wicked problems and scientific design

What is the role of a social psychologist in solving wicked problems? 

Further, is she required to elect between the scientific method in which she is trained or the design process for which she has seen more popular reception? I hate to confuse the morass of types of reasoning that already exist (deductive, inductive, abductive...), but could there be a hybrid approach that causes the most disruption-- the most lasting behavior change-- in the context of wicked problems?

I'm fascinated by differences in the scientific method vs. the design process and am doing some research understanding the nuances in each-- the reasoning, process, and possible outcomes.

Intuitively, we perceive that design involves more creativity compared to science's falsifiability; more empathy compared to science's controlled objectivity. Several have more extreme and controversial views on which has more merit and the generalization that science aims to prove, while design, to improve.

Roger Martin argued a few years ago that the scientific mandate to *prove* things stymies innovation. Around the same time, design thinking was heralded for its breakthrough potential, led in part by the critical acclaim of Tim Brown's book. More recently, and ironically I might add, design thinking has been criticized as a "failed experiment" in its mainstream adoption and packaging as a business process, devoid of creativity. Funny enough, some of the original (popular) thinking on the scientific method-- by Einstein-- cites the role of "creative imagination" in science:

"To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle, requires creative imagination and marks real advance in science."
- Einstein & Infeld 1938

I point out these select examples only to emphasize this methodological quandary is a complicated issue.

Which do you perceive leads to more disruption? Particularly as wicked problems abound and we have no choice but to move away from reasoning and explanation toward diagnosis and behavior change. Which is more apt?

Back to my research. Let me know if you have thoughts.

Photocredit: Eadweard Muybridge, digitaljournalist.org

Starting Up: Infusing business with social science

Over the past seven years I've become increasingly frustrated when people talk about things like influence, engagement, community, or collaboration (to name just a few) without enough of a nod to the wealth of data in social science.

I've blogged before about my concern that business is "awaiting igon valuation." This is the idea inspired by Steven Pinker's review of Malcolm Gladwell's “What the Dog Saw,” that there are solutions available to some of today’s more complex business problems, but they need to be made into banal generalizations before catching on.

Starting today, I've decided to apply myself to this 'cause'. I'm dedicating myself-- with a new professional venture-- to defy igon valuation and introduce more of the richness from psychology to business via research. KNowable Research, name courtesy of my former colleague, Peter Kim.

The origin of my idea is simple-- and you can walk through this from the perspective of an individual or a business:

• Online and mobile platforms for social interaction and the resulting data have made the formerly invisible dynamics of human attitudes, cognition and behavior more salient.
• This awareness has changed the ways we relate to people, places, and products.
  
• To be successful, businesses require a deeper understanding of these 'ways we relate' and the underlying thoughts and attitudes, through known principles from social science.

In subsequent posts, I'll walk through the above in more detail. I'll also provide more information about my plan, as things unfold. I'll be developing my ideas again here(!) and look forward to your feedback, reactions, ideas, perceptions, and any other elements of your psychologies you choose to share.

More to come.

*Photo credit: Kurt Lewin, the father of social psychology. Image in public domain via About.com

Minding the gap: Academia and Business

After a 7-year hiatus, I've been back on the UT campus, teaching, for about two months now. Each week, I notice different aspects of the great divide between academia and business. Each week it seems larger, but I'm beginning to better understand some ways to bridge it.

I've been toying with the idea with respect to social science for a few months now. It began with a small frustration: Why aren't social scientists more involved in conversations about 'our' work with the general public-- the way some journalists are? For example, discussions of collective action and all things collaboration and co-creation show little awareness of the early work on the pitfalls of brainstorming, groupthink, social loafing, or even social identity theory to name a few.

Last week I spoke with UT Psychology alumni and proposed a few possibilities:

1. Terminology: Academics and businesspeople speak different languages -- in content and style.
2. Comfort: Academics have safeguards against going beyond the constraints of an experiment; businesses often make 'business decisions' with more directional insight.
3. Information flow: (Right, chicken vs. egg.) There's very little flow of information from one world to the other. No means to efficiently access research (PsycINFO!) and firewalls that protect business questions.
4. Currency: While everyone wants fame and glory, it seemingly comes in different forms for academics and businesspeople.

Or does it? Do they?

