Below is supplemental material from Gregory Zobel’s interview of Dr. Clay Spinuzzi in the October issue of Intercom. See his article, "An Interview with Dr. Clay Spinuzzi with Tips for New Researchers," for more.
Theme: Using Topsight to Teach Technical Communication
GREGORY ZOBEL: If you could influence how technical communication teachers use this text to teach research in their courses, what two or three things would you want to be sure they included?
CLAY SPINUZZI: Let me unpack that question a little bit. Let me ask you to unpack that a little bit. So, are you talking about they bring it in as part of the technical communication course, but they are going to pick certain things out of it or what do you mean by that?
GZ: They are planning to use your text within the course and that may be either from selecting from specific chapters or having them—let’s say that it’s a proposal-writing course and they just decided they will use the section on proposals. Or it may be an intro to tech comm course and they may decide that they are going to use the book along with the selection of articles but I’m thinking of the values or key points. We could break it into graduate and undergraduate if that would make it easier.
CS: Of course I would want them to read the whole book. [But] I think that people can do the sort of field research without going in and doing an entire study design for instance. So if you want to let students go in and soak up what an organization looks like without necessarily designing a full study around it, then I guess they could hit phase two where we talk about data collection. Field notes and observations, interviews, artifact collection, just hit those three chapters and then they’d have something that they could sort of intuit things out of. You could skip phase three, Navigating the Data, because you don’t want necessarily that rigorous an understanding and then you could skip straight to some of the models.
We talked earlier about how a lot of the action, a lot of the conscious action is at the meso level so the resource maps, the handoff chains, and the triangulation tables are a great way to get to that sort of information really quickly and in a way that people may not have thought about it before. And, you can do that without a full study. I would say hit those chapters at a minimum and suddenly students are going to have a much more expanded idea of what we would usually call context.
Theme: Research Method discussion
GZ: Have you seen non-academic researchers following the same kind of rigor, or if someone is new and say they were just hired in a startup or again somewhere in the high tech industry. They are interested in research and they want to work in their environment, but they really don’t have other people to connect with or learn from. How can they improve their skill set? What you are describing sounds a lot like interpersonal skills and reassuring people and setting those safe guards up but often we don’t know that our systems are fool proof until they’ve been tested and they’re covered.
CS: So, for instance you could take this methodology and deploy it within your own organization. I think that’s entirely possible. I think people do variations of these. Let me acknowledge right now that I have a huge debt to Beyer and Holtzblatt’s book Contextual Design which came out in I think 1998. Like Topsight, they developed sort of a comprehensive methodology for field research and interpretation and the idea was that they would find places just like Topsight where there were incongruities and problems and then they would design their way around them. Three big differences.
One is that it was really based on ethnographic research rather than a qualitative case study approach, and so parts of their methodology looked really different. For instance, they really liked unstructured interviews, where you would follow a person around and constantly ask them questions rather than waiting until the end of the observation. Which I think works better in some environments than others. Personally I think it would drive me crazy. So that was one.
Two, the models were different. They were grounded in different theory. So they don’t quite do the same things.
But number three, and most importantly Beyer and Holtzblatt were really focused on taking all of these different innovations and turning them into a single centralized system, where you pull together everybody’s best ideas, put it into a single system, and then they have to use that system. What I have concluded is that that’s not going to work because there is always changes in the different parts of the organization, the different parts of the activity, and so you’ve removed all of your flexibility.
I think it would work well for, oh let’s say, let’s spitball, six months and then certain things change and the cracks start to open and people’s post-it notes, and—post-it notes of the premier wiring technology of the late 20th century; I don’t know if you knew that. But, the people’s post-it notes come back out and you have these different innovations coming out and you have these same process again.
GZ: A tangential question: Has anybody done a study on post-it notes?
CS: Just focused on post-it notes?
GZ: I just wonder, because we have looked at so many other focuses and special topics.
CS: I don’t know, that’s a good question. I’ve seen post-it notes in my studies, but my studies tend to be more ecological. I think being able to zero down on that, just watching the post-it notes moving around would be fascinating.
Theme: Finding Mentors
GZ: There seems to be a number of concerns with training new researchers. One is making sure that the new researcher is trained and prepared. Topsight offers examples forms and even procedures to follow in non-technical language. This is good, however, it’s still missing a potentially critical link: the mentoring or training a mentor or teacher can provide as a researcher starts to mess up or just before they mess up.
