The Business of Human Research – Episode 3 Transcript
The following is a transcript of the third episode of This Human Business, a new podcast that represents the growing movement seeking to balance digital innovation with a revitalization of humanity in business. You can listen to the podcast on Castos, Stitcher, and iTunes.
Jonathan Cook: Welcome to This Human Business, a podcast that explores the growing movement in business to reassert a prominent role for human experience in the culture of commerce. My name is Jonathan Cook, and I’m a qualitative researcher making my living studying the strange nooks and crannies of commercial culture – the irrational experiences that bring a dose of real humanity into the world of business.
In last week’s episode, we considered the ways that businesses engage in storytelling, even when they aren’t aware that they’re doing it. This week, we’re going to reconsider the story of the digital revolution, shifting it away from a tale of technological tinkering into a battle over the meaning of what it is to be human.
People commonly think of the digital revolution as a technological development, but really, it’s just as much an expression of ideas we have as it is about the objects those ideas make possible. Digital technology is a tool of information processing, and as such, an outgrowth of a particular kind of research: Quantitative research.
The biggest corporations these days make their money by mining quantified data from the ore of human behavior, trading it between each other, and using it to try to convince us to buy things. The businesses that have been built upon platforms of digital technology are really research firms as much as anything else, selling methods and products of quantitative research.
For this reason, if we’re trying to find alternatives to the dominant business model, to discover a more human kind of commerce, the best way to begin that quest is to seek out alternative forms of research. The commercial ideology that values efficiency over human experience, after all, is a direct outgrowth of the kinds of questions, and the kinds of answers, that quantitative research is capable of working with.
In this episode of This Human Business, we will be looking for new kinds of questions, and new ways of asking them. I will begin with a discussion I had with a quantitative researcher.
Why? As much as this podcast talks about the importance of non-quantified forms of experience, it’s not intended as a rejection of quantitative research. The point is more subtle than that. Besides, this particular discussion comes with a special twist.
Shadow Identities
Meet my identical twin, James Cook. He’s a quantitative researcher, a professor of sociology who studies network theory at the University of Maine.
James Cook: I am involved in multivariate hypothesis testing which involves multiple regression, which is really at its fundamental basis all about prediction of some characteristic that varies according to the value of a number of other characteristics that vary. So, that involves the collection in standard individual level research of two dimensional datasets in which one dimension is representing cases that you observe and another dimension in the dataset represents qualities that you observe.
The other aspect in terms of research method that I have is to think beyond that regarding the characteristics of relationships between people in structures called social networks in which it is no longer individual cases, whether those would be people or individual groups or individual communities, that you would study, but instead the relations between them. So that blows out standard multivariable research in a two dimensional dataset into a third dimension in which every possible variable that you could have describing relations between people is two dimensional in which both of those dimensions are sets of people and a single value in that two dimensional dataset for a single variable describes the character of the relation between those two people.
The areas in which I do my research are in primarily political networks in state legislatures and in online networks that exist on social media and I touch on other ideas primarily regarding the notion of identity, the creation of identity, the negotiation of identity when an identity is hidden, when it is shown in gender contexts, and when in online environments it is possible to recreate new aspects of identity, given the virtual rather than physical nature of the Internet. But that’s a quick summation of the kind of research that I do and I would say that in that research I work with numbers and so you could say I’m a quantitative researcher, but each of those numbers is really a representation of quality of some kind.
Jonathan Cook: My twin and I were sitting down to talk about the differences between us that had developed over time. You may have noticed that he doesn’t like to talk about the same kinds of things that I do. I pointed this out to him.
I notice that you and I speak very differently.
James Cook: Really?
Jonathan Cook: Yeah. Like I’m seeing you close your eyes in what I’m interpreting as an attempt to make sure that you’re precisely expressing the thoughts that you’re having and you’re very meticulous, and I feel kind of sloppy and wandering in comparison to the way that you do things, which I’m okay with. There’s some comforts in living that way, but I’m wondering what do you make of the fact that you and I came into the world with the identical genetic abilities, predispositions, all the things that come from that, and yet we have chosen these lives that are different in important ways, similar because we both like doing research but the kind of research that we do is in some ways you could say opposite, really quite distinct? What do you make of that?
James Cook: I don’t know what to make of it because what I enjoy doing when I’m not engaged in that research is in participating in political protest and singing and doing theatre which are not precise and meticulous acts. So I think that it may be that my need for that, and I don’t like the distinction between meticulousness and sloppiness, I would say my need for experience that transcends categorization is filled through these other avenues. And it may be that your need for tractability is there and addressed in other ways. And that it might be a mistake for us to only look at the work that we do that we call research as an indication of the full scope of our lives.
