THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING Podcast

Erika Hall on Fear & Ignorance

Erika Hall [https://www.linkedin.com/in/erikahall/] is a designer, author, and consultant. She is the Co-Founder and Director of Strategy at Mule Design Studio [https://www.muledesign.com/] in San Francisco and author of the influential books Just Enough Research and Conversational Design. Her work centers on evidence-based design, organizational learning, and ethics in digital practice. Research Questions are Not Interview Questions [https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/research-questions-interview-erika-hall/]: So I start all these conversations with the same question, which I’ve borrowed from a friend of mine. She helps people tell their story. I stole it because it’s such a big, beautiful question—but because it’s so big, I kind of over-explain it the way that I’m doing now. So before I ask it, I want you to know that you are in complete control, and you can answer any way that you want to. That’s my general way I approach life. And the question is: Where do you come from? That’s a fantastic question. Yeah, I’ll answer that on several levels, because I think they’re all important to where I am now. And the origin point is I come from Los Angeles. And it’s a two-parter. I come from across the street from the airport until we got eminent domain, and then the Valley. So if you’ve heard of Valley Girls—I was there. I was a child when that song was blowing up. But those parts of being in Los Angeles, and then really being in the Valley in the ’80s—that’s a cultural context. And then the next most important origin is I got the heck out of L.A. and went back East for school, where I studied philosophy. So I come from L.A., I took a tour through New England, and I’m back in the Bay Area. So my perspective is very Californian and very question-asking. I don’t have a traditional design or research background. I come from philosophy, with a dash of studying abroad in Moscow. And all of those things—I’m finding, and the reason I’m answering this question like that—is every part of that is so wildly relevant to what I do and how I am now. Those are kind of the key ingredients to that. So having grown up in the suburbs outside of Rochester, L.A., California—the Valley—I mean, these are mythical, mythical places. That you were there, growing up—what was it like? What can you say about growing up in that? I mean, the really salient thing to say is: it’s well documented. Because I really felt like I was growing up in a place and time that all the movies were being made about. So it’s like, what was it like? I went to a prom in the same ballroom that Pretty in Pink had been filmed in. So it was like, I really felt like—if you want to feel like, “Oh, we’re the center of the cultural universe”—in Los Angeles at that time, that’s sort of the feeling. And yeah, so if you watch Terminator 2, that aqueduct is right by my house. That’s sort of the fun part of it—how much was happening there then that was culturally important. Like we had KROQ, which is an amazing radio station. So I felt like all of the best new music—I was listening to it. And then, yeah, it was really funny because I went to school back East, and to people back there, it was mythical. I came from this mythical place, and they would ask me questions about it, like, “Does everybody really talk like that?” And I think part of it—one of the reasons I left—was I needed finishing school to get rid of my strong Valley accent. Our lawyer actually spent a lot of time in Southern California, and we had a podcast, and one of the podcast reviews was, “Their California accents are so strong.” So if I’m talking to someone who’s from the same place, or if I go back there, the accent comes back. And the other question I got was about whether I was worried about getting shot on the freeway, because that was a thing that was happening. And I’m like, well, yeah, I worry about being among all those cars and everything. And so, yeah, it was like that in a lot of ways. I feel that Frank Zappa—that song—is an ethnographic document, really, a linguistic situation. But I went to the Galleria. I went to the beach. There was a section of my yearbook devoted to the large hair. People had shoulder pads. I hated Reagan. I don’t—I don’t know. So yes, I’d say the one thing is the movie Valley Girl with Nick Cage, which I love—I love him so much—the thing that’s most wrong with that movie is that he’s supposed to be punk, and he was in no way punk. Because it was about this girl from the Valley, this affluent suburb. I went to public school, and a bunch of my friends drove BMWs. I was not from the BMW part of the Valley, but it was wild. And people were really self-aware, you know? Because I think children and teens always know more than adults give them credit for. And we were really clear on what was going on in the world and in politics and everything—even before the internet. So yeah. I drove once I got a car when I was 16. I drove a lot and really was like, yeah, if you watch those movies—and there was Booksmart, I think, is a recent movie—that was still the vibe in Los Angeles. So yeah. It’s incredibly well documented, I think, just because the movie industry was there. What—do you have a memory of what you wanted to be as a child? Like, what did you want to be when you grew up? I wanted—well, there were a few different things. I wanted to be an architect for a while. And I had an Etch A Sketch, and I would actually draw floor plans on my Etch A Sketch. And then a couple of things took me off track. I even applied—one of the schools I applied to was a school of architecture. So I got in, and I could have done that. But I was all over the place. I was like, maybe I’ll do psychobiology, maybe I’ll do architecture—we’ll see what I’ll do. And then I ended up going to a liberal arts school, which was perfect. But then I took a look at the built environment of Los Angeles, and I’m like, oh, we don’t need more architects. And then one of my teachers made us read The Fountainhead, I think in a prophylactic manner—like, you have to read this to be inoculated against these terrible ideas. And I read that, and it angered me so much that I was just like, I don’t want to be part of this. Also, you read about the profession, and it’s super competitive and super misogynistic and all of that. But I also didn’t realize until much later that I grew up surrounded by Eames stuff, right? Because being in Los Angeles—we had Mathematica, which I think is still in Boston, which is this amazing, kinetic, sculptural, experiential exhibit of the principles of mathematics. And that was my early childhood. So if you haven’t seen it, look it up—it’s at a science museum in Boston, I think still. There were a few different instances of this. And at the Museum of Science and Industry, they had the Eames explaining math. And I think the sort of Eames was in the air—all of that mid-century modern stuff was in the air. And that was a big part of coming from Los Angeles, too. And so I think the fact that I ended up doing a lot of information architecture—I was like, oh, this is sort of similar. And buildings are great. And I have friends who are architects who have gone to architecture school. It’s just—I am not a patient person. That’s also why the movie business—even though I grew up in Los Angeles and love the movies, everything about that—I never wanted to be in front of the camera. But seeing that process, I have so much admiration for filmmakers. But wow, the patience of putting something like that together is beyond me. So I’m happy about the internet. I’m curious about—you went East to a liberal arts school. And, you know, I’m from the East, I went to a liberal arts school, so probably the question of what it’s like to be from California came to mind. But what did you make of the people in the Northeast? Who did you find at these liberal arts colleges, as somebody from the Valley? It was a lot of—I couldn’t afford to visit. So I just kind of dropped in, like, oh, I guess I’m doing this now. I just flew out, you know, September of my freshman year, and I was like, what is going on here? Because I didn’t understand a lot of the things people were saying to me. It was class-coded. I was like, why are you—like, I told a story, and someone asked, “Why are you so hyped on Nantucket? Do you come from a whaling family?” And like, you summer places? Does that mean that where you live sucks part of the year? There were all these—there were all these codes and ways of being that I was like, really? Why? Why are you like that? And I found out about private beaches, and I was just horrified. Because a private beach is illegal in California. As a person who is not even a resident, but just as a human being, you have a right to coastal access in California. And if you have a beach property, you have to let people—there’s a number of feet. I mean, this sounds like maybe a minor thing, but I think it’s a hugely important difference in how you think about the land. California is not perfect, but it’s like, you can’t just block people off from access to the ocean. And I feel like I learned about all the private clubs and ways of excluding people. And California being a place where people just end up. The unfortunate part is we haven’t built enough housing for all the people who end up here. But just the space and the light. I thought people were fascinating, and a lot of the things sort of didn’t make sense to me. Like, it was fun—like seasons. I’m like, oh, seasons are cool. But I noticed that I was friends with people from New York, from Maine, and from California, mostly. There were states where I’d meet somebody and we’d get along, and they’d be from one of those states. It was a great experience. I had a friend who was in the dorm next to me freshman year. He was from Hawaii, and he was the only person I knew who was even more like a fish out of water than I was—just because it dropped below 60, and he was bundled up in his coat like, “Why did I do this?” And we were both there like, “Why did we decide this was a good idea when we were 16 or whatever?” A lot of it was tough because it was just a different way of being. It was a small town instead of Los Angeles. A lot of it was really hard. I’m glad I did it. I learned a lot. I got a great education from doing it. But yeah, I was just like, huh, East Coast people. It was really important to me, even when I was young, because I had a lot of autonomy over where I was going to college. I was the first person in my family to go to college, so it was my whole project. I thought I would stay and go to a UC—for many reasons—but then I got a scholarship, and I was like, “Okay, we’re doing it.” It’s wild, the things that just happen in life. I’m just like, why am I here? This is wacky. So, catch us up. Where are you now, and what’s the work that you do? Where am I now? I’m in San Francisco. After college, I settled into the Bay Area like a tick, and I’ve been in San Francisco for a really long time. I co-founded Mule Design with my partner, Mike Monteiro, a really long time ago. What I’m doing now—it’s consulting, really. A lot of it is practice development. And what that means is, we’ve done so much work with so many different organizations. Now that so many design teams are in-house, the best we can offer is helping the people. Because if you go to work in-house, you don’t have that kind of cross-training from an agency, and you don’t know what the job is supposed to be like. And you’re in that reporting structure. The best we can do for both the practitioners and the organizations is bring that outside perspective. When you see the same things in ten different organizations and you’ve had to wrestle with them—things around decision-making, getting the work done, or knowing what questions to ask—it gives you useful insight. A lot of what I do are research workshops now, because everybody sort of does design research wrong. We also do communication strategy and sometimes get more into the actual hands-on work—straightening out your information hierarchy, doing actual branding, things like that. But mostly it’s just taking all the expertise we’ve had from twenty years of design work in all these circumstances and providing that to people—providing that expertise that’s hard to get in the current situation. When did you first discover that you could make a living doing this? Were you a designer first or a design researcher? Neither. First, I was on the technical side. I was coding and stuff like that because that’s what I was interested in. The other part of my origin story is, when I got my first computer a long time ago, I wanted to learn to program. And the key origin story part is, I really wanted a computer. Where did that come from? I hung out at Radio Shack a lot—more than a lot of little girls in the Valley. I don’t know. But I asked for a computer because I wanted to learn to program. And they got me a game system. They got me an Atari. And I was mad. So that’s—if you want the key to my whole way of being—it’s that I wanted to learn to program, and you got me video games? Man, the Lisa Simpson energy was just strong with me. And I’m like, fine, fine, I’ll play a lot of Atari. Here’s your lightly edited version—cleaned up for clarity, grammar, and flow, but preserving your original voice and meaning, with no added words or labels: And I actually, at one point, did work for a company that was doing video game-based community and stuff like that. So it worked out. I started off coding—front-end stuff like HTML, Perl, JavaScript, all that. That’s where I started, because I started working at a publishing company. It was the earlier days of the web, so there was a lot of fluidity in the role. And when you’re a liberal arts person, you’re like, I’ll do whatever. So I started there. Then I ended up working for a consultancy, an agency, and I was like, this I like. Short attention span—I liked going in, helping people solve a problem, getting out, working on a team of people. That was all really fun. And just because I can do things, I ended up doing project management, content strategy, information architecture, and stuff like that. Then we started an agency, and I was doing all sorts of things. I worked with a researcher—who’s still a friend—at my first agency, and that’s how I was mentored in design research. But the only reason I sort of specialize in it is because people were approaching it wrong. We kept having arguments with clients about, “Can’t we just do the design part without the research part?” I was so tired of having the conversation that I wrote a book about it—because there was no book. I had to do the thing where you write the book you wish existed. There was nothing accessible for people, and I was like, this is bananas. People aren’t asking questions—they just want to make things. And I felt there was a lack of focus because so many people just wanted to make things. And I’m like, well, I like asking questions, so I’ll just kind of work on that part of it. My experience is—I’m assuming you’re talking about Just Enough Research, is that the book you’re referencing? Your writings across the board have always struck me as so welcome—and kind of alone, really. To your point, I don’t encounter a lot of people articulating the in-the-weeds principles of what’s research and what’s not, other than you. So maybe this is just a way of saying thank you so much for doing that work. But I wonder—maybe the follow-up question is: what do you make of research today? I know I’ve had my own fixation on how these weird labels—UX, CX—feel like machine-like acronyms for what’s really a human interface. So maybe tell us: when you say “design research,” what do you actually mean? And what are the mistakes people make when they talk about users and all that? Oh, boy. Yeah, the reason I talk about research—and talk about design research, not UX research, not user research—is that design research is the investigations you do, or the things you learn, in order to make better decisions. To make intentional changes in the world. Because design is fundamentally about intentionally intervening in systems and making artifacts under conditions of uncertainty, right? That’s the whole design-versus-craft—or all those arguments people get into. The key is, you’re trying to do something in a new way. You’re figuring it out as you go. And design research is the stuff you investigate or learn so you have a better chance of success and reduce your risk. That includes things like: you want to understand the people you’re designing for, because you’re fundamentally making choices on their behalf. But it also includes: what will it take for this thing to succeed? Whether or not it’s a for-profit business—what are the conditions that will sustain it? You have to understand who else is solving this problem, because that’s a huge mistake people make—like, “Oh, we’re going to do this thing that’s already solved,” or “nobody wants it,” right? You have to understand your organization, who you’re working with, your capabilities. You have to look at the history and say, “How has this been tried before?” And you have to know how to talk about it—the brand, all of that. All of these pieces were part of what we did at that first agency at the end of the ’90s. It was very holistic. Then, for reasons, it got reduced—limited to, “Oh, we’re doing user research,” and not thinking about these other things. And “user experience” became the label people used instead of “design,” for reasons. I think the biggest mistake people make is carving up the way of understanding the world. It’s like that parable about the blind men and the elephant. Organizations codify and reify that. They’re like, “Okay, we’re definitely distributing the elephant throughout our organization.” That makes no sense to me. If you’re making decisions about bringing something new—maybe consequential, maybe not—into the world, don’t you need to understand all the parts of it? And organizations do not do that. That’s why I’ve really focused on that piece of it. Because making all the other pieces—people are really hyped on those. “I made a beautiful, tangible artifact!” Cool. It doesn’t matter if it doesn’t do the thing you want it to do, or doesn’t fit into the world, or if it’s based on false assumptions. Because I’ve always liked asking questions—that’s just my thing. And I’m happy doing that. I’m happy helping other people do that. And that’s where I’ve ended up focusing my work. Yeah. How would you say it’s changed over time—from the first to second edition? It’s been a while, right? How are organizations today trying to understand the world? Watching this happen has been fascinating. The way it’s changed—again, looking back at what I was doing with my colleague in ’99 or whatever—we were doing all the things. The tools weren’t as available, and I don’t know that that’s necessarily a bad thing. There are a lot of platforms now that promise “insights at scale” and all that crap. But tools only help if you already have a solid practice. I think people are substituting. So, I would say the biggest change I’ve seen in terms of practice—this might not be linear—but the biggest change is: once the concept of design research, or user research, or user experience research, percolated into organizations as “Oh, this is a thing we need to do,” they started doing it, but they don’t really want to do it. What I mean is: because of the incentive structure organizations are working in—which is typically to maximize shareholder value, maximize investor value—when things are highly financialized, reality doesn’t matter as much. It’s all about telling a story to the market, telling a story to investors. The thing that’s changed structurally is that the economy has gotten more financialized—in large part because the internet enabled that. It allowed the abstraction and securitization of everything. So many shenanigans are enabled by the internet, and that fed back into everything. If everything is just a story you’re telling to investors, reality just gets in the way. Because if you’re talking about creating something for someone to use in the world—you know, like we have a really good coffee maker that we bought on the recommendation of a friend, and it seemed expensive, but he said, “Oh, this will last forever…” Here’s your cleaned-up, lightly edited transcript. I’ve preserved your tone and wording while improving flow, punctuation, and sentence structure for easier reading. Nothing added, just refined: And I’ve had the same coffee maker for, like, what, ten years now? It’s a really good coffee maker. And that was designed to be really high quality because they were selling it to people in exchange for money. There are very few things now that are just sold in exchange for money. And when things aren’t sold in exchange for money, then it’s like—what are the factors in the decision? And quality is not really a factor. In fact, there’s a news story now saying that people aren’t upgrading their phones enough, and so we’re all going to tank the economy, right? So the whole economy is based on not creating things that really work in the real world. It’s based on all these financial shenanigans. And that’s what made it tough for research. There’s a lot of conversation about, “Oh, we just have to prove business value.” But the fundamental issue is that business value doesn’t come from making better quality things for users or customers. Business value comes from telling a story to the market. And when the business value is based on those sorts of fictions and relationships—and getting market power and shenanigans—research has less value to the business. Often it’s really inconvenient to know things about the world that interfere with your story. So that’s part of it for a lot of these businesses that care about scaling and telling stories to investors or whatever. There are still—though they don’t get a lot of press—organizations that do things that are real, right? People still make coffee makers. People make devices and things like that. So, if an organization makes things that are real, and the real world matters to their success, then research still matters. Then the problem is the tools. So many organizations have created software tools, and so much of the information about how to do good research comes from the makers of these tools. Some of the tools are fine, but— What kind of tools are we talking about? Survey platforms, testing platforms, analytics platforms. They put all this marketing money out there, and so if you’re just looking up “how do I learn things?” what you’ll get is: subscribe to our giant, expensive enterprise platform, and that’ll give you what you need. That feeds into a common practice—organizations buy a tool set. We’re seeing it now with so-called AI. Like, “If I buy the tool set, it promises benefits.” And once you’ve made the investment, you make everyone use the tool. Then there’s a lot of skepticism for things that don’t have a cost associated with them—which is the stuff I advocate for. Like, “What if you talked to people?” There’s no marketing budget behind, “What if you listen to people or just look at the world?” And that’s why I do what I do. That’s why there’s that gap. I have a book that costs $25, and that’s fine. I have a workshop that’s not that much if you’re buying an individual ticket—or even if you’re bringing me into your company, it’s still not that much. It’s a tiny amount of money to say, “What if you just talk to people?” Meanwhile, these software companies are making huge promises and charging huge amounts. And because of how the human mind works, people value what they pay more for. Often, bringing it back to our consulting practice, the greatest service we provide is charging money to organizations to get them to listen to the people they already hired. I mean, I identify with a lot of that. You brought me back—I’ve been in those conversations. I guess it’s a beautiful articulation of... I mean, I’m always interested in the argument for qualitative. What is the argument for qualitative in that system? How do you make the case to talk to people? Well, the argument for qualitative is—you can’t. Like, this is also something I work on—this “versus” battle between qualitative and quantitative, because it makes no sense. You cannot measure what you don’t understand. You need both. But you need qualitative work first because you have to say, “Hey, what things exist in the world?” Once you determine that—phenomena, patterns of behavior, physical objects, ways of being, concepts—then you can say how much, how often, when. But it’s easier to develop and charge money for systems