Democratization is our Job
December 2020 Update - As a result of sharing these ideas and pushing on them more, I’ve changed the way I talk about the boundaries and risks of opening up our practice. I’ve written an addendum at the end that presents this new perspective in hopes of sharing the evolution of the ideas.
I had the incredible privilege to speak at UXRConfAnywhere this past month, reminding the audience that "You Are Not Your Research Report" (slides). The talk (and its title) was an acknowledgement that our impact is not and should not be limited to the formal outcomes of our work, and the deeper value in our practice is the ways that we bring rigor and structure to the curiosity of those we work with. I was speaking about the democratization of research.
Democratization is a hot topic in our community right now, and unfortunately it's often talked about in binary terms - should we or shouldn't we? In this piece, I want to make clear that democratization is not about reducing the surface area for researchers, it's about increasing the surface area for what we consider research. Research has been done, and will continue to be done, by people who don't have "researcher" in their title. It's imperative that we improve the quality of their work, rather than pretend that it doesn't exist.
Drawing Boundaries
If you zoom out and think about curiosity within an organization, you realize that there are at least a few distinct focus areas. Some roles focus their curiosity on the customer (i.e. Sales or Customer Success), some roles focus their curiosity on the product, (i.e. Product Management or Design), and some roles focus their curiosity on the company itself (i.e. Human Resources or Facilities). There are opportunities for us to play in all of these spaces, but the question is where can we be most impactful?
This idea of research focusing on where we are uniquely valuable is one that I've spoken about a few times [1, 2], but I realized that it is often lost in the broader narrative of democratization. When I talk about democratization, I’m not talking about giving our jobs away, I’m asking us to be specific about what is ours and what isn’t. Where do we drive, where do we navigate, and where do we simply come along for the ride, knowing that we're excited about the destination?
These three roles - driver, navigator, and passenger - are illustrated by the concentric circles above. The reality is that these three roles are already played by the researchers in your organization, but how intentionally are they playing each role?
While many people think that democratization is about researchers having less space to drive (i.e. shrinking the innermost circle), the reality is that democratization is about being a good navigator and a good passenger (i.e. expanding the outer two circles). You want to be able to partner with other disciplines, set expectations, and educate, enable, and empower them to be rigorous in their curiosity. Playing the role of the navigator or passenger in the outer circles is necessary, because any work we can do to help others with systems, processes, tools, and programs will make their work more impactful and give them a deeper understanding of why our expertise is valuable. It reinforces the reasons that we focus our driving time where we do.
Letting Go of the Wheel
Only knowing how to drive is one of the biggest problems I see with researchers today. Many people don't acknowledge that being a navigator or passenger is more than fine; our involvement in the outer circles is good for our customers, colleagues, organization, and ourselves.
Our customers benefit because the structures and guidance we provide result in intentional engagements that are more respectful of their time and energy. Our colleagues benefit because we are respecting and amplifying their relationships and expertise, working in partnership with them to improve the rigor in their curiosity and the quality of the overall learning and outcomes. Our organizations benefit because both our customers and our colleagues are more satisfied, and the relationships between them become more even value exchanges. We ourselves benefit because we are able to focus our driving on the most challenging terrain and routes, and in sharing the journeys with others, we ultimately learn more about where we can let go of the wheel and where we are most needed as drivers.
If you think about the distinct focus areas I outlined earlier, I imagine that all of us can think of people in our organizations who are close to customers in each area. No matter how much we try to drive, we will never be the only drivers. Beyond that, it's highly problematic that we, as a discipline, imagine that we can simply come in and drive better than any other person, even though they may have existing relationships and/or specialized training. If we're willing to recognize the role that our own skills and expertise play in understanding our customers, don't we also need to acknowledge that no number of interviews will replace a multi-year customer relationship? In these situations, we must let go of the wheel, navigating or riding alongside our colleagues.
To explore what this might look like, let's meet Linda, a VP of Customer Success at Acme Co:
Linda and her team are responsible for developing a better playbook for customer onboarding at Acme Co, and the only way they can do that is through research to understand how their existing strategies and tactics have worked, as well as where they can improve. This type of research is going to happen whether a research team wants it to or not, because the Customer Success team needs to do their best to support Acme Co's customers.
Are you going to pretend this kind of work doesn't exist, or are you going to be a navigator for Linda and her team? Being a good navigator in this case might mean working with them to identify the best ways to engage with customers, co-writing discussion guides, training her team on how to ask non-leading questions and good follow ups, and assisting them with synthesis as these conversations take place (among other activities). This helps her team be more successful and Acme Co's customers be more successful with Acme's products. It also allows Linda and her team to appreciate the skills that researchers have.
Letting go of the wheel is not about us replacing ourselves as drivers with autonomous vehicles - trading humanity for operational efficiency - it's about recognizing and embracing the different ways we can contribute. I'm suggesting that we acknowledge the places other people want to go where we may not need to drive or be able to, and do our best to help them get there successfully. This is what democratization looks like.
Democratization is our Job
Most organizations that are embracing democratization are not choosing between a more democratized practice or hiring more researchers, their choice is whether or not they do anything at all. They recognize that people all across their organizations are driving and they want to make sure those journeys go as well as they can.
Democratization is core to, not competitive with, the focus of a research team. We have to acknowledge that our role in helping our organizations learn and make better decisions means that we cannot be the ones with all the answers. Instead, we need to identify areas where our organizations need to learn in rigorous and structured ways and actively support that learning.
The questions many of us now face are "How?" and "When?" and the perhaps unsatisfying answer is that it depends. Some of us will need to learn to navigate when we have only 5 Product Managers talking to customers, while others of us can afford to wait until we have 50. It's important to recognize that all of us are in different organizations with different levels of research maturity, with different goals, and different team compositions.
My hope in writing this piece is that we can collectively acknowledge the multiple roles that research has to play in our organizations - in the right way and at the right time - to get all of us where we need to go. We've spent countless hours as a discipline talking about the right and wrong ways to drive (which are critical discussions), but have just scratched the surface in discussing these other ways of being. Knowing when and how to be in these roles deserves a separate conversation, one that requires each of us to think critically about our own practices and organizations, and it's something I’m excited to dive into more in future essays.
I want to close by giving a huge thanks (in alphabetical order) to Lena Blackstock, Nicky DePaul, Alec Levin, Brigette Metzler, Justin Threlkeld, Roy Opata Olende, and Cristen Torrey for their feedback on versions of this essay. My ideas - and this essay - are much better because of them.
Addendum
I’m grateful for the many conversations that this piece has sparked. One of the challenges that I’ve seen in sharing this model is realizing that the concentric circles are actually multiple spectrums of risk (lines) mapped together from the orientation of the researcher (imagine the researcher at the center of the circle, with “risk” going in every direction). What I wanted to get at with the concentric circles visual is that opening up the practice requires us to think about what are the various boundaries in our operating model - how do we think about the ways that our organizations need to learn and what are the different roles that we can play in facilitating that learning. As these conversations have continued, using the linear visual below has been more instructive.
There’s many different ways to think of risk, and for many people I’ve spoken with, we work through a number of different spectrums of risk to help clarify the kinds of boundaries that we set up. Recognizing risk on this kind of spectrum also makes it easy to talk about how to move from where you are to where you want to be, which I like to illustrate with the following image:
The important thing to recognize here is that building out the right operating model is two shifts at the same time - one in opening up and inviting people into your practice and the other about making sure that you have coverage in all the right places.
If this is something you’d like to learn more about or put into practice at your organization, please reach out!