Jan Chipchase on Field Research for Actionable Insights

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Hi, I'm Matt Devoe and you are watching the Oodacast and today we are joined by Jan Chipchase who is a field researcher and I wish I could say Jan, exactly how I got introduced to your work. I know it was a number of years ago, whether it was something that I saw where it was being covered or referred to me by a friend, but certainly became a big F, including having picked up and read the book Hidden in Plain Sight, which we'll put a link to before and as well as this field study handbook which is basically kind of the textbook for the type of work that you do. So welcome to the oodacast and I would love for you to just tell folks your story. You know, how did your career originate and take us through the formation of your company, Studio Dean.

Thanks Matt and it's a real pleasure to be here. Thanks for staying up late. So I started as a terrible usability engineer at Nokia, didn't even know own a mobile phone. I was hired into the company and working on the user experience. I was there for nine years and I went from usability engineer to being a principal scientist in the Nokia research lab in Tokyo which is also where I am now. And over that time period mobile phones went from being luxury items to being mass market and I was lucky enough to work on and in the company at that time when it went from tens of millions to high hundreds of millions of units sold by that company every year. And I did a lot of work cross cultural research in understanding the similarities and differences between consumers in different countries. After nine years and that stint ended in Los Angeles, I joined Frog Design, a design and innovation consultancy and I was charged with building a insights practice across all the rate studios. First two years were in Shanghai and second two years were in San Francisco. And after four pretty breathless years working at a really fast pace across the globe, I took a break. I was going to take a year off. I managed three months off and then someone came to me and said can you do a project for us? And I thought well, what is the infrastructure I need to take on interesting work. And that's really the genesis of Studio D Radiodurance, which is now in its ninth year. That's it in a nutshell.

Excellent. Describe to us kind of exactly what it is that you do. Why do clients come to you? What are they asking for when they engage your studio?

Sure, yeah. So essentially we are tasked by clients to go out into the world and understand something. I'll give examples of those in a moment. But essentially we bridge an understanding of culture with an understanding of the cultures that we are going into, whether it's China, Brazil, or the U.S. or Italy or wherever it is. Domain expertise, is it in medical, automotive, mobile data, something else. And the organizational culture. And that triangle of culture, domain expertise, and organizational culture, bridging those three things. So essentially, if we are not able to understand the organizational culture, how it thinks, how it operates, how it acts upon information, we might be interesting, but we're not particularly relevant. So you've got to get those three things in balance. We specialize in doing ethnographic research, which is essentially going into the field and engaging people in the everyday things that they do related to the research topic in the places that they do them. And so it's very common for us to do home visits, going into markets, and you name it, wherever people are doing the things that we're interested in, we would like to be there. And we've got to figure out a way to collect data meaningfully. We also do desk research, and we have access to a lot of quantum analytics data as well. We work with those teams within organizations and. And because we're mapping things, that data typically doesn't yet exist in what we're looking at. What we gather often informs quant and data analytics teams as well. In other words, it gives them new questions to ask and new directions to think about what data to collect. Somebody described what we do as being like and a mere satellite hurtling through space. And companies essentially are asking us to identify new planets. So new market opportunities, existential threats, those meteorites coming in going to blow the planet to bits. And occasionally we're asked to then turn the antennas back on earth, back to the company, back to the organization to help them understand what their organization is and how, you know, does the leadership really understand what their organization does and how it thinks about itself? So there's the. That's how. That's a way of thinking about it. 95% of our work is commercial clients. We do some nonprofit work as well. Almost all of our work is confidential. And in fact, generally, if a client talks about our work publicly, it probably means the relationship is over because it's quite difficult to then go out into the world with the degree of anonymity that we really value. So there are clients that have talked about our work publicly, but we wouldn't expect to pick up work with them again. We really like to be behind the scenes. In terms of the kind of questions that they're asking, we get a lot of projects which are how do users or consumers in country X, how are they similar and how they different to similar users or consumers in country Y or country zone? And that's often for companies that are looking to introduce products and services outside their home markets or in new markets. And they're really asking do we need to adapt what we do or can we just roll out the same thing? We get a lot of projects that are what is the future of something of X? And so for that we would often go to a lead market or lead markets to look at extreme use cases of how things are that might be indicative of how things might be on a wider scale. You know, we had a project, one of our earlier projects in the studio was a Saudi client that has talked about the work. We did three projects for them and their question was what should our. We want to start a new company, what should our. Or a new brand within our existing portfolio, what should it stand for and why? And what should our service offering be? That was in Saudi Arabia. The client wanted us on the ground tomorrow, 10 days to get the visas. In those 10 days, built a team of nine other people and we worked for one month flat out, no break, and at the end of that delivered to the client team to a room full of large consultancies that were using what we had learned as their North Star for thinking about what the service offering should be and what it should stand for. And maybe of particular interest to your listeners is projects where the client asks us to understand, use and abuse of the products and services. So we have a global platform, we're in 200 plus countries. How are people misusing our platform and in what ways on the ground? And what I love about that kind of project is essentially you're looking at gray market or black market activities. As researchers, we have a responsibility to our research participants to protect their identity. So we have that ethical component. Without that in place, we cannot get meaningful data because it would be too biased. And at the same time we need to deliver something of value to the client as well. And I love that difficulty of how do you do that? There isn't really a manual for those kind of ethical issues and it's not really taught. And I love that part of it. So yeah, that's probably a good example of the kind of projects that we have. So in terms of the approach that we have, essentially on most projects we have an international team of between two and four people, myself included. I love being on the ground. And then we hire local teams of researchers, fixers, guides and other roles. And we typically have one local person for every international person that flies in. So you can all operate independently in different locales. And aside from that team set up, we operate what we call a pop up studio, and that's essentially renting a house or home, typically in the places that we're running the research. So we want to be close to places that we're looking to learn from. So if we're running a project on micro finance in slum communities, we want to be in that slum community and to operate there for a period of time. If we're trying to understand high net worth individuals in Singapore, then yes, we all need to book a penthouse suite and live in the same manner that that person would live with as well. And that's how we operate. So fixers and guides, international local team and pop up studio approach.

