EPIC2015 keynote
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My keynote presentation at EPIC 2015 (10th Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference) in Sao Paulo, Brazil.
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EPIC2015 keynote
- 1. 3 truths and 1 lie Reflections after many years of doing ethnographic research EPIC Conference Sao Paulo, October 2015 @luisarnal @INSITUM
- 2. TRUTH # 1 Ethnography helps make a better world
- 8. Not all business problems require ethnographic research, but all those who use ethnography help make a better world.
- 9. TRUTH # 2 Ethnography makes you live longer.
- 11. What happens if you don’t walk for 4 months?
- 12. me
- 13. me family
- 14. them
- 16. me subject
- 17. TRUTH # 3 We taste life more intensely
- 38. 1. Supernatural observation ability 2. Weakened judgement
- 39. THE LIE
- 40. Make money Acquire new businesses Envision future services Inform decision making and innovation Make a company more user-centered Really?
- 41. I this job!
- 42. “If you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living” Joseph Campbell
- 43. Keep lying so we can keep doing what we love for only doing this will make a better world, will allow you to taste life more fully and will make you live longer
Hinweis der Redaktion
- 3 truths and 1 lie Reflections after many years of doing ethnographic research First of all, let me thank the EPIC organizing committee and everybody that makes up EPIC for inviting me as a keynote speaker. It is really such a great honor to be here. To be frank, at first I was surprised with the invitation. Since I know how rigorous is the curating process at EPIC I was shocked to even be considered. But I am very glad you are giving me the honor. What I want to talk to you today captures some reflections I’ve had in the last few years about the influence that ethnographic praxis has had in my life, and by life I don’t mean only the 8-10 professional hours on weekdays, trying to decipher people; abstract meaning out of their stories; selling ethnography inside organizations; or coming up with implications and solutions that hopefully will make peoples’ life better. But LIFE (caps), our journey, the way we are as human beings, all that we think, do, use and feel both professionally and personally. This means I will go over a few personal stories (even though Americans are not fond talking about their personal life in a professional environment, but since we are in Brasil and in Latin America, I have permission to do this). On top of this, today I have keynote powers and I can talk about whatever I want ;-) It is your fault for inviting me. So what I want to do is to reveal three TRUTHS about ethnography… (personal beliefs around the role of ethnography in my life) and one LIE. My intention is to share with you the passion that I have for this user-centric approach and hopefully instill some of that passion into you. If by the end of my talk you agree to at least one of these truths, it will make me very happy.
- Truth # 1. Ethnography helps make a better world. This truth is not exclusive to ethnography—any profession can make the case for theirs having a huge value to society—but we are in an ethnography conference and it is a truth that I ponder at every day.
- The fact is that compared to many other professionals out there, we do have a bigger effect in making this world more tolerable, easier, enjoyable, better overall. This happens because we work mostly at a strategic level inside organizations. As Elizabeth Churchill mentioned yesterday, we work around “THE BIG PICTURE”. The type of challenges we help solve have to do with inquiring the present in order to design a long-term future—whether this future takes the form of a product, a service, a policy, or a business alliance, while many other professions work at a tactical level, a short-term solution, a specific execution. Please note that I am not saying short-term solutions don’t help make a better world, take for example: doctors taking care of patients are making a better world,
- architects designing beautiful buildings also make the world better,
- politicians designing laws… I have more trouble thinking about how they make a better world ;-). But seriously, the work of most ethnographic researchers here—those who combine user-centricity with business strategy have had an invaluable effect in improving this world. In my last 12 years since we co-founded INSITUM, our teams have completed more than 1400 projects for the biggest companies in the world, and most of these have encountered inspirational stories like the one I am about to tell.