Jonathan Cook: My brother and I fit the stereotype of identical twins in that we both do the same sort of work. We’re both researchers. We defy the stereotype, though, by performing research in profoundly different ways – he with numbers, and me with feelings and experiences that cannot be quantified.
How can such distinct practices both exist in the same category of activity – research?
What is research anyway?
Search vs. Research
Perhaps the best way to understand research is to compare it to the more simple form of its root word: Search. Search is etymologically related to the words circus, circle and circuit, coming out of the Latin word circare, meaning to go out and wander around.
In the last few decades, we’ve been taught to think of circuits as highly engineered electronic mechanisms used in precise, mathematically-based information processing, but that wasn’t the original sense of the word. Think of what we mean when we call a process circuitous, and you get closer to the character of this group of terms – it’s anything but the shortest route between two points.
Another good cousin of search is the word circulate, suggesting a fluid condition full of uncertainty. We may seek solid information, but search itself is anything but solid. Once we get to hard facts, the search itself is over. The end state of search is not at all similar to the process itself.
Google, one of the biggest players in digital commerce, built itself on search, but did so with the ironic promise that it could make search less circuitous. Google made the circle of search into a straight line, and in doing so, sharpened the distinction between search and research.
The only difference between “search” and “research” in the way that you spell them is the prefix “re”, but those two little letters change the character of word dramatically.
The prefix “re” changes a word by adding both the sense of performing an act more than once and the sense of going back to the origin from which a journey has begun. It suggests a repetition, a reconsideration, and a return to a simple search, suggesting that the search has become full of uncertainty, double-checking, and self-reflection.
Search is a literal task. A search either finds something or it doesn’t. In a simple search, when the thing we are looking for is found, the search is over. With research, though, we don’t stop with the initial accomplishment of finding something. Researchers take the thing they’ve found, and then search again and again, within it and around it, always trying to go further into the mystery. They search through their search itself, considering the path that they’ve taken to get to their destination.
A search is satisfied when it finds an answer. Research finds its purpose in questions.
So, research is much more meditative than mere searching. Research is an activity as much about the experience of the person going along that journey as the destination that it reaches.
To research is therefore a multilayered process. It can be thought of as a spiral, a circling that moves deeper and deeper into a subject rather than remaining at its surface.
The shifting, swirling movement of the best research processes move between quantitative and qualitative methods, but the excessive emphasis on quantitative methods in both digital technology and business management have flattened the spiral, taking its philosophical dimension away, diminishing what had been research back into mere search.
The Consequences of Following The Numbers
Google’s algorithmic engine can do search, but it takes a human to perform true research. When search is allowed to replace research, there are grave consequences. Julia von Winterfelt, the CEO of SoulWorx, told me about what happened to her when she experienced those consequences firsthand.
Julia von Winterfelt: I like to tell the story that I, the reason I started SoulWorx was, I came to an epiphany when I realized every month I was flying over to London from Berlin at the time, to present my numbers, and when my numbers were great it was a two minute conversation. When my numbers weren’t great, being well-prepared, I had all of my arguments, but it was just a numbers game, and every time when it was good, there was still frustration like, you can do better. You can hit the top line by X percent more. You could be able to do more on your bottom line.
I just recognized I don’t want to run the company on numbers. That’s not who I am, and if that’s how I can progress my career, and that’s how I’ve got to be, then that’s not the right space for me. I’m certainly not against numbers. I think it is important to look at money being energy and being worthy of what you’re providing, but what really disturbed me was that it was just that that was on the agenda. There was less, if at all, conversation around what are the products that you’re building, what is making them so useful or so meaningful for clients and their clients to be using. There wasn’t any compensation around the people, and you know how people are engaging and what type of form of work that they’re actually doing.
Jonathan Cook: No business can afford to completely ignore the numbers that reflect the health of its operations. A business culture that allows numbers to become the reason for its existence, however, will alienate those people with the most to give.
Numbers games will best be run by artificial intelligence. It’s only a matter of time before AI takes over these kinds of jobs. The trouble is that AI is so darned intelligent that it’s predictable. Quantitative analysis will lead all competently-designed data-driven businesses to the same conclusion, leading them into the trap of commoditization, in which the products and services offered by every company in a given category will be essentially the same.
Data-driven management also prioritizes numbers over human needs, leading to alienation and exhaustion. Studies by people like Dr. Barry Schwartz show that employees aren’t motivated by the financial rewards that numbers-focused corporations tend to emphasize. They’re motivated by the feeling that there’s meaning in their work.
The Mystery of Qualitative Delight
Quantitative research is necessary to keep a company running, but it can’t be all we do. Competitive advantage in consumer insight and company culture will come from the distinctive perspective that comes from human research.
Researcher Nina Kruschwitz explained to me the necessary role of mystery and delight in business insight.
