The word survey has taken on a specific and narrow meaning in our industry – typically you’d expect it to mean data collected by way of a questionnaire or a perhaps a series of depth interviews. Yet the broader definition of survey “look closely at or examine (someone or something)” is more pertinent to how our industry is evolving to meet the needs of organisations as they struggle to stay relevant. In part this is due to changes in our understanding of human behaviour fed by developments in the cognitive sciences which has undermined the value of traditional market research survey methods and forced us to find better solutions. I think that this amounts to more than just a change in or substitution for previous methods – it requires a re think of the linear nature of traditional methods and instead is better served by crowd sourcing of data. During the past year, more than one in three clients projects uses no new ‘survey data’ in the traditional use of the word and a further third use newly collected survey data as only one, sometimes minor, component. I’ll be talking about an alternative approach to data collection for a new age of client business problems.