Simone Cicero 

Hello everybody and welcome back to the Boundaryless Conversations Podcast. On this podcast, we explore the future of business models, organizations, markets, and society in our rapidly changing world. I’m solo today, but I’m thrilled to welcome our guest for this episode, a consultant, author, and thought leader who has deeply influenced the field of research, design, and innovation and worked with countless brands worldwide, Erika Hall.

 

Erika is the co-founder of Mule Design, a renowned design consultancy known for emphasizing evidence-based design and ethical practices. She’s also an author of the widely acclaimed book, Just Enough Research, which is also coming up with a 2024 edition, which has become a cornerstone for designers and innovators looking to integrate meaningful research in their work. Hello, Erika. It’s beyond fantastic to have you here today.

 

Erika Hall 

Hello, it’s so nice to be here. Thank you for having me with you.

 

Simone Cicero 

Thank you so much. We are very excited to dive into some big questions with you today, but I would like to start from maybe a kind of a kickoff question. And I love to hear your perspective on how the field of research, which you have contributed to evolve so strongly, has changed from maybe when you started your career, where from a world, let’s say, where I guess research was a little bit more resourceful or slower or in general more thoughtful, I would say, into a world where we kind of live this interconnected ecosystems, multiplicity of options, speed, the modularity, AI, so iterations and changes become paramount. 

 

How have things changed in the last few couple of decades, I guess.

 

Erika Hall (03:21.216)

I mean, that’s a huge question and one I guess I’m getting a lot lately. And I think you can’t separate out, know, research is kind of just the learning function and you can’t really separate that out from how any other part of, I’d say business or any institution has changed.

 

And the short answer is of course the designer’s answer, it depends. Because even though like I got my start really in a consultancy, you know, working alongside a design ethnographer for the first time in the late 90s. 

 

And we worked in an organization that was founded by a designer named Clement Mock, who was always thinking about business. He came out of Apple and he founded his own design consultancy. And he wrote a very, very early book, Designing Business, about the relationship of, at that point, the interactivity was much lower, but about the relationship of digital design to business and how the one could make the other more effective. And so even though when we were doing research early on, know, in the late 90s at this point, we were still moving pretty quickly. It was more upfront work, right? 

 

Because we were doing project, maybe a project would last a year and we would do six to eight weeks of work that would inform that overall the strategy, as you said. But we would also try to set people up to learn, set the client businesses up to learn. And so I think it’s just the higher order question is like, how does an organization learn? this is a question that ever since management science, in the middle of last century, people have been wrestling with. 

 

And so I think a lot has gotten faster, but I think a lot of that is the appearance of moving more quickly. And if you look around, a lot of things actually change much more slowly than the way that we talk about them. Like maybe practitioners are expected to deliver more, but I don’t know that if you look at a lot of things, if like culture is changing as quickly or decision-making is changing as quickly. I think a lot of people are expected to give the appearance of moving quickly. But I don’t think it’s because there’s more faster sensing and responding in a considered way.

 

Simone Cicero

Mm-hmm. OK. So maybe it’s the other way around. I was thinking, as you were talking, I was thinking to the concept of festina lente, right? The idea that maybe we have to go slower to go faster. So how does it sound in terms of the role of research?

 

Erika Hall 

Mm-hmm. That’s exactly, I don’t talk about it in those words, but I talk about that concept a lot because like I said, especially in the wake of agile processes, this idea of delivering very, very rapidly and delivery-driven organizations and of course managing, if you’re a public company, you’re managing to your quarterly analyst call.

 

And that’s all driving this like, we’ve got to move fast. We’ve got to move fast. However, if you really want to set your organization up to really do the right things quickly or to have efficient communication, you need to do the work on getting that alignment upfront, right? Because it doesn’t, it doesn’t matter how well different pockets of an organization are functioning if they’re embedded within an organization that is out of alignment, because that’s, mean, you can use the mechanical metaphor, like the gears don’t mesh, but that’s essentially what happened. And we can look back now, we’ve been in this period. It’s also hard to talk about trends because, you know, there was at the beginning of this century, the the dot com bust and then things built back up. And then there was the financial crash and all of these sort of shocks. And so it’s hard to tease apart what are the actual trends as opposed to what were responses to these shocks and like what’s going on at a lower level to kind of, to drive all of this. 

 

And so a lot of what’s driving the way things work is finance and like technology and the way technology is developed and the processes actually follow finance. But we don’t as designers and technologists examine that enough and examine that relationship between financing and like the operation and how much of it is actually not responding to the needs of the user, but responding to the desires of the investor.

