Crafting a Perspective: The Role of Abstraction in Strategic Innovation
As a consultant and methods-based design researcher, my role often revolves around telling stories through data and inspiring action. Part of being a good storyteller is to deliver a clear and concise narrative that helps capture your audience’s attention, make sense of complexity, and inform a strategic perspective. Crucial to informing a sound narrative in research is the concept of abstraction, or the process of distilling complex information into thematic insights and delivering actionable guidance. Let’s explore why abstracting research findings into insights is so essential.
Enabling Communication and Collaboration
The unfortunate fact is that user research can be outright boring! Dense reports and presentations stuffed full of detailed findings and nuances of human behavior described in great detail, while effective references don’t often lead to action. To effectively deliver the voice of your user, it’s crucial to deliver simple, memorable messages to your audience they can connect with.
Insights abstracted from research findings help to facilitate communication and collaboration among teams. By distilling complex research findings into accessible and compelling narratives, they bridge gaps between different stakeholders and foster shared understanding. Whether presenting findings to colleagues, clients, or the public, insights facilitate meaningful dialogue and collaboration.
Creating Clarity Amidst Complexity
Research findings often encompass a vast array of data points, observations, and interpretations. It’s the process of analysis and synthesis of insight themes that provides structure and hierarchy to the learnings. By effectively interpreting findings into concise and actionable insights, researchers provide directionality and clarity to their teams and help them to focus on the most pressing problems.
In the crafting of insights, it’s important to recognize that there’s a push and a pull to analysis. On one hand, your project team or client has learning objectives and research questions they want answers to and it’s important to deliver upon these requests. On the other hand, your data will start to reveal themes and points of tension that although not explicitly asked for.
Driving Strategic Innovation
It is the researcher’s role and responsibility to help connect the dots, synthesizing diverse perspectives and making sense of disparate data sources, to inform creative problem-solving and strategic decision making.
Insights serve as powerful tools for leaders and decision-makers in healthcare organizations. By distilling research findings into concise and actionable guidance, design researchers enable stakeholders to make informed decisions quickly and effectively. Whether developing business strategies, designing interventions, or crafting policy recommendations, insights guide organizations toward their strategic goals and objectives.
In conclusion, abstracting research findings into insights is essential for navigating the complexities of research and innovation and a fundamental skill for researchers. By distilling raw data into actionable guidance, researchers can facilitate collaboration, simplify the complex and inform strategic planning efforts.
