But this phrase has a dark side. First of all, reality is not exclusive to business thinking. Most things, with the exception of comic books or mythology, or the like, deal with the ‘real world.’ And even these have some morsel of truth. So to say something deals with the ‘real world’ more than something else is ridiculous. The most troubling feature of this phrase is that it is a marker for our tendency to dismiss something because we cannot see how it applies to our own experience. We want things to remain in the ‘real world’ by which we mean immediately applicable to our needs and desires.

The problem here lies in the fact that the requirement to keep things in ‘the real world’ is actually more than it seems. It is not simply an expression of a desire to keep things grounded. It is actually code for a wide range of assumptions, philosophical positions, and antagonisms. This means the ‘real world’ is a way to assert a particular perspective on the world we live in—and our experience of it—which denies the validity of other ways of looking at the world. As such, the position it stands for is essentially a tyrannical epistemology. Additionally, instead of being a non-theoretical perspective, the phrase ‘the real world’ is actually evidence of theorizing without acknowledging what one is doing. It is a self-defeating and horribly limiting position that does more damage than good.

The worst damage done is the casual dismissal of kinds of thinking, arguments, or knowledge. The phrase the ‘real world’ quietly assumes abstract, complex, or theoretical knowledge is suspect or somehow does not apply to our lives. Those who wield it in this way often do so in reaction to an argument they feel is too philosophical or abstract. In these circumstances its applicability is actually what is in question. Often the cause of this problem is actually a feature of not seeing the very real connections between the argument as stated and the immediate problem at hand. The use of the phrase ‘the real world,’ in these circumstances is actually part of a denial of the argument’s validity on the basis of its abstract presentation. Dismissing an abstract argument, which when done well is most certainly addressing things in the ‘real world,’ is a sure-fire way to end in failure. We cannot be afraid to theorize or to talk about reality at a higher level of complexity if we want to solve hugely complex problems.

This phrase shows up in agency work a lot—mostly because there is always a time crunch and because clients will always approach the consultant to solve a very particular problem. But it is also true that some clients present problems that can only be solved with more abstracted thinking. Occasionally they are dismayed at the abstractness of the answers and ask for ‘real world’ examples. This is natural and can usually be solved through repackaging the insights or deeper emersion in the details of the study. What comes out of these conversations are several important points that will help everyone avoid the problems I outlined above and begin to make peace with abstract or theoretical thinking in a business environment.

/1 See everything, all things, and ideas, as existing together and interconnected. See a piece of research as making a specific argument about a particular part of this whole. Then realize not all arguments are talking about experience or things as they are in the same way. Different arguments exist at different levels, or strata.

/2 Learn to see the connections between strata and the implications of one circumstance on another. This will help ‘connect the dots.’ This is essentially what ideas agencies do for a living.

/3 Delegate understanding and knowledge. Sometimes one is simply not ready to see how something fits together. When that happens one must be comfortable with allowing others to do the understanding and helping them act on it.

There is much more that can be said about the intellectual tyranny of a concept like the ‘real world,’ but that is better left for another time. Suffice it to say, avoiding the damaging assumptions embedded in an idea like ‘the real world’ is as easy as being comfortable dealing with problems at several levels of complexity at once. One does not need to avoid theory when it is as simple as practicing seeing how it applies to many circumstances, including the one at hand. Finally, when you are tempted to locate something in the ‘real world’ ask yourself what you really want. You might find you simply want to see the connections or have something rephrased. Don’t cut out the good ideas simply because the direct application isn’t immediately apparent. Don’t assume something is not worth the time just because it is expressed in abstraction.

They were not only physically out of control, but mentally liberated from expectations and presumptions. For them there’s absolutely no reason why a frying pan shouldn’t talk about its cooking experiences or why you can’t hold your computer mouse the same way you hold your mobile phone. Their minds are not conditioned like ours and that’s what makes them a genuine source of innovation.

We as adults are generally limited to our past experiences. Any ‘new’ thinking or idea we initiate starts with a set of assumptions that will result in marginal revisions to what we’ve encountered before. Our minds are junkyards of historical observations. Those of us skilled or knowledgeable in a field will certainly be ahead of the game when it comes to decision making or when concepts need to evolve into feasible product. But if you’re a innovation strategist or a designer ideating the future of interaction design, you need to stop thinking about where apple is taking us and instead hang out with a 3 year old.

