Marc’s dissertation investigated an emerging network of nuclear-weapon themed tourist sites, museums and memorials in the Southwestern United States. In the course of his research, he worked alongside and interviewed a diverse group of people including nuclear weapons scientists and researchers, museum administrators, World War II veterans, survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and many so-called nuclear tourists. Interested in how nuclear weapons have progressively been transformed from something fearsome and apocalyptic into something everyday and banal, his work pays particular attention to the ways in which nuclear spectacles fostered discourses, emotional states and forms of spectatorship that are indicative of broader forms of late-modern American subjectivity and citizenship.

Living in New Mexico for two years while conducting his ethnographic research, Marc says the hardest (and best) part of his fieldwork experience was constantly filling up on amazing Tex-Mex food.

“Long before it was cool New Mexican food embraced bacon,” says Marc, who has worked on recent Idea Couture projects on everything from chronic diseases to Millennial dining to yummy dog snacks. “In New Mexico, even the beans have bacon in them. I miss my bacon beans.”

Morgan Gerard advocates the understanding of your own organization’s methodologies, practices and principles as paramount to innovation… in an elevator.

Common mistakes, mindless following of tradition and short-sighted thinking; these are some of the most critical things to avoid if ever you find yourself planning a focus group. That said, look closely at #10 and think about whether you are using the right tool for the job.

Click on the download to view the guide

Brands, businesses, companies, corporations, institutions and other large organizations should take some advice from Socrates: “Know Thyself.”

With so much time, money and effort being spent on locating, socializing and applying new knowledge about customers and consumers to gain competitive advantage, few organizations are investing in the kind of research that could power up equally, if not more, actionable, transformative and ongoing success: insights into themselves.

It’s not that the process is unclear or unknown. With Campbell’s 39 Indicators, Quinn and Rohrbaugh’s Competing Values Framework, Martin and Siehl’s study of corporate subcultures, McKinsey’s organizational health approach, and dozens of professionals working in management, psychology and anthropology, there is no shortage of models or methodologies that can be applied to identify the inner workings of the organization. Some are designed to do little more than identify familiar territories such as hierarchical vs. matrixed, internally focused vs. market focused, individual vs. collaborative, intuitive vs. analytical, rigid vs. flexible and so on. Others seek to locate archetypes, personality types and culture as a way of assessing how the values, attitudes, beliefs, behaviors, assumptions, artifacts and language of an organization shape its performance.

So why, when it comes to currently critical needs like developing a more effective and profitable innovation process or incorporating Design Thinking principles and practices into a business, are so few organizations ready, willing and able to look within? If we turn to the Suda, the answer is clear. The 10th century encyclopedia of Greek Knowledge tells us that Socrates’ famous aphorism is directed primarily towards those “whose boasts exceed what they are.” If this is so, the absence of an appetite for internal insights might be a symptom of corporate mythology.

In the context of a business, a mythology is that set of stories that employees at every level of a company tell themselves about who they are, what they do, why they do it and their place in the world. Sometimes, like a brand positioning statement that has become so successfully entrenched in the market that it is subscribed to by those responsible for producing or maintaining it, they function as an internal version of a Reason To Believe. Here, along with the realities of shareholder earnings, brand ideas about ‘helping people,’ ‘a fun night out’ or ‘making life better’ not only romance customers but also help provide some meaning and purpose for employees. Other times, like the cheerleading that goes on in annual reports, the mythology has evolved into a vocabulary that employees use to describe their own work and the characteristics of the company itself. Here, talk about an organization as ‘innovative,’ ‘responsible,’ ‘creative,’ ‘progressive’ or ‘committed’ functions as a top-down guideline or manifesto to frame organizational purpose and behavior.

Organizations create the mythologies that, in turn, create them. Like a Catch 22, a self-fulfilling prophecy or that guy who so desperately wanted to eat steak that he was willing to be plugged back into The Matrix, the more that a mythology is verbalized, marketed, branded and put out into the world for consumption, the more it is up for constant and continual subscription by anyone who has access to it. There are employees who understand this; behind closed doors, in quiet whispers of dissent or a conspiratorial nudge-nudge wink-wink, some can articulate how what their company says to others or to itself is a boast that exceeds what they are. It sounds somewhat juvenile, but these organizations resist conducting internal insights work because they do not want to get caught in the boast. Others who resist generally do so for one of four other reasons: lack of understanding, anti-intellectualism, loyalism and neurosis.

