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In the current economic uncertainty ethnographic consultants are asked to intensify their client focus and to demonstrate and improve the relevancy and impact of their work. This paper reports on a case of close collaboration between client and consultant during an ethnographic consulting project. It discusses three crucial challenges: the challenge of aligning expectations and clarifying roles, the challenge of cultural differences and confusion over ethnographic methods, and the challenge of finding the right rhythm between close interaction and useful separation. Written from both the consultant and the client perspective we describe how similar situations were experienced differently by both parties, analyse what underlies some of these tensions, and suggest some lessons for ethnographers and clients alike for future close encounters. The paper suggests that the central challenge lies in finding the right balance between client-emic and client-etic positions and in inviting clients into the process of doing consulting ‘magic’.
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INTRODUCTION – DEMANDING HIGHER IMPACT
In the current uncertain economic climate companies need to be assured even more than in the past that their investments will yield clear and expected returns. The days when companies spent money on exotic research projects, on nice-to-have rather than must-have studies seem if not gone then at least suspended. In such a climate business anthropologists and ethnographers working as consultants are asked to justify and demonstrate the relevancy, contribution and impact of their work to their clients with renewed urgency. They must show convincingly that they are useful and trustworthy advisors to their clients.
A growing strategic demand from clients for ethnographic consultants is to engage with them more thoroughly and deeply during projects, rather than remaining purely external professionals who hand over insights and recommendations at the end of projects – as if from the protected laboratory. Bridging worldviews and raison d’êtres, of course, has always been a crucial task for ethnographers, and the ethnographic toolbox has provided us with the means towards studying the real world and real people. Yet we tend to employ these skills towards understanding our informants and less towards understanding our clients and our interaction with them. As a result, a close engagement between client and ethnographic consultant poses unanticipated opportunities and challenges—making it a worthwhile learning experience on how to involve clients to produce results that have traction and are likely to live on once the consultants have left.
Using an actual project as example, this paper focuses on the challenges emerging from the close collaboration between client and consultant during the course of a project. The example raises significant questions about the ways in which the two respective professional practices need to be coordinated and synchronized to find the right rhythm in the dance between client and consultant. Speaking from both perspectives, the consultants’ and the clients’, we seek to illuminate what can be learned from such client-consultant collaboration for a more engaging, successful and long-lasting embedding of ethnographic practice in industry.
Collaborative approaches have a long tradition in ethnography, as described for example by Lassiter (2005). However, whereas Lassiter and similar discussions focus on the need for a collaborative approach between researcher and informant in the production of ethnographic texts, this paper explores the collaboration between consultant and client, where the friction plays out in different ways.
In our discussion we seek to address the following questions: Can such an intimate interaction in fact achieve what it sets out to achieve, that is to tailor the results of ethnographic inquiry and resulting recommendations to the client’s needs and deliver them to be implemented with success? How can clients become credible ambassadors of the project in terms of both results and methods? How can consultants find the right balance between being insiders and outsiders to both keep a fresh perspective and enable impact? And how can ethnographic consultants who often produce their work behind closed doors be transparent at the same time as they try to be persuasive, how can they closely engage with the client while coming to grips with complicated findings – or advise at the same time as they analyse? While tackling these questions, our primary focus is on the challenges and problems client and consultants face in such a close encounter.1
SETTING THE SCENE FOR COLLABORATION
In the fall of 2008 our consulting firm conducted a research and consulting project for a global hearing aid manufacturer. The project’s overall goal was to improve the client’s understanding of the daily work practice of the independent retailers who usually sell the devices to end-users—a business-to-business project. Field research was conducted in two main markets, the US and a European country. The immediate client who initiated the project was an innovation and design unit within the client organization. The unit’s mission was to discover customer insights, subsequently build competencies and inspire the engineering-focused organization to get closer to their customers and end-users.
As a consultancy based on ethnographic practice we have always aimed at making the client part of our processes at relevant points in a project. For instance, we usually bring the client with us to the field in order to expose them to the real world and our methods. And in order to become more familiar with data and insights, we always organize collaborative workshops during the course of projects. Yet, in this project we took the client engagement to another level. Rather than having client team members interacting with our project team just intermittently, the ambition was to establish a fully collaborative client-consultant team that would work together during all project phases, from beginning to end.
The team setup was not without challenges. Our team had two project managers and was staffed with a roughly equal number of employees from our consultancy and the client organization—three core team members on our side and two full and two half-team members on the client side, with a cross-functional representation from marketing, software development and the innovation unit itself (the client project manager was from the innovation unit). As close collaboration was a high priority we were allocated a dedicated space in an open office environment at the client’s headquarter and were encouraged to work there as much as possible.2
The intent behind this arrangement had several dimensions. The client had commissioned user-centric consulting projects before and had learned how quickly otherwise useful insights could get lost in their organization. By participating in every step of the project they wanted to ensure relevancy of the insights and warrant organizational ownership of the results. The team members should become ambassadors of insights and recommendations once the consultants left. They also hoped for more relevant and interesting insights where the consultants could utilize and build on the client’s insider knowledge of their products, the market and the business-to-business situation under study. Furthermore, the clients hoped to extend their own innovative capabilities by learning from the immersion in the methods utilized by the ethnographic consultancy. Finally, they sought to assure a high level of internal collaboration and buy-in by having team members from different units and departments work together on this project.
