A Little Humility, Please

“Things, not, mind you, individual things, but the whole system of things, with their internal order, make us the people we are.” Danny Miller, Stuff (p. 53)

The fall of Icarus—wax melting, loosed feathers eddying as he plunges from the sky into the Aegean— is a central image in western mythology. A metaphor for the risks of hubris, it is also a provocative figure through which to think about the value which ethnographic research claims and the range of reactions to those claims. In 14^th and 15^th century painting, the Fall of Icarus was a relatively common theme for artists (and their patrons). But it was commonly related with a different emphasis than the way we recount the myth today: in the great Italian and Northern Renaissance paintings, it is Daedalus, father to Icarus, who is the sympathetic center of the tale. As inventor of both the fabulous wings and the labyrinth from which they enabled father and son to escape, Daedalus the craftsman, architect and inventor was resourceful, competent, and –except for the moment which landed him in King Minos’ service—a man who blended great vision with endearing humility.

Daedalus was an inventor but also a close and skilled observer of nature. A practical scientist who studied and observed in order to create and improve. It should sound familiar. I’d not mind that sort of mythological association, if it weren’t for the son. The son who pushed the invention past its envelope, forced it to fail, and in failing and falling, co-opted the myth and the inventor both.

Science is practical magic. At least, that’s how most science got its start–simple reflection on the way things are, to no purpose other than knowing – that comes after we’ve grappled with some aspect of the way things are that we’d like to change, to master. We – those of us in practice–try, day after day, project after project, to make sense of the world for someone else, not just for the sake of sensemaking, but in order to change the world. Usually in quite modest ways– a new tool, a better way to clean or to travel or to communicate. Sometimes we gloss over the profit motives that pay for the work, sometimes we agonize over them, often we construct rather elaborate justifications for what “better” means. And sometimes we simply find the problem too interesting to bother with the reasons we are being asked to understand it in the first place.

Whenever we undertake to understand something on behalf of an organization or an institution that makes stuff, or makes money, or makes policy decisions, we do more than simply offering understanding. In positioning our work as useful, we position it as an instrument of change. Thus we, too, are instruments of change: our acting is always critical, always subversive, regardless of how many cutouts there are between our intentions, between the ways we ask questions of everyday life and work, and the bottom line of an organization that asks us to ask those questions, asks us to understand those daily lives.

It is perhaps too simple and attractive to hide the connection between ourselves and our work behind an idealized notion of “making things better” – something I’ve done myself, but no longer find convincing. “Better” really should require disciplined comparison between alternatives, against common standards. Atul Gawande, in Better and The Checklist Manifesto (2008, 2009), proves out the benefit, and the great effort required, of making one particular aspect of surgical procedure, better to a standard that matters a great deal: the mortality rate of surgical patients.

But in the work that we do, the outcomes are often less constrainable, the variables too many to even know what better could mean, let alone if we’ve somehow helped in making it so. And as I’ve argued before, the kind of change we enable often changes the underlying system as a part of the work itself. Uncertainty is part of what we provide, part of what is valuable to our clients.

For the past couple of years, some of my colleagues and I have been paying attention to the language in and through which the diverse kinds of groups who offer ethnographic research to partners in industry communicate their value and expertise, which we cluster under the rubric of ‘claims.’ It isn’t very challenging work to find that there are very few tropes involved. Most are some combinations of two: the ‘discovery’ trope; which is based on the notion that something of value exists in the world to be discovered. Often quite literally they offer to find the “hidden, unmet needs” that are, apparently, rife in nearly every aspect of human behavior. it seems a touch surprising that we humans are able to get along at all, given how shrouded our lives seem to be. The second is the ‘unique methodology’ trope, which asserts that one or more particular approaches to overall process, data gathering, or analysis assures some sort of value as an output. Uniqueness is an overriding virtue in this trope.

The nature of the claims that ethnographers make when representing themselves to the business world shouldn’t only affect how well they sleep at night. They also have an enormous impact on the expectations that our professional interlocutors have of the field as whole. When we claim that we ‘reveal’ something, that we ‘uncover’ that which has been hidden (by whom or what is rarely considered), we constitute the thing revealed as a simple truth. And ourselves as the diviners of the location where the truth has lain, rather than creators of those truths. In this, the way in which many professional practices market this work has come to have the perverse impact of limiting the range and nature of the types of inquiry that observational and ethnographic practices are understood to provide. “Discovering user needs” and the various forms of “product innovation” – each a class of claim—implicitly frame the work as “about” those ends in ways that elide much of the scope and diversity the work is capable of accomplishing.

