Monthly Archives: February 2012

Cognition and Collective Awareness: Creating “Place” in Retail

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Humans favor certain environments that satisfy survival needs. Through millions of years of evolution we are hardwired to seek out environments that signal an increases sense of comfort and  a higher probability of survival.  We seek out evidence of:

  • Abundant resources
  • Minimal threat from predators and aggressors
  • Shelter from the outside world

Much of this is subconscious, but it remains deeply ingrained in our collective psyche. Consequently, humans have evolved a visual preference for spaces that allow us to see without being seen when we so choose.  From a retail perspective, this means developing enclosed spaces that downplay threat and encourage complete emersion in the experience.

Even as we seek out environments that speak to our needs of comfort and survival, humans are inherent risk takers. Enticement and peril are part of the exploration process and without this deep-seated need to explore and take risks, we wouldn’t be human.  Humans need to seek new information and test their skills.

Consequently, we seek out new experiences that can be differentiated from other experiences.  We categorize these experiences, giving them greater meaning and a higher probability of habitual use.  Categorizing and differentiating suggest:

  • Diverse resources
  • Greater stability

Ultimately, this appears to be a contradiction. But there is the possibility of resolution.  Environmental psychologists assume that individuals’ feelings and emotions ultimately determine their behavior. The problem is that people rarely shop as individuals, even if they are alone. On the surface that may sound confusing, but the point is simple. Human beings are cultural creatures, shaped by shared experience and the unavoidable truth that we are part of a complex system of beliefs and interactions. Uncovering those cultural processes and designing a retail experience around them offsets the impact of cognitive responses to an environment.

So what do we do to provide a sense of security while playing to the underlying desire to explore and learn knew things?  We strike a balance.  And we strike that balance by thinking in terms of converting space to place.  Place identity concerns the meaning and significance of places for their inhabitants and users. People create memories within places and form personal and collective connections. The stronger the connection, the more likely they are to frequent the space and to bring new people to that place. The goal is to endow a venue with symbolic meaning, memory and significance.

The sense of place may be strongly enhanced by the setting, or the setting it attempts to project, being written about, being party of stories handed down over time, being portrayed in art or being part of the collective myth.  It can be established through modes of codification aimed at preserving or enhancing places and traditions felt to be of value. All this creates a “database” for framing the socio-physical settings we experience.  By providing customers with symbolic cues in the environment that set it apart from the surrounding area, we cater to the need to delve into the new while subconsciously establishing an element of the known, the safe and the familiar.

 

Purpose, Power, Politics: Barriers to Creative Organizations

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Creativity and innovation are always in demand.  Well, to be more accurate, lip service to the ideas of wanting creativity and innovation are always in demand.  The reality is often far different. Most of us recognize the necessity of creative processes at work, regardless of whether we’re taking about strategic planning, insights development, product design. We, as individuals at least, recognize creative thinking as central to generating new ideas and innovation that in turn lead to greater brand recognition and profits.  We know all this and yet creativity is something that often dies before it can get a foothold.  That begs the question, if creativity is so valuable to an organization, why does he corporate culture regularly frown upon the very pursuits that lead to ground breaking innovation? Why do companies so often suppress creativity, both tacitly or overtly? While there is no doubt room for as many opinions as people, I think it largely comes down to three primary elements: Purpose, Power, and Politics.

Purpose:

Companies hire people tasked with strategic thinking and innovation that they think are smart, inventive and inclined to explore their world. They hire people who tend not to think in terms of perpetuating the status quo or who are inclined to think in a linear fashion.  They hire people who can think in ways others overlook.  While those people are intriguing and exciting during the interview and indeed the first few months of joining the corporate team, they are also disinclined to conform to the standard practices of the organization. They do not sit typing at their desks, revisiting the same spreadsheets endlessly or thinking about to shave 10 cents off the production price of some widget the company makes.  They are the people who find new product ideas while visiting the museum, create new strategies while shopping for organic dog food with people and draw insights that can be applied to messaging through reading a Victor Turner. Unfortunately, these sorts of activities run counter to what many business people believe when observing or talking to these sorts of folks. If the activity can’t be readily quantified or tied to a specific project of the moment, it is a waste of time. If it takes cerebral effort and any degree of time, then the employee isn’t worth the expense. What this boils down to is the idea that if creative thinkers don’t conform to the expected, day-to-day behavior of the organization, they are devalued and ultimately punished, even though it was their non-traditional methods that got them hired in the first place.

Punishment for thinking, learning and doing is the driving force. Curiosity fuels every great innovation, but this is easily forgotten. Innovative thinkers don’t simply solve problems. They are engaged in a process of discovery that is its own reward. If that way of thinking is thought of on an organizational level as something superfluous, then creativity and innovation die. These people have a quality that allows them to identify significant opportunities and to find creative solutions rather than simplistic ones.  If they aren’t rewarded or if they are devalued, they leave. And the organization loses out.