It’s a big leap – sometimes a scary one – but arriving on the other side clearly positions the jumper in a new realm of possibility, opportunity, clarity and competitive advantage.

If an organization is neurotic, it resists developing insights into its own psyche. No one wants to admit that they’re dysfunctional, destructive or not that good at what they do. Like a junkie entering the final scene in an episode of Intervention, many organizations exhibit a blood-curdling resistance to the thought of facing what they think might turn out to be bad news, criticism or a bursting of the bubble. Here, knowledge of self can be scary.

If an organization is driven by loyalism, it resists developing insights that might be applied to improving the lot of others in life. Because the corporation is first and foremost loyal to itself and its shareholders, most would rather ignore the value and opportunity presented by self-examination and do everything in their power – like lobby Congress to block changes to ingredient labeling in products that might be considered unhealthy for consumers – to maintain a status quo that benefits them alone. Here, knowledge of self could be expensive.

If an organization is anti-intellectual, it resists developing insights that require deep investigation or analysis based in theory. It’s not that such organizations selectively suppress their internal intelligence. It’s just that many of them have, over time, engineered themselves to think, process and produce in very rigid, industrial-age ways. A by-product of the ‘optimize & control’ model used to identify and leverage new opportunities, the gates of practice are so closely guarded that new knowledge, new ideas and new ways of thinking cannot slip by. Here, knowledge of self could be disruptive.

Finally, some organizations resist developing internal insights not because they are neurotic, opposed to meeting real consumer needs, or just plain dumb. They resist them because they don’t quite understand the value, the process and the outcome.

The value proposition of conducting internal insights work is clear. It is perhaps best summed up by Arie de Geus, former Corporate Planning Director at Royal Dutch Shell and author of The Living Company: Habits for Survival in a Turbulent Business Environment and The New Workplace: Transforming the Character and Culture of Our Organizations. According to him, “Your ability to learn faster than your competition is your only sustainable competitive advantage.”

Describing the most enduring companies as those that treat their enterprises as “living work communities” rather than just economic machines, de Geus argues that the capabilities for more effective management, innovation and growth lie in cultivating knowledge to tweak or transform the decision making process. One stream of knowledge, about the outside world of the market, can be cultivated through strategic foresight and long-term scenario planning. The other stream of knowledge, about the inside world of the organization, can be cultivated through self-analysis. Both are valuable, but only one is truly proprietary: knowing thyself.

Among the ways to know thyself, organizational ethnography offers the most qualified lens to examine and analyze this idea of a living work community. By inviting anthropologists, sociologists and/or human factors specialists into the workplace and giving them both interview and observational access to meetings, workshops, work-in-progress and employees, organizations can benefit from uncovering new knowledge. This new knowledge includes: the cultural, emotional and cognitive dimensions of an organization that do not exist in manuals but only tacitly; the relationships between actors within the structure of organization and how they claim, conceive of and enact knowledge; the role that language and practices play in reinforcing behaviors; and, when employees are allowed to speak freely about what’s wrong, what’s right and what they wish would be, the underlying story that the organization wants to, or could, tell itself and its consumers.

The outcome is not a deliverable. A deliverable is a deliverable. The outcome is new knowledge that empowers through actionable insights: the role, impact and communication of organizational mythologies and how they can be reevaluated and re-shaped to allow executives to develop faster and more effective change strategies; opportunities for greater collaboration and cross-functional learning; principles and practices that are not, but should be, aligned with organizational intent; how space, tools and technologies influence creativity and productivity; why and how valuable employees and ideas are being internally stifled; and the introduction of ongoing learning and discovery as part of every day work.

Armed with some advice from the 10th century and some new knowledge from ethnography, organizations can escape their selfimposed, industrial-age exile and join the 21st century. It’s a big leap – sometimes a scary one – but arriving on the other side clearly positions the jumper in a new realm of possibility, opportunity, clarity and competitive advantage.

This is not the eulogy. I am neither friend nor family member of the focus group. My relationship with it is limited to receiving $20 at the age of 12 to taste test a few chocolate bars and reviewing reports so bereft of ‘insights’ it’s no wonder that upwards of 80 percent of products fail within six months of launch. Rather, think of this as yet another call for euthanasia on behalf of the functional side of the entire research family.

