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Ed Kahn

Ed Kahn

Senior Principal of CX Research and Insights, Mutual of America · Brand-side

Topics Ed shaped

Researcher craft & identity, Insights function & business, Industry, profession & meta, AI & technology, Methods, methodology & rigor

Episodes

What Ed said — indexed claims

  • The single highest-leverage 30-day action for a researcher seeking influence is to grab coffee with a non-research colleague — not the CFO, but somewhere reachable — and ask them to explain their role; the conversation costs nothing and reliably converts into broader business literacy and better questions later. — Ep. 40 · 38:57 · cl-ed-kahn-020
  • A research report has unpredictable downstream lives — picked up by PR, marketing, or other teams the researcher never anticipated — and most researchers underestimate how much influence they actually have because they only see a fraction of where their work travels. — Ep. 40 · 32:05 · cl-ed-kahn-017
  • Researchers should recognize that they are professionally good at the very thing — formulating questions, holding curiosity, learning from people — that earns invitations to the table; the trust grows naturally from showing up as the professional one already is. — Ep. 40 · 41:41 · cl-ed-kahn-021
  • Researchers cannot fully prevent being asked to validate decisions made above their pay grade; the response is to change one's own process — generating insights that help the team make the best of an already-made decision while honestly indicating where it sits in the risk landscape. — Ep. 40 · 28:19 · cl-ed-kahn-016
  • When driving any change — methodological, organizational, technological — the most important question to answer is 'Why are we doing this?'; researchers tend to treat the answer as self-evident to themselves, which is precisely why it isn't self-evident to anyone else. — Ep. 40 · 12:04 · cl-ed-kahn-008
  • When the alternative to research is a coin toss, evidence at lower-than-textbook confidence (e.g., 80%) is still better than nothing — researchers must be able to discern when 'good enough is good enough' tactically and when stronger confidence is required strategically. — Ep. 40 · 14:18 · cl-ed-kahn-022
  • Researchers should never lead with technology when designing tools, dashboards, or AI capabilities; the human and business context — who will use the tool, what they should and shouldn't do with it — must drive the design choices. — Ep. 40 · 00:01 · cl-ed-kahn-001
  • Executives with twenty years of experience confidently believe they know what customers want; researchers' value is the disciplined acknowledgment that no one truly knows, and the willingness to ask 'how far wrong could you go?' — Ep. 40 · 20:14 · cl-ed-kahn-013
  • Self-serve dashboards and analytic tools should be released even when stakeholders may misuse them at first; the misuses become teaching moments that send users back to research with a sharper appreciation for the expertise. — Ep. 40 · 26:22 · cl-ed-kahn-015

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