In his UT Game Changers talk this evening, Bob Metcalfe laid out three broad reasons as to why it's difficult to build an entrepreneurial culture at research universities. Paraphrased below, his reasons overlap with some of mine above, and otherwise extend the list:

1. Stigma: Some believe commercialization is crass
2. Reward structures: Participation in entrepreneurial activity is not aligned with incentives
3. Means. Some researchers believe they don't know how

Why do you think the gap exists? How could the theories and ideas from social science have so much relevance to business today, yet play so minimal a role in the broader conversation?


PhotoCredit: flickr.com/BlazerMan

Listening: make the effort!

Like many other evolutionary adaptations, we’ve all evolved to look like good listeners-- in life, to give off the cue we’re available for emotional support, and in marketing, to show executives and/or the public, we’re aware of what’s being said about us and/or our brands. Problem is, in marketing, as in life, many of us are not good listeners.

Many are reliant on technology to do all the work; to spoonfeed insight into the perfect, executive-friendly dashboard.

As a result, what I see today is rampant platform-hopping. Listening in 2011 has largely been marked by the quest for the ultimate platform. Clients switch listening providers for prettier user-interfaces, better-slicing-and-dicing, ease of direct engagement, access to the Twitter API... the list goes on, and many of the reasons for switching are warranted.

The error is simply in expecting the technology to do all the work.

This error has also led many to make the pessimistic statement: "Listening platforms are commoditized."

Is this the case? Is there really no qualitative differentiation? Partial fungibility? Can a listening platform really be a commodity in the absence of standards?

I would argue, not yet.

Further, have they jumped the shark? Is the pessimism warranted? No.

I see platforms vary widely on the surface, and then in more meaningful ways like data coverage, data quality, and mining methodology. But despite these differences, they all do a pretty good job in serving up insight; several have an impressive edge.

The problem is that the insight delivered will not be useful for your organization until you expend some effort, personally. In my Innotech talk last week with Kate Rush Sheehy, I argued there are three main things that matter when trying to be a good listener. The first, the most important, is a precursor and a contingency:

Get involved in the data. Physically. This task is not below anyone. Change up your Boolean operands and see the impact. Read through your results. Know what “spam” really means in your landscape. You must immerse yourself in the data before you can warrant switching. It’s not fair to you or the technology.

Listening platforms are growing in every sense-- in number, in prowess, in prevalence, and in importance. There are amazing advances in NLP, sentiment analysis, geo-location, and data warehousing enabling faster, more precise analyses to occur. But no matter how good the technology, good listening will always be effortful.

Photo credit: flickr.com/CarbonNYC
This post also appears in the Dachis Group Collaboratory

Social Media Measurement: This time for realz

We have crossed the just noticeable difference (JNdiff) in the threshold of signal: noise when serendipity has been compromised.

The noise out there can be infuriating. Too much clutter; no sense of what goes with what; what's a "need to know" vs. a "nice to know" vs. a "never wanted to know."

I often find myself talking clients off the ledge as they attempt to prioritize social media efforts, given inexplicable differences in results across listening platforms, varying calculations of influence, and the age-old question of "what's good" when it comes to buzz and sentiment. Further, knowing 'how well' you're doing in social media has only become more problematic with the increasing shift in interest from amassing eyeballs to mobilizing and rewarding them.

As an industry, we're plagued by inefficient categorizations, unstable rankings of authority, and unpredictable, black box algorithms guessing what matters most.

Perhaps as a result, we see more organizations shifting in the same way that we, as people, do as we go through adolescence-- from giving disproportionate weight to what others say about us, to being more concerned with our own actions. That which we can control.

Being in control of our actions requires a different type of measurement and management. To help organizations in said efforts, we're announcing today our public launch of the Social Business Index (SBI), the first application on our Social Business Intelligence as a Service (SBIaaS) data services platform.

Having worked in social media analysis for seven years, it's become clear to me, the trick to finding meaning in social media is to be intimate with your dataset (for context), and to monitor relative comparisons to yield meaning. We've thoroughly taken this to heart with the SBI.

Our dataset includes the social accounts of thousands of companies, their subsidiaries, and brands, in addition to the social accounts of their engaged market (e.g. anyone who interacts with a given account). Using natural language processing and machine learning algorithms, powered by our own strategists, we identify specific activities that are being executed by a given brand -- emanating from their social accounts. This is a critical distinction from the way things are being measured today. We're not exclusively monitoring reactions, or buzz in response to a real or perceived tactic. Instead, we're starting with the action per se. We're measuring what you, as marketers, are doing-- in addition to the way your market responds.

