The Organizational Appetite for Research
During my first year of graduate school, I found myself in the fortunate position of attending a talk from a researcher I respected. I approached him after the talk with some questions, and as we spoke, we found out that I lived along his commute to work. He kindly agreed to "grab coffee" with me one morning during the following week.
I suggested my favorite coffee spot as our rendezvous point, and when we met the next week, I saw my guest looking around the shop quite disappointed.
"They don't serve any food here?" He asked me.
I was confused, since I thought we were just meeting for coffee. I didn't realize (and I came to learn) that part of this person's "morning coffee" ritual at his neighborhood shop included a muffin or scone. If I had known that he wanted to grab coffee and have something to eat, I would have picked a different cafe.
While this was a pretty small speed bump in our relationship, it ended up teaching me an important lesson about my work more broadly - the importance of clarifying and understanding expectations before you dive in.
Misunderstanding the organizational appetite for research
Misunderstanding the “appetite for research” in your organization is likely the source of some of the biggest challenges you face as a researcher. This misunderstanding shows up in different places, but I see it most often when researchers blame stakeholders for not taking action based off their work or thinking about how they could better present our findings to make them more impactful. Stepping back and considering what your organization was hungry for — as well as what they are able to metabolize — can go a long well in helping you scope, execute, and deliver on research that moves your organization forward.
Food can be a helpful analogy to use when talking about research, for many reasons. At a high level, you have to identify and gather materials to use based on what you want to eat (planning and conducting research), you need to know proper skills and techniques to prepare the food so that you don’t hurt yourself or others (sensemaking), and how much you eat/prepare depends on your relationship to food (sharing). Everyone has to eat, even though everyone may not (ever) be a professional chef.
Even more than that, just like our practices around food — what we eat, where we farm, forage, and shop, how we prepare food, and the rituals around the meal itself — have historical and cultural roots and reflect aspects of who we are and what we believe, so does the organizational appetite for research. Your colleagues have likely had varied experiences with research in the past — both in quality and quantity — and their palettes will differ substantially. We need to recognize that just as some of us are in love with our own dishes (ideas, methods, etc), our tastes may not reflect the tastes of those we're preparing food for - and even worse, our audience may be allergic to some of the ingredients.
I believe that understanding the organizational appetite for research - what it is, where it came from, and how to change it (if necessary) - is one of the most important things that researchers (and especially research leaders) can do to build and maintain successful research practices in their organizations.
What does your practice look like?
In order to build toward the practice that you want (and likely, the one that your organization needs), it’s helpful to reflect the kinds of research you can conduct and/or facilitate for your organization here and now. As good as researchers are at asking who, what, when, where, how, and why, I bet most of us haven’t stopped to flip those questions on ourselves and our practices regularly enough. I’m willing to make this bet, because when I tell researchers that their job is not to be an oracle, but to help their teams make better decisions, I often get puzzled looks.
As a starting point, I would encourage you to think about the questions posed here:
What can you do?
Think about the different skills, abilities, and perspectives that you have on your team. Each of these enable you to do certain kinds of research, but perhaps not all of the kinds of work that you’d like to do. To what extent are those gaps acceptable or problematic for you, your team, and your organization?
Who can do you do it for?
Given the skills, abilities, and perspectives that you have on your team, think about the people in your organization that can benefit and are set up to benefit from your work. This includes thinking about the orientation of your team to the company - are you an embedded team? And if so, where are you embedded? If you are a centralized team, who has access to you and how? Think about who in your organization has research needs (known to them or not) that aligns with what you offer. Beyond that, where are the gaps between what your offer and what your organization needs? (I.e. do you have a marketing team that has an appetite for research, but no market researchers in your organization?)
How much can you do?
On a more practical note, consider how much capacity you have for doing research. Think about how many projects (or different shapes and sizes) you can support while maintaining rigor in your work, creating a safe environment for your participants, and preventing yourself from burning out.
When can you do it?
Related to the question of capacity, think about how often you can do research and the way the cadence of that work is or isn’t aligned to the cadence of decision-making within your organization. (As I mention below, there are plenty of reasons NOT to do research, but asking yourself this question is important).
Where can you do it?
While this was more helpful of a question prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s important to think what environments you’re able to work in and compare that to where your current and potential customers are. Can you conduct research in every place you need to?
Why is it worth doing?
This is perhaps the hardest question to answer, or at least the most uncomfortable, because the reality is that many of us (myself included) have conducted research that probably was not worth doing. All research has a cost- to you, the participants, your team, your organization, and the environment, and we should do our best to ensure that research is worth it for all parties. Most of us are probably not comfortable enough to push back when we need to, or we don’t even ask ourselves the “why?’ But we need to, much more often.
