My favourite desk

Here is my favourite desk:

Coloured papers, pens, coffee, the best croissants in the world, fresh newspaper, light, enough interactions to keep me awake, a quiet corner, and a clean slate. Working in a non traditional work environment was demonstrated in our last research to be used for creative thinking by knowledge workers. See below:

7 main reasons to work in coffee shops
- Creativity
- Freedom : freedom to choose what is convenient and fits my identity
- Regulated social interactions : a familiar place, where one does not feel lonely without having to engage
- A relaxed style
- Focus: an empty desk to focus on demanding tasks
- Separating places: not my home
- Not my main office: avoiding colleagues, other tasks and distractions

Seeing what is invisible in plain sight

Going from product design to strategy, corporate anthropologists are requested to provide grounded statements not only on the present , what is happening here, but also on how we expect these things to evolve in the future. However I share Brigitte Jordan's opinion that predicting the future is not a reasonable task and that the best we can do is to "look at insidient trends, focus on developments under our noses".

This requires to adopt a focus in sight which is unfamiliar to ethnographers and work analysts, trained in working on the details on the present situations and not to get the dynamic, future-oriented picture. Of course, ethnomethodologists demonstrated how staging the details of our everyday interactions could help us describe the organizing model of our social rituals. Ergonomists from the French-speaking tradition of work analysis also hightlighted how the small events at the workplace inherited and reflected all bigger corporate contradictions. But practically, seeing what is invisible in plain sight requires first to step out of the situation. Grasping the general trends which everybody could see supposes a kind of revolution of the eye: looking carefully, at the details - but through the magnifying glass, with a stranger's eye. This indirect condition - the magnifying glass - may allow us then, as Gaston Leroux's hero Rouletabille, to see

"tout ce que nous ne voyons pas et qui est immense"

  all that we do not see and which is immense...

mobile.migrant.communities. Postcards from the field

Remember I told you we were experimenting with small ideas to keep our internal partners in the loop of our field research as early as possible.

This includes designing the space of the research with their inputs (thanks to individual interviews and comments on the work in progress on collaboration tools at the beginning of the project), and later associating them to our first analyses in workshops and revising our reports with their feedbacks. But to bridge the temporal gap between the participatory definition of the project at the beginning and the discussions on its impacts at the end, we try to give them a sense of what is the core of our work according to us : what is happening on the field.

This year we called this attempt "postcards from the field" (maybe because the fieldwork is to be done during the Summer holidays). Here is one :

The postcard from the field is a under 2 minutes view of a striking fact from our field observations. One is done for each user. It communicates something that the ethnographer has felt to be important to keep in mind after this observation and interview. It is mainly visual, with most of the time a picture, a user quote and a comment in one or two sentences. I may post some more on this blog if you want to stay in the loop too...

mobile.migrant.communities. Food and beverage, or "take a candy and relax"

Take a close look at these desks (both from software engineers, but I guess the result would be the same for almost all kinds of desk workers).

Cookies.Apple.Water.

Coke. Empty cup. Empty cup. Water.

Food and beverage are workers' usual companions. According to our first observations on a collection of desks, this looks like a strong result. Working involves some kind of comfort and safety to which food and beverage constantly contribute. They are comforting. They have a social role (the morning coffee or tea and chit chat at the coffee machine). They can even be used as regulation tools for our own behaviour : think again of the coffee or tea cup as a ritual to enter into our own working space. And sometimes, they are even tools to regulate social relations. See below:

  "Take a candy and relax". It is the welcoming message from this support team, used to deal with frustrated and impatient clients-colleagues whose system does not work any more.

Conclusion : we do not know what the future of the workplace will be like, but we can bet that food and beverage will be part of it.

mobile.migrant.communities How professionals migrate from one work environment to another ?

"I am an anthropologist by training. I have worked in Europe, the United States, and a number of developing countries, tracing the influence of social and technological innovations on work practice, quality of life and organizational change. For the last 15 years or so, with my colleagues at XEROX Parc and the Institute for Research on Learning, I've studied how people learn at work as they take on new technologies, new organizational structures, new management ideas and incorporate them into their working lives. As applied anthropologists and system designers, we used to go into a workplace and observe the local culture, its formal and informal aspects, what people say as well as what they do. We called those studies "workscapes studies" because we came out to understand that work is not simply a set of specified tasks to be carried out as instructed, but much more like an arena, a territory that needs to be traversed and explored, with well-trodden paths and unknown caves ; with teams to be formed and mountains to be scaled. Like landscapes, workscapes have histories and are constantly exposed to the force of the elements, to seasonal fluctuations, and to human actions. We studied how these workscapes cahnges by spending time with people in their worksplaces, as attentive observers and inquisitive participants.