 

Simone Cicero

Okay, I mean that’s fascinating because just a few episodes ago we had exactly this conversation with Jen van der Meer when she made the point that the financial kind of constraints design the business models, know, impose the, and I guess they, you know, in the waterfall they also impose the constraint for the products. So, I mean, I have already a lot of notes, you know, so.

 

First of all, we’re speaking about fast velocity, let’s say speed and iterativity. Another very interesting point and topic that emerged in the last, maybe last, especially the last five, five-ish years is the idea of modularity, right? So when we work with companies, for example, very often, maybe because of the fact that technology has made things so democratic and empowered so much the teams, we now work with organizations where you normally have lots of teams autonomously developing different pieces of developer position. So how has modularity and in general the idea of portfolios impacted the way you do the work you do in research? as it maybe changed from, I don’t know, centralizing this capability and function of the organization into spreading it out across the board. So how things change as companies have moved more into ecosystem, value propositions, modules, and portfolios.

 

Erika Hall

I would say from my perspective, because the way I think about all of this is just, really grounded in, it’s already grounded in systems thinking, right? And so the way that I work and talk about work hasn’t changed because it’s always like, who are you working with? Who do you need to influence? Who are you accountable to? What’s your agenda? And how and where do you have knowledge gaps that are affecting decision-making? Right. Cause I talk about design at the unit of the decision, not the artifact so much. 

 

And so that sort of analysis, like it works for whether you’re going sort of top down. think, mean, top down, that sort of like top down unified view has always been a fiction, right? Because people work with the people they work with, they work in this unit and the ways that decisions happen are a lot more nuanced and idiosyncratic, even within organizations that might seem monolithic.

And so again, I think like the theme I always come back to is how much are you doing the thing and how much are you giving the appearance of doing the thing? Because when you talk about democratization, right, the difference between say democratization and delegation is a very important distinction. And the distinction to me is, are you doing a piece of the work, that is delegation. How much of a say do you have in the goals or the agenda setting? That’s democratization, right? If you have a vote in what the actual agenda is, what the policy is, what the goal is, what the strategy is, then I would say maybe your work is democratized. But for most organizations I work with, people might be in a modular business unit but something could happen in the macro environment and bam, that I have literally had clients where we were working with a, say, call it an entrepreneurial module within a larger organization. And because the organization as a whole was doing something like positioning itself to IPO to go public, that entire module was cut loose. 

 

Like I’ve had the experience of being on site when everybody I’ve been working with for six months got laid off because of a lack of internal communication coordination, that’s a terrible experience. And so everybody within that module, they were working, as you say, we’re like, have our budget, we have our goals, we’re responding to this need in the marketplace. But because there was a shift at the very top at the board level in terms of realigning the whole organization, it didn’t matter.

 

And so I come at this topic with, I would say a certain amount of skepticism because every large enterprise wants to present itself as being entrepreneurial, innovative, responsive to the marketplace to the extent where they’re ahead of the marketplace. But when it comes down to it, the people at the top of the organization, if they’re responsible to their investors, they want to give the appearance of having a strategic vision and still being in control.

 

Simone Cicero 

Control. Yes. Yeah. mean, that’s fascinating because no later than a week ago, I was talking to a customer and these leaders genuinely felt like, you know, our PMs are failing because they lack skills. They lack, I don’t know, this or that. And at the end of the day, my impression was more that it wasn’t even clear how much autonomy those teams had. 

 

So to some extent, there was this pressure that felt like it was good to democratize, really, so to give entrepreneurial autonomy to these teams. But on the other side, as soon as pressure from investors comes in, you feel like this urgency to say, let me control this. Let me maybe regain some responsibilities. 

 

And from your point of view, I tend to think that any company that in these days today, centralized control, and think that they can actually control outcomes top down, they are fated. They will fail because things are so much more uncontrollable now. in your perception, you’re also, once you’ve wrote another very interesting piece, quote that I captured, I don’t remember what blog post it was, you said something like, you can do as much as the research as you want, so you can understand your customer as much as you want. But if your organizational structure is not ready for that, that’s going to be wasted. 

So what’s your point of view in terms of what is the right structure to have, or how much really teams should be accountable versus maybe some coherent control in an organization that develops products?

 

Erika Hall 

It comes, because the thing that comes from the top down, yeah, and I’ve seen this over and over again, and I talk to researchers, especially those who come out of academia, who are very frustrated because they say, I just have to have more rigorous studies. I just have to have more data, and the decision makers will listen to me. 