Nina Kruschwitz: I think if there’s a mystery, there’s a message there. It says, pay attention. There’s something to learn here. I dread the linear approach that wants to look at the mystery and just disassemble it, and take it into all its little parts and then make it do something else that’s not honoring the totality of what that mystery is.
Research requires taking some time and being inquisitive from a place of respect, being comfortable with not knowing, and not knowing it all at the end point, but honoring the idea that whatever is there, whatever you’re looking at, that it has its own integrity and its own reason for being the way that it is, which doesn’t mean that it’s not going to change. That’s just the way it is at that moment you’re relating to it. Understanding why that’s so is really beautiful, and can open up all kinds of different ways of knowing and how to proceed.
Jonathan Cook: As Nina points out, there is always opportunity for delight in any human activity, and yes, that includes business management. Wherever there are human beings, there’s a human drama at work, but unless that drama is obvious, artificial intelligence won’t be able to ferret it out – and merely working with the obvious is insufficient in business.
It takes a human researcher to make the trusting connections with people that enable emotionally vulnerable revelations. A side effect of those connections that are fostered through human research is that they contribute to the repair of company culture in themselves. Simply doing research in a warm, compassionate way starts the healing.
Traditional organizational research and market research doesn’t work that way, of course. It emphasizes outcome over process. Bhavik Joshi, Strategic Director at LPK, explains that if we’re going to establish new forms of rigorously human research, we’ll need to dig a little deeper, and adopt unconventional techniques.
Bhavik Joshi: That’s the struggle of everyday strategy work. In the typical sense of a project, we at LPK do brand design and brand experience and brand innovation. So, the project that we get is to essentially take something from the brand equity, and kind of bring it to life in a visual way. That is the kind of task that is typically given to LPK. So, there is a design counterpart to the project and a strategy counterpart to the project.
In typical projects, we are given an insight, or at least what a client would call an insight. The first step in which I am able to introduce a methodology or an approach or a mindset to kind of infuse some of that deeper meaning is to challenge that insight. It’s not just an exercise in academics. It’s because sometimes, most times, the insights are extremely observational. The best of them have made a keen observation about a certain conscious or rational behavior that is extremely category-centric, so it is around the product category that the consumer is interacting in.
The worst of them kind of just seem like platitudes. They feel and sound like something someone would say even without having spent the money to do the research. So, the first opportunity that I get to infuse deeper meaning into this is to try to challenge that insight, and to, with the help of and understanding of not just the general human condition, but an understanding of unconscious desires, we use a methodology at LPK which is based on Professor Reiss from Ohio State University, his 16 hard wired human desires model. It’s a desires methodology to try and understand what could be one of those desires that is undergirding this very rational behavioral sense.
If the project opportunity allows for that, if there is room to flex, then we go out and some discovery of our own, to try to talk to consumers through unconventional modes and methodologies to try and see some of the expressions that they are leaving behind on their social footprints, and then try and go even one level deeper, to try and understand what could be underlying those subconscious motivations and desires. Is there anything more archetypal at play here, something that’s happening beyond the realm of their conscious choices that they’re making?
So, trying to anchor that surface-level product category-centric insight into something that is slightly more universal, slightly crosses those boundaries of segmentation, so that this doesn’t feel specifically about 25 to 44 year-old graduate almond milk drinkers, but it feels slightly more universal to the human condition, is what gives you the rich fodder, both verbally and visually to go beyond.
It is not only helpful for me to then start crafting the foundational pieces of a brand equity in terms of a proposition of what could be the tone and voice and character, but then my design partner is also able to look at it and be like, oh, I can do something with this. If you were to just tell me that this is about feeling confident, because your scalp is not itchy because your shampoo doesn’t make your hair dry, then I don’t know what to do with it, but if you take it down to the levels of status or the levels of ego, then I am able to do something with it, and create something that might have some more meaning. So, that’s a glimpse into one of the methodologies we use to get to a deeper level of insight.
Stupid Questions in an Age of Artificial Intelligence
Jonathan Cook: The truth is, the data don’t speak for themselves. So, Bhavik Joshi shows us some of the interesting kinds of materials that come when a business trusts human-to-human contact in unconventional research. We get beyond the boundaries of segmentation, past the rudiments of personas, into the strange territories of archetypal subconscious desires. This material is unusual enough to give designers the ability to go beyond mere category-level applications.
I was struck during a conversation with former journalist Jeff Kofman, now CEO and founder of Trint, by his willingness to allow for human imperfections in the research process. Trint is a fascinating company, and we’ll learn more about Jeff’s work there in future episodes of this podcast, but for now, I want to focus on a comment that he made about the role of stupid questions in his interviewing style.
