Musings on good research in consulting.
Throughout my academic career, I have observed that what people consider to be good research depends on the community to which they belong. I saw that folks in the quant(itative) world care deeply for p values, power, and generalizability. Those in qual(ilative) look for an outline of methodological decisions, philosophical foundations, and the researcher's context. And in mixed-methods, there are its own concerns (often parallelled with program evaluation).
Outside of these three, there is a whole other world called action research. It's kind of like inquiry in 4D. Action research involves working with - or forming - a community to address a concern that you collaboratively come together to solve. As you go about solving it, you generate knowledge. The process of problem-solving and knowledge generation can be codesigned. Here, good research is what the community considers key in process and outcome.
Photo by Anthony Tori on Unsplash
So I learned that qual, quant, mixed-methods, and action research have their own criteria for good research. At the time I finished my master's, I was a stumbling amateur and approached the field of research using a combination of those four perspectives. Then, I continued along a new journey, this time into the world of consulting. One whose language and mental models I've been ongoingly internalizing, through much joy and frustration (and generosity on the part of my teachers).
In the world of consulting, good research is "compelling." Compelling means research cannot sit on the shelf, gathering dust (like my Master's thesis). Research is, instead, articulated so movingly that just about anyone in the micro-communities of strategy, marketing & communication, finance, and the like, will be swayed to action. The research motivates people to make changes. It's a gentle yell that tugs at the heart strings (and budgets) of the receiving party.
Learning how to do consulting research reminds me of the pop-out effect that Michael Pollen wrote about in The Omnivore's Dilemma. Learning how to forage for mushrooms, he says, "when we fix in our mind some visual quality of the object we're hoping to spot - whether it's color or pattern or shape - it will pop out of the visual field, almost as if on command." He noted that his teacher trained him by pointing out an area where he knew a mushroom was, and Pollen's task was to go and find it.
So to me, conducting good research in consulting is like mushroom picking. You try looking where you have previously read or learned the mushroom (i.e., the insight) might be. Then, your teacher points you to a more specific area, and it's your job to a) find the insight and b) know how to find it in the future. And sometimes I can't do either. But, as this learning keeps going, my teacher has to do less work, and the compelling insights begin to "pop-out" more frequently. In my case, teachers tend to be my superiors or colleagues.
But the mushroom picking analogy falls short at the point of finding the fungus. The insight took a great deal of community, effort, and work to learn how to forage, but something needs to be done with it. That's where the next stage of good research comes to play: communication.
In consulting, communication is akin to the cooking of your raw ingredient. If you can't present what you found in a way that motivates and sways, you didn't do your job well. And it's not just finding the right words, it's showcasing everything along an intuitive narrative. It's bathing the whole package in a way that's accessible to the needs and aesthetic preferences of the receiving party. Altogether, the client's experience of interacting with your research needs to create a sense of action and delight.
Of course, depending on the approach, all the criteria of the previous communities I discussed also hold. But these two added elements of creating urgency to act and also delight is a new level of competence that I strive towards.
To summarize, here are some criteria that I'm beginning to see as important in this new world of research.
- Is your research compelling and articulate?
- Does your research delight the receiving party?
Writing this piece inspired me to think about ego involvement (or rather the lack thereof) on the part of the researcher, about empathy, and about the stages of research creation.
Appreciations to editors:
Questions to leave you with:
- What community do you belong to, and what does good research mean to you?
- When was the last time you had to unlearn what good research meant because you joined a different community?