From Academia to Action: Turning Research into Executive Impact | Stephanie Woerner

 

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 Building Trust and Impact in a Rapidly Changing World

How can an academic bridge the gap between rigorous research and actionable insights for executives?

Stephanie Woerner, of MIT’s Center for Information Systems Research (CISR), offers a masterclass on this topic in our latest podcast episode. She reveals how her team tackles the tension between academia’s slower pace and business’s urgent demands by designing projects with rapid deliverables and executive-relevant outcomes. It’s not just about publishing papers—it’s about driving impact and transforming practices.

Stephanie explains how CISR collaborates with its consortium of 75 corporate members to co-create research agendas that solve real-world problems. From exploring the impact of AI and data-driven decision-making to demystifying digital transformation, her frameworks make complex concepts accessible. Her advice? Listen to your audience, translate data into actionable insights, and focus on what drives performance—whether it’s profitability, innovation, or customer experience.

The conversation dives into the art of storytelling with data. Stephanie shares how visuals, like a simple two-by-two matrix, can illuminate business challenges and opportunities. By simplifying without oversimplifying, she equips leaders to move from confusion to clarity, making complex transformations manageable.

With thought leadership positioned as a practice, Stephanie reflects on her journey from researcher to influencer. She underscores the importance of connecting with your audience, constantly iterating, and striving for impact over time. This is thought leadership in action—anticipating the future, separating signal from noise, and delivering the insights your audience needs just when they need them.

Three Key Takeaways

Bridging Academia and Business: Stephanie Woerner highlights the importance of designing research to deliver actionable insights for executives. By structuring projects with shorter cycles and a focus on business relevance, her team ensures their work addresses urgent corporate challenges while maintaining academic rigor.

The Power of Frameworks and Storytelling: Simplifying complex ideas into accessible frameworks, like two-by-two matrices, helps executives understand challenges and take decisive action. Effective storytelling with data transforms raw information into compelling, actionable insights.

Audience-Centered Thought Leadership: Successful thought leadership requires deep listening and collaboration with your audience. Woerner emphasizes the value of co-creating research agendas and focusing on practical outcomes that align with what your audience urgently needs to know—or hasn’t yet thought to ask.

If you want to further explore the idea of using Academic Research to Build Your Thought Leadership, be sure to check out this video by Leveraging Thought Leadership Founder and CEO Peter Winick.

 

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Transcript

Bill Sherman How do you create cutting edge thought leadership in research that serves the needs of your stakeholders? Today I speak with Stephanie Werner, principal research scientist and director of the MIT Center for Information Systems Research, also known as Scissor.

Stephanie Woemer In this conversation.

Bill Sherman We’re going to talk about the tension between the academic publication cycle and the membership organization’s needs. We’ll talk about Scissors annual research calendar and how Jenny, I nearly broke the model. We’ll talk about building relationships and trust between the sponsoring organizations and the research center. And finally, we’ll talk about the process of spotting the questions bubbling up in the business world. Keeping a pulse on your audience and then being able to design and deploy a solid study within a year and report it out to your members. I’m Bill Sherman and you’re listening to Leveraging Thought Leadership. Ready? Let’s begin. Welcome to the show, Stephanie.

Stephanie Woemer Thank you, Bill, for having me. I am delighted to be here. So let’s start.

Bill Sherman With a level set question. Okay. What is my tease? Scissor? What does it do? And what is your role?

Stephanie Woemer So Scissors stands for Center for Information Systems Research, which is why we use the acronym Scissor. And we are a research center in the Sloan School of Management. And we’ve been around for 50 years doing research on how businesses get value for their investments in information technology and digital. And you would think that after 50 years, we would have kind of gotten, you know, answers to this. And we have. But technology is always changing. And so we’re finding that companies are trying to stay on top of that technology and they’re trying to figure out are there different ways of getting value? What are the ways that customers are now interfacing with that technology? So, you know, we’ve got six research scientists and we do research projects every year on these topics.

