By James Kennedy, client director, Brainjuicer
Even when we think we’re listening to what other people are telling us, the fact is that very often we’re not. We hear what they are saying, but our hearing – as my mother is wont to tell my father – can be selective. We hear want we want to hear, rather than really listening to what the other person is trying to tell us.
This was brought home to me at a recent writing holiday on the island of Skyros in Greece. The holidays there are designed to be ‘holistic’ and come with a particular ethos, a core part of which is the tradition of ‘co-listening’. (Type ‘co-listening’ into Google, and the first reference you get will be to co-listening on Skyros.)
Each guest is paired off with a ‘co-listener’ and the rules are strict: the speaker can speak for up to 10 minutes without interruption, at the end of which the listener can give feedback which is limited to ‘clarifying’ and ‘reflecting’ what the speaker has said, with no interpretations, no advice and above all no signifying approval or disapproval. You then swap roles and the speaker becomes the listener.
This means that at some point each day you are forced to take stock of your overall holiday experience and of your creative efforts and talk about yourself without needing to observe conversational norms. It’s an interesting experience – both as speaker and as listener.
As speaker, you start off feeling you that you are breaking social rules by talking too much about yourself (although this comes more naturally to some people than to others!), but after a couple of days you find yourself going into issues in greater depth than you would normally – and starting to unravel some of those mental ‘loops’ that can act as barriers to creativity.
As listener, you feel powerless, unable to influence the conversational flow and, initially at least, the temptation is to try and communicate non-verbally – to nod your head and pull faces. But after a while you find yourself listening to the other person in a much more attentive way, freed as you are from having to think of what your reply is going to be.
I came to realise that most conversations we have are actually much more to do with social interaction than they are about self-expression. This realization led me to reflect on what we have learned from interacting with consumers in the JuicyBrains Innovation Community during the last two years.
In the beginning I was reasonably comfortable with people labelling our community projects as ‘big qual’ – saying that you could use the platform to conduct research in a similar way to focus groups, but with more participants and over a longer period of time. But I’ve become increasingly uncomfortable with a label that fails to take account of some very real differences in the way that researchers interact with consumers in a community environment.
Clients often come to us with a ‘shopping list’ of things that they want to ask consumers and if we were conducting focus groups we might be tempted to shoehorn these into a discussion guide for a 90 minute group. However, in a community project we have the time to allow a more natural dialogue to develop with the participants.
Marketers can be in such a hurry to get the answers they need that they miss the fact they are framing a discussion entirely in their own terms – rather than allowing the consumer to tell us about things as they really see them. In a community we can start with an open brief that invites the participants to tell us a story about themselves or to describe some aspect of their lives. There will be time to get the answers the client is asking for later on in the dialogue.
In traditional qualitative research, there is always pressure to keep things ‘on track’ and to avoid going off on tangents. However, within a community, ‘off-topic’ discussions between participants can act as social glue that adds to their enjoyment of the process and can potentially reveal whole new angles that the client had not previously considered. The principal of obliquity tends to apply, with the best results coming when you don’t try and hit the target head on. Value is often found in the answers to questions you didn’t know you needed to ask.
While the chance to interact with each other can boost the participants’ enjoyment of community research, removing some traditional social mechanisms can help eliminate the dangers of ‘groupthink’. Asking participants to respond to briefs independently – without first knowing what others have said – gets them over the desire to fit in with the group or to seek approval from their peers. And the ability of the participants to respond without being interrupted means that you often hear more completely how they feel than you would do in an off-line setting.
So while my tan (such as it was) has faded and my stress levels have returned to somewhere near their pre-Skyros peak, one holiday legacy I’m left with is a renewed commitment to listen out for what consumers are actually saying.