Bridging Strategy and Implementation with Qualitative Research

By Destiny Aman, JPoint Strategic Design SME & CEO

Here at JPoint Collaborative, we love to get nerdy with behavioral science, strategic design, and research methodology, which is why we were so excited to embark on one of our recent projects – facilitating a set of strategic design sessions for a public organization looking to execute their strategic plan. The point at which strategy transitions from being ideas on paper into the fundamental workings of an organization is one of the crucial junction points (connections and pivots) that compel us here at JPoint. It’s a powerful and potential-ful transition for any organization – and we are always excited to help our partners through it. 

But especially now, when so many organizations are revisiting their goals in the light of major shifts, many teams are stressed and overwhelmed, and it can be hard to find the creative space needed for strategic thinking. As a company that specializes in risk, disaster, and disruption, we understand that challenge, and we embrace it. We know that being creative, flexible, and ready during times like these will yield huge immediate and long-term benefits for teams, and there will be opportunities in the crisis for those who are prepared.  

So to get things going, we first needed to find out where this org’s leadership team currently sat with the existing strategy materials. We had questions like: 

• Were they excited about the strategic goals their organization had articulated? 
• Did they feel like the content was still relevant, even with recent changes in the strategic operating environment? 
• What capabilities or mechanisms might they have access to that could be used to help the execution of the plan? 

Once collected, our findings went directly into the design and facilitation of two in-person design sessions – precious time for leadership to get clear on what was needed and build a path for how to realize their organization’s vision. 

In order to do this, and do it quickly and well, we used qualitative research methods, including conducting one-on-one interviews with each member of the leadership team.

The folks we met with were passionate, skilled, driven, and excited to be part of the foundational groundwork for their organization. Throughout the project, we had a great time connecting with everyone and learning about what mattered most to them. All important information that we used to help our clients identify and neutralize barriers and help them find a way forward.

Exploring new points of view: qualitative research allows you to deep dive into diverse perspectives and beliefs.

Qualitative research involves gathering data that isn’t inherently numerical in nature – it often explores conceptual topics related to experiences, beliefs, and perspectives. Qualitative research frequently employs grounded theory as its methodology, which focuses on gathering data and then extrapolating themes from what has been analyzed. Grounded theory involves bottoms-up, inductive reasoning, wherein researchers collect data and explore the common threads they find before they generate any hypotheses – as opposed to the top-down deductive reasoning primarily used in quantitative research, which typically starts with a hypothesis and then seeks to gather data that will support or disprove it.

While quantitative research often focuses on answering specific, discrete questions like when and what and where, qualitative research is generally more concerned with why and how. Unlike quantitative research, qualitative research is more concerned with depth over breadth. Qualitative research rarely seeks to find an immutable truth, but rather explores more conceptual findings. That said, while qualitative research is sometimes perceived as a bit squishier than quantitative research, it can absolutely be rigorous, reliable, and valid. 

Face to face: conducting one-on-one interviews gives participants the chance to say what they really feel.

We knew from the start that we wanted to conduct individual interviews with each member of our clients’ leadership team. By speaking to folks one-on-one, we gave them room to share their ideas more freely and explore their thoughts in a more personal setting.

We conducted interviews in teams of two, which allowed one person to take the lead and really focus on listening and prompting, and another person to keep track of notes, manage the technical side of things, and provide any additional support. With every interview, we started with a warm-up question to get people comfortable. We matched the energy of the participants, and made sure to stay open, receptive, friendly, and professional. 

For this client, we designed a simple visual exercise for participants to complete – to assign shapes to their organization’s strategic goals based on various criteria, and then to explain their thinking. These kinds of activities can be great for helping folks open up; they also enable our team to compile, analyze, and visualize results in interesting ways that can be useful for extending the discussion – in this case, into the strategic design sessions.

After interviewing all our participants, we then moved on to analyzing the data we’d collected.

Pulling the thread: through careful analysis of themes, you can discover what’s truly meaningful.

As we spoke with our interviewees, several common themes emerged. The points that we heard over and over again would help identify the gaps we needed to address in our strategic design session; however, the outliers were significant as well. Following our interviews, we broke our notes down and aggregated all the data in a shared digital design board – we like to use Miro for this – and began to organize our findings. The shared sentiments quickly became apparent, and we were able to extrapolate what most of the team was most concerned about, discover the elements that were already being executed successfully, and uncover a few observations only expressed by one or two individuals that needed to be brought to the entire group’s attention. 

We used all of this input to swiftly get oriented to our clients’ context, help them build a confident understanding of their current state, and develop an engaging set of strategic design sessions that got everyone on the same page regarding the execution of their strategy. 

At JPoint, we love using behavioral science to help empower folks doing the good work – especially in times like these. If your organization needs help finding and implementing a strategic direction that unites and motivates through the chaos, let us know.