Jeff Kofman: You don’t beat yourself up about taking the wrong turn. Being decisive it turns out is an incredibly useful skill when you’re running a startup. I have to make literally dozens of decisions every day. I have no business degree, no business background. I know how to ask questions. I have no shame about asking stupid questions I think any good reporter would say that you know it’s better to ask stupid questions before you go to print or go on air than to have to make make excuses for getting it wrong.
So, I’m really I’m good at asking questions and I’m good at finding answers and I think any reporter is. I’m a curious guy and I love to ask questions and my interviews were often a little longer than they needed to be for stories that were so short because I was just so interested in the people and I was looking for something that gave me insights that I could share with the audience, with the viewers, and so I spent a lot of my life transcribing interviews, speeches, news conferences, lectures.
Jonathan Cook: We underestimate, in our embrace of artificial intelligence, the enormous potential contained within the posture of curious human stupidity. I don’t mean, of course, plain idiocy or willful ignorance. What I’m talking about is the path that leads not just to intelligence, but to wisdom. Stupidity isn’t the same as being dim witted, after all. It’s more like the state of mind we experience when we’re struck dumb. It’s linked to curiosity, the feeling of being simultaneously delighted and mystified by what a person has to say.
What Jeff Kofman has, and what all good human researchers have that artificial intelligence systems lack, is the experience of interest to leaven their ignorance. We can program bots to ask follow up questions based on pattern recognition in linguistic routines, but we can’t program them do what Jeff Kofman couldn’t stop himself from doing: Taking longer with an interview than required by explicit research protocols to follow his nose down a path that seemed to hint at something unexpected.
A Partnership of Numbers and Visions
The thing is, Jeff Kofman now works with artificial intelligence, not to replace human researchers, but to assist them in the more mundane elements of their work. It’s not that qualitative methods offer the only right way to do research, while the quantitative is wrong. Rather, each approach offers different advantages along with their own flaws, so that the most effective overall regime of research takes place when they work together.
David Altschul offered some thoughts on this interdependence that reminded me of that conversation I had with my quantitative identical twin.
David Altschul: There is a tremendous amount of pressure to collect and analyze data these days, and there are a lot of businesses that would love nothing more than to find the way through to, that would allow the data to answer all the problems, if they could just collect the right data and analyze it properly and apply it effectively, they wouldn’t need to tell stories. They wouldn’t need to invent stuff. They wouldn’t need to be creative. They would simply know you well enough to offer you exactly what you want just when you want it at the price that you’re willing to pay and never waste your time or their money trying to sell you something that you weren’t about to buy.
I think that that’s a fantasy. I think that the reliance on data only underscores the critical role of story in making that data useful and meaningful.
Jonathan Cook: Okay, so we can’t simply make Big Data bigger, and expect meaningful insight to miraculously emerge from our analytics. What is the proper relationship between qualitative and quantitative research methods, then? Like me, David has a lot to learn from his brother.
David Altschul: You know, I learned about this from my brother who is an archaeologist, so he’s a legitimate social scientist and I, this was 15 years ago. I already had clients who I thought were misusing the tools of social science to try to get more quickly to answers that seemed questionable or superficial to me, and I said, you know, ‘What is the appropriate role of quantitative analysis in the social sciences?’
And, he said, ‘Well, the most important mentor of mine, the first thing he taught me was that in the social sciences, any question that you could answer by quantitative analysis alone was a trivial question.’ And I said, ‘Well that’s certainly congruent with my experience with some of what I see as the misuse of science by some of my marketing clients.’
So, I said, ‘Well, what are you doing and why are you out there with your surveying equipment measuring the distance from the fire pit to the pot shards and mapping it on your computer or whatever the hell you’re doing?’ And he said, ‘Well here’s the point.’ He said, ‘If you do the quantitative analysis well, the numbers reveal patterns that are not visible to the naked eye and out of those patterns you develop a hypothesis about the possible meaning of the patterns in the numbers.’
Well, that hypothesis is a story. That’s what a hypothesis is. It’s the story that the social scientist is telling themself about the possible meaning in those patterns that appear in the numbers. And then, if you’re a good scientist, you say, ‘Okay. Well, if that were true, then such and such ought to also be true,’ and you go out and you invent another study and you collect some more data and you analyze it.
And so, there’s a virtuous cycle between data and story. Absent story, you’re just racing with your competition to collect insights about the category as a whole, which is only driving you further and further toward the commodity position.
Jonathan Cook: David Altschul takes us from the naive belief that a data-driven business strategy leads us in a straight line to success to a virtuous cycle in which we alternate between data and story with the pair driving business forward in a meaningful direction.
Reflecting back on what Jeff Kofman told us earlier, it seems clear that artificial intelligence will be an awesome tool in the future, once its glitches are resolved, but it still won’t provide everything we need. Human researchers will always be necessary, to provide the beautiful stories and stupid curiosity, the interest that propels inquiry forward, resolving the data provided by AI into stories that are culturally relevant to our subjective experience.