Excellent. Sounds like a combination of, I mean there's some of the macro level analysis with the quant data, but then the micro level. Right. The stuff that can only be discerned through observation, including the misuse or makes me think of the William Gibson quote around the street finding its own use for things. It seems like you're kind of chartered with going out and conducting some of that research as well, which could be misuse or unexpected adoption. Do you ever encounter stuff that is legitimately a surprise for you? You know, where you go in with one expectation and you come out with completely different finding?

I mean, this part in our career there's like less surprises, but definitely surprises for clients. So yeah, totally. So that kind of mind shift of what you expect to find, that's our initial hypothesis. And in fact, actually this gets to the question of how do you create an environment that is conducive to revealing those kinds of things, particularly when you have a team with different levels of seniority, when you have cross cultural differences between your local and in your international team, how do you break down those barriers? And that's kind of actually one of the fundamental questions that we have when we run these projects is how do you enable a truth or multiple truths to emerge? So degrees of certainty? And do you understand what those degrees of certainty are, what the biases are and so on?

Yeah, absolutely. What other types of challenges do you encounter in doing the research?

Yeah, so every organization has its own culture within all cultures, and so cultures and subcultures and degrees of certainty vary considerably. So my background is in rigorous research. It's taken me many years to let go of some of that rigor for certain clients that are quite happy to have to buy into leaps of faith, whereas other clients absolutely want to see every step of the process and how you reach those conclusions.

Talking through challenges in general that you encounter. One was kind of the client organizational culture challenges that you encounter in the field as well.

Yeah, I mean, so I mean broadly speaking, early on in the, in one's career, when one does this, one fixates on operational challenges.

Right.

Which is you hire people and how do you get into countries and out of them? And do you need permits for things like that? In Rwanda you really should get a permit because when you're at the village level, the village elder's gonna come in and going to ask for it. If you don't have it, well, that's it. You've just lost three days out of a 10 day stint in dealing with that. Later on, the challenges tend to shift to impact, which is really about understanding how organizations work, how people think, different kinds of audience and what level of attention people are willing to devote to the thing that you're delivering. From very visceral things with a hook through to much meatier, much system, much more systematic, but requires a lot more attention to actually understand what's going on. Deliverables we actually, we have some clients. This is from social impact planting in Myanmar. Loves having books and these are cultural artifacts that sit within their organization. This is with and for proximity designs in Myanmar. We've done about six projects here. One of the ways to think about that is the organizational information metabolism or data metabolism. And every organization has a different kind of metabolism for information that they are comfortable acting upon. And they build infrastructure around and processes around different types of data and information. And often with ethnographic research, we are introducing new forms of data and information to ingest. And the organization may not be comfortable ingesting it and acting upon it. And so that's part of that question of how do we affect organizations? Yeah, interesting.

Yeah, I like that concept of metabolizing data. I mean obviously we named our organization OODA after the OODA loop, the observe, orient, decide act. And that ability, you can collect the data or the observations, but they have to figure out some way to orient to them. And there are certain types of data that they're optimized for incorporating in their decision making process. But it would seem like with the work that you're doing that probably that they're not optimized. So there's a bit of a learning process and I think metabolizing it is kind of an interesting analogy to use. It also seems like through your experience the challenges have been overcome with some of the process and structure that you've put in place. Because as I've read in your books and I heard you just state, part of the teams that you put together are fixers and guides. Right. Where you are kind of pre planning for the challenges that you're going to encounter and having the local resources to help reduce that friction or help to mitigate the field challenges.