Bill Sherman So you’re inside of Sloane at MIT? Yes. Yeah. And there’s academic work that goes within slum. Right. And there’s an academic sort of pace and standard of publishing and research. And then there’s the pace of business, especially in technology. How do you reconcile those two and are there tensions? And if so, can you give some examples?

Stephanie Woemer So there are huge tensions. I mean, if you are doing an academic research project, you could figure that could be easily 3 or 4 years by the time you collect the data do. And you’ve got to do a literature review and you’ve got to do all kinds of stuff around that. And you’re also teaching and you’ve got committee work. So what we do and what is so different about our research center is we are research scientists, which we have the same qualifications as the faculty, but we’re not on the faculty track. But that gives us a lot of freedom to choose our projects, choose our topics that we are going to do research on. And because that’s all we do, we actually can go after it really in a concentrated manner. And, you know, also we can scope things differently than you would in an academic project. And so when I look at an academic project, I am thinking about something that can be done in a nine month to 12 month cycle because our research cycle at this Center for Information Systems Research is annual. And that also means that you learn you might take a big project, but you’re going to tackle it in smaller chunks. And so that’s another big difference between an academic project. They’re going to put the whole thing out there and kind of start biting it, you know, just tackle the whole thing at one time. Whereas we’re going to say, what’s the first thing that we do? What’s the second thing that we do? And scope the projects so that we are delivering insights to our audience along the way. But it is a huge tension between the two because business is going faster. I mean, I say I’m on an annual. I got to tell you, business is on six months, three months. I mean, fast.

Bill Sherman I got to solve a problem in a couple of weeks. What do we do? Right? How do we.

Stephanie Woemer Do? And we’re not that fast. But that’s one of the big tensions. And I would have to say that being in the Sloan School of Management keeps us kind of attached and interacting with academia. But the way that we’re doing research is very different in terms of the kinds of projects that we do and the time frame that we do them in.

Bill Sherman And if I build on that, I think there’s something implied as well on academic research where the academic has a lot of freedom in self-direction in terms of what areas of interest they have, what they’re going to pursue, etc.. And they don’t have to ask the question from a pure research perspective, often how will this be used and how does this serve my audience in the same way? They may be following an interesting question and an interesting threat.

Stephanie Woemer That is absolutely true. I have members I have 75 consortium members who are all interested in getting value. And honestly, my projects have to reflect that. And so I sure there are questions that are interesting, but they’re certainly not relevant to impact. They’re not relevant to how a corporation or an organization does their business. And so I actually have a, you know, a more narrower, you know, set of projects that I could do. And but I think they’re interesting. I think they’re fascinating. So I don’t find that to really to really, you know, keep me hemmed in. I think that it’s a it’s a good line to be in because in part, a lot of those academic research projects are going to be doing something that’s interesting. But is it really going to change the way that work gets done, that behavior gets done, Whereas that’s one of the things I’m trying to do and trying to have all of our research scientists do, which is change practice.

Bill Sherman And. I think you’ve touched on the heart of one of the differences in the academic practitioner divide is that question of not only how am I creating new knowledge, but who is it for and who can use it today? Or when we as soon as we have answers, right? Because otherwise it gets published in a journal might be get taught in classes and that at best it’s a slow cascade of knowledge in an academic research piece, rather than here you’ve got a demand and you’re saying, Hey, I’m thinking of these research topics on the on the hour research calendar for Scissor. Are we aligned? And you can get immediate feedback of, hey, we love this, or explain why you want to put time there.

Stephanie Woemer Absolutely. And sometimes the results are going to be directly applicable right now. I mean, I can think of projects that we did on Iottie, the Internet of Things, where you could start saying, Well, yes, we’re starting to use that right away. We have a research project right now that I’m working on with Peter while my colleague on platforms, and we’re bringing in an idea that we thought about a couple of years ago that we think is going to be interesting. It’s sort of becoming relevant now. But I think that because we’ve kind of been working on it sort of simmering in the background, that now it’s ready to come out. And I think that our sponsors, our members are going to be ready to hear about it because sometimes you have an idea and people aren’t quite ready. You got to kind of prepare the ground and give them the early research so that they can start to think about, well, what are the technologies I need to put into place? How can I start to get value? And then you can say, and now look what you can do because you’ve been doing these kinds of investments.

