text:
The Ethnographic Mind
Exploring Ethnographic Thinking in All its Forms
Looking Back to Look Ahead
I Want to Believe (and so do you)
A Conversation with Rita Denny
© 2018-2023 Jay Hasbrouck
Searching for the Social in the Techno Futures of Mobility
Ethnographic thoughts from the front line of mobility
Mar 27, 2019 by
Charley Scull
In retrospect, the signs that this was not a familiar research conference had been there all along: the list of participants and their roles within organizations, the sessions on the periphery with the trade booths and café in the center, the prominence of the word 'disruption,' and the fact that very few of the talk titles even wasted time with anything as tangential as a semi-colon! This was a space where speed, efficiency, ingenuity and optimization were the dominant themes.
Although, I didn't set out to explore the conference's form as data, once the ethnographic brain is switched on, there's really no turning it off. This forced me to recognize my own biases, as well as reflect on relationships and unpack questions such as why the story of research— a story that is so critical to my own practice— played such a peripheral role in this space.
I was in London to make sense of the future of mobility and transportation landscape, by taking part in the Move 2019: Mobility Re-Imagined event. It was a hybrid of a conference, trade show, and a speed-dating event for investors and innovators. The field is at a critical juncture in its evolution and the creative ingenuity being applied to the diverse challenges of efficiently and sustainably moving people and goods into, out of, within and between cities has broadly captured the public imagination, my own included. Having done significant global ethnographic fieldwork with the Future Lab innovation team at the Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi Alliance on social aspects of the future of mobility I was eager to see how others were talking about this and its many related themes.
The great hall crackled with a tense energy, strung taught between the breathless optimism and the swagger on the one side and a tangible underlying sense of doubt and anxiety on the other. Bets were being placed on techno-futures all around us, but would they prove to be the right ones? "Change mobility and you will change the world," a keynote speaker from the Boston Consulting Group implored us, and many nodded in agreement; but the weight of the moment hung over the room like a cloud too. There was a sense that the near future would reveal both winners and losers. But nobody was going down without first making their case. Game on!
The players formed an eclectic and impressive group of thinkers, including creative and agile innovators, eager and/or panicked investors, and legacy players able and willing, however grudgingly at times, to re-invent themselves to what they see as a changing marketplace. But the challenges they addressed are often profound and include population growth and urbanization, connecting new technologies with legacy systems, slow-moving regulators, the need for sustainable energy sources, storage space for unfathomable amounts of data and so on. And those are just some of the design and engineering challenges!
More than 360 speakers were organized into eight different streams, with titles like: Business Models and MaaS (mobility as a service), Urban Supply Chains, Autonomous Vehicles, Smart Cities, and so on. The presenters spanned tech start-ups, government agencies, big automotive OEMs (Original Equipment Manufacturers), energy companies, financial services, logistics and many other domains.
The talks themselves, rolled out in 25 minute increments and in nonstop succession that left little time for discussion (or reflection!). A lot of the talks followed a familiar pitch-like formula that began with identifying a big problem; then explained how the speaker's organization had decided to address said problem; indicated where others had missed the mark (this was not universal); and closed by indicating that the work they had described was just the beginning and that they were building off of those early successes and expanding into new areas and new partnerships. The formula of these talks/pitches felt like it played into the impatience and urgency of the event that sometimes felt to me like a VC meets start-up courtship dance. Discouragingly, from my perspective, the path of research to insight, understanding and validation, rarely got much, if any, air time in these talks. I later found that conversations of substance and often real candor were still happening throughout the event, but in the cafés and trade booths around which the conference rooms were situated, and rarely at the talks themselves.
Micromobility is seen as an area of real growth but it needs to buck the bad press of public nuisance and infantilism
In spite of the pace and the technology-first focus, bigger picture thinking did emerge, which was a pleasure to see as an anthropologist. There seemed to be something inherent to thinking through these problems that necessitated an interconnected and systems-oriented perspective–a rarity in many other consumer spaces. However, while the idea of systems was invoked, they were often discussed in fairly limited ways and were primarily construed of as complex "problems to solve for". The vast and varied complex human beliefs, values, practices and experiences that animate these systems in the real world was disappointingly (from my perspective) often absent from the conversations, beyond occasional references to users and subscribers. Surely, there were more flies in the ointment of progress and future modeling than just software glitches and funding flows, right?
In addition to talk of systems and beyond the expected debates about the ideal energy source of the future (hydrogen, electric, hyperloop, human power etc.), the market readiness of autonomous vehicles, the tension between open-platform and protectionist practices, and the unending discussion of universal versus local solutions that extends well beyond automotive, a number of distinct culturally rich themes also emerged.
From Boston Consulting Group Keynote
Shapeshifting companies forced to confront their own identities in an ongoing struggle to ignore, absorb, or contest their perceptions of a changing marketplace
Uncertainty about the future relevance of OEM automotive companies
Ridehailing expanding into micromobilities
Transit authorities collaborating with private services
Legacy energy companies exploring alternative options
Manufacturers turned investors and vis a versa
Systems thinking approach to intermodality and multimodality
Often seemed limited to efficiency and optimization as opposed to ecosystem perspectives which includes social and cultural behavior
Micromobility a key democratizing tool for the spaces between and major area for growth and investment
Nostalgia served as cautionary tale and underscored uncertainty about the future
Presentations with visuals of missteps and innovations from the past
Re-visiting, re-vamping and re-positioning of ideas that have worked in the past like bicycles, buses, scooters, trains, carpools, re-imagined as optimal elements of future solutions
An iconic London Taxi in front of the Victorian era Marylebone Rail Station
After the conference ended I had to figure out how to get to Heathrow for my flight home. I decided to take one of the ride-hailing services I had just heard about that wasn't yet available where I live. I was compelled by their model of using small vans, dynamic routes and pooling platforms to connect with existing transit systems. I was also compelled by their £10 off coupon!
In practice, the experience was not as bright shiny and different as I had envisioned and it ended up being indistinguishable from taking a Lyft, back home. There's probably some lesson there about hype, fancy websites, and slick apps, but —given what I'd just witnessed at the conference— who has time to contemplate it? Since I was the only rider, I fell into a conversation with the driver, a Bulgarian mechanic who had lived in London for 10 years. He did ridehailing as a side-hustle before and after his regular work.
As is so often the case, when you're driving around with people, we fell into conversation. He told me about growing up in Bulgaria before the fall of Communism and about the good and bad of that time and he talked about what a struggle it was to make ends meet in London. He lamented the lack of interaction he had with his neighbours, compared to apartment life in Bulgaria, attributing the London reserve to the fact that people had to work too much. Despite the struggle, he and his family were happy in London and he was proud that his daughter's English was now better than her Bulgarian.
When talk turned to 'Brexit' he shared his fears that his family would one day be deported even though they had come to the UK on a legal work permit and had built a life here. Connecting the uncertainty and unfairness of this potential uprooting to his work life, he told me that until recently he had worked for one of the bigger ride-hailing companies until they had suspended him, without explanation or recourse, even though he had an excellent driver rating. Unfair but not unfamiliar was his assessment. I left his car, with a warm hand shake and a heavy slap on the shoulder.
The interconnected poetics of the fieldwork experience struck me, as they always do, by the ways in which the big themes can weave together with small details and cultural threads, always grounded in the lived experiences of people. In this vein, I was struck by how closely his personal experiences of nostalgia, shapeshifting and innovation mirrored things I had seen on the floor of the conference. As I had found there, his hope and optimism for the future was counter-balanced by uncertainty, anxiety and doubt. And just as some of the most exciting innovation promised frictionless and optimal movement of people and objects, his story showed ways in which these ideas could easily be complicated in myriad ways from the personal to the geo-political with a dose of human/machine frustration thrown in for good measure. Despite it all, new mobility didn't always feel all that different from old mobility and bigger social themes like fairness, power, access and agency remain, no matter how we design the future.
Having said that, change is definitely in the air and re-thinking the familiar and solving for the future remain vital aspirations. Speed, optimization and efficiency are all important values in the development cycle of goods and services, but they do not overrule the critical importance of making sense of social messiness, privileging inclusivity, and seeking cultural alignment for technological innovation. Not only can these fast and thick approaches to thinking complement one another, they can also benefit from the productive ways that they push one another. The possibility for inclusive and socially-grounded mobility techno-futures can be there for us all, but not without keeping both the human and the machine in sharp focus.
For those with a deeper interest in mobility, check out this addendum for some of the talks that really piqued my curiosity with their possibilities and/or spoke meaningfully to social, behavioral, human and cultural factors.
Robin Chase, a co-founder of Zipcar, introduced a sense of social responsibility in describing a manifesto for inclusive design in the mobility space.
Tom Kirschbaum the COO of Door2Door a software company that provides a white label software platform for multimodal mobility services spoke about the importance of local knowledge, rural mobility, and attending to the emotional impact of new technologies.
Presenting an atypically moderate point of view, he also urged the audience to consider mobility transformations over disruptions as a guiding metaphor.
Chantal Ambord of BlaBla Car, an inter-city ride-pooling platform that allows riders and drivers to set the level of social engagement that they want (bla, blabla, or blablabla) was a model that got my mind spinning on multiple levels.
Vilhelm Hedberg of Ekar ,the first car-sharing service in the Middle East and Syed Gilani of Safr, both talked about the distinct impact that women, along with other cultural forces, are having on the industry.
