Learn globally, learn locally

Editor’s note: Dean Barker is global product designer, Thomson Corporation, Eagan, Minn.

After several years crisscrossing the United States as a consultant working in software product research and design, business travel had lost its luster for me. Trips to Los Angeles and Des Moines were exactly the same…the baggage claim, the rental car counter, an office building, and then finally hotel room service, followed by a fitful night’s sleep in another strange bed. As a result, I left consulting for direct employment three years ago. In a twist of fate, I was laid off after six months but immediately offered a position in the organization’s sister company working for their international product design group. However, owing apparently to some unpaid karmic debt, I found myself back on the road again, but this time commuting over oceans to get to work.

Fortunately, I found global adventures much to my liking. For the past few years I thought perhaps my name must be Walter Mitty. My travel portfolio includes England, France, Spain, Switzerland, Australia, Argentina and Japan. I’ve seen the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace, eaten the world’s freshest sushi in Tsukiji fish market, hugged a koala, and narrowly escaped an overnight stay in an Argentine jail.

More importantly, the cross-cultural work has rekindled my interest in my career. After nearly a decade doing research and design projects, I had started to become somewhat ambivalent about my chosen profession. Doing the work on a global level has allowed me to leverage my expertise, amortize my investment in the field, and grow as a professional and a person. I’ve learned things that make me better at what I do.

The following are simple lessons learned from global work and jotted down during miles and miles (that is, kilometers and kilometers) spent on planes, trains and automobiles across the globe. But, they could’ve (and maybe should’ve) been lessons learned across town. These are really just reminders of best practices and common sense that I may have taken for granted without the additional challenge and awareness that comes from working abroad and in different cultures. With gratitude (or perhaps apologies) to the writing of Don Miguel Ruiz, here are “The Four Agreements” that I’ve made with myself as a researcher after reflecting on the past few years:

  • be prepared;
  • be flexible;
  • be creative;
  • be humble.

Be prepared

Be prepared for everything. Don’t worry about being prepared for “anything,” but do be prepared for everything that’s part of your research plan. Like many things, the success of a research project is in the details, especially a project led from one country and implemented in another country.

I’m not naturally a detail-oriented person. I’m more of a “big picture” guy. But, in a research role and when leading a study, I’m a list maker and double-checker. Project plans and checklists are my favorite tools and e-mailed courtesy copies to myself help me make sure that absolutely everything gets done before getting on an airplane for a 12-hour flight and a drive to a research laboratory that I’ve never seen in-person before. When participants have been recruited, a facility reserved and international travel arrangements for team members made, there’s no room for error in making sure everything is done and that everything works when the time comes. I travel with all my files on a laptop, but backups on a USB flash key and a backup of the backup on a CD-ROM help me sleep better at night (if not on the plane).

Most of all, being prepared means ensuring that you mitigate as much risk to the fieldwork as you possibly can. The highest potential risk area in a global study is the conducting of the research. If your research isn’t well prepared, then all other aspects of the project are for naught. To mitigate risk, one thing I’ve taken to is conducting additional pilot iterations. I’ll now routinely conduct an internal pilot with co-workers and/or local customers, then iterate the research materials before going on the road and conducting an external pilot with recruited participants in that global market. So I’ve doubled the effort involved in piloting a study, but it has proved to be an invaluable strategy.

But also, part of being prepared to work internationally means paying attention to some fairly mundane issues. For example, if you’re getting a video recording of your research, make sure you specify the format you want. It will likely be done in the local standard and you could come home with a box of useless videotapes. And, nobody else in the word uses 8-1/2 x 11-inch paper. Documents in many other places use A4 format. If your research requires a large volume of paper for the fieldwork, then proper formatting in advance may perhaps save you from cruising around London trying to find a Kinko’s at midnight.

For that matter, simple communications and travel issues need to be considered. International dialing to a given country is sometimes tricky to figure out, but even worse is being someplace else and trying to figure out how to call home when you really need to. When I’m traveling to a new country, I research on the Web before I go to make sure I’ve got the right power converters, phone converters, phone dialing information, time zone, weather projections, travel alerts, etc.

Be flexible

Great preparation though shouldn’t yield inflexibility. Unanticipated things happen during the course of any project and sometimes you simply have to roll with the punches.

As dedicated professionals, we’re advocates for best practices. As well we should be, but as Voltaire said, “The best is the enemy of the good.” Compromise is necessary to design and implement most studies overseas. Customer research is a mature field in the U.S. business culture, but I’ve been shocked to find out how comparatively little of such research is done in other countries. Furthermore, because of that, there’s not much infrastructure in many places. Facilities, recruiters, contractors and even willing participants may be hard to come by.

