning of the pictures that we had put up they offered more they shared experiences and stories from childhood and why they came to the to the National Lab in the first place Etc and it was started off the entire experience on this open openness for creativity this inspiration this you know all the wonderful things of the work that is possible so by providing this inspiration and this opportunity for them to just be um before we launched into the difficult work of the day they're allowed them to open their neural Pathways connect with each other set the tone for the session and prepare their mind to engage in new creative and meaningful ways as we guided them to and reimagine what is possible or to think about what is possible for the future so the next time you're getting prepared for a presentation uh strike that let's think about it as a performance take the time to consider the environment what is the room and the environment that that would lend itself to further in your store or the story and the data of the information that you're trying to connect what about the light how about sound what about the visuals how might each of these further enhance the message you're trying to communicate the story you're trying to tell the goal you're trying to accomplish as some of you probably know in food manufacturing scrap material often gets fed to livestock food streams so I recently worked on a project that was highly highly technical but at the end of the day we dropped our scrap rate from three percent to one percent across two plants and we recovered over a million dollars in product says L to sell to humans and we generate regenerating now an extra 10 000 units per month and while these are impressive numbers what really told the story so this seeing this image this sad little piggy this gets your attention and makes you understand we are now making less material to feed to pigs and the pigs aren't happy about it this is a message that anyone can get no matter what your where you are in the organization how much you know about the actual specifics of manufacturing and how we um detect scrap versus non-scrap or how much time you have um you could see or look at this little pig and get the core message that we were trying to convey and the research we did was actually pretty complicated we did um we collected hundreds and hundreds of samples we had a whole design of experiment we were comparing some different um defects and um we did research in four different cities with parents and kids and there was a pretty complicated research design but instead of going into all of that at least as our Top Line we use this pig to help tell the story and this really simplified what the takeaway was my r d partner and I get a lot of credit for This research and this um the effort we put into understanding this and learning from our consumers and making a a consumer driven decision and I really think a lot of the reason we get the credit is because we simplify the message enough and use this little pig to tell the story so might not be the most glamorous thing to associate myself with this cute little blue-eyed beauty Pig beautiful Pig but it was a good way for us to get the message across and it was very attention-getting um so Heidi just demonstrated the powerful impact of visuals and we have so many amazing ways to generate compelling images for audiences now and notice how I just use the word generate right I think we're all starting to get familiar with this term of generative AI it used to be that we were kind of stuck with these really boring stock photos and we're recycling all the same templates and you know it's not that exciting but now we've we've had an explosion of stock uh photo video options a lot of it royalty free and look we can create our own amazing images with just a few text prompts so again generative AI we have mid Journey we've got Dali there's there's tons coming online maybe you've heard a few of them maybe you've dabbled with text tools like chat GPT and things like that there's no shortage of opinions on where we're going with AI but I think we can all agree it's not going anywhere and its usefulness is its tool as a tool and its impact and Society is only going to continue to grow so for our purposes let's just kind of consider what that means um as a useful tool jumping ahead see previews so these images right here well let me just zoom in on them real quick these were all generated with a prompt that contains some variation of the words duck farmer tape and dirt bike and so as you can see the variations that kind of came out of this and the options that look it's pretty much endless so if we consider using some of these image generators to add compelling images to our research and our performances then at the very least um we're gonna we're gonna increase the impact and we're also going to be inspired it's so much fun to go and play with these and see what gets generated with just a few simple words it might even inspire you to take your research and your thinking in a brand new Direction foreign so we've covered a lot of ground today and many of the ideas we talked about today involve storytelling and storytelling is such a powerful tool it's a powerful way way to engage people to allow them to hear and retain information and so I kind of want to leave you with an example so I'm sure many of you are familiar with Stevie Nicks the revered songstress of Fleetwood Mac Fane I think even the younger Generations I've heard of Stevie and Fleetwood Mac so fun fact just learned this the other day her real name is actually Stephanie but when she was a toddler she couldn't pronounce Stephanie and so she would call herself TD and so the nickname stuck and it's interesting because mispronunciation is an interesting theme that kind of reappears in various times over uh Stevie's life so here's another question for you how many of you have heard of the word mandagreed so Amanda green is a mishearing or misunderstanding of a written or spoken phrase and as you might imagine this shows up a lot in song and song lyrics and one of the most famous examples is the Jimmy Hendrix song Purple Haze and the famous line Excuse me while I kiss the sky but a lot of times this gets misheard as Excuse me while I kiss this guy um that is what we call a monitor green a more recent example is um for all you swifties out there uh Taylor Swift has a song called blank space where the line is um got a long list of ex-lovers and for some reason the general public heard that as gotta love those Starbucks lovers so I think that's uh perhaps great branding on Starbucks part but uh that is also a mountain green and so we circled me back to Stevie she is what we would refer to as the Monda green Queen or maybe because it's Stevie she's just the Monda green witch her most famous solo song edge of 17 was actually inspired by Amanda green so back in the day Stevie's hanging out with Tom Petty and Tom's first wife Jing and apparently Jane was from the south she had this really strong Southern drawl and so she was talking to Steven she says ah well Tom and I met at the age of 17. and Stevie misheard this and thought that she said that they met at the Edge of Seventeen and Steve was like you know