Jennifer Connell

What do you do if your business strategy isn't yielding the expected results? Assuming you established KPIs and data upfront to measure your strategy, you need more information. Bring on perspectives from inside and outside the company. Internally, go beyond primary stakeholders involved and ask secondary stakeholders for their input on your strategy and how it eventually lines up with theirs. Externally, go outside your company and conduct discussions with peers and those in and outside of your industry on challenges that will spark ideas that you can use to adjust your strategy.

Research reminds me of the carpenter's adage "measure twice, cut once." Calculate the steps and total number of hours it'll take to complete a research project, and you can easily add 25% for later adjustments, either to the study or to the deliverables! And while you can make (limited) changes during the process, you can't always go back, depending on your method of collecting data. No matter how straightforward a project seems, it pays to take extra time upfront, take a step back, and even ask for a second opinion. The upside for me is that those tiny nuances that make each project slightly different, can turn be the seed for entirely a new megatrend that I hadn't set out to find in the first place.