How To Conduct Research for a White Paper

The Importance of the Story Arc To Guide Your Research

Let’s use the template we have written for our data cleansing services example:

• Incorrect data is costing businesses more than they realize. There are hidden costs that are frequently not considered.
  • The cost of fixing inaccurate data
  • The cost of inaccurate reports based on inaccurate data
  • The costs of poor decision-making based on inaccurate data

We now have a structure that will guide our research program on this topic because we expand this out as follows:

• Incorrect data is costing businesses more than they realize. There are hidden costs that are frequently not considered.
  • The cost of fixing inaccurate data
    • Validation or evidence point 1
    • Validation or evidence point 2
    • Validation or evidence point 3
  • The cost of inaccurate reports based on inaccurate data
    • Validation or evidence point 1
    • Validation or evidence point 2
    • Validation or evidence point 3
  • The costs of poor decision-making based on inaccurate data
    • Validation or evidence point 1
    • Validation or evidence point 2
    • Validation or evidence point 3

Our research needs to focus on finding the evidence or the points of validation for each of the sub-topics identified. We can now be very focused in terms of questions we want to ask our subject matter experts, and also in terms of our desk-based search engine research.

Create a Live Document

You should prepare this as a live document that you update continually as you research the topic further, with links to your research documents.

You may find you need an extra bullet point, or bullet points, to accommodate new points that could come up during the research program, as follows:

• Incorrect data is costing businesses more than they realize. There are hidden costs that are frequently not considered.
  • The cost of fixing inaccurate data
    • Validation or evidence point 1
    • Validation or evidence point 2
    • Validation or evidence point 3
  • The cost of inaccurate reports based on inaccurate data
    • Validation or evidence point 1
    • Validation or evidence point 2
    • Validation or evidence point 3
  • The costs of poor decision-making based on inaccurate data
    • Validation or evidence point 1
    • Validation or evidence point 2
    • Validation or evidence point 3
  • New point from research
    • Validation or evidence point 1
    • Validation or evidence point 2
    • Validation or evidence point 3

Always structure your research in this way.

One of the biggest mistakes is to not follow a structure and to attempt to research the topic in a serendipitous and haphazard way. This will cause you to go down rabbit holes of research on Google with no direction, and to waste time on side topics that distract from the white paper you are trying to write. It can lead to hours of frustration and a feeling of becoming lost in the topic, rather than making progress on the research.

Breaking Down Your Research

You’ll notice that this structure has provided the basis for three sections, which will become chapters in the main document, but equally provide the foundation for what could be three separate articles that could stand alone.

You should treat each section here as if you were simply now researching in order to write an individual piece on each point.

We call this the Russian dolls method.

Consider the first point: The cost of fixing inaccurate data. Here, we are looking for three examples perhaps of the cost of people’s wasted time in making these fixes. So, we might formulate a new hypothesis to guide us here, articulated as a title such as, “Why people fixing data is costing you more than you think.”

This would be your first article (Article 1) in a series of three, which would fit into an overall white paper framework as illustrated:

We’ll look at the introduction, foreword and conclusion later, but for now we focus on the main body of the white paper, represented by the three articles – so let’s update our framework with that information:

This will help us design our next layer of targeted research, for which we’ll use block 3 (Article 1) to illustrate.

Next, we run a mini version of the steps that we undertook to define the main article in that we need to define an objective (what we want our target audience to learn from this section), we define a viewpoint, and we develop a story arc to support that viewpoint.

What Is a Story Arc?

A story arc in the literary world is the framework that gives structure to a story so that the readers or listeners can follow and, most importantly, remember it.

It covers exposition (setting the scene), rising action, a climax and a resolution.

We know that this structure is powerful.

One of the most important Old English poems was a poem called Beowulf and was composed around 700-750 AD. It was told orally for hundreds of years before being written down in the 1100s. It survived as an oral piece and now survives to this day because of the strength of its story arc, which comes as three setting-conflict-resolution sequences leading to the ultimate conclusion:

Using the Story Arc for Business Writing

Due to its endurance and likelihood of being remembered, this structure is ideal for a business piece of writing, such as a white paper.

We might summarize it as thus:

• Define the problem or pain point.
• Identify the resolution.
• Demonstrate the positive consequences.

Let’s expand our research framework to include these points:

• Incorrect data is costing businesses more than they realize. There are hidden costs that are frequently not considered.
  • The cost of fixing inaccurate data
    • What’s the problem or pain points? (There’s more inaccurate data than you think, do you know how much bad data you have?)
      • Validation or evidence point 1
    • In what ways has it been attempted to be solved?
      • Validation or evidence point 2 (Employees spend lots of time trying to fix it manually)
    • What have these solutions achieved (or not achieved)?
      • Validation or evidence point 3 (While this seems cheap and easy, there is no way to monitor and it is prone to human error)
  • The cost of inaccurate reports based on inaccurate data
    • Reports are frequently wrong and don’t stand up to scrutiny
    • Validation or evidence point 1
    • There is a breakdown in trust and report either not used or follow up is needed
    • Validation or evidence point 2
    • Too much time spent validating what should already be clear.
    • Validation or evidence point 3
  • The costs of poor decision-making based on inaccurate data
    • Decisions are often taken on gut feel rather than being data driven
    • Validation or evidence point 1
    • This leads to having to accept more risk
    • Validation or evidence point 2
    • These risks can be costly – they can cost e.g. reputation, bad prod
    • Validation or evidence point 3

You would be building the points here as a live research document while undertaking the various phases of your research, so you may want to set up a template similar to the following:

You’ll notice that paragraphs equally follow a similar structure within themselves, as an echo of the overall structure – the story arc principle exists right down to paragraph level.

Once you’ve competed this for your three articles, in combination with the introduction, then you’ll have a complete program of topics on which to focus your research:

Make sure that your research is guided by this document. Don’t let yourself be led by what you research.