Sam Ladner
Better Insights Through Mixed Methods Research
In this episode of Brave UX, Sam Ladner explores the tension inherent in mixed methods research, why people get so emotional about identity, and the importance of interpretive flexibility in tech.
Highlights include:
- How do the statues on Rapa Nui (Easter Island) illustrate other ways of knowing?
- What two philosophical positions are at odds in mixed-methods research?
- How can researchers become more comfortable engaging with stakeholders?
- What is interpretive flexibility and how does it apply to technology?
- Why are you uncomfortable with a strictly Western way of knowing?
Who is Sam Ladner, PhD?
A sociologist by training, Sam specialises in ethnographic research, design thinking, and strategic foresight, and she has over 15 years of applied research experience, helping companies to uncover the human side of workplace technology.
Currently a Senior Principal Researcher at Workday, Sam is focusing her efforts on understanding how work is changing, and building that insight into Workday’s products.
Before joining Workday, Sam was a Principal UX Researcher at Amazon, where she was the founding researcher for the AI-infused Echo Look. Sam also invested several years at Microsoft, where she worked on Cortana, Windows 10, Microsoft Office, Xbox, and HolloLens.
Highly skilled in both qualitative and quantitative research methods, Sam recently published her second book, “Mixed Methods, a short guide to applied mixed methods research”, which is essential reading for anyone wanting to understand and apply mixed methods in their practice.
Transcript
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Hello and welcome to another episode of Brave UX. I'm Brendan Jarvis, Managing Founder of The Space InBetween, the home of New Zealand's only specialist evaluative UX research practice and world class UX lab, enabling brave teams across the globe to de-risk product design and equally brave leaders to shape and scale design culture. Here on Brave UX though, it's my job to help you to put the pieces of the product puzzle together, I do that by unpacking the stories, learnings, and expert advice of world-class UX, design and product management professionals. My guest today is Dr. Sam Ladner. A sociologist by training, Sam specializes in ethnographic research, design thinking and strategic foresight, and she has over 15 years of applied research experience helping companies to uncover the human side of workplace technology. Currently a Senior Principal Researcher at Workday, Sam is focusing her efforts on understanding how work is changing and building that insight into Workday's products.
- With all that's been changing in the way we work over the past couple of years, I suspect that she's uncovered plenty of interesting things. Before joining Workday, Sam was a Principal UX Researcher at Amazon where she was the founding researcher of Amazon's AI infused Echo Look, designing, executing, and managing the research program that informed the products development. Sam also invested several years at Microsoft where she worked on the AI interface, four Cortana, as well as on Windows 10, Microsoft Office, Xbox and HoloLens. Highly skilled in both qualitative and quantitative research methods. Sam recently published her second book, Mixed Methods: A Short Guide to Applied Mixed Methods Research, which is essential reading for anyone wanting to understand and apply mixed methods in their practice. Sam's writings have been published in peer reviewed journals and she is also the author of Practical Ethnography: A Guide to Doing Ethnography in the Private Sector, a widely praised and practical deep dive into an important research method. And now it's my pleasure to welcome Sam to this conversation with me on Brave UX today. Sam, welcome to the show.
- Sam Ladner:
- Thank you. Lovely to see you. Thank you for having me.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It is my pleasure Sam. And this is a conversation I have been looking forward to since we put it in the diary I think a couple of months ago. And something that I discovered when I was preparing for this conversation is that I believe that you are a player of New Zealand's national sport, or used to be, which is rugby, rugby union. And that back in your university days, you used to be a bit of a star.
- Sam Ladner:
- Star is completely overstating it. In fact, it's wholly inaccurate. No, I was not a star. I did play, I played rugby for about 10 years actually outside in university I started playing and afterwards as well, yes, I did play. We don't have rugby, we only had union, essentially union in Canada, there's professional rugby, doesn't exist. So yes.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And what position were you out of curiosity?
- Sam Ladner:
- I started playing hooker and then I moved to the backs and I played inside
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Center. All right. That's quite a change. So you went from front row to the backs. The people that don't understand rugby I won't attempt to try and explain the game in the next 10 seconds, but definitely go and check out the game on YouTube. You probably learn a few things. What was it though that made you someone who uses your head for a living want to charge headfirst into a bunch of other people without pads on? How does this work in terms of your intellectual self and then your physical self?
- Sam Ladner:
- Well, I would say youth and ignorance cuz I didn't make my living using my head at that time. Literally what drew me into it, a friend of mine and I, we saw a flyer saying, Hey, come try out for women's rugby. And we thought, hey, let's just go do that. Let's go find out. So went to the meeting and it seemed intriguing. I think really what kept me playing mostly was the community of women that play rugby is a very distinct community. It's a very positive community. It's a way of understanding gender for yourself as a woman in a unique way. So for example, you never said to somebody, Hey, have you lost weight? That was actually a terrible thing to say. They'd be like, oh no, do you think so? Oh, I've been working out I've been lifting. Wow, maybe I should take some more protein.
- You know, wouldn't say that. So it was a very positive experience. And of course fitness is wonderful. It's a great thing to be athletic. It's not such a great thing to get concussions, which I did get. I will admit, I actually had a, a MRI a few years ago and the neurologist was like, oh, would it surprise you to know that you have a old hairline fracture in your occipital bone? And I was like, no. And she goes it. I said, did you not listen, I told you I played bronch for 10 years. Of course I have a hairline fracture, ipi bone. So
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yes, so mostly given, right? Yeah,
- Sam Ladner:
- Of course, of course.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- So you look, you played for 10 years, that's quite a period, right? A decade. And I'm not sure if you'll be able to do this, but thinking about if you reflect back on that 10 years now, you know mentioned it encourage you to think differently about gender and there are probably a few other things in there, but what can you attribute to your time playing rugby that has helped to shape who you are and how you see yourself now?
