John Winsor

The Search for Meaning, Step 2 – Don’t Begrudge Complexity

In its essence, truth is complex. You can’t take the complexities and idiosyncrasies of the world and reduce them to black and white numbers and hope to gain any real understanding. I see this happening all the time in the sales department of many companies. Naturally the focus of salespeople is to consistently hit their goals.

In many instances I’ve seen salespeople count orders that aren’t really tied down or withhold excess orders until the next month, just to meet these rigid, predetermined goals. Instead of focusing on the needs of the customers, or even on the reality of what’s sold and what isn’t, the salespeople focus on the numbers that supposedly represent reality. Numbers can be manipulated; real people with complex wants and needs cannot.

The real problem is that quantitative tools for building strategy can’t capture the complexity of human life. They provide a wonderful rear-view mirror view of the world but it’s hard to drive a strategy into the future by looking backwards. Think about the stock market.

We’ve become so enamored with the ups and downs of the markets that we tend to forget the complex reality of what they represent. The best market analysts are not the ones who can merely recite the percentages of growth or decline, but the ones who can use their intuition to correctly interpret the reasons behind these movements.

Even the way most companies view their own structure – as a pyramid – suggests a static, top-down entity. Companies must recognize the complex world in which we live and begin to see their involvement in it in a new way.

Instead of looking at the corporate structure as a pyramid, consider seeing it as a tree: a living, growing tree whose roots are planted deeply in the reality of its environment, that has the sturdy support structure of a thick trunk, an efficient delivery system from the nutrients of the ground to the tips of the leaves and back again, and the ability to populate the ground (or market) with its products, its seeds.

The only way to welcome the role of complexity in your strategy is to rely on more organic strategic methods.

The Search for Meaning (or, why more and more data is not enough), Part 1 of 6

Today, information has leveled the playing field; everyone now has access to the same data. So how do you transform that data into relevant innovation? In such a competitive environment, what can you do to stay ahead of the competition? Once we’ve identified what we do (and do not) know, another crucial step has to happen.

Companies must actively develop these bottom-up tools to understand and transform information into action. To find meaning in what they learn about their customers, they must identify what keeps the community balanced: its center of gravity. By deeply understanding this center of gravity, any company can move more quickly in driving relevant innovation for their customers, and not spend time or energy going in the wrong direction.

As Einstein said: “Any fool can know, the point is to understand.” So many times the act of knowing is based on a quick observation: “I know Joe,” versus a deeper connection “I understand Mary.” But new information can be challenging, both to an individual and to an organization. Companies need to be fearless about finding ways of learning and knowing that allow for deeper understanding of meaning, of context and of the shared experiences of everyone involved in their businesses.

The key is to truly listen to the stories that customers and non-customers alike are telling about their lives, their cultures and how they really feel about the company and its products. It is crucial to understand, on an intuitive level, what the community needs and wants.

Pursuing a bottom-up strategy means seeking enough inspiration and input to find the magic to drive innovation. It’s hard work. It means breaking out of categories, words, and definitions. It means focusing on developing a renewed sense of wonder. It means really getting to know your customers, and suppliers, as people.

In the next two posts I’ll share some steps to think about when developing bottom-up strategic thinking.

Image of the Day

 

Grant McCracken posted this great Gary Larsen comic yesterday. Doing anthrojournalistic work at Radar I got a kick out of it. I always wonder what customers are hiding when we are out in the field talking to them. Thanks for sharing, Grant!

More on Focus Groups

I couldn't agree more with Seth’s thoughts on traditional focus groups. While companies spend over $1 billion on focus groups, some basic flaws plague this methodology.

First, they are conducted in facilities that strip away the context of the customer’s life. How can anyone talk about the experience of driving a car without sitting in a car seat and talking about it in the context of the activity?

Other issues, such as groupthink and bullying among focus group participants, only compound the problems with focus groups. How do you take people out of the context of their lives and spend two hours in a strange environment, trying to cover ten topics with eight people?

This gives each participant only a couple of minutes to react. How can you make significant strategic decisions after only getting to know a person for a couple of minutes? Can you really use this information to design a product or marketing campaign that expresses a deep understanding of your customers’ needs, and creates a space that allows them to co-create?

When many companies concentrate primarily on increasing their sales by using static top-down techniques, with only a secondary hope of developing deeper relationships with their customers, no agency or consultant can benefit them in the long term.

To enact real bottom-up change in the marketplace, companies must incorporate their use of consultants and agencies, as partners, to help shape their brands and products based on their customers’ wants and needs – they must intimately know their customers at the front end of the process, not only as an afterthought. This ongoing engagement allows the essential space for co-creation.

