The Researcher as a Diplomat

When you hear the word diplomacy, what is the images images that come to mind for you? Maybe it's images like these. Maybe it's images like these. Maybe this, many nations working together. Maybe it's images of international conflict and negotiation.

For me, diplomacy looked a lot like this. A bit of a change. I grew up in a family of diplomats and moved countries many times throughout my early life. As I adapted to new places, schools, social circles, cultures, I grew up carefully observing how those around me navigated the world around them through the lens of diplomacy.

Diplomacy itself isn't about politics or force. It's about relationships and building relationships without hostility. As a diplomat, you don't get a choice of who you work with. Some relationships are simple where your values and goals are aligned and sometimes things are a little bit more complex, where views differ, maybe where not everyone is open to a dialogue and yet you have to remain professional and maintain composure at all times.

Does this sound familiar to anyone? Raise your hand if you've ever struggled or hit a wall trying to build a relationship with a stakeholder. I had a feeling I would see a lot of hands. Navigating stakeholder relationships as a researcher can be a bit of a roller coaster. We aren't working with our best friends.

We're working with stakeholders who have different agendas, motivations, different goals, sometimes different perspectives. And we don't get to choose our stakeholders, but we do get to choose how we build influence with them. And as I've reflected on my journey as a researcher, I realized many of the lessons that I've picked up in my early years have served me in my career and helped me build greater influence over time. And today, I wanted to share these with you.

So let's take a look at three diplomatic principles that will help you build greater research influence in your organization. The principles we'll be exploring kind of build on one another and so first we have to start with our foundations and we have to start with how we actually establish our presence and that begins with soft power. So soft power is the ability to influence the behavior or interests of others through attraction and persuasion rather than force.

Unlike politics where a leader might use hard power to force through a new regulation, or an executive order, a diplomat who uses soft power waits for the other side to want to cooperate because they respect you, your culture, your shared vision, and values.

If you think of New Zealand's clean green brand, it's an asset that makes other nations want to cooperate with New Zealand. Thanks to our expertise in this space. And this is a good example of soft power. Soft power is about attraction, branding, persuasion, influence, and it takes time to build. And as researchers, soft power is the only currency that we really have. We don't have the authority as much as we like to to veto a product launch or make a key business decision. We only really have the power to persuade.

But like any diplomatic tool, its effectiveness depends entirely on how it's received by the other side. And before we talk about building soft power, we need to be really honest about where we stand as researchers right now. You know, you need to ask yourself, when you walk into the room, how is research actually perceived in your organization?

Is it trusted, rapid, reputable? Is it time consuming, but maybe thorough and reliable at the same time? Or maybe it's difficult, slow, maybe a bit obvious, sometimes maybe a little bit pedantic. You know, you need to know where you're starting from to know where you can have the most influence and where to focus your efforts. So how do you actually build soft power?

Great research is fast, it's rigorous, but most importantly, it is deeply attuned to what our businesses actually need. To build trust with our stakeholders, we really need to understand and build a strong sense of our product and a strength... Strong sense of our business. And, you know, this is something that we already spoke about earlier in Anna's talk as well.

You know, you need to understand what your business is trying to derisk or optimize for in this very moment. Awareness, acquisition, usage, retention, maybe monetization, know, does your research actually move the needle on some of these things? In the March future research report by Mays, clear business metrics and outcomes were highlighted as the biggest driver of executive trust in research.

When we speak the language of our organization, we build credibility and we show our stakeholders and our leaders that we care about the same things that they do. So we need to align our work and our insights to our organization's core concerns. And it's it's more than just reading annual reports. It's about really understanding the constraints and the practical realities that our stakeholders are wrestling with every day.

You need to ask yourself, what does our organization really need right now? Is it de risking a particular launch? Maybe it's challenging some deeply held assumptions that we have as an organization or as we heard in Anna's presentation, maybe it's giving teams the tools they need to work with the customers that they're in charge of. Maybe it's something simpler.

Maybe it's just a shared understanding of who your customers really are. I love this example from TradeMe, New Zealand's largest online marketplace. And they didn't need another research study. They needed to bring the customer into the room and so they plastered stories on giant posters throughout their office to really force the focus on the customer.

Sometimes you might find that your business doesn't actually need more research. It needs a reminder of who your user really is and easier access to learning more about them. And the other ingredient of soft power is showing up with confidence. Confidence is such a simple thing, but the importance it brings to this process is often overlooked.

