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December 19, 2005

Research, Identity, and the Authority of Desire

"I'm not perfect, but I'm perfect for you." -- Grace Jones

Fulfilling need is the core of a business, and defining need is the key to identifying the customer. But understanding need requires understanding desire, and the role of desire behind the need.

I.

In Truffaut's 1960's film of Ray Bradbury's novel "Farenheit 451", the vision of the future doesn't include a cell phone or a PC. There isn't anything in the future home that looks like it has a Delete key on it -- and even less something with a Find key. Meanwhile, the government perfects "information" by tracking down, confiscating and burning every text that it thinks would make people restless and unhappy. Information programming is pervasive. Of course, the ban on books is because independent reading leads to independent thinking. The "Thought Police" are everywhere. People who read are criminal outcasts.

But at the end of the film, everyone does the same thing -- they adopt identities as expert carriers of the information they chose. And whether they chose to identify with the propaganda or with the banned literature, either way they do what they do, and they know what they know, because they want what they want.

Fast forward to 2005 and increasingly, if you have a PC, you choose your own diet of information. (Is it true that we are what we eat?) Find and Delete are as routine for the individual as it was for the government in Bradbury's nightmare future. This leads to a lot more free thinking and free spirits, but it doesn't necessarily lead to great thinking or communities. Confusion might be the main reward of the escape from power politics. Not to worry, though: herding the cats, we still have Academia and we have Marketing.

What do academia and marketing have in common? Tremendous emphasis on "why you should think what you think." Put that way, we can see them both, like politics, as not mere information management but as instances of practical "knowledge management" in the commerce of ideas.

II.

Given the Web's explosive abundance of circulated intellectual material, shifting our scrutiny from "what" we should choose to "why" would seem to be more necessary than ever. Luckily we also have an unprecedented opportunity to analyze or "understand" the options available within the supply; but in the end, why do we care about what we choose?

Marketing, we know, makes product abundance manageable -- guiding our hand as we sort and select. It has always been interesting particularly because it answers the question of "why" with a picture of our appetites. But when it comes to ideas, Academia has always represented the view point that something more impersonal than appetite -- namely, science -- should provide the filters and orders that do the choosing, and the filters are paradigms. Yet why would a science make any more "important" choices than would a personality?

Bradbury's outcast literate society grew its membership with an unquestioned acceptance that all great texts were equally important, and with a requirement (or at least an explicit expectation) that each member select a great book (text) to commit memory for faithful recitation. Once "in", the member needed to show unflagging commitment to the literary identity that was assumed. But despite a virtually unlimited choice of texts, the society showed no overt selection process for what was "great" other than the discretion of the individual member. The apparently utopian feature of that alternative society -- that everyone had the same benefits of membership -- is an implied incentive or reward for making a good choice, but it's also a great leap of faith. At the end of Truffaut's film, all members have started out "equal" because all of them are impersonating ideas given equal merit. But where do they go from there? Why wouldn't this group disintegrate?

We get past this skepticism only through certain presumptions.
- For starters, the individual's selection of text must not have been problematic. Either the individual demonstrated sufficient critical skills, or the individual was willing to be guided by the reliable decisions of other "wiser" persons.
- Thereafter, the motivation behind commiting to the text was the key adhesive ingredient.
- But fueling the motivation, individual hunger for knowledge was the group's common cohesive principle. Thus, appetite itself is transformed into a paradigm of authority, called desire.

III.

To some extent that recalls Thomas Kuhn, who in his book "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions", digs deeply into how subjectivity drives the rise, influence and fall of paradigms. In doing that, he basically exposes the marketing that takes place within a presumably objective academia. "Community" issues, particularly politics, organize and promote subjectivity, mainly by turning certain ideas into products while rejecting others. These "information products" are cultivated by both providers (supply) and consumers (demand).

On the providers' side, through a diligent rigor, the discipline of the research practice breeds product credibility, and that is the normal focus of observers' attention. But as Kuhn reveals, it turns out that research is essentially dominated by motivation , not discipline. The credibility (pertaining to what it produced) is actually a completely separate issue from the relevance of the research (pertaining to why it produced it).