More Than A Momentary Observation
One of the methods that can take human research beyond the level of work that can be replicated by computers is ethnography. Anthropologist Tom Maschio has practiced ethnography to study both the traditional cultures found in the small villages of New Guinea and to understand Americans’ relationships with their cats. In both instances, ethnography revealed surprising meaning in everyday things by removing the obscuring filter of familiarity.
Tom Maschio: It brings up this point about everyday things, and what an anthropologist has to do in some ways is distance himself from the ordinariness of things and try to reframe these things and objects, commodities, products, services, experiences, defamiliarize themselves with them, especially if he’s working on his own culture and then defamiliarize himself, take a step back and sort of, like in Gestalt psychology, look at the object in a new way.
You almost have to put yourself or imagine yourself being in a Papua New Guinean village when you’re in someone’s home talking to them about their cat. You have to look at them as having interesting things to say about an interesting topic. Pets and cats are kind of one of those things where I found myself having to kind of defamiliarize myself with what was going on, and take a new look at people’s relationship with their pets.
With cats in particular, people feel that cats put them in touch with their own animal nature, enabling them to experience simple animal contentment such as when their cats sit on their laps purring, but I think beyond that, cats fascinate their owners because they seem to possess some uncanny exotic magical quality, and if my respondents were familiar with the idea, I would say that they perceive that their cats possessed something called mana. It’s a religious concept that represents the principles of efficacy and power and people often describe their cats as extraordinarily kind of efficacious animals. People seem to be saying that their cats introduced a sense of wonder or a kind of sacredness to their everyday lives, which was something that I felt that I really had to pursue and I watched people become very emotionally engaged.
Jonathan Cook: Emotional engagement is just what businesses have lost as they’ve moved to automate their operations and customer service. Ethnography exposes researchers to emotional engagement through an often-overwhelming immersion in the field of study.
What is ethnography, though?
A whole lot of people in the business world describe the research they do as ethnography. They’ll take a camera to a location for a few hours and call it ethnography. They’ll interview someone in their home, instead of in a dedicated research facility, and call it ethnography. Some firms have even developed software systems, automated, that they refer to as “digital ethnography”, though they consist of nothing more than systems for researchers to chat with people remotely, as research participants upload photographs and videos they’ve taken of their own activities.
Ethnography is something more than all of that. Many different research methods can be used as a part of ethnography, some of them quantitative, but what sets true ethnography apart from the many pseudoethnographies being hawked by market research firms these days is a certain ethos that can be boiled down to the following fundamental characteristics:
1. Ethnography studies culture, not just objects or behaviors. Culture is the collective sense of meaning that a group of people follow. It shapes their behaviors, and influences their selection and use of objects.
2. Ethnography includes some aspect of participant observation. An ethnographer needs to spend some time in the cultural setting being studied. That setting could be online, but presence and participation is essential.
3. Ethnography is performed slowly over a long period of time. An hour, a day, or a week isn’t enough to gain the sense of a culture. Ethnography is often performed in the accumulation of inquiry across several shorter episodes of research over the course of many years.
4. Ethnography adopts the perspective of the insider-outsider. This is what Thomas Maschio refers to as the process of defamiliarization. This process involves self-examination on the part of the researcher, and the careful consideration of multiple conceptions of what the culture being studied is really up to.
5. Ethnography is an interpretive craft, studying subjective beliefs and practices, and so needs to include thick qualitative methods.
Ethnography is a demanding practice, but Tom Maschio has seen the investment pay off for his clients in business. Only a thick, dedicated process of inquiry like ethnography can provide the level of human insight that enables businesses to break out of the trap of commoditization.
Tom Maschio: Especially when I first started this work, there was kind of, strangely enough, a kind of commoditization of the commodity which I had to break past, and people, marketers, could be fairly demoralized in their own kind of business life. And how do they demoralize themselves? They do it by taking a commoditized view of their commodity and not seeing the kind of meaningful dimensions of it.
So, my project, my brief, my goal in any of these projects really, is to show the human meaning, reframe business problems as human phenomena as social and human phenomena and meaningful phenomena. You get them out of a kind of linear way of thinking, step A to B to C, and just kind of place them in that field as if they’re living or swimming in a new kind of sea, a consumer sea of meanings, that’s kind of the first step, I think, in getting them to slow down and understand.
In Over Your Head
Jonathan Cook: Research itself is a cultural practice. It’s a form of ritual experience that, like a vision quest, blends outward exploration with self-discovery. The point of research isn’t just to gain information. It’s a rite of passage that shifts our identity, teaching us how to swim in a new sea of meaning.
