Thoughts on consumer research, business, and human nature
I have never met Chris Guillebeau, so his ability to read my mind is uncanny. I was going to write about the trained and the scrappy anyway, and he provided a wonderful launch pad. His idea (though you should read his post for yourself) is that he has built himself a wonderful career about which he is passionate—with virtually no qualifications.
My original thought, was that I seem to encounter three kinds of people: the trained, the scrappy, and the golden few who encompass both traits.
The trained are people who went to school to do exactly what they’re doing. They have read the books, taken the classes, and followed the career path. These folks are often very good at what they do because they have the vast background of their training from which to draw. However, that same training can limit them: they look only to the world of their field for inspiration, answers, and guidance. Often, they also look only to their fellow trained types for expertise.
The scrappy (who, incidentally make up a lot of qualitative researchers and insights managers—and Chris Guillebeau) are people who consider their job to be piecing together expertise from everything they know. That is, they don’t necessarily come in with knowledge from a classroom, but they believe in their imagination and work ethic, and they get excited about stepping outside the idea of training to make new stuff. The problem for the scrappy folks is that sometimes, they spend a lot of time reinventing the wheel, not knowing that in Chapter 14 of The Standard Textbook On The Topic, the thing they just spent hours, days, or weeks figuring out is already fully described, and they could have spent more time on the truly new.
Those who are both trained and scrappy have the depth of knowledge and an eagerness to step outside of it and make new stuff. Their scrappiness is the urge to fly, and the training is the net that can prevent them from crashing too badly, too often, or too soon.
If you see yourself as trained, take a risk, argue with your professional forebears, and reexamine your assumptions. If you see yourself as scrappy, spend one day a month at the library learning about the work you’ve fallen into. If you truly are both, then I hope you are using that gift to the fullest.
Last week, I was part of an interesting discussion on the topic, "Are Jobs Obsolete?" This led to a conversation about the changing balance between how people earn a paycheck and how they identify themselves. Living in a city full of musicians who are also elementary school teachers, microbrewers who are also mail carriers, and sculptors who trade commodities, I am surrounded by this idea daily.
As far as research goes, it did make me question our usual screening practices. Often we ask people about their jobs in order to screen out folks who work for competitive companies or who might have more than usual expertise on a topic. If we're doing research for a beer company, and our postal worker answers that she's a postal worker, what have we missed?
I am heartened by the fact that people are identifying themselves by what matters to them, not what pays them. We need to start thinking about how this matters to us as researchers.
Jonah Lehrer has an interesting piece at Wired about a study on creativity and constraint. Specifically, it’s about how having some kind of limitation actually enhances creative thinking. Lehrer’s example got me all excited. He talks about how writing in forms—sonnets, sestinas, haikus—actually frees the imagination to be even more creative and make ever more unexpected connections. I write poetry in forms; I also do better work when I have constraints.
I could blether on about the implications of this idea for days, but for now, here’s a key point: “The larger lesson is that the brain is a neural tangle of near infinite possibility, which means that it spends a lot of time and energy choosing what not to notice. As a result, creativity is traded away for efficiency” [emphasis mine].
When you are observing research, when you are planning research, and certainly when you are deciding what to do with findings, what do you choose not to notice? What are you losing by making that choice…
Am I prodding you to escape limitations, which is counter to the article’s argument? Well sort of. I’m prodding you to think about the limitations, and choose them so they add value. And when you encounter the limitations, don’t go into autopilot in how you go around or through them. Just because you find yourself writing a sonnet doesn’t mean you need to rhyme “love” and “dove.” What about “love” and “all of the above”?
… or working for yourself. Nice piece from Seth Godin today. I have a few things to add:
Like the sunrise, the awesomeness of Lynda Barry is a reliable phenomenon, and I encourage you to read about it in a piece in today’s New York Times. I do want to quote one specific bit because I think it has direct application to three things that are important to me as a researcher. Here’s the excerpt:
[Barry] told a story about the neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran, who helps patients experiencing phantom-limb pain. Barry discussed one patient who felt that his missing left hand was clenched in a fist and could never shake the discomfort — could never “unclench” it.
So Ramachandran used a mirror box — a compartment into which the patient could insert his right hand and see it reflected at the end of his left arm. “And Ramachandran said, ‘Open your hands.’ And the patient saw this” — Barry opened two clenched fists in unison. “That’s what I think images do.
“I think that in the course of human life,” she continued softly, “we have events that cause” — she clenched her fist and held it up, inspecting it from all angles. “Losing your parents might cause it. Or a war. Or things going bad in a family.”
So, my three important things:
(Tip o’ the hat to Jessa at bookslut.com for the original link.)
It’s good for your mental health, your respiratory and circulatory health, and apparently, your neurological health: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8526699.stm.
And if you’re in a profession that relies heavily on your voice (like, say, qualitative research, management, training), taking singing lessons can teach you how to maintain your vocal apparatus so it stays stronger and lasts longer. You learn to breathe, and you learn how to support your voice so that after six two-hour groups, you don’t sound like an adolescent guinea fowl. Don't worry if you are miles away from either Andrea Bocelli or Eddie Vedder. There's still lots of good stuff to learn.
Also, it’s fun, generates endorphins, and embarrasses your children. A win-win all around.
Does everything on your menu make sense, or is there stuff that just sort of hangs out there without being ordered? Is there something you feel confident is the best in town but you haven’t put it on the menu because it doesn’t seem to fit? If either is true, fix it.
This is roundabout, but here goes: There is a poem by Quincy Lehr called, “If God Is Good,” at everseradio.com. It’s a lovely piece in both language and sentiment, and it’s the latter I’d like to focus on. Essentially, the poem is a collection of hypothetical questions leading to the final question that is basically, “If everything I wanted happened, would I notice how good I had it?”
So there’s your question to ponder. When we—as individuals or as institutions—make mistakes, the impulse to analyze, to prevent it from ever happening again, is overwhelming. Often, we end up saying, wrongly, that we’ll never do whatever-that-was again (but that’s a topic for another post). My question is whether we do that kind of analysis when things are going well—when we’re humming along the way we want to be? I’m not talking about the equivalent of an iPad launch, I’m just talking about those times when the profit margin is healthy, the work is challenging but not overwhelming, the team is basically happy with each other, and you are sleeping well at night.
Do we put the same kind of analytical effort into figuring out those moments as we do analyzing the extremes?
Barbara Egel began her career with Primary Insights and qualitative research in 1997. This was interrupted by a 5-year sojourn in children's multimedia publishing where she dealt with the likes of Elmo and SpongeBob Squarepants. Since her return to qualitative, she has developed her skills with a variety of consumer constituencies including tweens, elderly, LGBTQ, and people with mental illness. She is a frequent presenter on all sorts of things in the qualitative realm. Contact her at barbara@primaryinsights.com.
