The Key Conceptual Shifts toward Radically Human-Centric Research

In the last chapter, I discussed the need to reclaim ethnography as a practice and a way of being in the world. This is the first, and most fundamental in the advancement of a radical human-centric approach. However, a rehabilitated ethnography is only the first step in repairing commercial research. The radical human-centric approach to research must also solve the many problems lurking in the corners of conventional innovation research. It needs to provide an alternative to the antiquated ideas and practices in market research and corrects the gimmicks and weak research approaches that are inherent in design thinking and human-centric design. Since none of these frameworks and methods are up to the task of providing a solid foundation for innovative thinking and action, it will require making additional shifts in thought and practice. It is necessary to reconceptualize the underpinnings of commercial innovation research. We must shift ourselves away from the bad habits and poor theorizing that plague conventional commercial research and move towards a theoretical and practical foundation built on an approach to research capable of delivering what human-centric perspectives have been promising: an understanding of customer/user/patients and their contexts capable of grounding successful innovation and design. This means we need to nudge innovation research practice towards a more solid foundation. We need to make a series of conceptual shifts in the world of business thinking and commercial research so we can fully make use of real research.

The Radical human-centric approach to real research brings interventions to 10 dimensions of the conceptual models governing innovation. The first shift, multi-disciplinarity, encapsulates the key alternations in thought and practice necessary to embrace a balanced research approach and to build the perspectival foundations for a radically human-centric approach to business research. The other nine—time, change drivers, the subjects of study, complexity versus simplicity, positive skepticism, the idea of needs, growth and homeostasis, impact and barriers, and research at scale—allow us to focus on the conceptual shifts needed to release commercial research from the shackles of many of the outdated, insensitive, unethical, and downright silly practices constraining it today.

Real research is engaged with the world in the most direct, experiential way. It is conducted alongside the people we study, on their terms, and deals with this world as it is, without tools to simplify what is found. There is no room for “good enough.” There are no compromises, gimmicks, or shortcuts. A researcher doing real research is in the thick of things, working at the point where the line blurs between research and just living life. When studying people, their behaviors, and their thoughts, researchers live life with them. They eat their food, speak their language, dance their dances, shop in their stores, use their smartphone apps, and live as they do. Here, the researcher is also always thinking about their audience and how to explain the meaning and impact of these experiences to people who did not have the luck to be there in the thick of it all with them. What this means is that within a commercial context, real research begins with an ethnography inquiry. This is true even if it ends with a quantitative study.

To understand real research and working in a radically human-centric manner, we must come to terms with what it means to do ethnography. However, this is not as easy as it sounds. For many years, ethnography has been borrowed—a stronger way to put it would be appropriated—by design research and design thinking. This has not been good for ethnography because the practice and tradition have not been respected. The weaknesses inherent in these research processes have been covered by claims of the power of the anthropological approaches and ethnographic methods they try to employ. Few practitioners who claim to be proficient in ethnography have any substantive training. Few commercial researchers are actually doing ethnography. At most, they are using a very watered-down variation. In short, the human-centric research and design research world still do not really know what ethnography is. So, to explain the ethnographic underpinnings of real research, we must first cut through some hype and misinformation and claim the practice back for human-centric research. Once we understand a little bit about ethnography, we will be able to see how it provides the framework for real research and a better approach to human-centric innovation.

An innovation consultant's life is often filled with little absurdities. The very idea of selling innovative ideas is, when you really think about it, rather strange. But there are even more fantastical moments and absurdities lurking in the very center of how the industry works. In part, this is because those of us in the innovation industry—research and design consulting in particular—work in a business where almost everyone is unaware that all they do is tell stories. Storytelling is so central to the process, that the entire industry is just an organized chain of storytellers fueled by newer and newer stories. Customer/user/patients tell researchers stories about their lives. The researchers tell these stories to designers and strategists to activate possible changes. These designers and strategists tell stories about how these changes will help people live better and companies make more money. The designers also tell stories to engineers who build things. Then the companies use marketing departments to tell stories about the benefits of the new products to the customers who initiated the whole process. Journalists then review the products and tell more stories about whether or not the marketing claims are true. Finally, the customers decide for themselves and tell stories about how these products work or do not work to the next bunch of design researchers who come knocking. So, you can see, storytelling is everything. Now I want to explore what it means to push ourselves further toward a radical humancentric way of doing research by exploring what radical storytelling looks like in contrast to older formats.

Practical Storytelling

One of my early realizations about storytelling and its place in commercial research came in an unlikely situation. It started with a problem. My colleagues and I were halfway through a project before we finally learned what the project was actually about. We were sitting with our clients around a table in our offices in San Francisco. Two of them had flown a long way from Asia to be at this meeting, and the other two were quite agitated to have them there. We were working on the sensemaking stage together after finishing a series of ethnographies in the US, UK, and Germany.