Bill Sherman This is why I love the work that you’re doing so much, because it fits exactly with one of the working definitions that I used for the practice of thought leadership, which is peering around the corner into the future, separating the signal from the noise and identifying who needs to hear about it today, deciding what the next steps and whether it’s called education or call to action those people need and then bring that inside in an accessible way, maybe leading them step by step at first until the time where, you know, in your case, a technology or an approach is ready for prime time. But it’s this ongoing service to your audience and helping them always feel prepared rather than behind the eight ball. Now, you can’t always achieve that now, but that’s the aspiration.

Stephanie Woemer Absolutely. That’s the aspiration. And it’s also drives how we write about the topics that we write about. You want to be able I love a good literature review, but honestly, my members are not going to really they’re not going to go for it. And the need to get to the nugget of what’s important. I mean, a lot of academic work really looks at interesting details, but some time. But a lot of our executives, they’re in a very fast paced world. And those details are not going to make as much difference as that central idea that we’re trying to get out to them and we’re trying to write it in such a way that gets them excited about it and, you know, so that they can get it and understand it right away.

Bill Sherman Well, and what you’re promising is the intellectual and academic rigor, but packaged in a way that will be accessible and actionable to them and presented by that. They don’t have to wade through specialist academic language.

Stephanie Woemer Yes, I want it to be actionable. I find that thinking about can I create a framework that I don’t want to say it simplifies, but what it does is it pulls out the important pieces and puts it in, you know, lays it out in a way that an executive can say, this is what I need to do first. This is what I need to do next. This is where I have to do two things at one time and giving them an idea of what the impact on performance is, because that’s another thing that really distinguishes the Center for Information Systems Research, which is not just talking about interesting technologies, but also what’s the impact on performance metrics like innovation or profitability or revenue growth. And, you know, how do you get to there and how do we think about what each of those things, you know, how do we measure them? You know, and some of them are quite easy. You know, profitability, we know how to measure revenue growth. We know how to measure innovation. We’ve come up with a measure that I think we’ve used for 15 years, and it makes a lot of sense to executives. And so we can talk about, well, here’s a measure that you yourself, you could dashboard this for yourself if you wanted to. I use it in my research, but it’s also something that’s useful to an executive.

Bill Sherman So let’s go a little deeper on how you’re communicating. Right. And the modalities that you use to communicate find. That’s right. Often executives are pressed for time, you know, and they look and they go, yeah, I don’t need an article length. I don’t need a book chapter. How are you communicating and are you using short talks? Are you using sort of like the executive summary one pager? What tools do you use the toolbox to get them to realize, Hey, I need to double click on this and listen.

Stephanie Woemer So and this is good because in our latest iteration of what we offer to our members, we’ve actually made some changes because of that need for speed that, you know, the compression of time. And so we do a couple of things. One is every month we do a three-page research briefing and it’s surprising to me, but three pages is often too long. And so for our members, the three-page research briefings we make available to anyone for our members, what we have started doing in the last year is a one page, very quick description of the research. We call this a talking point, but mostly what I want is 3 to 4 actionable points from the research, which is here’s a research briefing. You can go read it if you want to. Here is the 3 to 4 actionable things you can do as an executive. And we also include the graphic. So I want something that’s about 200 words with a great graphic and things that someone can work with. So that so you have research briefings, you have talking points, and then you have to start thinking about sometimes talks, work. Actually, what’s surprising is a lot of those don’t have to be quite as short and snappy as, say, a talking points because people as they’re sitting in a talk, listening, they have ideas and then they want to bounce them off. And so those talks I can do a talk on one of my latest book. I’ve told people I could do the ten-minute interpretive dance if you would like, but I could also do a three-hour workshop. And they’re just very different. You have very different reasons for doing each of those. You know, the ten minute is I just need you to have a gloss so that I can get to my next point. Where is the three hour workshop is I’m not going to talk for three hours. We’re going to have a conversation. I’m going to give you some ideas and some frameworks, and then we’re going to bring in your context and we’re going to talk about your context and why this matters and how can we get to creating a common language so that you can share this with your colleagues and you have an idea that everybody is on the same page. And so I think that if you look at Caesar, again, research briefings, talking points, talks themselves, workshops, and then one of the last things that we’ve started to put into place for our audience, for our members, is something that we’re calling hot topics, where we’re going to find something that’s new, something that is being researched. Maybe it’s not baked yet, as I would say, but it’s really fascinating. You know, right now there’s a real need for understanding. Jenny. Jenny And give them a 45-minute talk and then 15 minutes of Q&A. And we find that a lot of people like that, like right after work or right before work, and it gets them thinking about it. So I have to really introduce a lot of modalities depending on what we’re trying to accomplish and what kind of time the audience is.