Ethnography isn’t the only form of rigorously human qualitative research being practiced in commercial settings. Tania Rodamilans and I have worked together using a special technique for psychologically-penetrating interviews that finds its power in the cultivation of a radically open methodology that makes it more of an art than a science. It’s called Emotional Immersion.
Tania Rodamilans: The research that I do is very exploratory and I approach every new project with an open mind, just being humble enough to go in thinking that you really don’t know anything until you actually talk to the people that have those experiences. If you’re not going in trying to control every single outcome, you can allow yourself to just listen and be open to what the experiences might bring. That’s how you can get something that’s more creative and something that has a bit more soul.
If you’re being restrictive and assume that you know everything going in, then what’s the point of doing research anyway? If you have the information you need, you should just move forward with your strategy. But, if you believe that you are in need of some of some additional information and knowledge that you currently don’t have, then you have to also admit that you don’t know and you have to go in with that kind of a mindset.
I would say an open mindset is quite common in the art world and in the creative world, but sometimes you don’t see that in the business world as well. So for example, with my art projects, when I approach a new project, there’s a lot of trial and error and a lot of experimentation and that’s part what I really like about that side of my life. There really are no expectations, and things don’t need to be perfect all the time.
I get to try new things that I have never done before, maybe work with a new material or a new tool that I’ve never used before, and I would just say, as soon as I walk into the studio, there are no rules. I mean really, I can, when I’m in the studio, I can mix materials. I can do whatever I want however I want it. That, I think, allows me to come up with things that I would have never come up with if I had very strict rules and boundaries. If I had been told that, oh no, you can never ever mix this kind of paint with this kind of pigment, well, why not?
That’s what I believe the research that we do is like. When you are doing this kind of research, you kind of are experimenting a bit. It exploratory in nature, because you just really never know what people are going to tell you. I have been in projects where I thought I knew quite a bit about a particular topic, or I thought, ‘Oh, this is gonna be a little bit boring. I’m not really interested in this at all.’ And then, all of a sudden, you start listening to the people’s stories and why things matter to them, and you change your mind. You know, by the time you end the project you have a very different perception of that topic and the people involved in it.
So, whether it’s a product or a medical condition, whatever the project might be, you now have a very different level of understanding. I would say, in a way, you are changed by listening to those stories. The more you listen, the harder it is for you to cast judgment, and the more empathy you have for the people that you are interviewing. I don’t think that happens if you are not going in with an open mind and you’re not going in allowing yourself to be changed. If you have a certain rigidity about the overall process, it’s going to be really hard for you to actually learn something.
The Transformative Ritual of Research
Jonathan Cook: Allowing your product team to be changed isn’t the sort of thing that you’ll commonly see amongst the research objectives for project designs, but it’s actually one of the most important functions of research in the business world. When corporate clients take the time to actually participate in field research, rather than just watching remotely through a video networking service, they can emerge from the experience transformed.
Human research isn’t just about obtaining information. It’s a psychological process that enables participants to become open to new ideas. That’s especially important in the business world, because corporations are so effective at instituting management structures that ensure compliance – to a fault. It’s important for corporations to establish organizational cohesion, but that kind of social cohesion makes it extremely difficult to come up with truly new ideas or to challenge old ideas that aren’t working so well any more.
Research in the field can provide an important break in the corporate routine, a pause from the ordinary rhythms that maintain the solid business orthodoxy, and allow it to become more fluid.
The interviewing methodology Tania and I have worked with together is designed to heighten this alternative frame of mind by immersing everyone involved, from the people being interviewed to the clients themselves, in the emotional reality of the people being studied. As Tania explains, that emotional reality is often quite different from what’s predicted by clients’ data analytics.
Tania Rodamilans: I think this happens every time I do a project. You see people being moved and touched by what other people have to say about a particular topic all the time. That’s always really encouraging because I really don’t think it happens enough that we get those kind of intimate moments of compassion with the people that are ultimately using the products we make or engaging with the companies we work for.
So, during the course of research, I see people building that connection, just by listening to what their customers have to say. They are having an experience that I don’t think is happening as often as it should, and that changes their perception of what they do and how they do it and most importantly, why they do it. Seeing people in the business world that might have a certain ideas of how to go about research, or why they should doing research in the first place, and seeing them changed by having gone through this process, that’s something that I really like to see. That’s that’s one of the reasons why I like to do this work, because it’s exciting and rewarding, not only to be able to give voice to people that oftentimes don’t have a voice in the business world, by interviewing them and by sharing their stories, but also seeing the ripple effect that that voice can have. Our voice is to give them a voice that sometimes will linger for a very long time as their stories are being told and retold and remembered.
