The same effect we saw with the client. Often we see that it is hard to keep ‘discipline’ in the viewing room. Rather sooner than later discussions take away the attention from what is happening in ‘the other room’. And for viewers it often is tempting to reject the answers – especially for staff responsible for product, website, or service development. The consumer – in their eyes – doesn’t always understand the difficulties of there job. If you take away the wall, it becomes impossible to start a conversation on either the research (or on the rate of mortgage interest): you have no time for that. And directly confronted with consumer, the frustration is taken away a bit: you can’t just deny what is been said and you are able to ask questions. Now those responsible for making – in this case – a website were able to test their ideas and thoughts directly by sharing them with consumer.

As a consequence you see a level of engagement that you don’t normally see.

Inspired by the beautiful results of the co-creation workshops, I would like to talk about the methodology background of co-creation workshops. I have this urge because of the resistance I still feel with clients to the approach of workshops with consumer and clients working together on new concepts. There are a few major fears:

1. will the consumer not be afraid and be intimidated by the client?
2. what about objectivity? Do we get objective results?
3. the consumer has no phantasy and is not able to ‘think outside the box’. We only get diluted ideas in this way

The first one is very easy. As if any client could be intimidating! As if consumers would be intimidated nowadays by any authority! I mean: doctors have to follow the exact instructions of partly illiterate consumers who have been doing web-research on their complaints. Teachers have problems with parents insisting on a special treatment for their kids. And the consumer would shy away from a marketing manager or new product developer? They won’t and they don’t. I have been doing co-creation workshops with very senior clients and it never has been a problem at all.

Now about the second one. In the old research paradigm the ‘scientific’ value is in objectivity. In order to have objective results, a wall is needed between consumer and client. The researcher is the ‘middle man’, not biased, not interested in the outcome and therefore a guarantee to an objective outcome. The client is allowed to watch trough the one way mirror. A basic assumption is that there is an objective truth that can be found if looked for in the right (that is: unbiased) way. In qualitative research this objective truth often is finding out about consumers emotions and needs. If this objective truth is delivered by the research project, you can use the results to implement. You can sort of ‘deliver’ the results (preferably in a report) to the client. Enlightened by the truth the right actions, as prescribed in the recommendations, can be taken with improved advertising, product development or websites as a consequence and Everyone Will Live Happy Thereafter.

However, in thinking about solutions in improving products, designs or services, there is not such a thing as a ‘guaranteed, objective’ to success. Objective and rational thinking is not the right attitude for innovation. Objectivity and analytical thinking is very important but it is not useful in a creation phase. Creation is more like ‘evolution’. In evolution there are no right solutions, there are many solutions. The evolutionists describe a ‘field of possibilities‘  with barriers and attractors (a fitness landscape) that is in a constant flux. It is not possible to find the right solution by reason, because you can’t control the environment (as you can in a scientific experiment where you have carefully taken away all context and test in an idealized situation that will never occur in reality. That’s why evolution is in favor of many solutions and of variations. There is not an objective and reproducible road to any solution. It is more a model of ‘trial and error’. You see it when you get there.

So as opposed to the ‘analytical mode’ – that is archetypical for a research situation – you would be interested in a ‘integration mode’. Far more important words that help you in the creation process would be ‘imagination’ and ‘involvement’. It is exactly those values that tend to get lost in an analytic approach. And it is exactly those values that are there in a well moderated co-creation workshop.
Now the last fear. Will a consumer be able to fruitfully participate in an innovation project?. Could it be unwise to ask the consumer to think together with the client over any innovation? Doesn’t the consumer stick with ‘the old rules’? Here we see the old fear as described in my ‘Alfa or beta’ blog. The consumer as destroyer of ideas. And the researcher as the facilitator of this mass idea construction. Extended experience with co-creation has learned us otherwise. The idea of the ‘stupid consumer that doesn’t understand real innovation’ is rooted in wrong questions. If you asked a consumer 30 years ago ‘are you interested in machines that dispose money after entering a 4-digit code’ you were bound the get negative answers (as the research did). But that is basically: bringing the consumer to an analytical mode. So the answer is: if you set up the workshop in the right way, the consumer is not acting as ‘innovation-destroyer’.