Seriously! Leave a bunch of 3 year olds with toys and a few colored markers. Do a simple experiment, like having a transparent sheet of plastic in the middle of the room where they can draw on and  play with each other from both sides of the invisible border.

You’ll be surprised!

The opportunity to become an “Innovation Strategist” catches people’s attention.

Since our initial posting for the role in Toronto, we’ve received over 120 resumes from dynamic, brilliant young individuals all interested in joining the Idea Couture team. From the outside looking in, innovation strategy sounds incredibly sexy (and it certainly looks good on a business card). But if you ask a typical applicant what exactly they think an innovation strategist does, what usually follows is blank stares, buzz words, or my favorite, “They strategize innovation”.

None of those are good answers.

There’s nothing worse than expecting one thing and getting another. In preparing to take on two new strategists in the next few weeks, I couldn’t help but reflect on what is becoming an industry title with no common definition. So I figured the least I could do is take a stab at some common tasks to help people know what they are getting in to, what they should consider learning to do, and where their responsibilities should lie.

So here are a few of the tasks, activities, and responsibilities of your typical innovation strategist.

Project Design
Innovation strategist as the planner

• Work with the client to articulate project outcomes
• Help design the structure of what innovation projects look like
• Set up the project’s research activities, and collaborate to select methods
• Build a multidisciplinary team based on available resources

Business Strategy

Innovation strategist as the box builder

• Interview clients to better understand what problems the team is trying to solve
• Help clients / the team state the project vision
• Help the project frame the problems based on client input
• Define what project success criteria looks like
• Draw from existing models or develop new frameworks to direct the solution

Design Research

Innovation strategist as design researcher

• Design and / or participate and / or facilitate research (depending on skills)
• Provide a business or user centered flaw to the other design researchers (depending on core competencies)
• Help researchers synthesize the findings into insights
• Frame the insights of user research insights through deliverables (personas, systems diagrams, customer journey maps, mental models, touchpoint analysis, or something else cool that I don’t even know exists yet.)

Workshop

Innovation strategist as a facilitator

Idea Development & Evaluation

Innovation strategist as an architect

• Help come up with killer ideas
• Help prototype, evaluate and test those ideas
• Make sure the final solution is in line with project briefings or has a damn good reason to break the brief
• Develop prioritization frameworks to evaluate which ideas are strongest
• Evaluate costs and benefits

Design Development

Innovation strategist as a sherpa

While innovation strategists are the center of my universe, being surrounded by a strong team is what makes a project work. An innovation strategist is nothing without the help of true and trained design researchers, skilled industrial and visual designers, project managers, futurists, human factors specialists, content strategists, and support.

But needless to say, when people ask, “What does an average day look like?”, there is no short answer. Being an innovation strategist is definitely a full time job, but even more, it’s a lifestyle decision. Innovation strategists are always working, because the world is where they learn, and their curiosity is not 9-5.

So what would you add? And are you interested in applying? We’re looking in Toronto and New York.

UPDATE: Add San Francisco to the mix. In short, if you think you meed the description, we want to meet you!

Needless to say, the process of preparing and presenting to the internal IC team had me pretty primed to talk about what Design Thinking is and what it means in the context of Idea Couture, business, and innovation. So I was pretty happy when I went on Quora last night and came across this great question:

Part of the challenge in answering that question is that there is no single definition of Design Thinking. From what I’ve seen and what I practice, there are four points of view on what Design Thinking really is. Each have a different connection to innovation.

1. Design thinking is a person is a person who is capable of forming ideas through abductive reasoning. Abductive reasoning implies knowing throughout intuition (no formal proof), which is effectively a new thought. Innovation through new ways of thinking.
2. Design thinking is a human centered way of viewing the world. By trying to solve problems through gaining insights around people’s needs, you’re creating new perspectives which lead to new opportunities for innovation. Innovation through new perspectives.
3. Design thinking is a series of methods allow designers better communicate ideas. Completely new concepts are difficult for most people to grasp, so using a designer’s lens on communications improves understanding. The communication of innovation.
4. Design thinking is a series of steps to guide the innovation process. It’s the meta name given to the activities involved in creating a new idea. Design thinking is innovation.

So what do you think? Agree? Disagree? Just tired of hearing the term “Design Thinking”? Let me know.

Also, here’s a copy of the internal presentation if you’re interested.

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.

I hate the word “consumer.” But I’m not sure what to do with it.