Bill Sherman So one of the thoughts that comes through my mind and I don’t know if you’ve explored it, but I could see for your members as well. Short form Audio podcasts, Summary. And here I’m thinking of some of The Economist does excellent podcasting. Okay. And it’s not only a daily episode, but then they will do themed topics as well for subscribers. And they’ve got tracks on technology and that I’m not only a personal fan, but from a making ideas accessible job. They’re doing some of the best work in podcasting. I could see, Hey, I don’t have time to read a three page paper. But if I could listen to a ten minute conversation between the researchers with actionable items while I’m on my workout or something, I could see that totally in your lane.

Stephanie Woemer That would be so cool because we do actually record the research briefings. They come out in about 15 minutes or so.

Bill Sherman Perfect.

Stephanie Woemer If you.

Bill Sherman Can use the asset.

Stephanie Woemer And then what you could do there is say, okay, So we’ve read the research briefing. Now let’s do a ten minute back and forth or maybe an interview with an executive. Just five minutes.

Bill Sherman Exactly. You could put that on it. You could also use the audio as a pre read for a workshop so that they don’t have to read the three pager, but they can just put it in the queue. There’s a lot of ways to use that asset. Anyway, you mentioned Gen I and I want to go to Gen I, but I want to ask a couple of questions that are different than how a lot of people approach Gen. You had researching Q that you were working on as Gen exploded. Can you tell and share the story of how that impacted, you know, research projects for the year that were already baked and then everybody wanted to know about Gen I.

Stephanie Woemer I have to tell you, February of 2023, my phone started ringing off the hook because people had gotten past kind of the Christmas the holiday season. And now they’re hearing about large language models and open AI and how exciting it is. And I had members asking, well, what is this? What does it mean? How is it going to change the way that we work? And I had to, you know, say, I don’t know, this was not when we decided to do our research project. This wasn’t part of the landscape. And so, you know, first thing I did ask is, what’s the problem that you’re trying to solve? And most of them could say not sure is like, okay, experimenting is good here. You can do an experiment and you’re going to be fine. But at that point, it really became clear that we had to start adding questions about A.I. into every research project that we were doing. And unfortunately, you know, when we got to the annual research forum in 2023, we still had to say next year we will start having results next year because I mean, we’re fast, but we’re not that fast. And this is one of the reasons that we thought about those hot topics, which was, okay, I have somebody who’s actually been doing something. It’s not baked, but it’s interesting. And so let’s just let the hear what a researcher is doing. It’s not going to say how you’re going to get value and what you’re going to do, but it’s just going to kind of lay out the landscape. And what we found is my colleague Barb Wixom was doing a lot of research on a AI, but really more traditional AI. And so what became clear is we started doing the research up to the annual research Forum and 2023 was that a lot of the capabilities that you needed for traditional AI? We’re also going to be important for Gen AI. There were going to be other things that you had to think about also, but we could start at least saying we don’t exactly know. But here is what we do know. You are going to need good data and here’s what it takes to have good data. You’re going to need some data skills and maybe you’re not going to have directly machine learning, but you’re going to need to be able to ask prompt engineering, which I think is probably right now really important. My hypothesis is probably in 4 to 5 years that actually may not be important. That may be baked into all of the offerings that are out there and that there are issues around governance that you need to be thinking about and think about them now, because everybody’s experimenting now. You’re not losing ground by laying some of these things out into place. This year. We’re going to have a lot to talk about. I have some research on an API maturity model. Barb Wixom is doing research on, you know, the importance of your data, and she calls it data liquidity. My colleague Nick Vander Meulen has done a case study on using a AI in terms of identifying talent. And so I think that we’re starting to build out that portfolio. But my gosh, we really could. I mean, we kind of had to think, okay, we’re going to add questions to every single research project that we’re doing because this is important.