- Healthcare is not like it used to be My team, Eyra and Olivia were doing ethnographic research for a big pharmaceutical company. Their objective was to understand the dynamics (behaviors, perceptions, communication breakdowns, stakeholders) around a specific chronic illness in order to develop service innovation ideas that would help patients manage their disease—in this case a specific type of cancer. The team interviewed doctors, patients, caregivers, payors and other stakeholders involved during the pre-diagnosis, treatment and maintenance of the patients. After a few interviews, the team noticed that doctors were using very detailed descriptions around specific moments of the patient journey, but were vague and wary in some other moments—specifically the moments when the doctor described the specific dosage and adverse effects of the treatment they were prescribing. After talking with a few doctors, they discovered small inconsistencies, contradicting stories and evidence in non-verbal communication that felt wrong—this is hard to do since specialist doctors will hardly recognize ignorance in regards to a therapeutic area they are experts in. In subsequent interviews, the team probed further into that moment and confirmed a systematic and widespread misunderstanding in the way doctors were prescribing our clients medicine—apparently led by key opinion leaders and not by published research. As it turns out, these prescription mistakes were having serious consequences in a number of cases, not only harsher side effects and patients suffering but long-term effects and even premature deaths nationwide. This was not enough. After careful analysis, we ended up discovering a corruption scheme between the government health agency, some key opinion leaders and another competing pharmaceutical company, where doctors would intentionally prescribe low dosages of our client medicine—and this was causing fatal consequences in a number of cases. We had a difficult time communicating this scheme to our client, since participant confidentiality had to be preserved, but we did provide enough evidence for them to move ahead to a number of actions (such as lobbying) directed to reduce the corruption and the fatal consequences of this action. This is just one of many cases where I have seen ethnographic research have consequences far more fundamental than simply “discovering insights for business purposes”. This case is only one example where ethnographic research helped 1) “fight a corrupt system”, 2) “increase the quality of life for patients” and 3) “reduce fatalities due to doctors incompetence”, all three very good reasons to believe we did good to the world. I chose to tell you this case because I learned about it almost at the same time when I was writing this paper, but only in the last year I have seen at least a fifty clear examples of how teams at INSITUM have used ethnography make this a better world, including: Helping children learn better; educating families into having better nutritional choices; helping garbage collectors live with more dignity; reducing the stress and uncertainty when a low income entrepreneur requests a credit; eliminating accidents in a manufacturing facility; streamlining the process to get into a university program; making older people feel more satisfied with their life accomplishments, or simply helping people live more happily.
- In a world plagued by invisible negative forces, such as: selfishness, envy, corruption, incompetence, involuntary migration, financial instability, uneven income distribution, and other consequential disorders, having people like you who are passionate for studying others and using this to guide organizations over what they should be doing, is a blessing to the world. To be frank, I don’t believe all business problems require ethnographic research, but all of those who use ethnography do help make this a better world. We all should be proud of what we do.
- Truth # 2. Ethnography makes you live longer. This one is a bit harder to explain. By living longer I don’t mean we will all live to be 100 years old but because we live several lives in a single one. Let me explain this with a personal story.
- When I was 16 years old and right before entering high school I had an accident while trying to touch my toes with my hands as part of the sports exam in my school. Not being a very flexible person as I am (and neither a good-grader), I tried again and again until I managed to break both femurs—at the same time. It was a weird event that no doctor could explain—except one who rightfully said: “you are too stubborn”. Anyway, long story short I got seven big nails and screws into my legs trying to hold it all together and was confined to a bed in a horizontal position for 4 months until the bones were solid enough to withstand walking.
- And you know what happens if you don’t walk for 4 months? (ASK) The first thing that happens is that you forget how to walk! And the second thing that happens is that you get utterly bored. Four months in the same bed, in the same room, in the same house, no internet. Yes I had a TV, and magazines and people visiting but really after the first two weeks, TV is not really that fun, and people stop visiting. So in those 4 months I spent a lot of time with myself and reflecting on many different things: Why my house was designed that way; why people always screamed when they won at “The Price is Right”; Why it hurt so much if I tried to move my legs; and even speculating on all the perks I could get if I lived the rest of my life in a wheelchair.