that aggregate a lot of quantitative data. So there’s all this focus there. You could read James C. Scott’s book, Seeing Like a State—which I recommend constantly. He was writing about governments, but these organizations now are quasi-governmental. I mean, they’re larger than nation-state economies. Their decisions are more consequential. If you think of people who are active Facebook users as citizens of Facebook—that’s larger than any country, really. And these organizations are moving money and creating individuals—the billionaires—who have amounts of power and influence beyond anything we’ve seen in the history of the world. That’s the focus on quantitative. Also, you can make numbers say anything. Ten years ago—before it was “AI,” when it was “big data”—we had these giant “data lakes,” and the promise was, “If we have this data, we’ll make great decisions.” I had a whole talk based on that. It’s the same thing: the surface promise is that you’ll have insight, but really, you’ll have so much data that you can pull from it to support whatever you want to do. That’s why making the case for qualitative is tricky. Because if you have someone in a position of power who’s just looking for support for what they already want to do—that’s why qualitative gets in the way. And that’s why quantitative is so exciting. Also, everything’s about scale, scale, scale. Which—cool—except if you’re scaling the wrong thing. I’d say scale is more often a bad thing. Up to a point, maybe it’s good, but wow—we need to unscale some things. So the issue isn’t one or the other. The issue is: you have to understand what people are doing before you say how much. Here’s your lightly edited transcript—same approach: cleaned up for flow and clarity, but your tone and content remain unchanged. No added words, just polishing. And then it’s feedback—you need to—they go together, right? But again, I’ve talked to so many people who are in these versus situations, especially when quant is one team and qual is another team. That makes no sense to me whatsoever. But it depends on the business. I talked to someone recently who’s in a sort of lead-gen kind of business, and it really is just a little machine for generating a transaction fee off something. All they’ve got to do is keep that little machine running. So they don’t really need to do qual, because it’s like a little machine. So it depends on the business. But yeah, you really do need to understand the actual things in the world. What do you love about the work? Like, where’s the joy in it for you? Joy in it for me? People are so interesting. I mean, the real joy is that if you come at the world with kind of a research mindset, nothing is wasted. Right? If you’re in a really annoying situation—and I tell people this all the time when I’m working with them—if you’re being frustrated by something, or if you’re dealing with a product that makes no sense, or something that’s good, anything you’re interacting with that’s interesting to you, and you’re like, huh… If you stop and go, “Why is it like that?” and you follow that... Despite everything—the degradation of websites and internet tools and all of that—you can still find information really, really quickly. If you’re curious about anything, about any term, any concept, any physical thing, and you follow it back, you could, within ten minutes, find out why something’s like that. And that’s really interesting. Because people get so focused on the future—designers and technologists and entrepreneurs focus on the future—and ignore the past. And that’s a real mistake. Because whatever you’re doing, you’re intervening in a world that exists. And it’s worth looking at what’s persisted—why are things like they are? The fun for me is that people are really interesting. And it’s fun—like, it’s now fun—because we’ve been doing this for so long that I’ll be in a situation that used to be super itchy and uncomfortable for me, like there’s a conflict or something’s gone wrong, and a client’s upset. And I’m like, oh, I know how to deal with this. So there’s the part where experience makes things more fun, because you’re not like, oh my god, I’m in an uncomfortable situation. But there’s also the, like—I want to help. Fundamentally, I am a problem solver at my core. We joke about this all the time: when you recognize that you’re a consultant in your heart, and you see a problem, and you’ve got to stop yourself. The question we talk about internally—if we’re dealing with somebody we know personally who has a problem—is: don’t offer help that wasn’t asked for. That’s the thing. If you’re a problem solver, if you’re a consultant, it’s like, “Oh, let me help you with that.” But it’s like—no. If they’re paying you to help them, then help them. But don’t try to solve people’s problems if they didn’t ask. So it’s satisfying when I actually help—that too. I love the way you use the word practice. I’m curious about that. And maybe within this: what kind of practice do you recommend, or try to help teams build or develop? What are the things you see them struggle with—what are the problems you see over and over again? That’s a good question. Because, wow—it’s like the same five problems. And this is what I love about that. Now, when I do the workshops—the public ones where people can just go and buy an individual seat—I get people from different countries. Just last week, I had people from Northern Europe, Kenya, and all over America, all talking about the exact same problems. The struggle for teams, one of the big ones, is how the organization they work in sees the value of research. A lot of times, people were hired to do a job nobody actually wants them to do. But they’re told, “You just have to prove your value.” And it’s like, why should somebody have to prove their value? They went through some heinous hiring process that probably took a year. They have a job—and then their job becomes justifying their job. That’s garbage. Right? Because it’s like, wait—you hired me. I didn’t suggest my job title. You’re like, “We have this role. We hired you. We’re paying you to do a thing with a job description.” And then the organization turns around and says, “Justify why your job exists.” And I’m just like, no. Do not participate in that. Don’t be on the defensive. Look at the organization and ask, “Why am I really here?” Because the bad news I have for a lot of designers and researchers is: they were hired as part of a growth story. They were never hired to create the kind of business value they were told they were hired to create. They were hired to say, “Look, we have a giant research team! A robust design team!”—to ignore. Right? Then they’re just handed instructions of things to build. And the strategy is shifting all the time, because it’s just reacting to competitors or to the market. If design is fundamentally doing something intentional—and trying to do it well—you bring these poor practitioners and experts into an environment, and they’re like, “Is it me?” The worst part is, I see people making themselves insane being like, “Obviously I’m doing something wrong.” And it’s like—no. The first step is looking around and asking: What is the organization actually incentivizing, and why? How much can you change what it’s incentivizing? And if you can’t? Then it’s like—relax. Stop trying so hard to justify your job. You can’t. There’s a little serenity prayer in there: “Oh, this is just how it’s going to be.” Okay. But if you’re in an organization where the decision-making is broken, the first things to change are collaboration and decision-making. If you don’t have a collaborative environment... I’ve worked with organizations where I’ve talked to people in large enterprises with a whole building full of researchers. And they’re off doing their research, generating reports—and the organization does what it’s going to do anyway. Sometimes I get asked, “How do I get stakeholders to pay attention to the research? How do I present better?” And it’s like—if they didn’t care at the start, there’s nothing you can do to make them care. So the actual practice change—once you have an organization that aligns on goals and has a reality-based business—is getting people to actually talk to each other and resolve the territory battles. Then, you get everyone asking questions together. The biggest practice shift is moving away from tools and away from activities to: What do we actually need to know? That’s the big first step. It’s often internal research first: “What are we trying to accomplish?” “Why is that our goal?” “What do we already know?” That sort of level-setting around what we actually agree on. Only then can you start to work on the research part of the practice—where you say, “Let’s all ask questions together.” This is the part everyone skips over. A lot of the value I bring is helping people understand what it means to ask a question—how to ask a good one, and how to know when you’re done asking it. Everything else is taken care of. There are tons of tools and 10,000 books, but everybody skips over the “What are we asking?” They skip right to: “Let’s run a survey,” “Let’s do interviews,” whatever. And it’s like—why, though? What do you need to know? Then they end up with results from the research and they’re like, “We don’t know what to do with these.” All the problems show up at the end: “We think we learned something, but we don’t know,” or “It’s getting ignored.” And all that money and time gets wasted. You have to start by agreeing on your goals and where you need more information. Then: when do you need to make a decision by? Once you have those things—“We need to decide in two weeks,” “Here are our goals,” “Here’s what we don’t know”—everything gets straightforward. Then you can fit your research into your schedule. Because objections about time and budget are really just people not wanting new information. So you can’t argue against time and budget objections with time and budget answers. In preparing for our conversation, I was reminded of one of the first things I saw you write—on LinkedIn. The title was Research questions are not interview questions. And it was like a chorus of angels. Because I’ve so often been trapped in those conversations where the expectation is: just ask people to answer my question. Like, “Let’s just ask them to solve our problem for us.” I didn’t always feel armed with a good response. But you just talked about educating people about what a question is. So maybe—what is a good question? And how do you help people understand what can be asked and how? It took me a long time to realize the confusion between interview questions and research questions. Again, this is something you talk about because it’s an intellectual exercise. It’s not something you buy a tool to do. So there’s less information about it out there. It’s often associated with the more academic side. So it’s just not a thing people are ever taught. You really just have to start with: What are your questions? Get them all out there. People are afraid of asking questions. Then, you separate out—once you see all the things you might need to know—where your risk of failure is. That’s how you get to the real research question. There are questions you have, and there are questions that are good research questions—questions you can turn into a little project. So if you’re with all the people who will be making decisions based on the information, you have to get all the questions out. That can be really scary, especially for people higher up in an organization, who have to project confidence. That’s often the biggest barrier to research: “I have to look like I know what I’m doing.” But really—you have to admit ignorance in order to learn anything. If you can’t say “I don’t know,” then you can never learn. Once you have a sense of everything you need to know, you can sort through them: These are questions we can answer easily. Maybe it’s in analytics: how many people bought our product last year? You don’t need a research project—someone can just pull the data. Then there’s a question like: How are recent college graduates looking for jobs?Say you’re building a service to help them. You need to know what they’re doing now, in the real world. If your question can’t be answered with existing data, that’s a signal to do research. That’s a practical question you can turn into a project and go out and explore. We’ve got maybe almost no time left, but I want to hear you dish on surveys. You’re very critical of them—and articulate about it. What do we need to worry about when we think about surveys? The reason I fight surveys is that it’s a real tool. It’s a genuine research tool. It’s an advanced tool. The problem is, they’re so easy to make. It’s so easy to create a tool that lets you run a survey, and so easy to get garbage data. And there’s nothing about running a survey that lets you know the data is garbage. Other methods help you course correct. If you’re doing interviews, you’ll notice if you’re not talking to the right person. You’ll hear when your question is confusing. If you’re testing something, you’ll see when the prototype isn’t working. But with a survey—you might get answers, and you have no way of knowing if the sample was skewed, the questions were bad, the results are meaningful. Surveys can be good if it’s what you need. But the problem is that they’re too easy to do, and people skip all the prior research you need in order to write a good survey. Survey platforms—when Twitter was still a thing, I was fighting with the SurveyMonkey account. They were like, “Just run this kind of survey! It’s easy!” And I was like, “What are you doing?” Their incentive is to get you to run lots of surveys. That’s why I didn’t include them in the first edition of Just Enough Research. But I did in the second edition—and in the 2024 edition—because I wanted to go into how to get a representative sample, how to write good questions, and how to understand your audience so you’re writing questions they can answer I encourage people interested in research to take every survey they’re presented with for a week. Really look at them. Think: are they going to learn anything true from this? Who’s going to respond? Why would they respond? Surveys are just a machine for generating noise. And the worst part is when survey results get reported in the news as facts about the world. Then they generate consent. They generate narratives. They become self-fulfilling prophecies. So I think they’re really dangerous in the wrong hands. And too many people are promoting them as an easy thing anyone can do. Yes. That’s beautiful. And it also occurs to me—especially with platforms like SurveyMonkey—is that they completely edge out the collaborative relationship between qual and quant. They position qualitative as unnecessary, as if it has nothing to do with what you’re here to do. Yeah. The problem with all these tools is: everybody’s looking for a reason not to talk to people. Because people are scary. Why do you think that is? Because people are scary. They are. You have to start from that—it’s kind of a legitimate fear. And again, it’s one of those things where we do what we’re taught. Last weekend I was at an event where there was an amazing talk by a fire captain about how she leads firefighters responding to an emergency. And one thing she said—because tech people love to use “putting out fires” as a metaphor—is: what they’re doing is not that. And what she emphasized is: you follow your training. If you’re in a high-stress situation, you do what you were trained to do. She talked about how she responds to a building on fire—which is terrifying. I mean, San Francisco catches fire all the time, and I have so much gratitude for firefighters. The key is: we were not trained to interact with other humans—and those are high-risk situations. It’s just treated as something you should know how to do, like maybe you picked it up at home. But when you look at problems—at a small level, like people have with their families or at work, or geopolitically—it’s because people do not have communication skills. They were called “soft skills” because the military in the ’60s and ’70s divided up skills you can measure and skills you can’t measure. There were “hard skills” and “soft skills” for totally arbitrary reasons. But communication—interpersonal communication skills—are so important. Nobody was taught. And often, you’re in really consequential interactions with other people that are terrifying. And often, you’re right to be terrified, because you might be talking to someone who could fire you, or get you fired, or shun you as a friend, or break up with you. There are all these risks, but you’re never trained to have good interpersonal communication—unless you go to therapy, right? Therapy is like training for being a human. But it’s really expensive, and totally optional. And then people who haven’t gone to therapy become managers. And that’s why organizations are awful. Beautiful. On that note, again, I’m just really grateful that you accepted my invitation. I really love your work, and I’m so glad you’re out there writing. I appreciate you spending your time with me. Oh, sure. That was a great conversation. Thank you so much for inviting me. Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe [https://thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

Tanu Kumar & Nepal Asatthawasi on Place & Wellbeing

Nepal Asatthawasi [https://www.linkedin.com/in/nepal-asatthawasi-472a0a1b/] is Director of Development at Mechanism [https://www.mechanism.community/]. She leads fundraising and organizational systems that support Mechanism’s work with communities. Before joining Mechanism, she was Director of Development and Operations at the Pratt Center for Community Development. Tanu Kumar [https://www.linkedin.com/in/tanu-kumar-0699971/] is Director of Programs at Mechanism [https://www.mechanism.community/]. She leads program strategy and partnerships to help communities design and deliver inclusive, community-led growth. Before Mechanism, she held senior roles at the NYS Office of Planning and Community Development and the Pratt Center for Community Development. All right, Tanu and Nepal, thank you so much for accepting my invitation. I start all these conversations with the same question. Tanu, I think you’ve probably encountered this question before, but I stole it from a friend of mine who helps people tell their stories, and I start all these conversations with the same question. So I’m going to ask each of you in turn. It’s a big, beautiful question, which is why I borrow it, but because it’s big, I over-explain it the way I am now. Before I ask it, I want you to know that you are in total control, and you can answer or not answer any way you want to. And the question is: Where do you come from? And I’ll let either of you choose who wants to go first. Nepal AsatthawasiI can go first. You know, it’s the end of the year. I’m going home soon for a month. Home is Thailand. I’ve been in America for a long, long time, but home is always Thailand. So I come from Thailand, specifically on the banks of the old capital, Thonburi — which is essentially Bangkok, but it was the former capital before it moved. And my people were farmers of durian for a very long time. As Thonburi got incorporated into Greater Bangkok, they became landlords. And I have been trying to live with the knowledge of both those things my entire life. That is why I believe nuanced, community-based urbanism is extremely important — because it’s not just about form. It’s also about people and their histories. Tanu KumarI come from a couple of places. I come from Chicago, from the Midwest, and grew up there for most of my life — suburban Chicago, in a largely immigrant community comprised mostly of people like my parents, who were first-generation immigrants from India. They were able to move to the U.S. because of the passage of a bill in the late 1960s that enabled certain classes of immigrants to enter the U.S. They had a window of about two years to apply for that and guarantee passage. Another place that I come from is India, specifically northern India. My father is from Agra, now a pretty big city in Uttar Pradesh. My mother is from Indore, in the state of Madhya Pradesh. I spent a lot of my childhood going back and forth to India and lived there for longer periods at different points in my life. So I very much feel like I’m from there and from the Midwest. I feel this expansiveness in terms of what my reality is, what cultures I inhabit. It’s a liminal space that I think a lot of first-gen immigrants experience and try to straddle, because there are a lot of different worlds coming together. That’s really part of my perspective in the work I do and in the way I choose to live my life now, as a resident of upstate New York in the Hudson Valley. Do each of you have a recollection of what the younger you wanted to be when you grew up? Did young Nepal or young Tanu — what did you want to be when you grew up? Tanu KumarThere are two things I really wanted to be. One was a dancer on Soul Train — did you all ever watch that? I’ve just dated myself. But I watched it every week and tried to mimic those moves, and that was a huge goal. And the other was a writer. I have a very strong memory of being six or seven and feeling very certain that I was meant to be a writer — not fiction, but nonfiction. I wanted to be a nonfiction writer. Awesome. Do you know who you were thinking of? What was the writer, what was a non-fiction writer to you at that point? Tanu KumarI was thinking of… well, I watched a lot of PBS. So it was the kinds of people that wrote for, were able to create and produce documentaries on PBS, or the Jim Lehrer NewsHour, or any of these things. Those were very strong influences in my life. My father watched this every evening and we had family conversations about it. So anything that was acceptable on PBS was something I wanted to write. I like the Soul Train and the NewsHour together. Nepal, what did you want to be when you grew up, when you were a kid? Nepal AsatthawasiI’m kind of getting stumped because I don’t remember. I feel like I had no strong inclination towards any profession, although with the kind of family that I was in — which was quite conservative and proper and very fixated on social standing and appearance — maybe being a doctor was acceptable. Or, conversely, not being very much at all, as long as you were able to move about in society in a respectable way. So I do remember the through line has always been: I wanted to live life differently and to just be kind of free. Not necessarily bohemian, traveling in Bali with a guitar and a sarong type of free, but I just wanted to live a chill, interesting life doing interesting things. And yeah, still maybe an archaeologist. I like how the archaeologist snuck in at the end there. I mean, I definitely had a shelf of archaeology-related books. But when I was young, that’s the only thing I can remember with any great clarity. But I just wanted a different life. How did you guys meet? We’re going to talk about the work that you’re doing at Mechanism, but when did you first encounter each other or meet each other? Nepal AsatthawasiI feel like it predated us working together for many years before Mechanism. But I’m not certain of the circumstances. Tanu KumarI remember. I was working at the Pratt Center for Community Development in Brooklyn, which Nepal later joined. And we worked together there for many years. But we were working on a project around entrepreneurship and supporting small businesses and thinking about space constraints and issues in New York City. And Nepal was working at LaGuardia Community College’s incubator — I’m going to get the name wrong. But I remember this was back when you went to meet people in person anytime you met them for the first time. So I remember going over to Queens and meeting Nepal there in person. Nepal AsatthawasiSo this was New York Designs, which was the first incubator that CUNY created with a makerspace in it. And it was housed at LaGuardia Community College. So actually, this is amazing because this is our shared — this is our kind of meet-cute. And it has everything to do with what we’re doing now. Yes. In what way? Nepal AsatthawasiIt was trying to create a production and entrepreneurship ecosystem that was connected to a public university system — specifically in one of its non-traditional colleges, its community college. So bringing that framework of small business, entrepreneurship, solopreneurship, innovation to a community of students who, because of their socioeconomic circumstances, didn’t have the luxury or the time to participate in those endeavors. All right. Will you introduce Mechanism? At