“An operating room is like a restaurant. In order for a good meal to be served, everything must come together. Everyone must do their part to get the meal just right and make sure that nothing interferes with the diner’s appreciation of the meal and their experience. It is best when the maitre’d, the sommelier, the chef, the waiters and the table attendants are barely noticed, they are just there when they are supposed to be with what the diner needs.”

These are the words of a surgeon describing what he desires an operating room to be like during surgery. It is a wonderful story, full of rich imagery and detail. By the way, can you guess what role the surgeon is in this story?

If you said the chef, the maestro in the kitchen exercising their artistic and creative talents, you’ll be sorely disappointed. If you said the diner, then give yourself a prize! Yes, this surgeon viewed himself as the person who was being served, who’s every need was satisfied with him making the minimum of effort. His view of himself as the diner (guess what dish the patient was!) provides the most vivid and valuable insight possible into this surgeon’s true needs and desires.

• How do metaphor and analogy tell you about needs and desires?
• How can you take this vivid but unstructured story and turn it into something actionable?

Getting Under the Surface

The most important knowledge that an innovator, entrepreneur or businessperson needs to discover is how customers think and choose. This is knowledge that is not written down anywhere, that is inside people’s heads. It is knowledge that isn’t easy for people to articulate or to communicate clearly in surveys, questionnaires or focus groups. It is knowledge about the sub-conscious, about what our underlying needs and desires are, about the experiences we want to have and the outcomes we are seeking. It is knowledge that is best communicated by the stories we tell.

The vast majority of this meaningful knowledge that we seek falls through the cracks. It is not communicated or, if it is communicated, it is not captured, interpreted, or used in any meaningful manner. The Engagement Process is designed to fill these gaps and aid in discovering early-stage market knowledge. Some of the features of a good engagement process include:

• Incorporates cognitive as well as behavioral attributes
• Focuses on both outcomes and experiences
• Develops both abstract and concrete insights, general and specific
• Uses the best and most vivid means that people have of communicating – stories and imagery

But stories are not enough. They are necessary but not sufficient. As anyone who has listened to someone telling a story, they are often undirected, rambling, and lacing in focus. The key is to direct the story arc and get the person you are engaging with to also get specific. What are the outcomes and experiences they desire? What are they satisfied with, how important are they to them? The way to get these items is with structure and direction.

Our objective is to amplify the important aspects of the knowledge we are gathering from the people we engage with. This information will be used to create personas – an amalgamation of a number of individuals into a common description of a certain type of customer that emphasizes the important cognitive attributes that will determine future adoption behavior.

The Engagement

The objective of the Engagement process is to build both a robust knowledge resource as well as a knowledge pool. Engagements are conducted in a form similar to interviews, yet are both more and less deterministic in implementation.

They are less deterministic in the sense that the tools for advancing the dialog are more open-ended and may in fact follow a different path with each participant. This is in sharp contrast to statistical approaches to interviewing or surveys that use the law of large numbers to gauge average response. A fixed-question format is valuable when the context is also fixed and known by both parties in advance – such as for surveying buying habits or other behavioral lines of enquiry.

The Engagement process, however, is geared at discovering what leads to behavioral patterns:

• The root cause of behavior, and
• The dynamics of community members.

Inovo uses several methods for engagements including LOCA (Latent Observation, Constant Annoyance), Laddering, Pyramiding, Metaphor Elicitation, and others. These techniques draw from widely accepted best practices in cognitive science, as well as from techniques unique to Inovo. All approaches take the form of a casual dialog, yet all seek to find the ‘why’ behind each answer. Sometimes this is performed directly (e.g., laddering), and sometime indirectly (e.g., metaphor elicitation).

Each engagement leads to a Community Member Profile (CMP). CMP’s capture the details of an engagement including the observed and stated tacit knowledge.

Asking for a Story – The Power of Metaphor

There are many techniques and methods for interacting with customers or potential customers to get at what their needs and desires are. In order to get at the underlying ‘whys’ of how they think and choose – the cognitive processes that are going on in their brains, it is necessary use a mechanism that allows the person to reveal their sub-conscious thoughts and feelings. The Engagement process does this.
Stories are the method, but not just any story is good. Left to themselves, people often ramble, get off on tangents, skip important items or are just plain poor storytellers. What the engagement process does is to ‘tease out’ a story in a semi-structured way.

Engagement Methods

The objective of an engagement is to determine the explicit tacit needs and desires of the community member. We search for the reasons behind what is important and try to also find out the possibilities. While every engagement is inherently different because each person will focus on a different area, the facilitation guidance section of the community maps ensures some level of consistency between the engagements. Two techniques will be mentioned here – Laddering (the ‘why’ chain) and LOCA (Latent Observation, Constant Annoyance).

Laddering – The Why Chain This is just the simple mechanism of asking ‘why?’

Latent Observation Constant Annoyance (LOCA) This is storytelling with a twist. LOCA is one of the tools designed to recognize and understand individuals’ needs and desires. The tool is designed to determine what people find valuable. Amazingly enough, people are not very good at describing their wants. Most people live in a state of acceptance – being either apologists or survivorists. They are often not even very good at reacting to things presented to them. The basic principles upon which this tool is based are:

• The role of community in defining value
• The behavior of people in different circumstances
• The use of simulation as a tool for understanding dynamics

The principle behind the constant annoyance process is that both the technology creators and the technology users can learn to adopt an altered state of interaction with the world for a period of time that will illuminate true needs and desires.
By recognizing each of these states, one is able to extract the needs and desires from the community members.Gaining this knowledge is not always easy because people are very good at adopting to annoyance.

The Results of Engagements

When one does a number of engagements, several things become evident.

1. In traditional market research, questions and interviews are conducted to be able to pull certain pieces of information from them. This coding is pre-determined and is defined by the attributes of the existing product or the company’s existing segmentation scheme. Utilizing this method is superior for existing products in defined markets. But when the market is undefined, deciding the correct coding methodology is impossible. The engagement process does not establish a set of coding until the interviews are completed. Once all the community member profiles are completed, the results are carefully analyzed for prevailing trends.
2. The very process of Engagement itself produces relationships – with both consumers and businesses. These relationships are often the most valuable asset of all in developing and testing down-stream solutions.

Ultimately, the objective of the Engagement process is to develop essential knowledge, and reusable tools, for thinking intelligently about the future.