Outsource Your Data Synthesis

We will do the hard work of making sense out of the interviews and listening sessions you have conducted. Make use of the data you have, so it won’t go to waste. We’ll bring you knowledge for the foundation of inspiration, inclusivity, and innovation.

What you get is a set of patterns, synthesized from the recordings, representing people’s interior cognition as they addressed a particular purpose. These patterns are created by hand, carefully using each person’s wording, thinking, and approach. The patterns form the top half of an opportunity map for your organization. (The top half is also known as a mental model diagram as people addressed that purpose.)

Once we deliver the top half of the opportunity map, you can take it from there … or we can help you with the next steps: aligning your capabilities beneath towers, identifying a few potential areas of priority and working with stakeholders to choose among them, or benchmarking the level of help or harm your solutions are doing for one of these priority areas.

The Cost

Since this work is based on the richness and length of the interviews and listening sessions, the cost varies by project. To give you an idea of the synthesis work required:

Data	Total Recording Hrs	Our Labor	Total	Cost Range
Rich	40 hours	11.7 per hour	468	$23,400 – $56,200
Rich	15 hours	11.7 per hour	176	$8,800 – $22,000
Not-as-rich	15 hours	8.9 per hour	134	$6,700 – $16,000

The Test

We need to check your data first. Your interviews and listening sessions must meet some criteria for our services to be valuable to you. Before a project begins, we look over your data to make sure it will result in patterns. (This means you will get empirical, verifiable qualitative data, and we can steer clear of subjective data “insights.”)

We will sign agreements about security and privacy for the participants in your research, and after the test we’ll confirm that we’ve deleted the data. We will sign privacy and non-disclosure agreements before beginning the check of your data.

We will also be able to get a sense of how much it will cost and give you an estimate.

Here are the criteria we look for:

1. Are the transcripts high-quality, with emotional tone included and lingo defined? The ‘bots can’t do this yet. If not, our independent transcribers can work with your recordings and create hand-made transcripts for an additional ~$130/hr)
2. The set of interviews or listening sessions that you provide us all cover the same purpose. (A person’s goal or intent of any size, ongoing pursuit, habitual task, something you make progress on, something you are postponing, etc.)
3. There is interior cognition present in the transcripts in sufficient richness to provide patterns. (Interior cognition is the inner thinking, emotional reactions, and guiding principles that went through a person’s mind as they addressed that purpose in the past.)

We charge a sliding fee for this test. If your team is trained and experienced team in deep listening, the fee is $100. If you are trained in deep listening and this is early work, the fee is $250. If this set of recordings or transcripts comes from interview-style sessions, there may still be very useful data; the fee is $350. Whether your data meets the criteria or not, we will point you in a good direction for this small fee. We want you to harness your knowledge, to make decisions, and be informed about the opportunities for your solutions.

Patterns

It’s all about patterns! There is nothing to show if we can’t find patterns in your data. We will be able to find patterns in rich data which is about the same purpose. We are likely to find some patterns in not-as-rich data. Below that threshold, a session that contains 20-40 interior cognition concepts is potentially usable if you plan to conduct more research to add to it; usually this smaller number of concepts won’t form many usable patterns.

Sessions that are not all about the same purpose will not form patterns. These latter conditions are not something you will want to be aware of, so you can reframe and add more listening sessions within one purpose. Therefore, we do need to check your data to see what you have got, before we start.