Humility and Curiosity – Two Critical Skills for Researchers and the Rest of Us

Today, businesses clearly understand the value of consumer centricity and are investing billions of dollars in data, analytics, neuroscience and traditional research. To power a consumer first mind set, businesses are recruiting a variety of functions – data scientist, e-commerce insights specialist, neuroscientist – to support the insights function. 

Businesses look for insight managers with skills such as numeric comprehension and analytics, verbal and written communication, understanding of research techniques, etc. Are these the appropriate skills? In summary, yes…these are valuable skills within an organization. 

But we believe that there are two soft skills that are critical to being a successful insights manager – humility and curiosity

It’s very hard for anyone to say, “I don’t know” and even more difficult for an insights manager. 

Insight managers are expected to have most of the answers, and if not, at least an hypothesis as to what the answer might be. After all, we are the custodians of all the information within the organization. We collect the data, analyze and disseminate it to the organization. We are expected to know it all. This fundamental mindset and expectation can hamper our ability to be objective. To address this inherent prejudice, we suggest that researchers develop – humility and curiosity 

Humility

Humility to admit that we don’t know all the answers. This is difficult quality – saying “I don’t know” seemingly amounts to incompetence and so most of us would hazard a guess, right or wrong. 

Furthermore, when we do have the answers, we need to temper our knowledge. This is counter intuitive and again hard to do. As insights managers, we have built up an understanding of businesses we work in, and this is a good thing as we don’t have to reinvent the wheel – we don’t start from scratch all the time. Why would we not learn from past mistakes? We would argue that we need to understand the context of our learnings. If the context changes, then the learning’s would have changes dramatically. In today’s world, globalization and digital are rapidly changing people’s lives and their environment (our context for learning’s) and therefore their consumption habits. 

Little changes are constant, more than any piece of research can measure. So being able to say and insist that organizations don’t “know” but need to constantly review seems a must. 

Curiosity

Naturally insight professionals should be curious. We are all born curious, as a father of an eight-year-old boy, I was peppered with questions every day. However, as we grow older, we are conditioned to ask fewer questions for fear we might sound stupid. Or we assume that we have the answers to the questions.  We, as insight managers, need to have the unbridled curiosity of children to ask the questions.

So think about being the questioner within the organization rather than the provider of answers. The people we work with, our colleagues and customers, will all be looking at the world through the limits the bubbles of their own experiences and past learning. Maybe we should be redefining our role as being the “child”, the one in the team who tries to look at everything through “newborn” eyes and question, question, question. 

Can we? Well our role as the eyes and ears and interpreters of the world should never be limited to “answering this brief” but looking at all we know and don’t know to help the organization learn. Right?

In summary, humility, and curiosity, are critical soft skills for the new insights professional and the rest of us – we welcome your thoughts.