The Research Is Good. So Why Is Nothing Changing?
I've had a version of the same conversation about 5 or 6 times in the last few months with senior leaders.
Different people. Different organisations. Different sectors. But the same frustrated and dejected look when they day it.
"The research is good. The methodology is good. We have solid practitioners. But nothing moves. The findings go in a deck, the deck gets shared around, there’s a sparsely attended playback meeting, and then... it just sort of disappears."
So if researchers are doing good work - why does nobody care? Why are we commissioning researchers to go out, speak to people, do analysis, and then just scream into the void in 20pt Arial?
The problem is that researchers aren’t telling engaging stories.
Researchers are brilliant. Nobody's taught them to narrate.
The profession has matured enormously. The methods are more varied. We have dedicated res:ops tools! My mind would have melted had I been given Condens and Rally in 2015. Research is more embedded than it's ever been. And yet the findings still die in a deck that nobody finished reading, ferreted away in Confluence to remain untouched.
Not because the work isn't credible. Not because the stakeholders don't care. But because gathering evidence and telling the story of it are completely different skills and almost nobody is deliberately trained in the second one - the assumption is that good work should speak for itself. It doesn’t.
We spend a lot of time talking about insight quality. Almost no time on what happens after the insight exists.
And then we're baffled when nothing changes.
Data and slide decks don’t inspire change. I cannot stress this enough.
I know this sounds a bit trite and obvious, but it's true, it keeps happening, so here we are.
The most effective communicators in any field lead with a human moment and follow with the evidence. Not the other way around. They know something researchers often don't: the brain doesn't feel a statistic. It feels a person's experience. The statistic is what makes that feeling defensible.
This is why I bring people out to do research with me - so colleagues and stakeholders SEE the user. See the struggles. See the frustration. See the opportunity. But not everyone can go out to be in every research session, so when a playback opens with "67% of users struggled with the navigation" — that's starting in entirely the wrong place.
Start with the person. Bring their stories to life.
I use personas, mindsets, archetypes, videos - anything to bring the people you’re building for in to the room.
The four things I see going wrong, specifically (and then backed up by senior people)
1. The findings are presented like a report, not argued like a case
Theme one. Theme two. Theme three. Recommendations. End. Massive appendix to go untouched.
A report is a container. A story is an argument. Those are not the same thing. Artefacts vs feeling.
The argument is: here's what's happening, here's why it matters, here's what's at stake if nothing changes, here's what we do about it. In that order.
Researchers are trained to separate analysis from interpretation rightly but as a narrative structure, it's genuinely terrible. You end up with a rigorous document that nobody acts on and everyone admires briefly before moving on.
2. One playback for everyone
A head of product needs to know what decision to make on Monday. A leadership team needs to understand their exposure to risk. A delivery team needs to know what to build next sprint.
The same research can serve all three. But not with the same story. Different audiences need the same evidence translated through a completely different lens.
If you're doing one playback for the room, you're probably doing one playback that half-works for everyone and fully works for nobody.
3. All the emotion has been professionally removed
Neutral, measured, considered language. Because that's rigorous. Because that's professional. Because that's safe.
It's also utterly inert as a way of creating urgency.
Neutral language doesn't make a senior leader lean forward. It doesn't stick in anyone's head after the Zoom ends. Carefully removing emotion from findings also accidentally removes the point.
Users were frustrated. Users gave up. That's not a neutral fact. It's a problem. Present it like one.
(I say this as someone who has absolutely sat in rooms presenting neutral facts about frustrated people and then wondered why nothing happened. We've all done it. I can also share being the person being presented to - if it’s not engaging I’ll float away in my head.)
4. The 'so what' is left as homework
The classic sign-off: a list of recommendations, fairly hedged, fairly long, handed to the room to argue about and prioritise.
I get why it happens. Researchers don't want to overstep. They're trained to present options - not direction.
But there's a difference between overstepping into delivery and targeted effective advocacy. You can have a clear view on priority without taking the decision out of the room. Most stakeholders are quietly desperate for someone to give them a narrative anchor.
If you don't give them one, they'll make their own. And their version will almost certainly prioritise whatever was already on the roadmap.
This isn't a creativity problem
Storytelling is a craft. It is genuinely learnable. It is not some mysterious gift that some researchers were born with and others weren't.
But it requires deliberate practice. And right now most research teams aren't getting any. It's not in those grim 48 hour bootcamps. It's barely touched in most training programmes. It's assumed to emerge naturally from experience, and occasionally it does, for the people who stumble across it and take it seriously.
Meanwhile there are researchers doing genuinely excellent work watching their findings die on slide twelve.
What it looks like when it's working
When storytelling actually lands, a few specific things happen that usually don't.
Stakeholders start referencing participants by name in follow-up meetings. Not as data points. As people. "What does this mean for people like for Fred? Does Barney have the same problem?" That's when you know it's stuck.
Decisions move faster. Because the argument is clear, the urgency is felt rather than stated, and there's a natural next step rather than an open list of recommendations.
Research gets pulled in earlier. Because when people feel the value of it, they start asking for it proactively rather than treating it as a compliance exercise.
That's what closing the storytelling gap actually unlocks. Not prettier presentations. A completely different relationship between research and the rest of the organisation.
So what do you actually do about it?
Some of this can be addressed by individual researchers deliberately studying narrative structure, getting comfortable with a clear point of view, practising the muscle.
But the most durable fix is a cultural one. It requires someone to name the gap explicitly, give the team a shared language for it, and create the conditions to practise.
That's the work I do with research teams and the people who lead them. Not a lecture. Not a framework deck. I don’t just hand everyone Joseph Campbell’s “A Hero with a Thousand Faces” and do a mic-drop. (Or because it’s me, get everyone to download a meme generator and say ‘go do the memes’ - I don’t do just that.)
I’m developing a hands-on session, or a series of them that starts with the specific stories your team is already trying to tell and builds from there.
If you're recognising this in your organisation if that tired look is familiar I'm at jason@catseye.digital No hard sell, no lengthy proposal. Just a conversation about whether it's the right fit.
Your research is probably good. Let's make sure it actually speaks to people.