 

And I have to say that it’s not it’s not like that. And so it has to come from two places that are at the top. You have to have this, the actual spirit of learning, right? Because the thing about research that is very important, and I still feel like not everyone grasps, is that research is anti-authoritarian. If you talk about somebody in the leadership of an organization,

 

Right? If you have authority over that organization, that means that you have the truth, right? You tell people like, this is how we’re going to do things. And if you, a researcher, as a designer, as a technologist come to that with, well, I have data that contradicts you, or I have questions about your approach, like the fundamental starting place of research is we have a question. What you are essentially doing, from a power perspective is undermining them and you’re telling them, as the leader of this organization, you don’t have all the answers. And so if you are a leader of an organization, you need to come in with questions and you need to value the question, right? You need to say, okay, what is important in our organization is that we are always taking in new information and always adjusting based on that new information and you have to mean it. This doesn’t happen because so much, you look at, were talking about investors and talking about the marketplace, right? That runs on stories, not data, right? You can look at like any company and they make their quarterly, their annual like, predictions, announcements, projection, they announce new products. If you tell that story in a convincing way, that will translate into millions of dollars, billions of dollars of market cap, right? If people have faith in your story. 

 

And that has nothing to do with reality. And often the reality is very deflating because reality is very complex. Reality involves a lot of interconnecting systems. But the thing that makes you money is getting people to believe this story. And so it sort of doesn’t matter. But like I said, if your business is in alignment where you have a reality-based business model, a business model that’s based on creating actual value for people in the real world, sure, that can work. And at some point, yeah, if your story doesn’t match reality, it will come crashing down, but do not underestimate how long you can go. 

 

Like, look at Boeing. Like Boeing is the greatest example we have now. Like Boeing used to be a really strong, reliable, high quality manufacturing company and everything literally fell apart. Airplanes falling apart because at the level of the decision-making at the level of the Q &A, at the individual manager level, the incentive was to sweep reality under the rug. And so, yeah, so if you don’t have the spirit of wanting to produce something of quality, if you don’t have the spirit of long-term thinking and operating reality instead of operating in the world of telling stories to the market, nothing else matters in that organization. 

 

Like you can never have enough data because they don’t care about reality. So I don’t know if that answers your question.

 

Simone Cicero 

Right. No, think, again, I feel myself very much resonating with this because, again, stories are from customers that maybe have promised some results to their investors. And then results are not coming because product development is complex. And they blame their people maybe sometimes. Or maybe they do it genuinely because they genuinely think that their people lack capabilities or skills, or maybe their organization lacks certain structures. 

 

But the answer is never going to be stick with the plans and get angry about what’s happening. It’s probably something else. And so what I would like to ask you is, you don’t, you know, if we assume that planning and trying to make things happen according to our ambitious plans, you know, can be nice, astounding stories, but it’s normally very problematic from a perspective of operationally managing an organization. How do you manage it? 

 

So if you don’t manage it by giving objectives to people and you want to really make them accountable and make them entrepreneurial, because I think accountability sells another big piece of this picture, what do you invest in? So I guess in people, practices, doctrine.

 

What kind of things you have to create in an organization to be sure that the money you spend as an investor goes into evidence and products?

 

Erika Hall 

So it’s like, like I said, it’s not, it’s not an investment so much as it is like this, this positionality, because often like, and we’ve seen this, like if we look at the last like decade and a half of the low interest rates, plenty of investors made a tremendous amount of money doing nonsense. And I think we have to wrestle with that. 

 

And so the incentives like, people respond to the incentives in place. And so what you have to do is you have to change the incentives. So what you were saying about like people in leadership or in management, blaming the individual, the workers, the practitioners, like, they don’t have the skills. It’s not the skills. It’s, it’s the system. It’s what system they are a part of. 

 

Like, we talk a lot about the phrase individual contributor, right? That’s often how workers who are not managers are referred to. No one is an individual contributor. And so I think there’s just, there’s a total lack of systems thinking, right? You talk about modularity, and I think often managers will look at this on paper and say, that looks good on paper. But the distinction that I make is in design, there’s like information architecture and then there’s interaction design and you have to take both perspectives. Not only how are all these pieces related in the abstract, but what are the behaviors within those structures? And I think you have to think about both. No one is doing interact, no one is working on the interaction design level. People are saying, here’s a process. We’re going to adopt this process.

 

Then we’re going to use these tools to enable this process, communication tools, project management tools, whatever kind of like enterprise management tools. And they never take it to the level of how, who is interacting with who in what way to really fulfill the promise of these frameworks and the promise of these tools. And the tools are themselves designed by dysfunctional organizations. Right. And so.

 

Like there are a couple of thinkers from the past who’ve operated in this arena, right? There’s, well, Mel Conway is still alive. Like a lot of people, and I’m sure this has come up in your conversations before, Conway’s law, where it’s like, show me how an organization communicates with itself and that constrains the systems they design. Like he coined that concept in 1967 or something. And people run organizations still like that’s not true. 

