Learning the Literal, Political, Metaphorical and Spiritual

I’ve always had this love/hate relationship with research. On one hand, I love learning. On the other hand, I’m frustrated with companies and people who have reduced research efforts to routinized, mechanical bucket filling. So in my work, I’ve tried to reframe how research is done.

1. I stopped calling it “research.” I call it “learning” now.
Why? Because research is about collecting while learning is about synthesizing.

2. I establish a different end goal for our learning efforts.
Most research efforts seem to operate as if collecting a robust set of data and facts is the end goal. It’s a personal pet peeve of mine when people - who share information with other people and have no POV on its application or use - say “I just thought I’d show it to see if it sparked anything in your minds.” That’s just lazy and a waste of everyone’s time. To prevent this, I challenge people to create knowledge – defined as “information that is useful.” Don't show me data unless you have a loose idea of how to act on it or how it connects to other information to tell a decent story. 

3. I give little direction…initially.
I frame the challenge at hand and encourage my folks to pursue areas in and around the problem that speak to their curiosities. In other words, I want people to chase their interests and passion for learning and not mechanically follow my assumptions of where good knowledge can be found. Giving people too much direction initially turns the whole activity into a bucket filling exercise thus flipping the motivation from a internal one (personal learning and satisfaction of curiosity) to an external one (making my boss happy). Besides: doing it this way leads to the discovering of more interesting information.

4. I keep everyone in constant communication.
At some point our efforts must become more focused. But who am I to say what is important or not? I do not have complete knowledge to grade information. To remedy my deficiencies, I have everyone meet, during the research period, everyday (or every other day) for an hour to discuss what they learned that day. These discussions are vital to the learning process. Why? Because knowledge creation is a social activity. Information is only labeled “important” and “useful” when a group of people agrees that is important and useful and put it into practice. At the end of each meeting, we collectively learn what information should be pursued, dropped or fleshed out more.

5. I use four levels of understanding to map our learnings.
I believe there are four levels of understanding that we must satisfied before we can really “know” something:

Literal: This level of understanding is about block and tackle. For example, if we’re working with an automotive company, the literal understanding would be awareness of its different models, testing processes, awards its won, who buys the cars, etc.

Political: Business is politics. A company’s choice to exist and sell a product is a company choosing to amplify a certain value, activity or way of life in the world. This section is often about history – when was the company founded? What was the social context? What was the founder trying to do? What messages has the company promoted over the years in its marketing? What has it been telling people to do with their money and lives over he years? By learning this, we learn our clients role in the world.

Metaphorical: This is about connections to the larger world. At some point in learning, we will be able to recognize similarities between our client and another company, animal, social movement, some aspect of life or nature...or whatever. In other words, we’ll find abstract connections. When we do that, we begin to realize our client’s relationship to the rest of the world. 

Spiritual: This level is about meaning. What the company emotionally means to people beyond its physical aspects or commercial offerings.

It’s my rule of thumb that when my team can speak to each of these levels with ease, insightfulness and clarity, then we know we “know” our client and the challenge at hand.