- Sam Ladner:
- That's interesting. I think rugby was a very important turning point for me because I actually hadn't been athletic at all before I started playing and I started playing and I was not a star by far not a star. So I had to work a lot harder in that than I did in other aspects of my life. I mean academically I was very well. So it was an intentional deliberate, deliberate practice. So I learned that it's possible to improve and it's possible to get better. It's possible to be faster and stronger than you think. It's possible to do things that seem insane. It's possible to get punched in the face and be okay. Which I remember the first time that happened, it was a shock. I was like, oh my god. And I thought I'm hurt, I'm hurt. And
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You're like, no, the bottom of a rock or something.
- Sam Ladner:
- Yes, exactly. Exactly.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- So no intention to put pair of rugby boots back on again?
- Sam Ladner:
- Oh god, no, no, no. No way. I mean I have some friends from that days, those days who still play master's level and no, I couldn't possibly it's too physical. It's really hard on your body. I mean I got all sorts of injuries, I'm not interested in those injuries anymore. [laugh] also not interested in that level of fitness. In order for me to be that fit again, I would really have to invest a lot. Nope, [laugh] been there, done that.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Let's turn our attention then to your academic pursuits, cuz I understand that when you were studying your undergraduate, you like to read quite a bit of philosophy and that you, through that became, and this is a bit where I'm not quite clear, but I assume that through that you became quite interested in the nature of our social life where, and if it wasn't through this reading of philosophy, where did this deep curiosity in sociology and our social lives come from
- Sam Ladner:
- That? That's a intriguing question. I do remember quite specifically a moment when I started to think about it. I was taking a political philosophy class in my undergrad and our professor, rather acular tenured full professor, seemed out of sorts at the beginning of his lecture. And it turned out that he had been robbed, his house had been burgled and he was quite beside himself. And I can't remember at the topic of the day it was relevant but not directly relevant necessarily. It might have been montesquieu, it might have been rous. So I'm not sure social contract comes to mind, but he was clearly struggling to make sense of what he has was experiencing. He felt violated, he felt angry, there was a hassle, he was scared. All of these things are a problem. And he was trying to connect, he was struggling to connect it to these great minds, the great white men minds of to telling us how to navigate our lives.
- And I remember that moment being very quite interesting. I was like, whoa, this is a real life example. Here's another real life example, actually another one that I remember, economics class, and it was the international economics class. And our professor was talking about interest rates and predictions of various macroeconomic indicators, including an interest rate and inflation. And he started talking about buying a house. And he had just bought a house previously, six months or so previously. And to his credit, he expressed humility because he was so confident going into his house purchase that he knew what kind of mortgage he should get fixed or floating interest rate. And he chose, I can't remember which way it went. I think he chose fixed because he believed the interest rates could no not possibly go down in the six months. Hence of course they had in fact plummeted.
- And he [laugh] made a terrible decision on be, and he had told his wife, no, no, I do this for a living, trust me. And she's like, are you sure? And he's like, I'm an economist, of course I know this. Right. And it turns out he was completely wrong. And had I had the humility, the intellectual humility to note that the reason he had made these decisions and it was quite interesting. So yeah, human nature and it's grappling with abstract ideas and then the lived experience, there was always such a gap between those two things. I was always very interested in that.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You mentioned your professor referring to the philosophers who were largely white men. And I'm interested in that aspect of your education as well and how that has sort of shaped your thinking. Cuz I understand growing up in Canada you've previously described your upbringing as, and I'll quote you now, very white. And you also mentioned in that same breath that I was listening to as a term that I hadn't heard before, which was the vertical mosaic of Canada. And I was curious to know a little bit more about what that is and also mm-hmm how you came to see, it sounds like you post rationalized at the point you quoted your upbringing as very white. That it was very white. And so how did you come to see and realize that that was the nature of your upbringing
- Sam Ladner:
- There? There's a lot go to go into there. Let me start with the mosaic. A lot of people have heard the concept of the melting pot, which is how people describe the social context of America, or at least popularized narratives of the melting pot. It's a place that all different people come and they melt and they become this bulia base, this gumbo, right? Theoretically. Anyway, the Canadian context, there was a sociological and anthropological concept called the mosaic by contrast, where social scientists are saying we're not a melting pot. And this comes mostly from the Trudeau years, Trudeau Pierre Trudeau, his years where we created this concept of multiculturalism and the idea as opposed to the melting pot where everybody melts and becomes the same. The mosaic is supposed to be these pictures that are complete but stitched together. So you bring with you your a Afghani heritage, you bring with you your Sicilian experience, you bring with you your Brazilian language and you keep it right and you're a Brazilian Canadian or you're a Pakistani Canadian.
- That was the idea anyway between the mosaic. But of course when they did analysis after the fact, the popular narrative, it became clear that it's not a mosaic, it's a vertical mosaic worth an implicit hierarchy. And there's an implicit placement of the peoples. So sure you get to keep your non bread, but you don't get the top jobs. That's kind of the idea behind the analysis of the vertical mosaic. So I was kind of always slightly aware of this issue as a child, but not deeply. I remember growing up I went to a high school outside, just outside of Vancouver and wasn't very ethnically diverse really at all. But it is the home to a first nation. And that first nation, the sea, she First Nation was the first nation in Canada to get self-government. So we had exposure to when they won the big Supreme court case everybody got invited down to the band hall, there was a big presentation and the school kids were all taught what does this mean and what is it about for us and how does it work?
