Thanks to 35 years of being schooled by the best companies in the world in what it really takes for a team to see with new eyes, I have distilled my experience into a three-day experiential learning journey that gets at the heart of the matter.
The process and tools rest on these building blocks and values which are also outcomes:
My thanks to Diego Viana, Vice President, New Platforms at Rich Products, for this very specific description of the work we recently did together:
We asked Barbara to come in and facilitate an ethnography training for a group of our marketing, R&D, sales, culinary, and business development associates. The three day session was absolutely outstanding! Barbara taught us the tools and skills we need to gather and elicit valuable insights from our customers and consumers on the first day of the session.
We were able to practice these skills in real interviews during our field day, where we set out to explore a specific topic. We leveraged the tools and techniques to uncover new nuggets of information we could never have anticipated. We didn’t know what we would learn, yet we came back with immensely powerful stories from our day of interviews and observation.
On our third day debrief session, we worked as group to take the raw data we gathered from our day in the field and synthesize it into meaningful, actionable insights. We started our session with a broad topic in which we wanted to learnmore and ended three days later as a unified team, equipped with powerful insights that can immediately be translated into next steps. It was a very valuable session, the team learned new techniques and skills that will change the way in which we do business.
The ideal group size is 15-21, and brings a diversity of perspectives. Participants could be:
It’s important to invest our time in learning about something real that really matters so this becomes more than an exercise. Typically this has to do with innovation. It could be in search or support of a new platform. It could be at the very front end, or it could be an area that is already freighted with many hypotheses without adequate boots on the ground.
An important aspect of pre-consulting with the internal learning leaders involves framing of the topic (area of inquiry) as well as other specifics of the fieldwork.
If you are interested in discussing a full-scale team ethnography, please contact my long-time associate, Ruth Sando, at: www.sando-associates.com
