E132 – Research in Organisations (w Dr. Oli Mival)

podcast with James and James.

hello. This is James, and this is Jane, and here we are again with another episode of a world of work podcast. We've got some exciting lined up. What are we speaking about today, Jane, and who are we speaking to?

So today we are talking about the role of research in organizations, and we are talking to a very old friend of mine and friend of the shows, but also happens to be a you use UX expert, Director of user research at Sky scanner, and also Principal Research Fellow at the Center for interaction design at Napier University. And this is Ollie myveil,

so here we are in the main body of today's podcast, and we're really lucky today, and we're pretty excited we've got a good friend of a show, someone we've known for a while, called oli myvil, who is a user experience expert, and he's currently the director of user research at Sky scanner, which, as many of you will know, is a huge travel and booking agency online. And he's also the principal research fellow at the Center of interaction design at Napier University. So he's got multiple hats that he's wearing as he comes to this conversation, and lots of good stuff to share before we get into this conversation, which is going to be really focused on research overall, Ollie, would you be able to introduce yourself to the audience and say a bit about yourself and your background and the kind of work that you

do? Sure, thanks very much for the intro. James, so yeah, I've sort of had a strange transition from academia into industry, but for 20 years, I was running sort of research groups in universities and universities, and specifically around interaction design. My sort of undergrad was in psychology, and my PhD was in computer science, but it was always sort of about people. So tech, for me is the thing that allows people to do things, and that's the bit where my interest has always lain. So one of the things that was interesting is, as we moved sort of, I guess, over the last 1015, years, there's a whole bunch of emergent technologies that come out. So multi touch technologies for screens and speech recognition and AI and all these amazing capabilities. And it's for me, it's been about researching what it means for people. So I always talk about interaction designers, basically people in places, doing stuff with things. It's nothing more complicated than that, just some of those things technically involve some sort of digital component. So for me, it's always been about the user side of it, the human side of it. I'm sort of interested in the tech, but the Tech is a black box in many ways. It's really about the experiences that they enable, that I've been focused on. So I spent sort of time in academia, and then was moving sort of more and more and more to doing sort of embedded work with industry, so from governments to small companies to big companies. And what I found myself doing was more and more and more I was actually really just sitting on that applied research side in industry, and I sort of made the final leap into the dark side, as it were, probably about four and a half years ago. And then I was working on bringing in research methodology and applied thinking design research into rollback of Scotland, and then into my role at Skyscanner, and that's where I find myself today.

Cool. That's great to share, and that's such a great varied background at some point, it'd be great to explore in a different conversation that that merging of worlds between academia and business, because there's, you know, there's such a different approach to things, and there could be really interesting before we get into some of the depth of this conversation, it would be great to start with just some of The basics, right? So you're very much focused on the research side of things. And, you know, thinking about how we use technology to help people, if we sort of step back, what do you really see the purpose or role of research being in organizations? Where are organizations applying research as a broad question, and what type of insights are they getting out of

that, sure. So for me, it's pretty simple. It's about supporting decision making. So research, in its sort of simplest form, is about generating data. So quantitative data, quality data, you know, desk research analytics, talking to people all the all the fun things that you essentially, it's just generating data and signal, and from that data you can perform analysis, and that's where you get insights. So the role of research, to me, is about making informed and evidence driven decisions built upon those insights. It's sort of that simple. I think people wrap it up to be more complicated than that, but that's where I see. The role of research in any size of organization is essentially what. What are you making that decision based on? Is it informed? Is it and that information or that or that sort of informed position can come from people with 20 years experience. They don't necessarily need to check and research everything. Likewise, you get people who are incredibly senior making basically guesses based on something that their daughter told them. For me, it's about trying to make sure that what you're doing is as de risked as possible, so that what you're doing you can be confident about, yeah, that's

that's clear. And do you see research being helpful across multiple functions and multiple sort of strategic objectives within organizations? Or do you see it focusing in on some areas more than others?