Google something like: ‘The problem with focus groups’ and you’ll discover a growing list of strategists, sociologists, anthropologists, human factors people, UX and usability specialists, business people, consultants and others similarly calling for this end. Some would kill the focus group because, in being a part of the green lighting of ideas, it is implicated in that alarmingly high percentage of new product failures. These are the dreaded false positive cases: consumers (supposedly) reporting that they need, love, like and would buy a product. Of course, they and millions of their consumer peers ultimately do not make that purchase.

Others reporting from the frontlines of auto, kitchenware, digital commerce, soft drink, cereal and other design industries would kill the focus group because it has, time and again, reported negatively on an idea only to have a very brave product manager push forward, go to market and score a success with consumers. These are what I’ll call the colonoscopy cases: the likelihood that few men would have responded positively to the suggestion of sticking something up their bum to detect cancer.

The reasons for focus group flubs are many: methodological flaws in session design; inexperienced, leading or crappy moderators; poor or incorrect participant sampling; a badly written or misinterpreted report; reports that never arrive at the upper executive echelons because so much money has already been invested in the concept or its development that research folks fear losing their jobs; and, of course, the big reason – focus groups organizers pay people to do what they cannot do. Focus groups do not measure or convey what people think when they make a purchase, they measure or convey what people think when participating in a focus group. As a result, any combination of group think, peer pressure, the desire to please the moderator or an interest in the $100, free sandwiches and bottomless coffee can lead consumers into the territory of a frequently cited designer’s joke: the camel is a horse conceived by committee.

As someone who practices human-centered research on the anthropology side of the business game, I am particularly sensitive to the fact that what people say versus what people do can be, and usually is, very different. But the colonoscopy cases and false positives that occur because of this are not my main reason for putting a bounty on the head of the focus group. Before any of the group talk begins, the critical flaw of the focus group is location, location, location.

The focus group treats its participants as if they were a combination of school child, lab rat and Hannibal Lecter. In strip malls and office buildings, these ‘subjects’, ‘consumers’ or – worse yet – ‘target consumers’ are sequestered around a table, in front of a discretely located video camera and behind 2-way mirrors. On the other side of that glass, and with take-out menus, comfy chairs, much tastier snacks and a fridge full of drinks, sit the observers – stake-holders, clients and even ‘expert’ analysts who exert a sense ownership or control over the participants for a two-hour or so window that verges on symbolic violence.

Given the $100 (or whatever) incentive, there is an expectation that every one of the participants around the table will strip down to completely bare their opinions, attitudes and ideas for these observers in a setting so voyeuristic it verges on the peep show. Like the stripper who strategically metes out the ‘You’re so special’ eye to front-row clients, who can blame participants for stretching their truths or not even being capable of speaking in the realm of ‘truth’ that these observers seek?

Like the stripper’s stage, the focus group’s location shapes the rules and regulations that govern interaction and performance. Within its walls and behind its mirror, there are disturbing dynamics of social power at play that can only be properly deciphered through the lenses of Bentham and Foucault.

Jeremy Bentham was an 18th century English philosopher, social theorist and jurist who influenced the development of welfarism, utilitarianism, animal rights, gay rights, women’s rights, freedom of expression, and the abolition of slavery and the death penalty. He also introduced the idea of the panopticon, a building designed as a circular structure that allows its masters the power to observe (opticon) all (pan) of the population of an institution without them knowing that they are being watched. For such a seemingly liberal and progressive guy, Bentham’s description of the panopticon as “a new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind” was disturbingly Orwellian.

Michel Foucault certainly seemed to think so. One of the most prolific of 20th century philosophers, Foucault hit the panic button on the panopticon and its process and result – panopticism – is his book, Discipline and Punish. A critic of social insti-=tutions, prison systems, psychiatry and the human sciences, he wrote extensively about how public spaces and technologies were increasingly being designed to monitor and, thus, regulate the behavior of prisoners, school kids, psychiatric patients and ordinary citizens. Perhaps the best example of how panopticism is alive and well: CCTV on every street corner in a big city like London as a tool to ‘see’ and ‘discipline’ the population.

Following Foucault, one could say that the setting and the methodology of the focus group reveal the disciplinary nature of market research and its corporate sponsor. Like the overseers of the prison, the psychiatric ward and the school, the corporation exhibits a pervasive inclination to observe (“Tell us your opinion”) and normalize (“So that we might better control it”) the unpredictable opinions and behaviors of that potentially dangerous ‘other,’ the consumer.