A provocative talk by the spatial economist and urban mathematician Yuval Karmi outlined the potential for humans to bring out the worst in robots amused as it informed.
"The inventor of the safety elevator wasn't the one to imagine the skyscraper", he warned us, when talking about unexpected consequences.
Markus Seidel of the BMW technology group in China described a future imagining of an E3 urban transportation system of elevated and covered e-bike roadways.
As a general rule, the Cycling and Active Mobility stream seemed to feature more speakers who were both personally and emotionally invested in the adoption of their services, which served as a balm to some of the other talks which could come across as overly slick.
Tagged with EthnographicThinking Ethnography Future of Mobility Futurism Mobility
What Next, UX?
Toward a Value Proposition for Ethnographic Thinking
Nov 28, 2018 by
jayhasbrouck
I've been having more and more conversations with people who are thinking about how to position research within their organizations. In one case, a senior researcher and her colleagues were debating whether user experience (UX) researchers should report up to design, to engineering, or whether they should establish their own reporting structure within their company.
In one way, I see this dilemma as a promising sign, since it feels like an indicator that we're emerging from the reductive perception of research (and especially ethnographic research) as a tool embedded within other practices that's used solely for identifying customer needs. However, I also think it's worth considering whether this is the most effective question to ask. More specifically, does this question do enough to shift the conversation away from the constraints of "ethnography-as-tool" perceptions, and toward the ways in which research provides strategic market insight?
Learning from Others
It's useful here to turn toward design and the ways in which it has pushed past traditional perceptions of its purpose and value as 'the practice of crafting beautiful objects.' Through a concerted effort to actualize the critical value of its mode of practice (aka design thinking), millions now understand and use design processes to innovate across vastly different practices and settings. In this same way, ethnographic/user experience research needs to push past its own object of practice—user/customer needs—and better communicate the broader value of applying its processes to other domains. This means defining its contributions not as identifying customer needs alone, but as insights derived from modes of thinking about culture that reveal both customer needs (the original 'product') and the dynamics within and between the cultures that those consumers and companies exist within.
So, for example, the most valuable insights into social networking aren't necessarily about how easily users can share content, or even what they like to share. They're about how sharing and trust are understood within different cultures (or subcultures), and how this plays out in social networking platforms in different (or perhaps similar) ways. They're about how the range and direction of sharing practices in different cultures might allow an organization to better understand patterns of reach, pathways, and the viral potential of content. And, they're about how the modes of interaction social networking organizations provide—as well as the nature of their organization's own practices and norms—either facilitate or run counter to their customer's cultural contexts and expectations. These insights, derived by applying ethnographic thinking to domains that reach beyond identifying user needs alone, have direct impact on the business models of organizations providing these services.
Returning to the question of qualitative research (specifically UX) and its position within organizational structures, the benefits of ethnographic thinking listed above clearly demonstrate that subsuming it within any other discipline would constrain its full value. Which, I believe, leads us to two other questions.
Toward a Value Proposition
First, if the full range of insight from ethnographic thinking is often under-appreciated, how do we make its value proposition more clear and compelling? In the same way that design centered on it's unique ability to drive innovation as the core value provided by design thinking, I would argue that research should better communicate how it can inform strategy through behavioral and cultural insight. To do this effectively, we need to steer clear of highlighting skillsets or professional qualifications, and prioritize the strategic value that ethnographic thinking provides to organizations. For example, we might present some of the following benefits, which place an emphasis on the advantages they provide to an organization first, followed by the means of achieving them:
expand market share and increase loyalty through deep understandings of different customer cultures and the ways in which they intersect the organization's own culture;
increase new product/service success rates by developing offerings that are a solid behavioral fit for customers and are situated appropriately, ethically, and strategically within different cultures;
reduce risks through incremental, culturally-informed, thoughtful adaptation to cultural changes;
help organizations grow strategically by facilitating, finding patterns among, and curating, inquiries from customers, collectives, and internal stakeholders;
solidify market share by deriving longitudinal and holistic insight from cumulative understandings of behavioral and cultural dynamics relevant to the organization's offering;
build internal creative momentum by cross-pollinating ideas between insider and outsider domains and growing the pool of possible ideas via sharing different points of view;
improve internal traction for innovation and product/service development by expanding empathy to include both customers and internal team members and stakeholders;
break down silos and ensure customer centricity by challenging assumptions, 'common sense,' and orthodoxies within organizations.
(More here and here about ways these benefits can be realized in more detail.)
Similarly, we might work to introduce the broader benefits of ethnographic thinking within prompts that take the form of something like an elevator pitch…
Want to lower organizational risk and make better-informed strategic decisions? Ethnographic thinking will help you deeply understand your customers and their cultural contexts so that you can both serve them better and be more strategic about the actions and approach your organization takes to serve them.
As for the second question, I think we need to ask whether 'User Experience' reflects the full value that its practitioners can provide. Like Carrie Yury, I appreciate how the emergence of this term reflects the increasing recognition of the importance of integrating behavioral and attitudinal insights. However, it seems clear that the term also implies a set of constraints that focus on understanding people solely as 'users' (more on that from Tamara Hale here) within the confines of designed experiences. When we factor in the rapid growth of immersive interactions that reach ever more deeply into our lives via advances in AR/VR, AI, ML, IOT, voice, haptic, and gestural interfaces, and even ingestibles, the term UX feels even more limited.
So, instead of User Experience, shouldn't we be shifting our terminology to better reflect how behavioral and cultural insights can both ensure customer fit and drive more effective organizational strategies? Rather than focusing solely on UX, shouldn't we be talking about Behavior, Culture & Strategy (BCS)? And, instead of asking "Where do we position UX within our organization?," shouldn't we be asking "How do we position BCS to optimize for its full value throughout our organization?"
Regardless of whether a nomenclature change transpires, it's clear from my conversations with colleagues that a shift is underway: FROM seeing research as a tool embedded within other practices TO a means of establishing frameworks for other practices. Organizations at the forefront of fully leveraging behavioral and cultural insight will use these frameworks as a competitive advantage to develop more culturally-attuned product and service offerings, more informed and aware customer strategies, and improved adaptations to their internal cultures that align better with both.
Tagged with AI AR behavior culture design IOT ML organizational influence strategy ux VR
Excerpts from THIS IS HCD
A chat with Gerry Scullion about Ethnographic Thinking
Nov 5, 2018 by
How is it possible that a conversation between two people as far away as Sydney and Seattle felt like a fireside chat? Gerry Scullion is such a great host and skilled conversationalist that it felt that way to me. Listen over at This is HCD and hear how Ethnographic Thinking can expand the strategic value of Human Centered Design.
On ethnographic thinking in the development / innovation process:
"…Many designers are incredibly skilled at asking why at the front end of the design process but eventually feel compelled to drive towards a 'what'. They're trying to get toward that solution or that thing or that collection of things. Whereas I think ethnographers are by nature, or disposition, much more comfortable opening questions up, because that's what they do all the time, right? They're always asking why; you know they ask those types of questions all the time. I don't see them as necessarily opposed. I just think it's worth considering that there are different trajectories and that there is that history in which ethnography has been positioned as only a tool for design versus something that can be used as a means of opening up the process. If you understand Ethnographic Thinking and it's value in this way, it makes sense that that it should be engaged throughout the design process, not just in the beginning 'explore' phase…"
On ethnographic thinking and sense-making:
"…One example of this can be seen in the contrast between synthesis and analysis. In the case of synthesis (a term more aligned with design practice) the process is often seen as a narrowing one that is aimed solely at a singular design solution. Whereas analysis (a term more aligned with ethnographic practice) implies a more open approach; that there are dynamics to consider that may mean your outcome doesn't necessarily need to be a solution point at all. Instead, it may be ten points, or your solution may be a 'swirl,' or a 'grid,' for that matter. These opportunities for diverse outcomes can only happen if you're willing to continually ask why and open up the process in parallel to efforts to reach a design solution."
On ethnographic thinking as means of understanding cultural fit of a company's offering:
"You also start to see the value that the ethnographer's insider/outsider status brings to the table in ways that allow a team to incorporate the broader cultural dynamics at play between the customer, the company, and its offering in ways that expose new and unexpected opportunities. This can be seen as the strategic value of Ethnographic Thinking and the value it provides organizations in the ways it informs questions of 'how': How are we going to expand market share? How are we going to better understand consumer behavior in this respect? Or how can we introduce a new product in, say, Egypt? All those things are more than just visiting living rooms. They're about developing the strategic insights that lead to culturally-appropriate strategic decisions that ultimately have real market impact."
Tagged with thisishcd
"These People Ask Questions for a Living"
Think ethnographers only ask questions in the field? No. It's a way of life for them…
Oct 17, 2018 by
Every once in a while I get an unexpected glimpse into how others see ethnographic thinking and what makes it so valuable. This is a story about one of those moments.
I was conducting fieldwork in Los Angeles with a team of two other anthropologists, and we were on a break between field visits. The three of us decided to have lunch with a mutual friend at a local restaurant. As we settled in with our drinks, the waiter came back to socialize before taking our order and asked us how our day was going. One of our team members mentioned "fieldwork" in the course of conversation to which the waiter responded, "What do you mean?" My colleague added, "We're anthropologists." The waiter, confused, said, "Like digging up bones?" To which our friend responded, "No, not that kind of anthropologists. They're cultural anthropologists. These people ask questions for a living."