In the resulting supermarket of ideas, the consumers' side has a reflection of that same separation: the difference between what we should be able to choose from (or what counts) and why we should buy (or what matters).

IV.

Having choices to make comes with an accompanying tension involving who gets the last word and why, or where the authority lies.

Since a consumer's reason for wanting something may not be the same as the reason why the provider produced it, if the two parties are to help each other they must find an agreeable coincidence of their interests. Working out that coincidence, negotiationis what ultimately decides which options survive. But underlying that negotiation, research is the effort to resolve the great contest between what we want to decide and what we ought to decide. That's where the real issue of authority comes in.

The moment when we accept both an idea and its authority is summed up neatly in the phrase, "OK, I'll buy that." If you're a provider, getting the consumer to that moment is the goal. But which authority will win out -- desire or propriety? They are not mutually exclusive: rather, the issue is all about which one is primary, commanding the other to support it.

Propriety typically comes with a fairly explicit formality, making it seem easier to use for engineering the result. But what about desire? The formaility of desire has various models as well, dynamics mainly theorized by psychology; but it is typically and mistakenly assumed to be more subconscious than conscious. Instead, the case is really that it's dynamics are more implicit than explicit; it is not subconscious but rather just unrecognized as an organized whole.

Thanks to internet technology, pertinent information about desire's dynamics surfaces more readily and more regularly. The more intelligent we are about our desire, the more effective is its authority -- and consumers quickly gain huge amounts of this intelligence. Now it is more likely than ever that the consumer's own research competitively intervenes in the process of being influenced by the provider. The consumer gets to define what matters. And increasingly, the consumer's authority is by nature indifferent to the provider. Without the kind of value that matters, the provider's product may not count regardless of its quality.

Because that intervention can have an evolutionary or revolutionary effect on the perception of the provider's product, it becomes a strategically critical planning consideration for the provider.

Meanwhile, on the consumer side, it's increasingly evident that while we usually buy what we need to, with internet technology in hand we usually try to buy what we want to. If you're the consumer, how is it that you are actually intervening?

More importantly, how do you come to want what you want?

V.

Historically, at about the third level up in Maslow's hierarchy, "Marketing" has spent its time helping you to want what you want, mainly by offering you a vendors' choices about what you could be like. Thereafter, "Selling" has spent its time offering you choices about what you want a product to be like in order to please the version of "yourself" that marketing had helped you pick. Together, a vendor's Marketing and Selling has had to be sure that you are agreeing with the vendor's ideas and that you are preferring them.

That makes it look like the vendor is doing all the work; but the consumer is not inactive; the key ingredients in the above issues are selection criteria that qualify any items presented, using :
- information about what's possible (i.e., effectively available),
- information about what works (i.e. effectively correct), and
- information about trade-offs (i.e., effectively compatible).

In each case, there are claims made that must be found relevant. But working down the list from "availability" to "compatibility" -- from what counts, towards what matters -- the issue of credibility is increasingly important. For the consumer, the work here is in gaining confidence that the information being processed is good info. But that's not all.

Against that challenge, the vendor has typically worked hard to be able to ultimately say "Trust me!" The vendor gets some help, because from the buyer's viewpoint, the more we want something, the more likely we are to find reasons to buy it. But crossing the line between attraction and commitment is still hard. To make things happen, the vendor focuses on our desire. For the consumer, the work here is in accurately expressing the desire.

Now, thanks to the internet, the information we as consumers need for deciding whether we "agree and prefer" -- or "trust and desire" -- is much more readily acquired from providers other than the vendor, which has quite significant consequences. With online information, the process of discovery and validation has morphed into consumer-driven processes of search and research; so to get "buy-in" the vendor increasingly has to agree with the consumer's ideas. The age of reasonable alternatives has fully arrived. Thus, the first major strategic concern in managing it all is now about who defines the value of a product.

VI.

We can distinguish the idea of "product" by saying that something is a product when its characteristics are both targeted and promoted for a known set of needs. Having a need, we can even simply find something attractive, and in essence then promote it to ourselves. Thus, a "product" comes about through either invention or discovery. Online Search helps a consumer find, at minimum, anecdotal evidence of more different ways to skin a cat. This expanded perspective allows more of those ways (including competing, unprecedented or unconventional ones) to be recognizable (credible) as legitimate "products". It's not hard to see why this competes with Marketing. In effect, "products" are being "made" online through Search.