It drives me crazy when clients talk about “the consumer” like they’re some kind of other species out there foraging for nuts and berries in Wal-Mart, Rite Aid or the shopping malls of America. If only they could find the perfect combination of nuts and berries in their business offering they’d be able to lure “the consumer” to their section of the aisle.

It saddens me when clients profess an understanding of this other species based on some “quant-qual” they’ve done. Tossing around methodological pats-on-the-back like this bolsters their confidence that systems of knowing “the consumer” are (here comes another bad word) robust.

And it makes me scratch my head when members of the C-suite worry aloud that they’ve become too distanced from “the consumer” and that’s it’s time to roll up their sleeves, get on to the street and meet this other species.

Maybe it’s the cultural anthropologist in me. Anthropology long suffered from a similar disconnect from the humans it wondered and wrote about. It has wrestled with various ways of qualifying or quantifying the behavior of those humans. And one of the foundations of its ethnographic process is a meet and greet with the natives in the places and spaces where they live, breathe and experience the world.

The epistemological angst is much the same. The critical difference is that the scholars have acknowledged their obstacles, shortcomings, histories and such while the business world has not. One obvious reason for this is that most of the people populating the cubicles of the world’s big corporations are interested only in, capable of or too busy to digest little more than the PowerPoint version of the social universe. Another, related to this, is that many in the business world live by methodology alone. Theory, and a discussion of it, is – as they say – out of scope.

As a result, most of the big business world has never reaped the rewards of post-modern or post-structuralist thought – at least not on the level of public discourse. Certainly, strategists, consumer insights folks and others come home from a busy day at work, have a beer and reflect on their day, tasks, projects, challenges and such. But in the face of corporate silos, jockeying for jobs and the many tactical barriers to real innovation at any level, questioning the way organizations think, act and talk is bitching-based fodder for the water cooler rather than something that is perceived as possible to change. And so we have “the consumer,” the business world’s equivalent to anthropology’s primitive Other.

Where anthropology’s Other was exoticized as sexual, violent, magical, natural, primitive and savage, the business world’s Other is quite mundane. Consumers, or so I hear, aren’t that smart. They’re simple, not very sophisticated. They have fixed daily behaviors and preferences that can be tracked with surveys. They’re easily led to new, or refashioned old, nuts and berries with a spin or words, colors, stories or loyalty programs that will entrance their lesser minds. And they live in odd little communities called personae or segments.

If it sounds like we’re still living in the era of Mad Men, maybe a little Sapir-Whorf hypothesis can lead us into the present. For those living La Vida PowerPoint, the short version: how we talk about things influences the way we see those things and the world in general. Colors, numbers, spaces, people, relationships and the other ingredients of our world all appear to us to be what they are as fact based, in part, on the ways that we name and talk about them.

The application should be relatively clear. In always referring to the people who buy your products and services as “consumers,” you (the client) and you (the agency guy) have erected a first obstacle in your quest to understand and leverage your insights for competitive advantage. You have constructed a linguistic framing of “the consumer” as the Other in which they are not you and you are not them.

Put aside, for the moment, the fact that, unless you get your groceries and gas for free (and even then we’re in questionable territory because there’s the issue of where you choose to redeem your coupons), you, too, are a consumer. Then consider the following: this linguistic framing of “the consumer” as Other is an infection that courses through the blood of the C-suite, Strategy, Insights, Design and other organizational departments. It paralyzes action. It distorts vision. It leads to lethargy. And, in the worst of cases, it drives businesses to abdicate its role in work processes to the opinions, attitudes and ideas of this “consumer.”

How? It reinforces other barriers to knowing that previously existed (before the birth of the Consumer Insights department) between social categories of humans: if you live in New York City, the people living in Idaho might as well be in China; if you’re rich, the poor are another world; if you’re a man, women are a mystery; if you’re straight, the gays have all this disposable income.

Enter segmentation, psychographics and the persona. Engaging with the Other in tidy groups based on age, gender, race, economic status, education, geography, attitude, behavior and other, more brand or product related distinctions certainly makes some feel like as if they are getting closer to a more granular version of the consumer. Maybe they are. Maybe they aren’t.

Is the Active Mom, the Early Adopter or the Social Butterfly really a more accurate drilling down to the core of the “consumer”? Or are those terms just another way to make us feel like we’ve cracked the behavioral code of the species, another organization mythology we subscribe to in order to make our jobs more simple and efficient?