Years later, the way our friend described what we do continues to resonate with me. Much of the value ethnographic thinking offers boils down to asking skillfully crafted questions in one form or another. Of course, the aim and purpose of those inquiries can vary widely, but overall it is this ongoing curiosity—often about matters that are seemingly commonplace to others—that generates the data needed to develop insights that connect individual behaviors to broader cultural phenomena.
In applied settings, these questions help bring the voice of the customer to an organization, of course. Much of this value is rooted in the ways ethnographers continually navigate between insider and outsider status in their work. This allows them to empathize with many different people while their analytical detachment provides broader perspective. And, because they're always focused on both cultural context and deep understanding, they're able to identify the meaning and importance that interactions embedded within social systems have on people's lives.
Just as importantly, ethnographic thinking also raises questions that frame an organization's challenges in cultural terms by offering alternative lenses, and cross-pollinating perspectives between differing views. For example, at a macro level, the questions ethnographers ask can help organizations understand how flows between cultures (customer cultures, company/organizational cultures, stakeholder cultures, and influencer cultures, etc.) interact to inform how their offerings are perceived. Answers to these questions allow organizations to step outside their internal assumptions and see themselves in cultural contexts so that they can craft strategies adapted to the 'real-world' cultural dynamics that influence their market.
These modes of inquiry that ethnographers bring to their work are so deeply embedded in their thinking you could argue that they might exist on some subconscious level—it simply becomes part of how they think about the world. They're always asking why, always probing to understand dynamics and interactions, and the value they produce nearly always expands the scope of the original brief. Returning to the story of our friend who so eloquently described the ethnographic mindset, I think I would only edit one part of her description, by re-phrasing it to: "These people also ask questions as a way of living."
Tagged with cultural context cultural framing questions
Unconventional Tool Series: Picnic Tables
Are you testing the boundaries of your practice? What are you missing if you don't?
Sep 26, 2018 by
In Chapter One of Ethnographic Thinking, I highlight the many benefits of cultivating curiosity, with a particular emphasis on remaining genuinely curious at all phases of work. While many tools selected for a project have the potential to be diverse and creative means of cultivating curiosity, it's easy to get caught up in a standard set of practices that produce reliable and consistent data. But what dimensions of data (and related insights) are we missing when we constrain ourselves to only familiar methods? What more might we discover by opening up our set of practices to encompass methods that reconfigure what it means to explore and discover, and to experiment with new processes and protocols?
Which brings us to picnic tables. Yes, picnic tables. How so?
I've actually done a lot of thinking about picnic tables: their history, wide range of uses, and, most importantly, the kinds of behaviors they facilitate. It may sound odd, but I actually find them quite inspiring. Let me share some reasons why:
They're everyday objects. No one's ever surprised or shocked when they see a picnic table. Ubiquitous, practical, and utilitarian—picnic tables get the job done…everyday.
They're accessible. Take a look around next time you're in a park. People gravitate toward picnic tables. They're inviting, unpretentious, and disarming.
They're transparent. Not in the invisible sense, but in their recognizable disposition. Picnic tables openly display their basic materials and manner of construction, including their flaws and strengths. They're direct, evident, forthright, and sincere.
They're versatile. It may take some continued study to notice this one, but picnic tables are constantly re-purposed. I've seem them as vehicles, as skateboard ramps, as shelters, as scaffolding, towers, and workbenches. They seem to be OK with this, and offer themselves generously to new purposes.
They're egalitarian. Ever notice that there's usually no 'head of the table' at a picnic table? Why would there be? That would be far too presumptuous. Picnic tables are inherently egalitarian in their configuration. They're designed for informal interaction and open communication. Listen closely: kids speak up at a picnic table (unlike some dinner tables).
They're vessels for storytelling. More than a place to eat, picnic tables invite people to gather together and share the small things that make a difference in their lives. They're an easy place to express everything from passion and revelry to the mundane and everyday. Their seats, without backs, invite engagement and make it physically impossible to lean back and judge.
They're platforms for popular culture. It would be hard to have seen a good number of picnic tables without also noticing that they seem to draw (command?) embellishment from their users. Graffiti, carvings, layers of paint, stain…and yet more graffiti, carvings, and layers of paint and stain. Picnic tables invite people to express themselves, often in simple, clever, timely, and heartfelt ways.
They're accidental artifacts. Picnic tables accumulate human experiences. Their surfaces retain evidence of events, commemorate relationships, and even record confessions. They're treasure troves of experiential data.
In short, picnic tables are casual, collaborative, and colloquial in their service as facilitators, documentarians, and artifacts.
So, what role might picnic tables play in cultivating curiosity in a project? For example, how might they be used to work with participants for whom in-home interviews or design exercises simply don't make sense (e.g., they spend very little time at home, are highly mobile, or perhaps, don't have permanent housing)? How might picnic tables be used to capture data unique to 'third spaces' that aren't available in homes or workplaces? How might they supplement data in more traditional studies in ways that help stimulate creative thinking during insight development and ideation? How might they be used to help empathize more with participants by understanding the kinds of perspectives they might offer outside the context of direct ethnographic inquiry?
Here's a thought experiment on how it might look:
Imagine a scenario in which team members strategically place a set of brand new picnic tables at a number of different locations of interest as part of the 'discovery' phase of a research project. They then use those picnic tables as meeting points with research participants (to encourage open discussion in 'neutral' locations). They might then invite participants to use those same picnic tables for their own meetings, breaks, or general recreation—offering a resource to use as they see fit. Team members might also encourage some participants to document those interactions, conversations, or reflections that occur at the picnic tables—either by capturing audio/video, or by leaving notes or other markings directly on the picnic tables. Over the course of the project, others might join in (including possible friends of the participants or people who just happen to be nearby), each engaging in discussions, and some of whom might be inclined to add inscriptions of their own on the tables. At the end of this phase, team members could return for follow up discussions with participants to review interactions that occurred at the tables, as well as capture the inscriptions left on the tables themselves for interpretation and analysis. What symbols and inscriptions were left? What meanings are embedded within them? What relationship do they have to the project and its focus? What do they say about the people who left them? How do they differ from table to table, and why?
Of course, there would be many details to work out in order to ensure that this experiment produced useful data; and, some projects would obviously be better candidates for this approach than others. The idea, however, is to spark curiosity about expanding methods and the type and range of data or artifacts we include in our work—regardless of what type of work it is. How can we be genuinely curious about our approach, and be equally curious about the diverse range of data we might collect to both inform and push the boundaries of the insights we eventually form?
Tagged with accidentalartifacts methods picnic unconventional tools
Curioser and Curioser
What's the cumulative value of curiosity?
When I was an undergraduate student, a small group of friends and I invented a game we called "Go." Not the board game Go, this was something much more experiential. The rules were simple:
Everyone playing (4-6 players seems to work best) agrees to clear their day of all other responsibilities (not a difficult task for many undergrads who can creatively juggle a schedule).
The first player looks around the immediate environment (in any direction, as far or near as the eye could see), and identifies a given location within sight to all to which the entire group must navigate together…no matter what.
Repeat step 2, rotating turns among all players until everyone has had at least one turn to selection a destination.
No one really ever won at Go, but it did require significant strategic thinking when it was your turn to decide where to take the group next. What place should you choose? Will it be the church steeple on the top of the hill that's who knows how many miles away? Or will it be the convenience store across the street? How much should you (could you) ask of your fellow players? How challenging do you want to be with your selection? What kind of pace do you want to set for the game? If you choose a distant destination, are you making the choice to claim a significant amount of the team's time and energy to reach it? Conversely, if you choose a sofa across the room, what kind of tone and experience are you setting for your fellow players?
One of the most interesting parts of the game for me was the anticipation we all experienced when we reached a location selected by a team member, and were waiting for the next player to decide where we would go next. We would all look around, entertain the range of possibilities, and then begin to calculate the consequences of reaching different destinations—every location presented a very different set of potential experiences. And, as the current player contemplated their choice, the other players began to speculate about how that choice would be conditioned by their individual preferences, disposition, or even their mood. Some players gradually developed different styles that created even more anticipation, triggering questions like: Will the "long haul" player chose a location that takes hours to reach again? Or will s/he make a more accessible choice and open the experience for others to shape? What kinds of navigation challenges will we encounter for each possible location choice? What interactions with different neighborhoods and people might ensue? What barriers might exist for gaining access to a chosen destination once we reach it?
However, once the player made a choice it was refreshing to surrender ourselves to the journey and shift to collaborative mode as we collectively determined how we were going to reach our new destination. We learned very quickly that it was useful to have cash on hand, and that comfortable shoes and the right clothing were essential. But more importantly, we learned a great deal about the intricacies of many different cultural landscapes and geographies of Pittsburgh. The game took us to the tops of countless buildings, vending machine 'kitchens' deep in the bowels of administrative buildings, posh tree-lined shopping districts, blocks of boarded up townhouses, along railroad tracks, and under many bridges.
Over time, and after many games of Go, our curiosity for exploring Pittsburgh's landscape began to culminate into a body of knowledge about the city that went beyond cursory knowledge of bus schedules or restaurant locations. We developed a genuine understanding of how different neighborhoods felt, the ways that interactions on the street differed in each, the desolate places where the forgotten went to hide, and the decorated places where people went to be seen. We also learned what it took to navigate these different environs; to know when and from whom we might seek assistance, or when it was more productive to move ahead on our own. In short, we had amassed a cumulative, collective, street-level knowledge-base of the city.
