Daniel Berkel: good work doesn’t change

The Palmerston Group on making people feel something, turning a focus group into a game show, and keeping AI ‘in brackets.’

As part of our ongoing Good Work series, I had the pleasure of chatting with Daniel Berkel, SVP of Research and Partner at the Palmerston Group. I opened with my usual question: what does good work look like in the age of AI?

Good work in the age of AI is a dangerous topic, because really “the age of AI” should be just in brackets. It doesn’t have to exist, because good work doesn’t change. It has been good work always, and it will always be good work.Daniel Berkel, Palmerston Group

For Daniel, the key to good work is making someone feel something, and the emotion doesn’t always have to be happy.

All of us work on things that are occasionally not as bright and fuzzy. But if you can make the person who’s not there feel something, that’s good work. The best research doesn’t feel like research; it should feel like a natural interaction. If you can capture that, then I think you’ve hit gold.Daniel Berkel

A focus group as a game show

He shared a fantastic example of putting this into practice. His team created a live game show instead of a focus group, to make it genuinely interesting for people to attend. They took it seriously: a real prize, a giant cheque, microphones on tables, and the clients as judges. The themes were built around the client’s business challenge, and the format let people be themselves, with a bit of extra flair, and get away from the crutch of being over-reliant on technology.

He told me, with his acquired Boston accent, that everyone walked away thinking it was wicked. Then he added:

Good work is something that gets talked about. All of us have a limited number of words we share every day. When you come home and someone asks how your day was, I want to be in those first five lines. I want them to say, “we did this really cool research thing today, it was so interesting,” and that should go to every person in the chain, from the participant to the videographer to the end client.Daniel Berkel

He wants the clients who weren’t in the room to wish they had been, and the people who were there to leave saying they learned something they can’t wait to share.

I want the person who was never there to say, “we heard this thing from our team that has really inspired our product design, our marketing, our understanding of our audience.” If you can capture that, the virality is internal. That’s the ideal state. That’s good work.Daniel Berkel

Where AI fits

Daniel and his team are well versed in AI tools for analysis and content creation, and they find real benefit in the technology’s ability for pattern recognition.

What AI allows you to do is take unfocused content and build it into really good silos very quickly. Take the game show: you get a huge volume of input, and you can make sense of it very, very quickly.Daniel Berkel

For Daniel, AI is not the foundation of the work; it’s there “in brackets.” You have to figure out where AI sits in your workflow, but good work is more about methodological innovation, like turning a focus group into a game show, and the creative confidence that comes from being a genuine expert in your craft.