Soft power is all about optics and there is enormous power in how we show up in our organizations. You know, doing great research isn't enough most of the time. If we want people to trust us and entrust things to us, they're going to have to detect a level of confidence. And confidence is kind of easier said rather than done.

Right? Just build some confidence. So how do you actually do that as a researcher? One thing my twelve years in this field has taught me is that confidence isn't a trait. It's not something that we are born with. It's a muscle and it's something that comes from doing hard things. Having courage to put yourself in uncomfortable situations, to speak up, to put forward a new plan, maybe suggest a different approach if something isn't working. Maybe it's maybe putting your hand up at a conference and asking a question even.

It's not something that happens. It's not something we're born with. It's something that we can build over time and it takes deliberate and regular practice. How do I build confidence? Like this. You know, I I wasn't always confident and for many years, I doubted myself a lot and I still do. I'd hesitate, know, I'll stay silent in meetings where maybe I should have pushed back. I'd probably be the least likely to put my hand up in a meeting for a long time.

And a few years ago, I started challenging myself to build my confidence as a researcher, to do scary things outside of my comfort zone like this. And when you lean into discomfort, amazing things start to happen. You know, your confidence starts to build and as a result, your stakeholder dynamics naturally start to shift. You stop being this kind of passive actor in your organization and you start backing yourself more.

And confidence builds respect, but more importantly, it builds credibility and trust in our craft. So we've talked talked a little bit about what it takes to be a diplomat. You know, the internal work that we need to do of showing up with confidence and business acumen. But obviously diplomacy doesn't happen in a vacuum.

You can be the most confident, insights driven researcher in the room, but without a network of support, your influence remains bottled up. And that brings us to our second principle, which is you can't be a diplomat alone. So we need to talk about coalition building. In diplomacy, coalition building is the process of forming alliances or partnerships among diverse parties to achieve a singular shared objective.

Again, maybe this sounds a little familiar. Coalitions can be temporary alliances for a specific issue or longer term partnerships addressing broader concerns. For us as researchers, coalitions can exist at a project level, you know, aligning stakeholders around a singular problem or objective or maybe with a longer term view, building lasting partnerships with specific stakeholders or teams.

If I ask you about the ecosystem of all the people you work with in your organization, I'm I'm sure you could tell me who your key stakeholders are. Maybe it's your product partners, your key design partners, maybe they're in the team you work in, maybe they're part of leadership, you know, that's even better. And now consider in that ecosystem who are your greatest allies? Who who are the people who champion research day to day? Who are the people who share your insights when you're not in the room? But another question to ask yourself is who in your organization cares about the customers just as much as you do?

Because the teams that might be your greatest allies are teams that maybe you haven't even connected with yet. Build strategic relationships with your champions and allies and lean on them to help you grow research impact in your organization. Part of building influence as a researcher is understanding your organizational structure and the dynamics within your organization and really navigating these to your advantage.

Functions that regularly incorporate research in their decision making are your closest allies. And you can see product and design take the lead here. But think beyond just product and design. Now these are really the obvious ones. Maybe it's sales, marketing, data science. Again, Anna spoke about this earlier. You know, some of the greatest research allies I've ever seen in my career have come from these teams specifically.

And it's not just about who is using your work, consider who regularly connects with customers in your organization. At Atlassian, we identified our customer support team as a major ally of ours. You know, they were drowning in support tickets caused by really simple usability issues. And we partnered with them to test and ship improvements. By solving their problem, we were able to estimate how much it would save in support costs and proved the ROI of our work.

And the key wasn't the research itself, but it was the shared goal that we had with another team. Map out your stakeholders and consider where you might have work to do. Your champions are the people who have high power and show a lot of interest in research and data. And this is really your core coalition, you wanna make sure you keep this group close.

And next we move on to our supporters. The people or teams or stakeholders who have low power in our organization but show a lot of interest in the work that we do. And you wanna keep this group informed. You know, they're often the echo that amplifies our work when we're not there and advocates for research behind closed doors.

And then we have our challenges. You know, the folks with high power but low interest and engagement with our work and I'm sure we can all think of one of these people and that will inform now. Sometimes it's because of a lack of awareness, but it can also sometimes be a skepticism about the value research can provide.

