In conversation with Jo Leopore, Head of Global Foresight at McDonald’s, we discuss the challenge of translating complex ideas into easily understood insight... without over-simplification.
And with that: How do we accept the cultural grey, embrace discomfort in research, and re-calibrate our reality to something more objective?
None of this work is easy, but it makes all the difference.
A snippet of our conversation:
On holding our hypotheses loosely—
MK: “What we're doing here is trying to make sense of culture. We're distilling it down to the most simple story for anyone to understand and, further, to actually activate upon.
As soon as you have a kink in that gear and the story doesn't make sense, the natural tendency is to say, “No thank you.” Ignore. Put the blinders on because this is going to blow everything up.
Now, trying to make sense of that contradiction, that tension, that caveat, the number that doesn't fit the narrative, trying to then weave that in is so much extra work.
Let’s not dismiss that.
It's confusing. It's time consuming. It's de-motivating.
There's something about value in there as well: where you thought you knew the answer and you're not good at it. That happens too.
But that extra work of trying to make sense of that contradiction — the explanation of how you could hold both of these things simultaneously, that little piece is where you transform strategy into incredible strategy.”
Listen to our full conversation below.
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