Full Circle Associates

Epic Afternoon session - workshop. This is not totally comprehensible, as I've not "processed" the notes. But you know how it is. If I don't put this up, it will never get up!

Background for Workshop:
Collaboration across different types of boundaries
What are we representing, learning about
What is it that we are doing when we are using ethnographic praxis
What about those who don’t care about process, just outcome
Distance, where the boundaries my lie
Idea – by the end of this, design game, hands on way of thinking, some of it a how to, tools, learning from each other; to continue to problematize and think deeply about where this issues are.

Structure:
Short 5 second intros
Design game that gets at the heart of once we have material/data, the stuff we are working with, what happens when you try to make sense of that with other people. Push at the limits of how we are doing that.
You are already in the project, working with material
Then rewind to how you frame it up front. In the mundane sense, how do we set expectations as ethnographic practitioners with our partners and clients. Output, expectations and goals. There’s a dual mode approach to ethnographic work. A kind of product design in some sense. Organizational intervention for others. How does this look similar/difference from change management.
If time at the end, question: Does ethnography introduce particular challenges to collaboration If so, what and why? Is there anything unique about collaboration and ethnography?

Introductions: I did not catch all these, nor is the spelling checked.)
5 seconds, 6 words (Name, org, 2 words or less description/characterization of your collaborations.
Melissa Cefkin, IBM Research, pregnanat w/ possiblity
Jens Petersen, ITUniversity, coordination
Eliz Churchill, PARC, curiously challenging
Jack Whalen, PARCX, ethnographic consulting
George Simons, unnamed new company, can’t define collaborations
Whitly burret, own practice, U Toronto, Anthropologist, unmasking and demystifing
Natelie Hanson, SAP, varied and challenging
Carrie Rondo, MI State U, challenging grounding
Susan Wilheit, Yahoo, very challenging cross disc
Jill Laurens, Pitneybowse, chall fun
U Denmark, surprisingly complex yet somehow simple
Brook, inspirational infuriating
Barb Stukey, National Council on Ageing, Limited vision
Alexandra Lucard, Pettigrew, need to education
Dan Brunner, Dosis, enlightening distillation
Danyle Fisher, MSFT, quantitative means thick
Gina Grumke, Laird Medical, constant translation
J Grudin MSFT Research pattern seeking
John, valuable but frustrating
Bill Kagen, independent, opportunitic multi layered
MSF hardware, omplementary and energizing
Annetg Adler, Agilent Labs, patterns and lonely
Joke IT University of Copenhagen, productively risk reciprocal
Mizune, MSFT real time collaboration, oppressive now hopeful
Pier Weeks, --- , really nice

Introduction & Background of Design Game:

Collaborative research and design project with MSFT solutions. Exploring the domain of maintenance work, how mobile can work there. Engage developers in the use practice, participatory design, to involve the users in the design of their future products. Three step cycle with rapid field work, collaborative workshop, improvised video scenarios to further elaborate and document the original practice how it could transform.

Today focusing on collaborative workshop aspect.

Design games & collaboration
A collaborative exploration of field material
Facilitates and structures dialog between different stakeholders
Turn taking (everyone must have a say)
Tangible
Representation & re-creation, meaning making, sense-making,
Grand narratives, fragments to re-order – cut up fragments of field work, cut up to get away from the idea that we are proxies for the field work, that we could tell the grand narrative but instead we all create the shared meeting. In this case we are not the real stakeholders, so a bit of an experiment.

Mobility in Maintenance


We played the game

Elizabeth and Jack tell a story of their project

The location is far away. That creates its own set of issues. The problem, a company, software development. Commercial systems. A bank or oil company needs a system, or merging systems. Like IBM services, going around, figuring out how to build and integrate software systems for their customers. Large organization, large SI projects, thousands of man months. 40-50,000 system engineers, not including subcontracting programmers. They wanted PARC to help in the ways to innovate the way engineer works. Processes are 40 years old, set, hard to change. “Normal trouble.” What is the possibility of “change the way they work,” where there is impact. Something ethnographically based. WE originally thought socio-technical as we have donein the past with software. Maybe technology to support innovation in procress. It is the way the design and support the technology or not. How they organize the way they work. The difference between product and process ethnography. Typical change management problem, but approached with field workers going out and looking how engineers actually work. Not software or business change, but to do that at a great distance, with no competency to do that kind of ethnogrpahic work. Want us to teach them. They also have a laboratory. They want us to teach them how we do what we do at PARC with engineers, the subjects themselves, learn how to develop this competency as well. Change the tire while the car was moving. Big problems, millions of dollars. Bit of a challenge.