Yeah, I mean, maybe a good example of that is. So I'm a white middle aged guy from the UK that has lived in different countries, but you know, I represent a certain thing in a certain way of thinking. And my first hire is typically someone who is not me. Like literally, I do not want another white, middle aged white guy as my go to person if I'm just having one other person. So when, when we're building a team, we are very cognizant of the mindset that that each person brings. And we're looking for typically life stage, ethnic, cultural, sometimes sexual orientation perspectives. Really depends on the client and the project that we're working on. And the hardest hires are the international team because they really have to understand research processes to get to the rigor that the corporate clients demand. With the local teams we have a lot more flexibility. And so fixers and guides, you could call them translators, cultural translators, language translators. For me, a fixer is someone, if you said, I want a elephant, pink elephant on that roof tomorrow, helicoptered in, they're not going to say you can't do it. They would just say, well, do you want an African elephant or an Indian elephant? Right. It's kind of that mindset and there's a high degree of hustle and the challenge. And if you talking about challenges, one of the challenges is to make sure the hustle doesn't get to the point of ethically compromising the project, the data or the client itself. So yeah, building those teams is something that I thought would be incredibly difficult. Actually. I teach a course called Field Study Fundamentals. And one of the exercises I give a team of four is within 20 minutes, I want you to find someone in name of city they've never been to before. And I want you to, with a degree of certainty, be able to hire this person into the team. And you've got 20 minutes to do it. And almost without fail, everyone says it can't be done. And almost without fail, within 20 minutes they have at least one candidate within half a day you can have half a dozen candidates of whom in most cases you could hire someone within half a day. I think the biggest belief that it can't be done, the biggest challenge is the belief that it can't be done as opposed to that it can't be done. We really are in a hyper connected world.

So do you ever have clients that want to try and inject themselves into the process and join your team or how do you handle that? Because I know it's embedded in some cultures. I know when I interviewed Kevin Roberts from Sachin Saatchi talked about the never get the Japanese phrase, but it roughly translated to get your boots on, which was get the value of going out in the field and doing the field research too. So do they try and inject themselves or do you keep them separate from the field work that you're doing?

Okay, well we have some clients who essentially say we agree on the research, here's a pot of money, go ahead and do it, just tell us when you're done. But for the most part we like to work in partnership with clients and that's far more iterative process. They don't try and inject themselves into the process, we try and invite them into it. And so we do have a rule which is no tourists. So if you come in field, you are treated like any other member of the team. We're a very well oiled machine and if you have a piece of sand that is a client that's on their phone just doing other things related to other things that's outside the project, then they're upsetting that kind of balance. So I encourage clients to come in, they really have to jump in feet first. And in my experience the people who react against that roll up your sleeves are middle managers. They kind of reached an elevated status within their organization, worked hard to get there and they're now being told to do something, sometimes meaningful work, which needs to be done and they react against it. The folks who really appreciate it are the C suite and the director level folks who come into an environment. So just imagine we're in Kigali and we've got a rented house and we have three, four international folks working with another five local team members. People are sleeping in the living room, they're waking up, there's data walls, the client comes into that and then they're just asking how did this team get aligned so quickly, this cross cultural team? You guys have worked together a lot before? No, we met three days ago. Right, that kind of, there's A real appreciation from folks who are charged with having teams work together and for egos to be set aside, I'd say they're the folks that have the greatest appreciation of that approach.

Excellent. Just kind of free thinking a little bit. If I were. One topic that I've been looking at or we've been looking at closely, is the bitcoin initiatives in El Salvador. And it seems like it's really difficult to determine ground truth if you followed that, where they issued the digital wallets with a certain amount of currency and they made it legal fiat, so you have to take it at the stores. Is that a type of project that your team would take on where somebody says, I want to understand what is the adoption? How is this technology being used in surprising ways or being misused? Is that an example of where you just go and get close, close to the consumers and the culture and kind of study what is happening within that emerging ecosystem?

It is, yeah. That's a very good example. And so if that was. It depends on the client, but that could be like a month's work with a week's prep, plus maybe the rest of the month, three weeks on the ground of which probably about eight days, nine days would be data gathering and the rest would be making sense of the data and then writing it up. We prefer to work with local teams. As we're writing the deliverable, we'd like to have them around us instead of heading back to home base or client space because there's far more nuance that makes it into the report. If we were doing a project like that, there would be the surface level. Not the surface level, the kind of foundational level, understanding so what is happening. But then we would be looking at outliers and interesting new use cases and so on. You mentioned that I had a client recently that looked at one of our old reports on mobile money offerings in Somaliland. And Somaliland's interesting as a country or as a not quite independent state in that there are two mobile money systems. They're largely inoperable between them. So you can't send money between them because there's two competing networks that are not interoperable. It's not really a central bank per se, in the way countries understand it. In Somaliland, you can literally go up to almost any adult and say, here's some cash. Can you put this onto my Zod account? Or somebody comes up to you and says, can I send you some electronic cash? Can you give me some cash? And it kind of, kind of is the social equivalent of asking someone for the time, as in it's not very problematic. And so if we were studying in El Salvador, we'd probably look at prior research in some outlier places, such as Somaliland, to look at existing behaviors. And as well, if you wanted an outlier comparison, Somaliland, nothing to do with cryptocurrency, but a lot to do with what happens when there are very low barriers to sending and receiving money in technological and social space.