Only later in graduate school did I begin to explore psycho-geography, Guy DeBord's concept of the derivé, and the works of phenomenologists like Gaston Bachelard. As I devoured each book (and created some early visual experiments to process what I was learning), I was often reminded of our game Go, and how our random explorations opened up our understandings of Pittsburgh's cultural landscapes in ways we would never have discovered without the curious drive that lead us there.
Today, as I explore the broader benefits of ethnographic thinking, I see some distinct parallels with our game of Go. What stands out most is that, like Go, ongoing, genuine curiosity about the world around you is a core disposition of ethnographic thinking that exposes its 'players' to a much broader range of perspectives and interactions that allow them to see the world through many different lenses. And those different lenses accrue in the mind (and within teams or organizations) over time. What's more, even if experiences from different domains aren't clearly related at first, knowledge gained from curiosity within each builds, and eventually provides a growing set of references (and interpretations) that can be accessed and cross-referenced in other settings and challenges.
The result is that ongoing genuine curiosity, and the knowledge that accumulates from it, can inspire entirely new approaches to initiatives that are completely unrelated to their original objectives. This kind of creativity is possible because curious minds cross-pollinate ideas between different areas of exploration and observation. But they're only possible when teams can reference a broad and growing 'catalog' of experiences that trigger those unique (and sometimes unexpected) cross-references that lead to unique and creative new ideas. Remaining continually open, receptive, and curious is the key. This means going beyond the immediate focus of a project, and integrating ethnographic curiosity as a fundamental way that teams interact with the world around them.
To follow are a few strategies I've found useful for cultivating curiosity:
Stretch beyond the plan
Look for opportunities to go beyond the constraints and objectives of your original plan, whether it be for a project, initiative, or other purpose. Allow yourself to occasionally follow tangents and explore new perspectives to the point where you have a full understanding of their meaning—but not to the extent that you allow yourself to be derailed in ways that shift your focus to an entirely new topic.
Get 'curiouser' about underlying meanings
The everyday, commonplace, and familiar are a treasure trove of ethnographic meaning. There are always distinct reasons why routines have become so engrained that they become functionality invisible for their for their practitioners; and those reasons are frequently tied to deeply held values so embedded within daily practices that they're presumed to be common sense. But dig deeper, and ask the difficult (an naive) questions, and your curiosity will expose much more than what's initially apparent, and it will help you reframe assumptions in ways you never anticipated. For teams and organizations, this can, and should, be applied in both outward-facing initiatives and internal processes.
Continually expand your pool of perspectives
The more ideas and perspectives you bring into your work (and life), the greater the chances that they will collide or build on one another to inspire new ideas and create new forms of momentum for creativity and problem solving. The key is to remain as continually curious about unexpected connections and other relationships between the ideas you collect as you are about collecting them in the first place.
With these three tactics in play, any organization or team can begin to benefit from the cumulative value of curiosity. Over time, their pool of relevant and innovative ideas will grow from their ever-expanding strategic collection of observations and the ways in which they multiply, compound, interact, and inform one another. They'll also begin to see more productive relationships with other teams or organizations, because genuine curiosity breaks down silos and triggers empathic connections between those engaged in attempts to understand other ways of seeing the world. Finally, genuinely curious organizations and teams are much more likely to identify opportunities for growth by continually expanding their exposure to a wider range of diverse perspectives. They begin to function as a organism that benefits from this diversity because it represents new pathways and contexts that would otherwise have been missed.
In closing, I'd like to share a recent reflection from Mary Catherine Bateson about her mother's (Margaret Mead) concept of evolutionary clusters, and the promise they offer for affecting change.
"Major accelerations of change came out when a group of people got together and learned together and dared to think new thoughts and then pass them on. The evolutionary part of that was in the relationships between the members of those small groups, feeding off of each other's imaginations and insights and wisdom and then spreading them out in the society, going forward."
More from Mary Catherine Bateson here : Composing a Life
Tagged with curiosity marycatherinebateson teams
Inverting Empathy
Looking for strategies to gain traction in the workplace? Expand your idea of empathy…
Aug 9, 2018 by
The value of empathy in human centered design is now widely recognized as critical for aligning offerings with customer values, norms, priorities, and practices. Far less common, however, are efforts to extend that same empathy to the people with whom researchers and designers work everyday—the engineers, strategists, marketers, managers, executives, and many others who are critical to the daily functions of an organization. Like customers or constituents, each of these people bring their own lens and set of experiences to an organization's culture, and each of them has a set of practices, beliefs, values, and worldviews that influence how projects develop—as well as how the organization and it's culture evolves.
Empathizing with your colleagues in the same way that ethnographers do with research participants in the field might feel a bit counterintuitive at first, but the results of 'inverting' empathy in this way are quite tangible. It allows you to identify with their plights, understand their perspectives, and interpret their position within the organization's culture. In short, you can understand them from a cultural perspective, which allows you to position their needs, emotions, dispositions, and motivations within a holistic framework. From this framework, you can develop strategic communications aligned with their practices, beliefs, values and worldviews in ways that advance both their interests and your own. Eventually, building empathy in this way increases the odds of support and buy-in from colleagues who appreciate your sincere interest in their circumstances and contexts.
So what does this look like in practice? I've found that the following strategies, while not exhaustive, are particularly effective:
Read the social cues your colleagues send
The workplace is an ethnographic field site like any other; and the observational data you need to empathize with your colleagues is surrounding you everyday. Shifting your lens from emic (insider) to etic (outsider) in the workplace can provide you with insights you need to better understand your colleagues, and their priorities, values, and worldviews.
While observing, you should be continually on the lookout for cues that will help you paint a fuller picture of the culture you're exploring. Your aim is to look beyond the obvious and familiar to discover the key components that collectively make up an 'ecosystem' of behaviors and interactions. Some of the most common include:
body language, physical interactions, behavioral triggers, contradictions, unspoken priorities, normalized practices, sequences of events, affinities, attachments, repellants, workarounds, social transgressions, implicit hierarchies, priorities, neglected people/places/things, honored people/places/things, displays of comfort (or discomfort), unconscious habits and practices, and interactions with material goods.
These behaviors are made up of both intentional and unintentional expressions that people use to send signals about their current state of mind. Thoughtfully observing them involves continually sorting and prioritizing your observations to determine levels of relevance and the degree to which they begin to form collective patterns. Keep notes and play close attention, and eventually the patterns you identify will help you interpret your observations and develop a much more insightful understanding of cultural contexts that drive the perspectives, motivations, and priorities of your colleagues. Over time, you may also begin to identify broader themes that arise across and between the behavioral patterns you identify—a sort of 'ecosystem' of organizational priorities (both explicit and implicit) that will allow you to better understand overarching influences that drive your colleagues' behaviors.
Adapt (and time) your stories to your colleagues' needs
Stories participants tell are one of the primary sources of data ethnographers use to interpret cultural meaning as they explore new worlds. Stories set context, indicate values, demonstrate flows of power, and signify intentions—all in a narrative that's (hopefully) engaging and personal. In short, they ground cultural phenomena in everyday lived experiences.
Stories are also one of the most effective vehicles for ethnographers to convey their findings and insights. Stories help them generate empathy, encourage appreciation for difference, broaden perspectives, and make the unfamiliar familiar. Good ethnographers bring their field experiences to life by ensuring that their stories are directly relevant to the lives of those who are listening.
In Ethnographic Thinking I call this practice "empathic storytelling," and the core principle is ensuring that your messages are aligned with your colleague's interests and needs. You should always be asking yourself whether or not your stories matter, and whether or not they're timed to matter most to the people listening. Sometimes this involves breaking stories down into 'mini-narratives' that are timed and dispersed strategically for when you think your listeners are most likely to be receptive. This involves thinking back to the patterns from your observations and looking for key moments in your colleague's lives to enlist storytelling that facilitates new and relevant understandings for them. Ask yourself, "Is this the time when this colleague is most likely to identify with what I'm saying? Why should they care? What is the likelihood they they'll become an advocate and share my perspective with others if I tell this story now and in this way?" Of course, to do this, you'll need to be sure you're actively reading the social cues around you (see above). Which brings us to…
Usher a process of self-realization
In a well-crafted, well-timed, and skillfully configured story, the listener is invited to imagine a whole other world, and empathize with the particular lived experiences within it. In contrast to pedantic lessons or long morality tales, truly resonant ethnographic narratives are most effective when they're situational, provisional, contingent, and temporary. Their goal isn't to persuade others of some universal truth, but to introduce ideas and images that resonate on many levels for their listeners. They may integrate elements of logic, reason, or rationality, but their ultimate strength rests in their imagery, emotion, and personal experiences.
"I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel." —Maya Angelou
So, rather than arguing for (or imposing) a position, you can use empathic storytelling to gradually shift the overall platform of understanding for your colleagues by helping them internalize the feeling behind what you have to say. When timed well, this type of storytelling helps your colleagues integrate new perspectives of their own—to reach their own realizations rooted in stories that tap common human experiences. Since everyone's interpretations are made up of small moments of realization, using empathic storytelling in this way helps them construct their own realizations with an emotional anchor, which eventually grow to form insights that emerge from within their own thinking and feelings. In short, they end up owning the story (not you). This attention to relevance and small-scale points of emotional relation can prove to be far more relevant, persuasive or convincing than grand narratives or lessons that risk being perceived as dogmatic, pedantic, or moralizing.