I think everyone has to make decisions, right? So everyone has to perform some level of research. Now the question is, is what scale and what impact those decisions have? So if you've got a decision which is making, let's take a how do you roll out COVID track and trace? Right? That's an impactful decision that you should probably have some pretty well researched perspective on. If it's should we launch this ad for 20 quid tomorrow. Do you really need to spend lots of time researching it? So really it's about that, that understanding of literal ROI of research, which is, what's the consequence if I get this wrong, I think that's always a useful starting point, and then what's my capability to deliver on that research? So, you know, I'm a professional researcher. I need a team of professional researchers in data science and user research and user experience research. Not everyone obviously has that. But it doesn't mean that you can't just have an informed position, which is done on desk based research or listening to podcasts like you guys. So for me, I think it is, you see it a lot in certain types of areas in my world, and sort of the digital product world, product designers, product managers, commercial teams, marketing teams. These are the sort of like my course or stakeholders. But likewise, I've done a big piece recently with our HR team around and also people team, which is interrelated around what modern workplace it should be. So there's obviously been a big shift. We'll probably talk about that later on, where we have to have an informed position, and we can't just base it on our own understanding or our own simple views, sometimes we need to get external data to help inform those decisions more. So for me, it's really about that balancing act of, again, just de risking the decisions. And some decisions are very risky and others really have very low risk.

Yeah, that makes sense. And drawing in that relation with risk when we're thinking about applying that investment in research really makes sense, if we think about research generally, you know. And if we reach a decision, we're going to, you know, we're going to be taking a decision. We want to be informed. We want to take an evidence based approach to that decision, and we're going to do some research. What does good research look like? You know, how does, how does one decide that what one does is going to be helpful and aid that decision making process. Well, when we're designing and planning research, sure.

So for me, and people who've worked with me now, I always bang on about this, I start with two really simple questions, which is, what do we not know that we need to in order to move forward? And then the follow up to that is, when you know that, what will you be able to do that you currently can't and that second part is really important, because otherwise, people say, I want to know this, but they don't necessarily know the actions that can come from knowing it. So for me, if you if you can fully answer that first question and fully answer that second question, you want a really good starting point, because for me, clear objectives and great research questions are the key. So there's a great quote by Charles Kettering, who's the former head of Research at GE and he always said a problem while state is a problem half solved. And that's a mantra, again, that I sort of preach all the time, because that is what good research is. I've worked with, you know, master students, PhD students, and then professional researchers at every level across every sort of industry to think of. And one of the things that you often see is research questions that are either too high. So it's like, what do people think about travel? It's not answerable, so you have to sort of Cascade your questions down into something that is actionable by the outcomes of whatever data that you generate. So for me, that's that's such a critical part I often chuck in a third on which is, don't tell me what you need. Tell me why you need it. And so a lot of times, people will ask for something because that's what they think they need or want. But actually, a researcher or an analyst can give them a better result if they understand why they need it. So we see this a lot in analytics, where people say, can you build me a dashboard which shows X like performance of this feature in this market? And you go, okay, but if that's not actually what they need to know, the better use. Of the expertise of researchers is to say, what is it that you need to know? Sorry, why is it you need to know it? And let me understand and help best what that should be to actually answer that question and give you the actionable outcomes that you want. So for me, it's that once you've done gone through all that part, that's when you can get to the appropriate methods to answer those questions and get to that sort of actionable insight. And that's where this holistic approach, sort of appreciation, sorry, of a problem is so important, otherwise you can end up being a hammer looking for nails. And I think I see this a lot, where in sort of small, medium and large companies, people go to the people that they know. So it may be that they had the relationship with the data analyst or the analytics team, and so they ask that team or that person for an answer. Now it might be that quantitative, you know, data is the way to get that, and analysis of that will give them the answer, or it could be it's entirely the wrong signal for them together. And typically it's it's kind of both. So it's a useful thing, but also it's not the full picture. And so that's what I mean by holistic approach, is really understanding what the problem understanding what the problem space is, what data can then help inform that from a quantitative perspective or a quality perspective. And a lot of the times as well, we get asked this all the time. We've got a Slack channel. When people say, what do we know about and I'm like, if you spent 30 seconds on Google, first you'd know that there are literally 20 incredible travel journals that have been going for 30 odd years with everything you could possibly want to know about this sort of thing. So there is a habit of looking internal, when actually my first step is, well, what does the world know about this? Is that relevant to us? What's specific about our situation that we need to that we need to do? So for me, it's really about mapping out all of those, those sorts of things, and that's what gives you those crisp research questions, that gives you, inevitably, much better insight. I