Yeah, I'm just curious. Obviously it's one of those where it's an ecosystem where the behaviors are important, they're kind of interesting indicators. And I'm certain that there's ingenuity in ways that people are gaming the system or using it in unexpected ways. So it'd be fascinating to get that insight for my own decision making as I try and decode what is the importance of what's happening there and how real is it and what is the real ground adoption. You can give these wallets with this currency on mobile phones to all of these citizens, but then what's actually happening with it? So it seems like it'd be a fascinating topic to take a look at.

As an example of that. People who are invested in the technology tend to see technology as the solution to the question. Right. And whereas most people don't care about the technology, they care about getting things done. And yeah.

It was interesting as it was happening. You're getting the reports of executives from companies like Square that were very interested in, in that happening, going and living in country for numbers of months. So it seems like there's a little bit of field research being conducted or at least some lobbying as well. Can you give an example? I know that you can't name specific clients, but is there something that you found that was kind of a complete surprise that drastically changed the decision making process within one of your clients based on the work that you did?

I can talk about, I could talk about things maybe going back to the Nokia days. So for example, I don't know if you remember the Motophone, which Motorola put out a low cost handset with a month plus battery life because it had a bistable display. And within India it was seen as being targeted towards illiterate consumers. And there's probably about 300 million illiterate consumers worldwide, many of whom are in India. And so Nokia at that time asked, should we build a phone for illiterate consumers? Which is probably a 80 to $100 million investment, spin up a new product line, design, implement, produce market and so on. So they came to me and that was the ask, should we build a phone for illiterate consumers? So based on field research, within, literally within a month of having conducted some field research, the question changed from should we build a phone for literate consumers? To what is literacy? And phone literacy through to the reframing, to what level of competency is required to use a device? That's a very. It might sound quite subtle, as in how does an illiterate person use a phone? And let's design for them to what level of competency is required to get things done where a phone is used for that. So, for example, if you're in a society which has a lot of textually illiterate and innumerate people, and it's far more socially acceptable for an illiterate or enumerate person to go to someone else and ask their help for something that requires text or numbers or mathematics or arithmetic. And that's something that we termed proximate literacy. So when you know, as a company, you're asking, should we build this thing? And really that's kind of the wrong question. The question should be, is how do people get things done within the environment that they have? And once you figure that out, what might be a solution to that? And so the options were to build a new device or to adapt existing devices. A new device might have a market of a few tens of millions. Existing devices were sold in the hundreds of millions. There were already well established existing supply chain and so on. And the conclusion from the research was instead of building a new device which might have a social stigma attached to it, even if you positioned it well, it might be associated with being for just for illiterate consumers. Instead, we put illiteracy on a spectrum that included classically, textually illiterate people through to people, for example, using devices that are in a second language or third language. So you might be illiterate in a language that your device uses, but you love the device itself. And based on that research, the design of the user interface was adapted to better support people using devices not in their own language or illiterate users. So we broaden that spectrum. And then that was rolled out to I think probably that series of phones probably sold 1.2 billion units worldwide. Like they're kind of entry level phones. Yeah, that's an example of making a concrete commitment not to build a thing and understanding the rationale to do that, and then adapting an existing thing in ways that can have a far more meaningful impact.

Kind of reframing the question along the Way. Right. It seems like going into it, you had a very simple question, but it was actually a much more nuanced response that was needed. Or a nuanced understanding them.

Yeah. So actually, you know, you talked about challenges. One of the challenges in working in a consultancy is people come to you because they assume that you know the answers or you have a process to figure out the answer. And so they come to you, you build a project spec, you devote the weeks into that, you refine it, and you say, well, this is it, you know, and then when you get in field, you have to be willing to say, well, you know, those assumptions that we had three weeks ago when we were back in home base, well, they're all completely dumb. Right. Or there's a lot of them that need to be changed. And so one of the challenges is how do you build a relationship with a client that you can address the limits to your own learning? And one of the ways that we do that is we talk about the learning curve and we just say, well, there is a learning curve, but we don't know where we are on it. We might be down here or we might be somewhere over here. And at some point our learning is going to slow down. And at that point you should be asking yourself, well, do you want us to learn more, or would you rather devote our time to other things, such as applying that learning strategy and design and so on? I love to build relationships with clients where instead of sitting on opposite sides of the table, you're sitting on the same side of the table looking at the problem, and then you're looking at tackling that together. And it sounds like very similar to your own consultancy as well.