 

They think that, we can impose a structure from the outside rather than saying, we have to fix how we interact from the bottom up. And I think you need both. And everybody just wants to take a tool or framework and say, we’re doing it like this now. And they don’t understand that what they’re talking about is interaction design. It’s behavior change within an organization. And we know as designers, how hard behavior change is and we know that behavior responds to incentives. So organizations will absolutely say that they are adopting a particular pattern or framework or way of working, but then incentivize the opposite. And then if you take an individual, I don’t care how talented or 10,000 X or unicorn that individual is. If you put them into an organization, into that system, with that set of feedback loops and that set of incentives, that individual themselves, like you can’t talk about them being like skilled. Yeah. People have skills and talents and whatever, but so often it has to do with the environment you’re placing them in. Like what’s the ecosystem, right? Like if you have a panda, you have to put a panda into an ecosystem with bamboo. And people are essentially saying like, we hired this magical panda, but we’ve got no bamboo for them.

 

We don’t have the right things that they need to thrive and achieve their potential within this whole structure. So nobody’s taking a systems level view. We’re going back to because of the shock of the higher interest rates and the pandemic and all of that, we’re hearing all about founder mode again. So everything’s gotten really like, I am the only genius. And so I think a lot of leaders will say, yeah, that sounds good but then they won’t actually set up the incentives that make that function, or they won’t look at things in terms of, are people communicating in the right way to make this a reality? 

 

Like look at the return to office conversation, right? It’s been a big thing here in the US, and it’s a nonsense conversation. Like I love working with people together in person, but it doesn’t make the work better necessarily. 

 

And none of that has been data driven, right? You talk about like, like responding to actual on the ground, real world facts. Nobody is saying like, let’s, let’s make sure that we’re clearly defining success. We’re clearly defining productivity. We’re relating how people work to our desired outcomes. No, it’s a complete control move. It’s like, okay, I want people where I can see them. Often it’s a stealth layoff.

 

So if your organization is not being honest, which so many are just flat out not being honest to their people, to their customers, to their investors, right? They’re like, we’re just going to make it look like we’re doing things in a really considered way. And then they’re just like bringing people back into the office to as a, as a control thing, not as a, we’ve learned, we’ve actually learned that this is how we have these good communications. 

 

It’s actually like, all we know is that business got worse. And so let’s just bring people back where we can control them. And that doesn’t make people entrepreneurial, right? Doing things that are arbitrary and controlling absolutely demotivates people and gets the best people to quit.

 

Simone Cicero

Let’s understand that we understand that these knee-jerk reaction of things going not very well these days is not going to work. So I am a manager. I sit down. I breathe a little bit. I calm down. So how do I manage an organization and create an organization that is wise, thoughtful, evidence-based, and can create great products through what I get from your conversation, enabling constraints and a good social practice and not, you know, except thinking that I can control things. So how can I do it well? So what are the pillars of doing or making it work in your experience?

 

Erika Hall 

The most important one is having clear strategic objectives and not just following trends. Like we’re seeing this right now. Like everybody’s jumping on the AI bandwagon. Like why? Like I’ve been, like the field of artificial intelligence, which was only called that, like the university where I went to school, like was where the term artificial intelligence was coined like in the fifties or something. 

 

And I’ve been, I’ve been interested in machine learning ever since undergrad. And the field has been kind of like chunking along and making progress and, and, and, know, changing and trying different things. And then all of a sudden it blew up not because, you know, cause some of the technology advanced, but also because it was the next like financial terrain and, and so it really is starting from, we’re not going to chase a trend. 

 

We know why we’re in business. Right. And the reason isn’t just to maximize profits. Cause if, if the whole reason for your business, and this is tricky because of fiduciary responsibility, because, you kind of, as a leader, your job is to maximize profits. And the problem is.

 

If your only job is to maximize shareholder value, then everything is in service to that. And then you do whatever nonsense like helps you maximize shareholder value, which might have nothing to do with any of these other things. But if you have a strong, a genuine purpose, like why does your business exist for some reason other than being a way to maximize shareholder value, then everything flows from that.

 

But if you don’t have that, if you have that, like, we’re gonna chase whatever makes a good story. Like I said, like nothing else matters. And so there are some organizations that operate more like this. 

 

Like you take maybe a funny example, but Costco, which is a big like kind of warehouse retailer here in America. They’re a public company, but they are really clear about what business they’re in and what makes their business work, right? And what technology it makes sense to incorporate in their business. And they’ve been going along and doing really well. And you look at a lot of other businesses and it just seems like they’re like, yeah, know, like, we’re all about this now, especially more technology driven businesses.

 

They’re not leading in a human-centered way, a customer-centered way. They’re leading in an investor-centered way. So you have to really know what your purpose is besides just shareholder value. if you don’t have that, this is, I mean, this might seem like a really bleak pronouncement, but honestly, if you don’t have that, it’s just going to be like chasing that. And that’s where the waste comes in, right? 

