Bad to worse in one easy step.

I once heard Bill Gates say that if an organisation is already disorganised and chaotic, introducing new technology will only compound the chaos. But if an organisation is organised and well managed with efficient systems and procedures in place, technology, will compound or amplify that efficiency. In summary, technology will make good, better and bad, even worse.

First example: many years ago, as a student, I used to work as a starter chef in a restaurant called Pudseys in Bristol. We used to have a very ancient and slow microwave oven which our head chef believed slowed us down. One evening I turned up to fins a brand new high powered industrial microwave in it's place. And this is what happened...

With the old microwave, a sauce would be placed inside and because it was so slow, the chefs could do half a dozen other things before the bell sounded. The new microwave was too fast and slowed us down. The chef had no time to do anything else but stand next to it and wait. The cumulative effect was that everything slowed down. What is more, we never managed to crack a way of having ot's speed work to our advantage.

And here, dear readers,  is another example.

Buying vs experiencing and remorse

Here is an interesting blog post by Art Markman.

Came across it via LinkedIn.

Thoughts on a postcard please!

Estonains watching TV

I was Skype-ing a BrainJuicer genius yesterday and we got talking about the home and how it's changing. He sent me this link. I'm not sure what they are all about, but they are interesting, thought provoking and somehow soothing. Ethnographic studies with still cameras have always interested me but I have never had the nerve to propose it to a client.

Dinner in Milan

Many years ago now, Peter Cooper, a friend and former colleague/boss, returned from a meeting with Unilever (London) and called me into his office.

"Well, my dear boy, I told them what you told me to tell them..."
"And?"
"They didn't get it!"

Here is what, Peter had told some very senior folks at Unilever, Blackfriars:

"The difference between good and great ethnographic research is that you need to scrutinise the video repeatedly. Many, many repeat viewings. Once is never enough."

The Unilever client questioned the need to ever look at any video more than once. Why bother? When you have seen it you have seen it! Right?

Wrong.

"Peter, I hope you explained that the more you watch a scene/event/happening the more you see."
"She (client) never let me get that far!"
"Didn't you show them the clips?"
"They didn't have an LCD projector."

Twelve years on, I would like to invite you all to watch this short video. A study for the Arts Council following an art teacher around London:




Only don't watch it once. Watch it at least three times. And then tell me what you perceive each time. It can be one word or several sentences. And I'm not interested in quotes you might find interesting. I want MEANING. There is a seriously good prize for the best answers, which I will share in a new blog post.

It frightens me to death (truly it does) how little time we ALL spend repeat watching films. And there are ways of watching films from everyday life do decode meaning (separate post). Transcriptions only tell a quarter of the story and one view of a film will yield nothing more than what any lay-person can see. There is no short cut. And it's important for client side people to dedicate some time each week to watching and thinking - don't just rely on your consultants.

Now to my dinner in Milan. I was enjoying an evening out with fellow delegates from Qual360 and happened to sit opposite a US colleague who I knew nothing about - I had no idea what he did.

"Does your platform," he asked between mouthfuls, "allow you to add different codes to the same sequence of video?"
"Do you mean giving different codes to different sections of various clips and then being able to view all of the cuts/codes end to end in one go?"
"Exactly what I mean!"
"Not really - we don't usually receive entries longer than 3 minutes."
"Well, our platform does!" He replied triumphantly.

I nearly choked on my Ravioli.

"You have a mobile research platform?" I asked.
"Not exactly... we can't send video like you... yet." Then he chuckled to himself before adding. "You know what though? No one ever uses that feature!"

He went on to tell me how much time and effort they had invested.

Incidentally, one of the wonderful things about Qual360 - where I met this and many other like minded people - is that they are small events and very intimate. So lots of frank and honest sharing takes place, especially over food and wine.

The interesting thing about this exchange is that there appears to be two distinct way of thinking about video.

1) Code/transcribe and cut it to use the correct sections for illustration
2) Watch and watch again to begin to 'see' what others have not seen and think what others have not thought.

The former lends itself to quantitative thinking and the former to qualitative thinking. And as harsh as this may sound, if you don't have time to watch films, don't set them as tasks for your respondents in the first place. Stick with audio and pictures. Seriously.

My mum the interpreter

Here is a sad Christmas story conveying no particular lesson other than, perhaps, the speed at which kids can soak up a foreign culture.

My mum, aged 72, is an interpreter. In case you don't know, I am second generation Iranian (Persian is a Californian expression I refuse to use). So my mum interprets for Iranians and Afghanis who are asylum seekers (most claim to be gay or converts to Christianity in the hope they will be granted permanent leave to stay) or simply not fluent in English. She attends court, meetings with lawyers and hospital appointments including births where she has ended up in tears holding a newborn because dad was in Afghanistan and mum was under a general anaesthetic with no other relatives.

Recently she was called to interpret for a 12 year old Afghan boy who had turned up in the UK on the back of a lorry. The lorry had come to a halt on some B road in the middle of the wilds of Lancashire, the back doors opened, and he had been ordered off. It was 2am, freezing and he was on a country lane with no houses, street lights or people to ask for help. A reminder: he was 12 years old - only a few years older than my own twins. And he spoke no English.

He was starving and unsure of where he was, so he walked. Eventually he reached a small town where he saw some lights.  He hoped he could find food where the lights were shining from. It turned out to be a nightclub. A kindly bouncer took him to the local police station and directly into foster care.

We look after child asylum seekers here in the UK. This kid was given a complete health check, sent to school and his kindly foster parents even bought him a PAYG mobile phone.

"Did you go to school in Afghanistan? My mum has asked him when she was asked to interpret for the Social Services.
"No."
"Then what did you do?"
"After my dad died, my uncle took me in and I watched over his donkeys."