- But one of the main things I realized during those months was the fact that for me, life was moving in slow motion—almost in pause. Let me explain what I mean by this. If you stop moving, or stay in one place for too long, or you limit your thinking (i.e. meditating) you will eventually get a sense that you are “wasting time”. Well, for me, lying in bed meant wasting time while I saw that others in my family were not. From my bed I watched how other people in my family lived their life… My sister wake up, chose her clothes, went up and down the house, went to school, came back, ballet, homework, friends, dinner. She did so many things in a single day! My parents had similar hectic schedules. Left in the morning for work, came for lunch (in Mexico lunch is our main meal), had a siesta (my dad is my hero because all of his life he has gotten away with a 30-min siesta after lunch). In the afternoon more activities, my father would go to teach at the university and my mother would stay with me. And every time a member of my family came home, they would be filled with many stories to tell about their day, from the things that had happened to them, what they experienced, what they smelled, what they ate, who they talked to, where they’d been, what they saw. And when they asked what I did during my day, I simply responded “nothing”. I really had nothing to share. Because life had happened more for them than for me.
- In the same 24 hours, they had done so many things and I had done so few. But one of the biggest learnings I got from these 4 months was realizing the fact that doing things, experiencing things, learning things, is really the only way of cramming more life into the same time. To put it differently, given the same amount of time, people who do or think more things are really living more than others (and this by the way is the only way that humans have to control time—perceptually at least). Any physicist will tell you that time is not really that flexible or controllable, and that it applies to everyone the same way, but I have discovered that there is indeed a way to control time, and that is having more stories in your bag. What does this has to do with ethnography? Well a lot actually.
- Because most people spend their days, months and years experiencing the same contexts, talking with the same people, ignoring people around them and sticking with the familiar. And for these people, their life is like mine during those 4 months lying in bed in the same room.
- However, ethnographers are blessed with the task of doing fieldwork, of inquiring deep into the stories, the environments, the culture of other people—so different from ours that even for a short moment, we get to live not our own life but our participants lives.
- And ethnographers have this strange ability to take a moment of someone else’s life and you put it inside your own life, and the effect of this is such that it really extends your own life! This is why it gets to tiresome to do an ethnographic interview: you are living your life as researcher but also living someone else’s life as the informant. I don´t know if it happens to you, but for me this effect is addictive! We can´t turn it off. We are like a sponge because all the people stories that we are exposed to, make our life longer and it helps us realize that we are not spending time, but multiplying it. So next time you are doing fieldwork and you are tired as hell, or you are scared or you are disgusted, or you are in danger, think about how much additional life you are getting out of your time in this world and be grateful for it.
- Truth # 3. Ethnographers taste life more intensely. If the previous truth has to do with controlling time, this truth has to do with controlling intensity.
- The more you are exposed to experiences, the more you are capable of detecting subtleties that make you enjoy those experiences further. This is a phenomenon most often seen in gastronomy. For example the first time you try wine, your palate cannot really differentiate the type or quality of wine you are drinking, much less the region, or the grape type or the year or winery. However, the more wine you have, the more refined your palate and the more enjoyment you get from drinking it. This happens with so many different things in life: Food, beverages, art, theater, travel, and so forth.
- However, those experiences are context specific—your taste for art is only used and enjoyed when you look at a painting; your taste for caipirinhas is only useful in Brazil ;-) this means you can’t really appreciate them unless you are experiencing them. But ethnographers, we develop a taste for life because we study culture, people’s daily life, our material world, our traces and stories and behaviors and all of this develops our palate for life.
- Those who know me well, know that I am an obsessive collector of stovetop espresso makers—I have more than 200 of them. Some people see this product as a boring or uninteresting artifact, in fact the way these work is the same for all of them. Water is heated in the bottom receptacle and the pressure formed by the heat, forces the water through a filter that holds the coffee grains and the brewed coffee is then directed to the upper receptacle via a spurting cone. It is quite a fascinating mechanism, but also a mechanism where subtle design features that make all the difference in the way you appreciate the design. For example, this one has a nice pattern that was only done in the 1940’s and a bakelite handle; this other one is actually one of the smallest functioning espresso makers-a prototype someone did; this one by Hisao Hosoe looks like a roman column and is so elegantly designed that it might be a piece of art, while this cheesy one mocks a middle eastern lamp. But talking about strange looking ones, the Vesubio by Gaetano Pesce looks like a volcanoe, maybe this is why they only produced 500 of them. I assume that many of you have never analyzed this object in such detail, and many others might have been using it every day without giving it much thought, but what we just did—developing our “stovetop espresso maker buds” will help us appreciate this object much more the next time we see one.
