Synetic Brand

Years ago I read a passage from Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions which caused me to understand the importance of examples in illustrating concepts in a deeply different way. (This book is infamous for unleashing  the expression “paradigm shift” on the world.)

What Kuhn helped me grasp was that examples do not only illuminate or prove a theoretical statement — they give the theoretical statement its sense.

Why am I talking about this here? The ends experience strategists try to accomplish, the means we use to accomplish them, and the language and concepts we use to talk about our means and ends are very abstract. Our clients are often flying blind. They know (sometimes vaguely) what they hope to accomplish by way of “improving the customer experience”, but much of what leads up to this improvement is either confused, force-fitted into more familiar (mis)conceptions, or fragmentary, wispy or left a frank mystery. When we supply a client examples we are not only reassuring them that we are capable of solving their problems for them — we are also helping them understand how to see their problems in clearer and more productive terms.

If you’re interested, here’s a large chunk of the quote (bolds added):

Philosophers of science have not ordinarily discussed the problems encountered by a student in laboratories or in science texts, for these are thought to supply only practice in the application of what the student already knows. He cannot, it is said, solve problems at all unless he has first learned the theory and some rules for applying it. Scientific knowledge is embedded in theory and rules; problems are supplied to gain facility in their application. I have tried to argue, however, that this localization of the cognitive content of science is wrong. After the student has done many problems, he may gain only added facility by solving more. But at the start and for some time after, doing problems is learning consequential things about nature. In the absence of such exemplars, the laws and theories he has previously learned would have little empirical content.

To indicate what I have in mind I revert briefly to symbolic generalizations. One widely shared example is Newton’s Second Law of Motion, generally written as f = ma. The sociologist, say, or the linguist who discovers that the corresponding expression is unproblematically uttered and received by the members of a given community will not, without much additional investigation, have learned a great deal about what either the expression or the terms in it mean, about how the scientists of the community attach the expression to nature. Indeed, the fact that they accept it without question and use it as a point at which to introduce logical and mathematical manipulation does not of itself imply that they agree at all about such matters as meaning and application. Of course they do agree to a considerable extent, or the fact would rapidly emerge from their subsequent conversation. But one may well ask at what point and by what means they have come to do so. How have they learned, faced with a given experimental situation, to pick out the relevant forces, masses, and accelerations?

. . .

A phenomenon familiar to both students of science and historians of science provides a clue. The former regularly report that they have read through a chapter of their text, understood it perfectly, but nonetheless had difficulty solving a number of the problems at the chapter’s end. Ordinarily, also, those difficulties dissolve in the same way. The student discovers, with or without the assistance of his instructor, a way to see his problem as like a problem he has already encountered. Having seen the resemblance, grasped the analogy between two or more distinct problems, he can interrelate symbols and attach them to nature in the ways that have proved effective before. The law-sketch, say f = nw, has functioned as a tool, informing the student what similarities to look for, signaling the gestalt in which the situation is to be seen. The resultant ability to see a variety of situations as like each other, as subjects for f = nw or some other symbolic generalization, is, I think, the main thing a student acquires by doing exemplary problems, whether with a pencil and paper or in a well-designed laboratory. After he has completed a certain number, which may vary widely from one individual to the next, he views the situations that confront him as a scientist in the same gestalt as other members of his specialists’ group. For him they are no longer the same situations he had encountered when his training began. He has meanwhile assimilated a time-tested and group-licensed way of seeing.

The role of acquired similarity relations also shows clearly in the history of science. Scientists solve puzzles by modeling them on previous puzzle-solutions, often with only minimal recourse to symbolic generalizations. Galileo found that a ball rolling down an incline acquires just enough velocity to return it to the same vertical height on a second incline of any slope, and he learned to see that experimental situation as like the pendulum with a point-mass for a bob.

. . .

