Natalie Nixon

And so we just get better at priming questions, learning the difference between

convergent questions which are like who what when where and divergent questions which are why what if and i wonder and both sorts of questions are important but when we ask more questions we no longer are obsessed with our beautiful little baby the the trinket that we've made over over the past 14 years and we fall in love with the problems our customers have we we turn that curiosity to

problem finding, problem definition.

And when we do that, that often leads to greater brand loyalty and increased market value.

And that's a business result.

Well, the truth is they already are integrating qualitative intuition with the quant.

We just are afraid to say it out loud.

There really is no such thing as objectivity, even when we are collecting, when we're doing quantitative research, which is essential for understanding what are the patterns, right?

Let's say the quantitative research results are collected through survey data.

Well, the way people answer surveys is self-reporting, right?

So if I answer a survey, if a company's trying to decide if they should open a new gym, a gym membership company in my community, and they send out a survey, and one of the questions is, how often do you go to the gym each week?

I say, oh, I go to the gym five days a week, you know?

that might be a false positive and they built this gym and then no one comes or not the frequency they thought because they didn't integrate it with qualitative research, right?

So the first notes, the intuition would be like, okay, it looks like in this community, 78% of the people go to the gym five days a week.

That's incredible.

is that really true right um so the qualitative research which is the worms i view does deep observation and interviews and contextual inquiry and they observe oh actually she goes maybe two at most three days a week and it has nothing to do the gym is more about child care issues or is more about transportation so then you might do an interesting mash-up and realize what if we are the first

a group of gyms that offers round-the-clock child care or make sure we do a partnership with the local public transportation authority, whatever.

The point is that if we only stop at the quantitative, we're fooling ourselves.

If we don't acknowledge those nudges that come when we don't have the proof yet, but there's just like what I call a blip on the radar screen, we have to investigate that.

And