Being able to collect those stories, see the patterns and turn them into something that’s going to have a positive impact, in a business, and seeing what what that does to the people in that business, that’s very rewarding. The hope is that those voices would have that kind of ripple effect of sorts, that those that have been involved in a project, and they listen to those stories, would tell those stories to somebody else, and that as a result, people will act differently. Perhaps, as a company, they will have a different kind of interaction internally with each other and externally with their customers. That’s my little contribution to making things change over time, just by being able to do this work.
Jonathan Cook: How does this kind of transformation of perspective Tania describes take place within a research project? Just listening to customers’ opinions isn’t enough. If that were sufficient, businesses could simply rely on survey data. The thing is, consumer psychology isn’t as simple as what a direct approach to questioning can reveal. As experienced business leaders know, you can’t just ask people why they buy what they do and expect to come up with a useful model of marketplace behavior.
In order to begin to understand where consumers are really coming from, it’s important to take an indirect, oblique approach to inquiry by not asking people point blank about what we want to know.
The Obliquity of Emotional Immersion
Tania Rodamilans: We’re not just asking yes no questions or collecting specific information. We’re not even collecting data, or I would say simply gathering a lot of information. We’re going in with the idea of understanding what their stories are. Just that. It’s really quite simple, really.
These are not random stories, but stories connected with the category or the product we’re studying. However, we don’t ask direct questions and we let people self-select the stories that really matter the most to them, and it might sound like a more roundabout way to get at the knowledge we might be seeking, but it’s a much more human way to get at it.
It’s really hard to understand somebody by having a quick two-minute conversation where you’re asking 20,000 questions. A much better way to get to know somebody is to go and have dinner and hang out with them for a weekend and just talk to them about what life is like for them. It’s a different kind of interaction and the research we do is closer to spending time with people. You kind of condense that same idea in about an hour rather than spending the weekend with them.
This is the kind of research that wants to get to know you. It’s not the kind of research that is looking for you to say something we want you to say. And so, in getting to know somebody, you just never know what you’re going to find out, and that’s what’s exciting about this kind of work, but it can also be scary for some people because, you know what if what we find out about these people is not in alignment with what we’ve been doing for the last 20 years?
Jonathan Cook: What some people see as roundabout, others understand as well-rounded. Remember, research is a circle, not a square. Besides, it’s not just information that we’re seeking when we perform Emotional Immersion. It’s an experience.
Why go beach combing for seashells when you can just order them online? Why attend a concert in person when you can watch the same musicians on YouTube? The obvious answer is that sometimes, the thing that we’re looking for is not really what we’re seeking. In cinematic language, we find ourselves after a MacGuffin.
Here we get back to the power of story. A MacGuffin is an object that is valuable mostly because it propels a story forward. The classic MacGuffin is the Maltese Falcon, a statue in a Humphrey Bogart movie of the same name. Everybody in the movie is seeking the Maltese Falcon, and what happens with the characters in the movie is driven by the conflict created by that desire, but it doesn’t really matter what the Maltese Falcon is, in the end. What matters is the extreme behaviors people are driven to do because of their desire for it.
Furthermore, the desire for the Maltese Falcon is really just a means to another end. Different characters have agendas driven by their emotional and social needs. It’s what they dream of doing after their search for the Maltese Falcon is done that drives them, much in the same way that researchers are always seeking to pursue another question after their initial questions are answered.
Often, commerce is the same way. What we’re seeking when we purchase a product or service isn’t the product or service itself. It’s the further pursuit that we hope the product or service will enable us to engage in.
There is no real end in this pursuit. Every purchase is just one step further along an emotional journey. There are some imperfect analogues in traditional, pre-commercial cultures to this pursuit, such as pilgrimages and vision quests, but the repeated ritual of searching in both commerce and research is unique to commercial culture.
Emotional Immersion takes advantage of the repetitive, circular nature of this experience by leading participants in a unique mental journey across space and time, revisiting emotionally poignant moments to reflect upon their meaning.
Your Mind Is Not A Data Processor
I talked with Doug Grant, the founder of Inqui, about how this works.
Doug Grant: I’m Doug Grant. I am the managing director of Inqui Research, and I’ve been doing this for 30 years or so. Usually when I talk about Inqui I tell people that we focus on memory retrieval research where we do in-depth interviews with a very specific method that helps get past all of the, you know, all the unconscious barriers, that helps people to tell their story in kind of an authentic way.
A lot of the people that I speak with, a lot of the insights professionals are used to research methods that are rather shallow and they get, they ask direct questions and get answers but the answers often aren’t the answers they need. They don’t go to any level of depth. People talk in scripts and they talk around what’s really driving them and a lot of times they don’t even really know what’s driving them.
So, we use a memory to bring those memories back to the surface so that we can kind of relive those moments with people and by doing so better understand them and understand their needs and understand what drives them and hopefully understands what, we can serve them a little bit better.