Know, maybe they've been burnt in the past and they're less likely to want to collaborate with us. And you really wanna treat this group as your diplomatic mission. You know, focus on small wins to help prove your value. Find out what they care about or what they're worried about and find ways that you can help them understand it better even in really small ways. And lastly, have our bystanders.

The folks with low power and no real care or interest in what we're doing day to day. You wanna monitor this group, but you don't really wanna spend all of your resources trying to win them over. At least not at this point because you also wanna remember that power can shift over time. But coalitions aren't just about who you engage but how you engage them. And the tip here is to engage directly.

How many of you have walked into a high stakes meeting, shared an idea, or an opportunity backed by research and watched it get shot down in two minutes? I'm sure it happens to the best of us. And to avoid this, I like to use something called Nimawashi, a Japanese concept that literally translates to preparing the roots before transplanting a tree or kind of doing the groundwork.

And in our world, it literally translates to the meeting before the meeting. It's the process of having quiet one on one conversations with your stakeholders before a formal review, kickoff or presentation takes place. You're not just selling your idea, you're letting them see it, critique it, influence it. And if our stakeholders feel like they've been consulted and they've got their fingerprints on an idea, they're much more likely to want to see it succeed.

It's a really powerful tool for also working with the challenges that we spoke about earlier. You know, show them what they stand to gain by partnering with you. You know, they'll be much more likely to want to see us succeed if they can see how it benefits them. Once you have your allies, you need a message that sticks.

You need to ensure that the people you've gathered are aligned. And that leads us to our final and maybe what I'd say is our most creative principle, and that's framing narratives. Because research isn't just about the data that we gather, but it's about the story that we give to that data. And I'm sure we all love a very compelling story.

In diplomacy, framing narratives is a strategic communication tool that involves structuring information to influence perceptions and opinion. And an important call out here is it's not about changing the facts. It's about choosing which facts to highlight to empathize your message. As researchers, we have an incredible opportunity to influence through how we actually tell the story.

Research on its own is just a collection of observations, data points, facts, but narrative is what gives those facts meaning and narratives becomes the lens through which our stakeholders perceive a problem. The right framing is often the difference between knowing something and actually doing something about it and this is why we often see great research that doesn't lead to anything.

Shaping narratives is probably one of my favorite things about being a researcher. I love the creativity that goes into it. You can kind of be a bit of a journalist, an analyst, a writer, maybe a bit of a designer, visual communicator. And the reality is in the AI era, storytelling is more important than ever. And I'm kind of proud of myself.

We're twenty minutes through and I only said the word AI now. I'll consider that a win. The percentage of LinkedIn job postings in The US that include the term storyteller doubled in 2025. Our stakeholders need our expertise to help cut through the noise and to help them focus on what truly matters. Raise your hand if you've ever felt stretched too thin at work.

Yeah. No surprises there once again. There is often a superpower that researchers have that is overlooked. You know, the struggle of being spread across too many things can actually be a real advantage that we have. It lets us see things from a wider angle and to see the bigger picture and how the dots connect across our organization.

It increases that surface area that we talked about earlier as well. And another advantage is our inside out perspective. You know, we're really the bridge between what goes on inside our organization and what is happening on the outside. And these two perspectives give us a really unique edge in our organization. So make sure you use them to your advantage.

We often treat the research report as the finish line. But the most effective diplomats, they don't wait for the official meeting to happen before they build consensus. They treat every interaction, the hallway chat, the casual Slack message, the stakeholder check-in as part of that narrative. And if you shift your focus away from the final report towards the continuous narrative, you stop being a reporter and you start being more of a partner.

And that starts at the very beginning, you know, framing the right questions at the right altitude, engaging the right people in the work, choosing the right channels to share what you learn, choosing the right formats in which you're sharing it, co creating insights in that process. You know, the final readout and the report shouldn't be the only thing that you're optimising for.

And when you move away from viewing viewing the final readout as the be all in end all, you're now free to do the real work, which is campaigning. You're no longer just delivering findings, but you're actively shaping the organizational narrative. So what does that actually mean? The kind of campaign for change. It means you stop waiting for the research report to do the heavy lifting. You do this by showing up in the right places but also making sure your insights are opinionated, meaningful to your stakeholders and actionable. And you never want to leave your audience guessing.