Bill Sherman If you’re enjoying this episode of Leveraging Thought Leadership, please make sure to subscribe. If you’d like to help spread the word about our podcast, please leave a five star review at rate this podcast.com. Forward slash l t l and share it with your friends. We’re available on Apple Podcasts and on all major listening apps as well as Thought Leadership Leverage dot com. Forward slash podcasts.

Bill Sherman And I think what becomes important as well is scissor as an ongoing entity has built institutional relationships with your members over you said 50 years.

Stephanie Woemer 50 years. Yes, I’m doing a gala this year.

Bill Sherman Fantastic. Congratulations. So. But with 50 years, not only do you have a chance to build relationships between individuals, but truly embed between organizations. And so when something new comes up and, you know, everybody picks up the magic eight ball, looks at the answer and says, Answer uncertain, ask again later. And in your case, ask you again about next year’s research. You know, there is still trust who will give you what we can and the time that we can. Right?

Stephanie Woemer That is exactly right. We are very lucky. One is people know that when we do an event, we’re doing an event because we’re creating a community. We’re bringing our members together and creating a community. We have you can either call them Chatham House Rules or Vegas rules. What is said in the room stays in the room. Please do not you know, we’re relying on you and, you know, building a base of trust here. And it’s that ongoing, that long, you know, set of relationships that we have. The other thing it does help us is we can go to our members and some of our executives and say, what are you doing? And they’ll say they feel comfortable saying, we don’t know. And they know that we’re not going to go out and say, so-and-so company doesn’t know what they’re doing, but they can say, here’s what we’re looking at doing. Here’s where we’re piloting this. And then we can say, well, we’ve heard of other companies that are doing this and they feel comfortable and trust us so that they can tell us. It’s very much earlier in the sausage making process, and they’re willing to let us see into that process where I think that a lot of other companies that would want that kind of information, they don’t trust that it’s going to be treated well and with confidentiality.

Bill Sherman And that skepticism, whether earned or unearned. Impacts the conversations, impacts the clarity, impacts the quality of advice and insights that you can share.

Stephanie Woemer Right. Well, you know, it’s not your average slide that you can, but if you look at my slides, I have footnotes on my slides. I mean, I don’t expect people to read the footnotes, but if they are interested, it’s going to tell them, how big is my survey? What was my P value? What kind of analysis did I do? And people that helps them trust what I’ve put in the big letters.

Bill Sherman And there’s a tension there. Right. Of people don’t need to read all of the methods and the data analysis and look at the statistical analysis. But they want to know they can trust someone, actually get it who knew what they were doing. And having worked on a deck this week with a presentation that quite literally had, you know, statistical footnotes and P values on them, you know, in small print. But they’re there. You know, you want to ask further questions. Go ahead. That’s a statement of confidence. And also. What in my mind is moving towards data driven thought leadership. And I know you have a love for data sets. So and maybe and data sets come to light. So. How do you do that? How do you turn a big data set into something that people go, yeah, Dutch dot. That’s something I have to pay attention to.

Stephanie Woemer So I one is I think you get trained by talking to all of these executives by of figuring out, well, what are the good questions. And that’s going to drive a lot of what you start with, which is what are you know there’s the what. Which is. Okay, Jenny, I it’s there but it’s like the next the important is what’s the how does it get done. And so I look at a data set and I think, well, how is this going to what are the ways that I can start to surface a story? What’s the story that I think is the important story here? And it’s informed by interviews that I’ve done. It’s informed by being in workshops that I’ve done with senior executive teams where I listen to the kinds of problems that they’re grappling with, and that gives me ideas about, how can I create a construct? What are the variables that I think theoretically now I would never say theoretically in a talk, but honestly, I have.