Yeah.

You asked an example of a surprising finding. And actually in Hidden in Plain Sight, I think it's in there, is conducting research in Rwanda and was lucky enough to interview a lady in a village that only recently got electricity. And frankly, people who've only recently adopted a thing that many people in other parts of the world take for granted is wonderful. Right. Because you get to understand the before and after. And so as the sun was setting, we were sitting outside and we asked. I asked the question of, so how's your life changed since you got electricity? And she stood up, beckoned for me to follow. We walked into the living room, and in the corner of the living room was a Phillips iron. It was probably a used one from another market that had been imported, but there was a Phillips iron out. Okay, what's she trying to tell us here? Right. And the biggest impact of electricity for her, she explained, was now when she travels to see her relatives. She can now get up in the morning, plug in the iron, iron her clothes, and she had this beautiful dress with big shoulders and traditional Rwanda. And when she's on the bus, everyone in the bus can recognize that her village has electricity because she has creases in the folds of her clothes. Because prior to that, if you wanted to iron her clothes, she would have to get up two hours earlier, heat the coals, get the coals to a certain temperature so that you can then properly iron to get those kind of creases. And, you know, that's okay. How does that apply to the question of the study? Well, I'm not sure it does, but it's a good example of. In that case, that was a study on microfinance. But it's a good example of we assume that technologies have a certain impact, and yet people on the ground can have a very different perspective on actually what the value of that technology is.

Yeah. Or they adapt them to their own value system, which I think is kind of a core aspect of that. A lot of the research you do, at least in the field, seems like it's very driven by human behavior, observing that. And obviously, in different cultures, you have different behaviors, you have different norms. So that was obviously something that was very important to her, which my teenagers would say is a flex, being able to get on the bus and demonstrate that you have electricity with something as simple as having creases in your clothing. So that's a great example. I do get your newsletter, and I'll put the link as well when we publish this so that people can subscribe and you cover a lot of workshops and that you're hosting workshops around the world or, you know, had been and are starting up again. Can you explain, you know, to the audience what are those workshops and, you know, why are people attending them and what happens when you attend one of the workshops?

Sure. Yeah. Okay. I mean, we should recognize that there's pre Covid and post Covid.

Post Covid, yeah.

Right. So when I wrote this book, this is my second book, and it's only sold a few thousand copies, but it took about five years to write. It took about a year to design. And then we published it ourselves and did a Kickstarter as a byproduct. We weren't planning to do a Kickstarter. Raised quite a bit of money. Anyway, we put it out there, and I think a real community is formed around the book as a totem to a set of ideas, which is there are different ways to engage with people from other countries and cultures. That is far more equitable and far more interesting and leads to a more accurate or more accurate versions of the truth, which our clients value. Probably a month after it was published, a client said can you deliver a workshop? And we hadn't planned to do anything. I thought yeah, that's not going to be that difficult. Within two months, pull together a course, run one. And then in the last three and a half years we're over 80 workshops which I personally run. And typically that would be around the world tour with 20 stops with multiple workshops in each city. But more recently it's online. The workshops cover field study fundamentals, essentially how to get a team on the ground pretty much anywhere in the world in a way that is systematic, systematically enables them to collect data, meaningful data is sustainable mostly from team's emotional and well being point of view. A lot of travel can be problematic for people that travel extensively, especially in higher risk environments and is ethical essentially that workshop is about that. And of all the challenges that we have, most of them you can solve to degrees of satisfaction. The ethical questions just continue to be a wonderfully steep learning curve throughout my career. So there's field study fundamentals. We do sense making for impact, which is how to affect the way organizations think and do in ways that are meaningful yet sometimes surprising. And we do operating in challenging environments. So we do a lot of work in slum communities, difficult to reach communities, work in places like Afghanistan running research as well outside of the infrastructure of large organizations. And so we have a methodology for operating in with. With higher degrees of comfort and safety within higher risk environments. And that's very much around human behavioral things. Yeah, those are the two. And I'm writing a new course on ethics because that continues to come up.

And do the workshops. And are the field trips just a longer version of the workshop or they seem a little bit more immersive and travel to very interesting locations?

Yeah, no. So the workshops are in person, they're one day workshops, typically like 16, 20 people. The we also run retreats which are three days somewhere. It's up to 16 people, including some local folks as well. And we typically rent really beautiful interesting places like in Shouf Valley in Lebanon or Tripoli in Lebanon, Myanmar, China and other places. And that's 16 people for three days where we explore a topic together. And that probably half that time is spent just out of that environment exploring the neighborhoods or exploring the mountains. We like doing them up in the mountain places. Like Nepal as well. Yeah, it's very. It's modeled on the Pop up studio. It's a very conducive environment to both learn and then reflect on what is learned and make contacts with interesting people in an unpressured environment. So there's a tendency with events, I think, for people to structure all of the time and we like to build in a lot of what we call unstructured times.