That person isn’t there to intervene before an error becomes fully manifested. Granted, you are not there in order to guide the reader and that’s what you do in your courses and they are not paying to take a class from you. But what advice or suggestions can you give to someone who is new in an organization or they are working alone and they want to develop the research skills but they don’t have—they’re not enrolled in school, they don’t know somebody else who does research either in their organization or in the academy? How do you find a research mentor?
CS: I think that’s a really tough question. As with so many other things it’s going to depend on the organization or the situation. Let me give you a quick example. In 1997 I got an internship at Schlumberger Well Services in Austin and this is when I realized I wanted to live in Austin. It was a great summer. But I came down with a plan do a specific kind of research. It was going to usability-based and when I got there, the guys that hired me, a really smart couple of guys working in usability named Sam McLellan and Al Roesler, fantastic people.
They looked at my plan and they said, yes, this is not going to work for our environment, but you can do interviews and observations and you can pick up some artifacts. I don’t think they used the term artifacts; I think they said "texts" or "stuff" or something like that. They did a great job of walking me through the first couple of what were essentially contextual interviews. Then they said, "All right, go to Houston and do some more of these."
That was actually great for me because it gave me a little bit of time to kind of see how to do something like that in the field, to absorb it, to make it my own—by the time I went to Houston I was nervous for the first interview and then everything else fell into place. If you were in a situation like that you would have mentors to kind of help you out.
Let’s say you are in a telecommunications company or an insurance company or something like that, and nobody else is doing this kind of research, I think it’s going to be a little bit tougher. I think that maybe you can look for mentors for specific skills wherever you can find them. For instance, if you are talking about doing a good interview, there are people who do interviews for a living. People in HR. People like journalists. Those interviews are going to have different flavors, but you are still going to get a sense of what an interview should look like.
The same things with observations, you might be able to find a manager mentor who is good at sort of picking out how people do things. You might be able to find somebody in training—especially if the organization trains people by allowing new folks to shadow over folks. You might find somebody who knows a lot about the pit falls of those sorts of things. I think you might have to get really inventive in order to find a mentor that’s not in academics.
GZ: So rather than trying to find it all in one person, it’s instead looking through what skills—it’s like pinch-hitting coaches or trained specific sets and they can help you understand how to do better data analysis and another person with different interviews.
CS: I think so. The only other thing I can think of would be to find somebody who does consulting and this specifically, this kind of consulting where they ferret out problems in organizations. If you can find somebody like that, latch onto them.
More about Clay’s mentors
GZ: The last questions here. This is my favorite one here because it gets back to lineages. Topsight is impressive. It’s clearly built on a lot of experience, thinking, and applied theory. These things cannot happen without good teachers and mentors. When you start out learning how to research, who taught you? Who or what helped really set those foundational experiences for future success in research, best practices, inquiry, and all that.
And then the third question and obviously choose whichever amalgamation response you would like to. What lessons have you drawn from your teachers and mentors that have helped you to get where you are? I can repeat those if you want or if there is one of them that you prefer to address . . .
CS: I think I got it and I think I can hit most of that.
GZ: Sounds good.
CS: So here we go. I’m going to pull out three different mentors, none of which taught research methods classes. Because the research methods classes that I took, I took two of them, but they were both surveys, so it made it very, very difficult to kind of pull out a specific methodology or to really kind of zoom in and understand how the project itself is working.
But, the people included David Russell, who was my dissertation director, and he was and is fantastic. I came to him a little late in term of methodology, but he taught me a lot about how to play this believing-doubting game I’ve been talking to you about. How to really be compassionate toward the people in the studies. To suspended judgment of the way we have been talking about before and really to keep myself honest by not just taking at face value what I thought I was seeing at these organizations. So that was huge. That’s sort of in the theory and approach realm.
In terms of methodology realm, the biggest influence for me was Rich Freed who taught a proposal-writing course when I first got to Iowa State. He has a book out, it’s in its third edition now. I use it whenever I teach proposals, and it’s fantastic because it gives you a really solid approach to putting together a consulting proposal. And the heart of a consulting proposal is methodology. So what he taught me was to figure out, "What’s your question?" How do you break it down in order to get an answer to that question? And how do you keep breaking it down until it’s something that you can actually do?
And when I started writing research proposal, I just started following the Freed Proposal Methodology. It’s a fantastic methodology. I really soaked up the lessons. I wish I had soaked it up earlier so that I had gotten an A in the class instead of a B, but eventually I got there. So that was number two.
