Why my word of the MRS Conference was Consilience…

Consilience. That’s the word that for me summed up one of the main learnings I took away from this year’s MRS Impact conference. It’s also a word that I’d never heard before last week. Overall the conference was the same mix of papers that often inspired (as in either “I wish I’d thought of that” or “great – I can build on that approach to tackle my client’s challenge”) and sometimes reassured (as in “no better than what I’d have done”). By the way, everyone really wants the former – but actually everyone quite likes the latter…

Anyway – consilience was mentioned, once, in a great paper by Formula 1 and Flamingo where they were talking about bringing three separate research elements together to reach the conclusion/recommendations needed to grow the F1 brand. As a side note; these recommendations were really astute and have enabled F1 to move forward as a brand. For me, consilience was one of the big messages – it’s about using different or independent data sources to reach conclusions and move businesses forward. Whether it’s data mining, BE, or plain old telephone interviews, the key thing is about meeting challenges.

It was nicely paraphrased by Liz Lamb of ASDA when she talked about clients needing to use a ‘jigsaw of evidence’ to meet their insight needs – which I like for fairly obvious reasons. From an agency perspective it raises the question of what you offer – do you offer a mix of approaches, so that clients can get their consilience from one source. This means constantly adding to your worldview, bringing in newly developed thinking that helps better understand the human condition; it means constantly testing and developing diverse new approaches. Or do you focus on excelling on a specific discipline, so clients can pick and choose from individual providers. Are you a fox or a hedgehog? (see the article “Is your agency a hedgehog or a fox?” in IJMR by my colleague Luke Perry outlining this very point). At Jigsaw we see ourselves on the Fox side of the argument – bringing in disparate and different approaches to meet client challenges.

And we access our valued hedgehogs when we need to go outside of our core skills… this also talks to one of the points we made in the workshop that Luke Perry and I ran (with some great Mindfulness inputs from Susan Martle). The workshop was about how we can understand and combat the less helpful biases that we have at work – one of which is Confirmation Bias. And a way of combating this particular bias is to use different data sources… which you could say is a form of ‘consilience.’ 

Alex Johnston, Mar 19