 

Because when we talk about how to staff and how to have teams work together. There was a tremendous amount of, like the layoffs right now are awful. They’re affecting so many people I know. They’re affecting people in client services, because there’s just chaos. And the workers are being blamed for the layoffs, right? But that came from this like wild overhiring because they didn’t actually know who they needed. It was just like, we’ve got to grow because growth looked like success. And so when you double your headcount in a four year period, and then the macro conditions change, then you just shed people. They were never using those people well. All those researchers that got laid off, all those designers who got laid off, weren’t contributing to value by working on products they were contributing to value by adding to this perception of success that was being sold to the market. 

 

So the work was never quote unquote being used at the like making products level. Because when you’re a manager and there have been some, I don’t know off the top of my head, there’ve been a couple of really good business school papers about this, about the problem is that once you’re in a position like a manager, want you have an incentive if you have authority over headcount, you have an incentive to add headcount because that usually increases your compensation and it just makes you look more successful. You’re like, look, our business unit is growing. But what if, like what you’re talking about, what if you can get a lot done? Like I am a huge believer in getting a lot done with small teams working together well. Like look at Blue Sky right now, right?

 

Blue Sky is a 20 person company and they are doing a tremendous amount with 20 people and they’re gonna have to grow and things like that, but they’re innovating and they’re responding to their users in a really interesting way. And the problem is that the way that organizations add people and get people to work together, again, has to do with giving supporting a story, not supporting this operational reality of what it takes to make a high-quality, successful product over the long term.

 

Simone Cicero

And in terms of structures, right? Let’s say that you have a good, you figure out your strategy, your purpose as a company, which I also believe it’s very important to some extent, you know, I’m a believer in general of letting the organization go into spaces that were not necessarily 100 % planned. 

 

But at the same time, I think I’ve learned to understand that if you have a good strategic framework and a good vision and purpose, this can be actually used very operationally by teams, in terms of making choices, for example, or choosing to do something versus something else. But in terms of how you develop a practice of research in an organization like that, should it be centralized? Should it be more like a skill you cultivate? Should it be a community of practice? How do you change in size inside an organization. 

 

For example, another big problem that I’m seeing in organizations that, especially as they grow big in terms of teams, they lack a coherent representation of what they are building for, who they are building for, what are the customer ecosystems. 

 

And also customer ecosystems are becoming more problematic and complex because sometimes it’s a partner, sometimes it’s a customer, sometimes the partner serves the customer, sometimes you serve a customer job that is spanning across different products. Some of them are your partners, some are not. So how do you build a practice that let the organization function through this complexity, but keeping a certain coherent vision of their customers and their insights?

 

Erika Hall 

It has to do with being very clear about how the organization makes decisions and metabolizes information to make those decisions. Because the whole point of doing applied research is to help an organization make, it works on two levels. One, to make more confident, better decisions given the constraints. And then to, at a higher level, improve the process of getting information to those decisions. 

 

So you can look and say, that helps us make a better decision. What can we do better next time to actually improve the asking and answering questions process? And it has to come from an organization defining very explicitly how it makes decisions and how it uses information in making those decisions.

 

Like one of the objections to doing more research is always, it takes too much time, it takes too much money. It doesn’t. Like that’s why I wrote a book called Just Enough Research, right? Because if you have clarity with your decision, if you have clarity about how much of a commitment your decision represents in terms of time and money, then you know like how much you need to learn. 

 

And it all has to follow from that. Like a lot of the discussion I’m seeing happen online about research is, how can we improve the research practice? That is the wrong question. The question is how do we improve decision-making so it’s more evidence-based? And that responsibility is on the people making decisions because like we were talking about earlier, if you’re doing research and the decision-maker doesn’t want it or doesn’t care or isn’t prepared to incorporate it, it doesn’t matter how much you do. doesn’t matter whether it’s centralized, whether it’s out there. 

 

You have to say, okay, how do we make decisions as an organization? Because if everybody understands that process, then everybody knows how they fit into that. But if you don’t have that clarity, and if you aren’t, again, it goes back to what I was saying about organizations being honest, right? How organizations make decisions is the people with power do what they’re gonna do and they cherry pick research to support that. That is very common.

 

But if again, this all comes from the people with decision-making authority, if you say, okay, it’s important to me that our organization makes decisions and commits its resources in a way that helps fulfill our goals and we have good goals, then it’s pretty straightforward to go, okay, who should I, who should be asking and answering the questions? Who decides what questions get asked? How does that tie into decision-making? It has to happen at that level. 