Constructed and armed with technologies of surveillance so that it can function automatically, the ongoing efficiency of the panopticon is based, in part, on the anonymity and decentering of observation. The focus group with its 2-way mirrors achieves this anonymity, allowing clients to excuse themselves from participating out of some noble nod to methodological objectivity that their bodily presence will taint the discussion and research findings. As any anthropologist sensitive to the powers and politics of conducting ethnographic fieldwork will tell you, this view is about as methodologically realistic as Starfleet’s Prime Directive.

But that’s not the real reason for opting out of the discussion. Recognized or not, the market research industry and its corporate sponsors have so fully distanced themselves from consumers as ‘targets’ or ‘segments’ that to engage with them around the table would be to risk the kind of contamination that floats in the air of the prison or the psychiatric hospital. To protect themselves from the dangers of this contamination and invite more stake-holders into the domain of observation, increasing numbers of corporate sponsors have taken to paying for Focus Vision, the online service that describes itself as “the leading global provider of live video trans-mission, analysis and archive solutions for the qualitative market research industry.”

Somehow, according to Focus Vision, this technology increases key stakeholder participation. How this is possible, when their participation has never been a part of the equation, is unclear. What is clear is that people who have the inclination or critical faculties to think about how consumer insights are generated and put to use are increasingly calling for the death of the focus group. Ask the participative design or ethnographic relative if she wants to write the eulogy. I’m just here for the sandwiches.

Bonus Download: 10 Things You Should Not Do in a Focus Group

Don’t blame Kim, Khloe and Kourtney. When it comes to the current state of TV, the Kardashians and others of their narrative ilk are neither the culmination nor the cause. Like Gigolos, Coal, Jail, Cops, Real Housewives, The Ultimate Fighter and Pawn Stars, their second generation of so-called reality TV provides a portal into human experience and alternative identification that no amount of Boston Rob can ever compete with.

Don’t blame the platforms. With high subscriber satisfaction paving the way for intelligent advertising and a migration of the Internet’s targeting, tracking and recommendation functions, PVR is just discovering its potential to generate revenue. And with the likes of Netflix drooling over the $800 million valuation of streaming TV, watching online isn’t the culprit either. Both will put money into the production coffers for years to come.

No, TV isn’t broken because it’s going broke. TV is broken because so much TV sucks. Case in point: Game of Thrones. Don’t know the show? Here’s how HBO describes it:

Based on the bestselling fantasy book series A Song of Ice and Fire by George R.R. Martin (Hugo and Nebula Award-winning author), this sprawling new HBO drama series is set in a grounded fantasy world inhabited by ambitious men and women of both honor and ill-repute, much like our own real world. In the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros, whoever controls the Iron Throne holds unbelievable power, and the series centers on the rise and fall of several families that covet that power at all costs.

Forget metaphor or allegory – the only intrigue in Game of Thrones is how this show got made. A clear, present and dangerous signal that the organization responsible for giving the TV show a new set of legs over the past decade is slipping in a big way, HBO’s latest begs the question: If these guys are slipping, what does that mean for the overall state of serial or episodic small screen fiction?

That HBO is slipping with Game of Thrones is a point of personal assessment and concern rather than an alarm bell sounding in the TV business. Because of its sheer content scale – as well as ideas generated out of creative shops like HBO, Showtime, AMC and some of NBC – the past few years have seen a surge in the quality of ‘the show’.

A recent quick poll of Idea Couture employees reveals the scope of what viewers connect with and some of the reasons for those connections:

- The Killing (“honest characters”)

- Weeds (“subversive, challenges gender stereotypes and makes me think about the concepts of right and wrong”)

-The Walking Dead (“human frailties, political commentary and survival fantasy”)

- Fringe (“I miss X-Files and it’s the closest, next best thing”)

- Law and Order SVU (“a long journey that’s never disappointed”)

- 30 Rock (“fucking hilarious”)

- Love It or List It (“where my fantasies play out come true, and make me feel like I’m living what they’re going through”)

- The Mentalist (“quirky and psychological”)

- America’s Next Top Model (“creative ideas coming up almost every time”)

- Archer (“funny and engaging stories that make cartoon characters look super attractive”)

To that list, I will add a disclosure of my current favorite TV shows: True Blood (for an exploration of our culture’s sexually charged romance with power, life, death, immortality and transformation) and River Monsters (for a fisherman’s ethnographic-like exploration of place, fear, mythology and the quest).