But then something strange happened. The workplace went away.  Managers were not to be found in their corner office. Employees were somewhere other than the sales pit or the team meeting room. At the same time, jobs were going away. Corporate hierarchies became flatter. Workers all of a sudden needed to make decisions on their own rather than following orders from above. (...) While jobs were going away, there was plenty of work to be done. People in the US, and especially in fast-paced Silicon Valley, worked more hours than ever before. As a matter of fact, the boundaries between what is work and what is home life are blurring for many people. If you read email before your morning shower, send a fax before going to work, and get pages during your vacation for an urgent customer problem, where is the boundary ? It became clear that if we wanted to understand how people learn, change and adjust to the new technology-rich world, we would want to go beyond the evanescent workplace." 

From Brigitte Jordan, from PARC and IRL. 

With increasing technologization and increase of knowledge work, it has finally become possible to divorce much work from the workplace, be that of a factory floor, an office or an on-site meeting room. People now work at home, at secondary workplaces, in the car, in trains, in airplanes, on vacation, in coffee shops and shared working spaces. However they still can not work anytime, anywhere. Working requires a specific working environment, including (not exhaustively) space, data, social relationships, technological ressources, mood and also most importantly comfort with food and bevarages, music, and a sufficiently safe and inspiring atmosphere. What makes an environment a working environment? What are these working environments made off ? How are they actively built and transformed by the practitionners ? How do professionals transform some places (and which) into temporary or regular working environments ?  How do they transit, migrate from one to the other ? How do they anticipate and prepare these transitions ? Which factors regulate these migrations ? In short : what is a modern working environment and how is it actively managed by the professionals ? 

This is the focus of this exploratory ethnographic study into the everyday reality of these mobile professionals. This study is done in partnership with the Master of Design and Ethnography from Dundee University.

This is a fast-paced research project : 4 months, including focus phase, two months of fieldwork, one work of analysis with our partners. The field research is just beginning, we are in the process of building the research protocol. As usual, I realize that formalizing a shared transcript format is an indirect way to discuss and agree on a protocol. More to come on this research anyway...

Corporate anthropologist : what do we do ?

I was recently asked to describe my job (reminder : I am currently working as a senior corporate ethnographer for the Innovation and Strategy Department of a big IT company in Switzerland) for corporate ethnography students and thought it might be of interest for discussion more widely in the community. So here it is !

"Ethnography is the branch of anthropology that involves trying to understand how people live their lives. Unlike traditional market researchers, who ask specific, highly practical questions, anthropological researchers visit consumers in their homes or offices to observe and listen in a nondirected way." Ken Anderson, Intel

I totally share this definition. Now if I look at what I am concretely doing, here are some of my regular tasks :


- Identify important topics for our research and business : "hot topics" to be further studied ;
- Formulate research questions ;
- Design research plans to answer these questions, including framing, calendar, ressources, method, sample, guidelines, confidentiality agreement and ethics, outputs... Make them evolve during the fieldwork if necessary ;
- Identify key internal partners interested in this research ;
- Coordinate data gathering and analysis, follow and check fieldwork, coach the research team if any, collaborate through various tools ;
- Do some fieldwork, including real world observations, interviews, observations of online activity, sometimes questionnaires ;
- Inform bosses and key partners ;
- Create templates : transcript templates, analysis templates...
- Analyze fieldwork data : solitary, in workshops, in close collaboration with some colleagues, during external exchanges... 
- Present nicely fieldwork data and research results,write a report and many Powerpoint presentations ;
- Organize and conduct workshops with our key internal partners and re-write our conclusions ;
- Close the project (for example, organize data storage and knowledge sharing) and do the follow-up (questions on the project may appear 3 or 5 years later...) ;
- Sometimes but very rarely, we are encouraged to publish some of our results or to present in scientific conferences.