A bit of a long story. Sorry about that. And I haven’t been able to write half of what I wanted to touch. I would like to dive deeper into this in a paper that I intend to write.

However, as bad as a beta fault can be, there is also the chance of an alpha fault. There are a few famous examples. A fairly recent one was the ‘new Coca Cola taste’. It was tested and found a major improvement. The innovation died a quick death, after consumer started a massive protest against the disappeared ‘trusted taste’. Another example is older: a few decades ago a cigarette without smoke was designed, and thoroughly tested. It had to be withdrawn in a few days. Nobody bought it.

Here the mechanism is completely different. A collective wrong focus. Together with the client, the researchers share a tunnel vision. Context is ignored, common sense replaced by a shared vision of Reality As It Could Be If Only It Was The Way We Wanted It.

I have been given a hilarious video about a qualitative example of a ‘beta mistake’: a focus group to find out the attitude towards a new invention (the wheel). The research method seemed to have been designed in order to ‘falsify’ the new invention. The video is a must see. It is also a very strong stereotypical story of How Research Kills New Ideas. It sort of demonetises the focus group method, showing how a researcher COULD go completely astray by encouraging the wrong kind of rationalisations. Click on the link to see it if you want to have laugh.

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It could be used as an instruction video, asking students to pinpoint the Four Major Mistakes.The biggest mistake is setting up a focus group about this as an idea. Innovation can only be discussed in a focus group if it is incremental innovation as opposed to rule breaking innovation. The second mistake is the test material. If you would have rule breaking innnovation, you would need to show context and future use situations. Third is the recruitment. If you have a rule breaking innovation and you would like to discuss it in you shouldn’t invite the average consumer. You recruit either consumers who are into innovation or even ’semi-experts’. The fourth mistake is the moderation. The moderator gives plenty of room for post rationalisations. The human brain works counter intuitive. We think that our thoughts and opinions precede our choices. In reality it is reverse: we choose and than create opinions according to the choice. The reversed timing can be monitored: they occor as recurrent patterns in the brain after the choice has been made. It is therefor a big mistake to dive to deep into opinions and beliefs, especially in innovation, because there is a tendency in the human brain to dislike the new. A logo is liked more as it has been seen more often. This is referred to as the ‘mere-exposure’ effect. Since innovative stuff can never have been ’seen often’ it is disadvantaged in a test situation (and in the real situation as a matter of fact).

Funny how strong the illusion of ourselves as an individual is. And to see how we boil down our ‘individual selves’ to the part of us we know best: our conscious thoughts. We feel our choices to be completely free. We feel we make our own decisions in our conscience mind. The fact is however that our choices are contextual, based on influences we do not always notice. We react to our company. Our voice adapts (without us noticing) to status: the pitch raises if we meet a ‘boss’ and lowers if we feel socially above. This is all behaviour that has been measured and proved – but we are not aware of it. How much individuality is in behaviour we are not aware of?

There is a different level where the illusion of individuality is in tension with reality. In our world achievements are important (sometimes even in the circles that are achievement-aversive,  competing in being more averse to achievement than others). We are highly trained in perceiving personal achievements as ‘individual’: something to be proud of as a person. There is nothing wrong with that, but if you look at any achievement under a looking glass, you will have to notice that there are no ‘purely’ individual achievements. I write this blog on a Mac Air. The software is developed by Blog Press. I lend all of the words from the English language, that – by chance – is the product of many language like Frisian (my origins are from “Fryslan”), French and many others. I learned the language at school. The thoughts I express are lend, if there is any originality in it is the blending of ideas. If there is any skill in language usage, I probably inherited it from my father (a preacher) and my mother (very good in telling stories). But we flourish on the idea of our own achievements. It has been proved that we get depressed if we do not indulge in a exaggerated idea about our own contribution to our successes. We need that ego-boost.