- And that sort of stuff, which in retrospect was kind of amazing. So I was exposed to settler reality but not fully. And then as I grew older, I realized that my old family had a settler heritage where my grandparents collected artifacts. My aunts actually gave artifacts back to the first nation from which they were bought. I don't know if they were bought. And my grandmother even worked at a residential school, which is for those who don't know what a residential school is, you may have heard of the mass grave that was found at a residential school not that long ago. In Canada, there's many mass graves. We're sure it's just a matter of doing the autopsies. So the horror of it is she didn't really understand when I spoke to her about it. Cause I was curious as a late teenager, early adult, I remember asking her about that experience.
- Oh, you worked in a residential school, what was that like? And she says, oh, I know what they say about a lot of them and they're very bad. That's true. But ours was good. We had a good headmaster, she said, and I was like, oh, I think you're kind of missing the whole cultural genocide side of things. I don't think she really got it. She thought because people didn't die they were okay. And even at the time, I didn't have the words to figure out. I was like, that makes me uncomfortable. And I didn't understand. Even then I was getting there, but I didn't quite get it. So of course it took many years for me to look at where I was in this vertical mosaic and what implicit place on the hierarchy did I believe I deserved and I was supposed to be at, and what kinds of privileges are there too in that place on the hierarchy and the vertical mosaic. And so it took me a while to figure out, so now nobody used the word white really when I was growing up. We didn't talk about whiteness and what whiteness is now. I'm like, wow, that was really white. That was a very white upbringing game and I didn't quite get it at the time. So it did take a lot of retrospect and thought to understand it.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- So coming back to your conversation with your grandmother, if you think about that now, how do you feel about your grandmother's role in that system? Was she a bad person? How do you look at at this?
- Sam Ladner:
- That's a really good question. My grandmother's passed away for some time now, so I can't really double check and talk with her about it. So it's very difficult for me to speak on her behalf. But what is a bad person? A person who we should be all so happy, so lucky to know our historical context at the time, to have that historical consciousness and to recognize what's at stake when you make what seemingly are little choices, like taking a job. That's what she did. She took a job. Was it a job or was it something else? We should all be so lucky to be aware of historical conscious consciousness that where we are and the choices we're making, I would I have done the same thing? Would I have taken that job? Maybe I might have taken that job at the age that I might have taken that job. So can I say she's a bad person? I can say she lacked reflection. And because not everybody took that job, not everybody thought it was a good idea. Not everybody decided they were going to do that kind of work. She lacked the reflection and the thoughtful that she probably would've valued in her later life, I think. Does that make her bad? I'll leave that I, I'll leave that for others to decide.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- This notion of self-reflection that you've spoken of and also the education system and how that's evolved over time. I mean obviously the residential schools in Canada were only one part of the broader educational system, but you're ref, you're referred, so the whiteness of the philosophers you were studying, you referred to two professors earlier on, both of which were male. And I don't wanna pass sort of broad brush judgments on Canada's education system. Cause I can only speak from my experience here in New Zealand. But I was interested in something else that you said when you were reflecting back on the education system, which is clearly a system you've been through and you've achieved to a high degree. And you said it was on Roy. Roy Sharpe's unknown Origins podcast. And I'll just now you said, I see a cracking of knowledge systems at the moment. We need a better way of understanding our relationship to each other, but also to the objects and beings that predate us here on this planet. So that's, to me, that's a link back to what you were saying about your grandmother's need to develop maybe some more self-reflection and a greater tie to the broader impacts of what it was her work was contributing to. But you also went on to say that you had some discomfort with the Western way of knowing. So the western education system, the way we learn and know what we know, what is the nature of that discomfort that you feel? Because it sounded like you felt like we were missing something.
- Sam Ladner:
- When you think about how humans have understood themselves and the world historically in the broadest swath of human history, the enlightenment the scientific methods, these are small blips in the ways that we understand now. One could argue the enlightenment, the roots of the enlightenment go back to Greek philosophy. You could make that argument. But even the Greeks were more holistic in the way that they saw things. And logic was not the only way that they understood the world. My discomfort with the way that we negotiate knowledge about ourselves and about the people and places and things around us is very narrow. It is oftentimes bereft of soul poetry. And not to say all romanticism, I I'm very interested Roman, no, I'm not actually interested in romanticism. I'm much more interested in the connectedness of individuals and objects and places. And the flora and the fauna have a spiritual connection to each other that our knowledge, our typical modern Western knowledge system does not accommodate and does not include.
- One could argue that capitalism just made that even worse and I probably would argue the same. But it isn't just capitalism that does that. It's this breaking down of understanding about being atomistic individualistic. We're all somehow a Robinson cruso living in this world by ourselves. And it's not like that. It's not at all. That said, however, science has given us amazing things. So I mean, it's given us a vaccine for Covid 19, for example. That's just one of many, many mean, this conversation that we're having is enabled by scientific breakthroughs. We have amazing robust health wellness culture because of science. That said, however, science does not have a built in humility factor. And it's typically overstated itself as being the most, the only way to see things.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And you've got a great story. Well, I'm going to bring this down into mixed methods research. Now you've got a great story that I believe illustrates really well the danger and only looking at the world through a western scientific lens. And that story is to do with the moai statues on rapanui, which is otherwise mm-hmm. Known as Easter Island. What is that story that illustrates that importance of looking at the world through more than one lens?