In short we are expected to express grounded opinions on what is going on now, according to our observations ; which development we can anticipate in the near future ; what does it mean for the company. Although fieldwork is according to me the core of our job, highlighting its value and transcribing it into valuable corporate inputs take a lot of time.


In parallel to this process which is relevant for a full research project, we :
- participate in other projects from the team (with different status : for example, as contributor to brainstorming workshops in the definition phase, as fieldworkers, or as contributor to analysis workshops in the final phases) ;
- contribute to projects led by other teams (with variable expectations, from expert guidance to definition of prototypes) ;
- answer to plenty of questions on specific topics or products (we are the experts on the user point of view, are we not ?) 
- reflect on our own processes, experiment new tools or ways to proceed, try to improve what we do. 

I hope it gives a better idea of our realities here as "corporate ethnographers". And what are yours ? 
 

Professional Social Networking : six expert uses of social media

Last summer at Swisscom User Observatory we conducted an ethnographic research on professional social networking with brilliant folks from Dundee University. These last years and months, social media invaded our private lifes and we wondered whether they could have an impact on the ways we communicate, collaborate at work or the ways we conduct our business. We also wondered who the professional users of social media were, what they really did with them, why and how they used them, and whether private practices and expectations towards social media would influence the professional world.

What did we do ?

We interviewed (and observed when possible, at least we observed the online activity) 45 expert users in 3 places : London, Berlin, Switzerland.

These experts were chosen according to a set of criteria : we recruited people active on more than one social media platform, and having more than 400 contacts on LinkedIn or Xing.

By analyzing how these few individuals deal professionally with social media, we hoped to derive potential benefits for more mainstream companies (including ours). The idea is not to gather user needs or opinions or a representative picture of the Swiss market, but to understand their goals, the measurable objectives they hope to achieve with professional social networking, and the strategies they carefully tuned through time for that.

Providing inspiration

Our expert users turned out to be mostly independant workers, found of cheap, creative solutions to achieve their business objectives, quite innovative in their business use cases of these public technologies. Moreover, they can be described as trend-setters as they are highly influential in the professional communities they animate. Therefore, reflecting in this research on their objectives, strategies, and common use cases, provides an important inspiration to evaluate potentially relevant uses of social media in bigger companies.


Six main use cases

After many analyzes of the data, we restricted the whole practices observed to a set of six main use cases, which are :

1. Business Promotion
From SME which sell directly on Facebook, to consultants who promote their services via Twitter, social media offer new ways not only to inform your customers abou your products but to engage them in your business. The traditional one-way model is substituted by a more participative model where part of the marketing is delegated to key customers.

2. Business Intelligence
Social media represent a huge data bank which can be structured, analyzed and exploited. One of our users for example extracted more than 600 profiles from LinkedIn, did some cross analysis on excell, drew graphs and presented the results to his management to convince them that there was a new market which was worth a few explorations.

3. Establishing a reputation
This use case is about managing your own image online. Social media mostly enable individuals to establish themselves as interesting, reliable, witty, well-informed, connected, activ, creative people in a professional community. Producing, commenting and exchanging information is the cornerstone of this self-promotion strategy. As it is now, corporate or product branding is more difficult to perform via social media.

4. Testing ideas
This iterative prototyping is one of the most interesting use cases we encountered. Social media enable to get immediate feedback on ideas or prototypes. One of our users published all his new projects on his professional blog, collected feedbacks and comments and improved them accordingly.

5. People Sensemaking
Social media were used massively for people sensemaking, i.e. checking the online identity of your colleagues, partners, funders, speakers, customers... before you meet them - or after. This is supposed to provide fuel for chitchat (breaking the ice, finding common interests). But it is also precious to identify the key players in your activity : who are they, what are they interested in, etc. Professional social networks enable to get a kind of dynamic business card - but private social networks (like Facebook) or mix social media (like Twitter) are also used to make sense of people.They are said to provide a picture which is a lot more useful because it is less "polished", more faithful. For different reasons : Facebook because of its audience (you talk to friends so you share your life interests), Twitter because of frequency (you can not lie in constant stream).

6. Daily collaboration
Social media help solve some collaboration problems in speedy projects, distributed teams, or for Digital Nomads. Facebook may give a sense of being together although the team is geographically spread. Twitter is used by some innovative users as a project management tool to keep the whole team informed real time of the latest news and trigger discussion.