Some early anthropologists such as Margaret Mead were keenly aware of the fact that in order to help people see the value of ethnographic insight, they needed to think strategically about how their work would be received among their intended audiences. Mead intentionally embraced ethnographic film in part for the purpose of reaching broader audiences. She also wrote regularly for Redbook magazine, lectured to a wide range of audiences, and made frequent appearances on television talk shows.
In each case, she prioritized her audiences' interests and situated her content and style of messaging to maximize the potential for impact and adoption of the concepts she wished to convey. She did this first by directing the ethnographic gaze toward those audiences, and then responding in ways she knew they would be most likely to absorb her messages. At her most effective, she also tailored her communications toward institutions that she believed either need to reform their policies or positions, or had the potential to carry on her message and influence others.
Ethnographic thinking is most impactful when it extends empathy not only to those outside an organization but also to those who live within a company's organizational culture. By facilitating and embodying empathic connections on both sides, it ultimately enables more relevant and meaningful innovation.
Tagged with empathy organizational culture workplace
Book Review: Quantum Negotiation
What do quantum science, negotiation, and ethnographic thinking have in common? More than you might think…
What do quantum science, negotiation, and ethnographic thinking have in common? More than you might think; and certainly more than I anticipated when I picked up this unique work that extends the principles of quantum science to the practice of negotiation (and beyond). More specifically, the importance of interdependence is positioned at the core of this expertly crafted volume by Walch, Mardyks, and Schmitz in which they provide readers with both practical and strategic advice to help them surpass the limitations of traditional negotiation practices by enlisting a holistic mindset that's very similar to ethnographic thinking.
From the outset, the authors are careful to point out that "…Quantum Negotiation is less about tactics and technologies, and more about how we show up, the relationship we create, and the energy we direct…" and they establish some key concepts early in the work that drive this point home. Most importantly, they argue that:
"As an observer of one's own and others' emotional, social, physical, and spiritual needs, Quantum Leaders are able to be clear and anchored about their own needs. This anchoring serves as a foundation for buoyant behavior when adapting to uncertain environments and diverse viewpoints."
This concept of buoyancy is essential to Quantum Negotiation, and serves as a device for the authors to explore the topic from many different perspectives. They supplement this with candid stories based on questions posed by people who've faced real-life negotiation challenges, which are sprinkled throughout the book to help ground the concepts and demonstrate how the principles of Quantum Negotiation can play out in different settings.
On the practical level, the authors provide many tools for re-positioning how readers think about negotiating. From identifying "Zones of Potential Agreement," to "Developing a Sociocentric Orientation," to specific advice on how to respond to manipulation tactics, they detail the nuances and interactions that best support implementing a Quantum negotiation approach in ways that are both accessible and rooted in their theoretical premise. Two notable sections that serve this purpose include a chapter dedicated entirely to Quantum Negotiation tools, and another (in some ways more useful) set of Quantum Negotiation Assessments that help negotiators approach the process with counterparts in ways that prioritize building awareness around a set of continuums, such as task orientation versus relationship orientation, big picture orientation versus detail orientation, and a range of many others.
Beyond tools and assessment frameworks, however, I personally found sections focusing on facilitation, and the role of Quantum Negotiation in leadership, to be especially engaging. For the former, the authors approach to setting tone and reaching mutual understandings are very much like many of the skills that ethnographers use in their work to achieve similar goals. What the authors call "social intelligence" and its requisite efforts to "make others feel valued, respected, affirmed, encouraged, and competent" runs parallel to how ethnographers build rapport with their research participants in order to negotiate the process of collecting field data within a set of interactions that are inherently interdependent. Likewise, their calls for demonstrating vulnerability in the negotiation process in order to humanize the situation and invite a similarly candid approach from counterparts, is a critical component for conducting effective ethnographic research.
Another contribution that many readers might not expect from this work is the remarkably skillful way in which the authors demonstrate how Quantum Negotiation is a valuable and effective leadership asset. They argue that "[l]eaders are negotiating whenever there is something that they need from someone else," and that whether they acknowledge it or not, "[l]eaders engage in implicit negotiation on a daily basis." From here, the authors then outline a leadership approach that's focused on practicing "the art of getting what they need while inspiring and accelerating the capacity for others to do the same." Among the most valuable suggestions they have is the practice of widening observation skills so that leaders can go beyond tools like scenario planning and performance metrics, to expand their perspectives and take a more holistic approach. Among other things, they recommend that leaders track continuous change outside their organizations to "…tap into diverse networks both within and outside the organization across multiple boundaries," and "…see disruptive forces before it's too late." This requires a holistic approach paired with what the authors call mindfulness that together give leaders the "…mental agility, emotional regulation, attention, and situational awareness," to achieve the buoyancy they need to manage teams effectively.
You can buy the book here:
Tagged with book review quantum negotiation
Re-situating Intuition
Struggling with leadership who claims they "just know?" There's another way…
Jun 29, 2018 by
I've always found that opening up the innovation process to clients (or internal stakeholders) is essential for helping them understand how teams get from field to insights to prototypes, and to build buy-in along the way. So it was a bit surprising that after more than a year of working with a client on a range of different projects, our main point of contact (a VP at the client company) suddenly took us up on our open offer and asked if he could tag along with our team. We had already invited many members of his team to join us in various phases of our work with positive results, but he said his request was motivated by the fact that he was unable (after all this time) to see how we developed our insights and wanted to learn more. Welcome to the team, Mr. Client.
We included him in the full spectrum of a complex healthcare project, so that he could experience everything from project planning to field research, data downloads, pattern identification, theme creation, insight development, recommendations, and prototyping. Along the way, we were careful to encourage questions, and to demonstrate how we substantiated our insights through this process, and informed it through integration of anthropological theory. While he understood the premise behind our methods and approach, much of the process was a struggle for him. From his perspective, it was difficult to understand why the team needed to "go through all of this" to reach an understanding of how and why people behaved the way they did. After all, he'd been trained as a physician. For him, his "intuition" about patients' needs and motivations was easier and faster, even if it might miss the nuances. At the end of the project, he seemed to emerge with a greater appreciation for how we worked, but it often remained difficult for him parse out the difference between his 'intuited' assumptions and substantiated insights reached through ethnographic analysis and interpretation.
This example is one with a relatively positive outcome. Eventually, our client was able to make this distinction. In some workplaces it's not uncommon for decisions to be made that are regularly laden with assumptions based on "intuition." Statements such as "I just know what our customers want," or "My wife/husband loves it," are sometimes all that's needed to set strategies and determine work streams, especially when they're delivered as a decry from leaders within hierarchical organizations. Throughout my experience working with many different clients, I've experimented with a range of different responses to 'intuitive' decision making and it's underlying assumptions. What follows are some of the approaches I've taken as well as some context for understanding how leaders gravitate toward 'intuitive' decision making.
Yes, you have cultural insights, but…
First, it's important to recognize that when 'intuition' and ethnographic thinking collide, the latter can disrupt sometimes long held assumptions people have about their own culture, sense of expertise, or even their identity. They may see ethnographic interpretations as challenging or devaluing their worldview and what is obvious (to them) about a culture or group of people with which they have familiarity. This can be overcome if ethnographers carefully contrast 'intuition' and ethnographic thinking in three important ways: sampling, method, and analysis.
For sampling, I've found it useful to begin by validating the legitimacy of perspectives that come from direct involvement in a culture. Let them know that personal experiences are useful for a particular kind of understanding of the interactions at play within their own culture. After all, ethnographers rely heavily on participatory observation as a method, and there are even anthropologists who study their own culture.
However, the trouble comes when experiences outside of systematic research are used to form a position or defend a decision. That's because intuited arguments often falsely present accounts of personal experiences as empirical when they're inherently singular reactions to relatively random or highly personal observations or interactions. Repeated often enough, presenting personal experiences in this way can become so deeply engrained in the mind that they are presumed to be factual and naturally self-evident representations of a culture (what we might call stereotypes). Worse yet, intuited arguments frequently slide into confirmation bias, in which all future observations are selected (either consciously or subconsciously) with the purpose of substantiating the original argument.
When ethnographers select a sample for their research, they do so much more purposefully and systematically. Rather than tapping a single set of un-targeted personal experiences, they interact with a diverse array of carefully selected research participants who are native to a culture to understand as wide a range of experiences as possible from each perspective. Which brings us to method.
HOW you observe and collect behavioral data is as important as WHAT you observe and collect.
Unlike singular, random observations, ethnographers intentionally focus their observations and interactions with these participants on a topic or general area of investigation, based on the objectives they outline in their research plan. They collect all the data they can related to a research topic, without regard for whether or not it supports, contradicts, or even seem relevant at all, to any pre-conceived arguments or hypotheses from others. This allows them to identify unstated norms, shared values, and other interpretations of the collective ways people within a culture interact and understand themselves and each other. These are precisely the kinds of 'nuances' that make a difference in truly human-centered innovation work.
Getting from observations to insights requires a systematic process of value-neutral interpretations.
Finally, we reach the topic of analysis. Intuited knowledge often relies on the unsubstantiated and de-contextualized opinions of one person to form a point of view. As such, judgment (or at least singularly formed knowledge) is central to how intuitive insights are formed. In contrast, ethnographic insights are built on a systematic process of value-neutral interpretations to discover the collective meaning behind observed patterns in behaviors, interactions, and perspectives among a diverse range of research participants. They're developed by explicitly deferring judgment throughout a systematic process of data interpretation to reach fully-substantiated (and trace-able) insights.