 

And then it then whether it’s centralized, it’s like the, the learning again, needs to percolate throughout the organization. And that depends on, it depends on what business you’re in. Like designers always want to universalize things because designers tend to be in love with modernism and modernism is the idea that like, there’s one universalized solution for everything.

 

But, but what you have to do is be context aware. Like that’s fundamentally, you have to be like, who do we have? What are we doing here? And given that context, what’s the best way to arrange things? And also how do we tell if we have a bad system, right? 

 

Again, it goes back to that idea of systems thinking and feedback loops. And what you have to do is figure out where to put the feedback loops to tell you if you need to adjust. And you need to let go of the idea that there’s one right way. Like this is how design thinking kind of messed it up for design because design thinking was the idea that you have one process and it’s one tool, but you have one process that doesn’t interrogate the goals and you can drop it in any business and it will be like a vending machine for innovation.

 

Why are you innovating, right? I would love us to talk about improving more than innovating because incremental improvement has a really bad rap. Nobody wants to do incrementalism. But if you look at people in the world, we want things to get incrementally better. We don’t want to have to constantly deal with everything changing. 

 

We don’t want to have to suddenly buy a whole lot of new adapters because Apple decided, right, we’ve changed the ports. People are like, can you just, I just want what I’m already doing and I want it to be a little bit better. And that’s really what people want, but that’s not what the market wants. The market wants, we have a giant reason for everybody to switch to a new way of doing things and spend a lot of money. 

 

So to get your question, the best way to have a research practice has to start and it can. Again, this can also, this can be something you can kind of do bottom up, but you start with, well, where are some decisions where we can say, how do we start making this set of decisions based on the evidence? Okay, how do we gather that evidence in time and in a manner where it does influence that decision? 

 

And you can sort of start this at the level of a team and work out from that and try to change the organization. But like I said, if there’s somebody with power who decides to shift the whole way you’re doing things, it doesn’t matter what you’re doing at this level unless you have like power over the agenda. Nobody does it like this. I mean, I work with a lot of organizations and very few of them, it’s like always the vast majority of people I work with have like researchers and designers like trying to like get people to care.

 

But the people making decisions have to have questions. They have to need to know things. A lot of times what they want is they want quantitative data that they can use to support what they already want to do. So part of it is also just getting more qualitative about things. 

 

Like Google did the, what was it, Project Aristotle a few years ago, where they asked the question, what makes Teams very functional and very productive? And it came down to psychological safety and the teams, like they asked a question similar to what you were posing, which is like, is it teams that are more democratic? Is it teams that have a strong leader? Is it teams that have a certain number of people? Is it teams that spend a lot of free time together? Or is it teams that go in, work together, and then never talk to each other outside of their actual project work?

 

And what they found is that those quantitative things did not matter on like the effectiveness of the team. What mattered is do they have clarity? Do they have trust? Do they have psychological safety? 

 

And there’s always this desire, especially in large enterprises to quantify everything in order to control it. Quantification isn’t for learning. Quantification is for control.

 

But you have to start by understanding things before you quantify them to control them. And understanding is a qualitative practice and that makes managers itchy. They’re like, how do I measure? How do I measure? And what they end up doing is they end up falling into availability bias and saying, we have so much data. Let’s look at what the data is telling us. They don’t say, they don’t start from what do we actually need to know? And what’s the best way of finding that out? And that’s the, and like, what are we trying to do? What’s the most effective way of doing what we’re trying to do? 

 

So it has to start from the goal, the question and the decision-making in practice. Like literally how do decisions get made and how do people evaluate whether or not, whether it was a good decision or a bad decision. Organizations just don’t do this, right at a big level. 

 

They’re always like, well, how do we justify the decision that we made? So you mentioned accountability and responsibility and a lot in the appeal of doing quantitative work is you can evade responsibility. You can say, well, the numbers, but the problem is you can find numbers that back up anything. 

 

So, if you want people to have accountability and take responsibility, they have to feel safe. And right now, no one, no workers feel safe. So everybody’s just like using all of their brains to keep their jobs is really the sense I’m getting. And if you have that fear mindset where we don’t have a real strategy, we could lay you off at any minute, what you’re going to get is very smart people using 80 % of their brain power to keep their job and maybe 20 % to do their job. 

 

And this happens in like the performance reviews and everything being quantified. The result of that is things being bad.

 

Simone Cicero 

Well, I guess that there is some level of challenge that it’s not avoidable. So it’s just how things are these days. Markets are challenging. It’s very hard to create products. mean, from some extent, it’s easy. From some extent, it’s also hard because the market is so fragmented, niches and so on. So there is an intrinsic complexity in the market these days that you have to entertain. 

 

Just as a recap of what you said, but because I think it was really interesting, you said it’s not really about how you do things or finding the right way to do things, but rather in any type of organization you have, could be a more direct organization, it could be a more distributed organization.