The same uncle had paid some gangsters to have him transported to the UK. He had no mother.

My mum next saw him a few weeks later and once settled in with his foster family. There had been a disagreement between him and his foster parents. The foster dad had explained that the boy point blank refused to wear clothes bought in TK Max (TJ MAx in the US) and wanted the exact same brands/styles from JD Sports at 4 times the price.

When my mum asked him what the difference was between the products he replied that there were none. So why did he want to pay more?

Silence.

My mum asked him if he wanted to go back to his donkeys. I think it was her way of telling him how fortunate he was.

Silence.

My mum, being 72, could not comprehend a 12year old mind that wanted to pay more for the exact same product. I can understand but cannot articulate it into words. Another article perhaps.

Any thoughts anyone?

Mission for 2012

When I do my ethnography talks, one of the most important topics I cover is what people DON'T do. What they NEARLY do and, so it follows, what they don't say.

Conventional research is all about what is done and said. If lucky, some researchers will add meaning/interpretation too. If not so lucky, the quotes/statements will be presented as insight... Which is why agency planners like to differentiate themselves from researchers as follows: "A qual researcher will tell you everything that was said in a focus group, while an agency planner will tell you everything that wasn't said." Not sure where I read this but I think it was in a Linkedin group post. By a planner.


Another very nice (true) story I heard recently from a Kantar director goes as follows: During WW2 aircraft engineers spent valuable time and resources trying to figure out how to reinforce wings and fuselages so aircraft would survive heavy damage while on missions. They would study in great dept bullet holes and the like to try and engineer better aircraft until one particular engineer realised that the bits of the aircraft to study were the places not hit by bullets. 


Here is why.


The aircraft that never returned could only have been hit in these places sustaining irrecoverable damage. They had been busy looking at holes  of surviving aircraft instead of the areas that hadn't been hit which would, by deduction, have sent the non returning aircraft to their doom...


And a personal anecdote: I am a fine artist by training. The most important lesson I ever learnt was about what not to draw. That could be conveyed by the lines or colour around it. Look at the drawings by the old masters and you will see what I mean.

So where am I going with this?

Here me out.

My personal obsession with naturalism and reality are forever being blind sided by the way we are forced to recruit respondents. This is not about the quality of respondents. We always recruit excellent respondents. But nonetheless respondents who have been selected on the basis of their answers to attitudinal and other questions.

[A brief story: When I was at DDB London many years ago heading up their ethnographic research unit, I was showing a planner colleague some edits of one of our households when his jaw dropped.

"But I did an in-depth with the same guy in that same house!"

I looked at him and was taken aback by how upset he was.

"He told us he was a hospital nurse!!!"

Then it dawned on me. We had been told he had a completely different profession. I complained to the recruitment agency (a reliable supplier) and then to our head of planning before being told to 'not blow it out of proportion...]

The above happened over 12 years ago. Why did it happen? Most likely because the client had extremely tough criteria and the recruiters were in a hurry - which they always are - to deliver. And people get so obsessive about how respondents answer particular questions they completely ignore the fact that they too are humans, just like the rest of us, who have their own agendas for becoming respondents. This agenda us usually money related.

Now for something hard to swallow. I have lived in with hundreds of households, both in my JWT days and my DDB days. All had ticked the correct boxes. All fitted narrowly defined criteria by the way they had responded to screeners.

In many cases when we presented back films (and in those days I didn't do jump cuts or short edits) the client would be seeing their segment for the first time in their OWN SETTING. And they would ask questions such as: Why does a C2D household have a flat screen TV and health club membership? (A: because they are on benefits and pay no taxes). Why is a 'healthy' household having a fry up breakfast on a Saturday??? (A: because they don't see it as unhealthy) And so it went. Clients would see their respondents in-situ for the first time and slump back in their seats at all they things they might have got wrong with the way they understood them.

It's worth saying that I have never cut out events and happenings which conflict with who the respondents are supposed to be. It's tempting to do because the last thing you need is to be accused of bad recruitment which will undermine just about everything you have done including each and every insight generated.

When clients do question recruitment, I so want to demonstrate to them that the same respondent can fit all of their segments depending on context. I so want give another presentation so they can see the different hats, attitudinal and other, worn by respondents depending on their moods and modes. And Ethnography is such a brilliant way of bringing these things to life. Yet we don't. We recruit and capture respondents like they are two dimensional beings with emotions, beliefs and values which are constant. HA!

You the reader have better things to do than read my ramblings here so I will get to the point. What is our mission for 2012? To develop features and tools for EthOS which will allow us to immerse ourselves into the mundane, ordinary realities of non-recruited people in the real world. Not respondents who have pledged to behave in a particular way by filling in a recruitment form. This is what 2012 has in store for us.

Happy 2012!

Merry Christmas and a prosperous 2012

I'm writing this final post of 2011 through a stinking cold/cough/head cold. And tomorrow I have to drive the family all the way from Brussels to Leeds in West Yorkshire, UK, a distance of 455m or 700km.  So there. That's my whinge over with. Back to the post.

What will 2012 bring? For us, it will bring wild apples. 2012 will be the year we turn our attention to understanding real people, in real places, doing real things in real time. You may ask, "But you already to this via EthOS don't you?" and I would reply, "Yes, but with recruited people. Not real people. Not people happily going about there lives who decide on a whim to share a nugget or nuggets with us by responding to tasks embedded in the things they touch, buy and stumble upon." OK I'm saying real people to be provocative. And you may well challenge me by saying you can't use respondents without screening them. Oh but that will come. Stay tuned and I shall demonstrate. 

So here's to a very special 2012 for all of us. Have a good one!