You want to clear the path by outlining what needs to happen. When you shift from delivering insights to campaigning for change, you transform from being a passive reporter into a strategic partner who is actively shaping the narrative in your organization. And being that strategic partner requires mastering how you deliver a message.

As researchers, we're often the bearer of inconvenient truths. You know, maybe the feature that everyone loves and is excited about just isn't landing with your users. And the problem is when you highlight a problem, you trigger defensiveness. If you present an opportunity, you trigger dopamine. Neuroscience tells us that threats make us narrow minded, but opportunities expand our thinking. And if we want to truly campaign for change, we have to be more calculated and strategic about the lenses that we use. Stakeholders are much more likely to respond to opportunities rather than threats. Instead of pointing out gaps, point out possibilities.

Instead of saying we lack basic accessibility features, tie it to the opportunity that presents itself if this problem was solved. The right framing can really multiply the impact of the work that we're doing. And we also need to make it memorable. You know, frame your insights in a way that is engaging, easy to understand, and retell in a way that resonates with your audience, maybe it entertains them a little bit.

We need to communicate insights that stick. And there are endless ways to tell a story and I'm sure many of us have experimented a lot in this area. One of my favorite things to do is to identify a key customer quote and turn it into a bit of a slogan for my study. You know, create a bit of intrigue, get people excited about it. Thoughtfully design infographics for another one.

You know, create artifacts that are easy to reuse in different places. A picture can tell a thousand words, you know, find a hook, a stat, a quote to make your insights memorable, borrow from journalism, use headings to draw your readers in, you know, get crafty, make it interactive, And try different formats as well. You know, customize your message to different audiences in your organization.

And use AI as a brainstorming partner here as well if you're stuck for ideas. Why am I showing you an image of three blobs, you might ask? I was once working on a project looking at a different... A new market's taxation challenges. It was really dry and really quite boring, but I used these simple shapes to visualize the layers of complexity that we were dealing dealing with in this new market, Kind of the representation of the messiness that we had to wrap our heads around.

And what I ended up doing is transforming a boring subject matter into a more engaging story for my stakeholders to the point where they even started using these visuals in their own presentations. Is it sophisticated? Not really. It's just three blobs, but it was really memorable and that's really the goal. And the impact of making your insights memorable and why this matters is that the story that you share lives on in rooms even when you're not there.

If stakeholders can easily recall and reference your work, it helps the message spread organically. So we've covered three important skills that researchers can learn from diplomacy, but there is one more important skill that I think we all need to focus on in 2026. We have to really address the hardest part of our job, is letting go of the things that we know.

I think unlearning is one of the fundamental skills that we really need to harness as researchers right now. The ground beneath our feet is constantly shifting. I'm sure we're feeling it every day. And what works for us yesterday isn't guaranteed to work for us tomorrow. If what you're doing right now isn't working, you need to try another way. I recently moved into a new team and I instantly felt the pressure to set up regular one on ones with my new stakeholders, you know, to really fill up the calendar, get as much face time with them as possible And I quickly realized I was spreading myself way too thin.

I'm sure many of us can relate to this feeling. My capacity to focus at work just isn't there when my calendar is slammed and I'm constantly context switching. So instead I tried a different approach. I focused on building my coalition first. You know, I tried to find two to three stakeholders who I really wanted to focus on building relationships with in the next six months. You know, going deep over going wide.

When you take the pressure off yourself to do things the way you've always done them, it really frees you up and it helps you think about your role and your value in new ways. If what you're doing right now isn't working, you owe it to yourself to try things another way. So what's one small change you can make in how you show up at work to build greater influence?

Maybe it's in building your soft power, you know, pushing yourself into new uncomfortable situations to build your confidence or your influence. Maybe it's building your coalition, leveraging existing allies you already have, or finding new ones across your company or organization.

Or maybe it's in how you frame the narrative, you know, with a stronger point of view in a more creative way, in a different format to really make your insights live on even in rooms that you're not in. Research is only influential when it is trusted, remembered, and acted on. And so your challenge today is to really think about that one habit that you can reinvent for yourself.

So yeah, ask yourself, know, how might you show up differently after this talk? And I forgot to skip through these. Just a final reminder. Awesome. Thank you so much. Yeah. Really appreciate you being here. If you have any questions, reach out to me on LinkedIn. Love to chat.