And I think it also depends in Conway’s law terms from what you’re building. So maybe you are building a single product. You can be quite directive like a Airbnb. Everybody’s been talking about the CEO Airbnb, Chesky, centralizing all decisions. 

 

And on the other hand, if you’re building multiple products, maybe you need really to have a distributed and kind of synergic organization, but the important thing is strategy needs to be clear, the purpose, how we gather data, how we take decision on this data, how we measure the decisions. I think this is really crucial because I’ve been working so many companies where, for example, you ask who decides what goes into the roadmap of this technology or this product. And, know, nobody knows, you know, it’s basically, you know, maybe there’s a leader that doesn’t have the evidence and it needs to take decisions based on some salesperson telling them, you know, my customer wants this, but you don’t really know how many customers want this or how can you prioritize in the roadmap. So that’s very important. 

 

And of course, we spoke about accountability and psychological safety, which is also, again, something that I think it’s a friction between these two things that we cannot really rule out of the table. You have pressure these days. As soon as you become accountable to the market, there’s pressure, less psychological safety and it’s a challenge. 

 

So I think this is something we cannot really rule out of the table. So maybe as a last question before we dive into the breadcrumbs, 

 

I’m curious to hear from a, I don’t wanna say practical perspective, but as we see products and services increasingly produce by a massive number of interactions. So for example, you now have a company like, I don’t know, for example, HubSpot creating products and then having a plethora of applications of third parties integrated into the system. So how do you move from researching one customer into researching an ecosystem of interactions?

 

Erika Hall 

Again, it’s all, it comes back to the same theme because when, when all of these like products and services are connections among all these different platforms and ecosystems talking to each other, that makes the qualitative work more important than ever because a lot of times your customer’s interaction is going to go through all these systems where you don’t actually own the data. You don’t have the data. 

 

And if you, if you base decisions only on your analytics and what you can measure, you have a huge chance of, being wrong. And so again, it all goes back to like, only, I have five things I say and I keep saying them because like people don’t do them. 

 

And it really is, it’s having this clarity about what success looks like and what, what, who needs to do what when you’re talking about designing for your customers and your customers who are having interactions with all these different systems and like this ecosystem thing. If you are really clear on what you need to know in order to make a decision, then you can figure out how to find that out. 

 

And a lot of times it really does come down to talking to people out in the world and understanding how they are interacting with all these systems or not in reality. The only way you can learn that is by talking to people out in the world, because otherwise you’re going to look at whatever data you have access to and make wild, wild assumptions and interpretations based on that.

 

Like there’s a kind of consulting I do now that I would describe as we have a tremendous amount of data and no understanding. And you get people who have like so much quantitative data. But then everybody’s still fighting about decisions because everybody has the data that supports their belief or they’ve created some narrative to fill in the gaps. Like I’ve seen some wild like personas and scenarios based on analytics where it’s like you just, you literally just made this up based on seeing correlations and there are all these gaps and you’re not admitting you have gaps. And then what you do is you find some representative people, again, not hard, like you can offer basically anybody $50 to talk to you and you can talk to 10 people and you can learn a lot if you’re open to that. And so what you do is you’re like, okay, what do we need to know?

 

Okay, whose life do we need to understand? And then you seriously just get on, you don’t even need video. You get on like a voice call with somebody and you’re just like, tell me about your day yesterday. And they walk through everything and all the systems they interacted with. And all of a sudden you understand from the user’s perspective, how they move through the ecosystem. And there is no way to understand that without doing that. 

 

If you rely on your analytics, you’re gonna miss everything that they’re doing that doesn’t show up, that you haven’t instrumented for. But this is scary to people because the other problem is when you open up the question like that, you’re gonna learn things you don’t wanna know. I don’t know if you’ve heard the lawyers saying that you never ask a question that you don’t already know the answer to in court. And I feel like that’s behind a lot of the structure of research practices is this desire to control because, no, if we learn something that contradicts the story that we’re telling to the market, we’re going to have to deal with that. And that’s another reason why there’s this desire. And now people are talking about like, we’re going to have synthetic personas and stuff. It’s like, please just like talk to people. 

 

You could talk to people in a week for like a thousand dollars plus your employee’s time and learn so much that fills in all these gaps. However, what you give up is control. And that’s at the heart of it.

 

Simone Cicero

Interesting, because in this series we had Philippe De Ridder talking about synthetic users and doing synthetic interviews and now we have this completely different perspective. Lovely.

 

Erika Hall 

Yeah. Yeah. But like, why? Like, why not just talk to people? That’s what I’m always like, why? Because it’s so much risk. Like, because there’s this idea that like, are you saving time or you’re saving money? Like, no. Like, seriously. Yeah.

