Lift11 talk: Steve Portigal on "Discovering and acting on new insights about how people innovate"

Steve Portigal is the founder of Portigal Consulting, a a bite-sized San Francisco Bay Area firm that helps clients to discover and act on new insights about themselves and their customers.

How do people seeking to innovate address what customers want or need? Steve will discuss methods for exploring both solutions and needs (same notion on opposite sides of a lens). He will also explore how an understanding of culture (yours and your customer’s organization) can drive innovation.

Steve Portigal

Principal (USA)
Portigal Consulting
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Nicolas Nova: The approach you adopt is based on a careful engagement with the field and people: observations, interviews, etc. But beyond the data collection techniques, how can one turn the material you collect into something that is relevant, meaningful and perhaps useful for innovation?

Steve Portigal: The naïve approach to field research is to treat it as a literal exercise, akin to scooping up requirements. If field research is used to gather individual observations that literally impact the design of a product or service, then there’s not much you can do except sort and prioritize.

But if you use field research as an opportunity to understand people’s lives (their activities, motivations, successes, expectations, mental models, etc.) then you can take a much richer pass through the data. At the highest level, our process is to work individually with individual data “nodes” (say, a transcript of an interview) and pull out the bits that seem interesting, then work collectively to tell stories about those interesting nuggets and aggregate them into strong points of view about people.

Those points of view become areas of opportunity that we feed into brainstorming and ideation.

Being also involved in similar activities, I am always fascinated by people's creativity and their tendency to find solutions for their own needs. Is this something you rely on when studying people and providing insights to your projects/clients? To what extent these solution can be preferable to other problems?

I think the phrase “their own needs” is a crucial part of your question. Often we are asked to study people where we’ve been given a basic hypothesis of what people’s problems are, or even what the solution is going to be. Often what we end bringing back is some perspective about where our client’s products and services fit – or don’t – into people’s lives.

Our clients are trying to innovate in spaces where people aren’t paying much attention, and while that’s challenging, it does help focus the problem a great deal! I’m continually fascinated by two different archetypes with people’s own solutions: the first is a massive tolerance for a non-optimized situations. People are comfortable with satisficing – choosing a “good enough” solution where the effort to create a better solution is more than the inconvenience of the current approach. Look at anyone’s drawer of obsolete remote controls and chargers; it’s easy to decry this as a failure of technology, design, business, etc. but people are pretty tolerant of those sorts of “failures” – this doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to solve it, but we should be wary of what we’re going to ask of people in order to deploy this solution.

The second archetype is a massive investment for a customized solution. Even when we don’t sample for “lead users” in a study, we’ll always find ourselves absolutely amazed. I tend to think of these solutions less in terms of their creativity and more in terms of the dedication that they require. The insight is often “Look how important this is to people given the effort they are willing to put in to make this happen.” The details of the solution may not be as relevant as much as the passion they reveal.

Discovering "new needs" is very difficult, especially because needs fluctuate over time. For instance, certain behavior can shift from acceptable to less acceptable (say... driving a SUV while Peak oil is coming) and new needs emerge (having a car that requires less gas). How can field observation help the research for these near future needs?

Someday I’d love to get a social scientists to riff on this because no doubt somewhere in the literature is something called (I’m making this up) Rankoff’s Fundamental Life Profile that identifies the static needs across times (and cultures?).

I mean something that goes beyond Maslow and talks about the specific activities that make up our lives. I know there’s the Activities of Daily Living and other ways to come at it. But really what I’m getting at is that I’m often bouncing back and forth between two very different views – that things are fundamentally the same and don’t change and that things can change really rapidly.

From a business, product, and service point of view, the latter is definitely true. But from a customer and culture point of view, is it? Recently while visiting Rome, I was wandering through the narrow cobblestone streets of Trastevere. I was carrying my iPhone, but avoiding doing anything that would lead to the infamous international data roaming charges. I found a restaurant in a small alleyway, and after giving our names, decided to see if there was WiFi nearby. Amazingly, there was. So I “checked in” on FourSquare, and sent a tweet out to our followers with the name of the restaurant I was at. About 20 minutes later, a friend who was also visiting Rome came around the corner to find us, and ended up joining us for dinner. This was a moment of amazement.

Intellectually, I understood how these things were possible, but emotionally there was a strong feeling of excitement as something new – or at least previously out of reach – was enabled. And when that happens, I do realize that fundamentals of how I socialize are dramatically changed. But I digress!

To finally respond to your question, things don’t change overnight, so you can look at vectors. You can recruit participants who are a little more leading edge in their behavior (say, users of FourSquare). You can talk to people about where they’ve been and where they are at now and how they got there. And you can talk to people about where they are going (even if they aren’t good predictors of the future, answers to those questions are great at revealing today’s mental models and expectations). You can go back to people over and over again and look for the changes. Or you can introduce those changes by asking people to change their behavior (say, by becoming an active FourSquare user) and then reflecting on the experience.