Excellent. Cool. So I do know that a fan of the podcast who'd kind of referred us, referred you to us. So you were already on my radar screen. So happy to get you on as a guest. And there's an example that you had cited that was in your newsletter over the summer and we went back and forth over email about kind of rapid decision making in. I don't want to call it kind of like a hostile situation, but maybe a difficult situation, a foreign environment by going outside of norms. So can you tell that story for the audience? I think it'd be a fun one to cover with regards to the police pulling over the motorcycle.

Yeah. So actually It's Robert Abeyta Jr. Dual forces. He has that brand who recommended the Odaloop podcast. So. Yeah. So if you think of any social situation, there are possible and probable outcomes and some social situations are just without agenda and others have very strong agendas. It really depends who's in that situation. And one of the things that we like to do is put ourselves in situations where we experience different agendas at play and we try and figure out why we ended up in a certain place. So we do retroactive kind of thinking about, well, how did we get here and what are the other possible outcomes. And there's a framework that I introduced in a newsletter which is a possibility spectrum framework. It's essentially the example I gave was being in Rio de Janeiro. It was quite early on in my career and it was the last day of the study, so the whole team had left except for myself and one of my local team members. Hired a driver, motorbike driver, this really gruff guy on a really beat up old motorbike from one of the favelas. And essentially we spent three quarters of the days motorbiking around the city into as many neighbors as we could. I had my hand in my. On my camera and I tap his. I don't speak Portuguese. Some nonverbal communication. I would tap, tap him on the shoulder, squeeze his waist and he would stop the motorbike. I'd get off a document and get back on. It was really about collecting b Roll equivalent for the research. Like contacts, a wide variety of contacts. And we were coming off a overpass and we turned off. I just tapped him to turn off to go into this industrial area. And just as we turned off and we'd committed to this turn off, it was, I think it was on a Sunday, so quite quiet. There was a police roadblock ahead of us. Two cops, cop car, and they're looking at us and not wearing a helmet at that point. I had it in my hand. The motorbike driver is not licensed to take a foreigner in a paid situation. Whether they know that or not is a question. But he's also noticeably from a favela, he's on a beat up machine. There's a lot of reasons why they legitimately could stop us. This is also Brazil, right? This is a country where most locals would say when I move around in my vehicle, my motorbike, my car, I'm more likely to be stopped at the end of the month after I've been paid because police are asking for bribes, right? So anyway, we're getting to this thing and as you're pulling in, in many situations, you would have this sinking feeling of, oh shit, what's going to happen now? And approaching that, I would think of a spectrum of possibilities, right? And at one end of the spectrum is this is Brazil. I'm a. I do think race could be part of that equation. So I'm a white guy, middle aged, I'm foreign, I've got a local who is also Caucasian, they're on the motorbike. And I want to recognize that there are different spectrum possibilities for different people, right? So if a traffic stop in the US if you're a person of color, could end up in a very different situation. Someone else, for example. Anyway, back to Brazil. We're in Rio de Janeiro, pulled us over. And I'm thinking about that spectrum of possibilities. And at one end of it, realistically is the motorbike is impounded, they may force me to hand over my passport, which may result in a request for a larger bike later on. I don't really see violence as part of that equation, but I recognize that it could be for some people, probably a fine. I would say a minimum would be on the spot fine. And at the other end of the spectrum, which is what I really enjoy, what's the ideal outcome here? The ideal outcome would probably be thinking about collecting B roll. Would probably be, we're in a bar later, we're kicking back, there's a load of traffic cops and they're telling stories about their lives and the work that they do and the pressures they're under. And they're weighing up this kind of cops in Brazil, the cops as the criminals kind of stereotype. They're demystifying that and they're putting it into a broader context. And we're collecting amazing photograph photography. And that's the spectrum anyway, so I'm aware of these possible outcomes for ourselves. And recognizing that the driver has his own spectrum of possibility. Maybe he wouldn't articulate in the same way, but he has it. And the two cops have that as well. They're looking at these two people coming along and thinking, okay, I know our next few meals are going to be paid for anyway. We pull up, they beckon for us to get off the motorbike. We get off the motorbike. I have a Canon 5D Mark II, a camera looking camera