From insight producers to insight activists: How to enhance our role as knowledge stewards
Editor's note: This article is an automated speech-to-text transcription, edited lightly for clarity. For the full session, please watch the recording.
There are currently many disruptions in the marketing research and insight industry and the world as a whole. These changes make it difficult for organizations to stay relevant, leading to a larger need for insights.
James Wycherley, CEO of Insights Management Academy (IMA), argues that researchers need to transition to an insight activist role instead of primarily insight producers.
In this session from Quirk’s Virtual – Ensuring Data Quality, Ethics and Security series on June 11, 2026, Wycherley introduces the role of knowledge stewards. He explains what this role is and why it is important for researchers to take it on during this tumultuous time.
Session transcript
Joe Rydholm
Hi everybody, and welcome to our session, “From insight producers to insight activists: How to enhance our role as knowledge stewards.” I'm Quirk's Editor, Joe Rydholm, and before we get started, I just wanted to quickly go over the ways you can participate in today's discussion.
You can use a chat tab to interact with other attendees, and you can use a Q&A tab to submit questions to the presenter, and we'll address them in a live Q&A after the recording.
Our session today is presented by the IMA. Enjoy!
James Wycherley
Hi, everyone. I'm James Wycherley from the Insight Management Academy (IMA). Today I'd like to talk to you about the way in which I think insight professionals can enhance their role as knowledge stewards.
For those of you that don't know me, my name is James Wycherley. I was Insights Director at Barclays from 2004 through 2014. And since then, I've been Chief Executive of the IMA, an organization dedicated to inspiring, guiding and supporting insight leaders who want to transform the impact of insight in their organizations. You might well have seen me present on a Quirk’s stage in New York, Chicago or London. And also, might name me as the author of “Transforming Insight” and “The Insight Leaders Playbook.” And I host the Transforming Insight Podcasts as well as the IMA's own Insight forums.
The IMA itself is an organization dedicated to helping leaders and their teams to have more impact within their organizations. And a whole host of very familiar companies take part in our insight forums, our team development work, do capability benchmarking with us and contribute to our discussions about what best practice looks like. And it's based on those discussions that I then talk in podcasts, at Quirk’s Events and elsewhere, trying to inspire more leaders and team members to really take this thing called insight, make the most of it and really increase its impact within organizations.
Since the beginning of the year, I've been asking insight leaders to think about how we could shape the definition, the development and the decisions of insight-driven organizations.
I'm focusing on insight-driven organizations because we're all very aware, I'm sure, of the amount of change in the insight world at the moment as AI tools become available, as vendors start offering new things, as different demands are placed on us by our own organizations. I've never known a time when there's as much disruption, as many role changes, senior people leaving insight teams, in some cases headcount freezers or budget changes. There's just a lot going on and it's very difficult in those times sometimes to think about people other than ourselves and our own departments. But I think it's all the more important to think about our organizations and what we can do to help them because in times of increased technological change like the once in a generation or more changes that we're having at the moment, it's not at all infrequent for about 30 to 50% of major brands to go out of business over a five-year period, or at least be subsumed within a different corporate entity of some sort.
Depends on the maturity of the industry, but we shouldn't take it for granted that the organization that we work for at the moment or the organizations that we're used to seeing on the high street or all around us will still be there in a few years time. I'm sure there is going to be major, major disruption that will put pressure on them and it puts pressure on us to think, ‘how can we help those organizations to be insight-driven organizations and enhance their chances of making great decisions in the future and being one of the winners in the disruption that follows.’
So, what, in this environment, can we do?
Well, the first thing is to have a plan. The old adage, “If we fail to plan, we plan to fail,” has never been more true.
I encourage every corporate insight leader out there to write their own insight leader's playbook, paying particular attention to the nine Ps, which I think are essential aspects of leading and developing an insight team. Namely thinking about the purpose of the team, its profile in the organization, the people who work within it, its partners internal and external, how it understands what its priorities are, which areas get focused, which topics are investigated, which are not, the products that it produces, etc. The output that rest of the organization sees, the processes that it follows in order to work efficiently and effectively, including adopting more appropriate new technology and how it measures its performance. On a more personal level, how all of us can become more transformational insight leaders or more transformational insight professionals. In the current environment, I think we want to play a particular focus on the roles that our people play within our insight teams.
With that in mind, in November at the IMA's Insight forums, I introduced a new tool, what I called the “Insight Professionals Pyramid.”
Basically, it maps the world as I see it from a foundational level where we recognize that we're all doing market research, customer analytics and endowed listen desk research, but that's increasingly going to be enabled, assisted or powered by AI in the future. But more importantly, we want to use the presence of AI and new technology to try to shift our retention upwards to move upstream to the more value adding activities that we can have as insight team professionals so that we don't describe our roles and define ourselves as being market researchers or analysts anymore, but rather we move from building insight producers to insight activists.