this point it’s usually, “Tell us a little bit about where you are and the work you’re doing now.” So I don’t know who wants to take the turn, but I want to also introduce Mechanism and the work you do together. Whoever wants to take the lead. Tanu KumarSo Mechanism, which was formerly known as the Urban Manufacturing Alliance — and thanks to you, Peter, is not anymore — we are a nonprofit organization, and we work with communities and manufacturers and practitioners that support manufacturers across the country. We work to create production ecosystems that increase local resilience, well-being, and vitality. We’ve come a long way from our days as UMA. We are still building on those foundations, but I think we are shifting away from “Urban Manufacturing Alliance” in a couple of important ways. One is that we recognize the impact manufacturing has had on communities in ways that have been extractive, have caused harm, have depleted communities. And we are trying to embrace a vision that is more holistic and cultivates ecosystems that center production but also safeguard the environment. And ensure that while we have economic stability, we also empower workers, and we’re thinking about resiliency — community resiliency — in all its forms. Not only environmental resiliency, but also well-being. And we work across the country with communities that want to partner with us. We go to where we are needed or wanted, and where people are trying to accomplish the same visions and goals that we are. Yeah. What’s an example of — I always think of the old Batman show with the red phone. Commissioner Gordon had the red phone he would call Batman on. What’s the Mechanism red phone? When does a city — or who — calls you and why do they call you? What’s the moment that Mechanism was built for, if there’s only one? I know there are many, but why do people reach out to Mechanism? Nepal AsatthawasiI mean, one frequently occurring reason is: they have surfaced information or insights of their own, about things going on in their city — a lot of people engaged in small-batch production, what is commonly associated with making and the maker community, or just small businesses in manufacturing. It could be all of those things, some of those things, or only two of those things. But enough of a concentration that it raises questions about resource allocation, including space, and the identification of opportunities that the community — or the people already doing that — can improve what they’re doing. Their businesses grow. They employ more people. There’s an identification of potential or opportunity and no clear understanding internally of how to analyze what’s happening and take it forward. Sometimes they just want an understanding. They want us to come and share case studies from other places in the country and what we’ve done — or even what we haven’t. A consolidation of case studies that seem appropriate to their circumstance. Other times they realize they need more, at which point we are tapped to co-create programs or communities of practice or learning cohorts, or just give straight consulting on a strategic framework. In answer to why: the reason is usually they don’t understand what’s happening, and they’d like to capitalize on it. What is happening too — and maybe I want to step back a little bit, I remember talking about this — is that there’s one big story that we tell, or gets told, for people outside the work about manufacturing in the U.S. What is the state of manufacturing now, and what’s the story? How is Mechanism doing it now in a way that’s different than maybe it was done in the past? Is that a coherent question? Nepal AsatthawasiExtremely, yes. There are many aspects to this, and I think we just have to — in a boring way — define what we’re talking about, but also recognize that manufacturing is many things, and most of the time we’re not talking about the same things. Because of the political context and the news, the manufacturing that has captured everyone’s attention is the big facilities and plants with lots of immigrant workers who are being raided. There’s also manufacturing made up of family businesses across the U.S. who are being hammered by tariffs and are struggling to continue to do what they do. So those are two strands that are pretty active in our imaginations right now. And I think the picture that paints is that manufacturing is big, right? It’s over 100 employees. It employs a lot of people — enough that disruption is bad for the town or community where it’s located. And a lot of them are trying to get by but still getting all of their materials and parts from overseas, so they’re struggling there as well. And while that profile of manufacturing is true — it’s all true — the manufacturing that we concentrate on, because we want to unlock the specificities of this type of work, is small. They’re definitely under 100. More often than not, under 50. There’s a high chance there’s only one worker there — the owner-operator. At most, they have three to seven other employees. They have space needs but not intense ones. They’re small businesses, but some of them are highly innovative. And while that innovation can drive scale — meaning growth and expansion — more often than not, that doesn’t meet up with their desires for the interesting life they want to have. So like, that’s also a manufacturer. So yeah, I just want to put it out there that it is not a homogeneous typology of business or footprint or whatever. Is there a good story to tell about the work that you’re doing that brings it to life? Tanu KumarYeah, there are a couple. I guess one that I’ll highlight — which is a really recent project — speaks to a bit of what Nepal is talking about in terms of how the manufacturing sector is so varied. In the spaces we create, we tend to focus on the small, but they’re all impacted by and connected to the larger picture of manufacturing, mainly because a lot of these small businesses are part of huge supply chains that exist in the country. But the issues they face are so different from those large businesses. So about a year ago, we launched a pilot project that was funded through the Families and Workers Fund with a goal of helping small and medium-sized businesses bring in workers and also retain them. Because what was happening across this sector — and it’s true of other sectors as well — is that people can’t find employees and they can’t keep their employees. And this project built off research that was hypothesizing that the reason this is happening is because manufacturing leaders, or leaders of any businesses, are really out of touch with their workforce. They’re out of touch with people and the communities and their perspectives — what they need at work to succeed. And in order for this to be addressed or solved, it’s not going to just be a business owner and an employee coming together to solve it. It has to be other entities within these ecosystems that play a role in supporting residents to access and find these jobs and stay in these jobs, and organizations that help these businesses understand how to keep their workforce. So that was the premise — that we were going to bring a whole different group of people together to address this problem. And so we identified two partners. One was in Oklahoma City and one was in Houston, who are training people from low-income communities to work in manufacturing and placing them in these jobs. But they were very concerned about the quality of those jobs. If they were going to put people in these positions, were they going to be high-quality positions that people would want to stay in and grow in? And so they decided to work with us to design a process to help these businesses really engage their workers — through focus groups, through one-on-one conversations — really trying to understand their perspectives and understand the challenges to staying in these positions. And the next step was to change their policies to address that, with support from other stakeholders in the region. And so we did this — they went out and did this — they talked to a lot of folks, they got a lot of information. We came together last month, and there was a very small group of organizations that know about these issues and are committed to working on these issues, that came together to workshop these ideas. And it included some of the employees and employers as well. And it was just a beautiful gathering of people who cared about this and were really working toward a new solution — in states where it’s often challenging to talk about job quality at this moment. It can be challenging to talk about some of these issues, but they were able to do that. And while it’s a long-term process, I think it demonstrates the kinds of spaces that Mechanism can create. We can create environments where people feel comfortable talking about this, where people are taking on topics that are challenging or new. And we’re bringing together the right mix of perspectives to try to drive more innovative solutions. And it was very gratifying that it worked out, that it happened. I think people walked away with a lot of appreciation and a lot of energy to keep working on these issues. Yeah. I mean, because of the work we did together, I’m aware — I have insight into the experiences that you provide for people. And you’re talking about the power of bringing people together and the kinds of spaces you create. I wondered, can you share a little bit about how you do that? Is there a sort of secret sauce? Especially now, it feels particularly magical to have the skill to bring people together to collaborate at that scale. It seems unbelievably important. How do you do it? What’s your approach to bringing those parties together to work on things that are sensitive and big? Nepal AsatthawasiWell, there is an approach and a methodology. But there’s also a culture of care for our guests. They’re participants in our programs, and we facilitate them through conversations that end in action steps and all that stuff. That’s the engagement that we do. And there’s definitely an approach, and Tanu, being in the thick of it, can explain that quite well. I do want to say that we are an organization who — despite how lean we are and how efficiently we work to steward our resources in order to do this work at a broad scale — cares very much about gathering people in beautiful spaces with excellent food and drink. And that doesn’t seem to be a priority for a lot of people working in our space, which is equitable economic development with bits of planning and inclusive capital and stuff like that. We care very much. And it doesn’t have to be luxuriously expensive. We’re not spending funders’ money on four-course meals. But we make sure that people are well fed — usually catering by a local business, usually foods from immigrant communities — and there are snacks, there are cookies, all of those things. That is the setting for us to work on the hard things. We always have really good feedback on our… we always do a survey at the end of our events, and the food always gets really good feedback. But I think we also — and this is illustrated through one of our primary programs and modes of work, which we call Local Labs — one of the things we do in these Local Labs, when we go into a place, is spend a lot of time doing pre-work to understand and connect with a lot of different stakeholders in the community. So we get a sense of all the perspectives and voices that should be in the room and the kinds of connections that will facilitate and support the community to move forward in a decision-making process. So oftentimes, you may not get the mix of people that we bring into a room in a normal setting. But we do a lot of pre-work to make sure we have a diversity of voices, and we open it up to a lot of different kinds of people — maybe people you normally think of as part of a making or manufacturing economy, and those who aren’t necessarily part of that but have a perspective or support it in some way. So I think there’s something really strong about our approach to understanding who needs to be in the room and then getting them there. Okay. How would you guys describe the future you’re aiming at? Some of this can be very abstract, and for people not working in the space it can be hard to get a handle on the impact of it. But what would you say is the biggest challenge you encounter and are working on? And what’s the vision you’re trying to bring into reality when it comes to cities and manufacturing? Nepal AsatthawasiWell, the vision is for many people to have a different relationship to manufacturing and vice versa, right? Before, it was activity at the periphery of cities that released lots of pollutants and toxins into the air and the water — but it made things we needed. And so we put up with it. And it also employed a lot of people who were economically secure and were able to raise their families in a good way. So it was a hive of contradictions, right? We were discussing how even the promise of secure, stable jobs with union benefits… If you read — there was an op-ed about Bruce Springsteen and his father in the Times the other week — which kind of hit hard, pretty emotionally. Because while Bruce Springsteen’s father was employed in the manufacturing sector with a union job, he was miserable. And that job, while giving him economic security, also took a lot from him that passed down pain and trauma to his family as well. And wrapped up in that is the idea of well-being. And the manufacturing and the making and the production that we see is one that really supports and promotes community well-being — whether in the form of jobs or linkages to schools, to senior centers, to art centers, to other nodes within the community that are also important. And conversely, all communities need manufacturing — whether it’s small or large or medium-sized, whatever is right for their scale. Because of the jobs, and because we see the potential for the capability to make things as being part of a resilient future, but also a resilient present. Without the skills and the capacity to make things when we need them, we will be at a loss when the things we rely on and the systems we live in start breaking down, as they do in ways that we are beginning to feel and recognize. So that’s still abstract, but I think an example most people relate to is how, when COVID broke out, we did not have any masks. This country was not equipped to equip everyone with masks to stem the infection. But cities — especially the sewn trades in those cities — stepped up. Facilities were donated, material was donated, and then we had masks. And most of that infrastructure has been broken up and disassembled. But it would be nice to know that in the event of another pandemic, or some other thing that required the capability to make things, we were able to tap into that. What if we needed emergency housing for 10,000 people, and it was full of obstacles to get all the materials and contractors and carpenters from outside the city boundaries? Could we do that? Don’t know. But that’s part of our vision — that we could. That we would develop the capacity to build in that way and respond in that way. Yes, but not only for emergency response. We want to cultivate it because it belongs in a community in other ways too. But for a resilient community, especially one that is proofed against future shocks, we feel it’s vitally important to have a base of manufacturing to stabilize community well-being and resilience. What needs to change in order to make this happen? What position would you want to be given to make the changes you need to implement this stuff? Do you know what I mean? I could say “if you were president,” maybe that’s the one — but what’s the job you would need in order to implement the changes needed for us to do what you want us to do? Tanu KumarI mean, there are so many. First of all, I don’t think it’s anyone — it’s definitely a collective effort. This is system change. And there are a lot of systems that need to be shifted because what they reinforce are instability and inequality. So we have a system — an economic system — that definitely promotes profit and does not take into consideration a balance with our natural environment, our resources, or people. So that is a big system to tackle. But I think that’s one of the foundational systems that production ecosystems operate within. And we hope that these ecosystems could start to reconsider or realign some of those more extractive systems that deplete the earth, that deplete communities. I think there are other systems that perpetuate social divisions within communities. And I don’t want to get too political, but we do have a siloization of people, and there’s not a lot of open dialogue and understanding and communication. And that is a condition that is challenging and makes it harder for us to achieve what we want to achieve. I think what we’re talking about is a more democratic, participatory approach to designing systems. And then I think there are other civic resources or essential social resources out there that we need — and we believe production ecosystems can be important to improving — around, as Nepal mentioned, housing; around thinking about culture and how production and making is tied into our cultural history; around other types of infrastructure needed to get goods from place to place or people from place to place. So it’s all embedded in these other systems that I think are not serving us now and will not serve us in times of crisis or emergency as well. Yeah. I’m curious — you avoided being political, but what was the silo? I will encourage you to get political. What were you pointing at with the siloization? Could you be more clear about what you’re talking about? What I’m thinking of is how challenging it can be in certain cities and states we’re working in now across the country, where there are different political affiliations, beliefs, whatever, between different stakeholders who are working to change something. So there may be people at the center of some approach that would actually improve the lives of their communities — the outcomes for their workers — but they cannot openly talk about that, sometimes even within their own communities, or certainly with policymakers. And so it becomes even more difficult to identify allies to support that work — but also to do the work, because it’s really draining when you have to watch your words, when you have to think about the very real repercussions on your community if you pursue this work. Around funding, or drawing attention from different federal agencies. So there are lots of reasons why you would want to not do that, yet this is still very important work. So I’m thinking about that in terms of siloization. I think there are a lot of people who have just stopped communicating openly with each other. Yeah. We’re kind of coming near the end of the hour we have together. Is there something you want to share in particular about Mechanism that we haven’t had a chance to talk about? Or another way of asking: is there a story you want to tell about Mechanism? Nepal AsatthawasiWell, we are kind of grounded in relationships and a lot of coincidences and alignments that feel like little gifts every time they’re uncovered. So many people over the first 10 years that we were Urban Manufacturing Alliance came to us because someone told them about us. It was like soft whisperings of things that were happening. And Peter, I think when we were talking earlier this year about the essence of Urban Manufacturing Alliance before it was renamed Mechanism, I told you that it’s almost like it was a secret. Yes. Right? So a group of people already in the small world of equitable economic development or inclusive economies have known about us for a long time, but not in a bold-faced way. More like, “Oh, these people do this very specific thing, but it’s really cool — you should go to one of their events.” And that’s how people have traditionally come to us. They’ve told other people. And there are so many coincidences — whenever we travel to cities, and all of us do it a lot, it’s like, “Oh, you might remember me from 2016 at that gathering.” But then it turns out the colleague who sits next to them at work worked with someone who went two years ago, or maybe they went to grad school with one of us. And for me — I don’t know if it’s the same for Tanu — this happens on a weekly basis at this point. It’s both connection to Mechanism, formerly UMA, or to one of us or to one of our colleagues or former colleagues. And it just swirls with serendipity almost. And that’s not really — it’s neither here nor there. It’s not about the work directly. But I feel like it’s a magical space, almost. And how these atoms of people knock into each other all the time reinforces my suspended belief that this is magical, even though we’re talking about economic development here. I want to thank you so much for accepting the invitation and sharing Mechanism with the world. Thank you. Thanks, Peter. Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe [https://thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

Sam Gregory on Deepfakes & Human Rights