- Sam Ladner:
- Well, for those who remember, Easter Island is a place that has these amazing large characteristically, big nosed statues tons several tons, each of stone, solid stone. And they're scattered around the island. And the modern scientific eye will say, this is impossible. They didn't have hydraulics, they didn't have cars or trucks or they didn't have cranes. How was this even possible? How did they quarry it and how did they get it around the island and how did they carve it? And so using typical scientific methods of archeology, you couldn't figure out how this was done. You're digging through, literally digging through the dirt, trying to figure out how this actually occurred and the clues were not there. And the scientific method, that doesn't really tell you, there was a story though from the rap people where they, the moai, how did they get to where they were around the island And they said, oh, the moi they walked, which sort sounds absurd, of course.
- How could they have walked? They don't have legs. And so the science, the scientific mind would say, that's absurd. That's ridiculous. Well, it turns out they actually did walk, probably an archeologist who had spent many, many years with the islanders in context, got permission to do more work there. And she discovered that if you actually wrap them up in rope and you put them on certain rolling logs, you can actually teeter-totter them and they look like they're walking. So I mean, I think Newton would laugh because it's just basic Newtonian physics to be able to do this right? But the scientific minds before couldn't discern this and they just dismissed the story as being absurd, kind of silly. But it turns out the story was probably correct. It probably they did walk.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- So that's a big blind spot there that, well, it seems to be that they were so focused on their way of knowing that they were unable to consider and interpret the native people's stories in a way that would lead them to the answer of how the statues actually became their, and you've said that mixed methods research is hard because you are mixing different philosophical positions. What are those two philosophical positions that are almost at odds but don't have to be in mixed methods? Research?
- Sam Ladner:
- When you study the scientific method, typically you're not often given the root philosophical underpinning. So that's a disservice because you really need to understand, I'm going to use a lot of big words now, just fyi. Epistemology is the epistemological position of research, is it is understanding how this knowledge comes to be, right? You have an epistemological position, I believe that knowledge is created thusly. Oftentimes you learn the scientific method without seeing or learning that it is a objectivist belief system and that it is, the world is stable, reality is stable, it's a thing. And now I'm going back to the ontological position, which is what is reality? Well, reality is stable. It's objective, it's a thing you can pluck off a shelf and you can see it. You can say, oh, it exists. But that position is contrasted with another constructivist belief system, which believes that human beings are distinct from objects and they interpret, that's their very nature of their consciousness, is that they interpret their reality.
- Their reality is not a given, it is not objective. It is a thing that a human conscious mind must interpret and make sense of. And so in turn, they construct their own reality. Well, when you start thinking about humans constructing reality, of course there's a very different way that you would go about discovering knowledge about humans. They're not rocks, they're not even moi. They're thinking, breathing, interpreting machines, and they're making sense of things constantly. So it's a bit difficult to mix the constructivist and the objectivist kind of position to believe that. You have to recognize that there are two different things going on at the same time. You're measuring certain things that are objective that do exist. How many people did X? Well, that's the thing. I can count and I can observe and it's a reality. But then how did they feel about that experience?
- Well, that isn't quote, objective, right? And subjectivism, of course has this dirty word in natural science. Oh, it's a little subjective. Well, I'm sorry, but there is no such thing as not subjective when you're talking about human experience. Every human has been given the gift of consciousness and every human has a subjective internal secret impression of what is going on. Must, if you're understanding humans, you must coordinate those two belief systems. And how do you do that? Well, you look at things like I got a lot of real inspiration from a book a series of books. Actually I read in graduate school on post mod after post-modernism, actually I should probably find that off the shelf because it's been a while since I've read at Potter Lopez. I'm going to get it wrong, but they, it's called post positivism, right? So post positivism is like, okay, humans are not natural scientific objects.
- They're interpreting machines, they have consciousness. Yet we must have some sort of basis of real reality when we're doing our studies around humans. So we don't simply accept reality is stable and objective all the time, especially for the humans who interpret it. That said, however, there are portions of it that can be interpreted, that can be counted, can be observed. These are actually objectively observable things. But the secret is to understand the difference. One of the main things that they talk about is this idea of the hubris, intellectual hubris. To think that you can predict human behavior based on past human behavior without any complication whatsoever. In some ways that is a deep, deep insult to the humans involved because you are depriving them of the conscious ability to interpret their surroundings and their experiences. So is somebody going to go to this shop tomorrow because they went yesterday or because people like them went to the shop yesterday? It's possible, of course, and there may be reason to believe that it's actually even likely probable, but it is not a foregone conclusion. It's not linear regression. [laugh] put it that way. It is much more complicated than that. Humans are complicated and we must pay them the respect to be complicated. So knowing the line between things that are empirically observable and things that are empirically predictable and things that are not inherently predictable about humans, that's kind of how you resolve those things.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- So what are some of the common mistakes that people make when trying to measure things that can't actually be measured? Or examples of how this shows up in the commercial sector when research is applied? What are we doing that isn't like, we're not actually basing on a foundational understanding of what the outcome should be based on the method that we're applying?
- Sam Ladner:
- Yes, that's a good question. A classic example is using gender as predictive. So women are more likely to make purchasing decisions for their household, let's say. Okay. Is that inherent to women? Women are purchasers for household goods, or is that a role that is given to you as a self-identified woman? There's a role that you can pick up and you can look at it, it's like it's a script or a set aside for the action for the actor makes household decisions. Well, you can choose as the individual to pick that up or to not pick that up. And at times, perhaps unthinkingly, we pick up lots of what's in that script. We just pick it up. Okay, that's what I do. I'm a woman, I make the purchasing decisions in the household, but is that predictive of what I'm going to do? Absolutely not. So it is very, it's difficult and I have a lot of empathy for this because as one of my favorite books is the Social Construction of Reality by Berger and Luckman, and they talk about these social categories, these institutionalizations that we go through, gender for example, that does something really important for us.
