The detail necessary for insight

There's a common thread to all Customer Discovery methodologies.

This morning I was reading “What We Owe Our Fellow Animals” by Martha C. Nussbaum, wherein she makes the statement, “Animals have long been seen as mere property, as ‘brute beasts.’” Many think this way, but I’ve noticed that the people closest to animals rarely do. I know my dog has a rich emotional life; I narrate it often, based on the concrete detail of her behavior. Without that rich, contextual, concrete detail, attentively observed over time, I’m not sure I’d think much of the interior life of dogs.

So it is with Customer Discovery.

Understanding what problems a customer has, requires understanding their lived experience in the entire problem-space. There are two reasons for this:

1. Patterning of Experience:

Experiencing includes sense data, affect or emotional data, and the data of consciousness. For instance, imagine seeing two of your closest friends exchanging hugs. Your sense of sight presents two persons hugging; perhaps your sense of hearing presents their greetings to one another. Affect data also plays a role because you have an emotional response to this interaction. It probably makes you happy to see this ostensibly loving interaction between friends. Finally, and most basically, there is the data of consciousness which consists of the facts that you are not either of the two persons hugging, and this interaction is happening at a particular point in your personal reference frame. Our experiencing is also patterned, which means an orientation towards certain kinds of questions. Taking our example above, you, the onlooker, is, most likely in what can be called the dramatic pattern of experience; that is, you are oriented towards other human beings in a more or less social setting.

Let us suppose that rather than the dramatic pattern, you are engaged in the intellectual pattern of experience; maybe you are pondering a paper that you are in the process of writing. The same event occurs. You are not attuned to the world around you because you are focused on a particular task at hand. You may not even notice these two good friends. Your patterning of experience did not raise the questions that would have made you pay attention to the events around you. There are many different kinds of patterning — I’m sure several kinds occurred to you while reading this unless you were too hungry to focus — but the focus here is on the patterning, not the particular kinds of patterning.

When engaged in understanding the problem-space of others, it’s key to understand not only the pattern in which you are engaged but also the patterns in which they are likely to be engaged.

2. The Image is necessary for the Insight:

Understanding is a complex series of moments revolving around the moment of insight: first, there is a freeing of the desire to know from biological tasks to question; second, a hint, a suggestion, a clue that puts us on the road to insight; third, a process in which the questions and imagination share the road, the questions trudging solidly along while imagination runs out in front and explores the possibilities; fourth and finally, insight, the achievement of understanding. The answer to the question posed by our unrestricted desire to know is a patterned set of concepts that arises from an insight into concrete data or images. The image, let us imagine a cartwheel, strains to approximate the concepts, such as a circle, and the concepts provide the inner word that is impossible to visualize. The insight provides the pivot between the concepts and the images. We realize that a circle is a locus of coplanar points equidistant from a center. We also recognize that while a cartwheel is not a circle, it approximates a circle and can lead us to the definition of a circle.

In all its rich, particular detail, the concrete image allows us to come to these insights, and without the image, the insights are harder to come by.

These two cognitional concepts frame the literature of Customer Discovery and Innovative / Design Thinking. Each methodology uses different techniques to either change up one’s patterning of experience or the images one requires to come to the insight.

Over the coming weeks, I’ll summarize a few of the critical books from the last twenty years of innovation and lean startup thinking to provide a contextual, theoretical framework for the series of experiments I’m running across work contexts.