what that's a really cool concept like I need to kind of write that down a notebook somewhere and revisit it make a song out of it and so many years later she did and Edge of 17 ended up spending a couple weeks near the top of the charts in 82 and it contains one of the most famous Monograms ever recorded so those are familiar with the song the chorus features the line just like the One Winged Dove sings the song sounds like it's singing yeah yeah it's a White Winged Dove it's not a One-Winged Dove both wings oh my goodness I feel so much better now like for years I've just worried about this poor Dove and why does it only have one wing and how does it even fly and oh I'm gonna sleep better tonight knowing this Dove has both wings and thank you Kathy for collecting me in my misuse of in the Monda green right there okay so obviously we just had a little fun but you kind of see what we did there we we tried to bring every a lot of what we were talking about home right now um we dropped in some new learning right new work I'm I'm guessing a lot of you weren't even familiar with the word Manda green before this it's kind of like the research that you do how do we get people excited about the storytelling that we're wrapping it up in um and that's what we did is to kind of drive that connection and embed the learning by connecting it to story we incorporated it just a little tiny bit of performance it's kind of hard to do uh virtually but we do what we can um and look maybe you're gonna go home tonight you're gonna have a dinner conversation you'll be like I learned this new word monogram and you're going to share oh my I misheard this song lyric for years and there's funny stories that come out of that and again that kind of further embeds the learning and the connection and ultimately it allows whatever information that we've we're sharing or research or whatever to live beyond just the initial research and gain another life of its own so think about the tools you have available to you in your role whether it's the work you're doing your communication skills the level of collaborations you're able to have how you're presenting how you're performing how you're making your message sticky and relevant use these tools to help you help you yourself in your organization become associated with research and projects that move forward so thank you very much for your time um again I'm Heidi carrion I've had Kathy Wilcox and Joe Watson from switch Innovation lab and we are open to think of five minutes left for questions so we're happy to answer any questions that you may have yeah well great job um I will lead q a I will keep an eye out for any questions coming through um as it stands a few comments and thumbs UPS from some of our audience members um we have a couple minutes for questions if you have any log them quickly in the Q a or the chat become where you are accessing I have a couple of quickies um and I'm going to speak on behalf of the uh the data Geeks in the room um Joe and Kathy uh with regard to putting yourself into this sort of performer role you have any advice for us introverted data folk to sort of overcome our our desire and tendency to want to be not in the spotlight I'll start that because I myself am also an introvert so it's a conversation that Joe and I have often um and it truly has been that shift like that mental shift like okay we're gonna do this now that allows me to shift in shift out of that trepidate like it allows me to play a role right um we're connecting authentically we're we're delivering in a way that we're connecting but it allows me to kind of set my own insecurities and things aside and head in with the connection in mind um remove the personal a little bit so I think really as we shifted from presenting to performing like the mindset shift um as an introvert it allowed me to step step forward a little bit more um and so that that has worked that has worked for me um and I think the other thing that also helps is that level of preparation that I think um we do you know Joe talked about a little bit like the the practice the practice the discussion the the the the preparation part um is is truly essential right so that we can show up as your best um and just focus on connecting because you know the data so well right and now it's a conversation I would add a just a couple things I am not an introvert so um but I think you know I think you'd be surprised the number of presenters and you know things people in the world who who are introverts um and they're so passionate about what they're talking about or what they're performing that that just kind of all goes away so if you truly believe in the work that you're doing in the research it does make it a little bit easier to kind of get behind it and talk about it in a way that is authentic because it means something to you um and then it can be helpful just talk to your friends like I know I have some sort of charm somewhere what is that right and then lean into that um take all that good information back and lean into those skill sets that that everybody appreciates but appreciates about you already uh looks like yeah we're bumping up but we can probably take one more quick one on Ed Eduardo um asks any faults on balancing preparation versus having spontaneity in presentations yeah that's a good question sir but I find there's definitely a risk in practicing too much and focusing on the words I'm going to say versus what the actual meaning is so what I normally do as far as like actual presentation skills is I'll practice a couple times um leading up to a presentation but the day of I only run through it once if I do it more than that then I really do start focusing on I want to say this word here I want to make sure I think say this phrase and then I get away from the actual meaning so I think there's a I mean you need to be you need to know your data you need to know your information you need to be prepared but I would um caution you against over practicing especially right before your presentation yeah that's a great suggestion Heidi the other thing that um I've and I think we all kind of figure out our own tips and tricks um but I always find that similar to Heidi I think is I stepped down so I might start with a script and then I delete half the script and go to you know bullet points and then I have a couple key phrases right or a couple key words so I I step back as I prepare I remove more and more words um from what I have in front of me which which allows me to fill in with you know organic conversation versus the feeling that I'm reading a script that's my level of that's my process for preparation it's um it looks like we have a couple of additional questions we were not able to answer sorry you guys had an action-packed presentation it's kind of what we're going for is to to leave some Cliffhangers right um we are actually bumping up against our next presentation so we're going to thank Heidi Joe and Kathy for joining us I appreciate it that was fantastic um hopefully you can hang around and watch a couple of our presentations as they go on throughout the day um everybody sit tight we'll get started with the next one right away actually all right thank you Bill thanks a lot Joe