Some viewers have discovered something in Game of Thrones, too. The first two episodes scored a respectable 2.2 million U.S. viewers. That number climbed to 6.8 million via HBO’s OnDemand, and you can probably add another half million viewers who watched on the following Monday nights thanks to Ice Films, EzTV, TV Break, Megavideo and others grey market streaming sites.

And some viewers haven’t, like me. My issue with Game of Thrones is that its story just doesn’t seem relevant. To what extent that applies exclusively to me and others who watched episodes one and two with disappointment or applies to a wider demographic that never watched or will fall off the cliff before Episode 3 will only be revealed with time. I suspect I’m not alone though, and the reason is clear: zeitgeist.

TV, like Hollywood, has an odd relationship with zeitgeist. Sometimes it gets the prevailing mood or trope, sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes it drives that mood or trope, other times it reflects it. While doing one or the other, however, it always feeds on itself, following the Sneeze Rule where, every year or so, we get three law shows, three medical shows, three pawn shows, three junk buyer shows, three forensic science shows, three ghost shows shows and so on. Hopefully, two more Game of Thrones aren’t in development.

What ingredients of the zeitgeist might have inspired HBO to develop a teleplay of Game of Thrones? At first, the only signal I could locate to suggest there was a suitable scale of viewers who couldn’t wait for The Hobbit to provide them with majestic steeds, warrior’s garb and talk of valerian steel and dragon bone was Evony.

Then I thought longer. Lots of people are into combat, deflowering maidens and political maneuvering. But don’t the UFC, the Internet and the Birthers fulfill their desires? Maybe it has something to do with economic or other uncertainties over the future driving a desire among white Americans to live in simpler times? That could be it, given that the fiction of George Martin and others in his genre works as romantic fantasy for white men to reclaim an imagined, Euro-centric mythical past when we were all a little bit Celtic, when wenches didn’t complain about a good ravaging, and when the barbarian hordes who threatened to deflower them were suspiciously brown.

If that’s the inspiration for developing this into a show – and the zeitgeist is there among enough viewers to make it a financial success for HBO – go for it. Write off this and any ensuing criticism as the ramblings of a bitter old man frustrated with the fact that HBO has yet to develop a show around Weaveworld by Clive Barker, The Book of Negroes by Lawrence Hill or Darwin’s Radio by Greg Bear.

If Game of Thrones turns out to be a financial flop, however, consider investing in design thinking. The front end of the design thinking process – used by some of the world’s leading brands and businesses to generate, develop and validate ideas before they come to market – could be just the thing that battling channels like HBO, Showtime and AMC need to gain competitive advantage in this transformational time for TV.

So what happens at this front end?

At Idea Couture, we encourage our clients to conduct a comparative industry scan at the beginning of almost every job. Rather than leveraging ideas from within industries, we believe that more valuable signals for where to go come from outside your business. For example, if a client asks for help developing a cosmetics line we might suggest scanning new and emerging cooking or food cultures to understand the languages and ingredients of health, nourishment and inner beauty. Then, to more deeply assess if and how an idea is needed, wanted or might fulfill some latent, cultural or zeitgeist-y demand is to do exploratory (open to whomever, whatever) or more targeted (with a specific consumer, market or other focus) field research by an anthropologist or sociologist.

The aim is to beat the flu of ‘me too’ innovation where, like TV and Hollywood, brands and businesses continue to suffer from the Sneeze Rule. The result is always more than three ideas. And the process is longer, more detailed and more business oriented towards the middle and end. I’ll save that discussion for a later time. Until then, HBO, Showtime and AMC – please consider, or reconsider, Bear, Barker and/or Hill.

Is J. Jonah Jameson calling the shots on the theater scene, or what? An article in The New York Times reports that the producers of the Broadway musical, Spider Man: Turn Off The Dark, recently held focus groups to figure out why critics had largely panned the show.

I’m no fan of focus groups, but how anyone could expect to learn anything of value by letting participants only get to see Act I or Act II, fill out a questionnaire and then join a 15 minute discussion is beyond me.

