A newly minted PhD had recently started teaching business communication with me, and we were comparing notes on moving beyond the bubble of an academic audience. We talked about the challenges of writing more clearly, more concisely, and more persuasively, with a bias to action. These aren’t easy habits for most scholars to adopt, and my colleague summed up the reason why:
“Academic is the easiest kind of writing to produce,” she said. And I had to agree.
Inside the Ivory Tower, you’re writing mainly for folks similar to yourself. In most cases, you also have a highly interested, deeply invested audience who will read your work closely.
Outside the Ivory Tower, however, you’re usually writing for people whose attention is fractured by various pressures: time constraints, competing allegiances, digital distractions, and so on.
The thinking to produce ideas for academic writing is hard, but the expression of those ideas is, generally speaking, subject to far fewer constraints than those we find outside the academy.
It’s been encouraging to see many research teams now acknowledging this by following a co-creative approach to translating research findings and sharing them with non-experts. “Integrated knowledge mobilization” typically includes the target audience in planning and executing the communication products intended for their consumption. In theory, this should result in greater uptake and a shorter path from peer review to policy and/or practice.
I’m not convinced, however, that co-creation automatically yields better results than other ways of producing and disseminating research knowledge. Consulting and collaborating with your intended audience is absolutely the right idea, but you have to be canny about it if you want to achieve the outcomes you have in mind. It helps to enter the process with a healthy dose of skepticism, as well as some advanced “people skills.”
These safeguards are necessary because we humans tend to be erratic in our behavior. We don’t always act the way we say we’ll act, and we don’t always recognize what we need (as opposed to what we want).
People are unpredictable
In the business world, market researchers used to look to experts on human behavior—such as psychologists and consumer behavior researchers—for help estimating how a certain audience would react to a certain stimulus, such as the color of a package or a change in price point. As computer scientists began to harness the power of data, marketers dreamed of one day being able to say with certainty how X sort of person would react to X stimulus in X situation.
Yet the more advanced our analytics have become, the more this dream appears to be a misguided fantasy. For example, at Saint Mary’s University Jason Ivanoff has recently conducted research that showed consumers reacting willy-nilly to changes in pricing of their favorite brand. It turns out that an algorithm can’t accurately predict the way a shopper will behave in a store in a given day because so much depends on the context.
While you may think that co-creation is giving you access to your audience’s point of view, but inclusivity alone won’t give you the kind of insight you need. The way Sally or Abdul think and feel at the Tuesday meeting may or may not be how they think and feel next Thursday or next month.
The only constant is our changing mind
You probably don’t have to go far to find proof of how inconsistently people behave. If you’re like me, you just have to look in the mirror.
How many times have I said, “I’ll never do that again!” only to find myself doing that very thing years later. Here are just a few of the “never evers” I’ve changed my mind about:
- Teaching a university class (now I love guest lecturing)
- Starting a business (I’m now six years into my second business)
- Living in New Brunswick (what better place to call home?)
- Remarrying (my husband and I will soon celebrate our fifth wedding anniversary)
I know I’m not unusual in my changeability because I’ve seen similar patterns as I’ve guided entrepreneurs through process of getting market input into an emerging product. As I tell my founder clients, the key sign that your “customer discovery” process is working is that it’s surprising you.
For instance, about a year ago, I led a founder in the technology space through a series of interviews with people he believed to be his target customers. Let’s call the founder Hugh. Based on those early conversations, Hugh and I created a group of “buyer personas,” in-depth psychological profiles of his audience. Guided by those profiles, we then crafted messaging for Hugh to experiment with as he continued to prospect for his first customers.
Many months after our collaboration, Hugh reached out to say that he was getting close to landing two big customers. Both prospects came from the initial pool of people he’d interviewed—but neither one fit our persona profiles.
Why did the interviewees change their mind about what they thought of Hugh’s product? Hugh hasn’t discovered the answer to that yet, but it’s common for people to shift their opinion as they gain more information and consider a novel idea from different angles. To his credit, Hugh didn’t take the initial feedback as definitive. He kept an open, flexible mind, and kept listening to hear how the audience response was evolving.
The audience can’t always get what they want
As the Rolling Stones reminded us, what we want and what we need are two different things. Yet many of us fail to make the distinction. In many cases, we don’t know enough about what we don’t know to gauge our genuine needs.
Savvy entrepreneurs learn how to read the hidden needs of their customers, who often lack the self-awareness or imagination to articulate their real requirements. You’ve probably heard the legendary quote attributed to Henry Ford: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”
Knowledge mobilizers and entrepreneurs share similar challenges (as I’ve described here), and one of them is accurately reading their audience. This is especially true if your mission is educational. If you ask someone with limited knowledge to tell you what they need, their response may not indicate what would really help them.
To this point, I’ll share an example from my early years as a university instructor. Because, as I often say, I began my career as the World’s Worst Professor, I lived in dread of the end-of-term student evaluations. I could always count on at least one irate student venting about the course containing “too much grammer” [sic].
What that student wanted was a course that didn’t get into the nitty-gritty of written expression. What they needed was, obviously, more grammar—or at least some help with spelling. I eventually figured out that my job was not to cut out grammar but to make the grammar content engaging and empowering so students didn’t consider it punitive.
Beyond mere inclusivity
Effective co-creation requires skillful questioning, intentional trust-building, and a willingness to entertain surprises. It doesn’t happen simply by inviting your co-creators to participate in meetings or provide feedback on a draft.
To make co-creation work, you must cultivate a project culture in which people feel free to contribute, and free to change their minds. Or rather, free to speak up when they have changed their minds.
It’s also essential to engage the co-creators in the right stage(s) of the project and in activities that align with their interests and abilities. It’s easy for a feedback cycle to go awry when you ask for an opinion on an aspect of a communication product that your co-creators aren’t really equipped to evaluate.
Please don’t take this as my endorsing a hierarchical or judgmental attitude. The beauty of co-creation, when it works well, is that everyone on the creative team is able to participate fully, according to the different kinds of experience and expertise they bring to the table. Leading the co-creative process means bringing out the best in each co-creator so together what you achieve is greater than what you might have achieved separately.
Anchoring your communication production in design thinking helps tremendously. When you approach co-creation as a design process, you can articulate the phases of your product’s development in ways that encourage meaningful participation from everyone. You can keep the team focused on a common vision while enabling everyone to enrich it. You can streamline reviews and improve the quality of your outputs without getting into squabbles about different, and shifting, opinions.
Assembling co-creators is just the starting point. Leveraging the true power of co-creation requires you to engineer the conditions that will allow both your team and your research mission to flourish.
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