Power:

With power comes, many times, a decline in the ability to step outside your own way of looking at the world and embrace new ideas. While leadership leads to a unified vision and direction for the company, power often also distorts reality. Many leaders come from a traditional system that rewards organizations producing regular, predictable outcomes and profits.  There is a singular focus on how things should be done and a lack of flexibility, both in terms of thinking and control.  Encouraging more creativity means letting go of control and questioning the status quo.  This has two results. First, it means that uncertainty is now part of the business equation.  Business people are typically trained to avoid risk. Creative thinking means embracing a greater degree of uncertainty.  And this goes beyond direct business concerns, it goes to the heart of identity.

Embracing the way creative types think, learn and act often means relinquishing a degree over people. Power can be defined in many ways. Most simply, it is the ability to get what you want.  But what is it people want? Often it is greater power and recognition by the organization of their indispensability. Control leads to greater value and an increase sense of self-worth. Often, embracing creative thinking is interpreted by members of leadership as relinquishing control and opening oneself to personal and professional risk. The result is that creativity is subject to conflicts from the highest levels of the organization, down to the lowest. Which leads to internal politics.

Politics:

For all practical purposes, organizational politics are essentially an extension of the issue of power, but I separate the topic here simply because it is about those in search of power rather than those who have it. Creative thinking means being wiling to think about the big picture, to embrace the whole rather than the parts. Unfortunately, that means people are asked to do things in ways they haven’t before, thus challenging not only their worldview, but also their place in the pecking order – or so they often believe. Once a happy rut has been established, it is difficult to get out of it. We are encouraged by the system to stay within the confines of these ruts, receive our paychecks and maintain the status quo. We guard our kingdoms jealously, even as our borders slowly crumble around us. Consequently, innovation and creativity become subject to internal jockeying and stale thinking.

So What?

So what can be done to foster creativity in an organization? What needs to change? First, reward people for doing things differently and providing new, creative ideas. Encourage teams and individuals to experiment with new ways of learning. Encourage engineers and designers to spend a day at the natural history museum. Promote reading books other than the latest business book – poetry, science, anthropology philosophy, whatever gets the mind running at top speed and in new directions. In other words, give people license to think and act in creative ways rather than tying them to the same chain of behavior they have been tied to in the past.

Second, there needs to be more than temporary excitement at the top. There needs to be long-term, clear, open support by leadership and management at all levels.  It has to be sustained and encouraged throughout the organization. If leadership does not loudly promote its commitment to creative thinking, it will die on the vine.

Ultimately, talking about being a creative organization and actually performing as a creative organization are very different things.

Stories, Invention and the Bottom Line

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The power of a good story, or even a rather mundane one, is truly phenomenal.  In it are wrapped up the hopes, dreams, symbols, and significances that shed light on who we are as individuals and as members of a culture.  But the real power comes not from the explicit statements that emerge during, say, interviews, but from the subtext and patterns of meaning people assign to objects, relationships, and thoughts as they are created by participants through narrative. Not everything can be expressed as matter-of-fact discourse, especially things one cannot really put one’s finger on, or things that do not exist yet. Some of them are central to human experience, such as falling in love or admiring the full moon rising over the sea. If we want to explore this kind of experience, we need means and methods that are suited to communicate it.

I kept thinking about this problem, and one day I decided to see what happens if I explicitly ask research participants to write stories, pieces of fiction, about a topic related to my client’s needs.  Specifically, they were asked to write a story from the perspective of someone shopping for beer.  Much to my surprise, I ended up a wide range of ideas being expressed and a degree of complex language that was poetic, mundane, funny, sad and utterly fascinating.

I have used this method of gathering insights ever since, when I want to learn about things that are beside the topic but nonetheless worth exploring. It is by no means a replacement to fieldwork, but it is another tool that can be used to tease out how people construct their world in ways they may not normally be able to express. These things concern the creative aspects of the cultural context of how meaning is constructed.

Why are stories important for interaction and knowledge? Traditional cultures are storytelling cultures in the literal sense: people tell each other stories. We have often set this fact aside in the post-modern, linear, data driven world of business, but it is still fundamental to who we are.  People do not buy products based on specs alone, they buy based on deeper issues that connect products and places to their humanity. At certain occasions the stories gain a special role, such as at a child’s bedtime or while sitting around the kitchen table (the primal campfire). Stories make it possible for us to share our world, not lists of product attributes. We actively participate in the creation of culture by listening to stories and telling them—and we learn about culture through stories. It is in the context of understanding stories that we uncover triggers and meanings that simply don’t emerge fro surveys and interviews. They supply us with metaphors and meanings that are hidden from view when people are in the participant mode. Stories give them license to explore ideas and create symbols that tap the deepest recesses of a product’s or brand’s subtler meanings.

Stories are aimed at exploring the subjective, but not the individual. They are the collective myth. The point with composing a story is to find a collective level in the invention. It is a kind of inter-subjective reality. Creative solutions and innovative ideas arrive when imagination is actively used by participants, not just the people working for the company in need of answers.