Consider Organizational Culture Constraints in your Next UX Research Project
Over the years I've conducted several generative and evaluative research studies. Within that time there have been many times I’ve presented evidence-based insights and recommendations only to find that the organization has decided not to implement said recommendations. For context, let’s say you’re doing a generative research project and let’s assume that you’ve theoretically done all the right things in your research approach.
You’ve prepared your research plan taking care to ask the right user interview questions
You’ve taken precautions to avoid social desirability bias and avoid leading questions
You’ve used a grounded theory approach, letting the data inform your decisions rather than leading with an hypothesis
Now imagine you present your findings, insights and recommendations but the org says “this is very insightful indeed, but yeah….we’re not doin’ that.” Why?
Although using data to make evidence-based decisions is seemingly the north star, data alone doesn’t change hearts and minds. What many UX researchers (myself included) often fail to consider is what I’ll call organizational cultural constraints. Organizational cultural constraints basically refers to any internal politics and departmental silos that are an impedance or barrier to adoption. To break this down a bit and to better understand these constraints I usually try to answer the following questions.
What is the organization’s capacity and willingness to change?
Where do risks potentially exist that might affect change?
What political aspects and silos exist that are a barrier to change?
What are the limitations of resources and effort to adopt change?
There’s a lot driving the above examples and it’s important to uncover the answers to the above with diplomacy and tact. What I’ve come to realize over the years is an organization’s product (eg. website, app) is deeply personal. In many cases they’re both an extension and reflection of them as a person. Challenging those things is almost tantamount to pointing out a character flaw. It’s also important to consider that people making the decisions want to continue making the decisions. They may be hesitant to cede territory to a researcher. And that is completely fair; you want allies, not enemies. The best way to do this is by providing research insights and recommendations that fuel creative thought and innovation by pointing teams in the right direction
When and where to uncover organizational cultural constraints
Typically you want to uncover these constraints right at the beginning of your research project. I normally start with the following three areas.
Desk research:
I like to review and make notes from company strategy docs such as product roadmaps, value prop and brand statements, or aspirational goals tied to revenue to get the broad strokes of organizational goals. But these docs also provide insights into organizational and departmental challenges and limitations, which often take precedence over everything.
Stakeholder discovery:
This is the ideal place to uncover organizational cultural constraints. I use my desk research here to clarify and ask probing questions about what i’ve read. When it comes to identifying constraints during discovery, we tend to focus more on tangible constraints around technology, resources or budgetary constraints. But we should also attempt to understand any barriers or obstacles to adopting change at the company culture level.
Assumption workshops
I use assumption workshops as a collaborative tool at the beginning of a project; usually right after the initial stakeholder discovery session. The client assumption workshop does two things:
Confirms the scope, direction and focus of my research efforts
Gives me an idea of “what they already know” “what they assume they know” and “what they want to learn”.
The assumption workshop gets into the granularity of the above but it’s also an opportunity to clarify those organizational cultural constraints.
Summary
When presenting your findings and recommendations it’s a good idea to present both the ideal state (eg. your unfiltered recommendations) and the provisional state, tailored to the organization’s capacity and willingness to adopt change and innovation. For the ideal state, I would also consider providing an implementation strategy; this can be very helpful in providing context on what the organization would need to do to ramp up. By doing this, you’re giving the organization options; a version that can be adopted based on current state and an option that outlines how they have to change, as an organization, to optimize success and build better business outcomes down the road.