In terms of actually getting out in the field, I have to credit Al Roesler and Sam McLellan from Schlumberger Well Services. They took a chance on me and brought me down for an internship without ever actually meeting me. They modeled how to interact with participants, how to put together a quick research study, almost on the fly, that would get good data. And then they sent me out and they let me fail, not severely, but they kind of tossed me in the water and I kind of figured things but within a really supportive environment. That was fantastic too. Putting these three together really kind of set me up for later success.
Theme: Being nonjudgmental
GZ: Okay. So one thing I’m just thinking about [is how to apply this] in terms of the job market, and I know that I did this when I was in the field, because I had been advised to and it sounds like it’s a good use of the research skills as when you are on the job market perhaps treat it as another research event. Looking at potential employers as sites you are going into for the job interview.
CS: You know, I don’t think that’s a bad idea. One of the problems that people have when they go on the job market, and I think any job market, is that they tend to think that people are evaluating them. Them personally. And then when they don’t get a job that person, that organization, has rejected them. On the other side of the table, really it’s often about fit, it’s about trajectory, and so being able to do research on that organization that you are about to pitch to, or to apply to, I think that’s really useful because you get a sense for what they are really looking for and what they’re not. Sometimes you can say to yourself, "I’m not a good fit for them" or, "They’re not a good fit for me." Even if you think, "I’m the right person," you can get a sense of, "Well here’s what they might not have seen about me." So I think that would be very useful.
When I go into an organization—and this is something that I think this is really critical—you have to be sort of be nonjudgmental. You have to go in and say, "You know, these people are people like anybody else." Sometimes they will do things and don’t know why they do them and then make stuff up. Because we do that.
GZ: We do that?
CS: We do that all the time. Human beings are human beings. Which is why triangulation is such a big deal. Being able to lay out all of these data streams and take a look at how they all represent the same thing. Take a look at how different interviews or observations relate to each other. It’s a big deal because you can start seeing the differences in how people are perceiving things, what stories people tell themselves, what sorts of tools they are using, but you also see the similarities. Like if you see a bunch of tools like post-it notes and scribbles clustering around the same point in the same document across all these observations, you know that something is going on there that people are having to deal with.
But to do that, to get there, you really have to train yourself to be nonjudgmental. To listen to the people and kind of keep an open mind. Here’s an example. In the telecom company that I described in Network, I was sitting with a person in one section. I was really impressed by the fact that he kept developing these tools to make his life easier. I thought, this guy is pretty smart. Let’s call him Phil. I think Phil is pretty smart.
Later on I’m sitting at a completely different part of the company. Two people are talking. The less experienced says, I talked to Phil over in this other division about this and he said, "Da-da-da," and the other person, the more experienced says, "Oh Phil is a foul up." She didn’t use the word foul, but you get the idea. So the question is: is she right? Was I wrong about Phil? The answer is, you know, all we can say is that she perceives Phil to be a foul up. If everybody agrees there, then they all perceive Phil to be a foul up. All that really means is that there is something broken in the interface between them and Phil. There is something that he is not handling well or not interfacing well with, but that doesn’t mean he is not competent in these other sections.
This is a long way around of saying, being able to be nonjudgmental, sort of pull yourself back from investing in any particular person, I think could help you on the job market too. Just realizing they have to deal with a lot of people and here’s the traits they are looking for, maybe I have it, and maybe I don’t.
GZ: Based on your experience and work with students, where do new researchers seem to stumble most and how can they avoid this?
CS: I think the big thing, and I’ll preach this quite a bit, is this idea of being nonjudgmental when you enter a site, just being able to withhold judgment to see why people are doing things. What are they doing? I just created my—I’m teaching a course based on Topsight right now and it’s with undergraduate students. So they go in, they find an organization that they are connected to, and they do the sorts of things that I say to do in Topsight. What they have just finished is their project number two, where they turn in their data and then they turn in a brief interim report that summarizes what they are seeing so far.
What I often find at this point, and a little bit earlier as we are discussing the data that is rolling in, is that people really want to find problems, so they overemphasize the little problems or the little issues that they do see. They blow them out of proportion and they tend to try and pick winners and losers. This person is doing it right in the organization. This person is doing it wrong. I often have to kind of ask them to step back and say, "No, they are just doing things differently." At this point we are not sure which way the organization is going to go.
I had to tell a student the other day, "Yes, you have these two different factions, but that doesn’t mean that you get to decide which faction is the best." Take a look at what each faction says is the mission of the organization. See if there is any sort of common ground. If there’s not, then maybe they should just have two different organizations. So, I think the idea of just withholding judgment, just going in and seeing what the system does, that’s critical.