We learned much more, that I am not here fully authorized to share. Thanks again to our Dundee students for this nice ethnographic partnership !

Gardener or ethnographer ?

Invited post, by Valerie Bauwens, Human Centricity
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A couple of days ago, the radio was playing in background, when my attention suddenly  got caught by what the gardener of the castle of Prangins was saying talking about the fruits and vegetable in his garden: "créer une biodiversité orientée", probably badly translated… "Create an oriented biodiversity" . Intriguing. These could have been the words of an ethnographer. No, it was the gardener who was explaining why the different varieties of fruits and vegetables happened to have grown in the garden of the castle over the last centuries. Next to the climate constraints, he pointed out that the medical needs of people at that time were one important factor that shaped the biodiversity of the garden. People at that time had "des humeurs" to be healed (don’t ask me which kinds of illnesses these were exactly). One way to be cured from these "humeurs" was to "drain" the body. Subsequently, fruits and vegetables to "drain" the body were planted. It would be definitely worth it to pay a visit to the "jardinier" and ask for further details on what plants were used at that time for that function.

http://www.museenational.ch/f/prangins/chateau_jardins/jardin_potager.php

Keeping in mind that the aim of the gardener is to maintain the castle garden as it was 200 years ago, another point occurred to me. It is much easier too clearly pinpoint how particular social beliefs clearly influenced work practices when you can look back 200 years ago. Just one thought that made me feel more indulgent about ourselves as ethnographers, when we struggle identifying all the links between trends, daily habits, etc. Well, we might sometimes need just a little more time and distance to do so, time to look back.

The main impact of technology may be on power balance : some words to be continued on the Scollon's perspective

The main impact of communication technologies may be to change the power balances : two recent examples

Yesterday at Rezonance, Yves Cretigny explained how social media substantially transforms an event like Lift by the virtue of creating a community : this Lift-community of around 7000 people (compared to the 1000 people physically present for example at the last Geneva Lift event) influences the topics, program and logistics before the event ; during the event, it also influences what the speakers say because the speakers know that the community will have access to the Internet and check and comment real time the content of the talks ; the questions and comments of the community (via Twitter walls, or blogs for example) also add value to the global content ; after the event, the video recordings allow a lot of people to access to enriched contents (talks plus discussions) and to comment and prepare the next event. Alltogether, social media change the power balance between the scene and the audience. 
Similarly we mentioned in the same meeting the case of Jule, a honey producer, who works and lives in Berlin. Jule adopted a social media strategy to sell her honey and this strategy may well change the way honey is produced and distributed in Berlin area in the near future. Jule uses social media to identify key players in her business in Berlin, in particular famous cooks. She then contacts them to discuss new recipes with honey. In parallel she checks the online identity of her best customers and if she founds one with an important online presence, she keeps contact with them. Her idea is to create a data base of supporters to whom she can partly delegate the marketing and sales of her products. Being aware of the latest online discussions between opinion leaders in the food industry enables her to identify trends and opportunities to improve her products. Therefore her R&D is partly done thanks to social media, all the more as she can test very quickly her ideas and get feedback and support. Her objective is also to engage other local honey producers in this dynamic. If Jule manages to build and manage this "Berlin honey" community, which will not be a restricted group of either producers or customers but include producers, key customers, key restaurants, journalists... acting and interacting together, it may well change the way honey is produced and distributed in this area - this means, her social media strategy may change fully the future power balance between producers and distributors in the local honey business.

Back to the 80' : Ron and Suzie Scollon's experiments on social tech and power 

In January 1981 Ron and Suzie Scollon began to experiment with email conferencing on the ARPANET structure to teach to students distributed in whole Alaska. They reported their pioneer experiment and formulated an innovative theory on ethnography, social action and discourse analysis in books and papers, like Nexus Analysis.