really like the practicality of the way you describe that about really trying to make sure that you generate research and data that helps you take a new decision or make a different action, or inform something that supports you towards your goals, and that feels very applicable and specific in a way that feels intuitively, quite supportive and maybe commercial or outcome driven in organizations, which is, was really good, and I like the little bit there about Google at the end, what popped into my mind was RTFM, right? We don't need to elaborate on that, but there's a lot of that out there in the world. So say we've done this, I guess I've got another question, but before we go into is the hardest bit getting people to step back and think about what they need? Or is the hardest bit doing the research

itself? Oh, the hardest bits then crisp, clear objectives for people? Absolutely, research is is, relatively speaking, you know, once you know what it is you need to do, yeah, sure, there are challenges to do it, but you know what you need to do, when you don't know what you need to do or why you're doing it, and you lack that sort of clarity and crispness. That's where I've seen struggles, just everywhere, right? Well, it just across every single domain. I've worked in every level, from, you know, CEOs of multi billion pound companies to Master's use. If you don't have clarity on what you're trying to do and what why you're trying to do it, and what you'll be able to do when you've done it, then you really struggle. And it's, it sounds simple when you put it in those terms, but people don't spend that extra time to have that bit. And I think a lot of this comes from when I've been supervising PhD students, and this is what I mean, where you're doing a very rigorous three year often more investigation into a topic area, and you tend to have one or two core research questions, and maybe two or three cascading off that. If you haven't got clarity as to what it is that why you're asking that question, then you're really going to struggle to figure out the best way to answer it. I think that's that's the bit that I mean. Where you go, does this question? It to answer this question? Is it best served to get this type of data, that type of data? Where am I trying to get it. And part of that comes from when people don't know how to write research questions. The thing I tend to do is go, what are your assumptions? I don't even use the word hypothesis. I just say, what's your assumption about why you're doing this? And then what you find out is people are pretty well informed and, you know, pretty thoughtful, and tend to actually have a pretty good opinion of it. And you can go, like, right, all those assumptions you've made. We can flip those into a research question, and we can evaluate what that means, and we can then cascade other questions off it, or we can wrap them up into other related questions, because that's that's part of the challenge I've always had at Sky scanner with a small team, is when you have and the same thing will be true of, you know, smaller organizations, with maybe even the luxury of one dedicated researcher or potentially none, really, one of the things that you can do is start to understand the thematic problem spaces that you have as an organization or as a as a company or as a product or as a team, whatever it may be, and say, How can we systematically and foundationally drive through those. So rather than, and I see this a lot, where it's called discrete research, where you do a thing and the answer to that question gives you the answer to that one question. But you can't build on it. You can't use it for other things. The first thing I did at Skyscanner was basically use that as our way to push back on requests, where I say, if this is useful, just to you, just to now, we're not doing it. We have to. We've got a limited bandwidth. We've got a limited capability. What is our best bang for buck? What can we best help with? And that's, that's, I think, one of the sort of the core ways to think about how you can, how you can sort of land these things, is going what? And it, I hate to say, goes right back to that core question, what do we not know that we need to to be able to move forward? And again, is that organization, is that as a team, is that this project, is this, that this product, whatever it

is, it feels like, in some senses, those problems arise when people don't start thinking about what they know and what they don't know kind of either early enough or high enough in their strategic thinking for an organization. So if you're it sounds like you're saying, if you get to the point where you've got a single question, you've probably started too late, and you need to take a few steps back to think about the choices you're making when you're coming up with a strategy or tactics to deliver a product. And I guess that's really interesting to me, because historically, certainly organizations I've worked with their research officers tend to sit lower down the chain, if they've got one, and they tend to get very much treated as a service department, right? So, or in a function like we have this question answer it. So I guess is that, is that something you see in your workplace, how does, how does it? How can someone who, if they are working on research, whether it's their whole job or not, how can they sort of, you got any suggestions on how they sort of get further up the decision making chain, if you like,

