Day 1- The Shifting Sands Of Research: The evolving relationship between researchers, participants, and organizational systems

— Lot to talk about today, and will speak with broad strokes for top-line messages and reflections

• What am I talking about?
  • I trust that a whole queue of smarter people who will build on themes we talk about in this introductory call

 

— Balance of weightiness and lightness

— First a moment of gratitude to recognition to Jemma and Lou for recognizing moment and centering profound questions and showing up, and working with us — appreciating our journey and getting to tangible ideas and directions for us to take

 

— We are at a pivotal moment, and I don’t say it lightly with tons of disruption

— There are many shifts happening in our industry, but I’ll start not thinking of place in world as researchers, but with trends impacting the people we seek to engage and understand

— I canvas during election cycles and what can I tell you about the last cycle, was that it was hard not to be met with suspicion and distrust, and hard to build common ground with people and no matter where they were talking about

— Let’s begin with people and seeing things differently

— Article of faith that we speak for users, but often don’t speak about that, but how to preserve budgets and keep our roles and many years

• Not a matter of principle, but can’t take for granted our relationship to organizations and institutions

— So we need to think about increasing our value and influence and what to leave behind

— The Atlantic had an excellent piece summarizing the last ten years, and honed in on few things

— But overall theme was people choosing solitude and accelerated by digital-world progress and real-world regress

— Spending much more time at home, and this is a long-term trend

— Almost all demographics are spending more time alone, with less time in face-to-face socializing

• Our craft involves interacting with others

— The impacts of this solitude are profound on people’s psych and mental health

— So far it’s resulted in lower level of happiness and meaning and more research is being asked for, to understand it further

— People are now reaching out to AI tools to get the information they crave

— Landscape is shifting like sand and different tangent, and will find vectors and tangents will ground you going forward

• Incredible time and opportunity for research, so much that is interesting to learn

— So I appreciate we are on fascinating journey together, even if the road is a little bumpy and process of building out practice, and journey to show up

— We also have to resist the urge to withdraw, from headlines and our users

— But a little about me

— Had early career in criminal justice organizing and citizen advocacy, and simple things to not just do research, but goal was to drive change, and get citizens to act on change as a community, and I was not afraid to talk about power and politics

• Important part of how we impact change in the world

— Worked in digital product innovation, and now focus on research-led practice that is focused on social sector

— My practice now deals with profound activities that traverse citizens and institution, and society at large

— Shift power and control in rooms we talk to, and focus on how to craft an equitable experience

— Talk about external participation research, and thinking about dynamics of changing expectations

— Going back to first job which involved designing virtual worlds, and need to spend time researching odd places that were niche, with some worlds graphical, but most purely text based

• Flowering of behavior and sense of freedom that joined spaces and expressed themselves

— Openness to showing up in identity and connections they make

• For people in industry, it was an exciting moment of possibility

— Later in 2023, my team was hired by outside organizations to look at encrypted messaging platforms, and many companies feel they have all the data they need to get the answers

• Hired to look at messaging from peer-to-peer to group environment

— Spoke to lot of interesting people

• Business people in Nigeria, activists in Colombia, school therapists in the United States

— People had broad sense of risk and that influenced how they navigated the encrypted spaces

— This feeling of profound risk, compared to fluid mercury, moves around as people’s situation and context changes

• Their needs have remained the same, but their context hasn’t

— People felt vulnerabilities and lack of trust, with hard sense of who they were interacting with

• Not knowing where authority lives, and no clear sense of recourse or redress

— Environment was pervasive place for people and how they interact with friends

• You also can’t assume experience they are having, and everyone’s experience is highly contextualized

— Example of this, is India where ruling assumption was that people didn’t care about privacy and government could define data protection without consulting people

• Team spoke to people in India, and initially people didn’t have immediate sense of what was at stake

— But once it was framed properly, people cared a lot, and we did this in a variety of settings, and had breadth of viewpoints to bring into right framing and space

— So how did we bridge understanding and set of principles to level up?