   

 

In the first chapter of Nexus Analysis, they reported three cases where "a form of social interaction - a business meeting, a university seminar, and a legislative hearing with regular and well-understood  and well-habituated practices - was restructured through good intentions and for good purposes by using the very new technologies of the video conference, email, and the audio conference. In each case the social relationships, forms of power, and accessibility of some individuals was significantly altered in relationship to others within the same situation." (Ron & Suzie Scollon, 2004, p.2). They concluded that "discourse (understood in a broad sense of the use of language in social interaction) and technology are intimately related to each other". They highlighted that all forms of discourse (even face-to-face interaction) are supported by specific technologies, for example the regular conversational practices (for the exchange of turns, introduction of new topics, repair of misunderstandings, speech acts, etc.) or the structure of the physical and symbolic environment : 
"Why is it difficult to hold a clinical consultation in a classroom ? Why is it a problem to hold a business meeting in an airport lounge ?" Specific genres of discourse are best supported by generic or specific technologies.
Let's conclude shortly this entry, which I will develop later by presenting R. and S. Scollon's theoretical and methodological model : In their pioneering work, R. and S. Scollon showed that analyzing technology or discourse means conducting a nexus analysis in which power relationships can not be ignored - and in which the ethnographer himself is fully integrated by the virtue of his analysis work. Ron and Suzie Scollon thus remind us that ethnography, as well as discourse analysis, are fully linked to social action and transformation.

Being an internal researcher - reporting results 2 : no surprise it does not work, or multifunctional field data

Last year was full of experimentations at the Business User Observatory on the ways we report our research. With some colleagues we tried various new forms to report the results of our field research. Remember that as an internal researcher, shipping is a feature and that shipment is usually expected through the delivery of a Powerpoint presentation (see my former blog entry called “from pres to workshops”). Our experimentations included for example photonovellas, Indesign reports, short “hot” reports on our field observations, and various kinds of movies, including Dogma 95 shaking journeys with a hand camera into the days of our users, or filming the researcher presenting her presentation. We recently got a chance to discuss their impact and relevance for different audiences. Here are my conclusions.

What is the aim of user research presentations ?
Firstly, what is the aim of user research presentations ? It is tightly correlated to the audience. Presentations can be designed for internal workshops. In that case, their aim will be to share field data to make sense of them / to build interpretations / to discuss one point of the study (for example, the methodology) / to derive conclusions. For these purposes we may share selected raw data. In that case, we may even be interested in discussing what really happened during the field, selecting real narratives. However, as soon as the presentation is addressed to internal or external partners, for example designers or managers, the purpose changes. The narrative must be carefully packaged. These audiences are mostly not interested in the details of field research but in its potential impact for their work, project or company. If we present field data, we must pilot them through them. In that context, we may help people dive into our data to make them feel - and not only understand - what is happening around, but we can not expect them to dive into them “randomly”, for free, or graciously. Selecting and organizing data, we highlight some interesting points. We help them see what is to be seen according to us and therefore direct what they look at.

Our data are collected for analysis purposes and then requested also for demonstration

Secondly, the purposes are very different, from analyzing to convincing, inspiring or triggering actions. However we re-use the same data in all these contexts. Our data collection is primarily designed to support our analysis of the topic at stake, to help us understand and maybe describe the observed behaviours and their meanings, and not with a demonstrative idea in mind. We collect a whole bunch of interviews, audio records, pictures, video sequences… to work on and when the analysis is done, we may appeal to some of them to help us illustrate the results we get. No surprise that more than often we do not get the right material to make our point clear. Is it possible then to keep in mind from the first data collection phase on the field that some data should be collected for demonstrative purposes ? Or should we even consider producing “fake”, efficient field films to specially illustrate our point, once we know our main messages ?

The impact of visual presentations

Thirdly, increasing the readibility of our presentations hugely increases its impact. The same content presented in a Word document or in a Indesign report will have a different effect. Corporate people do not read, we were told. So we tried to design reports they would wish to read. We chose to write thick reports full of field details, but balanced by careful lay out, navigation conventions, graphics and pictures. The aim was to produce a 60 pages scientific report that could be read in the train almost as a magazine. Check the difference :

simple word report, not read

final report

Temporary conclusions

1. Doing the work is just half of the effort, reporting it just takes as much time. However putting your work into form to present it contributes to the data analysis process by helping you to get a point of view on your data.
2. Reporting is always a dialogue, data presentation being tailored according to what you expect your audience to do after having listened to you.
3. Try to engage your audience as early as possible in your research process, so that they get accustomed and even curious about field data.
4. Attention is rare – increasing the visual quality of your presentation has a strong effect on its impact. Commented pictures or very short video sequences help direct convey your message. 
5. Direct attention : do not expect your audience to see spontaneously in your data what you see after hours of careful screaning and thinking.
6. Make them feel, and not only understand. Nobody acts according only to its rational representations of a problem. Motivational aspects are far more important and “raw” field data (seeing the people in context) helps to build this motivation. 
7. Field data for presentations are not standing alone : they are efficient in supporting intermediary (or mediationnal) conceptual tools, like a notion, a matrix, a set of profiles, a list of use cases or an opportunity map for example, which are other ways to report how you make sense of your data. 

