Solving the Research Ops puzzle: How systems thinking can expand your impact

Think back to activities you enjoyed as a child, such as puzzles, word searches, and connecting the dots. These activities trained your brain to view the bigger picture, spot the problem, then recognize patterns and build connections to solve them. What you may not know is that your love for activities like these has taught you to think in systems. In his book The Fifth Discipline, Peter Senge defines systems thinking as “a discipline for seeing wholes…a framework for seeing interrelationships rather than things, for seeing patterns of change rather than static snapshots.”¹ And as a systems thinker, you focus on how the puzzle pieces work together to create a complete picture — how combining letters in a word search forms words, and how connecting a series of seemingly random dots produces an image.

In operations, it’s common to witness inefficiencies, duplicative efforts, siloed teams, and a lack of established processes. Teams often find themselves spending too much time and money with minimal return on investment, leaving hard work unnoticed or underutilized. I frequently hear shared pain points and frustrations expressed across multiple teams within an organization. Although everyone is (or should be) working toward the same end goal, it can seem as if teams are paddling in different directions instead of rowing as a unified force (or system) with a shared purpose.

I’ve worked in research operations or similar roles in many organizations — roles that have allowed me to inspire change and foster new ways of thinking about research. By intentionally connecting with different functions, I’ve identified opportunities for research operations to support and enhance collective efforts, ultimately improving the visibility, confidence in, and impact of research. Perfectly put in her book Research That Scales, Kate Towsey wrote, “Your primary work is gathering and coordinating existing expertise.”² But it all begins with stepping back to view all the expertise and resources, and approaching them creatively — or designing — better ways for them to work together.

In this article, I’ll share key steps for leveraging systems thinking to solve Research Ops problems and make a greater impact in your organization. These concepts are broad enough to help you work systematically and cross-functionally, and practical enough to apply and adapt to the challenges unique to specific contexts — and make lasting change.

Approaching the people puzzle

In the early days of a new role, my introductory conversations with new coworkers can feel like therapy sessions. After a few earnest questions, trying to understand their experiences, these conversations often turn into long venting sessions about what’s currently not working for them. From there, I can’t help but want to jump in and fix everything! But to effectively solve any problem, I know I must first gather all the relevant information and understand what I’m dealing with in terms of the issues, the impacted teams or results, and any resources I might have available to optimize a solution. So, I go on a listening tour.

Go on a listening tour

I’m an introvert, so meeting and getting deep into conversation often feels daunting at first, but working with others and sharing skills and knowledge is ultimately energizing. I love getting to learn more about my coworkers. I start by learning about their professional backgrounds, how they came to be in their roles, what their priorities are, and what our opportunities for collaboration are — and I manage to glean some fun personal pieces of information, too. By the end of these chats, I’ve found a way to connect with each stakeholder on some level, whether it’s about the similarities in our needs and pain points or a shared vision for the future. I learn who my supporters are, who’s willing to collaborate (and occasionally, those who aren’t interested in starting something new together) — and all of it’s okay! This process helps me prioritize focusing my efforts towards the people and teams that will be most productive to partner with.

Whether you’ve been in your role for months or years, it’s never too late to embark on a listening tour. Whether it’s one of the first things you do, or you weave it into your role over time, you’ll be glad you did. Maybe you kick off your listening tour to understand what is and isn’t working for your stakeholders and cross-functional teams, or perhaps you simply drop casual coffee chats into calendars to introduce yourself and research operations. The goal is simply to start talking to people.

Connect with the end-piece people

You know when you’re working on a jigsaw puzzle, and you make a beeline for those end pieces: the obvious first pieces that fit together? In the world of systems thinking, there may be teams that are obvious to engage with, like your direct partners, or product, design, and marketing groups. But the real key is to also connect with the outliers: the teams you may not identify as your immediate stakeholders or beneficiaries, but may offer undiscovered collaborative opportunities.

During one of my listening tours years ago, I met with the market research team, which, at the time, wasn’t working closely with the user experience research (UXR) team. It was through an outlier meeting that I discovered duplicative initiatives, including multiple teams working independently to build research participant panels for the same purpose. Granted, it was a huge organization, but this sort of doubling of efforts is equally common in small and mid-sized organizations. Through this realization, our teams decided to work together to build a mutually beneficial panel, sharing resources and budget to make it happen. Win-win!

Beyond your direct partners and stakeholders, I suggest meeting with other data or insight functions like:

• Consumer insights and market research
• Customer support and success
• Data analytics
• Data science

Engaging with these teams will help you gain a comprehensive understanding of the data available within the organization — a complementary and vital piece to strengthening the impact of insights in an organization. Then, meet with the engineering, creative, or sales teams. And don’t forget to connect with internal partners in privacy, legal, finance, IT, talent, and human resources, too. These centralized functions often have a more holistic overview of the organization, so it’s important they know who you are and what you do (and vice versa).

These teams can also help connect you with other potential partners. Some of my best partnerships and shared initiatives have emerged from outlier conversations. So, here’s a quick tip: after introducing yourself, ask everyone you talk to for recommendations on others you should meet, too. You’ll expand your web of connections and broaden your research system wider and wider.

