INTRODUCTION: THE PROBLEM OF DE-SKILLING

Like many listeners, we took great interest in Jerry Lombardi’s call last year to address the “de-skilling” of ethnographic labor in corporate contexts (Lombardi 2009). The main point of the argument was that ethnography—under pressure from the time and resource constraints that industry inevitably demands—is facing simplification, standardization, and reduction to piecework status. In the process, it loses the very qualities which industry values and seeks in ethnography, defeating industry’s own objectives. Ethnographic practitioners meanwhile grow alienated from their labor. De-skilling demoralizes them and exerts a depressive effect on their creativity. Contextual understanding is eroded as discovery runs on an assembly line.

In this paper, we suggest that collaborative work offers an effective response to this challenge; not just collaborative work in general, but work that gives ethnographic practitioners an explicitly integrative role. In the context of innovation, the role ideally goes beyond situating observations in a cultural context, to the active coordination of input from multiple disciplines such as business strategy, communications design, product design and market and lifestyle trends. Each discipline has its own body of understandings that an ethnographer must interpret and articulate back to the innovation effort. A road to practical effectiveness (and professional fulfillment) lies in recasting the role of the ethnographer as inter-disciplinary mediator.

Others have looked at collaborative ethnographic work before, particularly in the context of design (Dawson 2002, Wasson 2002, Sacher 2002). All agree that effective collaboration requires a great deal more than the collaborative “tools” of common workspaces, artifacts, deliverables, and the like. The real engine of effective collaboration is a common conceptual apparatus linked with integrative work practices.

In this paper we will build on that thinking and take it a step further. Collaborative concepts and processes are a resource for enriching ethnographic knowledge and skills. Considering our own experiences at a 25-year-old design innovation firm, we suggest that a way forward—and against the threat of de-skilling—is to re-assert the holistic perspective at the heart of ethnography, and to re-animate it in new forms of collective practice. We will call this approach “hyper-skilling”.

HYPER-SKILLING

De-skilling is a genuine industry concern. And yet consider for a moment the perspective of an ethnographic team that found itself experimentally re-crafting its members’ roles. Depaula, Thomas and Lang (2009) of Intel explain how they shifted into various strategic roles at the company to insure that their ethnographic work drove the innovation process and its outcomes. “As we narrate our own trajectory…from simply ‘informants’ to product and business strategists to dealmakers,” they write, “we come to realize…profound transformations in our ethnographic doing and knowing…. We reached and experienced new forms of ethnography that the ‘founding fathers’ of this discipline would have never imagined.” (Depaula, Thomas and Lang 2009)

The roles played by the Intel ethnographers migrated in response to “pull” from the rest of their team. They had to learn about competitive market intelligence, business strategy, engineering, and more—not to replace these functions, but to effectively articulate their own contributions. The result was a transformation of their practice, creating a sense of increased relevance. Circumstances are never identical, but in essence that is the kind of experience we are talking about. In collaborative, interdisciplinary ethnography, what happens is not de-skilling, but hyper-skilling.

Simply put, hyper-skilling means finding and using clear lines of sight to the efforts of others working on the same problems from different perspectives. The term reflects a magnification of effectiveness that can occur when those sight lines converge in powerful new ways. At least two basic benefits emerge. For industry, hyper-skilling makes the findings of ethnographic practice more actionable, by including more of the relevant knowledge domains needed to solve a problem. For individual practitioners, it pushes them beyond their usual range, enriching and extending their interpretative skills, capabilities, and knowledge.

An innovation firm such as Ziba Design is a good place to explore the potential of such an approach because its focus is inherently integrative. It focuses on “experience design,” the premise of which is the tight organization of offers across multiple touchpoints in a consumer’s experience. The business must express its purpose, identity, and value across these touchpoints in a meaningful and harmonious way or it will falter in its relationship with its audience. Clarity and consistency across the experience is essential. In all cases, the focus of these integrative efforts is the business’ brand. Thus, much of the language at Ziba focuses on “authenticity to brand,” both in our publications as part of our internal work practices.

“Consumers seek meaning and a brand they can trust,” writes Ziba founder Sohrab Vossoughi. “They are creating ways to cut through the noise in search of products and services that resonate with integrity and transparency: in a word, authenticity.” (Ziba 2007) Trust in brand is also more universally recognized as the key to experience integration. Brand character expert David Altschul writes for instance that, “A brand is like a character in the drama of its category…[One] is suspicious of any character whose motive is not clear.” (Altschul 2009) Of course, the words “integrity and “integration” both derive from and share roots in the idea of wholeness; experience design must create interconnections to establish the perception of brand unity in consumers’ minds.