What’s even more beyond me is that focus groups are, according to the Times article, not unheard of on Broadway. That’s sad. While I do have a populist streak to my view on culture, the idea that the collective expertise, experience and creativity brought to the stage by writers, producers, directors, actors and all could be tossed aside by the opinion of a sample of a supposed audience makes you wonder what’s next: Christian fundamentalists helping revise the next English translation of the Quran to make it more in-line with U.S. readership? Registered voters getting a first pass at the next Obama speech? Anime fans making over the Sistene Chapel? Movie goers getting to call the shots on the next Hollywood blockbuster?

Oh yeah, they already do that one.

In response to the news, Steve Portigal asks an interesting question on his blog: “Do we admire producers for being user-centered or do we decry them for being desperate?”

This isn’t a case of being user-centered. If the producers of the show were at all user-centered, they would have listened to the Spidey sense of Marvel fans and critics long before beginning production. That would have told them they were way off on the zeitgeist, that Broadway had already crossed the line on cannibalizing pop culture and that swing, not sing, is the leitmotif of Peter Parker.

Creativity by consensus kills the arts. Focus groups are little more than an abdication of responsibility and executional wisdom. The answer, Steve, is desperate. Forget Dr. Octopus – let’s hope the focus group participants pummeled this Spider Man senseless.

In a recent blog post, Grant McCracken suggests it is the job of designers to conduct provocation and innovation through pie.

He points to Project M as the source of this uniquely American metaphor with its Pie + Conversation = Ideas/Ideas + Design = Positive Change equation. As a first step towards ideas that better the world, Project M believes that “pie can bring people together.”

Notwithstanding Grant’s anthropological magicking of the subject matter with references to gift economies and turn takings, much of the gist of his post is on the value of bringing people together to mine their ideas and interactions through indulgent and interuptive moments that occur while eating pie. Of course, he advocates the need for social scientists familiar with Marcel Mauss and Charles Goodwin to manage the “social and cultural mechanics” of what is said and done during those moments.

In referring to gathering input with pie slices as part of the design process, he writes:

Some people who wish to make a social difference don’t really care to hear from the Pie recipient. They have a vision of the new world, and they mean to keep banging away at this vision until the pie recipient embraces it. But if we have learned anything about engaging the world it is that it can’t be about us. Our best efforts must begin with a study of them.  

I wonder about that, especially when it comes to innovation and design that occurs in the business world rather than the philanthropic world. Here, the issue isn’t about facilitating insightful conversations with consumers over tasty pie. For me, that’s never been an issue. The issue is implementation, adoption and the secret filling of innovation: innovation is only innovation if it offers a new or improved way for humans to do things that they already or will do. Otherwise, the big ideas is just another idea. And we all know what ideas are like. Grant addresses this issue when he writes:

Designers are very good at thinking about provocations. After all, they are in the imagination business. They are trained to look at existing systems, spot where stasis lives, and think of ways to make things new. What designers are not so good at, in my humble opinion, is figuring out what happens next, what comes after the provocation. Handing out pie…does have the potential for provocation. But something substantial happens if and only if new arrangements are made visible, thinkable and doable. Pie qua pie will not get this job done.

At Idea Couture, we’ve baked our share of pies. Some of them, like the Aviva Community Fund and the MIT Global Challenge, have had social change as their key ingredient. Thank designers for that, and a guy in Edmonton who provided a spark of an idea. Others that were not about generating ideas to better the world but designing new and innovative product or service revenue streams, have had a few teaspoons of transformation snuck into the recipe.

In almost every project, we begin our efforts with a study of them. Before that, there is always some kind of tacit knowledge about the sponsor of the project: the grapevine, stakeholder interviews, collaboratively refining project plans, and past experience. But maybe that knowledge shouldn’t be so tacit. Maybe it should be more provocative, purposeful and pursued to ensure that the “something substantial” and “new arrangements” actually get out of the oven and on to the table.

Why? Well, when you are a design movement, you are often the only baker. Yes, there can be a conversation with them over pie. But you buy the ingredients. The recipe is yours. You set the temperature on the oven. Maybe you cut the slices and serve them. But when you conduct design work for Fortune 500 companies, the kitchen can be a more complicated place.

Like pies, kitchens are bursting with the rich and tasty flavor of metaphor. One of my favorites is that the kitchen is a stage. As a place to remember, rehearse and perform who we are and who we want to be, every fridge and cupboard is filled with meaning, purpose, intent, function, dysfunction and history – even when they are empty. When that stage is crowded with multiple bakers (with their own ideas, their own ingredients, their own baking methods and their own meanings, purposes, intents, functions, dysfunctions and histories) actually getting pie on the table can be a challenge.