What ethnographic research in industry has accomplished with simple conceptual contributions such as Lucy Suchman’s ‘ready to hand’ (1986) or heuristics like AEIOU (Blomberg, Burrell & Guest, 2002) is remarkable. The early work changed the way in which large swathes of consumer, medical, and technology was developed. But in the post-.com world, the proliferation of ways to deliver up the hype around ethnography’s contribution to “new”, to deliver “innovation” at the paradigm-shaking level, has seemed a struggle. I think that Icarus and Daedalus have something to show us. I think that the way in which we look at the relationship between practicing groups determines much of how the field as a whole grows, evolves: whether we get better.

The idea that very good work can and does come from aiming to support, not just aiming to invent. Description and interpretation can both be terribly creative (that’s the point of the covers notion in this context). And when we think about doing ‘good work’ in that frame, rather than in the ‘discovery’ model, there is tremendous room to be better than the other guy. But ‘discovery’ is either finite (the new lands model) or subject to Xeno’s paradox, finding every slimmer just noticeable differences.

Ways of describing, ways of interpreting. The relationship between those two, or between pairs of pairs of them, is amenable to the work of style (“styling” seems very much the wrong, and dangerous, term).

Differentiation is at the heart of capitalism. Differentiation is the basis on which competitive (not absolute) value is built. Differentiation is essentially relative; the offer, the tool, the notion, which provides an edge at one time in one competitive set will, when all the major competitors adopt it, gradually (or suddenly) become ‘cost of entry’, and consequently of less value. Long-term value (strategic and tactical) lies in the ability of an offer to move from differentiating to required, to expected. As opposed to fads and fashions, which move from differentiating to irrelevant (though admittedly, some of those move back to differentiating over the long haul), this is clearly the more desirable course.

In the past twenty years, ethnographic research has moved from a tiny differentiating tool to broad acceptance. That’s a good thing in terms of opportunity. But scale of use does not necessarily mean increase in value. And although Jerry Lombardi’s 2009 EPIC paper uses examples in ways that I find quite disingenuously skewed, his idea that anthropological work is becoming commoditized in the private sector is a disturbingly legitimate characterization of evolution away from competitive value.

This is what makes claiming “uniqueness” of process or tool a losing proposition for the field as a whole in the long run, even if it might, for a while, be valuable for any particular group of practitioners, consulting or corporate. In my EPIC2009 ‘b flat’ piece, I argued that the notion of style, especially as James Wood explicates it in How Fiction Works, provides the loosely connected field of applied ethnographic work with a workable dynamic capable of driving change in the field more productively than methodology does. Working with Wood’s characterization of style as a particular way of controlling ironic tension, of characterizing the relationship between voices, registers, imagined and real worlds doesn’t mean that ethnographic work is itself a style to be contrasted to some other way of knowing, like quantitative survey work. Rather, it means looking at any given practice’s way of working as of a style; that a particular way of tensioning the descriptive is with the potential could be, or should be, offers an enormous amount of room to express, to re-register, complex relationships without needing to claim, each time, to be finding or inventing, or revealing something novel.

Here, I think that an example from popular culture can again serve us pretty well (from work that Kris Cohen and I are currently doing). One of 2009’s movie hits was Jason Reitman’s “Up in the Air” with George Clooney and Vera Farmiga in the lead roles. The opening sequence is, especially to those of us who fly far too much in the course of their work, a disturbingly precise ethnography/montage of airports, aircraft, hotels, and rental cars. The accompanying music is–perfectly–Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings’ cover of Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land.” A genre-bending rendition of a Depression-era American folk classic reset in gender, race, (Sharon Jones is a black woman while Guthrie was a white man) and style (folk to gospel). And as the movie and the opening montage chronicle the day to day life of a white, professional man, the “ironic distance” that is opened between the music and the movie is brilliantly effective, an embodiment of the core of fictional “style” that Wood described at the heart of literature.

The ‘cover’ version of a classic song – bringing a work to new and different life by altering one or more of the fundamental ordering dimensions of the original – is a blend of hubris and humility from which the practice of ethnographic research might take new direction itself. The hubris takes the form of the willingness to appropriate, alter, and/or critique something that has worked successfully in an earlier form, venue, or purpose; a form that is often in some way understood to be ‘owned’ by an earlier originator or performer. That hubris is the Icarian aspect of covering. The Daedalusian, more humble act is to yoke in some significant sense one’s own expertise and creativity, explicitly to the work of a forebear. To work within a set of constraints, or to acknowledge that you do, rather than creating all of the work anew. It is an essentially collaborative act, albeit usually asynchronously so. For academics, or academically inclined professionals, this acknowledgement is often the default way of working, sometimes to a (maddening) fault.