That is why our work practice is becoming increasingly cross-disciplinary. It experiments a great deal with new integrative concepts and structures. Its teams strive to “connect the dots” to insure that a company’s brand expresses its promise correctly across potentially disparate experiences, which include new products, physical retail environments, communications, online purchasing, customer service, and so forth.

Without integrative structures, such a firm would have to rely only upon individual genius to work across multiple, diverse consumer touchpoints with any success. And while there was a moment at which that may have been said of the company (indeed, it has been said [Byrne and Sands 2002:59]), Ziba numbers over 100 staff these days, with 10 creative directors orchestrating many teams across diverse projects. The genius model cannot dominate its practice.

A case study of our recent work with Chinese athletic apparel manufacturer Li-Ning illustrates some of the core conceptual apparatus and processes surrounding our current model of ethnographic work. Within it, a hyper-skilled approach has emerged vividly—albeit imperfectly at times, and still very experimentally. To set the stage for that discussion, some background on the project is needed.

THE LI-NING CHALLENGE

Li-Ning is the third largest athletic retailer in China. It originally approached Ziba for little more than a handful of youth-oriented designs. At the time (2007) it was 17 years old. Its founder, Mr. Li Ning, was a sports superstar who had won 6 medals at the 1984 Summer Olympics in gymnastics.

The company just wanted some of its clothing and footwear to be considered cool. Because at the moment, Li-Ning’s wares were patently uncool. “When we look around,” its Marketing VP said of the teenagers and 20-somethings he wished to attract in China, “none of these kids are wearing our stuff. They’re all wearing Nike and Adi (Adidas). So how do we get them to start wearing Li Ning? What can you do for us that will get them to pay attention?”

This wasn’t something that a handful of new styles could cure. Li-Ning had been losing ground to the bigger players from the West for some time—since the company’s beginning, really, back in 1990. It had done well enough in those early years just by providing quality at the right price, as a less expensive alternative to the Western giants. But now it was struggling as the market matured. The upcoming generation remained an enigma to the company, and its existing consumer base was getting more sophisticated. Local upstart companies were also posing a threat. Smaller and more agile, they exhibited a tremendous talent for copying designs and selling them fast and cheap, effectively squeezing Li-Ning from the value side.

Considering all this, we urged them to not worry about finding a new angle on cool, but to focus instead on making the Li-Ning brand relevant to a new generation of Chinese kids. What was Li-Ning about, other than being big, successful and Chinese?

Based on early reconnaissance at retail, kids in the stores seemed appreciative of Li-Ning’s quality and consistency, and were glad to have a Chinese option. But they were not passionate about Li-Ning. Back at corporate headquarters, everybody seemed to have a different take on the brand’s essence and character—not a good sign. Where was the sense of definition that could support a deeper engagement with the brand? The company had global ambitions, but it was hard to see how it could go anywhere until it defined its meaningful core. If Li-Ning’s strength wasn’t evident at home, how could it travel outside China?

Fortunately for them, Western brands were not yet fully connecting either. Nike, Adi, and Puma were selling prestige and a piece of America or Europe. But a new generation was clearly moving into place: Gen Y, the children of China’s one-child policy, who had never known life under Communism. Surely these Chinese 20-somethings, contemplating a new era heralded by the Beijing Olympics and the Shanghai Expo had higher aspirations for sport in their lives?

Company executives acknowledged all of this reluctantly; especially problematic were the issues around brand definition. But despite the obstacles, they sensed that this was a rare opportunity to develop a unique relationship with the emerging generation. They rose to the challenge, aiming to become the first athletic retailer that understood the values of China’s emerging youth market, and to build a new product strategy aligned with that understanding.

For Ziba, taking this on meant building an entirely new understanding of modern Chinese identity as it related to sport. Few models existed for the crucial 14-25 year old group, and those that did were too simplistic to be useful. If we were to help, we would have to start from scratch. And we would have to find answers fast, compressing into a matter of months a study that justified years of dedicated effort. “We want to stand on the shoulders of giants,” said the CEO on deciding to move forward with the project. “What western sports companies took 60 years to achieve, we will need to do in six.”

HOW TO GET HYPER-SKILLED

Hyper-skilling, as we have said, preserves and enhances ethnography’s value to industry and the anthropology/ethnography profession in the face of just such constraints. We were able to realize this to a significant degree in the ensuing study. Where we could not, it helped us better understand the ideal. In what follows, we will describe the core elements: a collaborative definition of insight, team integration around the consumer worldview, intellectual resource management, and envisioning the endpoint upfront.