Some bullet points I know many who’ve made it this far wish had been put up front:

• Refer to “consumers” as “people (who buy our stuff or who might buy our stuff)” and you’ll be a hop, skip and jump closer to cultivating stronger insights

• Chill out the fantasy that methodology will answer your questions. It won’t.

• Ask yourself if you’ve even asked yourself the right questions.

• Stop pretending to be so objective. You’re not. It’s an illusion.

• Be more subjective. Ease up on the boundaries between “you” and “them.”

• Cast a wide net. Segmentation has its value, but so do warm bodies like yours.

• Explore first, validate much later. You’ll be surprised at what a little wondering can do.

• Co-creation is not asking the “consumer” what she wants. That’s a focus group.

It requires that we put ourselves on the same streets of the people we would like to offer new services or products to.  We cannot simply sit behind a desk and target potential consumers with ideas which are created in a vacuum.

Corporations are more comfortable when they are able to absorb information that is presented in un-ambiguous volumes of information such as with infographics, data plots, matrix charts and/or clear examples that illustrate the archetypical consumers mated to a given technology.  See Ford’s Antonella, a Computer Generated personas used in development.

However here is where the problem arises, because most companies are too focused on their day-to-day production to really see any greater potential for other adjacent services, similar markets or entirely new opportunities thus limiting their capability to even begin thinking about taking a ‘calculated risk’.  Identifying and developing an entirely new product, experience or service requires a Re-Think, Re-imagining and Reset of business as usual.

Most companies already know who they want to target and what they are willing to spend, but what they don’t know and don’t have, are all the cultural points of reference, the interviews, the video-diaries,  the deep insights that come from knowing and understanding their ‘target market’ intimately.  Companies can literally get stuck when it comes to identifying new social classes that are yet to exist 10 years (even 15 years +) from now into the future.  Experimenting with branding techniques and products that aren’t really connected or based with anything that is current quickly loses relevance, authenticity and meaning.   Internal Design studies and Innovation work really start to break-down because no one actually knows who these future consumers really are.  Again, this is not an Engineering issue, it is an Anthropology study, also a Futurist’ scenario and a Qualitative research issue.

This is why a consultancy such as Idea Couture make sense for companies who wish to understand, utilize and implement foresight strategy that take responsibility for identifying, examining and creating innovative solutions for future target markets.

This issue is often referred to as a ‘wicked problem’, which is to say that the solutions are not obvious, nor are they transparent or easily recognizable upon initial inspection. The real answers are not known only until after someone has solved it.

Furthermore, if any attempt is made to solve a particular issue as an individual part of a wicked-problem, then it could potentially do more harm than good.  To ignore the over-lapping of adjoining issues for products and services is like to going into a field of land mines blind-folded.  You need innovation that that allow you to navigate the most effective  way through using the right tools and taking the right steps.

The opportunities to solve these issues cohesively, requires groups of different and complimentary minds (that do not have a conflict of interest in developing solutions) to work together as a team to create points of cultural reference, identify weak signals, map out scenarios and if need be engage even more raw ideas from un-biased participants.  This synergy-approach eludes most corporations primarily because each node of expertise comes from completely different and diverse set of backgrounds, which is normally not associated with human resources that are  available within an established organization.  What ultimately facilitates desired outcomes for Idea Couture clients is essentially our diversity and key competencies within our respective areas of expertise.

We’ve been running ethnographic projects at Idea Couture since go. Almost three years ago, when I first joined what was then a five-person team on the fifth floor of our building, I was jettisoned into the field on a CPG project designed to examine the role of the kitchen in people’s lives. Since then – dozens of hires and a second floor later – I’ve led the research side of business challenges in banking, insurance, health, investing, mobile phones, travel, alcohol, retail, education and more.

From the front-end of boardroom to pitches clients to the back-end (TW) of the research findings & recommendations presentations and Noodleplay workshops, one of the key learnings I’ve taken away is how valuable good research can be to addressing and solving these challenges once they are put into the shared hands of designers, experience architects, strategists and technologists. And I’m not just talking about good ethnographic research but also good usability, human factors, social psychology, quantitative and design research. Putting a different lens on an issue or, even better, multiple lenses from different disciplines, is the only way to conduct research for innovation.

But how do you – the client – know when you’re paying for a good quality lens? With every consultancy and its uncle parading their ethnographic method and its goofy, branded name online and in your boardroom, quality control is critical to your budget, your project, even your reputation. Dodgy ethnography can be a waste of time, money and resources. It can lead you astray with weak insights or no insights. And it can deliver little or no more than what you’d get from traditional market research.