- It alleviates what they say is all those decisions. You can't be constantly, what will happen here? What will happen there? How do I greet this person? How do I pay this person respect? How do I talk about this person? You can't constantly be doing that. You're just going to be overwhelmed. So you look at these shorthand, these very simple categories that help you understand and act in the world. You don't have to take all of those. You don't have to take gender wholesale and say, oh, it's a thing and it's fixed and it's a objective reality and people all have it and it is what it is and that's it, right? I think it's, Fanta gender's a great one because when you look at how far we've come in understanding gender, even in just the last 10 years, it's just amazing because once upon a time, it was almost impossible to have somebody believe that a woman would want to do something that a man typically does.
- Much less have a man decide, I don't want this rule actually. I don't want this identity rather be a woman that was fantastical and ridiculous. And now it's like, well, of course she wants to do that. That's what she's identifying with that script. Let her pick it up. It's hers. What issue is it of ours? But it's that flexibility and that interpretive flexibility of gender that makes a lot of people very uncomfortable, interpretive flexibility of everything makes people uncomfortable sometimes. So if you just accept that reality is not fixed, you don't not bothered by it, it doesn't cause you pain.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- [laugh] set yourself free by reframing how you look at it. Now, when you were t talking about gender roles there, I was just reflecting on last year where my wife, I think I've mentioned on the podcast before, she's training to be an ophthalmologist and she had to do a six month placement outside of our home city here in New Zealand. And Teddy, our son, stayed with me for that six months. And while Rebecca would come back every weekend I was providing that, I suppose what you would look at more historically as that traditional motherly role for Teddy during that time. And I would consider myself to be a fairly progressive person when it comes to gender and roles and the flexibility I have around that. And I had an absent father. I didn't know my father. So I have made a commitment to know my son and be very involved.
- And so that's something that's changing over generations as well. But I couldn't help but feel like I was, somehow my masculinity was somehow being impeded by my wife's professional role, taking her outside of the home environment. And so I was having this really interesting intellectual conversation in my head in somewhat emotional conversation at times where I was fighting, I suppose that pull to that gender norm that I suppose we've somewhat been conditioned to have through our upbringing and various other inputs into our lives when we were younger. So it was just interesting hearing you talk about that and how these constructs aren't actually objective reality. They are in flux and you can choose what to pick up or put down. And they do lead to some fairly interesting conversations in one's head as well.
- Sam Ladner:
- It's funny, the femininity has proven to be far more malleable in the last 40 years than masculinity. And masculinity I think really must be examined and problematized. We need to understand masculinity as a construct. It's a construct just like anything else, anything that a human interprets and comes to know and comes to see that doesn't have an empirical aspect to it. It needs to be problematized and understood as having far more flexibility than what might appear mean. And we know this from the data, I mean just look at the data on any kind of supposed sex-based differences are widely outstripped by within sex differences. So men are more different from other men than they are from women. So when you look at the vast majority of us within gender, there's so much variation. And then when you stack gender against gender, that variation between the genders is just meaningless. It doesn't make any sense. As much as we'd really like to hold on to the concept of a physical biological basis of sex, the data just don't bear this out. They just don't. With a few minor exceptions, upper body strength, okay, yeah, [laugh] fine. Yeah, upper body strength is a real thing.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Child childbearing ability,
- Sam Ladner:
- Childbearing ability and certain hormonal differences toward perhaps being able to have a more keen sense of smell. But other than that, it's really, it's all a script that you can choose from.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I was having a conversation with Peter Marvel, you may have heard of Peter. He was one of the co-authors of the Polar Bear book, also known as the IA Bible and being an information architect categorization over there, something that's obviously, oh, you've got it there. Yeah, great. Of course I've got my copy somewhere over here in the studio. Yes. And this came up, this the rejection of the sort of binary approach to people and I suppose the broad spectrum of places that people can see themselves within a category like gender and I suppose the almost visceral reaction that this idea of gender fluidity is having out there amongst people that, and I don't wanna generalize here, but maybe a bit more conservatively minded, a little less comfortable with looking at issues or aspects of humanity, gender in a way that is outside of those two genders that we've traditionally defined for ourselves. Why are people losing their minds so much o over this? Why does this cause humans when it comes to things like this, so much concern, anxiety, and why do people get so emotional about this?
- Sam Ladner:
- Yeah, that's a good question. I thought a lot about this actual question because it does not occur to me, genuinely, does not occur to me to deprive another person their gender identity. Why would I care? What does it have to do with me? And so I'm like, this doesn't make any sense. Why would anybody care? And I took a little bit of inspiration from George and his work on understanding the metaphors underpinning conservative minds and supposedly conservative minds and supposedly liberal minds. And he just talks about the power of metaphor as a shape. There's not everything I agree with George Loff on, but he has this interesting idea of the strict father mentality underpinning conservatism. So the strict father concept is there is a patriarch, and this person or entity archetype in a sense owns your soul. You don't own your soul. This person owns your soul and for your good.
- And if you relinquish or you sacrifice or you surrender these words that you hear a lot in kind of conservative concepts that patriarch, whether he be real or a religious icon or what have you, this patriarch will take care of you if you surrender and you give ownership of your soul to this person. Now, you can imagine how an affront of gender fluidity might be to that concept because you don't own your soul. This other patriarch owns your soul. This old white guy with a beard owns your soul. So it's not yours to give and it's not yours to change and it's not yours to determine and it's not for you to do what you want with it. If you contrast that with this nurturing parent concept of the liberal progressive idea, the liberal ideal of, we're here to give you as the individual everything you need to fulfill your greatest self-actualized identity.