We've captured specific behaviors correlated with outcomes such as Brand Awareness, Brand Love, Brand Mindshare, and Advocacy. In aggregate, this gives us a company's Social Business Index Score-- a ranking, analysis, and benchmarking of Social Business adoption and performance.

Go to socialbusinessindex.com, learn more, and sign up.

We're excited about our progress in digging out of the black hole of social media measurement. We acknowledge our approach will evolve over time and we look forward to your collaboration to do so. If you work at a company covered by the index, register for private access to deeper analytics. If your company is not currently covered, request coverage.

If you're just curious, take a look at our ranking and best in class analysis by browsing at www.socialbusinessindex.com.

This post also appears on the Dachis Group Collaboratory, where you can find my colleagues' related posts as well.

Social Media Measurement: Winning or Winging it?

People are "winging it" with measurement in social today. Marketers embarrassedly tell me this daily.

In my social psychological opinion, those of you who aren't abiding by any standards, measuring a little sentiment here, a little influence there, and a lot of buzz everywhere are falling prey to a cognitive bias: The Imposter Effect. You're denying yourselves the credit of being bona fide experimenters.

With no standards yet, and no evidence that a global social media metric standard spans all business goals and outcomes, the best thing you can do in measurement today is effectively operationalize your variables. Operationalize in the scientific sense: define the ambiguous concept you're trying to get at by coming up with a relevant way to measure it. We're an industry without gold standards. You have no choice but to wing it, but you can still do so empirically.

When social scientists study things like "health," "happiness," and "satisfaction" with marriage, jobs, or life, we rely on proxies. You often hear things like "health, as defined by number of doctor visits in a month," or "happiness, as defined by size of smile." In lieu of (or sometimes in addition to) getting self-reports of "how healthy/happy you are," these objective measures act as a best bet or starting point, eventually with some validation as to why that operationalization was selected.

Take a typical desire in social business measurement today: "we want to tie engagement to business results." So, how do we operationalize engagement? Importantly, this doesn't mean you should settle for a kitchen sink approach and add up everything to yield engagement, instead chose wisely - a realistic manifestation of what it means to be engaged. As I've said before, think about:

• Objectivity-- Really think about what engagement means; don't arbitrarily involve variables simply because they’re available (e.g. # friends).


• Reliability - Look for something that gets at engagement over time. Don't incorporate variables that measure the same thing multiple times (e.g. friends on Facebook + followers on Twitter + connections on LinkedIn).


• Validity - show that your variables predict a meaningful behavior (e.g. statements of connection with the brand and likelihood to purchase, etc.). A great trick in defining variables is to think of the inverse. Get positive results of what you want (i.e. engagement) and negative results of what you don't want (i.e. disengagement).

As always, when you operationalize, highlight the right aspects of your business-- things that measure important movement and things that matter to those who consume the numbers.

This is also posted on the Dachis Group collaboratory. Join the conversation there to access a wider network of social business professionals.

Photo Credit: flickr.com/mlrogers

ATX: the world's social business hub

This post was done in parallel to a group of social business thinkers and practitioners, synthesized and excerpted by Peter Kim here.

I left my hometown of NYC for ATX to cure myself of pedestrian rage (NYers version of road rage). This shocks people-- to have left New York City (said with a Texas accent like in the old El Paso commercials) for a funky little Texan town. Truth is, all that NYC offered didn't stack up so well for me, compared to Austin's riches.

I came for the intellectual curiosity UT Austin uniquely offers-- academic freedom most schools don't manage to breed. I came for the start-up spirit Austin Ventures nurtures-- premium value on entrepreneurialism unseen elsewhere. I came for the work ethic that preserves the best of east coast ambition with the backdrop of west coast yoga retreats. I came to raise my family in a place where people genuinely want you to succeed in life.

Quality of life in Austin is simply higher than in the more fast-paced, cut-throat, nail-biting enclaves of the US. Austin is the perfect mix of intellect, athleticism, family-friendliness, creativity, and entrepreneurial spirit. And like attracts like: this unique combination makes us the most ripe breeding ground for social business - thinkers and doers. You won't believe the people you run into at Whole Foods headquarters...

People often dream of moving to NYC. Living in today's Austin makes me wonder whether people will soon dream of someday making it in Austin with the same tenacity. Austin is a great place to work and live. If you're smart, we're hiring; join us!