I’ve officially begun to describe myself professionally as a mutt, which I think is ideal in the world of marketing and innovation.

The last few posts were about network thinking - the development and maintenance of an actual personal expertise network and the application of network thinking to stretch beyond traditional dogma and barriers. Another way to achieve network thinking is to develop a diverse set of experiences and expertise.

As I’ve gotten further in my career, I’ve realized a few things.
- First, destination thinking is a mirage. The path from here to there is rarely a straight line and is almost never straightforward. Growth comes through the journey…and a journey through different experiences is much more valuable in broad developmental terms than moving up a narrow, hierarchical org chart. (This is a tribute to David Armano’s sun-shaped people).
- Second, you can’t overestimate the power of fun. That’s what I aim for in work now. I want to have fun. I want to discover. I want to learn. I want to grow. And the more fun I have, the more I’m fueled and enthusiastic about what comes next. Life is too short to do things that don’t excite you.
- Third, everything is related. The only way to understand the connective tissues and threads is to find the relationships. And the only way to do that is to experience different areas firsthand.

My traditional marketing background got me to Brand Management, which taught me that I love building products that have conceptual unity and that solve consumer problems. Brand management got me to Research, which taught me to revere and respect consumers. Research got me to Innovation, which sparked my curiosity and passion for ideas and which taught me how to stretch my mind to develop new products, packaging, messaging, media, and business models that satisfy and delight the consumer in new, disruptive ways. Innovation got me to Design, which taught me how to inspire the emotional, right-brained side of the value equation. Design got me to new media, which taught me how to develop new relationships with consumers, based on two-way conversations, co-creation, and the magic of a big exciting charismatic idea.

None of these lessons would have been possible without the one that came before it. And I couldn’t do what I do without being open to each twist and turn of the path.

I used to call myself a bilingual, because I understood marketing and research. Now I’ve given up on trying to assimilate all of my different languages. I’m just proud to be a mutt and I’m looking forward to the next lesson…and the one after that…and the one after that…and the one after that…
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I was fortunate to spend some time with Grant McCracken a while back (Grant is a brilliant sociologist, author and blogger extraordinaire of “This blog sits at the corner of” - www.cultureby.com). We spent a pleasant afternoon talking about the differences between traditional qualitative research methods and ethnographic research. In my eyes, a critical difference comes down to the role of MISSION. In traditional qualitative, we are problem solving - we have a specific objective, or mission, and we are seeking answers. Conversely, ethnographic research much of the time is about discovery. Rather than setting out seeking a solution, we set out to discover the problem. It is a much purer form of observation and inquisitiveness. (Please comment on this to share your thoughts!)

Grant’s blog today shares a story about ethnographic fieldwork he did in Germany, with a curious translator who asked him about the art of ethnography. I loved his answer, excerpted below.

“To do ethnography, [one] would want to master the mechanics of the interview process:

1. Humility. Interviews work well when the interviewer understands that the respondent is the expert and defers to him or her carefully. It is precisely when the respondent hears this deference that he or she is willing to open up.
2. Empathy. A willingess to suspend what you think for what the respondent thinks.
3. Patience. Does the respondent mean X or Y? Very good. Is it X1 or X2? Fine, is it X1a or X1b? The ethnographer ends up acting like a programming language for which only the most exacting input will do.
4. The ability to draw this life into the interview. Quite substantial adjustments of approach are called for in almost every interview. What is the best way to draw this person out? What is the best direction to bring them to the topics in question?
5. The ability to discover the best approaches at any given moment. How we ask the question is as important as what we ask. Lots of improvisational work is called for.
6. The ability to shift frame to see the significance of testimony. This is especially difficult when we have to do it in real time, under pressure, while staying on schedule. “Shifting frame” here means finding the ideas that make an ethnographic datum reveal its (possible) significance.
7. The ability to follow things up without losing one’s way. Occasionally, the ethnographer will hear a possibility. Now the question is how much to invest in its pursuit and when to “cut and run.” Normally, it is easy enough to identify the moment of diminishing returns. But when something does not look promising, it may be that we have failed to find the frame that makes it so.

Ethnographic research has finally come of age and gained the respect it deserves as an important methodology for uncovering enduring truths and anchoring insights. It deserves to be a critical part of your innovation process.

Everyone knows by now that you are what you measure. But so often, we go off track by measuring the wrong things. We define our goals, our success, by what’s easy to measure, not what’s right. We focus on the “hard stuff” that lends itself to quantitative metrics, rather than the “soft stuff” that so often defines success. And we tend to focus on the internal measures of profitability and neglect the external marketplace.

An example: A creative agency that focuses almost exclusively on utilization, a measure of productivity, as a key driver of profitability. And while yes, this hard number may accurately describe the relationship between staffing and billable work, it neglects to focus on the key business drivers, which tend to be soft: quality, creativity, client satisfaction. Productivity may be a proxy for profitability, but it cannot stand in for business health. If clients are walking out the door, you may be measuring the wrong things.

As we think about the appropriate measures for innovation, it’s important to pay sufficient heed to the soft stuff; to balance the focus between quantitative measures (number of projects in the portfolio, stage gate performance, investment per concept per stage gate, etc.) with qualitative measures of enthusiasm, intuitiveness, and legs (platformability).

Great ideas have charisma. They recruit their own following. They inspire extra credit. They are impossible to leave behind.

Do you have a system of measures in place that is calibrated to pick up on enthusiasm? Without it, you may be missing out on the best ideas. Maybe it’s time to innovate your measures, to capture the soft stuff.

I just finished reading Daniel Gilbert’s marvelous book Stumbling on Happiness. It’s a definite must read about studies that show our brains are imperfect machines when it comes to imagining the future and predicting satisfaction.

A key point Gilbert makes on emotional memory struck me. While we believe our memories are accurate, they are actually simply a collection of some details that are then filled in to make a complete picture, based on our minds at present. We don’t so much retrieve our memories of experiences as we reweave them. In other words, “information acquired after an event alters the memory of the event.” Particularly the emotional memory.

Emotional memory is subject to extreme variations based on time and mood. The way we “remember” an emotional experience is colored by the way our psychological immune system has transformed its meaning (people are really good at finding a way to positively view the past). It is also colored by whether we’re hot, cold, having a good day, got snapped at by our bosses, or were cut off on the way to the research. Emotional memory is inaccurate.

So what does that mean for qualitative research? It means we need to do more “in the moment” research and stop asking how they felt at the time. Whether an intercept, an in-home or in-situ exploration, or research in a traditional facility, we need to gauge emotional reactions as they happen, not in retrospect. Give people a chance to experience, not reflect. It’s the only way to accurately understand their emotional life at hand.

The more I learn about neuroscience and the emerging neurosociety, the more fascinated I become. Until we know how the hardware works, how can we possibly understand the software?

Read the book. You won’t regret it.