Ethnography as a method has been used for corporate purposes for around 30 years, give or take.  It has adapted ferociously, but I don’t know anyone who is doing self conscious product development.   

Something happened by accident today that it worth sharing.  It’s a team work approach to the ethnographic interview.

I am in Moscow doing research for a client who had a smart idea.  Why not, he said, train members of my team while you are doing your research.  That way, I can build ethnographic sensitivity into the organization.

Fine, I said. 

But it was tough.  Research is always difficult.  The method works best when it is maximally opportunistic and mobile, discovering things that might otherwise remain invisible.  Ah, here’s how the consumer thinks about x or y.  Often, this is so hard to anticipate from within the corporate culture that its hard to  imagine the question that elicits it, let alone the answer eventually elicited. 

To work opportunistically you want to be clear headed, intellectual mobile, transparent to the act of speech, and prepared to turn on a dime.  Instead, you are working through a translator, badly jet lagged, wrong footed constantly by another culture, and otherwise off your game. 

There were moments, I will say in candor, when it felt like this project was like trying to do archeology with a broom handle.  But today, it clicked.  The two clients reps and I somehow got down to it.  This is not to say that the data were not forthcoming in the opening days of project.  Not at all.  The data came pouring in.  But the interview process felt like a forced march (French soldiers on Moscow?), joyless and mechanical, with no synergies or momentums to make the grind of 3 interviews a day and endless traffic jams more tolerable.  Today, we were air born.

I was the problem.  I was keeping all the strategy to myself, and this meant that the method looked arcane, implausible, and unpromising.  The odor of skepticism was audible.  (Synethesia intended. Misspelling of synethesia accidental.)  And there is something about the method that hates skepticism.  I guess it’s because we are trying to enter the ideas and the emotions of the respondent, and any hostile presence works to jam the signal.  I am not sure why this should be so.  Perhaps empathy can detect it’s enemy and when empathy attempts to internalize anti-empathy, the result is predictably unpleasant.

Anyhow, as I say, I was the problem.  Today, instead of merely asking a question for translation, I audibilized my strategy.  "Look, the respondent has used this key term.  I want to follow up."  Or, "look, the respondent has set up a nice little contrast here.  Let’s use it to find out more about x."  Or, "I think what is going on here is maybe a shift towards spontaneity.  What would be the best way to ask about that?" 

This was a good idea because it made the questions make sense.  It put the methodological strategies under glass.  It invited a more intelligent, active participation.  And these are things we know to be effective managerial approaches.  (So why did I not think of this approach before?) 

But the still larger up shot was that we began to work as a group.  We were pooling our intelligence, our methodological abilities, our strategic gifts.  One of the things that really worked well is that extent to which we were able to spell one another.  One of us was working on the translation, one of the question at hand, one of the question to come.  Some much of ethnography conflates the collection of data with the analysis of data that always we are caught doing several things at once.  Team work allows a division of labor. 

Furthermore, a group mind effect emerged.  We were now thinking out of one another’s pocket, completing one another’s questions and sometimes thoughts.  We would be working out of the fixed questions, when a new topic ran like a rabbit through the interview.  Foxes all, we rose like one.  The pursuit was a joy to watch, a joy to do. 

Team interviewing might be the smart thing to do even when working in one’s own culture in one’s own language.  Certainly, as my client surmised, it’s a great way to communicate the whats and the whys of ethnography and disseminate in in the corporate world.  But I think it might even serve to inspire better ethnography and deliver better results. 

And given how much really bad ethnography there is now in circulation, this would be a good thing. 

post script

I am not concealing the client’s name here but until I’m given the all clear signal, I can’t mention what I am working on or for whom.   Thanks for your patience.

I will on ethnographic assignment for the next two weeks in Moscow.  I am pretty sure I will have access to the internet, but I am also sure things will be hectic.  Please forgive if blogging is intermittent.

Later today, the airport willing, I am hoping to post something called "advice to a young consultant."  This will be practical advice for someone who is just getting into the consulting game.

Victorian anthropologists would have had ready access to advice of this kind.  Contemporary ethnographers are forced back on their own resources.  Stop by for my STEWQL formula (Small Target, Early Warning, Quick reLease) and other invaluable tips for the international traveller. 

Ok, so I made it to Chicago.  I had hoped to take the train from Las Vegas, the Southwest Chief–and what could be better than taking the train through the desert–but a derailment intervened and I was forced to take the plane.

Good thing, too.  For I was just settling into my seat, when a woman beside me said,

I trust him just the tiniest bit more after this weekend…but I am not going to let myself get hurt.

Normally, I would contrive to persuade her to tell me all about it, but I am going to spend this week doing ethnographic interviews in Chicago persuading people tell me all about it and I thought I would keep my own councel for a change.

The flight was otherwise uneventful, except that they were showing The Pink Panther.  Some good moments which I credit to one half of the film writing team, Len Blum, a fellow I happen to know slightly.  But the rest of the film actually so dishonors the original concept that Inspector Clouseau actually becomes Lieutenant Frank Dreben (sp?) of the Naked Gun series by about the 20 minutes mark.  Now, that, in my opinion, is a crime against civilization as we know it. 

Happily, I had along a copy of the new book by Alan Furst, The Foreign Correspondent, which I recommend heartily.  What a writer!  He builds narrative as well as John le Carre, but he is more nuanced, more anthropological in his development of person and place.  He is free of ideologically self indulgent that so often took le Carre captive.  Finally, Furst understands the French with a depth of knowledge and affection, a useful corrective against our current impatience and, sometimes, loathing. 

I am now (or was at this writing) in a a chop house in Chicago called The Chop House, Sinatra and Billie Holiday as the "music over."  (Why is it always voice over and never music over?  It’s because music insinuates and voice does not, I think.)  It’s all dark wood and deep booths with lots of words on the wall: "New York Strip, Pinot Blanc, Maine Lobster…"  Some of the Chop houses of our time are instruments of the restoration of a steak and whisky masculinity.  Not The Chop House.  I mean, they are playing Billie Holiday, who in her extraordinary way captured another feminity in which women always let themselves get hurt.  Or perhaps that femininity and the steak and whisky masculinity go together.  Nah, couldn’t be.