Are you really prepared to bank on gut instinct?
Having made these distinctions in sampling, method and analysis, a second challenge often arises: helping people integrate new observations they encounter over the course of a project. Here, the goal is not to simply contrast intuition with ethnography, but to bring co-workers or colleagues into the fold of the ethnographic process itself. To do this, ethnographers need to provide an incentive beyond the methodological advantages of ethnographic thinking. They need to position deferring judgment, value neutrality, systematic investigation, and testing interpretations against established models and theories of culture, as clauses in an insurance policy for the kinds of high stakes investments it takes to develop and market a product, system, program, or service. While assertions rooted in intuitive knowledge may be faster and easier, they represent only one data point—a data point that's doubly biased since it is valid for only one individual, and is brought to the decision making process through the lens of an insider who is more than likely positioning their observation as evidence to support the success of an initiative they wish to succeed. Intuitive decision making in these cases can be a form of judgment that masquerades as 'obvious fact' in ways that dramatically escalate risk for the organization and everyone in it.
By shifting the focus toward ethnographic thinking, ethnographers can help decision makers put their intuition on hold so the organization can benefit from a broader and more carefully considered approach to constituent/customer behavior. In this way, the organization's exposure to risk is reduced by ensuring that a targeted range of diverse perspectives is systematically and strategically vetted and analyzed to provide substantiated insights that can more fully inform decision making. In addition to risk abatement, this shift from intuitive assertion to ethnographic thinking lays the groundwork for design constraints that guide culturally-attuned (human-centered in the current parlance) ideation and iterative prototyping. Furthermore, the ethnographic approach sets the stage for much more informed quantitative inquiries that can be structured to assess scale in ways that align with the logics, contexts, experiences, and behaviors of the customers' or constituents' daily lives.
Tagged with insight intuition
to The Ethnographic Mind
Hello and welcome to "The Ethnographic Mind." I'm launching this blog to explore the many ways that ethnographic thinking — the thought processes and patterns ethnographers develop through their work — can be applied and appreciated.
Each post will explore the distinct value ethnographic thinking adds to a wide array of processes, strategies, and approaches, including its unique ability to broaden perspectives, reframe challenges, cross-pollinate ideas between differing viewpoints, and change the way people think about themselves and others.
I'm looking forward to hosting this journey, making both discoveries and mistakes, and learning from readers.
— Jay Hasbrouck, Seattle, 2018


text:
City May Scuttle Marijuana Initiative
INITIATIVE DOOMED?
In a press release issued late Wednesday the City of Costa Mesa may have thrown a serious impediment before the proponents of placing a medical marijuana initiative on the November 6th ballot. You can find that information on the City web site, HERE.
HANDLED PROMPTLY
The petitions were turned in to the City Clerk around noon on Wednesday who date stamped each page, counted every signature and hand-delivered them to the Registrar of Voters.that afternoon.
STAKE IN THE HEART
However, the City MAY require the proponents to present information about the impact of the proposed ordinance on zoning and other elements covered in the press release. Because that information typically takes 30 days or more and the final date for the Registrar of Voters to certify the item for the November ballot, the City may have driven a stake in its heart.
NOT ON AGENDA YET
The agenda for the council meeting on August 7th was published today and it DID NOT include anything about this issue. It could be added as an emergency item but it seems impossible for the deadline to be met. We'll see.
Labels: Medical Marijuana
posted by The Pot Stirrer at 8/02/2012 09:17:00 PM 10 comments
Krupp Pulls Out
HE'S OUT... Costa Mesa City Council candidate Marshall Krupp announced on the steps of City Hall today that he has decided to withdraw his candidacy effective today.
UNHAPPY WITH CM4RG REJECTION
Unfortunately, not only has he chosen to extract himself from the political turmoil that is sure to come later this summer and fall, he basically dropping out from ANY involvement in ANY community activities. Based on the items he handed out at his press conference today, and his comments to those of us who showed up to hear him, he was VERY disappointed when was not chosen by the grassroots organization, Costa Mesans For Responsible Government, as part of the group they recently endorsed.
SHORT-SIGHTED AND SELFISH
While I do believe that his presence on the ballot would have been a distraction to the voters and would likely have been an impediment to defeating the OC GOP-endorsed slate of Gary Monahan, Steve Mensinger and Colin McCarthy, I think his decision to extract his voice from the debate of important issues is short-sighted and, quite frankly, selfish of him. I hope, upon reflection, he will change his mind and return as a participant, if not a candidate, during the upcoming campaign season.
TOO MUCH BAGGAGE?
Krupp apparently felt that, despite his considerable skills and background, CM4RG rejected him as an endorsee because of his history with The ManKind Project - the program that had him leading groups of naked, blindfolded men through the forest and sitting around speaking to a wooden dildo. I don't know if that's a fact or not..
GENIS, STEPHENS AND ...KRUPP?
When asked who he thought he should have been paired with by the folks at CM4RG, he said that he, Sandra Genis and John Stephens would be a strong slate. CM4RG chose activist and entrepreneur Harold Weitzberg. Krupp figures that the Weitzberg choice was because he is related to CM4RG president Robin Leffler.
PETULANT? MAYBE...
While I understand part of Krupp's reasoning, his reluctance to be an active participant and strong voice in what he acknowledges is a critical juncture in the history of this city seems a little like a kid who doesn't get chosen near the top in a pick- up football game, so takes his ball and goes home. It seems to me that, if he seriously had the interests of THE CITY at heart he would swallow his pride ans find another way to participate. Maybe not.
8 AND COUNTING
So, we are down to eight candidates with nine days to go before they have to make their final decision to run or not. We'll see how this plays out next week.
Sorry for no images. My computer sprained it's brain so I'm left to using my IPad.
I'm back, computer is operating again, so I added images. That darn Ipad is too much work!
Labels: Colin McCarthy, Gary Monahan, Harold Weitzberg, John Stephens, Marshall Krupp, Sandra Genis, Steve Mensinger
Marijuana Petitions Submitted To City
PROPOSED ORDINANCE SUBMITTED TO CITY
Today, shortly before noon, proponents of the movement to place an initiative on the November ballot which, if approved by the voters, will permit "certain Medical Marijuana activities in the City of Costa Mesa". You can read the text of the message that appeared on the petitions as well as the entire proposed ordinance HERE.
MORE THAN THE MINIMUM
Several proponents stood before the main entrance at City Hall and presented their pile of petitions. It was required for them to gather roughly 5,800 signature of registered Costa Mesa voters - 10% of the number of the total registered voters. According to the proponents, they gathered 6,780 valid signatures. Shown here with Acting Deputy City Clerk Christine Cordon in the background.
DELIVERING THE MESSAGE
Robert Martinez - a name with whom some of you may be familiar as the fellow who broadcast his weekly marijuana radio program from then-mayor Gary Monahan's pub several months ago, then had the program removed from the airwaves - was the primary spokesman for the group. He's shown here reading the text of the item on the petitions.
DELIVERING TO CITY CLERK
The pile of papers were turned in to Interim City Clerk Brenda Green for processing. She's shown here exchanging details of the process with Martinez and others.
TIMESTAMPED AND COUNTED
Once Green and her staff timestamped in each petition page those documents were taken to a private room where Green counted each signature in front of a representative of the proponents. Once that was completed the documents will be delivered to Neal Kelley, Orange County Registrar of Voters, where his staff will certify each and every signature as valid. If sufficient numbers of signatures are found to be valid this item will appear on the November 6th ballot.
6777 IS THE NUMBER
According to Green, the counting is complete and she is leaving to deliver the 6777 signatures to the Registrar as I type this. His staff will certify each signature to the point where they reach the minimum for placement on the ballot - 5811.
CITY MUST PAY IF IT QUALIFIES
Green also tells me that the city will pay for this item to be on the ballot if it qualifies, but the numbers are unknown at this time. The Registrar's office determines the cost based on several variables that cannot be quantified at this time.
VERY "INTERESTING" DOCUMENT
I think you'll find this initiative to be an interesting document. Here are some of the highlights as presented in the petition language: (the emphasis below is mine)
It authorizes the establishment of storefront, mobile and agricultural medical marijuana operations, not operated primarily for profit, in the City.
No approval is given or required by or from the City to establish such operations.
The City cannot ban such operations.
The City cannot punish property owners for such operations.
It specifically exempts such medical marijuana operations from being required by the City to obtain a business license, special site plan or variance.
It prohibits the City from cooperating with county, state or federal law enforcement agencies in enforcing laws contrary to the Initiative.
It basically "grandfathers-in" ten (10) medical marijuana establishments deemed to be in good standing and free to begin operating. Go to the link above for the identities of these establishments
Inspections of these establishments for normal fire and other safety inspections, appropriate parking per square footage and similar requirements for a private club may be performed so long as these are not different for any other business or private club in the City.
Storefront locations are prohibited within 1,000 feet of a public or private school where K-12 grade classes are held.
It requires medical marijuana establishments to have a closed circuit video camera system for security purposes; an active centrally-monitored burglary alarm system and proper lighting.
If found in violation of any of those regulations the City may fine the establishment a maximum of $1,000 per week per infraction but may not order the closure of the establishment.
The City would be limited to one inspection a year to insure compliance with these regulations.