That example should begin to make clear what I mean by learning from problems to see situations as like each other, as subjects for the application of the same scientific law or law-sketch. Simultaneously it should show why I refer to the consequential knowledge of nature acquired while learning the similarity relationship and thereafter embodied in a way of viewing physical situations rather than in rules or laws. . . .  the verbal statement of the law, taken by itself, is virtually impotent. Present it to a contemporary student of physics, who knows the words and can do all these problems but now employs different means. Then imagine what the words, though all well known, can have said to a man who did not know even the problems. For him the generalization could begin to function only when he learned to recognize “actual descents” and “potential ascents” as ingredients of nature, and that is to learn something, prior to the law, about the situations that nature does and does not present. That sort of learning is not acquired by exclusively verbal means. Rather it comes as one is given words together with concrete examples of how they function in use; nature and words are learned together. To borrow once more Michael Polanyi’s useful phrase, what results from this process is “tacit knowledge” which is learned by doing science rather than by acquiring rules for doing it.

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In my opinion, getting a better grasp of what tacit knowledge is, what it effects, how to research it and how to employ it in design is the most interesting and explosively promising area of exploration in experience strategy and design.

In pursuit of this goal, I’ve been reading Suzanne Langer’s Philosophy in a New Key, whose central idea is that human beings use two different kinds of symbolic meaning to order our existences, and James Spradley’s  The Ethnographic Interview which teaches methods for learning about and analyzing (at least some of) these symbolic meanings. Very exciting stuff.

James Spradley’s fantastic book The Ethnographic Interview identifies four different roles a research participant can play. Each implies a different relationship between researcher and participant:

• Informant – In ethnography, a participant is related to as an informant. Informants are “engaged by the ethnographer to speak in their own language or dialect”, providing “a model for the ethnographer to imitate” so that “the ethnographer can learn to use the native language in the way informants do.” The ethnographer learns as much about the informant’s world as possible, in the linguistic terms of the informant, and this helps provide insights into the informant’s perspective. The informant is related to as a teacher.
• Subject – Subjects are participants in social science research, upon whom hypotheses are tested. “Investigators are not primarily interested in discovering the cultural knowledge of the subjects; they seek to confirm or disconfirm a specific hypothesis by studying the subject’s responses. Work with subjects begins with preconceived ideas; work with informants begins with a naive ignorance. Subjects do not define what it is important for the investigator to find out; informants do.”
• Respondent – A respondent is any person who responds to a survey questionnaire or to queries presented by an investigator. “Survey research with respondents almost always employs the language of the social scientist. The questions arise out of the social scientist’s culture. Ethnographic research, on the other hand, depends more fully on the language of the informant. The questions arise out of the informant’s culture.”
• Actor – “An actor is someone who becomes the object of observation in a natural setting.” In ethnographic research, participants are also often observed but the participant is still related to primarily as an informant, indicating through language, in his own terms, the significance of his actions, to give (to use Clifford Geertz’s term) “thickness” to the description of what is actually going on. As with subjects and respondents, when participants are related to as actors, the terms of the description are those of the researcher, not of the participant.

The takeaway from this is that over the course of a research program research participants may at various times be regarded as subjects, actors or respondents — but if the goal is to really understand participants as people in order to cultivate a relationship with them, the beginning of a research program should treat participants as informants. Accordingly, early research should include a component of semi-structured or unstructured conversational interviews (instead of more structured interviews that resemble in-person questionnaires). Once researchers have developed a better idea of what matters to the participant and how they conceptualize and speak about these things, researchers are in a better position to conduct more structured kinds of research that permits comparison and quantification.

This allows researchers to use language participants will find natural and understandable — earning trust and cooperation, while and minimizing misunderstandings — it also helps researchers form more productive hypotheses, ask better questions and to find more insights in the answers they get. The insights on hidden “subjective” motivations complement the objective data to help the organization avoid superficial misinterpretations of the kind people make of strangers with whom one has never spoken. Instead researchers gain a much more complete, nuanced and fully-dimensioned human understanding of the people with whom the organization is seeking to cultivate relationships.

Recognizing the difference between insights and data and how the two relate allows researchers to design research programs that allow organization to understand large numbers of individuals, how they see and how to reach them and engage them, without sacrificing either empathy or statistical significance in the process.