I agree that asking those sitting around the table what kind of pie they want can be a critical component of getting the bakers to do what they should be able to do best to serve the needs of the hungry. Extend the conversation to include smells of pies, memories of pies, places of pies, people of pies, attempts to bake pies. Bring in Human Factors to watch pie in the making. Throw open the doors of the kitchen to let loose a co-creation of pies. But if those hungry consumers are not going to own the pie, name the pie, manufacture the pie, bring the pie to grocery stores and market the pie, then I think it’s equally critical that the entire pie design process begin with a study of us.

I think it takes very little to provoke their ideas. It takes much more provocation to ensure that the bakers deliver something to the table that truly fulfills the pie eaters’ needs and wants. Rather than faulting designers for not being able to follow through on “what happens next,” I think they – along with strategists, anthropologists and others working within and for organizations – need to more effectively provoke their corporate sponsors. For the sake of the anthropologists, it would be nice if that could be done long before we consider provoking consumers for their ideas and interactions.

To begin, two questions that are always in the backs of our minds but, perhaps, need to come more to the front of our tongues:

1. Do Americans really need another pie?

Obesity is a major health crisis in the U.S. (and Canada, too), and some Fortune 500 companies are contributing to the crisis by encouraging consumers to stuff their faces with more pie. The shelves on grocery stores are bursting with them.

When considering innovation and design, everyone in the kitchen needs to ask, Is there a real appetite for this? Do Americans really need another pie? If the answer is no, then why are we even talking about ingredients?

To get to the answer, over pie or not, organizations need to talk about why they continue to create clutter and cultivate calories in an era when many of us want to simplify, even purify our lives. If it’s about feeling the buzz of being part of this innovation thing, maybe the C-suite should consider something like an extension move into the celery business. Designers need to talk about why they’re taking another pie gig. If it’s just for the money, they should remember that the best pie is made with love and what they ultimately pull out of the oven could be a total disaster.

2. Who wants a piece of the pie?

Everyone’s hungry. Me-Too Innovation afflicts enough large organizations it’s no wonder so many of the good and/or new ideas are being brought to market by small companies and start-ups. Examining institutional, processual and cultural barriers to innovation isn’t something most organizations are willing to fund, unless they are actually trying to build an innovation process rather than simply adopt job titles to reflect the dubious existence of one.

Cue the Tina Turner song: we don’t need another knock off. If an organization does engage in the copycat business to keep its sales scale tipping, fine. But at this stage in the game, there’s little to no reason in talking with consumers. Like Grant says, it’s just “banging away.” A more valuable use of conversational time, over a slice or not, would be to talk about some of the causes and symptoms of Me-Too Innovation and, perhaps, address that corporate cultural malaise with an institutional ethnography.

I’d be interested in any other pie-related questions and concerns you might have about designing projects that come to fruition – blueberry, strawberry, rhubarb, whatever.

In a business culture of innovation, there are some things you should never hear:

Seeing is believing. Who feels it knows it. A picture is worth a thousand words.

Humans love idioms, those catchy little phrases that make the world seem so much more simple than it really is. Like GPS systems programmed through tradition and by consensus rather than through position calculation and by engineers, they cling to sophistries that allow them to navigate their own social and cultural complexities with the confidence that, as long as they agree on having correctly arrived at a destination, the route taken was the correct one.

It wasn’t. Like husbands who refuse to accept the fact that they can’t follow maps while driving, idioms can lead us astray.

Because idioms are collocated words that, over time and like bits of garbage in a dump, stick together until they are fused into one sticky mess, we forget just how originally mismatched they might be. How can seeing be believing? Or feeling be knowing? Or the communicative value of words be subject to a higher currency exchange when trading up for a single picture? They aren’t and they can’t, except for the fact that the sheer span of time over which they have been used and the consensus that language groups amass over that time have made them so.

Idioms, like assumptions, can make an ass out of you and me, especially when they are of the type that require a sharing of an epistemological framework rather than an, arguably, more simple linguistic one. In using them, we run the risk of abdicating our critical faculties to become sociological simpletons.

Here, I’m not ignoring language as the progenitor of epistemology. It is; how we talk about the world helps us make and perceive the world we live in. Instead, I want to raise a contrast with the oldest idiom in the English language: kick the bucket. We all know what it means – die – because we are part of the language group that assembled the word ‘kick’ and ‘bucket’ together to express the end of life. Simple or harmless enough, right?