• Translated stories into frame of understanding people could come upon

—Understanding is central to talk, but

• Hard to achieve
• Not a scientific process, but a relational one, and personal human and qualitative

— Critical ingredient of our work

— Gloves have been taken off in domains like fact-checking as well

— How does this ladder up into broader social structures, and increasing fragmentation

• Building sense of identity in information bubbles within social media and a broader polarization of truth

— Ownership of narratives, with people having a close personal ownership of narrative, with a rise of disinformation

• No single truth and single story exists

— Research is no longer impartial, and in a shifting landscape of trust we need to build trust with communities, and translate to organizations and institutions

• Need to manage and navigate across different worlds

— Research as political and need to navigate agendas and what is shaping stakeholders

 

— Speaking for other is always an act of power

• Many fields have had a reckoning, and public health was badly impacted by Covid

— Want to pull us out of current frame, and center understanding, as we can’t get tolerance respect, dignity and justice without a high-level of mutual understanding

• Understanding is not one way, but a dialogue and in how we show up and engage with others

— Challenge is holding differences, not resolving them

— So how do we build understanding in a pluralist society and act as bridge to understanding

• Rethink and reframe how we understand our own power

— Power is not word we talk about that much, but it’s something we should discuss

• For orgs and institutions needs to shift thinking within orgs

— Right now, we anchor our own power on our expertise, and it should give us a strong voice, but thinking as field is that if we can create knowledge and people respect expertise, we can increase value

• This has been where we are standing

— Another form of power call ‘relational’ power

• Which involves recognizing that power is dynamic and context dependent, and shifts of relationships and context of individuals involved
  • Context-dependent
  • Based in relationships
  • Understanding individuals
• Sounds like UXR

— So how does it show up in orgs?

• Unpacking fact of knowledge, insights, and research and many people owning different aspects of it, and those relationships
  • And context they are operating in
• In virtual context, relational power is more important, as formal structures are eroded
  • We need empathy and curiosity about wide range of stakeholders at different levels in an organization
• Bring empathy and curiosity to people, not anchored on producing knowledge, but building relational power, and increasing understanding
  • This can increase power and influence across the world

— Talk about work with insurance industry, and grasp health decision making, and how they evaluate risk, and situations in managing personal health and health of family and what they turn to first

• To get to those answers need to build trust and understand how people navigated financial issues, and how this flowed through medical decision making

— So how to deliver?

• Created space for stakeholders to occupy, and allowed people in organization to find connections for themselves and conversation with each other

— Ran workshops to figure out trust networks, where they were established and where insurance had permission, which was little

• Then brought people to create connections, and broader level of understanding, and active acting on knowledge, and so passionate about gaps he saw
  • Saw this in relational way with woman who was rationing medication for rheumatoid arthritis — and saw program to cross-train customer care and medical providers, and financial planning to meet people where they were at

— We have interdependence, and don’t control resources, but that’s not the most important question

• We require trust and reciprocity and need to think hard about how we build trust and permission we do and don’t have

— Understand how to build relationships with others, and better at communicating and not put our understanding on a pedestal

— So let’s put it all together, and many layers of this, and we are at a moment of profound change

— People feel unclear norms, and suspicion of authority and no ability to change

— Dealing with polarization of truth and proliferation of misinformation and push for people to own their narratives

— Research is changing accordingly,

• Knowledge is something that sits on a shelf while understanding as active way to connect people to knowledge
• Facilitators who build strong reciprocal relationships to activate
• Expert to relational power

— My North Star?

• Bringing understanding
• Building relationship power
• Fostering a more pluralist society

— Thank you. Any questions

Q&A

1. What aspects from research do you witness that prevent them from reaching impact or stated goals?
   1. I think aspect is lack of trust in researchers themselves, where industry feels at risk, and people are falling back on expertise and knowledge they hold, and waiting for opportunity to respect it and translate them to
      1. Skills of UXR are there, but people don’t feel they have power or permission to move forward and people have chance to shift focus and attention of skills to trust that they can serve as bridge, create and influence people
   2. Own way of showing up on their own skill