Broadly speaking, there are five parts to a radically human-centric approach. They are dependent on each other and make no sense separately. Instead of being a modular process, where you can plug one phase into a design sprint, or conduct it individually as a workshop, they must all be present for it to be any kind of research at all. So, while you must go through each step, there is no set timeframe, minimum or maximum, or proscription on when they must be applied. Rather, this is the set of steps every good research program must have in order to be successful. They can be executed rapidly or stretched over a long period of time.

The five steps are:

• 1. Scoping – Establishing the purpose of the research and tuning the approach to the goals.

• 2. Observing – Studying the world as it is and digging deep into the lives of others.

• 3. Understanding – Making sense of what you found in your observations.

• 4. Generating – Developing statements of truth about what you found and think and extrapolating the next steps.

• 5. Activating – Preparing your insights for your audience and helping them understand what to do about it.

There should be nothing surprising here. Every one of the actions one undertakes in each phase of an RHC research program should be intuitive and solidly grounded in common sense. I argue the real shock lies in why few people talk about research in this way. Rather than being a branded process, or a framework for success, these are just the steps to executing good work. They can be applied in a number of different ways or spread across different kinds of research. The Radical Human Centricity is less a process than it is a set of alterations to thought and action in order to achieve the goal of really keeping people and the reality of their lives at the forefront as we research, ideate, and design for the betterment of everyone's lives. These five phases can even be mapped over a design thinking program, getting us from an idea to a product, service, or experience in market.

Few of the steps in these five categories are sufficient in themselves to earn the name Radical Human-Centricity.

Uncoded in academic jargon, authentic and bold, and most of all necessary, Paul Hartley's book delivers a roadmap to courageous creativity and offers an approach to the vision, complexity, and scale necessary to make qualified observations founded on rigor, sensitivity, and knowledge.

As the title suggests, commercial research is in need of radical change. There is an immutable truth in his observation that design and market research are not equipped for learning the semiotic system another person uses to understand the world around them, or their purposeful behavior. The lack of context and awareness is the root cause of the current commercial research's inability to produce reliable results. Hartley is endeavoring to make individuals understand that research into human behavior is much harder than advertised and also that it requires a specialist practice to achieve its intended purpose. What separates the people we call experts from those who are creative thinkers and skilled planners? Experts are people who know what to do. I find this Bill Maris (founder of Google Ventures) quote entirely appropriate in illustrating the point Hartley is trying to make in the book: “those of us who know what we are doing, know what we are doing!”

The essential components of Radical Human Centricity are framed by a structure that is both pragmatic and compelling. The book is a lively and fascinating the exploration of the transforming power of specialized knowledge and research. Radical Human Centricity unravels the intractable need for adaptive experimentation, human centricity, and learned human excellence in research. It suggests we can entirely dismiss the limitations of mere rationality in navigating the complexity of innovation through an absolute commitment to human-centeredness, specialized research guided by constant intellectual curiosity, focused creativity, and critical thinking.

The scope of Radical Human Centricity expands and develops into both a philosophical account and a practical manifesto, one that guides a radically new vision and the commitment to uncovering the skillful work that lies behind understanding people's motivations and actions. That framework supports a radically new form of critical reflection—one sorely needed in commercial practice. Its potential is astonishing: enabling the transformation of our worldview and giving businesses the knowledge to develop tools that can successfully process information about human behavior in the context of the development of products and services.

We have seen that Thomas Reid credits even young children with a solid understanding of promises and the obligations they entail. Recall his example of the two boys playing with a top and scourge. Let's continue this story for Reid. Suppose the top belongs to Calvin, the scourge to Andy. Calvin takes the first turn. When the top stops spinning, Calvin hands the scourge back to Andy, picks up his top and abruptly leaves. “But you promised,” says Andy. Absent some special explanation or apology, both boys should agree that a wrong has been done. Not only is Andy disappointed at not having his turn with the top, seemingly the trust he extended to Calvin was betrayed— Calvin had given his word.

What else needs to be added to this story for us to understand what has happened and why the boys should see it as morally problematic? For Reid, very little, if anything. The mutual promise made by the boys is understood by both to have committed them knowingly and willingly to take turns. But this is likely not the only communication between them. For example, Calvin might also have indicated to Andy that he was going to an event with his parents that evening. But this would not be a promise of anything to Andy. It may suggest that Calvin believes he has an obligation to be with his parents that evening. However, Calvin's departure without offering any explanation parting words need not call this to mind. To all appearances, Calvin simply broke his promise to Andy.

Clearly, Calvin and Andy know how to promise, and they can recognize when a promise has been made to them. They both know that Calvin's breaking his promise without any explanation or indication that he will make up for this later is morally problematic. This story, we could say, presents us with the premise of a promise. This premise does not include a definition of “contract” or “promise.” It does not presume or rely on an underlying, elaborate theory of promising. It includes only the boys’ understanding of what has taken place. Calvin and Andy promised each other and thereby took on obligations to each other.