They have 6 system engineers and 5 from lab and 6 from PARC. 17-18 headcount on a scale never before attempted, done at a great distance with two locations and we don’t share a common language. That in itself would be difficult enough. What are we trying to do and who in that organization believes we should be doing what. They describe it as creative pragmatism. How do you organize the people. Manage the coordination and organization of ourselves and them in a political environment (never known) at this scale ever at PARC. Three year time table. Just gone thorugh first year. Elizabeth joined after we set this up. General goal to improve productivity, but no particular benchmark (x%). Just have some impact.

As part of that process having one day workshops with games rather like these. To try and get around the issues of who should be there, who should be listening. Get people on board to taking the change through the organization. Now would be very interested in sharing stories, if you have used these techniquesl, how would you take this kind of workshop into your field work. How to use these kinds of activities to break down local/cultural barriers. Reflect on today’s experience and this kind of project. Share some stories. What would you do? Or other ideas of other kinds of workshops. Could also send out an email later with some ideas and resources. Want to have reflection in this workshop. Keep the conversation going.

Discussions

Biz to technology translation
US to India translation
Field up to upper management
This sort of game doesn’t apply

10-15 years ago there was a guy at ATT/Bell labs, then to Colorado Qwest, the MSFT research. Restricted to paper and pencil design user interface, very effective.

We were studying a worldwide online community of senior citizens. One of the things we did, interesting doing field work online. We posted our research questions on a bulletin board. That became a whole forum of discussion. You have to disclose yourself, but also an interesting way of soliciting worldwide. Created collocated space – not the original intention. We were trying to explain. Became very fascinating.

Distributed group – hard to get the upper level to give you time to give you the nuance. Works when you have someone at the senior level who becomes the torch barrier. They help you translate to sr vp speak.

What about working with India. Is that as strong no. We have two guys that went over there. We meet once or twice a week on phone. The IT guys were horrified by their experience and could not talk about it, no data. They were supposed to build the bridge and unable to make the connection. So the idea of ethnographer as cultural translators. Is it even possible. Do activities like this bring people together.

Representations of data and the key informants/decision makers in the room at the same time.

Get lots of information, but the people who can make the changes aren’t here. How do you get the managers to wear the mini mouse ears.

End of breakout groups.
Cultural basis of doing work like this, engaging, knowing it is a game, might not work in all culture/subcultures.
Trying to understand more about expectations of people walking in to play the game and how the data/outcome will be used.
Intentionally designed to bring different levels of knowledge into a level playing field. Not always possible. Senior level might not be willing to privilege lower levels.
We believe this kind of gaming had some good properties to gain awareness of why interdisciplinary groups can gain. But requires knowledge of what they are going to get out of it, how info used, how fits within org culture. A day in the life of field would be valuable, but this would be a good first step of seeing why multidisciplinary groups can work together. This is worth solving.
Talked about the value of getting people strategically immersed in the data, challenge assumptions. We take for granted that we are exposed to users every day.
Wondered what this would be like if you had marketing, product managers, biz dev. We’re all basically kool aid drinkers. Would you be able to get to this point with diverse groups and a couple of vice presidents.
The physical, tangible aspect of the model. Limitation – ability to walk up to this and get it without a 5 minute oration. It does not stand by itself. The cards – 5 cards, we did not place the most significant on the front. The ability to look and have it represent something explainable. Like contextual inquiry, people walk the wall and look at physical model and get it.
Do we make distinctions between the work we do to come to conclusions and how we share those with others. Is it just for us. Would we want to transform it. Often felt pressed that the stuff I start to talk about, not in the form for others’ consumption.
It appeared that this required a lot of pre-processing. Would you use it to generate new ideas, or preprocess and set up to gain buy in rather than generate new things; build relationships.
Difficult to get the time you need to do games like this. At Intel games help mediate the relationships. Engineers and marketers get jealous of researchers. Like they went on vacation. Use games to develop a working rapport with colleagues.
Had the same questions on managing up with all this rich data. They won’t take an hour to look at video clips
The challenge of doing this with distributed groups.
The overhead of using video. How to introduce the power of these approaches without the overhead of getting and editing videos, selecting the clips. Which piece of gold to show them.
The video clips were useful as provocative starting points. You had to think and respond quickly. We can’t use much video. We’ve taken photos as stand ins. Often we present PPT slides, which are summaries of data, including transcripts of audio recordings to illustrate. You can use various kinds of data, unsure of where it will lead; as a provocative sense. Don’t try and tell them literally what you’ve found.
It would have been quite interesting to ask those maintenance people, “how would you change the way the factor works and the way you do your job.” Not just mobile widgets. Would have seen plenty in that video
What happens next with the above questions rather than what kind of mobile widget can you make. Difficult thing about process.
Fun game. Video clips are sort of a mystery. What we had to guess was the context of these clips. How they are connected. Context are important issues. Our job to make it clear. It was held from the participants. Will that defeat our purpose of making context clear. We are an artificial audience as this is not our story. If working with their own stories, they step in and correct. Here it is quite artificial as we don’t have the real workers as truth tellers.


Categories: EPIC2005