So how do you know when you’re getting the good goods? In researching firms, tapping colleagues working in other organizations for recommendations or asking questions during the first meet & greet, these give tips should get you started on separating what Steve Martin in The Jerk referred to as the difference between shit and shine-ola.

DISCIPLINE, DISCIPLINE, DISCIPLINE
Ethnographic research emerged from cultural anthropology circa 100 years ago. Anthropologists have done it, taught it, built it up, torn it down, debated it, evolved it, revised it, anguished over it and written about it more than anyone. Since then, sociology, social psychology, education, nursing, human computer interaction and other disciplines have adopted and adapted it to enrich their encounter with and understanding of humans.

When hiring a firm to conduct ethnographic research, ask about discipline. What were the people who are going to conduct the research trained in? What school of thought are they coming from? How will they draw on their discipline’s method and theory to make their work and findings more than just same-old, same-old market research?

DEGREES OF SEPARATION
One of the simpler ways to discuss discipline is to get your potential research providers to divulge their degrees. While there are a number of institutions that include ethnographic methods as part of programs in design research, there are few, if any, people with undergraduate degrees out there who have been trained in and conducted rigorous ethnographic fieldwork. The methods, theories, politics and pains of conducting ethnography – and there are many – aren’t even taught to undergrads in most university programs.

When hiring a firm to conduct ethnographic research, ask about the qualifications of the people who will be going into the field. A Masters or Doctoral degree in one of the social sciences, like anthropology, can be a first sign of the researcher’s qualifications and experience as well as an indication of the kind of rigor and/or insights you might be paying for. Then again, it might not. As someone recently pointed out to me, there are a lot of PhDs who couldn’t consult their way out of a wet paper bag in the business world.

DIFFERENT QUESTIONS, ODD QUESTIONS
Anthropologists are fascinated by what inspires, motivates, structures, influences and inhibits people and social systems. They want to understand performances, rituals, mythologies, genders, codes, interactions, spaces, places, systems and more. Believe it or not, in the context of your new soda, your frozen food, your car insurance or your consumer segmentation algorithm, these areas of inquiry can be critical to your business and its future growth. Exploring big, human, cultural, social, enduring and evolving issues is key to innovation. Otherwise, you’re just doing market research.
When hiring a firm to conduct ethnographic research, consider the topics its team wants to explore and the questions it wants to ask. If they plan to ask consumers what they think of a test flavor, chances are you’ve been bilked. That’s for focus groups, not the field. Some of the issues and questions you will be familiar with, but there should be an original or unfamiliar spin on them. Some you might be unfamiliar with, but the ethnographer should be able to explain why investigating them are critical. And some might seem just plain strange. That’s okay. Strange is good. It creates room to explore and, sometimes, discover valuable surprises.

FIELD FLEXIBILITY
Business anthropologists know when they’re beat: sometimes a client doesn’t have the budget or time to go into the field, sometimes the field is inaccessible because the subject is too fleeting, private or otherwise unobservable to justify designing an ethnographic project around it. And so we have to find another way to deliver the “actionable” insights every client needs. Enter the anti-focus group. Idea Couture offers a variety of less on-the-fly research approaches. Depending on the method, the setting or the purpose, we call them Customer Context Labs or Co-Creation Sessions. Part participative design (getting consumers to join in on the ideation process for nuggets of inspiration), part informal chat sessions (getting consumers to open up about their lives and the topic at hand), a room or a skate park or a bar or a restaurant or a mechanic’s garage becomes the setting for gathering the raw materials of innovation.

When hiring a firm to conduct ethnographic research, understand and appreciate what they’re saying when they tell you they can’t. Sometimes there’s a better way. I’m constantly astounded by the quality of insights and information that I get every time I sit down with groups of six boomers, Millennials, tweens and so on. Sometimes I even break those market research rules on ‘group think’ by inviting a group of friends to join me. Often, I combine this approach with more traditional ethnographic fieldwork. Either way, if designed and conducted properly, sessions like these can be invaluable to answering critical business challenges. The one caveat to guaranteeing more successful sessions is the Bob Marley approach: who feels it, knows it. Clients who join the ethnographer in these sessions will be better able to understand, appreciate, own and socialize the findings in their organization.