with a big lens. It's 1535 mil lens. Right. So it's a very camera y looking camera. So that could place me as being a dumb tourist because no local is gonna have a camera visible. Yeah, in, in an urban environment you just get, get stolen. Could be a photojournalist, could be, you know, like so, you know, they're trying to place who I am. And so there's uncertainty in their spectrum of like, possible outcomes. And one thing I've noticed in almost every human interaction is there are what we term conducive moments. Moments where at that point things could go in one direction or another. And it's about timing, it's about prior to that moment occurring, it's about framing things in such a way that there are other possibilities that could occur. And so, for example, just to jump to Afghanistan for a moment. When I'm working in Afghanistan, I do not wear boots. I wear slip on shoes or I wear sandals. If you wear boots, boots imply that you're about to kick down doors or you're about to run away and you want to be able to react quickly. Sandals or slip on shoes means that you're adhering to local norms and you could slip in, slip out, but you're really not a threat. Right. So we're paying attention to those kind of details. So talking with these two cops, I don't understand what's going on, but I know the direction that it's going in. I take my camera, the two cops are maybe like three, four feet away and the driver's there and he's taking out his wallet, I think for an id, not for money. It wasn't that obvious. And I take my camera and underarm, in that kind of conducive moment of tension under arm, I throw the camera to one of the cops. And if you throw an obvious object of value to someone, their instinctive reaction is to catch it. And prior to that, we're not an obvious threat, it's not a threat situation. I want to encourage that. This wouldn't work in every situation. A cop catches it. And so now this thing that might be part of their spectrum of possibility of maybe there's a camera in it for us, right? Suddenly it's become far easier than it should be, and they are fully in control. And this is unexpected. This up ends the normal narrative of how this unfolds, how this unfolds is we have power, you don't have power. And there's going to be this to and fro, and then we're going to use that power to get a thing. But here's someone who's willingly giving up power to this. They're either completely stupid, crazy, or they know something that we don't know. So all of a sudden, that spectrum of possibility for these cops becomes very different, where the negativities are now amplified. They recognize that there's things that they don't know. The cop looks at the camera, he looks at his colleague. He looked like this is like a three, $4,000 camera. Looks at the camera again, looks at me, looks at the camera, looks at the colleague, hands the camera back, tells us both to get on the motorbike. We get on the motorbike, and then they shoo us off. We go like 150 meters down the road, turn a corner. The driver stops the vehicle and gets off, takes out a cigarette and is like shaking his head, like, how the hell did this happen? Yeah, so, okay, so that's a lovely anecdote in itself, I think. Right. But what is it? What happened? And so there are people with power, there are assumptions with how things are going. There's a kind of a known narrative that is likely to be followed if you do not offset that. Right. And so the question as someone going into that is, do you understand that narrative or that current? And how might you do that, really? You need a local team and exposure to experience that. And then there are actions that are expected, and then there are actions that are introduced into that. And for me, that's a really good example of which I've seen play out in many situations of that conducive moment, which is to recognize the moment where you can Change the trajectory of, of a thing by introducing uncertainty and so on. And I thought about that in relation to the odor loop. And I think, you know, the odor loop, I understand why. But essentially that's about pressing and not giving the adversary the time to react because that affects decision making. Whereas this possibility spectrum framework and this conducive moment does not assume that that person is an adversary. It assumes that there are many positive and negative possible outcomes, but that we keep an open mind on what that is. Yes, we plan for some of the negative things. I don't typically carry a passport in Brazil when I'm going out on the streets to get a photocopy, for example. You only carry enough stuff that you could get robbed and so that minimizes risk and so on. Yeah, I've been in so many situations where the camera as an artifact, where there are known behaviors about what is expected of a person with a camera, enables you to change the social dynamic. Another oh, and sorry, I should have mentioned in that example is after having thrown the camera at the cop, I then put my hand around the driver and pose for a photo. In other words, please take out photo. And that was when he was looking at the camera and this. And then handed it back. It's like, I'm not taking your photo, but on your way. Yeah, excellent.

