Thanks for the post!

That aside, I know the experience. Just at this moment I am an ethnographer tackling a project with lots of numbers to play with, a network analysis of the upper reaches of the world of advertising creatives in Tokyo. Not just tons of data to digest, but masses of new software to get beyond the “I sort of know what that means” to the “I know how to do that” stage. Wandering around like a cartoon character with a bucket on my head sounds just right.

The typical (strategic marketing) consulting project I do first involves a period of information gathering at the beginning — talking to people (staff, customers, partners, competitors, regulators), collecting relevant data and statistics, testing the conjectures of the person or people who commissioned the project with those lower down the hierarchy or in customer/partner organizations, and simply getting the lay of the land. This first task can take anywhere from a week to 3 months, depending on the nature of the project, and there is usually a period in the middle of this task of complete and utter confusion, before one has got one’s head around the problem and/or the paths towards potential solutions. Calling this period a “category debt” is very insightful.

I would indeed go further, and call it an “ontology debt”, since we usually not only need new categories to make sense of the phemonena being studied, but also need to understand the relationships between these categories. Almost always, as you would no doubt expect, the conjectures of the person or people who commissioned the project turn out to be wrong, or not sufficiently nuanced for the reality on the ground.

Going for a walk in a park or doing some vigorous exercise often works for me to facilitate the head-clearing needed before the new ontology can emerge.