TEAMWORK
The classical model of ethnography is romantic: lone anthropologist struggles to get funding to traipse into the wild, arrives in the wild, embeds herself in the lives of her informants, does her work, and madly scribbles notes between bouts of dysentery that will one day get published as a monograph. The business model of good ethnographic research is anything but solo – and there’s not that much dysentery. One anthropologist can conduct the fieldwork, but I prefer bringing designers, experience architects and strategists into the field when it’s feasible and fiscally sound. That way, when it comes to synthesizing, presenting and socializing findings and recommendations, the whole spectrum of a client’s needs are accounted for. 


When hiring a firm to conduct ethnographic research, look for the team. Bad ethnographic work is bad ethnographic work. You paid for it. It’s too late. But reams of paper deliverables have been delivered to clients as a result of solid ethnographic research that are gathering dust under all those Mintel reports simply because they were written up by someone who didn’t appreciate the scope of the business challenge, didn’t have the support to bring their work to life in tangible product, service or platform ideas, or didn’t have the management consultancy types to successfully socialize work with the C-suite.

That socializing – of the work, the insights, the recommendations, the ways forward – is critical to the people who conduct ethnography. We don’t do this just for the fun, the money, the endless nights in hotels away from our families, the thrill of understanding humans or the glasses of Pinot Noir with dinner before clubbing with Millennials into the wee hours of the morning. We do it because we want to make businesses better, products more powerful, services more smooth and experiences richer than ever before. Do you?

Here are some tips and tricks that I learned along the way:

1.    Talk to Locals (Use the internet as a reference only)
Who cares where you’re from or what you don’t know− talk to local people, they know best. I talked to strangers on the streets, clerks at convenient stores, homeless people, drunk people at bars, and figured out what’s real and what’s a tourist trap. Use the internet as a reference only!
We also figured out that since Austin is a BBQ city and famous for their meat, the air tends to smell like meat as well.  We quickly assumed from the restaurants we ate at and the research we did, that Texas is not a vegan/healthy food kind of city. However, after talking to locals, we were quite surprised to hear that Austin is one of the most health conscious and vegan friendly cities in Texas. Case-in-point, you’re first assumptions are not always right.

2.    Be Adventurous, Try New Places
If you have the opportunity to either go to a local coffee bar or a Starbucks type chain, go local− chances are the Starbucks will be exactly the same in any and every city. You could learn a lot about the culture and the people in a city by visiting places that are quaint, or a ‘hole in the wall’ type place. If you think you see an interesting or unique place, peak your head in; there is nothing to be shy or nervous about. Plus, you’ll be leaving in a few days anyway; you don’t want to have any regrets.

3.    Blend In, Stand Out
When you are in a new city, go with the flow, do what people do, eat what people eat, and wear what people wear. However, be yourself and don’t be afraid to let people know that you are not from the city. Ask questions, remember details, and listen− people love talking about themselves and love telling their stories.

4.    Walk Everywhere
Walking is a key tool in helping you familiarize yourself with the size, scale, people, and environment of a new city. We even walked along highways because that was a big part of Austin. They didn’t have a subway system or anything. Everyone drove cars, especially trucks and not many people live downtown except for the high-end rich people.

5.    Be Interested, Stay Interesting
It is essential to always stay “alert” and be interested in what people are saying and it is also important to sometimes just listen. You need to know the art of carrying a conversation, infuse your two cents when necessary, but sometimes you have got to just listen, and listen, and listen. However, if the conversation is going in an unusual or unrelated direction, it is key to know how and when to direct the conversation to get the information you want and need.

6.    It’s Nice to be a Girl
I know this is something that we obviously don’t have control over, but if you are a girl, chances are people will be friendlier to you, nicer to you, less threatened by you, and most importantly, people will be more open and willing to tell you the things you want to know.

Lessons Learned- I have a lot more to learn but overall this was a fantastic experience.  The only question I have left is, when is my next business trip?

A recent article in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette describing how consumer feedback (or lack of it) impacts the design of cars once again reinforces how ethnographic studies trump focus groups in concept development and testing. It points out that the 2010 Ford Taurus and Buick LaCrosse were designed with input from ethnographic studies. That’s a step in the right direction for Detroit. Problem is, the article unknowingly outs those who conducted this car ethnography as having only conducted one-on-one interviews and sat with owners in their garages talking about favorite features. Talk is great, but how about a test drive? Like a prospective buyer, a research firm might want to consider hitting the highway with consumers before claiming their insights represent any kind of heavy metal thunder.