Editor’s note: Nancy Cox is the founder of Research Story Consulting and former CPG corporate researcher. Her work and play include words, sketchpads, cooking (not baking) and the occasional sock puppet.
Passions, hobbies, healthy distractions and even guilty pleasures – discover how the research community plays and how that plays out in their work life. In the Venn diagram of work and play, what happens when they overlap? Research colleagues share their work and play stories in this interview series by Nancy Cox.
Hello to Kajoli Tankha, senior director, consumer marketing insights, Microsoft
What is the “play” in your life?
My time studying forestry management has been a foundational influence in my life. Forestry means many things. It can be understanding the biology of the forest. It can be the tree-hugging piece, the ecology piece. It also includes harvesting forests for items like furniture and housing materials. All these subjects were covered when I studied forestry. Where I went to school, there were just 20 students. We had a gorgeous institute in the middle of a forest on top of a hill. Completely cut off from the world. Yet being in the place so opened our minds that my tiny class went all over the world – India, Canada, the U.S., South Africa and the U.K. – but also places you might not expect such as Cambodia, Vietnam and Indonesia.
When I worked in forestry, my specialty area was trying to understand the people who have lived in forests for millennia. Their way of living is inside the forest, and that’s completely fine when there’s seemingly endless forest in relationship to people. But when the proportion changes, the forest gets degraded. Both the people’s way of life and the forest are threatened. Thus, I worked on joint forest management.
That management begins with understanding the people. With that understanding, you can start figuring out how to make an agreement with three parties who, at first, appear to have competing incentives. The first party, the tribal people who lived in the forest, loved the forest, but didn’t care about leaving the forest intact because there was always more forest. The second party, the government, wanted to protect the forest from the human element. And the silent third party, the forest, just wanted to be.
How has your play influenced your research work?
Now that my career is in market research, I still feel how forestry has been a foundational part of my life in three ways – understanding an ecosystem, recognizing there are competing stakeholders and making the silent voice, often the most important voice, prominent in the room.
It’s extremely helpful working in a large company like Microsoft, understanding that you are one small part of the ecosystem. A complex ecosystem of competing stakeholders, each with a completely different and justified point of view. For example, departments have conflicting goals, good goals, and there’s no reason for the other stakeholders to listen. The work is to actively gain a shared understanding of what is good for the ecosystem – like forest management. In work, what is the good of the forest becomes the company’s interest. Something that everyone can get behind. Everyone wants to see the company flourish.
Another example is how a product launch may influence a brand. The brand is a silent stakeholder. The launch may influence it positively, negatively or not at all. As a researcher, yes, there is thinking about the short term. How to launch. But also thinking of the long term – how it impacts the brand.
I don’t want to make this one-dimensional. We all have multiple influences in our lives that overlap and intersect. While forestry is foundational, I have two other major influences: one is my autistic son. A direct influence on my career, as I chose to work at Microsoft for the insurance benefits to cover his needs. But in turn, autism has made me very, very optimistic. At first with the diagnosis, there’s a lot of grimness. A sense that things are very hopeless. Then life with autism goes on. You start to discard your biases. Your child is just your child. The same child you had the day before the diagnosis. The same child the day after. The same child you love. We treat the diagnosis like it’s a slammed door. But it’s not.
I take the same approach in my work. I lead consumer business research in Microsoft. Which is a definitely less important part than our commercial business. But I feel it’s the most exciting place in Microsoft because you’re up against the odds. It’s your brain and your strategic thinking that’s going to keep you ahead.
I also read 50 to 70 books a year. I especially like murder mysteries which show how to communicate research by framing a problem up front. If I’m doing a project about messaging – I would show here’s an ad that did well, here’s an ad that didn’t do well. Why do you think that happened? I would draw them into the frame. It’s exactly like Agatha Christie: very early on, we have the dead body. How do you think that happened? Then the tension is not about the bad thing that happened – the ad that didn’t perform. The tension is about why it happened, and we have to figure that out.
Ultimately, my three major “plays” or influences of forestry, autism and reading intersect in my fascination to understand the world from different perspectives. In forestry, I was plunged into a world where you have stakeholders with nothing in common. With autism, the most important thing I could really do was learn from son’s perspective, what gave him joy and what he wanted to achieve out of his life rather than try to make him “normal.” From books, well, books are the ultimate way to experience so many perspectives in the world. So many experiences and lives that are so different from ours. It blows my mind that there so many people in the world who are having a completely different experience.
What would you tell readers who want to know more about your area of play?
I would encourage Quirk’s readers to ask themselves, what is their angle? I have a colleague whose entire approach to his life and his work is behavioral economics. My husband’s angle is always to find fairness – in any topic to explore from various points of view – not just one. My angle is clearly psychology. I’m always trying to understand the motivations. I wanted to know the motivations of the various parts of a forest ecosystem, my son’s motivations and when reading? I read a lot of murder mysteries. I’ve read and reread all of Agatha Christie – over 80 books.
Examine your angle, your theme. Understand that you’ll find the play and the work that enriches you. And it’s not limiting! It sounds like making choices, but that understanding helps you take more chances. Driven by my passion of understanding motivations, I chose adventures, the chance. The adventure of coming to America to study forestry. Taking a less normal approach to raising an autistic child. Everything that is good that has come to me, has come from taking the chance vs. a conventional choice.