Being an internal user researcher : sharing results /1 from pres to workshops : ethnographic research as a collaboration and innovation tool

These last eight months, I was engaged as an internal researcher at Swisscom User Observatory in a big ethnographic research on social media, called professional social networking, on which I'll tell you more soon. We designed and coordinated a research conducted with some brilliant students of Dundee's Master on Design and Ethnography. Together we observed and interviewed 45 Lead Users in 3 places : London, Berlin and Switzerland. We did some fieldwork in Switzerland ourselves and delegated the fieldwork in London and Berlin to our associated students-researchers. Analysis and interpretations were partly shared, and partly done independently by the students and by our team. Eventually we wrote three reports at different times of the project. The story of their evolution will be the topic of a future blog entry.

Discussing the design, surprises and outcomes of the research will take me more than one entry. Today I would like to share with you just one point, which is related to the way we convey our results.

As internal researchers, we are expected to deliver results. Software developers say : "Shipment is a feature. You must have it". Corporate anthropologists must have it, too. In our case, the expected deliverable is a Powerpoint presentation. You can hate it, play with it, whatever, but it is something you can not avoid here at Swisscom if you want to share your results with your internal colleagues, engineers, consultants as well as managers. However, presenting your results in a Powerpoint format can be quite frustrating. The problem is not only the Powerpoint format itself - it is the very concept of presenting. Presentations to busy people - as decision-makers are supposed to be in a company - are short (from 10 to 30 minutes max). You present highlights of your research and answer to a few questions but you do not get a chance to engage with your audience into a real discussion on the issues tackled (or not) by the research and on the ideas it may trigger.

Your situation as an internal researcher is generally slightly better than your situation as an external researcher, because you (are supposed to) know better the challenges of the company and the potential impact of your results. But still, there is few difference between a traditional face-to-face presentation and broadcasting : you give your data, interpretations, hypotheses and conclusions but you rarely know how these results are understood, appreciated and appropriated, or (if and for) what they will be used. Of course you know who is listening to you (you more or less control your audience) but you do not know if your research is relevant to them. Feedback remains superficial. Even if your presentation is successful, the questions you get are predictable : what is the impact for the company ? What does it mean for us ? How does it impact blablabla (fill in this space with a name of product, service or process) ?

That's why we decided in this project not to do presentations any more but to do workshops. The format we chose is a two-hours workshop : 20-30 minutes max were dedicated to the framing and presentation of our research. This short presentation is possible because participants were sent the report one week in advance (a highly readable report, I'll comment this in a future entry) and were expected to have read it before the workshop. Interestingly, most of them did read it. The other 90 minutes are dedicated to (1) a discussion / validation of the results, (2) a reflection exercise in smaller on the impact of the research for the company. We piloted the discussions and prospective exercises with framing questions.  We took risks, too, since we offered our hypothesis, even if uncertain, for discussion in this second part of the workshop.

Three months of fieldwork preparation, interviews and analysis, then three months of "reporting" of the results

With these workshops, we overcame the frustrating feeling of "broadcasting research results" instead of sharing them and collaborating. Please notice that the status of our presentation changes : it is not conceived as a final product of the research, presenting your analysis and conclusions, but as "a tool for thought". The status of the report changes, too : it is not a final report, but a draft report, which will be improved thanks to the feedbacks collected. Globally the status of the research changes : the research does not bring answers, it brings in a first step, structured inspiration based on observed use cases and behavioural patterns, and in a second step, consolidated understanding of the impact for the company based on the reactions of the participants to the propositions of the researchers and on the thoughts the research triggered among the participants. In that sense ethnographic research can serve as a humble collaboration and innovation tool.

