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.

Another powerful idea is ‘the great chain of being‘. This view that can be traced down from the ancient times, describes our universe as a sort of big ladder of phenomena or beings from a very simple, earthly form towards more complicated, complex and – in the end – celestial forms (such as angels and ultimately God). The ‘lowest’ parts are minerals, further on the more humble beings, worms, insects, towards animals, human beings, angels, gods. The human race is placed in the middle, just between the more mundane and the more transcendent. Lovejoy (The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea, (1936)) wrote a tremendous book following the idea from the ancient greek towards the modern biology from Darwin. I utterly enjoyed reading it, in the early 80ies. In this book the evolution of this idea is described in detail.

Maybe this could be an important factor of ’sticking power’: any idea that is more resonant with some other, archetypical ideas is more easy to pick up. Maybe this is why the evolution – as an unintentional, non goal seeking, non idealistic process – is not (yet) very sticky in our common sense world, whereas the idea of ‘intelligent design’ that is very resonant with the idea of a ‘masterplan’ is very easy to stick.

For me it took reading ‘the blind watchmaker’ from Richard Dawkins to really grasp this idea of unintended progress, without any plan or preconceived idea. Every next step in evolution as an emerging trend, the consequence of many interactions over a long time. It is apparent that we do have a problem to intuitively understand how complexity can grow out of ’simple laws’. But it is obvious that complexity does always emerge from simple interactions, such as weather systems with extremely high complexity arising from simple interactions between gas molecules.

Dawkins tried to apply the idea of natural selection to our thinking, introducing the concept of ‘memes‘ as the ‘genes of ideas and thinking’. I wonder if we really would need this ‘memes’ concept as a mechanism of how selection could work in ideas.  I feel that it is possible to conceive other ’simple’ mechanisms than these mysterious  ‘memes’ to account for a natural selection within the thought world. Some interactions are extremely simple: I remember reading Montaillou from Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, describing in detail the way the religious ideas spread in this village. What really struck me was the simple explanation: you got ‘infected’ by the new religion by just hearing it from someone you new. It was quite simple to track down the current of the idea by understanding ‘who knew who’ and ‘who met who’. The conviction outcome was like a function of ‘meeting’.

Gladwell dived deeper into this in ‘the tipping point‘, using three simple basic laws as explanation of how ideas spread: the law of the few, the stickyness factor and the power of context. The only law really ‘explaining’  is the law of the few. This law describes in detail different ‘modes’ of infection of ideas by accounting for different kind of persons who spread the ideas. The other two are not really ’simple laws’ . As interesting as they are they are more a description of the the problem than an explanation to the spread of ideas.

Take for instance the ’stickyness factor’. Some ideas seem to have more sticking power than others. This law asks for an explanation. Why is the one idea more sticky than the othert? Why was the sticking power of the religious ideas spread in Montaillou so sticky?

I think the ‘Origin of ideas’, with an explanation of a process that steers the idea evolution would be an important next step in science.