The Moment of Clarity: Using the Human Sciences to Solve Your Toughest Business Problems
The Moment of Clarity: Using the Human Sciences to Solve Your Toughest Business Problems
Christian Madsbjerg and Mikkel Rasmussen
If we truly intend to understand culturally nuanced questions, the pairing of a rigorous analytical framework from the human sciences with various qualitative research methods can give us helpful insight.
We might be getting all our numbers correct, so why do we keep getting people wrong?
In Beyond the Stable State, Donald Schön argued companies needed to view themselves as constant learning organizations.
What about problems for which you don’t know the variables and have no heuristic to hold on to?
Instrumental rationalism. At the heart of the model is the belief that business problems can be solved through objective and scientific analysis and that evidence and facts should prevail over opinions and preferences.
All business uncertainties are defined as problems. Problems are deconstructed into quantifiable and formal problem statements (issues). Each problem is atomized into the smallest possible bits that can be analyzed separately—for a list of hypotheses to explain the cause of the problem is generated. Data is gathered and processed to test each hypothesis. Induction and deduction are used to test hypotheses, clarify the problem, and find the areas of intervention with the highest impact. A well-organized structure of the analysis is deployed to build a logical and fact-based argument of what should be done.
All proposed actions are described as manageable work streams or must-win battles for which a responsible committee, or person, is assigned. Performance metrics and a proposed time frame with follow-up monitoring are put in place. ... When all work streams have been completed, the problem is solved.
What happens when you reduce something nuanced and complex—like being a good driver—to a simple and measurable question:
Companies base their problem solving on what can objectively be described, quantified, and analyzed without too much interpretation.
There is nothing wrong with asking people about their perception and desires—it can be quite revealing and insightful—but are perceptions and desires the only two aspects of humanity that matter? And even if we decide that they are, does this kind of market research give us any understanding of how they work?
We rarely know what we want. We almost never fully grasp the market and, most important, we almost always buy something at a different price than what we thought we would.
The informant will be able to talk about his or her needs with clarity and answer questions correctly.
The six-burner gas stove and granite countertops have become essential symbols in millions of American homes. They signify gourmet family dinners and tell a story of a home in balance. The reality is that such showpieces are rarely used,
People think they cook a lot, but they really don’t. It’s not that they want to lie to other people; they are simply lying to themselves.
There is often a vast distance between what people say and what people do—at
The good news for companies is that we buy a lot of stuff. The bad news is that we don’t always know why.
Assumption 2: Tomorrow Will Look Like Today
We fool ourselves into believing that the assumptions of the current moment will also hold true in the future.
Assumption 3: Hypotheses Are Objective and Unbiased
If the industry based its designs on the assumption that people are not just bodies—rather, active agents in their own healing process—hospitals would look very different.
Bourdieu coined the term habitus to describe the somehow hidden but always present dispositions that shape our perceptions, thoughts, and actions. In his view, many things that we regard as common sense are in fact shaped by the social context we are in.
We often quickly accept evidence supporting a preconceived hypothesis, while we subject contradictory evidence to rigorous evaluation.
Tolstoy’s nonfiction magnum opus The Kingdom of God Is Within You, he writes: “The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him.” If you are not open to questioning even the most basic assumptions about your company and your customers, then you risk missing the new ideas that will be the future of your business.
Assumption 4: Numbers Are the Only Truth
Most businesses are downright obsessed with quantitative analysis.
“The greatest weakness of the quantitative approach is that it decontextualizes human behavior, removing an event from its real-world setting and ignoring the effects of variables not included in the model.”
It is good to know that x percent of your customers are satisfied with your company, but you also need to know what the experience of interacting with your company is like.
Maybe you know that two hundred million Chinese people are moving into the middle-class income bracket, but do you know what it means to be middle class in China?
because it was the only thing quantifiable, it became the thing that mattered.
Almost all data analysis is about crunching numbers from the past and extrapolating these numbers into the future. For obvious reasons, the past does not include data on things that haven’t happened or ideas that have not yet been imagined.
tends to underestimate or even ignore past events or conditions that can’t be measured while overestimating those that can.
Simply changing a few of the business case assumptions can radically transform an incredibly good idea into a complete disaster.
In our view, the quantitative obsession leads to a sorely diminished approach to future planning. It tends to be conservative rather than creative because it implicitly favors what can be measured over what cannot.
Assumption 5: Language Needs to Be Dehumanizing
Business and management science has become a world in itself, and the language of business has become increasingly technical, introverted, and coded. You don’t fire people anymore; you “right-size the organization.” You don’t do the easiest things first; you “pick the low-hanging fruit.” You don’t look at where you sell your products; you “evaluate your channel mix.” You don’t promote people; you “leverage your human resources.” You don’t give people a bonus check; you “incentivize.” You don’t do stuff; you “execute.” You “synergize, optimize, leverage, simplify, utilize, transform, enhance, and reengineer.” You avoid “boiling the ocean, missing the paradigm shift, having tunnel vision, and increasing complexity.” You make sure that “resources are allocated to leverage synergies across organizational boundaries and with a customer-centric mind-set that can secure a premium position while targeting white spots in the blue ocean to ensure that there is bang for the buck.” It can become almost poetic.