- Ethnographers go through a similar process during our professional lives. The more we are exposed to culture and the wicked lives of people, the more we appreciate life. Do this long enough and you will end up tasting life more intensely than others; do this long enough and you will develop a higher bandwidth of attention (what I call “life buds”) and this allows us to experience life more intensely.
- There are two major reasons why I believe this happens. The first is that we have developed a supernatural ability to observe and to notice things that few people notice. We travel in this world with our eyes wide open, more aware than others. Just as I went over the special features that make each espresso maker different from each other and you had a “wow” moment learning about them, ethnographers develop a skill to notice all the details that make up people’s life and have these “wow” moments—adrenaline rushes—when we discover the “why” behind things. The second reason why this happens is that we tend to postpone judgment of what we experience—to the point of losing it. For us, there is no right or wrong but only facts. Our focus of attention is to describe the behaviors, feelings, thoughts and material evidence of people to produce some sort of novel knowledge, to understand something better than someone else but in order to do so, we need to see things from a neutral point of view—to avoid our own interpretation. And the lack of judgement makes you happier, makes you live life more fully and allows for inner peace. People are the most fascinating thing on earth, (more than wine) and we, social scientists are the ones who get to taste them.
- And now over to the lie. As professional ethnographers, most of us work in corporate environments (or as consultants to corporate environments) where we constantly defend our work. We interact with people from very different backgrounds and interests: engineers, financial folks, sales & marketing, human resources and so forth. Most times our interactions with these people are cordial and respectful, they understand the value of our work and we focus on sharing the implications that our work has to their work. After weeks of planning, fieldwork, and analysis, we sit down with the engineers and share customer insights and recommendations on the way they should design the product. In the few cases when these so called “internal clients” question our methodologies, our qualitative samples, or the recommendations that we give, we end up justifying that the main driver to do what we do is: adding value to “the bottom line”.
- As some industry practitioners have mentioned in this conference, we help these companies “make money”, “acquire new businesses” (Intel), “Envision future services” (Nissan), “Inform decision making and innovation” (Steelcase) “Make a company more customer-centered” And we use this narrative so often that it leads us to believe that our main motivation to do what we do is this. Really?
- I think this is the lie. Because when I look around this room (and I know many of you for years); when I see the passion that my own employees have towards each and every project they do; and when I see the excitement that many of our clients have towards our deliverables; and even when I talk to people who are new to this field, I can’t really believe that their motivation to do this work is to help an organization. I believe that our motivation is different. We study society, people, and culture not to make a company more successful or more profitable—this is what we keep telling others—but our true, main motivation is: we just love to do this. And we get such a rush from doing this that we end up “lying” to our clients, and giving them the most functional and capitalist justification that we know in order to continue doing what we love doing. Really, how many of you have in the last month thought “I love this job”? (Raise hands) Most of us “don’t do this for the income, we do it for the outcome” that comes with doing this work. For me, It struck me the first time I did fieldwork back at the E-lab days and it strikes me back every time I go to the field, or everytime I finish an intense analysis session, or everytime I see the clarity in my clients eyes, and everytime a client congratulates one of my teams. Inside I always say to myself “I love this game”.
- As Joseph Campbell mentioned in his popular interview with Bill Moyers: “If you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living.” I think this phrase resonates with most of us. User-centeredness is the track we chose to be on.
- So, keep lying so we can keep doing what we love for only doing this 1) will make a better world, 2) will allow you to taste life more fully and 3) will make you live longer.
- God bless you and thank you.