yeah. I mean, yeah, couldn't. Couldn't agree more. So there's a couple of things to that sort of to unpack. The first stop is, I often talk about the types of research we do as strategic, tactical, evaluatory. I don't let anyone use the word validation. So you see this a lot like you're saying, can we just validate this? I'm going, I'm not here to make yourself feel better. I can evaluate it, but I'm not here to validate your decision. So strategic is, what should we do? Tactical is, how should we do and evaluate did we do it well? And so what I again, so we have a small team. We were embedded. We've got the squad tribe model at Sky scanner, which has its pros and its cons. The biggest con is the fact that you have, we had a researcher embedded in the squad, embedded in the tribe, so they were looking specifically at supporting part of the hotel's product on Sky scanner, right? So the problem is, the topic that they were looking at, which is essentially, how do you get someone who's looking at flights to also book a hotel, is also what people were trying to spin up in the advertising tribe. So you've got a very specific, very obvious, very linked thing so and you've got different agendas at play, and then you've got the different seniorities. So what I did was actually move ourselves out of this sort of backlog driven service, almost brand as a discipline, where people would go, here's a question, as you say, and then they sit there, sort of tapping their watch, going, like, when do I get the answer? When do I get the answer? When do I get the answer? When can you go? And so there's two bits of that. One which is pushing back on it by saying, don't tell me what you need. Tell me why you need it. And then we'll figure out the best way to deliver it. Also. Then there's a prioritization piece about going, I know that's important to you, but we're a big organization with lots of things, we have to understand how we can best use our expertise to sort of support the wider objectives as a business. And then there's that, how do you get further up the decision making chain, so that you are informing that strategic thing, so that you're then able to help inform the tactical bit, so you're not just stuck at the end of that evaluatory validation box ticking exercise, which you can often become. So for me, the probably, I guess, the way that I've done it and the way that I've seen it be effective in the past is getting allies so and demonstrating the value of the outcome of sort of good approach. Now that's not easy. So for me, when our so an amazing woman called Joe McClintock came in to Sky about six months after myself, and she came in as Director of Brand and she was saying, Wow, we don't have any insights driving our brand identity. Hey, Ollie, can you help us with that? Absolutely, that's exactly what we're here to do, is to help understand people's perspective that is, perspectives, attitudes, advertise differences in markets, all those sorts of fun things. So what happened there is we formed this sort of amazing allegiance alongside Patrick, who's our head of data science, and what we're doing is basically saying, How can we have an insight driven perspective into these core questions, which is not how Skyscanner had typically operated. It comes from an engineering background, right? It's an amazing engineering infrastructure that allows it to operate at such scale, and that's great. But then to do the next bit, you need to have these more sort of, I guess, the soft skills, the social science side of things, which is not its historical strong suit. So that's what. Have been trying to develop. Once you get those allies, and then you can go to the people in commercial, or you can say, like, when you're coming to us with these decisions, we can help inform those decisions. And so once you get that, that I guess, mindset shift, that we're not a service, we're actually a consultancy. We're actually an expertise. What we found is people started and we also, I got great advice from Charlotte Clancy, who I brought into the team earlier last year, who set up and ran research and delivery for four years. And she said, You can't keep delivering if you always deliver everything and people assume everything's fine. You gotta go, No. And so you know, you're killing yourself, you're working silly time. You're pressuring everyone in the team that you're like, well, that's not sustainable, so you have to change the conversation a little bit into what is it that we're trying to do? And really it's a case of once you can have those senior stakeholders understand that, so you help make my life easier by making my decisions better informed and therefore much more likely to be successful, and you get other allies who champion that approach. That has been by far the most effective way to get that seat at the table. It's always people talk about that you need the seat at the table. And for me, I found that the way that I talk about research like this, where it's about decision making, rather than it being dry, academic. Side of saying we've done this analytics and graphs, you have to understand, right? I've got the chief financial officer and the Chief Commercial Officer. They care about the numbers, and they care about, specifically, performance, business performance numbers, right? How does what I'm talking about? How can I use the language that they're familiar with to give them the sense of the value of this type of thinking and this type of approach that's different from when you're talking to Chief of Staff and strategy. It's different when you're talking to Chief Product or chief marketing officers. They have different lenses. They have different motivations, agendas and focuses, and rightly so. So what you need to do is talk their language and frame what it is that you're doing in a way that is sort of generically, hey, we help decisions. And specifically, these are the type of decisions that you're making, and we're not making them an informed way. And this is how we can help. And once you get that, you tend to find that people go, Oh, wow, I see the demonstrable value of that. And if you can do a use case, if you can do something which illustrates that, then you tend to find people come to you rather than you having sort of like, beat down the door.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense, and sounds really familiar in terms of, particularly, I think, around framing for different audiences, and getting really good at being able to demonstrate the purpose of why, I think, fundamentally, why your job or your function exists, and what it can do to help people versus what you want to show people. I wanted to ask you a little bit James mentioned it earlier, and I just wanted to ask you a little bit because I had a conversation with someone recently who has made a similar type of transition from academic research into becoming an in house researcher in a very different area to yours, but they were sharing some of the challenges of adjustment. And for them, they said the biggest single thing was, there's never enough time to do it the way that I would have done it before. And I just want to ask you, what have been the differences for you moving from a full time academic role to working in your principal role within an organization. So