The City may not impose any further regulations or regulatory procedures on medical marijuana activities, unless they are approved by a majority of the City of Costa Mesa voters in a regularly scheduled or special election.
I WILL VOTE NO...
Each of those items I highlighted are very problematic for me. It looks to me as though any of these kind of facilities will operate beyond any reasonable application of the law. If this item is certified and placed on the ballot I will vote NO.
Labels: Medical Marijuana, Robert Martinez
Costa Mesa Charter On November Ballot
Only kidding...
To absolutely nobody's surprise among those 100 or so folks gathered in the Costa Mesa City Council chambers last night, the council voted to place Jim Righeimer's Charter on the November 6th ballot. Actually, there were fewer than 30 people left when the vote was taken. Many of the rest bailed out after they took their three minutes at the speaker's podium. In fact, we were out of the auditorium well before 10:00 p.m.
NO "RED" IN SIGHT
I arrived early - 5:00 p.m. - for the meeting that was to begin at 7:00 - because I wanted to be there for the closed session and I wanted to see what kind of a crowd might assemble based on the OC GOP appeal to the Orange County Young Republicans. Based on the email message I'd seen earlier, I expected to see dozens of bright young people, all dressed in red shirts, scrambling for pizza before they were handed their scripts to read before the council. I didn't want to have to arm-wrestle one of them for a seat. I shouldn't have worried. The only red shirt in the house was on the back of resident Phil Morello, President of the Costa Mesa Republican Assembly, who actually suggested bankruptcy as a solution to our fiscal woes! The rest of the freshly-scrubbed Young Republicans apparently didn't get the "red shirt" message.
WRONG TIME - SMALL TURNOUT OF PROPONENTS
Just before six a couple of them arrived, expecting to find their cohorts on site already. Seems they'd been told the meeting was at 6:00! Maybe they read the city flier that was mailed to all residents which showed that time. I went outside a few minutes later and found a few folks chowing down on pizza from the rear end of a SUV- and few of them looked like "young" Republicans. As it turned out, all of them were from the Associated Builders and Contractors (ABC) who came to sing the praises of Jim Righeimer's Charter. I don't think any of the young folks got pizza.
MOST SPEAKERS OPPOSE
Mayor Eric Bever, who showed up late for the closed session an hour earlier, kicked off the Charter meeting at 7:05. Ninety-five minutes later 42 speakers had addressed the council and 69% of those spoke against it. Of the remaining 13 speakers, nine were either Young Republicans or ABC spokesmen (two of which were Costa Mesa residents). The remaining four were actual Costa Mesa residents without a script or an agenda.
EVERETT, THE SCRIPT-WRITER
One of the speakers from the ABC was Dave Everett, freshly-minted Government Affairs Director - more recently the Executive Director of the Orange County Republican Party - who apparently provided the script for the young folks and read his own later. As each of them spoke you could almost predict the words since they were all using the same song book. If there was any doubt about the cross-pollination of those two organizations, Everett's presence herding a covey of Young Republicans removed it.
I felt just a little sorry for those bright Young Republicans who stepped up and read the script handed to them just a few minutes earlier. It was very clear that few of them had any real knowledge of the issue, and yet they stood and spoke - like a pup "speaking" for a treat. Folks around the auditorium chuckled to themselves as speaker after speaker laid that prepared text in front of them at the podium and tried to read parts that made sense to them. They didn't pull it off.
CANDIDATES PRESENT AND VOCAL
Of those speakers who spoke against Jim Righeimer's Charter, several were members of Costa Mesans For Responsible Government and also included council candidates Sandra Genis, Sue Lester, John Stephens and Harold Weitzberg.
ROBIN SETS THE RECORD STRAIGHT
Over that hour and a half most speakers addressed the council with respect, outlining their concerns with varying levels of detail. Several pointed out specific deficiencies in the Charter while others delivered their message with more emotion than facts. I had to chuckle when CM4RG President Robin Leffler stood and used valuable time to set the record straight about this blog, which had been identified by Everett in his call to action earlier this week as a "liberal blog". She pointed out to the council that I, by name, was a "Big R" Republican and that the only thing liberal about me was my liberal criticism about "this half-baked Charter". I smiled. Later one friend asked if she had said "Big Arse" - I smiled again, knowing that she didn't say that, but if so, that Fruedian slip was pretty darn close to home. As a sidebar, I saw Everett as he sat in the audience before the proceedings began and I introduced myself as a life-long Republican and the author of A Bubbling Cauldron. He was courteous and a little flummoxed. Thanks, Robin...
SOME NEW SPEAKERS
Once again, in addition to the "usual suspects" - those residents who actually care enough about their city to study the issues, step away from family obligations and actually address them to the council - there were a sprinkling of unfamiliar faces taking the speaker's podium for the first time. It takes guts to do that, especially knowing that one or more of the council members may throw a caustic, snide remark at your back as you depart. In fact, one speaker pointed that out to the council, but that didn't keep Bever from demonstrating that he simply has no self-control. Time after time he tossed juvenile retorts at one speaker or another.
UNEVEN APPLICATION OF THE RULES
Speaking of Bever, he again demonstrated an uneven application of the rules last night. When 34-year Costa Mesa resident Bill Henniger (sp?) attempted to explain his concerns about the Charter by presenting a summary of the reasons he didn't trust this council with it, Bever tried to shut him off, telling him to stick to the Charter. Henniger tried to explain that's what he was doing, but Bever's interruption did what he apparently hoped to accomplish - he knocked Henniger off his stride, but he did finish. The next speaker, Jim Kerr (above) from Huntington Beach - one of the pizza-eaters, a spokesman for the ABC and a proponent of the Charter - rambled on with an explanation of the ABC, using up at least two minutes on that irrelevant drivel and Bever never said a word. Despite the fact that he kept on tossing mini-grenades at speakers, I guess we should all consider ourselves lucky that he didn't curse us out and tell us to go home.
IMPARTIAL ANALYSIS?
Special council for this issue, Kimberly Hall Barlow - former City Attorney and member of the law firm Jones and Mayer - was on hand to guide the discussion and answer questions about the most recent minor modifications made to the Charter. Resident Tamar Goldmann expressed an opinion during her three minutes that City Attorney Tom Duarte should NOT be permitted to compose the "impartial analysis" of the Charter that will appear in the voter handbook because he answers to the majority on the council that will approve it and is hardly impartial. Barlow addressed this with the following comment:
"I do want to address one issue that was raised by a speaker with respect to the impartial analysis. The City Attorney is a public officer designated by the Elections Code and the Government Code to prepare the impartial analysis. Mr. Duarte is not a city employee and neither am I so I'm sure that I will work with him to insure that the impartial analysis is what is required by the code and other than that I'd be happy to answer any questions."
I think that the fact that this question was even raised gives a good idea of how little trust some residents of this city have for this council and its administration.
BEVER CAN'T SHUT UP!
The vote to place Jim Righeimer's Charter on the November 6th ballot passed, 4-1. Wendy Leece voted no after delivering a clear, concise explanation of her reasons during which several council members rolled their eyes and smirked at her. And, after Leece ended with this sentence, "Whether we adopt the Charter or not in November or the voters approve, I know that we will continue to work hard and the residents will help us to continue to make Costa Mesa a great city to live in and that's clean and safe and has great parks and and a great place to raise our families. So, I'm sorry, but I cannot support this Charter in its present form.", Bever, in his own infantile way, threw this comment at her, "And a great place for grandstanding." I seriously think this poor man needs some professional help. He just CANNOT stand it unless he gets the last word in! He just needs to keep his snide, caustic yap shut and move on.
Several speakers suggested to include the ENTIRE Charter on the sample ballot. The council agreed and CEO Tom Hatch said that, in addition to the initial ballot cost of nearly $100,000, it would cost around $14,700 to include the entire Charter. Printing of the proposed informational mailers suggested in the staff report would cost around $10,000 each.
NOW, OFF TO WORK!
So, now the fun begins. Jim Righeimer's Charter will now become the cornerstone of debate during the city council campaign. So far no entity has expressed interest in holding a "Charter-only" debate during the campaign season but questions on it will certainly be addressed during the council candidate forums this summer and fall. Each side will undoubtedly find ways to get their messages out. It may boil down, as Daily Pilot columnist Jeffrey Harlan suggested recently, to a matter of trust. If that's the case, this Charter will be DOA at the ballot box.
Labels: Charter City, Eric Bever, Gary Monahan, Jim Righeimer, Kimberly Hall Barlow, OCGOP, Tom Duarte, Tom Hatch, Wendy Leece
Unified Voices on I-405
SIX CITIES AGREE ON ALTERNATIVE #2
In the press release shown below Costa Mesa Mayor Eric Bever joined other elected civic leaders to oppose Alternative #3 and unanimously support Alternative #2 as the Preferred Local Option for the expansion of the I-405 Freeway between Costa Mesa and the I-605.
COSTA MESA, CALIF.—Five Orange County mayors and a mayor pro tem jointly signed a letter today that details their united opposition to an option pushed by the Orange County Transportation Authority (OCTA) requiring the installation of toll lanes on the 405 Freeway from Seal Beach through Costa Mesa.
Costa Mesa, Fountain Valley, Huntington Beach, Los Alamitos, Seal Beach and Westminster have come together to oppose Alternative 3, which would use taxpayer funds to build toll lanes as part of a major expansion of the 405 Freeway in Orange County. The cities endorse Alternative 2 as the locally preferred option. That plan would improve traffic flow by adding more general purpose lanes but not require tolls.
