Evolution Toward Ethnography

Historically, organizations were run from the top down, with each lower rank following the orders of higher ranks without question.  Some organizations still operate according to this model – and even in organizations that have recognized that the most insight and expertise exists in lower ranks of the organization, rank is still respected – it intimidates, and is sometimes intentionally used to intimidate, people who know better into following orders they know to be dead wrong.

Next, there came an era of specialists and consultants, bringing in ”experts” from outside the firm to provide direction.  This was a slight improvement, as outsiders had no political agenda within an organization and no dedication to preserving business-as-usual, and could ostensibly be counted upon to provide a knowledgeable and objective point of view.   Unfortunately, this did not always happen because the consultants brought an agenda of their own: to be re-hired and recommended, and to do so they recognized that they could not present recommendations that were not palatable to their clients.   So eventually, and inevitably, the experts became the puppets of the ranking officers.

A further step was taken when firms recognized that their front-line employees that interact with customers regularly received direct feedback from the market.  They were able to quickly recognize the flaws in the instructions they received “from headquarters” and bore the brunt of unsatisfied and disgruntled customers.   However, the attempt to capture this information in knowledge management systems failed horribly, as employees feared losing their personal competitive edge (one cannot be “top salesman” if everyone else knows the same tricks) or retaliation if they admitted breaking rules and ignoring procedures to get the job done.

The closest that many firms have come to truly understanding the customer is through market research: interviews, focus groups, and surveys that attempt to gather feedback from the customers themselves.  However, the participation rate in these experiments tends to be low and the results are often skewed: customers rely on vague memories and speculate, and they very often posture by presenting rational reasons for an emotional reaction, a carefully process for a casual decision.  There have been many spectacular failures based on bad research, undertaken all the more boldly because there were numbers to back the decision.

This brings us to the latest attempt to gauge the preferences of the customer: ethnographic research, borrowed from sociology, which attempts to observe behavior “in the wild.”   It is particularly easy to do in online channels, where every click and keystroke can be monitored, though video surveillance in retail operations affords the same kind of data.   It is believed that actual behavior in the recent past is the best indication of what actual behavior will be in the near future, which seems entirely plausible.

However, even this method is not perfect – it observes only what is observable, and misses a great deal of the cognitive and emotional goings-on inside the mind of the customer that drive the decisions.  And worse, speculation is often done to fill the gap: one can see what the customer did, but can only make an educated guess as to why it was done.    But these limitations conceded, it is a promising advance that has significant potential to better align firms with the tastes and preferences of their customers.

The question remains as to how often and accurately ethnography will be leveraged.   It takes time to conduct an observational study, and in a climate of rapid change few are willing to invest the time.  It takes money to conduct such a study, and often the ROI cannot be proven because it is a research effort, so it may not be prioritized.  And just as in the earliest phases of evolution, the upper ranks of management are firmly in charge - they tend to favor research that supports their foregone conclusions, and use intimidation and threat to puppet the experts who conduct and analyze research - so just as much fake innovation and fake research is being done today (a veneer of objectivity over initiatives that are subjective and driven by gut instinct), so will this continue in the future, and it may be decades or generations before the vestiges of the most primitive approaches are at last laid to rest.