The bottom line is that an intimate relationship with your customers has to begin before you offer them a product, brand, or service. Their insights, needs, and desires should be driving production from the bottom-up at the front end, and sales thereafter.

Anthrojournalism

With all of the talk of Archetypes and market research lately, I thought I’d share some of the things we think about at Radar when we are in the field, working with consumers. First, we use a process called Anthrojournalism.

Anthrojournalism was first used as a term in 1985 to describe the pursuit of journalism that went beyond the traditional journalistic questions of who, what, when, where, and why to examine issues. It sees journalists and cultural anthropologists as workers in related fields, seeking different goals but sharing similar tools.

The focus of anthrojournalism is on the systemic nature of human relations and the cultural fabric in which these relations are imbedded. The goal is to find and report on commonalities in the human experience cross-culturally, giving participants in the process new and deeper insights that drive innovation and inspiration.

The aim of anthro-journalists is to develop deeper understandings of the communities they report about; they are willing and able to investigate and report on human events and issues in a comparative, holistic, and culturally sensitive manner.

Anthrojournalism draws on anthropology's understanding of culture, and its personal, face-to-face approach to data through participant observation and ethnographic methods; it borrows journalism’s communicative skills and its ability to synthesize information, its understanding of the cultural context of issues, and its methods of allowing events to be widely shared.

The overall goal is to use a tool that seeks context and perspective in understanding human interactions – with not only each other but with their cultures, including the products that they use.

In his book, The Turning Point: Science, Society, and the Rising Culture (1982), physical anthropologist Fritjof Capra suggests that

“...in the future, journalists will change their thinking from fragmentary to holistic modes and develop a new professional ethic based on sociological and ecological awareness. Instead of concentrating on sensational presentations of aberrant, violent, and destructive happenings, reporters and editors will have to analyze the complex social and cultural patterns that form the context of such events, as well as reporting the quiet, constructive and integrative activities going on in our culture.”

Companies can learn to use these anthrojournalistic tools to help them gain a deeper perspective in the context of the community when gathering intelligence to inform a more bottom-up strategy.

To better understand how to use anthrojournalistic tools, here are some principles to remember:

Being Aware of Context – Unless you understand the context, you can’t get the meaning. Only after spending time deal of time with a person, through several interactions over several days in the context of their world, can you begin to understand them.

Insisting on Eyewitness Perspectives – You have to go there, be where it’s happening, when it’s happening. You have to observe and ask questions until you understand the meaning from the point of view of those involved. Only when you get out on the street and spend time with someone do you really get to know them. It begins with honoring people and spending time with them in the context of their lives, which then helps foster the intuition that drives innovation.

Holism – Before focusing in on the details you need to look at the big picture – the whole experience within which a particular behavior makes sense. When you are developing a bottom-up marketing or product innovation strategy you have to be able to think about the lives of your customers in whole; and not just from your perspective.

Dynamism – You must seek to understand a living, evolving process – not a static snapshot. People do not lead simple lives. Likewise, their relationships with brands and products are dynamic, not static. Depending on who is asking the questions and what questions are being asked, the answers can vary widely. A bottom-up strategy understands the dynamism of the world and accepts the reality that there is more than one best way.

Descriptiveness – God is in the details: the story and its meaning are embedded in the concrete, particular details of what people actually do and say. This is “ecological validity” – keeping the level of abstraction low enough to keep the story honest. Sometimes the story is obvious, but it must be described in the context of the organization listening in order to be understood.

Rigorous Subjectivity – Anthropologists and journalists are only human. It is, therefore, their responsibility to know their own biases well enough to be able to keep them from interfering with telling the story in a fair and accurate way. We all bring our own lens to the work. This lens includes our beliefs, expectations, values, history and unwritten rules – as well as our ignorance, at times. It’s impossible to get rid of our lens. What’s more important is to recognize what we bring to the table and be able to put that aside and be as open and simple as possible.

Appropriate Interpretation – While all human interactions involve interpretation, companies have become so sophisticated in their strategic research that they can filter and interpret too much. The anthrojournalist’s job is to give an audience enough direct inspiration to allow them to come to their own conclusions and point of view. Because of the context, much of the most important inspiration is ignored simply because it comes out of the consumer’s mouth first or because we’ve heard it before, telling each other “They always say that.” Many listeners are so educated and so busy looking for the golden nugget that lies at the center of an interaction with a customer that they lose sight of what’s going on right in front of them – especially when sitting behind a one-way mirror in a focus group facility.

Grant Replies!

Grant McCracken wrote a wonderful post in reply to my request. I especially like this insight:

"It's not about us. The Fast Company records Rapaille's eagerness to claim the success of the PT Cruiser has his own. "I discover the code, and--bingo!--the car sells like crazy."  The article also notes the unhappiness of Chrysler employees when they hear of this.  Good research delivers new insight but this insight will come from the corporation as much as it does the researcher. The research is working collaboratively with the consumer and the client."