Quite similarly, based on previous projects we as consultants also knew how difficult it could be to have our insights and recommendations actually taken up and implemented by our clients once we leave. We had learned that it took more than just striking insights and a nice presentation to make changes happen in large corporations. Working closely with clients at every step, we hoped to better understand the client, their organization and their everyday and strategic needs, and thus be able to develop recommendations and concepts that fit.
Following this plan we in fact worked more or less as a collaborative team through every phase of the project. We defined the scope of the project, planned the fieldwork, recruited informants, went into the field, analyzed the data, organized workshops with the larger client stakeholder group, developed recommendations and presented large parts of our final presentation – all of this more or less together and over a period of about three months. This degree of collaboration was as new to us as it was to our client.
Overall the embedded format worked quite well. From our perspective, we did in fact understand our client more deeply than we could have through other means. The growing trust between us made it possible to learn about political issues within the organization beyond official stories that we needed to be aware of. The advantage of spending so much time together was that “it created an open atmosphere with humor where nobody was afraid of saying what was on their mind and whether they disagreed with the other team members” as the client put it. The embedded team approach was a very useful ethnographic setup to get closer to the client both through conversations and observation. As a result we believe our recommendations were in fact better aligned with the client’s needs, expectations and capabilities. Our physical presence at the client’s premises over a three-months period was also helpful in another respect. Our visibility at lunch and in the open space office generated a kind of curiosity for the project that laid the ground for more easily spreading insights and recommendations throughout relevant parts of the organization. We no longer were external strangers who handed over exotic insights but “people we have seen before and whom we know can be trusted”.
For the client, the collaborative setup was overall also successful since they felt they learned the process of user-centric innovation from the inside out and through all stages, not only in theory but in practice. As innovation unit with a user-focus they could expand their skills and move closer to conducting such a project by themselves. But even more importantly the client team members stood behind the insights as proud co-creators. They became successful ambassadors for the project insights, spending several weeks after the official end of the project busily presenting the work to different parts of the organization, facilitating workshops and having informal conversations throughout the company. They owned the project results and were able and willing to not only communicate but promote them.
CHALLENGING THE CLOSE ENCOUNTER
However, for this paper we have chosen to emphasize the challenges that emerged and not the successes, in order to be able to learn from them for future projects. In the following we will discuss three: the challenge resulting from different expectations of roles and responsibilities among clients and consultants, the tension emerging from different professional cultures and levels of expertise, and the tricky task of finding the right distance in the dance between client and consultant (and the problem of doing magic in the open). We describe how clients and consultants experienced these situations as problematic in their own respective ways and ponder what it is that may underlying forces may have led to these situations. Finally we suggest what may be learned from these cases for a more productive close client-consultant collaboration.
Mismatched Expectations – Who Is In Charge?
“We as a company had bought the consultancy’s knowledge and competences, and at the same time we wanted to be an integral part of the whole project – so who had the responsibility?” One of the single most important challenges for every team project is to clarify roles and expectations. As the previous quote from our client illustrates, this is not always a simple process. We as consultant assumed that we were responsible for the project while it was ongoing and the client team would be responsible once the consultant team had left the building. Yet, who was in charge was not really settled from the beginning and this created some tensions along the way. The core of this tension was that both parties strongly identified with the project and saw their reputation on the line. The result was a cautious and not so cautious dance between the two project managers to make sure that every voice was heard while asserting their own point of view.
The best example of this initial struggle about who was in charge, was the scoping process at the beginning where a shared definition of the actual scope of the project was to be established: what the project was really about and what was to be part of or outside of the focus of the project. The re-scoping of an initial project definition described in a ‘Request for Proposal’ (RFP) is common practice among many consultancies (Chang and Lipson 2008). Going through the RFP we investigate how the goals of a project fit into a wider context and often find it necessary to challenge the existing view of the company by redefining what the most relevant problems should be. Yet whereas the level of re-scoping in many projects is decided upon mainly during the initial kick-off meeting, in this case the process took longer and was more intense. We met surprisingly strong resistance from the client against our suggested approach. While the initial project definition had its focus on the interaction between retailer and hearing aid patient, we, the consultants, suggested a somewhat broader focus to also understand the context of this interaction. But the client was afraid to lose specificity of the results with such a wide research scope. For a while we felt out of step with each other and the scoping process took much longer than expected as both parties felt equally in charge. In this as in other cases, visual models, for example of the overall research scope of the project, often became the best way of establishing a common ground linking our different understandings and thus enabling agreement. The model helped, for instance, to define what we meant by context and that both parties agreed on the core question.