Meanwhile, with online Research , highly available critiques make it more likely that a product's true probable kinds of impact can be objectively well-determined on one's own. A provider should see that from that greater certainty it's easier for a potential buyer to commit to the item being considered. Why? Because a product that is explicitly appropriate (relevant) can more easily find its "right" buyer. Here we can see research competing with Sales. In effect, "customers" are being "made" online through Research.

But the parallels are not just that simple. It's not just search replacing marketing and research replacing sales.

The important true difference between search and research is, respectively, the difference between discovery and investigation. Discovery is concerned with "what I should find" (i.e., what counts ) while investigation is concerned with "why I should find it" (i.e., what matters). Both concerns are found within marketing, and both are found within sales.

In wanting what we want and getting what we want, desire is made of both discovery and investigation - of both what counts and what matters.

VII.

As seen below, desire is multifaceted and is managed concurrently by the provider (vertically) and by the consumer (horizontally).

For example, in this picture:
- Marketing's promotional aim is to propose a "correct" option for the consumer's target concern.
- But to buy in, the consumer must also find the option to be "compatible". To get there...
- ... the option must be highly "available". Otherwise it is unlikely to survive as an option.
- Finally, a compatible option must be "convenient": that is, it's accessability, usability, comfort, and so forth must make the option fit the consumer's need, not just the consumer's occasion.

VIII.

As consumers, we use search and research to collect and examine information. We use a marketing search and a sales search to take in both marketing and sales information and find options that have value (i.e., what counts). But in order to sort through the variety of valuable options and get to our preference, we use research, examining search results for their compatibility and convenience, to find worth (i.e., what matters).

This processing is the authority of the consumer. It presents the consumer's desire as a paradigm targeting "preference"... or more specificaly, an unobstructed ability to get what is wanted. Authority represents the consumer's ability to make a decision (namely, to accept or reject the product) independently of the provider's promotion of value. Additionally, because we can understand it as a standard set of interrelated factors (as shown) that can be repeatably exercised, we can see the authority acting the same way whether the consumer's preference exists wholly from self-imagining or, at the other extreme, from the militant influence of other non-provider parties such as peers, supervisors or dependents.

IX.

As just described, authority describes the consumer's ability to act independently in pursuit of preference. Preference will reflect the consumer's goal of having the right thing in hand for the occasion of highest priority.

But the priority of the occasion is not always set by the consumer. Importantly, the consumer commits to the priority because of the priority's associated rewards and risks. This commitment effectively places preference as a proxy for need . Making that circumstantial commitment also means that the consumer actually presents an assumed identity to the provider.

In effect, the consumer's need supercedes the consumer's authority.
Because of that, the consumer's autonomy is an actively critical issue at a level even higher than the consumer's potentially revolutionary authority. That is, does the consumer have the right to set and change the highest priorities as the processes of discovery and investigation carry on?

And regardless of the autonomy, can the provider persuade the consumer to assume an identity that is advantageous for the provider?

For the provider, persuasion must succeed across a spectrum of strategic concerns having at least three major segments.
- It starts with who defines the value of the product (who decides why it counts).
- From there it goes to who defines the worth (who decides why it matters).
- And finally, it reaches the point of who sets the priority of the occasion in which the product is anticipated (who decides the need).

Control of these factors cannot be taken for granted. Consumers' online search and research often finds them actually engaged in an experience of self-discovery as they encounter vastly more information of uncertain quality or importance to any progress towards their goal. They wrestle the information to the ground over a series of refinements and iterations, but during the effort they are making decisions about the identity they will assume as often as about the product they will accept.

To take advantage of that, providers should focus on framing the information and its delivery to assist the consumer's development of their final operative identity. This is, actually, what has always been done in marketing and sales. But now the odds are also much greater that the provider will encounter a consumer that has a far more aggressive capability for self-determination, and/or a more powerful capability to suddenly bring alternative providers into the considerations at any point.