Yeah, I like that. You know, it's also with the OODA loop, I mean, obviously the original, the origination was kind of adversarial, but it's been adapted over time. And the recognition is that the people you're interacting with have their own loops. And what you did was basically kind of disrupt their loop. There was an unexpected behavior that kept them from cycling through what was almost like the muscle memory of decision making for how that situation should have played out. And you disrupted that. Right. You get them to react in a different way with that unexpected behavior. So that's why I like that story. I think it's useful. I think we also have, obviously within our audience a little different now with COVID but a very well traveled kind of global audience. And I think there's just a great lesson there as well. And operating in a foreign culture where you didn't know the language, you're being presented with this authority figure that is coming and interacting with you and finding a great way, I don't want to say to diffuse, because it wasn't necessarily a hostile situation, but disrupting the situation, disrupting the outcome path. So it's a great story.

Maybe a slight nuance on that is. And recognizing that it is a loop is recognizing that it has a momentum. And whereas a disruption is perhaps putting something that brings it to it, it stops momentum.

Yeah.

What we're really looking to do is presenting ways of using that momentum for it to continue and feel natural that it continues, but to a different endpoint.

So what sources of information do you rely on to stay informed? What are some of the things that you track on a day to day or week to week basis?

Okay. If it's relating to a particular project, our projects are typically three to six months. And so we go very deep on a topic for that period of time. And so that's. For example, they're about to spin up a project in three countries in Africa. As part of that spinning up process is simply following a few people on social media, in my case that would be Twitter and Instagram, to obtain a spatial awareness of what's happening on the ground and typically follow a whole bunch of people and then whittle it down just so they have this understanding of weather conditions and what they're celebrating and what they're commiserating and other things like that. Right. And what interests them. So that's a kind of just a spatial awareness that ideally you get two, three months before you go in somewhere. And then beyond that, Each project has its own disciplines and domains that we need to obtain a lot of information on and absorb. And clients often provide a certain amount of that to us. But we're doing a lot of desk research to complement it. That's within the projects sphere for a lot of the kind of multi year research. Like I'm working on my new book, which is about how organizations make sense of the world to affect what they think and do. That's really day after day going into a lot of research journals and looking at the primary research for things. And actually at the moment I'm looking at criminology and the kind of history of criminology as a part of a larger framework of thinking about ethics and the ethics of innovation. Yeah. In my library here, I'd say it represents maybe one tenth of the things that are currently active. There's a lot of things that are only available digitally.

You make the deliberate decision. That's why I tell folks the greatest compliment that I can have for a book is to actually physically possess it. Because I now have thousands of books and only a small percentage of those are in physical form. So you're two for two. So give you that. And of course the field study handbook. I don't even know if it is available digitally, but I think it's something you want to have the physical copy just given the artwork and the margin art and kind of the things that just make it almost a piece of artwork within itself. There's the great content, but it's a joy to consume as well. What is the. You know, I always like to end, and I appreciate you taking the time. I think one of the most fascinating things for me in hosting this podcast session is, you know, I encountered your work, became a fan, read it. I've been tracking the newsletter, purchased some. Some of the physical products as well, you know, that you're producing previously from a. From a travel perspective. And then we get to have this great conversation over the course of an hour. So I guess that's the delight of the Internet, is that you can be in Japan and I can be here, and we were able to establish this connection and talk on these topics where we have these intersections. But I always like to conclude the interview by asking, what's the best book that you've read recently that you'd recommend to the audience?

Yeah, I pulled a few from the shelf, so do you mind more than one?

No, absolutely not.

All right. I like them for different things. I think it's worth explaining mine, so I think so. First of all, the Culture Map by Erin Meyer is a really good example of some good, underlying, scientifically conducted research that she's added her own interpretation to and some of her own research to. But most importantly, she's packaged it up in such a way that abstracts it to make it accessible to a wider audience. If you understand cultural dynamics within organizations, you understand that this is a. I don't know what Americans would say, but it's basically a kind of pop version of that research. But she really is very good at abstracting that into things that someone can act upon. Yeah. If you understand the research itself, the things that she references tend to have a bit more weight in the community in terms of validity. So the Culture Map. Erin Marlins next one is Jer Thorpe.

Living in Data, my favorite book of 2021.

Yeah, I mean, Jer does just a remarkable job of making very complex information very readable with a heavy dose of humility for someone who really deserved not to be humble for what he's achieved. So, yeah, I think this is just a remarkable artifact.

I highly recommend folks watch the Oodacast I recorded with him as well, because it was just. It was a great session. And interestingly enough, you have both been referred to as the Indiana Jones of your respective fields. I Guess you share that in common.

Oh, poor dear. Those kind of labels, I think are unhelpful generally, to be honest. I mean, you know, it makes a nice title, but. Yeah, kind of counterproductive, I think. And now to get to things that I think are a little bit more geeky, but really have been foundational to my way of thinking about the world and when I'm researching. So Sense Making in Organizations by Wake. He's actually. He's got a bunch of these, but it's pretty heavy going. You really got to commit yourself to it. But I would say almost revolutionary in its way of thinking about how organizations think about themselves.

Excellent.

That's pretty awesome. And finally, this. So how writing came about. This is a really old publication, but essentially, like, what is writing? I'm going back to those origins. You know, we talk about understanding and informing, but how did writing actually come about? And it's a byproduct of something else. And what is that? And this is remarkable documentation of research and making that link between tangible things that were inscribed and language in itself. It documents that. So I recommend that. Excellent. This is definitely for. If you're really geeking out on human understanding and how we got to where we are. This is one of those origin books.

Excellent. Great. No, no, I love it. Thank you for sharing those. I'm always happy to get one, so to get four as a bonus. So I also appreciate you taking the time to have this conversation and responding to my Instagram message. I guess it does prove that, you know, the cold outreach via social media can work. So very grateful to have met you via Zoom and have shared this conversation and hope our paths cross in the real world as well.

Yeah, likewise. I hope so. I'll hope to be in the US soon for a client project as well.

Excellent. Let me know. Absolutely. Okay. All right, thank you.

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