In combining ‘seeing’ and ‘believing’, however, we give birth to a phraseolexeme of more epic proportions, one that requires us to leap from a combination of things that have been put together to give us a quicker, easier and often more amusing or light-hearted way to capture an idea to a combination of actions, emotions and sensory inputs that, when combined, support certain mythologies of the world that help us ignore or, to conjure Roland Bathes, ex-nominate the complexities of the world around us.

Idioms are an anathema to innovation. They fuse organizations to assumptions, cultural mythologies and fossilized ways of seeing and talking about themselves, their business and, more importantly, their consumers.

Case in point: the consumer research game. Virtually every market research department in every major organization is founded on an idiomatic understanding of consumers. Psychographic caricatures of actual humans, like the Active Mom, have become business idioms used to simplify and, more importantly, agree on the polysemy of what are lived preferences, behaviors, opinions, attitudes and needs rather than PowerPoint descriptions such as, “Mary is a successful real estate agent who struggles to balance taking care of her three kids with her love of pilates and desire to eat healthier breakfast bars.”

Big organizations thrive on small ways of seeing and talking to themselves about the world of consumers. It seems necessary, considering the amount of work to be done, the short windows for socializing ideas internally and the efficiency that is required to transform ideas into products or services via multiple stakeholders, partners, agencies and channels. But it can lead to missed opportunities.

Don’t blame the market research department. They’re just following orders. But the oversimplification does seem to begin there. Whether it’s the result of a lack of fascination with human complexity, a lack of training or experience in decoding that complexity, or simply following age-old work processes, traditional research models, methods and modes of communicating findings from them are one of the reasons why internal innovation initiatives fall flat on their face.

So how can market research departments create better innovation opportunities?

RELY ON MORE THAN JUST SEEING TO BELIEVE
Observations are not insights. There is tactical value to observed behaviors, like watching a consumer have difficulty opening your package, but these can only be applied to refinements or extensions of your product or service. Insights are the result of observation, maybe conversation and an ability to frame data both in the context of the consumer’s experience as well as a theory or theme that helps to explain (and act upon) that experience. Given that believing typically needs to the claim of knowing, it is critical that researchers do more than observe to create their insights and find more creative ways to communicate those insights than show stakeholders what they have observed.

STOP JUSTYIFYING KNOWLEDGE BASED ON FEELINGS
Research personnel love to point out that they know they are not the consumer. They are consumers and they do feel it, but that still doesn’t mean that they know it. Good researchers understand that great research is the result of a calculated balance of subjectivity and objectivity. There is no formula to casting off your assumptions in and beyond the field. Instead, understanding and communicating consumer lives requires a phenomenological approach, some clinical analysis and team of sounding-board collaborators – all of which help you get to know and get you beyond what you think you know.

FIND BETTER WAYS TO SHARE YOUR FINDINGS
In this business, we love PowerPoint. But our love of it limits (for those whose presentations suck) and structures (for those who understand how to tell stories in it) our capabilities to communicate our findings and insights. Photos from the field are more subject to this rule than text or charts. A picture might be worth a thousand words to someone who took it and knows the context in which it was taken, but the amount of interpretation that can be read into that picture once it moves beyond the author leaves room for misinterpretation. Photos, like music, are not a universal language. Annotating them with the interpretations, insights, explanations and contexts that give meaning will safeguard them down the line. Incorporating them into scenarios or experience maps will help lock that meaning down even further and provide a more valuable tool for executives, brand managers, designers and other downstream audiences.

AIM BEYOND YOUR TARGET
Organizations that subscribe to developing products or services only for target consumers run the risk of missing social, behavioral or usage adjacencies that might exist elsewhere. Sure, your focus groups tell you (probably because that’s how you recruited participants in the first place) that so-called Active Moms are a fantastic target for breakfast bars. But if you haven’t had a real breakthrough in the breakfast bar category in years or, for that matter, ever, maybe it’s time to start learning elsewhere. Instead of Mary, consider Mike. “Mike likes to watch late-night UFC fights at home in his Tapout t-shirt and underpants while eating Oreos. He thinks breakfast bars are for sissies.” Trust me, you’ll learn something from Mike that you can use to understand him and maybe even apply to Mary.