- Of course, gender fluidity makes sense in that concept, right? Because you know how you become more of yourself if you make that choice, why wouldn't you do that? Of course you're going to do that. So they're just very different ideas about who owns whose soul. If you believe that you've been thrown into this world with no connection to the people and things around you, it is much easier for you to self determine, to determine who you are and what you're going to be. If you believe, however, that nobody's thrown anywhere, we're all part of this connective holistic being called humanity. It's not for you to decide, of course not. It's all of us to decide. For you,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Is it possible for people to hold both of those perspectives at the same time?
- Sam Ladner:
- Of course. Of course. But you have to be careful what you're picking and choosing. I think most people do have both of those perspectives in their minds at the same time, but maybe they're not a hundred percent aware of how conveniently they own certain things and don't own others [laugh] that for which that they are not responsible. So if you truly believe that you are connected to other human beings and you must relinquish control over yourself in certain cases, that doesn't mean you don't get to wear a mask when you go into the shop. Of course you have to wear a mask. But sometimes people forget that conveniently, they don't know the limits of where they're holding their beliefs. Right.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- So it sounds like we do oscillate between the objectiveness and constructivist philosophies sometimes by choice depending on the circumstance or environment that we find ourselves in.
- Sam Ladner:
- Yes, of course, of course. Humans are self-serving beings. We do that often it's not abnormal and it's not bad.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- There's such rich territory we could get into, but I probably should avoid just being mindful of time regarding the pandemic and some of the choices and positions that people have taken on this stance on things like vaccines and mask wearing and all the other sort of interesting social behavior that we've seen come up as a result of that. But I, I'm keen to bring this back to research, back to technology because you've said in the past that there's a strong bend and technologists of which I'm hearing from that designers, engineers, people that create the technology and the products that we work on towards constructivism. And that's because within our fields, this isn't a label that I'd heard before, but that there's somewhat an inherent, or at least a widespread belief in something that's called interpretive flexibility. And I hadn't heard of that and I'm not sure I really still understand that. Just for me and for the people listening, what is interpretive flexibility and how does that apply to the products and the experiences that we're creating?
- Sam Ladner:
- Interpretive flexibility comes out of the science and technology studies of social science, pinch and biker, if I'm not mistaken. And I believe pinch just died. I'm going to have to look that up. I saw something like that. I'm not sure, I'll have to double check. But the idea of interpretive flexibility is that artifacts, this is what s STS scholars tend to call technology like artifacts. Artifacts tend to have an implicit flexibility built into them. So there's a script that's put on top of this device, this artifact, and it's intended for me to use it in a particular way, but there is around the edges gray areas in that script that I can interpret as a human and I can use it in ways that you don't expect. I can hammer things and I can throw it and I can use it as a flashlight, which by the way is an interesting example. The flashlight functionality was not something that was built in to or the first iPhone, but people noticed that the screen was very bright. It was very bright, so they would use it as a flashlight. And then the user designers were picking that up and realized that this is actually a tool that we can use for. So that's a perfect example of interpretive flexibility. And it's also a really good example of great technology.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I remember doing that. Do you remember doing that using
- Sam Ladner:
- Your screen? Yeah.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah.
- Sam Ladner:
- So you would use it because you're like, oh, I didn't know I could use it as a flashlight. It was so bright. And then they picked that up, the designers of the tool of the artifact realized that people were doing this, so they'd put that into the script officially.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And how else, but through fieldwork, can you understand this or understand the opportunity for these enhancements, these features, these the evolution into our products. So how else can you do it? That's
- Sam Ladner:
- A good question, and I think it's a creative challenge. Obviously fieldwork is the easiest way, it's the most typical way watching people use your actual device in the way that it's being used. You can ask people, that's possible. You can ask people and in what ways they use things, you don't necessarily have to observe them. It's trickier.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- How reliable is that if you ask people about their behavior compared to actually observing their behavior. I'm not sure if you've got any sort of empirical evidence or research to draw on here, but how reliable is the opinion or the self-reporting of previous behavior over and above the observation of actual behavior?
- Sam Ladner:
- It really depends on the kind of behavior that you're trying to uncover. So for example, we know about 25% of everyday behavior is habit. And so that behavior is by definition, a habit is a cluster of unconscious activities strung together to be a completed task or thing, then action. So about 25% of your day-to-day life is passing by unconsciously, you don't even notice it by definition. So if you ask people about their habits, first of all, they're not aware of their habits. And secondly, we have a self-serving belief system as well. So if it's a bad habit, you're probably not going to have a good understanding of what you're actually doing, not because you're a bad person necessarily, but the cognitive dissonance of, oh, I'm a healthy person and I eat three pounds of chocolate every night, you know can't handle that. So habit is a really good example of your especially bad habits.
- You're probably not going to get a realistic understanding. That said, however, social scientists have come up with lots of ways to get around, things like that. They don't get good precise frequency data or number of activities or how often it happens. But you can get whether or not it happens by asking in different ways, you know, can ask about, oh, if a friend were to describe you or depersonalization, those types of questions are a good way to get to the bottom of that stuff. But you're probably not going to get a very precise measurement of how often a thing happens. We can all probably see that in our own day-to-day lives because once upon a time the quantified self became a thing and everybody wondered how that was going to change everything. Well now we we're quantifying everything in the background all the time. So I can tell you right now exactly how many steps I've walked today and it is 3,638 steps [laugh]. Actually, that's kind of surprising, I thought.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And I've burned currently, I've only burned 619 kilojoules today. So I'm a little bit behind the eight ball.