Jonathan Cook: When you’re talking about memory retrieval, it almost sounds like what you might do with the computer where you have active memory and databases of information, and the computer just needs to retrieve the information. So what’s different about the memory retrieval research that you’re doing with Emotional Immersion that makes it anything better than just going and getting a bunch of data from a computer?
Doug Grant: It’s funny. I hadn’t really thought of it in that sense and I mean, I guess in some sense you could actually say that’s a fair comparison, but it doesn’t get at the heart of the issue.
I think when we go back to these memories we’re actually bringing back, you know, we’re bringing back what makes us human, and where our passions lie, and where these are these key moments that influenced us in some way that might have changed us in some way. So, in many ways, when we’re doing this work you know it’s like a little mental time machine of some sort, where you’re going to go back in time, and in terms of the data that we’re presenting it would be really more like playing a movie for someone and bringing a story to life that might not have been seen otherwise.
So, it’s yes, actually we are retrieving data but we’re retrieving and it in the form of stories and we’re reconnecting with the emotions there to bring it to life versus other ways it might be really kind of surface, be shallow where people just don’t bring that richness. It’s kind of like providing someone with, handing over your diary to someone to read versus doing a checkbox on a form. It’s like that kind of level of difference.
The Telling Error
Jonathan Cook: The thing that Doug is getting at here gets back to the difference between search and research, but it goes further than that. Emotional Immersion is about taking the subjective nature of qualitative research much further than traditional qualitative market research methods can go.
Emotional Immersion works by getting people to articulate the subjective passions that drive their stories of consumption forward. What’s essential to understand is that the insights gathered through Emotional Immersion are, as stories, fictions.
Methodologies that preceded Emotional Immersion sought to use the visualization process to gain access to what psychologists called “flashbulb memories” – picture perfect recollections of past events that were imprinted permanently in the mind by intensely emotional experiences. What we’ve learned since then is that flashbulb memories actually contain significant errors. These errors are revisions to the original memory, introduced according to subsequent reinterpretations of the event that’s being revisualized.
The trick to Emotional Immersion is that an accurate memory of past events doesn’t give us the most accurate model of why consumers behave in the ways that they do. That’s because, as research debunking the idea of flashbulb memories has shown, we make decisions in the present based on inaccurate recreations of the past, not on the actual events of the past.
What this means is that even if we were able to collect perfectly accurate information about consumers’ past experiences, through a form of Big Data that was made really, really big, we wouldn’t grasp what was actually motivating consumers’ choices. That’s because the structures of motivation are reshaped in consumers’ minds independently of external reality.
To get the real story, we need to explore in the strange, fluid world of human subjectivity, where errors in memory are at least as informative as the facts of the matter. It’s weird, I know, but that’s what lets you know that it reflects what’s really driving consumer behavior.
Think of the people you know. I mean the ones that you really know, beyond the conventional exterior that they present to the world at large. I’m talking about people like your siblings, or your uncles, your spouse, your own children, or friends you’ve known since childhood.
What do they all have in common? What do you know about them that the world at large does not know? They’re all weird.
Every human being is weird. If a person isn’t weird, that in itself is weird.
This simple characteristic of human beings is what’s being missed by the standard quantitative and qualitative approaches to market research: People are weird, but they don’t show their weirdness to just anyone at any time. They don’t show the weird in surveys. They don’t let it out during focus groups. People definitely don’t display the true weirdness of themselves on their carefully curated Instagram feeds.
We are all so busy trying to appear professional in our business lives, trying to appear normal, even though we know that we’re really not, that we’ve created a bias in business against acknowledging how weird human beings are. What this means, however, is that businesses that use human research methods to understand the strangeness of subjective human experience will have a distinct advantage over their competitors who continue to insist that people are predictably rational.
The fatal flaw with the machine learning models businesses are using to try to predict human behavior is that they’re using data that has had most of the human weirdness filtered out of it. It’s no wonder that data-driven businesses routinely discover that their predictive models miss essential aspects of true human behavior.
The problem isn’t that businesses just need to gather more data. The problem is that understanding the bizarre reality of being human requires something deeper than data. It requires shared experiences through which empathy can be established, and that only happens in special circumstances during which people feel free to interact human-to-human, weirdo-to-weirdo.
It takes unusually dedicated and patient research techniques like genuine ethnography and Emotional Immersion to uncover the lovable freak hiding in each and every one of us. These unorthodox methodologies work because they themselves are strange, and by being strange, they open up doorways to experiences of human strangeness that straight and narrow research methodologies just can’t get at.
What these human research methods have in common is that they work by using the structure of ritual.
The secret structure of ritual in business, operating both for consumers and in corporate life, is the subject of next week’s episode of This Human Business.
Come back and listen next Wednesday, and bring along a friend. After all, building community around bizarre moments is what ritual is really all about.