But to me, the appeal of the cover notion is in the way it encompasses both Daedalusian and Icarian engagement with a form, and what that engagement offers our work. Let’s go back to “Up in the Air” for elaboration: Although the main charters are classically tragic (as in, their flaws are obvious and central), the tone and the storyline develop along lines that are equally deeply referential to the Hollywood romance/romantic comedy. And as the story plays out, the expectation that there will be a “happy” ending, even if it is a somewhat idiosyncratic one, is easy to fall into. And so, when the ending follows not the genre ideal, but something much more likely, much more realistically connected to the characters and their behaviors, it is paradoxically shocking and compelling. Reitman’s play on the “Hollywood ending” forces a reconsideration of what you have seen; it opens the easily accepted up to reflection, and exposes the conventions of the genre as conventional. There is something about that moment of recognizing the expectation that speaks to me about the interaction between research work and the folks who make use of it. We have, over the past two decades especially, created a form, a genre, of relationship between questions, data, and uses. We can describe that form almost as typically as one could a pop song or a romantic comedy. And each time we perform it, we have the opportunity to follow the storyline or open it up. Or not to. Looking at the way that claims for expertise are made, it seems we rarely take the opportunity to open it up.

I think that the argument for a less splashily promotable notion of what the field contributes, and how it might best work with its partner disciplines: design, technology, engineering, strategy, lies not in perpetually claiming to uncover the new, but in engaging the “standards” of the field as if they were what we grew up singing along with.

In talking about the notion of style in ethnographic work, the idea was to open up the space where ethnographic practices exist to a kind of evolution or elaboration that does not get measured against an academic ideal so much as it works out an expressive range, works out values through application and particularity. The expertises which make that possible are more than just anthropological ones, as we all know. They are expressive and communicative and visionary. In music, in art, in literature, in design, both the ‘standards’ of a style or genre and the instruments through which they are performed are played need to be mastered on the way to invention and contribution. It is the difference between interpretation and recitation.

Some of the central things from the work that this field does are like standards in the musical sense – cycles and journeys, for instance. But you can no more ‘discover’ this for the first time than you can invent the core storyline of a romance, a heroic journey, or a tragedy. Yet these forms don’t lose their appeal as we find new ways to tell them, to tell them differently.

The explication and development of a style of work has a different kind of relationship between a practice and the collectively constituted field than the relationship among competitors does, though the two are neither mutually exclusive nor completely independent of one another.

The evolution of this as a distinct discipline might be taking the short sighted end of the available paths. Legitimation means, for this field, shaping a path that lies between academic rigor and practical efficacy. If we claim, always, to be unique, to reinvent, to do strategy, design, human factors, and clean the windows, there comes a time when we will have no partners to work with.

In his sharp, concise, but sweeping analysis of the American academy, The Marketplace of Ideas (2010) Louis Menand offers us a way of understanding our entanglement with the limits of disciplinarity. Menand’s history paints a trajectory – propelled by Talcott Parsons’ separation of the social sciences – that has led to a generation of scientists for whom identification with their discipline is the primary frame of reference, and where “interdisciplinarity is a ratification of the existing order.”(p.96). For Menand, the vocabulary of objective and disinterested knowledge, methodology has overemphasized a distinction between hard and soft sciences that is much better understood as a continuum between “ways of knowing” that ranges from the empirical “way things are” to the hermeneutical “what things mean.” For Menand, most of human action and its study lies in between those two, a combination whose emphasis shifts as required, as the underlying structures are articulated, among combined, synthetic methodologies. Like ours.

Ethnography is a complex tool, a complex instrument. Using to make changes in the world is a form, a score, an idea which can be played in ways good or bad, valuable or blindly derivative. The value in how we express the relationship between instrument and score does not have to be positioned as a completely new thing, never before attempted in the history of research, like Oz and his balloon, like, now that we come to it, Icarus instead of Daedalus. What a glorious thing it would have been just to take those and get out of the labyrinth, get across the sea and away from the Minotaur. But Icarus just pissed the gods off.

The gap between what the tool is capable of doing and what humans can make it do is not an absolute one. An artist, in the deepest sense of the word, can always make the materials do something that predecessors and peers had never thought possible. As scientists and as designers, the shape of that gap, and the ways of bridging it, are the space in which we can develop distinct styles. Our audiences do not always need unique, unprecedented. They need the brilliance of the flying, despite the risk of the fall. The humility of doing that well and beautifully, and claiming no more than that, is enough.

Rick E Robinson is a partner at Partner at HLB, LLC. Rick was a founder of E-Lab in Chicago. A few years ago he started a blog called Pulp www.thinkpulp.com where he writes and invites critique on questions about the place of design in contemporary business. He holds a PhD in Human Development from University of Chicago.