The 3rd episode of This Human Business (available on iTunes, Stitcher, Castos) focuses on the key to subverting the automated artifice of digitally optimized business model that dominates commerce today: To make business more human, we’ve got to question the fundamental research ideology that leads to corporations to run efficiently cold.
This episode features Nina Kruschwitz, Julia von Winterfelt, Bhavik Joshi, Jeff Kofman, David Altschul, Tom Maschio, Tania Rodamilans, Doug Grant, and my quantitative, but otherwise identical, twin James Cook.
Among the insights you’ll hear:
Research goes far beyond the factual focus search to serve as a form of wandering meditation, transcending the tight circuitry of digital technology to follow circuitous routes
As much as we need quantitative methods to keep business running lean, we also need to loosen our grip on the reins from time to time, and go thickly qualitative, because numbers without vision have no meaning
We don’t perform research just in order to obtain information, because research is a cultural practice in which the experience of seeking is as transformative as the boon of data we gain upon its completion
While the supercomputers are busy racing each other to new goalposts in artificial intelligence, human advantage in business will come from the willingness to be artfully stupid in our interactions with each other
Anyone can say they do ethnography, but the real thing is more demanding
A interview has the potential to immerse us in the subjective experience as another human being, to be as qualitatively robust as Big Data is quantitatively powerful
The quintessence of humanity is it’s weirdness – so if your research doesn’t find anything bizarre about your customers, it’s not getting to the heart of the matter.
In addition to the audio podcast, a full transcript is available to those who still prefer to read.