Bill Sherman To avoid the T word.

Stephanie Woemer You do to avoid that t word. But I’m trained. To think about what are good theories that would inform and how would they make me think about a great construct that an executive would find really compelling and actionable? Could they actually do that? You know, we have one framework where we talk about what is digital transformation and we say digital transformation is really doing two things at one time. You’re working on operational efficiency and you’re working on customer experience. And that’s why digital transformation is so hard, because you’re being asked to do two things at one time. It’s kind of like, you know, patting your stomach in, rubbing your head, or is it the other way around? And I think that that is how, you know, you say that in an executive goes, that’s what I was trying to do.

Bill Sherman And well and if you add that visual of a two by two matrix, you know, a researcher and a consultant’s best friend and you say you’re stuck in this lower left quadrant and that’s why it’s driving you bonkers. You need to move on these two axes. Let’s talk about what you need to do in both places. That solves the problem of trying to walk left and right at the same time.

Stephanie Woemer Absolutely. And I can’t tell you how many executives, business people I’ve said this is what you’re trying to do and this is why it’s so challenging. But if you can do it, look at the financial impacts. Look at the impacts in terms of your new systems. Look at what you can do with your data that you could not do before. You are perfectly adequate. Although I think, you know, in another five years or so, what is adequate now is not going to be good enough then. But, you know, you’re really relying on great people. Whereas if you can get systems in place, you can then leverage those people and they can do things that you would not have even imagined. And that’s part of what we’re trying to do is let’s reimagine. And I think that part of when I look at data is in a data set. And again, as I’ve said, just a nerd here, give me a large cup of coffee and some loud music and a data set. And I very, very happy. And but that’s what I’m trying to pull out is what are those concepts? What’s important, what really? Is going to be meaningful. And let’s put the other details to the side.

Bill Sherman Well, and you’ve mentioned a couple of things here and that I want to sort of pull together from an actionable perspective for our listeners. And I’ll flip back to you two comments as well. One is, if you have a data set, the storytelling is absolutely, absolutely essential. If you can’t distill that story, the data are saying into something that’s clear and compelling and explains the why should I be paying attention? If you can’t do that in 20 to 30s, you’ve lost your audience before. They’ll tune in. Then. On the front end. It’s about defining what it is, your operational definitions. And I know we’re going nerdy here, but if you don’t define what you’re measuring, you got problems. And then what hypotheses are you testing? In my mind, as I look at all leadership in general, I Jenn-air and its successors will be able to answer many, many common questions that are already within its body of knowledge, in its training model. What the human mind will be able to do is to ask and I identify questions that need to be asked for community frame hypotheses and define how are we going to test them and then bring those insights back to the community, which is exactly what you’re doing at Cicero and have that you.

Stephanie Woemer Yes, that is exactly what we do. And, you know, we’ve been also, as part of what we’re doing, also we’re bringing not just the insights themselves, but also you kind of show the method. Here’s what we thought, here’s what we did. And then you start to talk about, well, how do you become more evidence base? How do you get to data driven decision making? And you can say, well, this is look at how we did a research project that is data driven and evidence-based decision making. And I think that it helps to show how we’ve done it as well as just tell them how we’ve done it.

Bill Sherman Modeling evidence based is absolutely essential. So evidence based thought leadership is also a thing, right? And so from my perspective, it becomes the question, how do we make this accessible? And you may not be able to start down the journey of and be doing primary research. Day one, right? But you can certainly move to evidence informed and not be in conflict with what’s out there and what has been researched and known rather than, Hey, I’ve got an opinion.

Stephanie Woemer Absolutely. And. Trying to do that makes you realize, well, what do you have to do with your own organization so that you can start to move there? And sometimes it’s one leader saying, I’m going to make decisions based on that data. And that means people go, that data is important, we better start pulling it together. And then from there you build outwards so that all of your data, all of your systems start to come together to give you that base for using evidence as part of your day-to-day operations.