The first step is to work on your own practice to maximize what you will accomplish in field. It is important to begin by understanding why research is needed in the first place. Usually, innovation and commercial research projects are initiated for good reasons. Sometimes they do not. Knowing the difference is a key piece in planning a solid piece of customer/user research. Good reasons involve a genuine curiosity about the world and a desire to use the results of the research to make the world a better place. They can also include a clear need to fill a lack of information about a particular group of people, a specific behavior, or an unknown or emerging market that requires new approaches to address. Bad reasons are more numerous. From my experience, they include a desire to address a political situation in a company (which in the case I witnessed involved disproving a VP's opinion), testing a commonly held, but fictitious belief (that millennials and generation Z are drastically different from other consumer groups), or to conduct a research program that has already been conducted and well documented elsewhere. More egregious examples of bad reasons include conducting research just to “cover your butt,” to develop reductionist perspectives on consumers (such as poorly constructed personas or segments) in order to avoid doing other kinds of research, or to run a cheaper research program to avoid doing it correctly. I am using these examples to make it clear that the first step in conducting a radically human-centric research program is to decide if the research is needed at all. If there are solid, honest reasons, then you should do research. If there are not, it is better to just leave people alone to live their lives in peace.

The second step is to scope the project properly. This means spending the time to carefully match the goals of the project with the approach and methods you will use to accomplish them. Scoping research is not about deciding how much money to spend, how much time to devote, or how many people to recruit.

Researching in a radically human-centric way requires a focus beyond mere process. Sadly, commercial research practitioners—particularly in innovation and design—are enthralled by process and the promises made in their name. One of my biggest critiques of how so-called human-centric research is employed in design thinking is the tendency to over-emphasize process overthinking. True, this is a bad habit in business thinking to begin with. But as I have described several times, adherents to the tenets of design thinking and market researchers tend to believe process guarantees success. This is certainly how design thinking is sold to customers and to potential practitioners. However, process does not provide anything other than structure. Process simply provides a framework for all of the small actions needed to succeed. Plodding through the steps will not give you good results. Only good observation and analysis provide solid insights. So, accept no substitutes.

My hope is that many people will begin to use the alterations to commercial research practice captured in my concept of Radical Human Centricity. Since it is essential to have some sort of outline of practice showing how these alterations work in a real-world setting, I will present one. The purpose of this section of the book is to help everyone collaborate, coordinate, and commit to the rigors of a radical human-centric approach. However, I cannot emphasize this enough: the process is only a way to organize the order of operations. Without the right people, skills, knowledge, and analytical procedures, the process is nothing.

With this in mind, this chapter is a detailed description of the actions central to a radical human-centric research program paired with an outline of the kinds of people you will need to involve, the skills you will need to have, and the things you must do at each step in order to ensure you fulfill the promises you make to yourselves and your audience. It is a set of alterations to existing commercial research patterns and to the design thinking approach itself.

Feel free to read this section all the way through. But this section is also divided into a number of sub-sections and key topics and can serve as a reference manual of sorts.

The understand phase does not usually appear in a lot of service design protocols. It is missing in the “Observe, Generate, Activate” format used in service design and foresight circles. It appears a bit in the “define” stage of the design thinking process, but given that this protocol outlines its actions as “empathize,” “define,” “ideate,” “prototype,” and “test,” we can see emphasizes problem framing and is not about a true analysis of what is discovered in research. This is a real shame, because this is an omission borne out of the “action-oriented,” somewhat antiintellectual phase in contemporary business. There is little appreciation, or time allowed, for the work of sitting and thinking, arguably the key element of any consulting process. Since most consultants and innovation teams use off-the-shelf formats like service design, or design thinking processes, there is very little to differentiate them except their skill as analysts. And yet, the process they adhere to does not really give detailed thinking its due. It is a forgotten skill in any research process, and it is what happens between the “ethno” and “graphy” of ethnography.

The RHC process puts an emphasis on analysis and thinking by giving them their own phase—the Understand phase. What this means is in any RHC engagement, the thinking is not squeezed between the flight home and the production of some deliverable but is given the appropriate amount of room to breathe.

Thinking is an undervalued skill in business and design. It is not something cultivated in cultures that prefer “do” over “think.” But without analysis, data is just data, and fieldnotes are just a list of curious observations. Insights do not happen overnight, and so it is important to allow researchers the time to make sense of what they experienced and to translate this into what everyone needs to know about we world they studied. This is a time for experience and expertise. The Understand phase is also a time for conversation, collaboration, and argument between collaborators. It is a time to make mistakes and to correct problems in thinking. Done properly, the Understand phase develops the foundations holding everything coming after.