Sam Gregory [https://www.linkedin.com/in/samgregory/] is the Executive Director of WITNESS [https://www.witness.org/], the global human rights group using video and technology to defend rights. A human rights technologist and media authenticity expert, he has led innovation on deepfakes and generative AI, testified before US Congress, and received the Peabody Global Impact Award for WITNESS’s work. I start all these conversations with the same question, which I borrowed from a friend of mine. She helps people tell their stories. And it’s a big, beautiful question, which is why I use it. But because it’s big and beautiful, I kind of over-explain it — the way that I’m doing right now. And so before I ask it, I want you to know that you’re in total control, and you can answer or not answer any way that you want to. And the question is: Where do you come from? And again, you’re in total control. That’s a great question. There’s so many ways you could answer that, I guess. I’ll give maybe two answers to it. Where do I come from? So, I’m a transplant to the US who grew up in the UK, as part of a family that had also moved from somewhere else. So I’ve continued the evolution of my family moving from Europe to the UK to the US. So that’s one way of thinking about me — as someone who, at this point in my life, has spent exactly half my life outside the US and half my life in the US, as of this year — but still feels very much like someone from outside the US. The second part of it — where do I come from — it’s interesting because I’ve also spent all of those 25 years, or pretty much most of those 25 years I’ve lived in the US, focused on the same sort of issues. So, like, when you talk about where I come from, it sort of comes out of, like, an endless kind of working around of what it means to trust what we see and hear — which has been what I’ve spent most of my working life thinking about. So, two answers to that question, I guess. Yeah. Do you have a recollection — young Sam — what did you want to be when you grew up? So, very young Sam wanted to be an archaeologist. I was fascinated by cave paintings and by medieval history. Subscribed to History Today magazine when I was a little kid, read Herodotus. So very young Sam was an archaeologist and a historian. I think I wanted to be that till I was about 15. And then, around then, I discovered the two things that kind of have ended up linking together. One was kind of thinking about activism. So, young Sam, around the age of 15, I encountered the Tibet activist movement. The Dalai Lama spoke in an arena near where I lived, and I became part of the Tibet activist movement. And then also, about the same time, I started thinking about kind of filmmaking, video making. And I think at the time, I wanted to become a documentary filmmaker — was how I saw the two combining. Like, documentary was the way you combine the two. So, archaeologist to historian, to activist and documentary filmmaker were probably the transitions. That’s amazing. I mean, I can’t — we met many, many years ago, but I have in my mind this conception of Witness. And it seemed to me that Witness was doing a lot of work in far-flung places, right? I love the way you talk about small media. And I’ve been following your work, of course, but it seems like all that stuff is just — it’s now, it’s everywhere. The same questions are everywhere. Maybe I was being very, very naive at that time. Did Witness work? Is that an accurate representation of the evolution of these questions around media and trust? Or not? You know, we’ve always worked globally, right? I’d always worked also in the US, right? So, you know, human rights happen everywhere. Human rights violations happen everywhere. I think there’s always been this central question of: how do you trust what you see and hear? Which is — I remember we first met around trying to build tools to really imbue trust into media, to prove its authenticity. And those concerns — you just see them playing out in very different ways over the years. I think one of the things that we were probably — we’d already learned it by the time you and I first met, which I think was probably a little over a decade ago — was that you had to think at multiple levels about how you defend our ability to believe what we see and hear. One is, of course, how does a human rights defender in a favela in Rio film the evidence of a brutal police raid, right? In a way that is trustworthy, ethical, protects the victim, stands up as evidence. But if you don’t do that in a way, in a system that’s then going to make sure that gets seen and trusted — and a system that’s everything from how a platform is built to how AI systems enable us to know what is AI and what is human — then that human rights defender on the front lines is fundamentally disadvantaged. So one of the things we’ve really wrestled with in our work is how to bridge between that very direct experience of audiovisual storytelling and evidence gathering that a human rights defender has, and these systems that are being built — that can either fundamentally put them at an advantage or fundamentally disadvantage those truth tellers. And how do you describe Witness to people, for those who aren’t familiar with the organization? So Witness exists to enable the frontline defenders of human rights and the journalists who document what goes wrong and what’s needed, to show the visual truth of what is happening. Primarily they use video, and increasingly they use AI-mediated tools to show what is happening and to show what’s needed to change that. Now, how we do that — we also operate at multiple levels. We often describe it as our “thousands, millions, and billions” layers. So, at one layer, we very directly support specific communities who are using video, increasingly using these AI-mediated audiovisual tools, to document war crimes, state violence, land grabs. We do that with thousands of people each year. Then we try and share the best practices, the good practices that come out of that. What do you need to do to document the police during an election in the age of AI, when everything is going to get undermined by people’s claims that everything can be falsified? We work out how to turn that into guidance and tools that are available to millions of people. And then the third layer is this billions layer — which is this idea that if you don’t build the fundamental infrastructure of tech and policy in a way that enables us to trust what we see and hear, then we’re fundamentally disadvantaged. An example of that — and it’s an evolution of work we did together — is that a lot of our work over the last five years has been about: how do we build the trust layer in AI that enables us to know the recipe, the mix of ingredients that are AI and human in the videos we see in our timelines? In an age when it’s increasingly hard to discern what’s true and what is synthetic — or what is real and what is synthetic. Yeah, I’m so curious. So much of the language around this — it just seems like it’s emerging, or not even — it’s not firm yet. But I heard you use the word “synthetic.” I heard you talk about the trust layer. Can you just tell me, what is the trust layer? Where are we in the process of developing a trust layer? Yeah. So the way we thought about trust — and it really is an evolution of working on this for 15 years — and I can sort of take you back through that evolution of how we built our understanding. So largely, what we think of as the trust layer around our current information environment is — more and more AI content is entering. And it’s sometimes purely AI. Sometimes it’s a mix of synthetic and authentic — synthetic and something that was created by humans in the real world. And sometimes there is purely authentic human content, right? It’s just something that was filmed on a cell phone in a protest and it’s not materially changed by AI. Right? Like, broadly speaking. And in order to have a trust layer, you’ve got to be able to understand that mix of ingredients in every piece of content. Right? So you have to be able to know if something was made with AI, how it was, maybe what models were used. You need to know how it was edited. You need to understand how humans intervened. Now, where that layer is at the moment is there’s a lot of work on the technical standards to build that out. An example is something like the C2PA standard. It’s called the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity, which is a coalition of companies — includes groups like Witness — that are trying to build a standard for how you show that recipe so you can basically reveal the recipe of a piece of content. Right? And that’s not just to show if something’s deceiving you. You might also reveal the recipe because you’re like, this was awesome and creative — how did they make this? You know? So that’s how I think about the trust layer. I think there’s some lessons we learned from our work on this that inform how we think you do that right and you do it wrong. Right? So, for example, you and I first met around a tool we built called InformaCam with a group called The Guardian Project, which was a tool to create authenticable data within videos. And we kept working on those tools with The Guardian Project, another mobile developer working in the activist space over many years. But increasingly started to think, how did the values from those tools carry over into the mainstream — which is how we started getting involved in the AI trust layer. And we also talked to the people we worked with. And I’ll give you a really concrete example of the types of things they said: it’s important to have this in the trust layer; it’s really important not to have this. So, for example, many of the people we worked with said, don’t build a trust layer based on identity. Right? So, we don’t want you to make it obligatory for you to say, “Sam made this,” just because you used an AI tool, or “I used an AI tool.” And the reasons they said that were to do with all the risks that we see for human rights defenders, journalists, and frankly, ordinary people — of surveillance, of privacy breaches, of the way governments are trying to track us, as well as corporations. And so our understanding of how to build that trust layer for the internet also comes out of saying, actually, this doesn’t exist in some sort of place of perfection and an absence of misuse by governments, by states, by corporations, and by individuals. And so how you build this really matters. What do you love about the work? You’ve been at it for a long time. Where’s the joy in it for you? Joy comes from a bunch of places. Like, I love the community of people who work in this. I like my colleagues — that’s a good start, right? I also think there is something fundamentally affirming about working with frontline defenders. In the sense that this is really hard work — it is far harder than my work to be a frontline human rights defender — but people generally navigate that with a sense of purpose and optimism and realism, grounded in doing something that matters for their community. Right? And so when I’m working very closely with the people we work with, that is a source of joy. I’ll also say that I actually find a lot of joy in the fact that, in our work, we’ve been able to be really sort of front-foot-forward on some issues that matter. Joy is an odd word to place there, but when you know that you’re doing the right things around something, and you see it having an impact — I draw joy out of that, or at least satisfaction. I don’t know if it’s joy, but satisfaction. So I think that’s a part of it. The other thing that folks within my organization, Witness, know is that one of the things I really love doing is trying to make sense of the world and look ahead. Right? So a lot of my role over the last 20 years has been to say, where are we now, but where are things going? Not in an abstract way — not just guessing, not in a kind of detached, “futures” way — but like, if we look at what’s happening, if we understand existing problems and challenges, where can we look ahead to? Over the last 15 years, I think I’ve engaged a number of times on that. And I get a lot of joy. I spent a lot of time in the 2010s thinking about live streaming and how to think about live streaming in very different ways. And then, around 2017, we started working on deepfakes at a time when many people were saying that just feels like a very niche issue and probably not what a human rights group should focus on. There are bigger issues. Part of it was — and I was driving this within the organization — a sense of how this brought together many of the issues that really matter to the success of our work: the issues around trust, the issues around how you create authentic or synthetic content, and also the issues of risks. Because the thing that was most visible in those early days of deepfakes in 2017, 2018 was that it was targeting women particularly, but also LGBTQ individuals, with these non-consensual, falsified sexual images — where someone’s face was placed in a sexual scene or on a naked body. And so, again, it’s a weird word to say joy, but I draw satisfaction personally out of the work we can do — and I can do — to try and be proactive in being ahead of the ways these issues of trust and the ability to have human rights action and reliable information are shifting. And move an organization ahead of those things rather than reactively to them. Yeah, I mean, I feel like you’re speaking a little bit to something — one of the reasons I reached out, I think, to you is because you’ve been present in that place at a period when there must be a period when people don’t really know why you’re doing what you’re doing. You know what I mean? Until we all catch up and people are like, oh, good Lord, this is what you were talking about. And I guess there’s a piece of me that feels like AI — I think of AI like a storm. It’s some sort of weather system that has arrived in a very strange and abrupt way. You know what I mean? It’s brought all this really strange phenomenon with it, but you can kind of do a before and after with it. Yeah. I agree. You know what I mean? And I’m wondering — how do you conceptualize AI? And is that even the right question to talk about AI, or is deepfake your way of talking about AI? Yeah, you know, it’s interesting. I’ll make two observations. One is, I think there’s been a growing swell that you could see the early signs of in 2017–18. And you could see — and I don’t know weather systems well enough to know if my analogy is correct, Peter, so we’re going to get a meteorologist critique of my description of it — but you could also see the things that were contributing to make it a bigger weather system or a bigger swell even back then. We organized literally some of the first global meetings that brought together technologists and human rights defenders and companies. I know literally some of the first conversations for folks in companies where they met people to talk about deepfakes were actually in meetings we organized. And some of the things we heard there — for example, from the human rights defenders — were things like, I don’t see this yet, but this sounds really similar to the issues I already face around the undermining of my evidence, the targeting of my leaders, the intersection of facial recognition and surveillance. Because they saw the way these were playing out. So they were pointing to this little swell out in the water that we were telling them about. We were saying, this is going to be technically possible. And they were saying, we know how that swell will get bigger — from the societal context. And so what I’ve been watching — and actively we’ve been trying to intervene in from Witness over the last eight years — has been, you can see that swell growing. And our framing was always: prepare, don’t panic. There are very clear things we could be doing, in some sense to set up the flood walls — or build better flood management systems, or whatever our analogy is for this extreme weather event. Which is that there are things we can do that would make this both manageable and, in many ways, potentially positive. And that sort of leads to how I think about this space. Although a lot of my work in the last seven or eight years has been around deepfakes — which I think people tend to think about as malicious or deceptive — we’re clearly entering what we talk about as an AI-mediated information ecosystem, where there’s just so much AI-generated information. And it’s competing, it’s supplementing, it’s creating new ways we communicate. And as someone particularly who comes out of an audiovisual background, some of that is tremendously exciting. I love the way that AI video can be more accessible, more easy to make, more translatable, more personalizable. There’s tremendous accessibility and storytelling potential in what’s happening with AI — as well as the negative consequences, as well as the underlying, fundamental problems we might worry about, like copyright theft and theft of artistic work, and all of those. And so when I look at where we are now, I tend to think of it as: how do we adapt to a communication system where there’s more and more prevalence of information? We’re now in the sort of tsunami phase. And how I judge how we’re doing — and I’ve been quite critical in public in the last couple of months of where I think people have failed to do things they could have done to make sure that we had better flood walls, better flood defenses — because you could see these seven or eight years ago. Right? This is not a surprise to folks who are close to this. And there are things we could have done and things we could still do to make sure that we maximize the positive sides of this and find ways to adapt to the negative sides — or, in fact, reduce them or eliminate them. Right? So I think that’s the challenge now — to say that we don’t need to be passive around this. And we don’t need to be either binary — AI is bad or good. We need to take a very deliberate way of dealing with what is happening, and what we need to do in terms of safeguards, in order to channel it in the right way. Yeah. I think in one of your talks, you talked about reality fatigue. Is that an idea that you’ve talked about — sort of being tired of having to... I mean, it’s just, we don’t — it’s so difficult to tell what is real. Yeah. I think reality fatigue, and also just a general kind of corrosive fatigue about knowing what is real and what is synthetic, is something that’s been given a lot of sharpness in the last couple of months by the release of tools like Sora — OpenAI’s app-based approach to reality falsification, likeness appropriation. The reason I point to that is it’s just a way in which we’ve made it very normalized to create things that are across a spectrum — from silly pratfalls to funny cat videos to slightly sinister exploitative videos to hateful videos to full-on deepfakes that are trying to deceive people. And I think one of the things we’re all trying to calibrate in that landscape is: what is the impact of people constantly having to question not only the really important stuff, but so much of what they look at, and not trust the evidence of their eyes? And how corrosive is that? So it becomes a problem that’s not only about the big deepfake — and there’s lots of work we do. We run this global rapid response mechanism on the big deepfakes that influence elections and things like that. But it’s also like: what is the overlap of people’s fatigue, and perhaps unwillingness to believe anything, because they’re too used to being deceived by videos in their regular timeline that appear to show reality but aren’t? And what it does is reinforce something we’ve seen for probably four or five years with the one-off deepfakes. It’s very easy for people to plausibly deny reality and exercise something known as the liar’s dividend. The liar’s dividend is the idea that the presence of this deceptive AI — these deepfakes — makes it much easier for someone in power to deny something real. They just say, it’s easy to falsify anything, so therefore this real footage could have been made with AI. And so the prevalence of us all sitting in this fog of confusion also impacts the really critical stuff, because it allows people to exercise the liar’s dividend — to plausibly deny reality. And we already see that in our work. In our deepfakes rapid response force, about a third of the cases we get are cases where something is authentic, and people are trying to claim it’s AI. So two-thirds are AI where you’re trying to prove it’s AI, and one-third is authentic where you’re trying to prove it’s authentic because people are claiming it’s AI. So you’ve got both sides of that dynamic, and that kind of reality fatigue — that corrosive doubt — has an effect. We still don’t quite know what it is yet, but it has an effect on the ability to dismiss the big stuff as well as the little stuff. Yeah. It’s really — I find sometimes with this stuff, it’s hard to know what I’m actually talking about or thinking about — with the impact of these kinds of tools on how we communicate with each other. And I guess I’m thinking about my own experience living in a small town and how even social media made it very difficult for us to develop a kind of shared understanding about anything. You know what I mean? And so we have this continued fragmentation where we’re not really sharing anything. We’re all so isolated from each other, and ultimately the reality fatigue — it doesn’t even really matter if anything is true or real. You’re not really evaluating whether something is meant to be true — you’re really only evaluating it as to whether it either entertains you or... I mean, I feel like there’s a total detachment from what we’re engaging with. But again, I’m thinking of a general person. I know you work with activists and people dealing with human rights abuses, so maybe my context... No, that problem is — if we can’t trust the evidence of a human rights abuse, and just believe that it’s entirely a matter of opinion, or a matter of emotional affiliation — I think that’s incredibly damaging. And again, this is AI layered on top of what we already have. Social media pre-existed AI — the algorithmic amplification of division, the echo chambering, the partisan divide that isn’t just about social media, it’s about far deeper economic and social ruptures. AI is layered on top of that. The way it changes that, though, is — we’ve at least, in some sense, been able to have some contestation around: is this actually factual? Is this actually true, what we’re seeing and hearing? And in certain venues that really matters. We need to know whether something can hold up as evidence in a court. We need to know whether a government communication is real. Once we move out of the social media realm, we start to get into a space where it really matters to be able to establish some shared basis of facts. And I think there’s something particularly — and obviously, I mainly engage with audiovisual AI, or the audiovisual manifestations — not like hallucinating texts and stuff like that. There’s something profoundly challenging about not being able to trust the evidence of our eyes in a lot of settings where previously we might have thought we could. So when I go to a Marvel movie or the latest Avengers movie — whenever they release the next one — I know in that context that I’m not watching reality. And it’s not like in the social media context I believe I’m watching reality, but I’m not having to constantly question, does the literal fabric of what I’m looking at — is that real or not? We’re not cognitively designed to do that. We’re not cognitively designed to second-guess our visual cortex’s experience in every single visual interaction we have in the world. And so that worries me, because it takes us into a different place that isn’t purely about the existing contestation of facts or the fracture along partisan lines. It takes us into a place where we really can’t even look at something and know whether it is what it is. And we may be doing that minute after minute in our social media timelines, in our information environments. And that’s where the absence of safeguards — the failure to put in those flood defenses — really matters. There are ways we could make that easier. And going back to what I was saying about this trust layer — the reason to have that is so that you can, you know, see 15 videos in your timeline. The first five, you don’t care they’re AI — they’re funny. Like the cat jumping out of the baked loaf and running across the kitchen floor — I love that. I don’t need to know it’s AI. And if it’s not AI, I don’t care — it’s just funny. But the sixth video that seems deceptive — I want to be able to dig down and know that AI was used there. Know that it isn’t a realistic representation of an event. I scroll through seven, eight, nine. The tenth video — I maybe need to look at the recipe again. That ability for us to ask questions of our information environment, in order to know where AI is playing a role, is pretty critical. And that’s a safeguard that we’ve not yet generalized. We built the first parts of it, but we haven’t yet generalized it. So although I feel this is reinforcing problems we already have in our information environment, I also think there are things we can do about it. Yeah, yeah. And to return to the trust layer — what has to happen? What’s your vision for the next 10 years in terms of how we build the safeguard? And maybe there’s a question in here too about — where is there hope? Where do you see these safeguards or the trust layer being built, or evidence of us being able to create what we need to survive this ecosystem? I think this is a case where technology and law and regulation fit together. Regulation’s obviously a dirty word in the US context right now — and challenging even in Europe. Even today, on the day of our conversation, the EU has just announced it’s essentially watering down its landmark AI legislation. I think there’s a few things we need to do, and this is what they’d look like. One is: we need a robust foundation to know the mix of AI and human in the content and communication we see — that’s easily accessible, that we can look at when we want to, and that helps us as individuals. So we can look at something we find very creative, or something we think is deceptive, and not have to rely on just guessing. At the moment, most people are just literally guessing that something is AI. They’re looking at it, looking for glitches — and that kind of forensic gaze, it doesn’t work. AI is getting better. That production of images and video and audio — it’s like, looking and listening hard doesn’t work. We need a way of structurally building in a way to do that, which is probably some combination of rich metadata and ways to retain that in the information and make it super accessible to a user. And it’s interesting — that’s an area where there’s a lot of technical work happening. It just isn’t yet implemented across the internet, and it isn’t yet implemented in a way that continues to protect those key values like privacy and access that are fundamental to doing it right. So that is totally doable. It could be the work of the next couple of years — it’s not a decade’s work. We just need the impetus there. And there are a number of places where law and regulation is pushing that. So that’s one foundation. There’s another foundation that’s perhaps more relevant to a core constituency that I have — which is the frontline human rights defenders and the journalists. People will remove that recipe. They’ll try and find ways to pull it out or be deceptive. So you also need to be able to detect when you’re in really malicious and deceptive contexts. You need to use these AI detection tools that exist already. People will be familiar with them — the most visible manifestations are things like going to “AI or Not” as a website or something like that. The problem with them at the moment is they don’t really work very well in the real world, and they don’t work well in most of the world. So what I mean by that is: if you’re trying to deal with, for example, one of the cases we’d get in our