Mayors Eric Bever (Costa Mesa), John Collins (Fountain Valley), Troy Edgar (Los Alamitos), Michael Levitt (Seal Beach), Margie L. Rice (Westminster) and Huntington Beach Mayor Pro Tem Devin Dwyer will submit their letter (see attached) to each member of the OCTA's Board of Directors. City representatives will speak at the OCTA's scheduled public meetings on the proposed expansion on Aug. 13 and Sept. 24.
The city councils of Costa Mesa, Huntington Beach, Los Alamitos, Rossmoor, Seal Beach and Westminster recently have voted against the toll-road Alternative 3.
Alternate 2, which is unanimously supported by the six cities most affected by the proposed freeway expansion, essentially adds two lanes both north and southbound between Euclid Street and the 605 Freeway.
The OCTA Board is expected to select the "locally preferred alternative" at its Sept. 24 meeting, and Caltrans is scheduled to make the final decision in the fall.
Labels: Eric Bever, I-405
They're Back! (Amended)*
ONCE AGAIN...
You will recall that, back in May, I told you about a probable infestation of our City Council meeting by outside agitators from the Orange County Young Republicans, HERE. We'll, they're back at it again.
In an Action Alert sent out this week those rabid young misguided folks are being asked, once again, to flood our city council chambers at the meeting tonight - when the council WILL vote to place Jim Righeimer's Charter on the November 6th ballot.
IMPORTING YOUNG ELEPHANTS
This time the flames of this Action Alert are being fanned by a guy named Dave Everett, HERE, who apparently recently left his position as Executive Director of the OC GOP for a position with the Associated Builders and Contractors (ABC). In correspondence provided to me he exhorts the troops to rally at City Hall at 6:30, luring them there with the promise of pizza and a chance to visit the Fair. Well, the Fair is dark on Tuesdays, so these gullible, easily-manipulated young folks will be disappointed. That's a lesson they'll learn more than once in their young lives if they don't begin thinking for themselves instead of following the OC GOP script.
LEAVE BRAINS AT HOME
Speaking of which, in his correspondence Everett asks these young people to wear RED shirts in a show of solidarity - they wore black last time - and tells them that he will provide them with SCRIPTS to read to the council. Oh, yeah, Young Republicans... just leave your brains at home... we'll provide everything you need - pizza and a script!
"TRANSPARENCY" AT WORK HERE
In his correspondence Everett says, "For ABC, we are trying to get charter's up and down the state for cities, so that our members are not excluded from bidding on contracts for those cities...". It looks to me like Everett has become the reincarnation of Kevin Dayton - the shill for the ABC who almost incited a riot in council chambers back in February, HERE and HERE.
MARCHING ORDERS ARE CLEAR
I've mentioned many times that the changes being attempted in Costa Mesa by Jim Righeimer and his pals on the council are actually being guided by marching orders from Scott Baugh and the OC GOP. Here is yet another example of them trying to influence the APPEARANCE of broad public support for these schemes. One could interpret this as a recognition by the current council majority that this bogus scheme does NOT have broad community support so they're trying to stack the deck purely for appearance purposes - to make it appear that folks who will actually be impacted by Jim Righeimer's Charter are supportive of it. Personally, I find it offensive that these guys think it's necessary to import agitators with no skin in the game - especially when NOTHING that will be said tonight is going to change the fact that the four members of the council WILL vote to place the charter on the ballot.
If you plan to attend the council meeting tonight - it begins at 7:00 p.m. - I suggest you plan to arrive a little early if you want to have a seat. Everett has rallied his young troops for 6:30.
MY CHUCKLE FOR THE DAY
I had a chuckle when I read the Action Alert mentioned above because they linked to two of my previous posts and referred to my blog as a "liberal blog". Me, a lifelong Republican, being painted by the FAR RIGHT wing of my party as a liberal makes me smile. These guys just keep doing the same things over and over again, failing every time, and getting closer and closer to the cliff of irrelevancy. If they don't soon change their tactics the Republican Party in California will be only a memory - and that's not a good thing for any of us.
I'll report on the meeting later tonight. See you there.
*STILL NOT SHOWN ON WEB SITE!
By the way, despite several telephone calls, at 1:30 Tuesday afternoon - less than 6 hours until the Charter meeting time and less than 5 hours for the Special closed session at 6, the City still has NOT shown the two council meetings on their schedule of events on the City home page. Instead, they continue to show the following image. So much for transparency, huh?
Labels: Charter City, Dave Everett, Jim Righeimer, Kevin Dayton, OC GOP, Orange County Young Republicans, Scott Baugh
Costa Mesa Charter Vote Tomorrow
COUNCIL TO DECIDE CHARTER FATE
Just a reminder that the Costa Mesa City Council will meet at 7:00 Tuesday in council chambers to vote on whether to put Jim Righeimer's Charter on the November 6th ballot or not. There is NO chance they will NOT put it on the ballot. You can read the agenda HERE and the final (so far) version of the Charter HERE.
SEE WHAT THE FUTURE HOLDS
For those residents interested in this issue - the second-most important issue in the history of this city - you can join your neighbors to hear the discussion, watch the council majority ignore the pleas of those who have studied this bogus document and see a sample of how draconian the governance of this city will be if they get the power that this document provides to them.
CURIOUSLY DEFICIENT INFORMATION
It is interesting to note that, despite how the City touts itself as being the most transparent city around, the information about this particular meeting has been curiously missing or misleading. For example, the most recent glossy marketing flier sent out to every Costa Mesa home shows the start time for this meeting as 6:00 p.m. There actually has been a meeting scheduled for that hour - a closed session about labor negotiations and legal problems - but the charter hearing is at 7:00.
TRANSPARENCY IS MORE THAN A WORD
And, on the City's brand new web site, over on the right side where you can click on the Community Calendar tab to get the upcoming schedule of events, when I did that over the weekend and as recently as 3:30 Monday it shows the following. Note - NO mention of EITHER council meeting. I've called City Hall twice today about it and it has not been fixed. Transparency is more than a word.
So, I'll see you all there tomorrow evening to watch what is being foisted off on us as the "democratic process" take place. Yep, we'll see a charter document cobbled together by one man to meet his personal political agenda be sent on it's way to the unknowing voters of this city.
Labels: Charter City, Jim Righeimer

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


TASER's been selling more cameras than stun guns lately. Is the end nigh?
Now what do these four headlines, all published by TASER International (NASDAQ:AAXN) over the past two weeks, tell you about how TASER's business is going?
Optimists -- the folks who have bid up TASER stock 28% over the past 52 weeks, will tell you they mean that TASER's business is booming. And to an extent, they're right. Last quarter, for example, TASER's sales exploded 26% higher.
Pessimists, on the other hand, may read between the lines of TASER's booming sales growth. When they do, they'll tell you that while TASER's overall sales are growing very nicely, much of this growth is being fueled by the explosive growth of TASER's Axon Body Camera business.
Last quarter, Axon sales grew 49% year over year, which was nearly twice the speed of the company's overall sales growth, and more than twice the pace at which sales from TASER's higher-margin Taser -brand stun-gun business grew. On average, every Taser that TASER sells generates 70% gross margins for the company, while the faster-growing sales of Axon cameras yield only 42% margins.
It gets an investor to wondering: Is TASER's Taser market starting to get tapped out?
According to TASER's own figures, "more than 850,000 TASER weapons have been sold since 1994" to these "more than 18,000 law enforcement agencies." TASER itself boasts that its stun guns are now so "ubiquitous" in America that approximately 17,800 of the 18,250 law-enforcement agencies in the U.S. now keep Tasers in their arsenals.
At first glance, it sure looks like it. At the department level, 97.5% of all law-enforcement agencies now field Taser stun guns. Moreover, 850,000 Tasers sold, divided among 929,000 officers, suggests 91.5% market penetration at an individual level. And that's assuming no sharing of weapons among officers.
These figures suggest that one more year of "20% sales growth" should suffice to achieve total market saturation of the Taser stun-gun market -- and put an end to TASER's growth.
Yet over the years, TASER has gone through multiple iterations of its eponymous stun gun. It stands to reason that a lot of those "850,000 TASER weapons" sold to date have been upgrades of and replacements sold to repeat customers. And if that's the case, then true market saturation may still be a way off.
Indeed, in the case of the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission sale announced last week, TASER confirmed that the 850 X2 stun guns sold were "an upgrade of older TASER weapons." Likewise for the much larger Jacksonville Sheriff's office purchase of X26P stun guns back in June. That, too, was described as "an upgrade of 2,500 older TASER weapons."


2019 Audition Applications have closed. However, you can still apply for a late audition. However, we cannot guarantee that we will be able to allocate you an audition time if you apply for a late audition.
Read the Audition Brochure and decide which orchestra or ensemble is best for you.
Complete your audition application before Tuesday 18 September and check out other key dates.
Download your audition excerpts and technical requirements. These are available for you to download after you submit your audition application.
Take your excerpts to your private music teacher.
Attend the Audition Information Session on 22 September 2018 and read our FAQs.
Receive your audition time. You will receive an email by Friday 28 September with information on the date, time and location of your audition.
Receive your results. Results will be sent via email to the primary email you nominated in your application by Friday 14 December.
Accept or decline your offer and select your payment method. You have until Sunday 13 January to accept your offer.
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