MRS Conference: Rush and Revolution

We were getting used to the idea of rushing by the time we entered the 'Ideas Rush'. The morning sessions - even without questions - had left us so breathless that one chair advised us to 'leave now and get two minutes of your life back'. DRNO's Teresa Lynch pauses to report.

This session however was supposed to be rushed; so stand back and in the words of the programme 'Be prepared to be challenged, provoked, amazed, and perhaps dazzled.'

Ray Poynter of The Future Place chaired the return of this very popular session from last year in which the speakers had five minutes and one slide to put across their 'big idea'.

First out of the traps was Audrey Anand of Listengroup, and listen was what she wanted us to do, or to be more accurate: continually observe, question, hypothesise and confirm. She contextualized her points using illustrations from the world of the stand up comic, and got some of the biggest laughs of the session.

Andy Dexter of Truth, standing in at short notice, gave us a chart which extended the conventional distribution curve with a long neck making the whole into a cuddly brontosaurus. His point was that insights were not to be gained from the average in the belly but from the exceptional at the business end of the dinosaur. Radical - certainly not what we were taught - but you can't argue with someone whose company is called Truth. Not when there's no time for questions anyway. Andy concluded by encouraging us to expect the unexpected and seemed to have something against Gary Neville.

Next up was Rich Shaw of Virtual Surveys. His slide was a visual representation of the causes and number of death in the Crimean war pre and post Florence Nightingale's intervention. His point was that we can make graphical illustration more informative by making them more visually engaging. He had the audience scribbling like mad as he reeled off a list of sites from which to download apps and examples. He also admitted at the end that Miss Nightingale had not thrown his slide together on her Mac the night before.

Rich was followed by Annelies Verhaeghe last year's ESOMAR young researcher of the year. She wanted us to stop asking questions to which we already knew the answer or could easily obtain it from another source.

Time for one question? Sorry, but we are a bit rushed...

All articles 2006-23 written and edited by Mel Crowther and/or Nick Thomas, 2024- by Nick Thomas, unless otherwise stated.