Good stuff, Grant!

Cracking the Culture

Danielle Stacks wrote a fascinating article Fast Company, entitled Crack This Code, as she followed G. Clotaire Rapaille through India on a quest to crack the Indian cultural code.

Rapaille, well known for his flamboyant style, uses psychoanalytical theories to tap a culture’s "collective unconscious” by running three-hour psychotherapy sessions with large groups of participants. These sessions are famous for having people lie on the floor recounting childhood memories.

While Rapaille speaks about the ineffectiveness of the typical focus group (I agree), I’m not sure I see the subtle difference between his sessions and these groups. One of the keys to understanding any culture is to understand the context of people’s actions and words. It’s hard to understand the context of a culture while sitting in a hotel room.

Interestingly, academics seem to have a big problem with Rapaille’s work. In the FC article Richard A. Shweder, a University of Chicago professor of cultural anthropology and psychology, calls Rapaille's tools the "the soft porn of irrationalism."

I wonder what Grant McCracken thinks?

Deep Inside the Brain

Lately, I've been interested in how new discoveries in neurology and psychology might shift our understanding of how consumers connect with products and brands and have written about it here and here.

A recent article from Seed Magazine entitled, The Ad-Busting Brain, discusses a new study that explores the neural response to brand personalities and is certainly another piece of the new paradigm.

Is a Smile Just a Smile?

I’ve been re-reading Anontio Damasio’s wonderful book, Descarte’s Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain, when I came across an insightful story about context. Damasio tells the story of the smile. It seems the way you smile in a “staged” situation, like standing in front of a camera when the photographer says “cheese,” activates one section of the brain while a smile created by a genuine experience turns on different section of the brain.

This example made me think about the lack of context that so much of market research contains. We’ve all heard the horror stories of focus groups. Damasio’s smile story can perhaps explain why they don’t work as well as other “in-context” methods, such as ethnogrophy. The problem is that “in-context” methods take more time. In my mind, the time is worth it when you’re relying on the research to make important strategic decisions.

So many times I see people wanting to try and enter a new market and desperetely want to understand a culture, like surfing, wanting to immediately jump into exploring the way a product or marketing campaign might work or be perceived.

It’s great to be excited about going out and getting the story, but without going slowly enough to understand the cultural context, things can go wrong very quickly. One of my favorite stories of such a case is one that I expereinced on the beach in Mexico.

I was getting out of the water after my morning surf session. That morning I was surfing with a friend who had been in the film industry for a long time. It was still early and the light was beautiful. We looked around and saw a photo shoot in progress. It seemed intriguing that such a thing was happening in our small fishing village.

There was a large group of folks including a couple of photographers, a make-up artist, an art director, the director, some assistants and several models. As we walked over and inquired what the photo shoot was for, a tattooed woman looked at us with disdain and said it was for the Buckle, a teen retailer in the U.S. for an instant it felt like we were in L.A.

It was obvious that the Buckle’s creative team decided to be sure their photos were authentic – so they jetted the team off to Mexico to enjoy a little of this authenticity. As we watched, the photographer directed a male model jumping around with a surfboard in his hand. The photographer was yelling out “Rub the surfboard! Rub the surfboard!”

During the action, my buddy said, “Watch this.” He quickly strolled over right behind the producer and said very quietly, “The surfboard’s upside down.” All of a sudden the producer started yelling, “Stop! Stop! The surfboard is upside down!” which sent everyone scrambling.

The creative team for the Buckle thought that they could prove an understanding of the culture by spending a ton of money on a Mexican surf experience. The problem was that the team didn’t know anything about surfing. Obviously they thought surfing was cool, so it became the theme for that year’s catalog. But they could have been way more authentic by really understanding the cultural context of surfing, driving to one of the amazing beaches in Southern California and hiring real surfers as models.

They would have saved Buckle a lot of money in the process – but missed a nice Mexican vacation on the client’s dime.

Appreciating the context is all about understanding what activates the authentic smile that Damasio talks about. There is no way to really understand it besides doing the hard and in-context research upfront.

Myopia

Recently I got a speeding ticket on my weekly trip to the Denver International Airport. In court, I agreed to reduce my points by going to defensive driving school all day, one recent Saturday.

When I entered the class it was apparent very quickly that I suffer from a serious case of Myopia, living and working in Boulder, writing books and blogging. People in the class had some pretty rugged stories about how they got there.

It was a good reminder that instead of going around the world to learn something new I can learn a lot by changing the context of my every day existence. In turn, gaining different experiences that can help me do my work in a richer way.

Do you have Myopia, as well?