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Researcher craft & identity

Insights communication skills

60 indexed claims · 24 guests · peaked 2025-Q4

Insights communication skills

Overview

Across these podcast episodes, no professional skill generates more consensus — or more urgency — than the ability to communicate research in ways that actually drive decisions. The dominant tension runs between data volume and decision clarity: guests describe organizations drowning in findings while executives remain starved for perspective. A second fault line cuts across professional identity — the gap between the neutral findings-reporter that academic training produces and the opinion-holding business partner that commercial stakeholders consistently say they want most. Where these conversations converge is on storytelling as a learnable craft, on structural brevity as a discipline, and on the willingness to stake a clear position as the skill that most reliably separates influential researchers from forgettable ones.

From the corpus

  • Research programs suffer from scope bloat when teams fail to explicitly state what the research will NOT answer; defining the boundaries of a study upfront — including what is out of scope — is as important as defining its objectives, and protects against the stakeholder friction of unanswered questions. — Aarti Bhaskaran, Ep. 52 · cl-aarti-bhaskaran-013
  • Asking a colleague to review a survey is how jargon survives; the right pretest is outside the company — a parent, a grandparent, a regular customer — and watching them take the survey while they report what words mean and which questions confuse them is how surveys actually get sharper. — Ernest Baskin, Ep. 48 · cl-ernest-baskin-023
  • Researchers reflexively jump to answering questions without pausing to ask why the question is being asked, what it will be used for, and how the answer will impact decisions — this habit causes wasted research effort and is the industry practice she most wants to see stopped. — Aarti Bhaskaran, Ep. 52 · cl-aarti-bhaskaran-025
  • 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. — Ed Kahn, Ep. 40 · cl-ed-kahn-008
  • Brand tracking and measurement programs fail when they report numerical changes without linking them to causal explanations and business outcomes — the 'why behind the numbers' is the difference between a measurement program that succeeds and one that falls short. — Aarti Bhaskaran, Ep. 52 · cl-aarti-bhaskaran-011
  • The most effective form of stakeholder influence is storytelling that lets the listener arrive at the conclusion themselves; trying to prove you're right is structurally weaker than telling the story of someone experiencing what you want them to understand. — Charitie Dantis-Gayo, Ep. 42 · cl-charitie-dantis-gayo-019
  • Researchers should not just present what they found in the data — they must tell the story; the best piece of mentorship Louisea received was this directive, and it remains the skill that separates memorable insight delivery from forgettable data dumps. — Louisea Hudson, Ep. 15 · cl-louisea-hudson-018
  • Communication — both written (down to how to write a client email) and verbal articulation — is the most critical soft skill new researchers need, and it is rarely taught explicitly even though students will face it on day one of their first job. — Don DeVeaux, Ep. 18 · cl-don-deveaux-003

Contributing guests

Episodes in Insights communication skills

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