If you’re not exclusively visiting customer sites, you’re probably using one or two “favorite facilities” as a central location for your research. If you’ll be working in a new facility, especially overseas, you’ll likely base your choice on referrals and recommendations from others and not have the opportunity to visit it in-person. I always try to get a second opinion and if I can’t get any personal recommendations, I’ll try and at least get a colleague in that area to pay a visit to the facility for me. But, if, after traveling thousands of miles, you do arrive at a “Little Shop of Horrors,” then do your best to be kind to yourself and simply be at peace with the environment. It may mean you’re uncomfortable, or your stakeholders are uncomfortable. Or perhaps you can’t get the audiotapes you were planning on. Whatever. The bottom line is that most research can still be done as long as you and the customer are face-to-face and you’re able to take some notes.

Recruiting is an issue where I’ve been particularly pained while learning what’s possible in other markets. The lack of maturity in the research industry means that clients and consumers aren’t used to dealing with recruiting and being recruited. So, robust screening criteria and large candidate pools to draw recruits from may not be realistic expectations in some places. In Japan, the greatest success in recruiting research participants comes from well-established business relationships and personal invitations. While I was aware that because of cultural reasons such would be the case there, I was surprised to find a similar approach was necessary in the United Kingdom. Perhaps this is because of the profession of our market segments, but regardless, the first time I conducted a study in London I spent a lot of energy trying to put upfront best-practices in place in regards to the recruiting process. Ultimately, in order to even implement the study, we needed to resort to minimal criteria for participation as well as personal invitations from our client to their preferred customers. While I was frustrated that this use of “friendlies” risked an artificially positive bias, I had to remind myself that some data is better than no data and that if I had been too rigid in my policies, we very likely wouldn’t have been able to complete the research at all.

Be creative

It’s important to be flexible and willing to adapt the specifics of how you do your work, but when designing research plans for other markets you sometimes need to think substantially outside the box. Creative or even radical ideas and plans may be necessary to meet the challenges of researching certain markets outside of the U.S. Years ago, I was pretty stringent and by-the-book, but developing new techniques to meet the needs of a given situation is sometimes required and makes for an interesting and enjoyable challenge. As a research professional, the trick is to be flexible and creative but still maintain experimental rigor in your research.

In usability research, the classic formal method is a usability test. But not every business situation makes it possible to do such a study. So in the spirit of “cheaper and faster” I’ve taken to using an amalgam of two formal walkthrough methods which give results that can be reported in a very similar manner. And, when one project had geographic and other constraints that wouldn’t allow for this group walkthrough technique to be conducted face-to-face, we figured out a way to conduct it using the Internet and still got good some data. Again, if you’re talking about formative research and are simply trying to inform product development, some is better than none. And, in global markets, typically budgets are smaller and resources fewer than in the U.S. Plus, the logistics are often more complicated. Creativity can allow you to get some customer feedback rather than none in those circumstances.

Be humble

Specifically, always practice cultural humility. Our company creates products for attorneys and other legal professionals worldwide. In Japan, there are currently about 18,000 attorneys from a population of 128 million. In the U.S., it’s estimated that we have about one million attorneys out of 294 million people. Because of the small number of attorneys, Japanese lawyers have an extremely high social status. Class systems exist in many countries. Understanding how your research participants (and clients) in other countries perceive themselves and are perceived by others can help you tailor your communication to be most effective.

In general, other cultures all have differences that make a difference when it comes to preparing research and working on product designs. Some are minor, like the differences between British English and American English. Others are major, such as the general cognitive processes that impact how people conceptualize information. For example, East Asians and Westerners prioritize different aspects of information. East Asians emphasize the relationships between things and Westerners emphasize the organic nature of the things (i.e., information objects) themselves. Reading the book The Geography of Thought gave me some valuable background on this topic, without which my research design for a recent project would have been substantially less effective.

Learning about a culture, especially a given business culture, and cultivating awareness and sensitivities to the differences between that culture and yours, is a key element of success in global research. I’ve got good French language skills from my college years, and have made it a point to pick up a little bit of Spanish and German, plus have taken a 10-week course in basic Japanese. I certainly won’t ever be fluent in all of these languages, but studying the language is a great way to build a better understanding of a culture. Also, being able to simply introduce yourself, say please and thank you, and order a meal in another language is useful for building rapport with business associates. Many business people around the world are schooled in English and don’t expect you to learn their language, but they certainly appreciate when Americans make such an effort.

Equally as powerful

In his book The Four Agreements, Don Miguel Ruiz says, “In these agreements we tell ourselves who we are, how to behave, what is possible, what is impossible.” I think such agreements with ourselves in regard to our professional personas are equally as powerful those used to shape our personal lives. Who we are and how we behave on the job is shaped by our professional philosophy. What is possible and what is impossible is based on our knowledge of the craft and our ability to think beyond our own previous experiences or even what has come before in our field. The Four Agreements offered here are only a few bits of advice and are simple in principle. But making these agreements with yourself or reflecting on your own work to arrive at new agreements with yourself may help you be a better researcher, whether you’re working across the world or across town.