deepfakes rapid response force — a piece of audio from Cambodia that’s low resolution or compressed, with someone speaking in Khmer — the detectors probably won’t work very well on that. Even if what you’re trying to prove there — and this is a real example of a case from the force — is a former premier demanding an assassination of someone. You’re trying to work out: is this real or is it falsified? So we need to get those detection tools to actually work. So people can actually use them in real-world contexts to deal with the most high-profile cases. Then I think there’s another set of things that feel really important — and this is a mix of law and policy — which is the easy likeness appropriation. You see it with Sora, the app, and also the notification apps where people are just dropping in their schoolmate or someone else’s face into an app that turns them into a notified image. There’s a whole set of problems happening around basically stealing people’s digital likeness — where we both need to make it easier for us to know when that’s happening, and we need much stronger legal safeguards that say: actually, it’s not okay to do this. It’s both morally and legally inappropriate to lose control of your digital likeness in a way that you don’t want. So I think those are things that — it’s all against the backdrop of the fact that we’re doing this against monopoly AI power. So I think there’s also something here, which is the age-old story, or the story of the last decade, of: how do we put some controls on the platforms so that they are not just purely pumping out synthetic content to us, and have no obligations to think about how their algorithmic curation and amplification reinforces the deeper divides in our societies? Yeah. I mean, I don’t follow the policy and the regulation side of things, but it strikes me that sometimes when I talk to people, they talk about AI as just another technology — and we should just sort of, you know, it’s a boon, because this is how we operate, and we kind of have to let it go. But I guess, what’s the temperature when it comes to regulating AI? And how does it feel different than other technologies or shifts in media that we’ve gone through? Just another? Yeah, I think the two — like, definitely the way that the AI companies talk about AI is that it’s not just another thing. It is transformational. It’s the dawn of a new age, etc., etc. And there’s some truth in that. It is a fundamental shift in how we create information, communicate, and may do things in the future. I think that’s part of the way they’ve also been stifling regulatory approaches — by saying this is so completely different, it’s got so much potential, that we can’t regulate it. We can’t put guardrails on because it’s going to stifle innovation. It’s going to stifle something that’s completely new. You’re seeing that play out in both the US — where there’s really no meaningful federal regulation on this, though there is state regulation in California — and in places like Europe, where they’re trying to work out how they navigate between innovation and these guardrails, including in this EU AI Act that just got essentially watered down with some announcements just today. As we respond to it, and as I respond to this from the position that I occupy, I think it’s useful to think: this is not just the same as some other waves before, but it’s not super different, either. You can navigate those. When it goes back to the conversations I’ve had with people we work with — and I’m primarily thinking about the information environment in AI — it’s, in some sense, a subset of the AI universe, where they’re saying: look, issues of privacy, trust, who gets heard, who gets listened to, whose information gets seen — these are not novel. These are existing issues. Putting in safeguards that enable transparency for how something was made, that prevent people doing terrible things like notifying their neighbor — these are not things that are inhibiting innovation. They’re actually creating an environment where people can trust the information they see and hear, where we don’t do things that are patently illegal and should be illegal. And frankly, from a business perspective, they’re probably better. I think a climate in which people don’t understand if what they’re seeing and hearing is real is not good for a business environment. It’s not good for human rights documentation. It’s not good for journalism. So I push back on the idea that we can’t do anything — it’s the dawn of a new age — because A) we can see the corollaries to previous and existing patterns, and B) there are things we can do that would actually reinforce the innovation side of it, because they reinforce basic human values that we care about, like interpersonal decency and transparency about what we’re seeing and hearing — things that matter to ordinary people, but also matter to the business sector. So I think we can coexist with both of those and navigate a path that recognizes that. How would you articulate — very often these things are framed as regulation versus innovation, technology versus values — and you’re always in opposition to the thing that’s happening, right? But how would you articulate: what’s your affirmative vision of a business or of a modern information ecosystem? What’s the utopian vision? What’s the best-case scenario? The utopic vision is that we all have a greater capacity to create and share and access information in the ways we want to create it, in the ways we want to access it — in a way that is super accessible, at a cost point that is valuable to us, and in a way that we’re not reliant on others to do that for us. So that’s the top layer — the ability to create, produce, share. And that we’ve built that on a foundation that makes sure that we can trust that information, we can query it, and we can be creators and sharers in a way that protects our privacy, that doesn’t lead to being weaponized. To make that really concrete, from the world I work in: I want every human rights defender I work with, every journalist, to be able to — at their fingertips — edit real video much more easily, translate it into the languages they want, protect the identities of the people they want in it. Just trivially easy edits and changes using the power of AI. I want them to be able to use synthetic video when it matters, as a way to tell stories they otherwise wouldn’t. I want them to be able to personalize those stories for people who want to see it in a way that matters to them. I want their information to be going to LLMs in a way that — when someone wants to find out about land rights in Colombia — they can ask for a video, a podcast, a PDF. All the things you can do with multimodal AI. But when you do that, it also makes sure that it hasn’t completely lost the voice, the point of view, the agency of the source material. So when you see that video, it hasn’t just obscured the fact that all that information came from a critical human rights defender working in a community in Colombia. It’s not anonymous information. It comes from a place, a source, a point of view. So that’s a vision of access to information. And then you have to have that layer under it — which is, when you see a video online, you can know that it was made with AI, you can know it came from a human. You can do that in a reliable way that enables you to navigate a more complex, more rich information environment without doubting the evidence of your eyes, without feeling that reality fatigue, without saying: I just live in a morass of information and I have no idea what is real and what is false, what is authentic and what is synthetic. Yeah, beautiful. Well, I want to thank you so much for joining me and sharing the work you do. I mean, I really — more than ever — really appreciate knowing that you’re there doing the work that you’re doing and at Witness. So thank you so much, Sam. Yeah, I really appreciate it. Good to talk again. All right. 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Mark Earls on Herds & Change

Mark Earls [https://www.linkedin.com/in/mark-earls-a393982/] is HERDmeister at HERD [https://herdhq.com/], his independent behavioral consultancy based in London. He previously served as Chair of Ogilvy’s Global Planning Council, Planning Director at St Luke’s Communications, and Head of Planning at Bates Dorland. He is the author of several influential books on behavior and creativity, including Herd: How to Change Mass Behaviour by Harnessing Our True Nature [https://www.amazon.com/Herd-Change-Behaviour-Harnessing-Nature/dp/0470744596/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1E78PA6AMAP2H&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.14iKbDql3CEkytMMPKjjasEDSbvyilnwgioshP1nVNPsNFjxqpf0OIjx8j1T3carX2jXKzAZ1V1SLY5R68OVYwG-4NoavdXz43NiWdx0IllJL5AexTu3jG1SI-a-o2vWlpFvEHWLsEByF_wY_YVpP37mG8R7pIoFxmdeaJVcqi1U4gMPECFE0kexRYuX-wJOWVdN7_vWvQUQTtX_SCPtrnpos7uccewNZ-lkpkx6tDk.MZzYtV9BBSRrq4nLoTph040qVtijkWRXLJCuFsUOXzc&dib_tag=se&keywords=mark+earls&qid=1764592703&sprefix=mark+earls%2Caps%2C152&sr=8-1], I’ll Have What She’s Having [https://www.amazon.com/Ill-Have-What-Shes-Having-ebook/dp/B08BT2LVJF/ref=sr_1_3?crid=1E78PA6AMAP2H&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.14iKbDql3CEkytMMPKjjasEDSbvyilnwgioshP1nVNPsNFjxqpf0OIjx8j1T3carX2jXKzAZ1V1SLY5R68OVYwG-4NoavdXz43NiWdx0IllJL5AexTu3jG1SI-a-o2vWlpFvEHWLsEByF_wY_YVpP37mG8R7pIoFxmdeaJVcqi1U4gMPECFE0kexRYuX-wJOWVdN7_vWvQUQTtX_SCPtrnpos7uccewNZ-lkpkx6tDk.MZzYtV9BBSRrq4nLoTph040qVtijkWRXLJCuFsUOXzc&dib_tag=se&keywords=mark+earls&qid=1764592703&sprefix=mark+earls%2Caps%2C152&sr=8-3], Copy, Copy, Copy [https://www.amazon.com/Copy-Smarter-Marketing-Using-Peoples-ebook/dp/B00XA4A3FA/ref=sr_1_1?crid=VVS5X5ZSXMTT&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.t_o3Jf0rbOR4eEcmMeAxMmB7462pJTm7by2eJmadHPA.wVNV4_I9721wLPTAldX3dAQXM4OhXXiIwZ_PjSmokZo&dib_tag=se&keywords=mark+earls+copy+copy&qid=1764592758&s=digital-text&sprefix=mark+earls+copy+copy%2Cdigital-text%2C110&sr=1-1], and Welcome to the Creative Age [https://www.amazon.com/Welcome-Creative-Age-Business-Marketing-ebook/dp/B000QENXM2/ref=sr_1_1?crid=GZQWFZJT5SZY&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.AfkeYeyka90YfN4c07vD9w.u_xvi7C48MBBFFrtKuYK9_gj9sk3G8r7jtevWHBkp1c&dib_tag=se&keywords=mark+earls+welcome+to+the+creative+age&qid=1764592782&s=digital-text&sprefix=mark+earls+welcome+to+the+creative+age%2Cdigital-text%2C80&sr=1-1]. I start all these conversations with the same question, which I borrowed from a friend of mine. She helps people tell their story, and I fell in love with the question because it was so big. But because it’s big, I tend to over-explain it—the way I’m doing right now. So before I ask it, I want you to know that you’re in total control. You can answer or not answer in any way you want to. The question is: Where do you come from? Very good question. Where do I come from? That can be answered in lots of ways, and I think that tells us a lot about how I—and we—are. So I come from... My parents were the first out of the working class into education in their families. They both worked hard to get us a good education, and I got a scholarship. I found myself actually very lucky to have had that kind of education as a foundation. So that’s where I come from. Education has been my family’s escape from the working class, and, as it happens, that was probably a good call. The working class that existed at the time my parents were born was based in heavy industry—which is now gone. And where were you?A family all from South Wales. Coal and steel. My dad had a choice at 14: would he stay on at the grammar school, the high school, or would he take the pair of steel toe-capped boots that his father got him for his job down at the steel mill? That was his choice. He chose grammar school. Wow. Right, which was always a matter of tension between him and his family. It wasn’t the proper thing—sitting around reading books and smoking cigarettes. That’s not the proper way. Anyway, so that’s one strand of me. Another strand is that I was exposed from very early on to other cultures. My mother was a languages teacher, and I spent the time of puberty—before and after—on railways going across Europe to visit friends of the family or to do language courses. I studied languages at university, and I’ve mostly failed to use them—apart from a couple of German girlfriends. So my view has always been one of curiosity toward people. Not from a psychological perspective, I think—but from a cultural perspective. That’s turned out to be really important to me. I’ve always been interested in neuroscience. I was the first person who really started talking about Damasio in the ad world. Later on, people like Wendy Gordon started bringing that into market research and insights. I brought some of that through—and, I’m afraid, I introduced Rory Sutherland to Kahneman. That’s on me. You’ve got the Rory Sutherland-mobile now. But for me, culture is the thing. People are amazing. They live with shared beliefs, practices, and rituals. Culture is what makes us who we are. That’s where I come from—a view of human beings shaped by culture. There’s a photograph from a family album. I must be six or seven. My younger brother and sister are behind me on one of those fiberglass kids’ slides in the backyard. And I’m in front of them, doing jazz hands. I’ve always been someone who’s just really excited about the world—very positive. And when I’ve encountered some of the more cognitive-science-based views of human behavior in business and culture lately, I’ve been dismayed. There’s this disappointment at humanity’s inability to be rational. But we are amazing, extraordinary creatures—even the worst of us. Extraordinary. And that’s how I approach the problems I see. That’s so—my God, you said so much. So many things. And of course, I remember you putting these concepts forward. It was the first time I ever encountered them. I love what you just said in distinguishing between the kind of—is it sort of a culture of disappointed cognitive psychologists? That framing of our way of being in the world as a failure to be reasonable? Exactly. Our way of being in the world is amazing. Not all of us get it right, and all of us don’t get it right some of the time. The world—we are constantly renegotiating it. But we are still extraordinary. Absolutely extraordinary. If you think of one of the classic desert island questions: if you were marooned on a desert island, how would you get on? Could you build a shelter? Probably it would be a bit crap, honestly. But I could probably knock something together. Maybe it wouldn’t last a monsoon or a tornado, but it could be okay. Could you catch fish? I probably could. Could you build heating? No. Do you understand how the internal combustion engine works? Yeah, I guess so. Could you make one? No. All of these things—this know-how—we depend on so many other people to make our lives work. It’s like each of us stands at the front of an army of human history. It’s just amazing when you look at it that way. The stuff that we don’t have to think about individually because humanity—and its culture, its storing and transmission of knowledge across generations and geographies—is just amazing. No other species does that. It’s amazing. It really is. And it occurs to me—I’ve struggled with this too—that all the language around the unconscious and irrational... I always return to Lakoff. I think at some point he called it “imaginative reason.” That felt like the one time I encountered a framing of our decision-making, our behavior, as something positive and beautiful and celebratory. It is amazing. I’ve been lucky enough to do some collaboration with an academic based at the University of Kentucky, Professor Alex Bentley. We did a book together called I’ll Have What She’s Having. He’s an anthropologist and archaeologist. Mike O’Brien is another American archaeology professor. Their take on humanity is that our species is successful because of cultural evolution—our ability to store and spread information, knowledge, and know-how. You don’t have to think every day, “Now, how do I light a fire again?” You can just look: “Oh, that’s how he does it. Let’s do that.” My shorthand is learned from over there and from here and from my own practice. I don’t have to think about it. That cultural evolution—culture itself—is the thing that makes us different. Yes, our brains are amazing and our bodies are amazing too. Cognitive abilities are what they are, and they’re particularly suited for the lives we lead. But it’s our cultural capacity that’s the extraordinary bit. Do you remember a younger you? As a boy, what did you want to be when you grew up? Very good. I wanted to be a vet—a veterinarian. That’s what I wanted to be. I’ve always loved animals. I have my lovely Irish terrier sitting on the sofa here now, guarding us, making sure no one interrupts our interview. I’ve always loved animals, dogs in particular. I kept fish as a teenager. I think that was partly a distraction from my parents, partly from the troubles of puberty. Tropical fish—not unusual, is it? I’ve always loved the outdoors. Fishing was something I learned early on, and I loved it. I thought that would be a thing. My uncle was a chemist, a professor of chemistry, and he was sort of a role model for me. So I must have, in my head, combined the two things. It’s a science-y thing, even though I’m absolutely rubbish at—I struggled. I wasn’t rubbish. I struggled to get what I needed to in those subjects at high school. I was looking for something to combine the two. Yeah. So what are you doing now? Where are you, and what are you up to now? I’m based in London. I do a combination of three things. First, I’m writing and thinking—writing and thinking about this amazing thing that is humanity. I’m championing a couple of things right now, to be honest. One of them is my core thesis, which I call the “herd thesis.” It’s provocatively named because no one wants to be part of a herd—unless you’re a fan of that U.S. college football team called The Herd. But apart from that, the idea is that we’re not a “me” species. That’s probably where we first made contact, around that idea. The other thing I’m thinking about is how we think about time. It’s another cultural thing I think we’ve got wrong. I did a TED Talk on that this year and I’m looking to write a book about it next year. That’s a lot of fun. We can talk about that. Basically, I’m trying to share—I’m trying to tease out better maps of humanity. If you want to navigate the world, you need a good map. But if you want to navigate change, you need a really good map. And I’m trying to help enable that. So I’m writing and talking about that as well. I’ve also done a couple of really interesting projects this year, including one with an extraordinary contact lens business. I know nothing about that—I love spectacles, and I think anything that goes in the eyes is an abomination. But they were amazing people. And I was helping them understand how humanity really works—giving them better context for trying to solve problems and turning that into things they can test. That’s incredibly rewarding. So I do that kind of thing too. We talked a little before we started about doing this work in the nonprofit space. What kinds of questions do people come to you with? I call them tells—like in a poker game. Whatever the question is, people show tells. They say things like, “The innovation pipeline is so dull,” or, “It’s empty,” or, “Why are my people so slow? Why can’t we have good ideas? Why does nothing we try work?” So I come in as the person who knows about human behavior and explain why things are as they are, and how to unlock that. Not as a personal coach, though sometimes I do that unofficially within organizations. I help people identify and solve their own problems using human behavior. I’m curious about how you feel things have changed in this regard. I remember encountering your work when the ideas were really new. You introduced them in a very real way in the marketing community. I think I was probably young enough to believe that once we knew better, we’d all shift into a new way of being and operating. But growing older makes you realize that doesn’t happen. But, maybe that’s unfair? No, I think it’s fair. And I think it’s an opportunity to learn. One of the points I’ve made—perhaps unwittingly—is that telling people the answer, revealing the facts, very rarely creates change. And it’s frustrating because that’s what our culture is coded for—particularly in the Anglo-Saxon world: North America, Northern Europe. We believe if you give people information and data, they’ll clearly do the right thing. You see this mistake in politics, healthcare, and policymaking. Just tell people the thing and they’ll do it. Or worse, tell them the thing and give them a reason. That also doesn’t work. Essentially, my creed says that both as individuals and groups—this is a paraphrase of a paraphrase I made of Kahneman, which has now been attributed to Kahneman, which I love—humans are to thinking as cats are to swimming. We can do it if we really have to, but we’d rather not and will do anything to avoid it. So making people think—that hurts. Yes, it really does. That’s if we’re talking about individuals. But individuals exist in networks. And those networks, and the relationships between individuals, are what keep things as they are. That’s what sustains the status quo. And we rarely ask that question: Why are things the way they are? We imagine people are isolated. Give them the right information—about smoking, heart health, whatever—and they’ll change. But we know from things like 12-step programs, despite criticisms of their spiritual side, that there’s some efficacy in the fact that they pull people out of one network and place them into another. People don’t change because of information. They change because they’re removed from the environment that sustains the behavior and given a new one. I was a smoker for years. I worked on smoking cessation programs. I knew exactly how damaging it was. Did that make me stop? No. I knew all the information. We’d step outside meetings and say, “That was hard,” while lighting up. It’s just crazy, right? Yes. So I think the biggest thing is that when you tell people something, it doesn’t create change. You have to help them change. You have to engage. That’s where a lot of my consulting lies now—helping people understand why the network is as it is and how it keeps things in play. Then we work with the network to change it. To what degree did social media affect that? Because you were talking about this stuff way before social media. Did it deliver? We thought it would. I just posted something about what I call “digital medievalism.” We thought the social media revolution—the Cluetrain Manifesto guys, these visionaries—was going to democratize. It would liberate us. It would create a new Enlightenment where facts would matter more than authority. For a time, it felt like that. But it doesn’t anymore. It feels like a hate factory. That’s partly because of how the tech companies designed it. But also because of us. We’re not rational calculators. The scientific method is a cultural artifact—a process that allows us not to defer to authority or preference, but to arrive at something more reliable. We need that in the public space. Social media was supposed to offer that, but it didn’t. Every once in a while, a new platform pops up and promises it will be different and better—Substack, Bluesky, whatever. But absolute freedom creates a torrent of abuse. Group biases kick in quickly. Us vs. them. Selective perception. All of it. That’s where we are now. So social media has actually failed in its dream and is making the world worse, to be honest. What does The Herd Thesis have to say in 2025 about where we go from here? First, we have to accept that this individual-focused idea we have—that individuals are the ultimate unit of human action and value—is just wrong. We are social creatures—first, foremost, and last. Once we accept that, we begin to see that what matters are our connections: how we’re connected, who we’re connected to, what we share, what we do together. That’s the general policy direction. And we need to be aware that when someone draws a line between “us” and “them,” that’s exactly what they’re doing. We need to see it clearly. There’s an example in my next book. A verbal tick that appears in African-American vernacular, Caribbean dialects, and some UK dialects—swapping “ask” for “axe.” I was sitting in a coffee shop and heard a well-dressed, articulate woman say, “I resent that I have to effing axe for everything.” It wasn’t the swearing that struck me. It was “axe.” I