The essential difference between what one learns from qualitative vs quantitative research (in their most common forms) is this: Quantitative research helps an organization know things about a person, where qualitative research helps an organization know a person.

To know about someone means to grasp particular attributes of the thing or factual knowledge pertaining to him. When one knows about a person, the person is perceived less as a perceiving, experiencing, knowing entity than as something that is perceived, experienced, known. In other words, the person is comprehended objectively, as an observable, behaving object — a passive non-participant in the process of coming to an understanding.

To know someone means to understand that person specifically as a perceiving, experiencing, knowing entity: a subject. And this someone is an active participant in the researcher’s coming to understanding, not something set apart to observe and analyze. This does not mean the participant is not observed, only that the observations as such are not the primary focus. In essence what is going on is the participant is showing the researcher his world as he sees it.

The type of knowledge gained through qualitative research is not possessed in the way discrete facts are possessed (though facts can come to light through it). The essential knowledge consists in how facts — and more generally, symbols — are interrelated and applied in concrete life.  (I’ve been reading Clifford Geertz, and finding his way of thinking about these problems useful.) This symbol system is bound up with how the person sees life in general, which aspects and details of life are relevant and have particular significance, how he feels about it, participates in it, and tries to influence it.

Another way to say it: quantitative research produces facts about people; qualitative research provides insights into how to relate to people.

Of course, in the language-leveling environment of business, flat facts are often branded as “insights”, but the difference between fact and insight is an important one and the distinction ought to be preserved. The difference between a fact and an insight is that a fact can be subsumed by one’s current mode of understanding without serious disruption. Facts are comfortable. Compared with insights “hard facts” are easy. An insight, to the degree it is an insight, causes disruption to one’s own understanding and effects a sort of perspectival shift or vase-face remapping of understanding, similar to what happens at the end of a mystery novel when the truth comes to light and forces a comprehensive remapping of significance to the clues and incidental facts of the story into a new understanding. The characteristic charms of the mystery novel genre  revolve around the transfiguring insight, the pleasures of attempting to anticipate what will be revealed, in succeeding or even better, in failing. If the novel concluded with just the addition of the missing fact, and the story did not gain a retroactive reinterpretation through it, the readers would be disgusted. This is also how great qualitative research works. A finding of the form of “47% of customers prefer the color red over green” is a fact, not an insight.

The chances of gaining this type of insight is diminished if one remains removed, uninvolved and objective, in accordance with the ideal of physical science. The researcher must engage in dialogue in order to learn how to communicate naturally with the person being researched, which means becoming conversant in that person’s symbol system — which means knowing what the symbols mean — which means not only knowing what the symbols represent, but also how the symbols are used and experienced, effectively and affectively.

But this does not mean one can dispense with rigor. It is completely possible to go drastically wrong subjectively, and as with physical science, the qualitative researcher’s own subjectivity is always the primary suspect in the crimes of distorted  findings — but in qualitative research the researchers stance toward subjectivity as such is completely different. In the physical sciences (at least in the “normal science” mode of research) minimizing subjectivity as such is desirable. In qualitative research for design and strategy, the very “object” of one’s understanding is subjectivity. Again, this is a source of discomfort for people who equate knowledge with objectivity, epitomized by the physical sciences. In qualitative research the charge that one’s findings are “subjective” is to deny the validity of qualitative research as such, seeing that the goal of qualitative research is to understand subjectivity.

In qualitative research the risk is in imposing one’s own subjectivity on the subjectivity being studied, thus obscuring it. However, the  researcher cannot try to eliminate his own subjectivity in the process of research, but rather to make appropriate use of it, empathically substantiating the insights. The insight is not transferred from the research participant to the researcher: the researcher, by way of looking out at the world with the participant, finds a subjective understanding within his own experience that dialogically matches that of his participant.

Crap. Out of time…

The surest route to understand a subject more deeply, comprehensively and productively is to look at opposing or conflicting views on that subject.

Often what causes the views to conflict is a shared error or at least a shared limitation in how that subject is approached. If you can see what the oppositions have in common, you can often find new intellectual space for understanding in the alternative to the shared error.