Bill Sherman So I want to ask you a question, Stephanie, based on your work with your members. Can. Failed leadership works well when you’re tuned into your audience and answering the questions that either they’re urgently asking or they need to know about but don’t know to ask. What insights have you learned working with your members that others could apply to be able to help them see around the corner for their audience and bring back the answers their audience needs?

Stephanie Woemer I think one of the things that. Was I think a revelation for me was that. I have skills, they have problems and they also have experience. And so. To really look around the corner. It’s a kind of a melding of the two. And so it means that I have to listen as much to what their lived experience is and think about the issues that they are struggling with. And then at that time, I can bring what my expertise is. I think that you don’t get to looking around the corner if all I say is I have this expertise. It’s much more of a dance. So I feel like we’re good at predicting what’s coming. But that’s not just because of what I know myself. It’s really that interplay between you’re in the field, you’re getting stuff thrown at you every day. Now let’s. And the other good thing is, is talking to a member of Scissor like a research scientist is they get a chance to actually reflect back on what they’re doing because we’re asking them a question that allows them to synthesize their experience. And so I think this, you know, moving ahead is not just based on an MIT scissor. It really is because we have this consortium of members who want to share with us and are really very generous with their time and with their knowledge and because to really see what’s happening around the corner or, you know, three years ahead, it’s not typically based on one companies. It’s really based on I’ve talked to 20 and this is the problem that 20 of them are facing. Therefore, this is something we should be looking at.

Bill Sherman That ongoing dialog with the community and respectful dialog. You are not coming down from the mountain with the tablets and the insights that you’ve received. It’s really what don’t you know or what do you want to know? And maybe I can go out and scale the head movement. That’s an entirely different relationship. And it requires ongoing effort and communications. 100% agree. And I’m thrilled and delighted by the stories that you’ve shared, Stephanie. This has been an amazing conversation. I want to thank you. But before we wrap up, I have one last question.

Stephanie Woemer Okay.

Bill Sherman So I want to ask you. Where you learned about the practice of thought leadership. What helped you down this journey?

Stephanie Woemer So long journey for me. When I came to Scissor, I was excited about. Getting a chance to work with data and do, you know, work on the guts of a project. But after a while. Probably a couple of years, you start realizing. The guts of the project are just the start of it. That’s actually not what the. End goal is The end goal is to make a difference. The end goal is to have impact. And I think once you realize that it’s that’s the goal is impact it’s then. Okay, well, what do I need to do? To actually help make that happen. Who do I have to listen to? Who should I be interviewing? How should I be changing how I communicate? Things like that. And so I would not say and and as say, someone who was very comfortable with the guts of the research. To stretch and to try to communicate in a different way and to ask different kinds of questions was hard. I would not say that it was an easy that was not an easy process for me. And I would say that it would have taken a good solid five, six, seven years to really start to have inklings. And so that’s my and I’m only in the middle. I got to tell you, I’m only in the middle of that journey.

Bill Sherman So the way that I work for leadership is it’s a practice like meditation or yoga. You come at it, you don’t get the badge of accomplished thought leader and off you go. It’s how do I serve my audience? How do I get better at the work that I do to bring ideas into the world and make impact? Because ideas for ideas sake doesn’t change the world. And that’s what we ought to do.

Stephanie Woemer That’s what we are trying to do is yes, chase the world have impact.

Bill Sherman Stephanie, thank you for joining us today. This has been amazing.

Stephanie Woemer Thank you, Bill. I have really had a great time. And much like our interviews, this has really given me a time to reflect.

Bill Sherman That’s such a gift. Thank you. Okay, You’ve made it to the end of the episode and that means you’re probably someone deeply interested in thought leadership. Want to learn even more? Here are three recommendations. First, check out the back catalog of our podcast episodes. There are a lot of great conversations with people at the top of their game and thought leadership as well as just starting out. Second. Subscribe to our newsletter that talks about the business of thought leadership. And finally, feel free to reach out to me. My day job is helping people with big insights take them to scale through the practice of thought leadership. Maybe you’re looking for strategy, or maybe you want to polish up your ideas or even create new products and offerings. I’d love to chat with you. Thanks for listening.