Connect the dots with care

Once you’ve made connections with traditional and outlier stakeholders and started building bridges to connect the dots, it’s time to take action with the information, resources, data, and technology you have at your disposal. Here are a few ways to kick that collab into action:

• Build trust and close the loop. Openly and clearly document what you learned during your listening tour and report back to your stakeholders, highlighting themes, duplicative efforts you uncovered, and proposed solutions.
• Share the wealth. Share what you know and what you have that others can benefit from, like customer insights, tools, or resources you can make available to help everyone create efficiencies.
• Expand the sharing network. Seek out or build a community of practice to share strategies, findings, and resources more widely.

Find communities of practice

I first learned about the concept of communities of practice (CoPs) while working in research and impact measurement at a nonprofit organization. Anthropologists Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger-Trayner define communities of practice as “groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly.”³

While CoPs are common in the social sector, they’re also used (and useful) in the private sector, and they’re equally valuable in Research Ops. Examples of Research Ops-oriented CoPs I’ve run in the past include “insights coalitions,” “research enablement teams,” and champions for “research ethics/privacy,” and “accessibility in research.” What’s common among these examples is that they include a group of people with shared interests, collectively working together to accelerate a shared vision. Whether the collective work looks like dividing and conquering participant recruitment, sharing a templates database, or being particularly passionate about all things to do with accessibility in research, community practitioners all recognize the larger benefit from shared activities — and shared workload.

Build communities of practice

To establish a community of practice, align participants on shared goals and define what collective success looks like. Identify ways in which you can share your capacity to enhance your velocity and impact. In tech, your community of practice could be your insight coalition (multiple insight functions working together to provide holistic insights), “tiger team” (experts from different functions working together on a shared product/feature), or a working group. In the same article, Etienne and Beverly Wenger-Trayner describe different use cases or activities for communities of practice, which I’ve tied to some specific Research Operations examples:

• Request for information. Building a research repository (a place to find your insights/reports) and participant panel (a place to find details about your user base).
• Reusable assets. Developing assets for multiple teams, such as method templates, insights, and research guides, could benefit both researchers and people who do research (PWDRs)⁴ running research.
• Coordination and synergy. Consolidating resource needs, i.e., purchasing vendor licenses or credits in bulk, or leveraging a joint enterprise plan to preserve budgets across teams and functions.
• Building an argument. Sharing data to build stronger cases for getting things done or securing greater confidence in decision-making.
• Identifying gaps in competence. Leveraging individual skills and resources to fill gaps and source solutions, i.e., bringing in team members with coding or data analysis talent to automate or expedite manual tasks.

Use these community- and partnership-building opportunities to share your resources and insights with the people who can benefit from them most. Establish a regular touchpoint, open up your platforms, prioritize transparency, and introduce continuous visibility. Ideally, by working this way, the teams around you will learn that keeping all the puzzle pieces to yourself yields multiple weaker structures, while sharing and combining them allows you to build a system (or picture) that’s stronger and expandable.

Collaboration that scales

Okay, so you’ve put the puzzle pieces together, connected opportunity dots from your conversations, and you’re building bridges with new functions. You’ve established shared platforms and knowledge, and coordinated initiatives to work on together — as a collective. Now it’s time to use all that work of coming together…for the greater good.

“The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.”
— Aristotle, a Greek philosopher

For Research Ops teams, the mission is to scale the impact of research and insights across an organization. For research, the mission is to understand user behaviors and needs to support strategy and help the organization make data-driven decisions that grow the business. Regardless of the team or function, the shared objective is to make a meaningful impact on business priorities.

And there’s no time like the present to take initiative and identify opportunities to make an impact in different areas. Many insight functions lack operational support, which presents such an opening to fill that gap. For me, it was making these connections with other insight functions that led to shared tools (and cost savings), shared initiatives (like a newsletter), better collaboration (through an insights coalition) and more meaningful results for the business through optimizing mutual interest, goals, and common ground.

Stepping up to this challenge may add more to your workload, add some new recurring meetings to your calendar, and expand your stakeholder relationships, but if the end goal is to increase the overall reach and impact of Research Ops — and therefore of research — it’s a puzzle worth solving.

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Edited by Kate Towsey and Katel LeDu.

👉 The ResearchOps Review is the publication arm of the Cha Cha Club – a members' club for Research Ops professionals. Subscribe for smart thinking and sharp writing, all laser-focused on Research Ops.

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1 Senge, Peter. 2006. The Fifth Discipline The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization. 2nd ed. Doubleday/Currency.

2 Towsey, Kate. 2024. Research That Scales: The Research Operations Handbook. Rosenfeld Media. https://rosenfeldmedia.com/books/research-that-scales.

3 “Introduction to Communities of Practice: A Brief Overview of the Concept and Its Uses.” Wenger-Trayner. June, 2015. https://www.wenger-trayner.com/introduction-to-communities-of-practice.

4 PWDR (pau·duh) stands for “people who do research” and includes researchers, designers, and product managers — anyone who does research. It’s a widely used acronym that was coined in 2019 by Kate Towsey, editor in chief of The ResearchOps Review.