This new perspective on the topic is often very fertile ground for innovation. It makes the world feel larger and more pregnant with possibility. People love this feeling. This was the feeling of the Renaissance, of the Scientific Enlightenment, of Romanticism, of Democracy, of Jazz, of Rock n’ Roll, of the Summer of Love, of Punk, of the Internet. It is the feeling at the source of every vital cultural movement.

And this attractive, inspiring and productive common ground is the soil upon which a synetic brand is grown.

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The reason synetic brand researches both the “user” of a design and the perspectives of others involved in the experience of the design is to fully inform the dialectic. What is sought is not an answer to which perspective is right or better, or whose view should prevail — or even what kinds of compromise can be struck between competing perspectives. What is sought is something superior to anything that already exists or that anyone could conceive of by themselves.

I will start this post with a blatantly provocative statement:

Uncritical application of a user centered design approach to a branding problem can harm an organization’s brand more than it helps it.

1. UCD tends to lead organizations away from sustainable differentiation toward commodity strategies that market leaders are  well equipped to defeat in the long-term.
2. The kinds of improvements UCD discovers tend to be atomistic and easily imitated, and are therefore provide only unsustainable competitive advantage.
3. Because the typical UCD understanding of brand is inadequate, attempts by UCD to create “branded experiences” tend to actually cooperate with and reinforce the market leader’s positioning. The vision of an ideal offering implicit in users’ perceptions and decision criteria are often learned from the market leader who is far better equipped to deliver on those criteria than contenders. To “discover” these criteria and present them as objective truth, and to attempt to position an organization in accordance with them is to fall into playing a rigged game.

The fundamental insight of synetic branding is that at its essence brand is a vision — a way of seeing — so compelling that reality is organized and seen by this vision. The goal of synetic branding is to discover a way of seeing that reveals the organization’s own offering as superior. This name for this way of seeing is synesis, a social form of understanding which binds an organization together with all its internal and external stakeholders.

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Now for the verbose version:

User Centered Design (UCD) is the right approach to take toward a design problem when two conditions are true:

1. The design problem can be approached as being already adequately understood — that is, the outline of the solution to the problem is given and only the details are in question.
2. The understanding of the design problem results in a design solution that serves the aims of the sponsoring organization in the near- and long-term.

If these two conditions are met, and this is not the usual case, UCD is sufficient.

The weakness of UCD is it fails to ask whether these conditions are met. Instead, because it lacks the awareness and the tools it needs to ascertain its own suitability, it bypasses this question and gets right to work on answers. Accordingly:

1. UCD unconsciously assumes whatever first rough sense of the problem it finds, however rough and unclear the conception is, is an adequate understanding and starts elaborating its answer, which is usually conceived as discovering and addressing as-yet undiscovered needs (adding new useful features) and filling in gaps in the offering and refining the usability and charm of the whole by fully adapting it to the preconceptions of the user (making features more useful and desirable to the user). UCD tends toward atomistic solutions.
2. UCD assumes that doing a better job of what everyone else is attempting to do will give the sponsoring organization a competitive advantage. Unfortunately, UCD habitually ignores the crucial question of sustainability: how long can this competitive advantage be held? How easily can a competitor imitate and incorporate UCD’s discoveries into its own offerings? Atomistic solutions are easily stolen and incorporated. It’s a matter of adding on this and polishing that.

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Generally the best candidate for UCD are market leaders whose vision of its offering is the predominant one, which everyone else unconsciously accepts and works within at a disadvantage.

A market leader emerges where one organization has persuaded the market to see as ideal the offering it is most suited to offer. The followers, because they are unable to see an alternative and lack awareness of the possibility that an alternative could exist, chase this same ideal.

And when UCD goes out and researches how users see, what they find is often only this ideal. They unearth only what the market leader itself has buried in the users’ minds. When UCD designs according to this understanding, all it does is reinforce the perception that this understanding is truly the “objective standard” of the industry.

Automatic application of UCD reduces a client to becoming amplifiers of the market leader’s brand and a cheap R&D department that toils to find new ways to invent and polish easily imitated offerings the market leader better equipped to deliver.