When Research Becomes Relational: Earning Stories of Impact in Social Innovation
The Innovation Foundation, the global corporate foundation to The Adecco Group, serves as a Social Innovation Lab that supports sustainable livelihoods.
In its work with underserved populations, the Foundation increases employability and access to labor markets. That’s a bold model, and building it meant pushing beyond data gathering, into a process that earned trust so that researchers could develop the right solutions with the right partners.
They needed to create a space where these voices could truly shape things.
Before designing the research session, &Human focused first on the researchers themselves, introducing a connection-first facilitation approach.
Where the team had previously conducted “intake,” they learned to follow the natural thread of conversation. &Human built that capability by developing the team’s skills in deep listening, reading what sits beneath initial answers, and navigating status dynamics and emotional weight.
Paired with a small-group research session format and a redesigned question architecture, this approach enabled conversations to move beyond surface-level responses into something more genuine and revealing.
The shift was clear and immediate.
Participants who walked in guarded would slowly, visibly let go, their shoulders dropping, face softening as they found words for their experiences. Researchers shifted from managing conversations to engaging in them—creating space for participants to move beyond guarded responses. Insight expanded accordingly, shaped both by what was said and by what wasn’t.
Together, we designed a workshop model that transformed the session and scaled its impact beyond the room.
The Innovation Foundation is now building a global program to train facilitators and researchers in empathetic data collection, using the model developed with &Human.
We believe the brightest future is human. We partner with those bold enough to build it without compromise.
