This is a profile from the 2022 version of the DataIQ 100.
The latest list is available here.
Michelle Patel, deputy director, analysis and insight, Food Standards Agency
What has been your path to power?
I’m not sure I’d describe it as power, as such! Responsibility, perhaps (to misquote Spider-Man). To be honest, I always thought my future would be in communications, but I’d rather spend my time understanding what makes people tick than answering late night questions from the tabloids. So after twenty years in comms I made a switch to analysis and insight via behavioural science, studying for a PhD in how citizen insight is applied to food regulation while getting the chance to apply what I’m learning on the job. I think it gives me an unusually interdisciplinary focus, as well as an understanding of stakeholders’ interests and opportunities to influence - which you don’t always get in someone that’s a pure analyst.
What impact has the pandemic had on your role?
Fortunately a lot of us worked remotely anyway and we have a really good IT setup, so that part was pretty seamless. The real change was the pace. It made us work faster, and helped us prove the value of good insight for decision making on the fly. I was asked to set up a horizon scanning function, drawing together data, social science and economic analysis and to pivot the focus of a lot of our work pretty much overnight to meet challenges no one had seen coming. We’d already been moving quite a lot of what we do to digital methods, so while lockdown affected our ability to interact with local authorities and food businesses, some of the digital techniques we’d been developing anyway (web-push surveys, online ethnography, for example) really came into their own.
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