Excerpt: Paul Hartley, CEO of Human Futures, opened our fall speaker series with a talk on research as the sensory apparatus of an organization. Watch the talk and the follow-up podcast.
On October 29, the KPMG Ignition Lab at McMaster University opened its fall speaker series with Paul Hartley, CEO of Human Futures. Students, researchers and practitioners filled MCCD8150 at the DeGroote School of Business for a session titled Knowledge in a Time of Data. Afterwards, Paul sat down with us for a podcast conversation that went further into the same ideas.
Both recordings are below.
Watch the talk
About the speaker
Paul Hartley leads Human Futures, a strategy and research firm that helps organizations understand people, culture and change, and use that understanding to plan for the future. His work sits where research, strategy and foresight meet. That made him a natural first speaker for a lab built on bringing designers, builders, technologists and subject matter experts together.
Research as the sensory apparatus of an organization
One idea anchored the session:
Research is the sensory apparatus of an organization.
On this view, research is not a step that happens once before a launch. It is how an organization perceives what is happening around it. Customers, employees, markets and culture keep shifting. Organizations that invest in research can sense those shifts and respond. Those that don’t end up reacting after the change has already happened.
From data to knowledge
The title of the talk points to a distinction that runs through Paul’s work. Data records what happened. Knowledge explains why it happened and what it means for the decisions ahead. Getting from one to the other takes interpretation, context and judgment. That is where qualitative methods earn their place: interviews, observation and close attention to how people actually live and work.
The session covered:
- What research does for an organization beyond collecting data
- How qualitative and market research are practised in industry
- Why human context still matters when data and AI tools are everywhere
- How research becomes knowledge leaders can act on
- What students and early-career researchers can take into industry roles
Continue the conversation: the podcast
After the talk, Paul joined us for the first episode of the KPMG Ignition Lab Show. The conversation covers how research is changing, what AI means for insight work, and the skills that matter for people entering the field.
Why this matters for the lab
Ignition brings together people who design, build and analyse. Paul’s session set a strong starting point for the series. Before teams build solutions, they need a reliable way to understand the problem and the people involved.
The thread continues on November 26, when Dr. Shane Saunderson presents Making Sense of Sensemaking: synthesis in Design Thinking in MCCD8150. Registration details are coming soon.
Thank you to Paul for opening the series, and to everyone who joined us in the lab.
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