- Sam Ladner:
- So I'm definitely behind the eight ball, but I usually am around this hour, so that's okay. I'm like, oh, okay. I've actually gotten a much better understanding of how my activity works and based on my use of this tool but you could imagine if you had a passive collection of any number of things, we haven't figured out how to passively collect data on what you actually eat easily compared to number of steps. For example, we all know once we start keep tracking of things change, we get surprised we didn't know we did it. I did an analysis of my time use recently at the end of the year. And so I have a outlet calendar and I categorize just as an invites come in, I categorize it was for work, so it was my work calendar, so it wasn't everything, but I was able to categorize as I go, new invite comes in, I put it in my calendar, I give it a category, and then I export that and I did some analysis and I was like, wow, did I really spend that much, much on vision? I didn't think I did, didn't feel like I did. But then part of it's recency effect too, cuz I actually turns out the first six months of the year, that was pretty much all I was working on and I forgot.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- So I wanna come back to this notion of interpretive flexibility. And I don't know if there's actually a thread to draw here between what you've just been describing, Sam there with the ability to quantify certain aspects of our lives through the products and devices that we are using and interpretive flexibility. But I was thinking about this notion of the rise of big data and the way in which the products and experiences we use often feed our own usage of those products and experiences back into the cloud. And that supposedly at least some of that data is used to shape better experiences for us. I is the notion of interpretive flexibility. This is an intentional, intentionally binary question, but is this notion of interpretive flexibility and the way in which we understand how people use our products and big data, are they at odds with each other in the ways in which we make decisions about how we shape our products in the future?
- Sam Ladner:
- That's a very interesting question. Are they necessarily at odds? So if I'm interpreting you correctly, what you're suggesting is big data infused alri algorithmic interfaces are stamping out interpretive flexibility potentially. Is that right?
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, I hear, and I'll just quote you again here. So I heard you describe interpretive flexibility as we design technology. It doesn't mean people think of it the way in which we think of it, they have consciousness. And I was just wondering whether or not that belief that we bring to our work is being eroded, if at all by the prevalence of data-driven decision making through the things that we believe that we know about the people we design from based on the data that we collect for them.
- Sam Ladner:
- That's a really interesting question. I have this book on my desk, this is a great book to understand how social science is changing and C could change based on data. And I found one thing that was quite interesting about it and I hadn't really thought about it, of course I knew about it but I hadn't really thought about it. Big data aren't pure, empirically valid data for multiple ways, but one of the ways that they're not is that the mere acts, most interactive systems are algorithmically driven already and therefore are infusing our behavior with a particular valence as it is. Secondly, systems themselves drift over time. We trim the edges of the system, we delete aspects of functionality, we add new features, we move it over here, we do all this stuff that necessarily that drift is hidden when you look at the data that comes out of it as empirically valid.
- So there is interpretive flexibility happening all the time, even though we are algorithmically informing our users constantly about what they should do, what they shouldn't do, and then we're taking the data that they give back to us as confirmation bias of what we told them to do. I don't think it's stamping out interpretive flexibility because humans are going to interpret and they're going to continue to interpret. Does it minimize the delta between the intended script and the actual lid script? Maybe the delta is smaller, we know this from other types of research on technology so far. There's a valence, a preexisting valence that's engendered into the tool and it is affordances shape your behaviors in particular way is not cuz you're lifeless or senseless or consciousness but because you're just not paying attention.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Maybe this is an overly simple question and it's not something I don't necessarily want us to dwell on for too long. Just being mindful of time, I've got some other things I'd love to dive into you with before we have to go, but how much of the philosophy that underpins the founder or the founders of this technology, these products, whether or not they see the world primarily through an objectiveist lens or whether it's primarily constructivist, how much of an impact does that founding seed or that germ of the product that Genesis, how much of an impact do you feel that has where they end up and the view on which the products express or the assumptions that they make about the world and express through themselves almost as a third object? How much of that ties back to that initial genesis of the product and that philosophy of the founder?
- Sam Ladner:
- I find an interesting example with kind of accidental ethnographers. Most founders today are they call themselves data driven and empirical and scientific even, et cetera. And I find them, I find it so bereft of insights. And so non-core, courageous [laugh], uninteresting [laugh], more intrigued with the people that don't even know that they're doing ethnographic work, like the founder of Trader Joe's grocery stores, for example. You don't have Trader Joe's in New Zealand, we didn't have it in Canada, but it does exist here. Trader Joe's is a very unusual combination of a very finite number of raw ingredients and a much larger number of packaged goods and the packaged goods. Some of them reach cult status like the peanut butter, chocolate peanut butter cups for example. And they're all Trader Joe's branded. And yet Trader Joe's is also quite reasonably priced. So the founder had talked about relentlessly observing the neighborhood where he was going to put the store and looking at the behaviors and he basically came up with a winning distinct segment of essentially, and I believe he described it this way grad students with no money but high taste.
- That's basically his target. So can and bear and dark chocolate and I p a beer instead of Miller and Hershey's, what have you, right? He found that niche. Now would he describe himself as a ethnographer? No, but what he was as a wayfinder on the seas of his business, and most founders I think don't see themselves as lashed to the mast of of control sailboat, and they have no control over the sea. It is far bigger than they are. They don't see themselves that way and yet they should because you can be as logical and data driven as you want, but there's not enough data in the world for you to manage black swan events. You just can't So strap on and get on the sea and what comes into view, react to that will fades out of you. Let it go
- Brendan Jarvis:
- If only some more founders would take heat of that advice. I think we probably have some more human products currently out there. Sam, I just wanna bring the conversation now down to you. I'd heard you describe yourself as someone who wasn't as extroverted as other people may think. And I think given the conversation that we've had, clearly this is a one-on-one conversation and we're not really about applying stereotypes here, but it's obviously evident that you have a great command of your subject area and that conversation isn't a problem for you. And I've also seen you speak in front of crowds, large crowds as well. And I wanted to dive into this particular thing as it relates to your practice of research because being a researcher can come at a cost like a personal cost. It's a huge investment of our own energy into something that isn't ourself.