In research, the generate phase is focused on the articulation of insights and the establishment of a common understanding of the context.

Insights

In Chapter 6, I established the purpose and structure of an insight, which describes, explains, and predicts a particular phenomenon in context. This describes what they should be, but there are some practical considerations that need to be addressed as they are developed.

Description

As a descriptive construct, an insight should detail something as thickly as possible. But this description needs to be organized so that it allows the audience to view the content of the insight through the eyes of a cultural insider. This is not the time to foster a clinical perspective. This is important because this description allows the audience to get a visceral sense of the distance between them and their customer/user/patient.

Define

Insights should raise concepts and terms that are completely new to the audience. It is easy to do this if you draw from the terminology native to the context you studied. However, this means an insight should also help the audience understand the meaning of these terms or the importance of the concepts. Here we are staring to being the translation process and providing the intended audience access to ideas they need to understand.

Translate

Insights should point towards the culture and perspective of the audience. They should serve as a bridge between the people who were studied and the people who want to learn about them. As such, the fundamental purpose of insight is to be a bridge between these two groups.

This is not an easy thing to do, because it involves an intimate knowledge of both. If one is a consulting researcher, then there needs to be time and effort devoted to learning about the client and their internal politics, knowledge system, and the perspectives they have on the world. One of the most useful tools to use to accomplish this is conducting a set of baselining interviews at the beginning of a project. These interviews should be with the people running the project, receiving the work (e.g., design group, engineering teams, etc.), and the stakeholders who have a voice in determining whether or not the project was successful.

Making the commitment to work in a radically human-centric manner is brave. It involves taking a step away from what does not work very well, towards something that is difficult but more rewarding. While this involves doing away with many of the moribund, out-of-date practices still used in the world of commercial applied research, doing so leaves a large hole in a conventional research practice. These older ways of working have been so entrenched, that they leave a big hole when they are gone. But once this is accomplished what do you do now that you cannot rely on easy methods like personas, gamified synthesis, focus group settings, and quick, tactical customer/user engagements? You fill the void with detail, stories, experiences, and careful, methodical analysis. To do this, you must learn to meet the world and your respondents on their own terms and study their thoughts, behaviors, and contexts without resorting to the kind of abstraction, reductionism, and simplicity of the older format. This means instead of adapting market research or design research tools to fit circumstances they are not suited for; it is better to approach researching people in innovation contexts armed with the new tools a radical human-centric approach provides. These come from anthropology, foresight, and new forms of design research methods like transition design and design anthropology. All of these are intended to study, analyze, and make sense of the world as it is, not the simplified version we might want it to be.

This will not be an easy task. Once you leave behind the ideologies and methods of market research you are immediately confronted with how complicated researching real life can be. People are not easy to understand, rational, decision makers who have “needs,” market research makes them out to be. A radically human-centric researcher is confronted with a messy, multiplicitious world filled with people who inhabit many social roles simultaneously, lie, and act in ways that are not clear to themselves. It is not possible to find a generative grammar of behavior, this was tried in the 1950s and 1960s and the project did not go very well. You cannot control the situation to focus on mythical phenomena like the “naïve response” or simply collect observations to identify an “unmet need.”

When it comes to researching real people, current market research, design thinking, and human-centered approaches are actually quite poor guides for how to conduct research that is actually human-centric. They provide clear guidance on how to develop data for use within a business, be it market information, demographics and psychographics, or to fill design personas. But the methodological toolkit for how to do this research is surprisingly small. Design thinking and design research are especially lacking in solid research practices, preferring to focus on empathy as the grounding for solid research. The guidance on research practices that the majority of descriptions of HCR/HCD provide is approximately this: “[…] empathy is an approach that draws upon people's real-world experiences to address modern challenges. When companies allow a deep emotional understanding of people's needs to inspire them—and transform their work, their teams, and even their organization at large—they unlock the creative capacity for innovation.” This is all well and fine, but it hides the fact that empathy is neither a research methodology nor a gateway to knowledge of people. In fact, empathy is just table-stakes. It is the grounding every researcher should have to do any kind of research about people and behavior, from historiography to census taking.

A deeper problem reveals itself when people make methodological statements about design thinking and HCD. In the same article on empathy by several researchers at Ideo entitled “Empathy on the edge” the full definition begins this way: “The definition of empathy is the ability to be aware of, understanding of, and sensitive to another person's feelings and thoughts without having had the same experience. As human-centered designers, we consciously work to understand the experience of our clients and their customers. These insights inform and inspire our designs.” What is curious about this is the subtle shift that happens in this, and most, description of empathy in HCD. Do you see it? In the first sentence it says “feelings and thoughts without […] the same experience,” and in the second sentence it says “experience of our clients and their customers.” The first problem lies in the fact that the interior, emotional experience of an individual is not what people study when they do any form of UX (UX researchers are not interested in the thoughts of an individual).