Advantages :
With the same effort (time invested in the research and in the production of a Powerpoint presentation), you gain :
- greater trust in your own data and interpretations and a better final report ;
- better impact ;
- better engagement of your internal partners ;
- slightly more control on the use of the results of your research ;
- a better understanding of what your colleagues are interested in and of the opportunities for the company ;
- some support and arguments for further research ;
- potential collaborations.
- You also increase the visibility of user research,
- and the size and quality of your internal network.
Drawbacks :
- you have to identify the right potential partners (i.e all people in the company potentially interested by your topic, to invite to your workshop, and at the right hierarchical level), which can take a lot of time.
- you have to provide them with "food for thought" before the workshop
- you have to invite them cleverly (we organized two different workshops for example with CBU and SME managers to reflect on the impact for big and small companies)
- you have too write two reports, one draft report before the workshop and  one final report after the workshop.
- it is more difficult to get two hours of free time than 20 minutes, so it will take more time to organize a workshop than a presentation, you have to plan it in advance.

Tech Diving - The context of the research

"Don't panic". Or why should we do a psychological investigation of Technical Diving ?

As clinicians of activity, our interventions answer to field requests : we help the professionals to investigate the questions or problems that come to light in their everyday activity. 

The main question related to Tech Diving is risk and risk management.

Last pages of the official diving book of each diver

"An old Tech diver is a good diver", they say, or "I do not know if I am good but I am still here". See for example this quote from the field : "Pour durer dans ce milieu, il faut prendre le temps de construire son expérience". Accidents happen (see for example the news, in French, of the death of Brigitte Lenoir, trying to dive to -230 meters : http://www.24heures.ch/deces-plongeuse-brigitte-lenoir-egypte-2010-05-15).

Therefore the field demand can be stated as follow :
1) As a diver : a good preparation is critical in Tech Diving. It is thought to be a triple preparation : material preparation, physical preparation and psychological preparation. The material preparation is very well documented and is the focus of much of the training programs. The physical preparation is not specific to this activity, which requires a good physical condition as in other sports. And they know almost nothing on the psychological preparation. Some teachers ask questions on this topic in their courses : are you aware of the risks you take ? And your family ? Do they accept them ? But how do Tech Divers really feel regarding these questions ? Stress and fear are two words from the field. Tech Divers say that if an incident happens when you are at the bottom of the sea, the difference between a dead diver and a diver alive is related to his psychological ability to deal with this unexpected situation. Can we explicit these psychological ways of staying in control of a difficult situation ?
2) As a trainer and teacher : can they help their trainees to better evaluate and manage the risks ? Can they tell them when they put themselves in danger and why ? Can they help them to better manage these psychological aspects to practice more safely ?

My bet is that risk management is strongly incorporated in all the small, repeted, common gestures of the experiences divers and that we can work on this everyday experience in order to get this psychological aspects visible, and put them under discussion.

Tech Diving - 2

Some more pictures from this first fieldwork with Tech Divers, taken after the dive, which was 110 minutes long : 5 minutes to go to -107 meters, 5 minutes at the bottom of the lake, including an exercise to check the backup material. There was a problem with the material (although it had been tested successfully just half an hour before before the dive) and the diver decided to go back to -80 meters, where he spent around 10 minutes before coming up slowly. The first levels were around -35 meters. The lake was clear and calm, no wind, crystalline waters.

Back !

The rebreather - inside

What was done, recorded by the diving computer : see in blue, the dive curve ; and in red, the decompression curve

A (Swiss) diver's car : full and very well organized.

Tech Diving - 1

Yesterday fieldwork journey with an experienced Tech Diver. We begin a research project on Risk Management, exploring the psychological aspects of this kind of very, very technical diving. These divers go deep, more than 60 meters deep and up to 100, 120, sometimes 140 meters. They breathe special mixes of Oxygen, Nitrogen and Helium - called Trimix. The day is sunny but the water is cold : 6 to 4 Celsius degrees (around 41 °F). Preparation work requires more than one hour, and you'll understand why below.

Beautiful spot : Thun lake, near Interlaken

Rebreather ready for use - 25 kg

Testing the back up air tanks. Redundancy is the word.

Testing if the diving suit is water-resistant

The compass

Putting the rebreather on

Backup air tanks and life line ready

Ready to go - bye bye