Can we stop defaulting to “Lean Research?”
Do More with Less.
This is a common demand of user/human-centered researchers. The expectation of faster, cheaper research programs has led to a number of resources to help researchers accommodate to this kind of work. Articles, conference presentations, tweets and Slack channels for research practitioners are dominated with tips and tricks on how to be “scrappy” or “hack together a study.” Tools that crowdsource recruiting and facilitate remote and/or asynchronous data gathering are also increasingly popular.
These moves in response to the need for cheaper and faster research is good for our industry because they expand our capabilities to deliver on demands. However, lean research increasingly becoming the default standard of approach to addressing learning needs. This default workflow is problematic not only in that it provides a narrow path to insights development, but it has also created a grumbling workforce of researchers.
In my network of colleagues and clients, there is a resignation that this is our fate now: to work with smaller budgets and tighter timelines to deliver the same learning volume and demand.
Any activity that requires doing more with less is bound to run into practical problems and team angst. Researchers I’ve encountered feel a conflicting sense of being overworked and devalued. They struggle with “being told how to do my job,” (such as utilizing a particular method) and working toward “impossible success criteria” (such as arbitrary timelines).
While there is a time and a place for lean research practices, it should not be the default expectation of research generally.
Why?
Lean always manifests as “resource poor”
Despite its best intentions of being an engine to generate fast insights, lean research typically results in workaround practices specific to addressing tight budgets and timelines. This means researchers are expected to limit their field work, internalize or “scrappify” recruiting practices, minimize analysis time, and adhere “templatized” reports. As bearers of inspiration and information, researchers often feel their intellectual hands are tied in order to meet success criteria that are arbitrary to actual learning needs. The ever-popular “research team of one” is particularly vulnerable to simply becoming a research executor rather than a knowledge strategist.
“Lean” widens an engagement void
A common complaint of research consumers is when insights are “stale” or “stuff we already know.” Lean studies and methods often do not allow participants enough time or space to be able to adequately express themselves — which is the origin of uninspired insights. In lean research, we are often remote, using interview-heavy or stimulus-heavy approaches and relegated to limited timeframes with each participant. With so little opportunity to engage the participant, the result looks like a targeted Q&A (which is appropriate in some cases, but not all the time). Two consequences result: 1) researchers feel compelled to embellish (i.e., over-interpret) insights with very little backstory, and/or, 2) the insights fall flat, are deemed useless, and reflect poorly on research as a meaningful process.
“Lean” results in constraint-led study design
An emphasis on lean is an emphasis on achieving efficiency criteria — fast and cheap. These aren’t necessarily meaningful criteria to design a study against; they are in fact, limitations. Researchers are also tasked with addressing a learning objective. It is all too often that exploratory and discovery questions (that are more about people’s emotions and attitudes) are shoved into validation studies (that should provide definitive answers about the offering). Constraint-led study design is often at odds with objectives-led study design because constraints limit the modes and methods in which an objective can be addressed.
“Lean” weakens our exploratory culture and capacity
Common issues, for which research is meant to be a remedy, is designer navel-gazing and assumption-driven offering creation. Research is credited with bringing in the human-centered perspective that time and again has proven to lead to better product outcomes (read: more money, happier teams). Lean research can very easily lead to a false perception of confidence that the team is solving for the right problems in the right ways. Lean research is a learning proxy to address organizational constraints, and can quickly become a crutch from which organizations are unable to break free.
Research is not innately resource heavy
Organizations are seeking lean research as their default approach because there is a misconception that research is a heavy lift. They think of costs like travel and incentives or time like for alignment and analysis, and question whether or not these can be done cheaper and faster. While the answer can have an element of “yes” to it, it is not always the case. Not all research programs will require gobs of time and money, but some will. Organizations also seek lean research because they’ve mandated lean product development. While there are certainly research programs that fill well within lean product development, there are many other learning objectives that are product agnostic, which should not be beholden to these efforts.
Ultimately, all organizations rely on insights-production, and without research resources, this knowledge would simply be floating out in space. Research itself builds efficiencies, reduces cost and time later in the offering development process by aligning organizations on the key problem to solve and providing a platform for how best to address it. Lean research, when used inappropriately, simply cheapens an already efficient process.
The problem with research is not that it’s expensive, it’s that it is rarely planned well. The simple tasks of developing a research philosophy and learning roadmap stop the inefficient, incidental work that tend to follow unplanned research.
No team has really unpacked and socialized a successful and integrated implementation of lean. Of course, if you have, I would love to interview you about it!