realized I had an internal bias—that it signaled lower education, lower class. It made me stop. I went and looked it up. Turns out, it’s entirely legitimate. It appears in Chaucer, in the King James Bible, even in Shakespeare. Calling it an African-American vernacular feature, or a dialect thing, is just patronizing. It’s how we mark boundaries—who’s in and who’s out. We do that kind of thing constantly without realizing it. If we don’t recognize that, we lose our ability to choose. We’ve seen this in the UK recently, with a knife incident, for example. People jump over themselves to assert their side’s narrative. I remember reading The Cluetrain Manifesto too. Didn’t they say that everything was going to become a conversation? “Markets are conversations” was the great phrase. But yes, it’s been weaponized. That’s the dark side of the herd thesis. And we have to accept both the good and the bad. Someone once asked me, “Should we just keep this for the good guys? Should you be selling this to corporations?” No. Everyone needs to know this is how we are. Because it’s not just a tool for corporations or politics to exploit us. It’s something we can use to reconfigure our lives. I have a provocative question, and I’m going to put you on the spot. Here in the States, there’s a lot of conversation about misinformation and disinformation. And there’s something about that framework that seems really, like, incorrect. Can you help me understand why it feels the way it does? Yeah, I think the misinformation, I think, is a really, it’s a really interesting thing. And it’s very separate from disinformation. But misinformation is probably, let’s call it careless sharing of things that are not precisely true, for other purposes—whether it’s to signal to the group that you’re part of it, to point the group towards a particular action, to challenge someone who’s outside of the group, whatever it might be, right? That’s the reasons individuals in the network do it. I think that underneath it is this idea that information is the answer. Which is just not true, right? Yes. Yes. Information is not the answer. Information is part of the answer, but information is always colored and flavored. But it does—and it assumes some world of perfect information. A world where nobody is ever wrong. Where we all agree, implicitly, that we are correct. And you—who are a social being, sharing things to strengthen your relationships—are the one who is supposedly incorrect. Absolutely. It’s not incorrect. It’s just a form of cultural behavior. Yeah. I mean, one of the things I do is, if you turn the sounds down, right, and you go, so what kind of behavior is this that’s going on here? You could do it as god puppets, right, even. And that’s quite—so re-enact a conversation, go, what was going on there? And it’s not because I want people to be psychoanalysts, but to understand that actually this is not about the thing that’s being said. Oh. Can you say more about this? Yeah. So very often—so there’s a great guy, Paul Watzlawick, Austrian-American. I think he was a psychoanalyst. And he wrote an almost impenetrable book back in the ’60s called The Pragmatics of Human Communication. I don’t know if you know it. Yeah, I do. Okay, so Watzlawick—and I waded through it—but there’s a chunk of it which is really valuable, right? When he says there are broadly two kinds of human communication. There’s what he called digital, which is a bit confusing for us nowadays, but he was in the ’60s, which is information-based stuff. So I’m transferring information from me to you. That’s a sort of standard kind of thing that we understand. It’s all very powerful and strong in our culture, that idea. And he said there’s another bit, another kind of communication, which he calls phatic—P-H-A-T-I-C, phatic. And that’s about the relationship between you and me. And I think that’s the bit we ignore because you can’t easily digitize it. You can’t easily quantify it. And it doesn’t look like information in any way. So it can’t be important. So our culture screens that out. But that is much more important than you think. I do a thing—and if you see this on my website—I do a talk about how communication really works. And the first bit of it is me standing on stage for two and a half minutes not saying anything. And the audience feels really uncomfortable. And they then read into me and my standing there all kinds of s**t. So, I mean, the guy who—Morty, who’s one of—who’s the UK’s leading audience, TV audience research guy. He’s an amazing dude. I looked at my watch and Morty said out loud to the crowd, he says, it’s like you were the teacher telling us off because we were late back from lunch. Oh, wow. I was just looking at my watch, to be honest, to check what time it was, how long I’d been standing there. So it’s no big deal. I wasn’t saying anything, but they heard me. Because the relational stuff is there. They picked up—imagine the information there, which is a whole other thing. We need to think about the audience first. But I think that split between digital and phatic is really, really, really important. So this is part of the information-heavy world. And I think we know enough about that. It fits neatly with our engineering, factory mindset that has dominated—has built the British century and now the American century. And maybe the Chinese one after that. But information is not all of what it is to be human. It’s only a very small part. And our interaction with each other and our ability to decide things is not based on information. And that’s part of why we’re brilliant. So ignoring this huge chunk is, I think, a mistake. There’s something a little torturous about being, I guess, feeling attached to the institutions that I’m attached to, that they are very often run by people who are incapable of accepting this reality. And they really operate in the information space. And I think maybe a generation before it was OK to kind of say, hey, listen, there’s the commercial world out there. They get to do their marketing stuff. But we’re doing the grown-up—we’re doing the grown-up official stuff up here. So we deal in information and facts and that stuff. That’s been my experience where I feel like they very often—I’ve been—we talked about this before—I’ve been sort of the marketing guy with activist organizations who don’t want to accept responsibility for communicating into an environment, into culture, basically. How do you communicate with them? Does my diagnosis feel accurate to your experience? Yeah, no, I think that rings a lot of bells for me. So here’s an example. I love the activist mentality because you want to do something rather than just talk about it. And part of what motivates the feedback loop that motivates that is that people talk about what we’ve done. And some of the guys go, yeah, right on. And sometimes you upset your mother-in-law. That’s what you’re trying to do, right? And those stout patrons of the local church will be horrified by what you’ve done. That’s a buzz for you, right? And you as a group of people, look what we’ve done. We’ve upset the past. So yeah, let’s accept that action is a good thing and the feedback on that is really good. But what’s hard is that if you think from your—whether you’re corporate or you’re an activist organization—if you think about you being responsible for how the world is, you’re being unrealistic. The world is as it is because of things outside, people outside, relationships outside. You need to work with and twist those relationships in order to make the thing happen. You need to be interested in that to start with. But mostly people in activist organizations are interested in the debate about, would this be the best way to say it? Or would this be the priority we should really go for? Should it be solar over wind? And if so, how do we fund that? We think it’s the perfect way to do it. It’s just irrelevant, honestly. It’s what them out there think. How can you unpick it for them? How can you help them want to do this, do whatever it is? How do you make them want to embrace this? How do you help them to put it in their hands to make change? I am curious about—I remember you had the purpose idea, right? In these conversations and talking about two things, brand and then research and the implication. So you had the purpose idea. When did you discover brand? How do you feel about that word in 2025? Well, let’s see. I think it’s just heavily overblown, like a lot of things in the world of marketing. I suggested it originally as one way to think about how you might pull a community of people inside or outside the organisation together to point in the same direction. That’s what it was, right? Also, that I recognise that most jobs are what the late David Graeber called b******t jobs. Most people really just carrying on because it’s the paycheck and I’ve got kids in school and I’ve got to make the monthly rent or whatever, my mortgage, you know. It’s not that this is the meaning of their lives. Give people what the Lord John Browne, who used to run BP, used to call—and I worked with him—the volunteer margin. Give them that extra bit of something if they’re inside the organisation to believe in. Equally, if you look outside the organisation, people are desperate for meaning, as my old buddy Hugh MacLeod from Gapingvoid famously scribbled. They’re desperate for meaning and a sense in their lives and a sense that somebody has a cause that they can be part of or is aligned with their—you know, so they’re desperate for that. So use it if it’s relevant. And that’s the kicker, right? Because it’s mostly not. You have to choose, is this the time to do this or not? Is this where you’re going to bet the farm or not? Now, when the brilliant Silvia Lagnado and the team at Ogilvy London and Frankfurt reinvented Dove and the Real Beauty campaign way back—20 years ago now—that was an amazingly brave thing. And they navigated both Ogilvy’s internal barriers and the external barriers at Unilever, brilliantly. There was an extraordinary thing. They used purpose there because the brief was, unless you can make this a $2 billion brand—that’s Silvia’s brief—unless you can make it a $2 billion brand, we’re going to sell it. Oh, wow. So how can you make it a $2 billion brand? They looked around the landscape and realized—so noisy, hard to tell them apart, blah, blah, blah. And then looked over the other side to consumers, and basically young women felt awful about their bodies because of the way the beauty industry was doing and because of the way they were dealing with each other. So that’s the opportunity. So we can put purpose in there. It also—then you do it. So it’s appropriate, right? It’s relevant. It’s timely. But if everyone does purpose, then it’s just nonsense. And very quickly, the world sees through it. Yes. And it becomes a half-hearted thing. We’re in the first week of November here in the UK, and there’s charity for men’s health. Movember is big here. I don’t know if it is where you are. But men stop drinking and grow a ‘tache for the month of November. And they’re not allowed to grow a beard. You have to have a ‘tache only. I mean, particularly embarrassing. That’s the point. Now that’s something nice to be part of, right? It’s kind of nice to be part of that. But you don’t want it every day, most people. It’s quite hard for most people to do it most of the time. Even people who work in things like crisis aid or on the front line of things like domestic violence or homelessness or whatever—wherever they are in the world—they can’t live that all the time. They have to have other things in their lives, otherwise they burn up. And some people manage it better than others, but you can’t be the only thing. Lots of people have things that matter to them that aren’t their purpose. I think it’s just overblown and oversold. Can I just say, if you have a chance though, can I just put this up? This is the bandana that my dog is wearing through November. For Cancer Research UK, we’re walking 60 miles together in this month to raise money on cancer research because cancer is something that affected my life and my family’s life and many friends. Now, that’s a purpose for a small part of my life. If my life was dedicated to cancer, I wouldn’t be able to deal with it. I’m not an oncologist. You know there’s that terrible thing amongst surgeons and doctors and healthcare workers generally who see death regularly. They just have this strange dissociation from it. Sometimes it’s gallows humour and sometimes it’s just sick. But they have to survive because that can’t be it. So we can’t have a purpose all the time. In business and in behaviour change, it’s useful sometimes. But not for everything all the time. Yeah, I realise that my question—because I remember the purpose ideas animating brand in a way that was really interesting to me—that my question associated it with the madness around social mission and all the confusion the past 15 years. And that wasn’t my intent at all with the question. No, no, nor me. Okay. But do you understand where I’m coming— Yeah, yeah, no, totally. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because I’ve—yeah, because—and so, what do I want to ask now? Yeah, it just felt like—was that a conversation that happened a lot? How did you feel over the past several years? I just—it’s just a bit—maybe I’m being oversensitive. No, no, no, I think it’s fair. I think we need to own up to our mistakes. And I think that I allowed myself to be misunderstood, and the other people took it too seriously. It’s like, you know, that if someone comes to you with a problem, do you give them the same solution every time? I mean, for me, that’d be tedious, right? Yeah. I’ve got a correlate with that, which might lead us in a slightly different place, which is I’m obsessed with triage at the moment. Yeah, tell me. Asking what kind of problem this is so that you can solve it better. And I find myself repeatedly saying to my clients, don’t be House. Don’t try to be House. You know, the guy in the - the Hugh Laurie character. Don’t be House. House deals with the 0.01% of cases that no one else can solve. The rest of the team very rapidly triage and say, it’s this kind of problem. Therefore, this is the treatment path. Right. And they have quite a lot of types of problem they can identify, right? Because they’re really good. We should be doing that when we’re looking at an activist organization, a behaviour change community conversation, or whether it’s in corporations generally. I think we should be saying what kind of problem is this? It’s one of the things that in my change consulting workshops we focus a lot on. And I’ve even created an acronym for it: Why are things as they are? WATATA. Nobody spends any time bothering to do that. Why are things as they are? Explore that. Spend time triaging, digging around, triaging. So yeah, oh, things are as they are because of that. Allows us to say we’ve seen that before over here in this other situation. And what we did there, what we learned from doing that was this. Okay, so let’s take that learning and apply back here. Instead, we go, this is a problem that needs a House-type genius to solve. No, it doesn’t. It needs smart thinking, triaging, and accessing the knowledge of the rest of humanity, to be honest, but there we are. We have just a few minutes left, and I’m wondering what would you want people to know about your work? Or what does the herd thesis ask of leaders, of marketers, of people wanting to make change? So one of the interesting—one thing I think leaders need to think about, or anyone who wants to lead change, I think is true, is recognize that change—as status, the status quo—is a product of us. It’s a team game. It’s not about heroic individuals, which is the way the story always goes, right? After the fact we say, and I did this, and I did that, and all the case studies go, and then the insights team discovered this bit, or then the strategic planners did this, or then the blah, blah, blah, and you go, no, it’s not that. It’s us. We together solve these problems. We together make this happen. We together keep things as they are, because that’s sometimes a really good objective, right? How do we manage this so that we don’t lose? That’s a good way. But we do it together. We come to that conclusion, and then we execute it together. So I think that’s the first thing, is to recognize that whether it’s change or status, both are team games, and you as a leader there are part of the team. It’s not you. And it not being about you is, I think, really kind of an interesting thing for a leader to ponder. The second thing I think that—and we haven’t talked much about the time thing in this—but I think the other thing that leaders need to start to do is to help organizations prototype the future repeatedly. Not make it like something you do once a year on the off-site or allocate an innovation team or give McKinsey a bunch of hundred thousand dollars or a hundred million dollars or something. You need to do it yourself. You need to constantly be going, where are the things that could be better in this organization or outside in its customers or its end consumers? Where are the things that we might solve for the problems they’ve got? Constantly going, would that make a difference? Would that make a difference? Would that make a difference? Constantly doing that, because that is the way to prepare yourself for stuff—opportunities that come. And opportunities will come that you don’t imagine. You need to get ready for them rather than predict them and sort of eagle-eyed, you know, like one of those—remember from the old, these are those ’80s Superman-type movies—there’d be a guided missile that went upstream. Literally to the target. Really? That’s not how you get ready for the future. You don’t try and predict it. You identify many possible things and then prepare for it. Work out what you have to do. So I think that future leadership is a key part of leadership. It’s not an option. It’s not an option. Things keep changing really quickly and they will not change any more slowly and will not become any less difficult to deal with. So you have to prepare. I tell an anecdote to just land this one. Jude Bellingham, who plays for Real Madrid, an English soccer player—in the England team, always really mediocre at soccer tournaments—you’d think they’d be better, but no. And they’re about to be kicked out by Slovakia, the mighty Slovakia. It was three years ago now in the Euros. And in the 96th minute—so six minutes into overtime—England were one nil down, and a ball came across, frantic, and Bellingham executed a perfect overhead cycle, bicycle kick. Kicked the ball over his own head into the top corner, right? Amazing. A miracle. Truth is, that was not the first time he tried that in his life. He’d practiced for that scenario. Not precisely that—as in England would be about to go out of a tournament—but that situation: ball comes to him in that position, that he could do that. And that’s what elite sports people do. They prepare for lots of different scenarios. And that’s what real—that real excellence in elite sport is actually about. It’s preparing so you don’t have to think. If you have an organization, it takes forever for the organization to do anything. You can’t just press the button in the CEO’s office and go, right, here we go. We’re doing this. That’s the new strategy. Executing takes forever. So get the organization executing before it needs to. And some of those—it’s like bets, right? Across a horse race. You need to bet on them all. Where you put your money will tell you whether you make any money out of it ahead of the day. And you go, okay, this isn’t working. So let’s rip it out of there and put that money over here, which seems to be working. And now we need something in to solve this kind of—have anyone got anything? Let’s try that then. And you need to do that all the time. So be a future-forward leader and it will allow you to deal with the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, as somebody once wrote. That’s the stuff that we—that’s the stuff that leaders need to do. And I’ve got a third thing that’s really, that’s really important for everyone to remember: that in the end, it’s just people. Numbers and technology and infrastructure and all of that are all great, but they’re all distractions from the basic difficult bit, which is people. Humans are extraordinary, but our world, our culture, and our business culture—and the leadership that we’ve trained through business schools and so on, whether it’s in marketing or in general management—is really good at engineering, information, technology. It’s really bad at humans. And I don’t mean get the HR department out. I mean humans—how humans work. How do you interact with each other? How do you get a group of people to do something? How do you understand what matters to them? And how do you help the team then to deliver against that stuff? Again and again and again. That’s really hard because we’re not trained for it. The good thing is, we’re brilliant at it as a species. So let’s go back to that stuff. I’d like to cut business school curricula in half and put half of it on the human stuff. My next question was going to be about—if you have time—I remember I always tell this story. I’m sure you know Grant McCracken. Oh, I know Grant very well. Yeah, yeah. I remember he wrote that book, Chief Culture Officer, and I remember him privately telling me this. I say it out loud all the time, so please forgive me, Grant. But him saying that the corporation—in the way that he uses that term—saw that title and they see the word culture and they think of themselves. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. And so there’s a narcissism within the corporation that makes it impossible to see the culture outside, which is what you’re always pointing everybody at. How do you—if somebody, so a leader says, hey, I hear everything you’re saying, but how do I learn about culture? How do I go out there in order to get the information I need in order to prototype the future? What kinds of guidance? So there are three or four things that we can do—and I’m not going to mention all our fabulous friends and colleagues in the insights world, particularly. You know, they are great, right? But I’m not going to talk about particular people, and they don’t get the respect that they deserve, I think, in corporations, and that’s a real problem. One. Now, one thing I do is I teach people to actually meet face-to-face in the real world with their customers. And it sounds really simple. I call it a buddy interview. Go speak to people. Go stand there. Stand there in the mall. If it’s a, you know, if it’s a healthcare intermediary, like a healthcare professional, go and meet the healthcare professional. Just ask them about what matters to them, what’s in their head, what’s going on for them. Not about you—about them. And just get that. Then, second thing—and this is to do with all interactions with people—listen really carefully to the words. And note them. We’ll come back to the words in a moment, but also note the body language. That’s—you know Dave, is it Dave McCaughan? The great Australian researcher, and I’m sure a qualitative researcher. I’m sure you’ve come across him. He’s a fantastic guy. He once told me that he, when he was a junior qualitative researcher doing focus groups across Australia, he was told, look at people’s feet. Look at the feet. Look at the feet. Because the feet tell you so much about what’s really going on. What is it like to be that person? We have this amazing ability to be imaginatively empathetic. Step into their shoes. How do they feel the world? Listen to that stuff. Watch it. Feel it. And I will say, when I was running ad agencies, I’d say to my teams, find something to like about our client and their customers. Find something—just something. Because it’s too easy to be cynical and push them away. Find something. What do you like about those guys? What is it that you really get that touches you? Hold on to that. Now use that as a sort of breakthrough point into the rest of their world. There are ways of formally listening to the language, but write down the words that people use. Jill Arou, who’s a brilliant practitioner in the UK, has written a book called How We Do Things Around Here. And it’s just won a couple of business prizes in the UK—business book prizes. The Way We Do Things Around Here. And I first worked with her years ago when she was doing great stuff with American Express. The words—she says there are three buckets. The words we use about us in here, and how we do what we do around here, reveal certain assumptions. The way we talk about the words we use and the way we talk about them out there—our customers—reveal an awful lot of assumptions we have about them. And then the way we talk about the way we interact with those people out there reveals an awful lot of assumptions. And that’s just a start point. But if you listen really carefully—which you, as a great qualitative, you get this, right? Listen. Why is that a word? Why is that word? That’s really weird that you should be saying that. Why should you be so on edge? When I say the word customer, what’s that? What’s that about? Tell me about that. That’s really interesting. So you don’t have to be an expert, like, in the language before you start. But the buddy interview—go meet people. Have scheduled time with buddies. Make sure that all of your executive have buddies they go and speak to all the time. It’s not a replacement for quantitative research, but it helps you with your empathetic imagination. So that’s that. And I think the other thing is, bake in feedback really early on. So I do these rapid innovation streaks. Let’s imagine it takes three days. And at the end of three days, a team of 12 people have created six ideas to solve existing problems in the business and prototype them, right? They’ve done that by very early on checking their thinking and their understanding with a buddy in the audience. Everybody should be doing that all of the time. And those might take money out of our market research industry, but I don’t care. Because I think it’s crucial that we take people away from the corporation or the activist community and go, who are the people? And what’s their world like? And how do I make their world work to get the change I want to see? So that’s that. And I think finally on this subject is—I think the—well, excuse me. Kate, what’s that audio? Sorry, that’s my construction guy. Let me—sorry, let me say that again. The final thing is that we need to remember it’s not about us, and it’s not about the thing. It really isn’t. There’s—I’m sure you know—the notion of a social object, which became quite interesting in the early days of the social web. And Malinowski—I think he was Polish—anthropologist, sociologist, did work in Oceania, so the Southern Pacific around the ’20s, I think it was. And he observed that the objects in the cultures he came across that were most prized were not prized because of their scarcity or because of the scarcity or value of the ingredients—their constituent parts—but by the way they were given away. You know, it was called the Kula ring, was what he—this is an amulet essentially. And he watched that go around. He monitored that, described that. And I think that’s really important—that many of the things that we think are most valuable and most important, many of the things that shape most of our lives, are valuable not because they’re valuable in themselves or because they’re scarce. It’s because of how they make us—allow us—to interact with other people. So it’s not about us, and it’s not about the information. It’s not about the thing. It’s about each other. Beautiful. Thank you so much for accepting the invitation. It was very generous, and thank you so much. You’re welcome. Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe [https://thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