A third level. We are not that aware of how ‘others’ interact with and even ‘form’ our individual selves. I have been living for 23 years with my wife, 20 years of those with our eldest son and 17 with the second one. I live with these persons every day. I am working in a company I bought in 1998. Some of the employees I have been working with for almost 20 years, and I meet them at an almost daily basis. One of my best friends has become a brother in law 15 years ago. We have spend long hours disputing, exchanging ideas. Al of these persons have influenced in one way or another in the way I think, how I feel, how I take my decisions. What is the individual me? Where does it start? Where does it stop?

A fourth level in the ‘illusion of individuality’. Like me as one person. Or you as one. How different are you if you are with your three best friends or with your colleges? How different are you if you are in the company of superiors? If you talk to a beautiful male/female? If you enter a shop? Some of the ‘role changes’ are marked with different clothing. By wearing uniform. By changing attitude.

in the illusion of individuality. The illusion of myself as an invariant phenomenon. The illusion of me being the same as the person I have vivid memories of as a child. There is no single cell in my body that is the same as it was at the time of these memories. Psychology has proven that even these memories are not so much as ‘movies’ ‘proofs of the past’ but as a continuously retold story, changing through time without me noticing. If I look back carefully I see read threads through time, but also many changes. What we tend to see as a clear cut nucleus (our personality) is actually a cloud with not very defined shapes, to be interpreted in many, many ways and to change continiously.

And I do not think that this is a purely individual, philosophic fantasy. There are important implications to marketing and research. If we think that clients are ‘clear cut individuals with predictable choice patterns’ we might be wrong. If our marketing is based upon that conception, the marketing could be wrong.

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Optical illusions reveal ‘faults’ the way we make sense of visual stimuli. It is more difficult to reveal mistakes in the way we make sense of other data. Like the illusion that mankind is the crown of the creation. Or that language is the basis of our thinking. Or that we steer our own thinking. Five illusions that delude us quite often:

1 the illusion of individuality

2 the illusion of stability

3 the illusion of truth as a binary phenomenon (true or false, right or wrong)

4 the illusion of insight and understanding

5 the illusion of knowledge transfer as a rational phenomenon.

In my following blogs I would like to write about those illusions, culminating in the sixth: the illusion of control. I don’t think these  represent a complete and systematic framework of ‘thinking illusions’. But I hope that thinking and writing about them will give me some insight in how we (I, my clients and maybe you) withhold progress in our thinking, and how we systematically deceive ourselves in order to keep alive the illusion of control.

And now for the real school board dilemma, lend from Poppers idea about formulating interested hypothesis. This is the research and marketing dilemma right away. Who dares to have the consequences of uncertain interpretation?

Van Lierop, from www.nu.nl (’now.com’, the Netherlands most popular news site) describes a tension between ‘advertisment’ and ‘news’, both struggling for attention. I guess this quote is quite revealing, if you look at it from the point of the reader, who loves to be tempted by the news but is not seeking the attention of the ads at all.

Funny if you take into consideration that I often hear consumers claiming to like the ads in a magazine. They even like the ‘better’ ads on tv. But no one seems to like banners at all. I moderated a group op youngsters lately that were definintively into online. But they said: if you want my attention, don’t advertise on the web. Use tv.

He said that research could play a role in separating emotions from facts in the whole credit crunch debate. Separating those  could prevent the crisis to go out of hand.

Now I like Frits a lot and I have a huge respect for him both as a researcher and the ESOMAR president. But I think that this is actually a complete mistake. The notion of something to be either emotion or a fact. The root of the mistake is that it would and could be possible to separate emotions from facts and therefor ‘rational concepts’. This is however not true. The interesting fact of this crisis (and all economic crises) is that it makes very apparent  the two cannot be separated. If there is a difference between the emotional and rational way the human mind looks at the world mind (which I doubt) the two are heavily interdependent. Emotions create facts and the facts create new emotions. It is not either / or, it is and / and. The mutual influence between the two creates a complex system were mind creates reality and reality changes mind.

If there is a role for research it is not to separate the two, but to find out the patterns in the way they intermingle.