On the latest episode of the Change Agents podcast, Alter Agents Chief Strategy Officer Devora Rogers is joined by Vanessa Hensler, founder of Outside Insights and formerly of Google, Pinterest, Nielsen and Reddit. Vanessa holds a PhD in neuroscience and spent her career bringing neuroscience methods into market research. She talks through what neuroscience research actually looks like in practice, the career-defining moment she risked her job to challenge a C-suite decision, why she believes human-led research matters more than ever in the age of AI, and the simple methods that still surprise her most.

Let’s start with your PhD — what was your field of study?

My PhD is in neuroscience, and I worked with Antonio Damasio, who — if you’re in the field of neuromarketing or marketing — I think most people are familiar with. Most of my work focused on understanding how emotions and empathy impact decision making.

For the uninitiated — what is neuroscience, and what does neuroscience research actually look like?

Neuroscience itself is the scientific study of the brain and the nervous system. Neuroscience research is when you’re using methods that capture responses that are less verbal and more direct — directly measuring physiological responses, which could be cognitive responses like reaction time, or looking directly at blood oxygen levels and changes using fMRI or EEG. Those are some of the methods you’d use as part of neuro research. And of course, eye tracking — I think that’s probably the most popular one.

When did you realize neuroscience was going to be your specialty?

There’s a bit of a backstory. I was born and raised in India, and my parents were really clear: you’re either a doctor or an engineer. Sadly, I don’t have an MD, so I still hear about it from my parents. My undergrad was in psychology, and I was really intrigued by the human brain. For most of it, it was my curiosity and the desire to learn more, but it was also about how close I could get to a natural science and away from a more social science, which is sometimes how psychology is considered.

After I spent time in the industry, outside of academia, it became evident that there was so much we were leaving on the table when we weren’t bringing in these methods to truly understand how people feel — which, often, people themselves can’t fully articulate.

Is there a favorite study you did using neuroscience that’s stayed with you?

It’s hard to name just one, but there are a couple I can mention. When I was at Pinterest, we looked at how people were feeling as they went through big life moments — Pinterest is all about the big moments, right, getting married, having a child, buying a house. We mapped that emotionally and physiologically using EEG, eye tracking, skin conductance and more.

It was really interesting to see how people’s responses varied as they moved through the platform and looked at pins representing things like their wedding gown, or the kind of setup they wanted on their wedding day. It was eye-opening, because the nuance you got using those methods was absolutely impossible to get by simply asking people. That allowed us to really tweak the creative and the product to meet people where they were, based on how they felt in that moment.

This is the question I ask everyone on the show — what is an insight in your career that changed everything?

I’ll be clear — this didn’t change my life, but I’d say it did change the life of the company I was at, which I can’t name. The insight led to a shift in focus on who the company’s key customer was. At the time, the C-suite was quite determined to focus on transactional goods and services — really focusing on lower-funnel customers — because they wanted to diversify the customer base. I was lucky enough to be working closely with the C-suite and had their trust enough to question a decision that didn’t seem grounded in data.

I led a segmentation, along with a product gap analysis and understanding of the platform’s consumer base, to be able to tell the COO: instead of focusing on transactional goods and services, which is where you do want the money to come from, we need to focus more on the upper funnel — on customers with a longer sales cycle, on higher-value goods and higher-value services. That was a hard one to sell. I actually remember telling them, if this doesn’t work, you can have me leave my job. And the funny part is, I was going into maternity leave at the time.

I was totally ready to take complete ownership of it. I actually went back three months after having my first baby to keep working on this, and we pivoted to what my research suggested. To this day, that’s the highest sustained revenue stream the company has, and it was a huge revenue unlock. So the insight itself was that we needed to pivot to the customer base that actually fit our product, our consumer, and the psychographics of that customer. But what really stuck with me was this: we’re often either afraid, or not in a position, to question decisions made at the C-suite level. My learning was that we need to be brave enough to question it and let the data guide us.

I’ll quote a close friend of mine and an incredible researcher, Steph Kumar: “I did not have a seat at the table, so I brought my own chair.” We need to ask these tough questions, because it’s important that decisions get made on credible, legitimate data. That’s what helps people on both sides of the table.

What are you working on now?

After almost 10 years, and more, in tech, I recently left to start my own research consulting. I started Outside Insights, a research company that works at the intersection of neuroscience and strategy — bringing my expertise in neuroscience together with the experience I’ve had working in tech, especially at the executive level, to help craft stories that uncover emotional truths we can’t get to using only traditional methods.

How’s it going, getting to launch this journey and finally direct research the way you believe clients need it?

It’s super exciting, super empowering. But at the same time, I’d be lying if I said it’s easy, because it’s not — though I knew going into it that it wouldn’t be. There’s so much to learn, from building your own website to running a business end to end. In all my previous roles, I was never the one pitching to a client or worrying about tracking the finances. So there’s a lot I’m learning, and I’m genuinely excited about that.

How are you thinking about the work researchers do — and the work your company will do — during this time of massive change, with AI moving fast and the industry consolidating? Are researchers more important, or less?

I think research is definitely more important than ever. And I’d add a qualifier to that: research led by humans is even more important. I’m starting to read more and more people saying this — your edge is going to be your humanity, and I could not agree more. I’ll say, I love AI, I use it every single day, and it’s made my life a lot easier and more efficient. But it’s also about recognizing that while AI can make things more efficient and faster, it can’t replace certain human abilities that will stay unique to us — things like the a-has, the gut feelings, the intuitions. Maybe one day AI will gain that kind of human consciousness and emotion, but I don’t think we’re there yet. In an age where everyone’s leaning more and more on AI, I think the key human element becomes even more important.

What concerns you, if anything, about research that leans too heavily on AI?

What’s concerning is that a lot of the decisions being made now, based on research that may be purely led by AI and may not have had the opportunity for meaning-making, are going to have consequences that won’t be felt until much later. I’m hopeful there aren’t huge decisions being made on research done via ChatGPT alone, but I do think we’ll miss the tacit wisdom, the insight, and the deeply human sense-making if humans are taken out of the process. That leads to incomplete, less comprehensive decision making.

What are some of your favorite research methods — the ones that get you out of bed in the morning?

Honestly, it’s a mix, because I think a mixed-method approach reveals the whole paradox and irony of the spoken versus the unspoken. I’ve seen this in action in research that has a traditional survey component but also a neuro element — and often the two give you contradictory results. People will say they feel satisfied, but when you measure their physiological or neurophysiological responses, you notice it’s actually extremely stressful, or very low arousal. Those methods bring so much richness to the data. And while neural methods are often thought of as expensive, they’ve actually become much more affordable over time — the same is true even for fMRI, thanks to advances in technology.

Where do you sit on the qual versus quant versus neuro debate? Some researchers are quant to the core, or qual for life.

I honestly don’t have a preferred methodology. I let the research question drive the methodology, not the other way around.

Do you have a favorite example of a simple but powerful research method?

Sometimes the simplest methods give you the best answers, even though here I am singing the praises of neuro. This reminds me of a research paper I read years ago — the method really stuck with me. Participants were given an outline of a human body and asked to feel different emotions, then color in the parts of the body where they felt each emotion. It gave rise to what the paper called body maps of emotion. I don’t know if I’m doing the method justice in describing it, but it was such a creative, simple approach, and the results — those body maps — were incredible to look at.