Cori Moore
“…Usually when people want to talk to me I run a mile in the other direction. It was exhilarating to have a tool to help my own communication…. [It] made explaining & expressing my knowledge easier..”
(Particle Physicist, PhD. From CERN)
We’re here to share our story of how we helped to open up this man’s mind beyond Big-Bang-Theory-Geekism. Using Qualitative thinking and doing, we want to share a recent experience of how we stretched Qual into a new arena.
This was our game changer – by using haptic sense-making techniques to facilitate a dialogue, we made use of the fact that those who play together learn together.
The Players:
For the few of you who might be rusty in your knowledge of particle physics research, CERN is one of the biggest players in the field. Their Large Hadron Collider, the world’s largest particle accelerator at a whopping 27Km, is where they smash particles together at close to the speed of light with the purpose of studying the basic constituents of matter, as part of their quest to demystify the origins of the universe.
Equally impressive, however, is their ‘open door’ policy. One of Europe’s first joint ventures, it now has 21 member states, and allows students and researchers from all over the world to use their data. Furthermore, being a publicly funded institute, it is important for CERN to maintain transparency in their endeavours. But how to get the general public on-board and enthusiastic about such inherently complicated research?
The Game:
In honour of the occasion of their 60th anniversary this year, CERN hosted ‘Neighbour Days’, inviting members of the local community to come and get to know their work. The highlight of the event – a visit to the 14 000 ton CMS detector, that lies inconspicuously 100 metres underground amid the beautiful Franco-Swiss countryside.
Over 8000 people showed up over the 2-day event, to snap up the rare opportunity to feast their eyes on the mammoth contraption. Reams of physicists took time out of their weekends to guide groups of wide-eyed visitors around the detector, and there were many other exhibitions & activities surrounding the site as well to help further inform & explain the wonder that is particle physics.
The Objective:
CERN were keen to learn what comes out of such an event, and how much & what exactly the public would take away with them. This is where we came in. As Qualies with a penchant for drawing out insights, we ran workshops to facilitate & foster the dialogue between the scientist super geeks, and the neighbouring community.
The Equipment:
Now, we are no strangers to using creative means to activate and stimulate our participants. Over the past few years we’ve become huge advocates of taking a multi-sensorial approach with our work. Our favourite to date – using haptic sense-making to coax people out of the cognitive sphere & into ‘thinking with their hands’.
Processes such as memory & learning are strongly influenced by the way we use our bodies to interact with the world. Using our hands to fiddle with objects can get your thoughts flowing, acting like a search engine for the brain. This helps unlock tacit knowledge that not only helps in generating ideas, but by literally ‘giving your ideas a body’ you off-load your brain and have something tangible, which you can share with others.
For this endeavour– fostering an exchange between the global geek elite tribe and the average Joe – the methodology we conjured up was inspired by LEGO® Serious Play® (LSP), a business communication tool that uses precisely those small particles that helped us make sense of the world in the earliest years of our childhood to tangibly represent ideas to tackle complex problem solving.
The Set-Up:
We were stationed in a marquee near the entrance of the detector, to pull in the crowds & get the conversation started. We asked participants to write down their key learning, or most impressive moment of the day on an experience card, which we hung in our gallery. Then, following the motto, “Everybody builds. Everybody shares”, our visitors & physicists (literally) built metaphors together, but it was only as they began to share what they had crafted, that the real story unfolded.
In order to foster empathy & understanding between the two target groups, we equipped our physicists with LSP questioning techniques to coax the visitors deeper into their stories, with the scientists acting as mentors to help moderate and guide.
The Winners:
The kind of feedback we received from the visitors was much more thoughtful & elaborate than that we would have achieved from, say, a basic question & answer format. So much of our work relies on verbal and cognitive processes; we often expect of our participants that they can eloquently express their thoughts and opinions, which is not always an easy feat.
We’re reminded of a quote from Wittgenstein:
“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world”
Language tends to lead us down a particular logical path of thinking. Using a tangible modus of communication such as LEGO® Serious Play® provides an alternative way of sense-making; a hands-on communication format that helps us to bypass cognitive blocks and (self) limitations.
Our workshops gave CERN the opportunity to get detailed feedback from the visitors, but also, they equipped the physicists with a new tool to share their intricate knowledge. (And as you can see by our opening quote, they truly positively surprised themselves).
Now, this may seem like a far cry from classic qualitative market research, but if we consider the real backbone of our work, in essence, it boils down to 3 core elements. Firstly we connect our clients with their consumers; we then deep-dive to understand & translate what these people think & feel, and finally we reconnect this back to the client.
This is precisely what we did for CERN, but instead of merely delivering our understanding to the client, we enabled mutual understanding; acting as intermediaries to allow our physicists to be a part of the moderation & dialogue – an exchange that came from playing together.
By placing the experience at the heart of matters, CERN, their many visitors and we ourselves were able to communicate at eye-level; playing together & conjuring meaning through story making. This was a deeply rewarding experience for all of us involved.
This is just one example of how we’ve managed to put qualitative thinking and doing to good use. The ‘people business’ is a vast one, and there’s much more to us than moderating focus groups in stuffy viewing facilities. At the end of the day, we are communication experts and as ‘People’s-People’ we will continue to explore ways to help our clients unlock insights and push our profession into new and exciting domains.
Cori Moore is Communications Strategist at Point-Blank International