 

Simone Cicero 

I mean, I guess the idea is that you can, as you have to create many more niche products, you can maybe reduce again, the cost of experimenting and trying things out.

 

Erika Hall 

Yeah, false economy, false economy, right? Like, come on, I wrote a book, it’s $24. Like I said, if you give like 20 people 50 bucks, you could learn so much. But instead, because people, they don’t want to talk to people, they want everything to be in the technology, but the risk, you’re like, what’s the risk of you being wrong? The risk is very high. People do these things because they want to do these things and they use time and money as an excuse to do what they want to do. 

 

But it’s all about exerting control and also living in this fantasy world that you can then sell to your investor, right? But if you learn things about the real world, you have to deal with it. And that’s really that fear, that fear of losing control and being wrong are at the heart. 

 

So what I tell people, the research mindset is the scientific mindset, right? You don’t want to be proven right. Everybody, like, this is the whole heart of my whole shtick, right? We’ve all been rewarded for having answers and right answers because that feels really good. Being uncertain feels bad, but that’s the… If you’re a scientist, what you want to do is be proven wrong. And that is the research mindset is I want to be proven wrong as quickly and cheaply as possible. 

 

And if you flip it like that, like, so you don’t talk about validating things because that’s all confirmation bias. You’re like, how do I make sure I’m not wrong? I want to know that I’m wrong. Tell me I’m wrong. And you have to change your heart. Like, really, it’s hard for some people to really welcome being wrong because the faster that you figure out that you’re wrong, the less time you spend being wrong. But a lot of people are writing being wrong for a really long time before, because they want to cash out, right? It’s like, okay, if we can pass, if we can get another bag holder for whatever, and we can just be like, let’s just operate in this pretend world until it all comes crashing down because fundamentals catch up with us, great, I’ve got my bag, I’m out. 

 

Why is Adam Newman a billionaire, right? Adam Newman is a billionaire? Because he told a story and he got somebody with a tremendous amount of money to believe him and then people with less money looked to the person with the most money and they all follow, right? Like he made up this entire, he made like subleasing office space sound like a technology business, which it wasn’t. And then once enough people believe in it, it’s like clapping for Tinkerbell. It’s like, we have to keep putting money into that or else it’s all going to come crashing down. Like it’s all gambling. So I would say the thing you need to do the most is figure out, you doing science or are you doing gambling and making sure, cause, cause designers and researchers are doing science, right? Making things based on the evidence. But a lot of business is doing high stakes gambling and you need to say like, which am I doing? Right.

 

Simone Cicero

I mean, that’s a great note to end up on because I was thinking how different would the world be if this mindset was the winning mindset in the business world? Because to be honest, that wasn’t. As you know, you are from Silicon Valley, which is the heart of the other side of the spectrum, making these things happen, the founder mode, the visionaries and people wouldn’t have been asked for cars if maybe they would have asked for faster horses. So these narratives are very much well known. 

 

So thank you so much for making the case for the other side of the spectrum. So as a closure of this conversation, would you like to share with our listeners your breadcrumbs for today?

 

Erika Hall

Let’s see. I guess as far as a book, I have it right here. Closing the Loop by Sheryl Cababa. It’s about systems thinking and that’s really, really good.

 

My breadcrumbs for people, honestly, with everything going on is to go offline a little bit and look around you. Seriously, go out to the movies, go out to a restaurant and just, I think, be in the world around you and then you can bring that back because I think it’s easy to get lost in the idea that everything we see on screen is everything that exists. 

 

So what I will tell, I will say my breadcrumb is go someplace you haven’t been before in your town and just look around you and reflect on that and reflect on that and talk to a stranger.

 

Simone Cicero 

Fantastic. Fantastic.

 

That’s one of the best breadcrumbs we have ever had on the show. So thank you so much, Erika. I I hope you also enjoyed the conversation a little bit.

 

Erika Hall 

yeah, yeah, absolutely. Thank you.

 

Simone Cicero

Thank you. It was fascinating. And for our listeners, of course, you can head to our website, www.boundaryless.io/resources/podcast, and you will find Erika’s conversation with all the notes, the links, and everything else. Of course, we have to recommend your book, Just Enough Research. There is a new edition out. It makes a good gift for the holidays.

 

And of course, it’s something that should be in the pocket of anybody working with products, services, customers, and users, and organizations. Because we also learned that research is not just about customers, it’s about how you organize, how you communicate, how you structure your teams, the clarity you make in the organization. 

 

So thank you so much for bringing this larger perspective. I really enjoyed it. Thank you so much.

 

Erika Hall 

Thank you.

 

Simone Cicero 

And for our listeners, until we speak again, remember to think Boundaryless.