The combination of those consumer capabilities means that "the market" is now more virtual than ever -- having boundaries that rapidly appear and disappear along with the identities that consumers derive and assume for themselves each time they are out and about.

The question is, with online search and research, are consumers also "making themselves into customers" more efficiently than does conventional sales -- and are consumers "discovering products" more efficiently and innovatively than does marketing?

If the answers are "yes", then both marketing and sales as we have known them should change -- and while they will still pursue consumer trust and desire, more evolution of their underlying practice models for knowledge management seems imminent.

X.

As suggested above, the consumer recognition and experience of practical KM has typically gone by another name -- such as "marketing" or "sales". One key point to take from all the preceding discussion is that as more consumers do search and research, the underpinnings of sales and marketing change, so it's logical to expect that the KM practice behind sales and marketing will also change.

But now, beyond mere "customer-centricity" developed at modern providers, the source of the new practice models may be the consumers themselves.

The implications of that are most specially interesting when:
- information or knowledge itself is the product sought by the consumer, and...
- the consumer is busy defining both the product and himself.

The challenge to the consumer is considerable. The internet still has a frontier character because it does not inherently guide the choices it might support or reward. But, that offers unprecedented latitude in exploring and finally deriving the predisposition for agreement and preference that will characterize the consumer's activity. Through trial and error, consumers find out what forms and usage of information and knowledge that they perpetrate are usually underlying what feels like progress in aligning and linking the identity they want with the need that they respect. This frontier represents the R&D environment from which consumers may derive the models of practice that will suit them best. Today, because it is now so much easier to discover and self-serve the uniqueness of one's identity, any given consumer seemingly has a chance of deriving a personal model that is as good as any from elsewhere. The consumer is, in effect, a knowledge worker.

XI.

For providers, the message in that is really important: the future standard benchmark of provider success is consumer productivity -- that is, the ability of the self-defined consumer to use the provider to generate solutions to the consumer's need.

This modus operandi is far from an unusual concept: for example, some IT organizations in corporate enterprises have existed in provider roles under this demand for at least a decade, making technologies into products for enabling prior-defined business tasks.

Paralleling that, some providers are all about making information into products for enabling user tasks. For them, the problem of assessing the worthiness of knowledge management (KM) in the enterprise highlights a similar challenge: "knowledge workers" -- i.e., employees whose primary responsibility is production output from a work toolset of information products -- must generate more enterprise benefits when supported with managed knowledge provision than they do with mainly ad hoc knowledge access. In the enterprise, the knowledge worker is the consumer.

XII.

The uncertainty of dealing with differences (heterogeneity) amongst knowledge consumers is a tremendous problem for the corporate setting, in which standards and economy of scale are functional gateways. For the providers in the enterprise, the necessity is now to standardize and scale individual production instead of mass production.

Whether in IT or KM, the primary tension for operations still exists in the difference between the consumer's preference and the provider's promotion. Specifically, the consumer may want to do things one way while the provider offers a different way. Bilaterally resolving the tension will be the key to productivity, and this is possible only through addressing the issue of why the consumer wants what they want.

On the provider's side: understanding how the knowledgeworker's need and desire are established and defined by the knowledgeworker is crucial to designing knowledge management -- which must remain a vehicle for the development and commerce of information products. It is logical that, just as with IT and information management services, the first baseline of widespread KM success will come with the creation of KM "services" and service level agreements that are incorporated into consumer-recognized operations like marketing, scholarship, resourcing, support, planning, or whatever... (Thus, the Googles, Yahoos, eBays and Amazons are not in the least mysterious as to how they are maturing. In the enterprise, we at least can anticipate corporate versions of those providers.)

On the other side of the coin: in light of the consumer's new capabilities in an online environment, a knowledgeworker is clearly a consumer with a heightened, "open" opportunity to become a source of product (i.e., a provider) as well. "Grass roots", "social networks" and "open source" efforts are examples of increasingly coordinated activity that integrates and elevates self-service, peer-service and collaboration to the status of a complete but alternative channel or environment of intellectual commerce -- not outcast, but exotic... albeit perhaps for only a little while longer.

Posted by Malcolm Ryder at December 19, 2005 7:27 AM

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