- And I just wanna read something that you've previously said about this. It's a little long, so just bear with me here. But it was in relation to you trying to make a decision whether or not to bring a camera to a social gathering or not to a party. And you realize that you are only considering doing that because you wanted to hide behind it. So here's what you said. You said that's a little bit of what I do as an ethnographer. I actually disappear. I'm not a member of that group. I'm not seeking a friendship. I'm accompanying those people. I'm taking their side, I'm standing next to them and I'm watching what they're watching. But that's very different to when you've got stakeholders in an organization. I'm not accompanying them, I'm doing more than that. I'm working with them. I'm even dragging them. I find that a little more challenging to be honest. The dynamics at play are much more complex. I can't just disappear. I have to be there. I have to have an opinion. What advice do you have or that you can share with people who may be researchers or designers that feel a similar way to what you are expressing there in that quote, yet still need and want to have impact in the enterprise setting where it's inevitable that they will have to put themselves out there and work with stakeholders to get things done?
- Sam Ladner:
- There's no easy answer. The only way out is through. So you have to recognize that you must have a point of view and that either well, in equal measures you might be wrong or they might not listen both. So if you're wrong, having the intellectual humility to recognize wrongness and to have the bounce back ability to both admit and then say, yes, it was okay that I was wrong. I just, I've got it wrong. Okay, so you have to work on the bounce back ability part, I think quite strongly when it comes to them not listening to you. That's a different skillset. I think I talk a lot about this in some of the public speeches I've given, and I've written about this, about the concept of the Cassandra complex, and this is where you see clearly what's wrong and you're telling everybody, listen, there's soldiers in that horse I'm telling you, don't bring the Trojan horse into Troy because there's soldiers inside.
- It's not a gift and they don't listen. So you're not wrong. So you don't really have to worry about bouncing back intellectually and having the humility to know if you're wrong. You were right. You were more than right, you were tragically and they were wrong. And yet, not only did they not listen to you the first time, but they didn't give you credit for accurately predicting a terrible outcome. That's a different skillset. That's the ability not to be so much humble, but to be accepting that the world doesn't bend to your will and as much as you would like it to, sometimes it's just luck when people agree with you or hear what you have to say you can be the most definitely handed, extroverted person in the world and you'll still have people who just won't listen to you. And you need to let go of the pain that causes, you need to grieve it and you need to go through a process whereby you let it go.
- I've seen this over and over again with researchers in particular, the ability to say, I know that there's soldiers in that horse and I've predicted the last 12 horses and still nobody listens to me. And some people they can't handle that level of loss of disrespect, of humiliation that it's just too hard. I think it might be because they're not really coming to grips with it. I don't think it's too hard for everybody. Like I said, I think it's a skill that you can learn getting past the fact that people don't listen to you is accepting that you are not omnipotent.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Just very briefly before I ask you a final question, what role has asking questions played in your effectiveness as an influencer?
- Sam Ladner:
- Just asking questions that sounds to taken on a very bad connotation these days. I'm just asking questions, is a provocative act. It's a very provocative act. And so if you ask questions overtly, you can be the flashpoint for anger and confirmation bias cognitive dissonance. You can be the lightning rod. If you however, float up questions other people who are curious will naturally pick them up. So that's kind of the strategy that I've always taken or I've tried to take anyway, is to give the naturally curious fodder for their curiosity, give them the framing and the understanding. What should I be asking? Here you go. Here's a few
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Things. So well timed. And pick your audience carefully
- Sam Ladner:
- And you'll get it wrong, guaranteed. Don't worry. Get it wrong
- Brendan Jarvis:
- A lot. Bounce back. Bounce
- Sam Ladner:
- Back.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah. So Sam, look, if you reflect on your career and all the great products that you've worked on, the people that you've worked with, and maybe they weren't, maybe not all of them were successes and not all of the people were great, but if you think about the entirety of your time in this field, what is the most important lesson that you feel that you've learned?
- Sam Ladner:
- Wow, that's a tough question. Cause there's so many, it's not about you. That's the lesson. It's not about you.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I think I have nothing further to add to that. I think that's a great place to leave things and leave a question to, or a statement or a thing for people to think about. It's not about you, Sam. I've really enjoyed the conversation today, especially the depth that we've been able to go to. It certainly made my morning. Thank you for so generously sharing your knowledge and your insights with me today.
- Sam Ladner:
- Oh, it's been my pleasure. Thank you for having me.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You're most welcome. Sam. If people wanna find out more about you, about your books, about all the great things that you've done, your previous talks, what's the best way for them to do that?
- Sam Ladner:
- They can look me up, SamLadner.com or LinkedIn. Easy, easier. Probably on LinkedIn because my website, I will confess, is not super up to date. So LinkedIn is a good place. Twitter, also Twitter.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Oh, good. Few different places. Thanks Sam. I'll make sure that I link to all of the places that people can find you in the show notes to everyone that's tuned in. It's been great having you here as well. Everything, as I mentioned, will be in the show notes that we've covered, including Sam's books and any resources that we've covered. If you enjoyed the show and you want to hear more great conversations like this with world class leaders in UX, design and product management, don't forget to subscribe to the show, leave a review, and also pass the conversation or pass the show along to someone else that might get some benefit from these conversations. If you wanna reach out to me, you can find me on LinkedIn. There'll be a note to my, a link to my profile at the bottom of the show notes, and you can also head on over to thespaceinbetween.co.nz. That's thespaceinbetween.co.nz. And until next time, keep being brave.