Depending on how much energy you’ve put into shaping your current team and practice, the answers to these questions may shock you. At a minimum, I hope that they can help you better understand what your practice looks like and who (and how) you’re able to help.
What is your organizational metabolism for information?
A successful research practice has alignment between how you can feed your organization and what their appetite looks like. You want to be able to provide the right food, in the right amount, at the right time, to the right people, so that they have sufficient nourishment until the next time they’re planning to eat. If you zoom out, this feels pretty analogous to research and it’s easy to see where we can make mistakes along each of those dimensions — the wrong food, in the wrong amounts, at the wrong time, to the wrong people, without enough time to metabolize what they’ve eaten. (How often have you tried to feed your team feast after feast, when they either needed a snack in the first place and/or didn’t have time to digest the first feast before the second showed up?)
Understanding how to provide the right food, in the right amount, at the right time, is about understanding the “organizational metabolism for information” (per Jan Chipchase). Doing this well requires you to not just understand the appetite, but also consider how your organization makes decisions at different levels (who is involved, what data is or isn’t used, what the cadence of those decisions is, etc — which is worthy of a separate post). How your organization makes decisions has a large influence on both the organizational appetite for research and the organizational metabolism for information.
In addition to being intentional and communicating more about how we practice, better alignment between research teams and our organizations requires us to teach people to feed themselves (when appropriate) and help our organizations develop a better palette.
Teaching people to feed themselves
I should make it clear that I believe democratization is our job. I also think that it’s easy for people to do bad research, harm or damage participants in the process, and/or misinterpret the findings. If I can accept that I’ve provided teams a feast when they needed only an entree, I have to admit that most non-researchers will make that mistake even more often and likely with more damaging results if they’re left unsupervised. That said, I do think we can make it safe for people to be in the kitchen and feed themselves, even if that only means getting a ready to eat snack from the pantry or the fridge.
Having a clear operating model and communicating the boundaries around where research needs to lead projects, where they can assist others, or where they’ve approved it safe for others to conduct research activities on their own is something I’d love to see more organizations do. What these boundaries look like depend a lot on your organization, your industry, and the maturity of your practice.
Because you probably cannot satisfy everyone’s appetite in your organization all the time, I’d encourage you to think about how you can make it safe for them to feed themselves and when that is appropriate. What are the research equivalents of knowing when meat is “safe to eat” or how to handle a knife? What other appliances are in your kitchen that you are okay with other people using with instruction or guidance? Maybe it will never be okay for anyone other than researchers to cook an entree or a feast, but I don’t think you want to be the ones that have to fetch a snack for the entire organization at their whim. To really push on the analogy, what would cooking classes look like in your organization? How about meal kits?
Different kitchens, different palettes
I started this piece off by talking about the way that food has historical and cultural roots and we should invest in understanding what those look like and how they shape the appetites of our organizations. In the same way that we need to acknowledge and be respectful of people’s preferences, we also need to acknowledge and be respectful of our participants, the environment, and our practices.
There is some research that should never be done, period, no matter how much someone asks for it. There are also many kinds of research that are probably necessary to informing key decisions at your organization that some people have never been exposed to or would ask for. As a researcher, it’s critical for you to help your organization understand what goes into our work. In the same way that ingredients take time to gather, harvest, and prepare before they’re cooked, research takes time to plan before it is conducted - and consuming some meals and some research immediately after they’re “done” probably will burn you.
All of us work in different organizations that have different kitchens full of different tools and appliances. Our organizations have different appetites, metabolisms, and palettes (even internally), so it’s clear there’s not one “right way” to feed people.
The goal in sharing these ideas is to provoke us — within our organizations and as a field — to recognize some of the ways where we may be underdelivering on our full potential. How often are we bringing a feast when a snack will do? Do we have the people, skills, and experience to make a feast when that’s the thing our organization needs? Do we have the right practices and processes in place to know our organization needs a feast in the first place? And more than that, has the organization made the time and space to digest that feast before their next meal?
If thinking about your organization’s appetite for research and metabolism for information is helpful, I’d love to hear about it. I’ve found these concepts useful in my own work, but — like most things I’ve written — I’m sharing rough ideas here in service of starting a conversation. Along those lines, I want to thank Matt Bernius, Vincent Bish Jr, Pierce Gordon, Alec Levin, Arthur Nelson, Faaiza Ramji, Danny Spitzberg, Justin Threlkeld, and Alba Villamil for participating in this conversation with me and providing feedback on drafts of this essay.