Graham Booth on Research & Creative

Graham Booth [https://www.linkedin.com/in/grahambooth/] is a brand strategy and communications consultant and founder of Movement, a UK consultancy established in 1997. He helps clients develop effective brand positioning and advertising through qualitative research. His clients include Coca-Cola, Aviva, Tesco, Innocent, and Paddy Power. His research has contributed to multiple IPA Effies award-winning campaigns. So, I know that you know this, but I start all these conversations with the same question, which I borrow from a friend of mine who helps people tell their story. When I learned this question, I just stole it, because it’s a really big question, and it’s a beautiful way to start the conversation. But because it’s so big, I kind of over-explain it the way I’m doing now. So before I ask it, I want you to know that you’re in total control, and you can answer—or not answer—any way that you want to. And the question is: Where do you come from? Well, it is a great question, Peter. And it’s kind of a classic qualitative question, isn’t it? Because it’s not just about the answer. It’s about how the person who’s answering the question interprets the question, because it is so open to interpretation. My answer, I guess, is not a geographical one. I was born in South London, in the suburbs of South London. It’s pretty much like the suburbs anywhere—it could be the suburbs of Birmingham, could be the suburbs of Leeds, suburbs of Manchester. You know, it was classically bland, homogeneous, even more so than it would be now. And I’ve always struggled with working out actually where I do come from, in geographic terms, because I’m much more interested in the sensibility and the culture and those aspects of things. So really, when I think about where I come from, it’s more kind of psychological, I suppose. Maybe that sounds a bit pretentious—I don’t mean it to—but more of a sort of psychological or personality background. Because I think how “where you come from” is significant to talk about now is in terms of how that impacts how you see the world and interact with people and so on. And, in relation to what we’re talking about, also to your practice as well. So for me—I’m buffing on too much, meandering—for me, I guess where I come from is that I’m a maker. Roy Langmaid—I don’t know if you know the name—Roy Langmaid was one of the qualitative research directs in the UK, still is, God bless him. But, you know, we met each other a number of times, and I did a course with him one time, and through various exercises we’d been doing, he identified me as a sense maker. And that kind of distilled it for me. I thought, “You know what? You’re absolutely right.” And it put a lot of things into place. And essentially, if I think about my journey, I started off making things. When I was a kid, I used to construct models of stuff. But also I would make stuff from scratch. I’d make stuff from timber, from matchsticks and cardboard boxes, just leftovers, all kinds of things. And I would construct houses and construct Formula One cars and all this kind of thing. I was intrinsically interested in how you can put things together to make something coherent. I thought, “You know what? You’re absolutely right.” And it put a lot of things into place. And essentially, if I think about my journey, I started off making things. When I was a kid, I used to construct models of stuff. But also I would make stuff from scratch. I’d make stuff from timber, from matchsticks and cardboard boxes, just leftovers, all kinds of things. I would construct houses and construct Formula One cars and all this kind of thing. I was intrinsically interested in how you can put things together to make something coherent. And I did that passionately as a child, through to when I was about 14. And then, bizarrely, my best subject at school was design—creative design. And I absolutely loved it. I look back on my schoolbooks now from when I was 13, 14, and I go, “My God, that’s just ridiculous.” But in my school, you couldn’t do creative design. They constructed the timetable in such a way that you couldn’t do creative design at the same time as doing academic subjects. So because I was academic, I couldn’t pursue design technology or creative design between the ages of 14 and 16. When I took exams—when you’re 16, we have a tranche of exams that decide whether you stay at school or whatever—I had to do geography and history rather than design and technology. And, you know, it didn’t do me any harm. At the end of the day, I read geography at Oxford, so it kind of worked out fair enough. But I think what really happened, when I reflect upon it, is I transitioned from making with my hands—physical making—to intellectual making. And in a way, there’s absolutely a parallel. I think the two things absolutely overlap, which is trying to make sense of pieces, of loads and loads of stuff, which you’ve got to put together and make sense of and make shapes of. So as a sense maker, I transitioned from doing that physically with my hands to doing it mentally, intellectually, with my head. So I think I’m still a maker. But I now make things in my head, because at the end of the day, that is what so much of what we did—and certainly what I do in qualitative research—is all about. You’ve just got this sea of data, and you’ve got to actually try and find the structure. Where’s the dynamism? Where’s the structure? Where’s the shape? How do we put it all together? How do we make something coherent that makes sense, that other people can then appreciate and understand? So it’s a sort of intellectual version of what I used to do physically as a child, in a weird kind of way. And interestingly enough, I sort of rediscovered this a year or two ago when I got back to photography, which is something that I’m very, very keen on. I did my first exhibition—it’s not like they’re grand exhibitions, I’m not doing stuff at Tate Britain or anything—but small exhibitions. And I’ve done three now. One of the brilliant things about when you display your work is you get to talk to people about it. And that’s really fascinating, because when you do something intuitively—as I think people who have a bit of a creative bent do—I never really analyzed it. But when people come and look at your work and they start talking to you about it, you start having to think about it. Okay, so why does that look like that? Why is it abstract reality? So it’s essentially mostly photographs of architecture, photographs of landscapes, and so on. What I do is I take a picture, and I know that in that picture is something interesting. I don’t quite know what it is, but there’s something more than just what I’m seeing. Elliott Erwitt, who’s a great American photographer, said words to the effect of: The point of photography is that you see the same thing as everybody else, but you see something different. It’s actually a brilliant term for what we do in qualitative research, as well as what he did in photography. And I completely identify with that, because what I do is I get it on my computer screen, and I play with it. I recrop it, I move the image around, and so on, until eventually I find—there it is. There’s what I was looking for. I knew it was there somewhere. I’ve now found it—bang. And there it is. So you found the pattern in the data. You found the pattern in the pixels. So it was then actually as a consequence of that that I wrote a piece for the Association for Qualitative Research over here, which I’m a member of, which actually drew the parallel between my photographic practice and my professional practice in qualitative research. And it occurred to me that maybe I’m not alone. Maybe there are other people, not just in qualitative research, but actually in all kinds of fields of business, who maybe, when you reflect upon it, can see a relationship between a personal passion and what they do for work—assuming they enjoy their work. So that parallel was really interesting. So at the end of the day, a sense maker. A sense maker of all of that stuff that people tell me in the interviews, you know, and all those pixels that appear when I put it up on the screen. I’m trying to work out what that picture’s about. So I guess that’s where I come from. Oh, it’s beautiful. I mean, I have so many things that I want to ask about. First, in particular, just to call out the fact that I don’t know how I encountered Roy Langmaid, but I did. And I really became a fan and reached out to him. We had an exchange, actually, I think, over the pandemic. I’ve invited him here for a conversation, but it just hasn’t worked out. So I’m a massive admirer of Roy. I think, in a way, I was—often I say that I was raised by wolves here in the States and then sort of reached back, I think, through my mentor and other people back to planning and research and then creative development, qualitative. So I have a lot of love for Roy Langmaid and the way that he talks about qualitative. So the idea that he called you a sense maker, I feel the significance of that. That sounds pretty good. Yeah, no, I mean, I should wear it. I should wear it on my T-shirt. I’m proud of that. He and Wendy Gordon are sort of seminal figures in qualitative research over here. In Wendy’s case, she certainly actually wrote the book. So I was so, so chuffed with that. And it touches on all kinds of—because also he’s a psychologist and I think psychotherapy as well, which is also another part of where I’m from. Because one of the things that really interested me, coming from that very flat background in the suburbs, was then I went to university and just encountered this other world. I was a state school educated kid, right? And I went to Oxford and in those days, 70% of the intake there was from private schools. So their parents had paid for them to be educated. A lot of them had been to boarding school. And I was just from a state day school in South London. I was the only one from my school to go to Oxford. So all of a sudden you’re there, you’re surrounded by all these people who come from a completely different background to you. That was extraordinary. I think that’s another aspect of it: difference, encountering difference. So coming from that very homogeneous background, encountering difference and going, “My God, actually my background isn’t everybody’s background. My life isn’t everybody’s background.” And then you compound that by going with your friends to their home for the weekends—you find yourself having dinner with their parents. And all of a sudden, the reason why you thought, “Why is Mike like that? Why does he do that?” Or, “Harry, why is he such a pain?” And then you see them with their parents and it all falls into place. And that, again, was a really, really subtle experience. So not only appreciating difference—because I think I’ve always had a curious mind, and that sort of dovetails with the whole sense maker thing—but then to actually see how different people’s backgrounds impact them as adults as well, and how varied and diverse people can be in those terms, was great. And that, I think, again, is something I just kind of carried forward into my practice—just a real curiosity. Again, it’s sensemaking. Why? Why are they like that? Why do they feel that? Why are they responding to this idea in the way that they responded? Why do they feel about the brand in that way? All of these things kind of dovetail and all overlap and it all kind of makes sense together, I think. Again, it’s sensemaking. Why? Why are they like that? Why do they feel that? Why are they responding to this idea in the way that they responded? Why do they feel about the brand in that way? All of these things kind of dovetail and all overlap and it all kind of makes sense together, I think. Do you have a recollection of what you wanted to be? You’ve talked about it a little bit, but as a boy, what did you want to be when you grew up? I wanted to be an architect. Somebody gave me—one of my family, I don’t know, they must’ve seen something—they gave me a book, I think called Modern Buildings, as simple as that, when I was about 14. And it featured the work of Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, several wonderful modern architects. And so when I look back at my sketchbooks now, I can see I was drawing extraordinary sort of three-dimensional house designs and stuff like that, which is just completely ridiculous. I wanted to be an architect, but again, I was taken away from that because—even though it wasn’t working with your hands—it was still drawing. You don’t really draw. You want to be a lawyer, you want to be an accountant, you want to be a medic. I came from a very aspiring, low middle-class family. So, basically, architects—they draw, don’t they? You don’t want to do that. You want to get a proper professional job. In retrospect, of course, I would have realized that architecture is a pretty professional job—you know, a mere seven years’ training. It’s pretty credible. But that was a dream that was eventually realized, because about five or six years ago, we eventually did manage to get ourselves—we designed, with an architect—a low energy house in the UK, which we moved into. So that was it. Finally got there, through a very sort of contorted route, finally got to that destination. So yeah, that’s what I wanted to do. Again, it all feeds into the same thing. It’s about creating stuff from pieces and creating something that is coherent and makes sense. So catch us up. Tell me—where are you now, and what do you do for work? How do you talk about what you do? Okay. So I started out in advertising. I worked in advertising agencies for the first six years. First three years were at Leo Burnett, as a matter of fact, in London. Then I worked at one of the hot creative agencies that grew up at the same time as BBH—BBH is still around, but GGT, where I was, isn’t. Dave Trott was a really seminal figure in my experience, and we might touch on that later on. But after about six years, the bit that really interested me was what people did with ideas. So I was the guy—I was an account handler, you know, a bag carrier for my sins. I was the guy who had to go and sit behind the glass with the clients and watch the groups. And when Rob, 10 minutes or half an hour into group seven, started slagging off the creative idea he was being presented with, I was like, “Well, you know, I think what Rob actually means is...”—busy trying to calm the client down and sell the idea. Because Dave Trott’s thing was always, “Don’t come back to the office if you haven’t sold the creative work.” That’s what he said to the account handlers. So anyway, that was the bit that really interested me. I stepped out after six years because that was the thing that interested me, and went straight into research. Within three years, I was running my own business in partnership with someone. We did that for 10 years. Then I stepped away from that partnership, set up my own business—there were about seven or eight of us. About six years ago, I went freelance. And it’s been fantastic. I mean, of course, it’s a roller coaster ride. But generally speaking, absolutely wonderful, wonderful work, fabulous clients. You get the clients you deserve. And therefore, I’m very, very glad that I deserve those clients, because my relationships with my clients are so, so good. Essentially, my work broadly splits into two. I do brand development and creative development. A lot of my work is ad development, though I’m increasingly stepping back from calling it ad development, since advertising is rapidly becoming the “A word.” I think the emphasis is on creative elements. And genuinely, I do creative development. It’s not just advertising—it is developing creative ideas, but also packaging design, pack graphics. Recently I did some work for a dog food business on pack graphics, also corporate identity—logos, if you like—and I’ve done some of that work for major businesses. So there’s that creative development side, which is about half of it. And then the other half is strategy development—principally, positioning development. And of course, the two are incredibly closely linked, needless to say. Quite often, it’ll be a project where I’ll do the strategy development and then we’ll move on to the creative development as well. In some cases, like this big international project I did last year, it was a two-stage project. It was a positioning exercise for an international schools network, as a matter of fact, who’ve got offices in America, Mexico, Spain, India, the United Arab Emirates, Malaysia. They had a guy who became their marketing director who had worked as a marketing director at Diageo. So he knew his onions. He got me involved via the non-exec there, who I’ve known for a very long time from working on Coca-Cola. We did a positioning project internationally there, and then coming out of that we did the brand identity development. It had a huge impact on them. It’s been incredibly positive. So there’s an absolute process. If you’re going to do good creative development work, you need to get strategy. But equally, if you’re going to do good strategy work, you need to understand creative as well—because you need to understand how that can manifest and inspire great ideas. Because there are all kinds of really pedestrian brand propositions and brand strategy. Some of the stuff I see from some of the briefs—I say, “Oh my God, really? It’s just embarrassing.” Can you say more about that? About the relationship, the necessity that these things work together in that way? That’s really—it’s probably more obvious if you’re doing creative development that you need to understand strategy. One of the things I always say when I’m doing creative development—I work very closely with agencies. Unusually, because of my advertising agency background, they tend to trust me. Because, of course, research is notorious for, you know, “kill your creative baby at birth,” and creatives classically hate it. So I make a point of trying to engage the creative team in the research process: talk about the idea, ensure they’re there at the debrief, and so on. I really understand the creative idea. But another part of that is also saying: tell me about the strategy. What’s the strategic basis of this? Not just the marketing context, but how have you arrived at the proposition? Did you explore other areas? Why do you think this idea is going to have cut-through? Then what I always do is find a way—even towards the end of my focus groups, for example—to put the strategy in front of the consumer. Obviously not as an advertising agency strategy statement, but just as, “Funny enough, I was talking to the people who came up with this idea, and they told me what their intention is behind it. Because what they feel is that people feel so-and-so... So what they’re trying to do is...” Then I ask, “How do you feel about that?” And they tell me how they feel. Then I say, “Okay, how does that sort of fit with the advertising we’ve been talking about?” So what you’re doing is you’re doing a sense check against this stake in the ground—this is what this thing is supposed to be doing. One of the things that helps you do is work out if you’ve got issues with the idea, and on what level those issues exist. Is it the strategic foundation that’s flawed? Is it that the creative idea doesn’t deliver the strategy effectively? Or is it just executional? That’s a really critical thing in creative development research: to be able to identify at what level the issues arise, so you can actually, with your diagnostics, say, “Okay, this is what you need to address going forward.” Flipping it the other way, I’ve done lots of strategy development work. And you can arrive at a strategy that’s really pedestrian, that inspires nobody. Or you can come to a place that comes at it from an angle. What I’m really into, with both creative work and strategy work, is coming at it laterally—from the unexpected place—so that people go, “Oh, okay.” One of the things I’ve always said is that strategy should be something that I should be able to sit with my mate in the pub—or you should be able to go have a coffee with a friend—and when they say, “Oh, all right, what’d you get that for?” you can answer them. Human beings position things with each other all the time. In almost every interaction we have, we naturally position things without realizing it. And what you need is a position for your brand that you can say, and it doesn’t sound like it’s from Planet Marketing—it sounds like a genuine thing. You need to approach strategy and brand propositions, for me, as laterally as you do creative ideas. Because at the end of the day, yes, insight can be very powerful. You can find that insight and turn it your particular way, but you’ve got to find an angle on it. Because a lot of stuff is the same—you’ve got to be imaginative about strategy in the same way as you are about creative. Sorry, I’m buffing on too much about that. But I think that’s why, when you’re doing strategy development stuff, I’m just trying to push the envelope as much as possible. In fact, I’ll often do idea generation sessions with clients as well. So I won’t just do the strategy development research—I’ll actually help develop propositions too. All the time, I’m looking to develop stuff that’s a little bit edgy, that’s going to push the edges of things, to put into the research. Because it’s a bit of a case of: rubbish in, rubbish out. You’ve got to have some really good, stimulating stuff to take into the research. What do you love about it? Where’s the joy in it? Oh my God. Well, fortunately, I do love the work. I mean, I’ve been doing it for a very long time. And I really, really do love the work. I love working with creative people. I love creative ideas. I love all that stuff. But I think what I really love about it—what the real joy for me is—is talking to real people. It’s so easy in the world of advertising. We used to produce our ads in Soho, in the West End of London—an ivory tower. And then I’m off in some suburb in Birmingham, sitting in somebody’s front room, listening to people talk about it. It’s a different world. You’ve got to get out of your bubble. I actually regard it as a massive privilege to talk to ordinary people day in and day out, week after week. In my peer group, that’s pretty unusual. I’m the awkward bugger who, at a dinner party, when people start going, “Well, you know, people nowadays do blah, blah, blah,” I go, “Well, actually, I’m not entirely sure that’s right, because I’ve talked to people. And it’s not quite like that.” Most people go, “Whoa,” because most people don’t talk to ordinary people most of the time. Maybe they do their cleaning or drop their kids off at the babysitter, but they don’t actually listen. And it’s a real privilege, because it just takes the scales from your eyes. You can’t live in the bubble anymore. You can’t live in the echo chamber, because you know how real people live. And for me—as a privileged, middle-class, middle-aged male—I’m very aware of my privilege, to actually get out there all the time and talk to ordinary people. That’s a privilege. And of course, the way the world is heading, people are getting more and more separated, and less and less aware of the reality of other people’s lives. So it’s incredibly important. I’m very, very grateful for it. And I’ve learned an awful lot. Because one of the interesting things, you know, when you’re doing stuff—on baked beans, or on organic food, or Diet Coke—you’re incidentally learning stuff about people’s lives and lifestyles and values that is absolutely fascinating. So I think that’s what I love about it. I carry that with me. And yeah, I’m the guy who really annoys your guests at your dinner party. Well, you know, I think we share that. I think you’ve probably put in many more hours than I have, but I’m very aware of the fact that I’ve spent more time than the average person in conversation with everyday people, and how unique a point of view that is. And how different. I feel very grateful. I mean, I walked into a brand consultancy because I loved TV, and they put me in front of people and told me to ask them questions. And it made me a different kind of person just by virtue of having to do that kind of conversation with people. Unbelievably, I really feel grateful for that. And I love that you’re calling attention to it. How do you feel about it? Can you tell me more about what it’s done to you, to be a person who’s listened and asked as much? That’s a really good question. The danger is, I have to try to avoid being too angry. Not angry with the people I talk to, but angry with how people talk about the people I talk to. I’ll give you an example. You doubtless know Brexit—when we voted to come out of the European Union in 2016. Absolute catastrophic mistake. Something that will be the biggest act of self-harm in national history. I’ve heard it called—100% correct—complete lunacy. We shan’t get into the reasons why it took place. That’s a whole other discussion. But I’ll give you an example. I was actually training—doing my psychotherapy training, as a matter of fact—and I was going into London for one of my sessions. It was the day after the results had come in. Me and loads of people, of course, were just reeling from this horror that we were going to be exiting Europe. I could hear, just along the train carriage, somebody talking about it. Quite a posh guy. He was really angry about it. And I heard him say, “The thing is, these people shouldn’t be given the vote.” I thought to myself: do you know what? The reason they voted as they did is because of people like you—who have the arrogance and the ignorance to imagine these people are stupid and shouldn’t be allowed to vote. Actually, if you spend time with them, you realize they’re not. Very early on, one of the early projects I worked on was with a very mass market group of consumers. One of the things I noticed in the groups was how they struggled to articulate their feelings about things. This guy on the train would have thought, “See how stupid they are.” They’re not stupid, mate. The fact that they don’t have the language or the confidence to express their feelings, or maybe the verbal skills to articulate how they feel, doesn’t make them stupid. Unless you have that attitude, you’re only going to do more to push them away. It’s that terrible mistake Hillary Clinton made, when she referred to the “stupid people”—and she deservedly got absolutely clattered for that. It’s that ridiculous attitude that alienates people. That, for me, was one of the very earliest lightbulb moments. You work with that, and you give people different ways to express themselves. But also, just don’t make them feel inadequate for being unable to articulate. You help them find the words. You say, “I wonder if maybe it’s a little like this?” You help them find the language. People can be so patronizing. I remember sitting behind the glass with clients back in the day as well, hearing the way they would talk about the people who paid their bloody salaries and their bloody mortgages. I’m sorry—so long. Yeah, so long. So as you can tell, I get a bit—I get quite angry about it. That arrogance, that distance from the reality of ordinary people’s lives. I suppose that’s the bigger picture of what it’s done to me. Well, I mean, it’s beautiful. And I ask because I feel the same way. I mean, we assume responsibility—I assume responsibility—for the people that I talk to. It’s a real obligation and a commitment to represent them. And because I think there’s this—I want to transition into talking about….the word “method” is coming to mind. How do you do what you do? I think often qualitative interviewing, moderating, that stuff can be sort of invisible. It just looks like, “Oh, Graham’s an affable guy. He’s really good with those people, and he gets them to say interesting things.” But there’s a lot of skill. There’s a lot of craft at work. I wonder if you might talk a little bit—just executionally, operationally—how do you do what you do? What does it mean to have a conversation? What does it mean to listen and ask questions about creative and about people’s everyday lives? That’s a really good question. Just to illustrate that there’s so much more to it than meets the eye, I’ll tell you a little story. About 10 years ago, somebody I worked with in London went back to Dublin, and she got me over to run a two-day training course in qualitative research with the planning departments of her agency. So I did this thing for two days. At the end of it, I remember one of the planners came up to me and said, “My God, I never realized there was so much to it.” And thereafter, I got almost all of the qualitative research projects that agency did, because they had no idea of the intricacy of what was involved. I see this all the time. One of the things I’m obsessed about is stimulus material—getting stimulus material right. In both creative and strategy development, you’re often given these concept boards with massively overwritten propositions—strategy statements consisting of several sentences, often incorporating three or four different ideas. They’re surrounded by stock photos—women cartwheeling on beaches and so on. You show this to people and say, “How do you feel about the brand being talked about in this way?” And where do they begin? The language is opaque, it’s marketing language, and there are multiple ideas there. Which pictures are they responding to? So I developed this concept called invisible stimulus. The idea is: don’t use any stimulus. How do you put the idea in front of people? You talk about it as something you just noticed or heard. Like a chat down the pub: “So there I was at this company the other day, and they make this vodka. They put sloes in it. And they were telling me that apparently all the sloes are handpicked. What do you make of that?” And we have a chat about it. The first time I did that—using that very example—one of the participants said at the end, “Thanks, that was really good fun. I thought it was going to be boring marketing, but that was a really interesting conversation.” During that conversation, I put eight different positioning concepts in front of them. So I thought, okay, I’m onto something here. That’s a pretty extreme version. But what I often do in positioning research is turn the positionings into quotes from users of the brand. So rather than marketing artifacts trying to sell you something, it’s: “I’ve talked to people who use Brand X, and here are a few of the things they’ve said they like about it. I wonder if any of these connect with you?” Now you’re dealing with other human beings—not with a brand, but with how people feel about something. So stimulus is really important. I work really hard with clients on developing it. Similarly, in creative work, it’s all about identifying the right kind of stimulus for that idea. If you’re looking at advertising—say, three ideas in a project—it’s completely legitimate to use three different types of stimulus. Typically, less is more. In many cases, a vividly written narrative that lets people picture it in their own mind works better. Storyboards are the death of me—people get hung up on the staccato, static nature of them. Nowadays, you get AI imagery. Clients like the closer it gets to final execution, the better. But that’s not true. Because the final execution won’t look like that. It never does. What we need to be looking at is the idea—the ability of the idea to connect in a relevant and distinctive way, and convey the understanding we want people to take away about the brand. So it’s about the idea. They’ll say, “But you’re not comparing like with like. You’re using storyboards for that one, video for another, and a narrative for the third.” We’re not creating a level playing field for the stimulus—we’re creating a level playing field for the idea. And we use whatever stimulus best conveys the idea. I’m really obsessed with that—getting the stimulus right, whether strategic or creative. How you structure discussion is absolutely critical, too. Some people still start creative groups by saying, “What advertising do you like? What are your favorite ads?” You’ve screwed it from the start. You frame the whole thing. The group coalesces around some definition of “good advertising,” and if what you show doesn’t fit, it’s already in trouble. So never do that. And then there are all kinds of things about asking open questions, how you pursue a response, and so on. But obviously a critical part—and this is becoming more mission-critical with AI moving into our arena—is analysis. I’ve always called it the black box of qualitative research. It’s where the magic happens. What we don’t do is reportage. It’s all about interpretation—finding patterns in the data. We’re not probability aggregators. What often matters is that thing Robert said in group four that unlocked the whole project. So what? Why did he say that? What was he responding to? Why didn’t others say that? You develop hypotheses and test them against all the data. Constant cross-referencing. I’ve always described analysis as peeling the layers off an onion. You can’t get to the one beneath until you remove the one on top. Incidentally, one of the good things to come out of COVID is that most of our work is now on Zoom rather than face to face. God knows I love face to face—and I still do it, it’s stimulating—but I’d say we get 99% of the results online. One of the things that’s changed is that now clients watch almost all my groups. And what’s happened is they can now see the difference analysis makes. They’ve heard people talk. They go, “Okay, it’s like that.” Then next week, Graham comes back and does a debrief. And they go, “Wow. I hadn’t seen that coming.” Because what I’ve done is dug away and found the underlying patterns, motivations, implications for development. I’ve made sense of it. I’m a sense maker. I’ve shown them what the future could look like—something they never would’ve got to. Before, when they saw a couple of groups in a viewing studio out of, say, eight, they’d think, “Okay, maybe those two were anomalous.” Now, they’ve seen all eight. And still, when I come back, they say, “Wow.” Because they still wouldn’t have gotten what I present. I think it’s added massive value. That black box—they can now see that’s where the magic takes place. But we’re also massively under threat, because the budget holders don’t get to see that. And they’re saying, “Hey, we can get that done faster and cheaper.” Well, great—if you want to commoditize your insight so your brand loses competitive advantage over the next five years. Off you go, mate. But boy, that’s short-sighted. Yeah. I always like getting sort of foundational in a way about qualitative—and maybe this is what you’re talking about with the black box. What is it—and you’ve been at it for a while—how would you say qualitative has changed? And what is the proper role and the real value of qualitative? Because I hear in the stories you’re telling—and I’ve had these experiences too—where there’s a set of quantitative expectations that clients often bring into qualitative. So how do you articulate the value and purpose of qualitative, especially as we do enter this weird synthetic age? I think that’s a really good question. In terms of its results, I think it’s very justifiable on an ROI basis. You look at the amount you spend on proper, human-led qual—the return you can get on that is absolutely huge. Three campaigns I worked on last year won Effie’s Effectiveness Awards. Without bigging myself up too much, none of them would have turned out the way they did without the qualitative research. It helped them identify the most promising route, how to best optimize it, and—in one case—it enabled the client to buy a route they felt very uncomfortable with. The agency managed to persuade the client to include it as one of three routes. The client said, “Okay, well, I’ve got two I really like, so we’ll put that one in too.” And the route the agency had to really push for just absolutely nailed it. It made a huge difference. So I can cite the effectiveness of that. At one level, you can get a fantastic return on investment. You can persuade the C-suite to buy stuff they wouldn’t normally buy—if you can get it in front of the consumer. You can simply optimize ideas. Maybe you’ve got an idea, but there’s something going on that you can improve: “If you address that in this way...” Another thing I like to think about is that ideally, what you deliver doesn’t just apply to this creative route or brand positioning. It’s a framework. It gives people a way of thinking about other creative work they do—other brands within the portfolio. Because the insight you provide into human motivation and how people actually process communications—you really hope that builds a store of understanding that they’ll bring to their next campaign, or when they move on to another brand and work on repositioning. So my hope is that you’re giving people a broader framework of understanding—a wider set of reference points—that they can bring to bear on future projects, not just the one you worked on. And I think it’s incredibly important for us in our field now to really lobby and fight for the difference it makes. There’s a lot of pressure in the industry at the moment. And it’s incredibly short-sighted. We’ve got to keep reminding people of the value of what we do. Can you tell me a little bit more about one of those stories? They sound amazing—to the degree you’re comfortable. Yeah, well, I’ve written them up—you can read them. But the particular example I’m thinking of that pushed the envelope a little bit was in Ireland. There’s an Irish insurance business called FBD. The “F” stands for farmers—it originally did farmers’ insurance. But they’ve moved into household and car insurance and so on. They were suffering from a salience issue. So much of choosing financial services products is about salience—especially insurance. You need mental availability, trust, etc. They wanted to make it clear that FBD stood for support—that they’d be there for you in the event of a problem. Now, that’s arguably a bit generic. But they’re very embedded in Irish society, and they wanted to get that across. So the agency produced several routes intended to build that sense: this is an insurance company you should consider because they’ll be there for you, and they’re Irish—they’re embedded in the community. The agency developed three routes. One of them the client was really unsure about, because it didn’t do the “embedded in Irish society” bit. What it did was create theoretical meanings for the acronym FBD: “Fuchsia Bike Dads,” “Field of Butterfly Detectives,” and so on. Each was presented like: “FBD stands for Fuchsia Bike Dads”—three men in lycra, on pink bikes. Then, “Or does it stand for this?” Or this? And finally: “What it really stands for is support.” So you draw people in with something completely unexpected and memorable. And you’ll talk about it. All those things Dave Trott used to talk about when I was working at GGT 30 years ago—he was well ahead of his time. In the world of social media, talkability and shareability are absolutely critical now too. And it just really cut through. The really important thing was giving people a reason to remember FBD when they’re thinking, “My insurance is up for renewal—let’s have a look at FBD.” You’ve built that mental availability. It’s just there when you need to access it, which is how memory works. And it had a fantastic impact—measurable, in terms of market share, inquiries, etc. I can’t remember all the numbers, but it’s in the piece I wrote on LinkedIn. That research gave the client the confidence to buy a route they were uncomfortable with. It looks like no other insurance advertising out there. None of the worthiness. Just great fun—and it did the job. And also—it performed that same purpose of coming in at an angle, right? Yeah, a lateral angle. Completely. And the way I did that one—if I recall—I used a narrative script. I didn’t show them images of Fuchsia Bike Dads or Butterfly Detectives. I just said, “We see three men standing by their bicycles in pink lycra…” and so on. So it’s just Graham telling a story to a group of people, right? Well, you know, it is. And that’s something that clients sometimes feel a little uncomfortable with. Sometimes, if it’s a particular style of voiceover, we’ll get it pre-recorded. But I’ve done a lot of acting in my time, so I’m able to deliver things reasonably well. To give you an example of how well narrative scripts can work—there’s the insurance brand Aviva. I developed a campaign with them some years ago that ran for many years. It used a guy who’s a big comedy actor over here. He became their sort of signature: whenever you saw him in one of their ads, you knew it was Aviva. Though he always played different characters, just like he did on TV. They always had a comic element. Then they came to do a life insurance ad, and they weren’t sure if they should use this comic actor. Because life insurance is a bit… you know. But one of the three routes we put in—two were more conventional, but one used him, not in a comic role, playing it straight. He’s in the house, the family’s packing to go on holiday. He’s handing them things, staying out of the way. Then he’s standing on the stairs, just above the hallway. The daughter says to the mother, “It won’t be the same without Dad this year.” And she says, “I know.” I’m filling up even telling you—and she gives him a hug. Then we cut back to him. It was inspired by a movie—I can’t remember which one—but basically, he’s dead. And he’s looking down on his family. I delivered that as a narrative. I had people in tears in the group. Not because of my delivery—but because the narrative script was written really carefully. Usually, the agency gives me something the creatives wrote. I edit it. I take out technical directions like “clock wipe to...” and anything like “at this point we realize the brand is good for…” You have to let people take it for themselves. So I help them write it. But it shows the power—the emotional power—of something that’s really well written. It’s a story. And it was extraordinary. That convinced the client to go with the route they were least comfortable with. I love it. I love these stories because they shine a light. Well, I guess I want to finish with the time we have. I have to ask about mentors. If you have mentors or touchstones—you’ve already mentioned Roy. I’d love to hear more. Dave Trott is someone I’m aware of—I’ve watched some of his stuff on YouTube. Maybe talk a little about Roy Langmaid and Dave Trott. What you learned from them? Yeah. Roy reinforced my—well, I was fantastically lucky. The first guy I worked with when I moved from advertising into research was John Siddall. I don’t think he’s still with us, unfortunately. But he ran a business called Reflections. He just nailed it. He did everything right. Stimulus, structure, open questions, not framing—it was superb. I learned the basics from the right man. It was a fantastic place to start. Subsequently, when I employed people, I found myself having to “de-train” them. They hadn’t learned in the right place. They weren’t doing it right. Eventually, I started taking on graduate trainees so I could train them from scratch. Now, that might sound egotistical—like I’m threatened by difference. But I’d like to think it’s because I wanted people to do it the right way. John was fantastic. Dave Trott—oh my God. To be honest, in my first two or three years at Leo Burnett, I didn’t learn a great deal about advertising. I learned about advertising agencies. I learned about advertising when I went to GGT. They produced great work. Dave had no patience with me at all—I was one of those poncy, Oxford-educated bag carriers. He used to say, “Don’t come back to the office if you haven’t sold the work.” So I had very little patience from him. But, God, did he know what he was doing. Single-mindedness—that’s what I learned. He’d say—and I’m sure he got this from somewhere—“Graham, when are you more likely to catch a tennis ball? When I chuck you a dozen tennis balls or one?” Point made. So single-mindedness. Which applies strategically and creatively. And then: impact. The importance of impact. It doesn’t matter how clever your advertising is if it doesn’t get noticed. If it doesn’t stop people and make them pay attention. That was number one for him—create impact. It was a really seminal experience. I learned a huge amount. To be able to step out, after working two or three years with Dave, into research—that so informed the way I approach things. So yeah, probably John Siddall and Dave Trott were key figures. I would’ve loved to spend more time with Roy, but I never worked with him. It was just one or two encounters at training events that really informed things. One other thought—not quite a mentor, but a seminal experience—was sitting in debriefs when I was an account handler. You’d get the debrief from the researcher, get to the end, and think, “Brilliant. So what the devil do we do now?” They told you all the problems and gave no solutions. I was determined that when I went into research, I’d never do that. You will never come away from my debrief without a sense of the way forward. My company tagline is: Clarity. Direction. Progress. You give people incredible clarity—so they understand what’s happened. You give them direction—so they know which way to go. So they can make progress. That was absolutely a reaction to not getting that from so many debriefs I experienced in advertising. And that’s the reason creators hate research. Because there’s so much bad research out there. That’s the brutal truth. Beautiful. Graham, I want to thank you so much for accepting the invitation. It’s been a real treat talking with you. Thank you very much. I’m sorry to have gone on and on and on, but it’s been an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for asking. Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe [https://thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]