it's pace versus rigor, so and then it's also sort of related to value of outcome. And so the immediacy of the value of that outcome to sort of take those two things down the the I was always seen as a very applied, very pragmatic academic research, and I'm sort of seen as a relatively academic, industrial researcher, which just makes me laugh. I sort of straddle the two, but it's because I see the value of the both things. So when I say it's pace versus rigor, so I often talk about it as a little bit like skiing, where, yes, this is the way that you should ski down this slope. Yes, this is the safe way to do it. But actually, if you need to do it a bit more quickly, you can go this way, but now you're off piste, and you've got to be careful, because you can hit trees. So once you become sort of, I guess, literate enough to know what you should do, you know when you can not do those things, and it doesn't affect the outcome of what you're trying to achieve. I think that's the bit that people who come from academia into industry often struggle with. They go, well, it's not the right way of doing it. And you're going like, yes, in many ways, that is true. However, the outcome for the business, which is why we're here, is okay, right? That that level of rigor that you're trying to get to, it's not about trying to deliver it to the nth degree. It's about, how do we de risk this decision to enough level that we've got a threshold of confidence that means we can move forward? And it's different, right? If you know, we often talk about, hey, we push pixels around to help people get flights and go on holiday, right? End of the world doesn't happen. When you're in critical systems, you know, if you like, doing the user interface for air traffic controllers right, different level of rigor required. So for me, it's about that balance of pragmatism. What's the consequence of you being wrong? What's the consequence of these and doesn't mean that you don't you cut corners. You just understand about if we're trying to move here within this time frame, within this budget. How can we do that and knowing when to say we can't, so don't do it. That's one that people really struggle to get their head around. I often think no research is better than bad research, because bad research gives this false veneer of validation. And again, it's back to that sort of word evaluation. You go like, No. And there's another one, which is where people will say, we've got to do this work. You're saying, If I told you something completely different to what you're expecting, are you going to stop what you're doing? And a lot of the times, people say like, Well, no, it's already happening, and it's already so again, like, well, we're not going to do that either. So for me, it's very much taking, taking that sort of, I guess, trying to think of the right word that doesn't sort of insult either side of this debate. But really it's, it's that balancing of going, we're trying to deliver business decisions. That's what we do in industry. If you're in things like E health, there's obviously different constraints. But typically speaking, you just need to balance the WHERE IS MY rigor line. It's not about doing it. And in academic research, the whole point is it's so foundational, it's so peer reviewed, it can only move forward incrementally and slowly, and it should do and it should be reflective, and it should be debated, and all these sorts of things. Now that's all terrific. And certain things should be like that in industry or in government or in whatever, however. It's about that pragmatic moment. And I always come down to the what's the consequence of this being wrong? Then it becomes a judgment call, an ethical call, a moral call, depending on which domain you're in.

Yeah, I think there's a really important piece in there about even educating people about what I really like, that phrase, rigor line, right, and even educating those around you in your organization of what that means and how you weigh up. Because I think there's a danger that some some research and some researchers in past lives have sold themselves as using words like validation and proof and irrefutable evidence. Don't get me started on the word proof. So

I wanted to ask you, because you've got this, you've got this, you've got this incredibly pragmatic, practical approach to all of this. And so one of the things that I've seen in organizations is where someone's done a really helpful piece of research, and it's really, you know, drawn a number of new direction opportunities for organizations, and yet the organization has, at some level, decided they're not going to act on it, and not necessarily because of a well thought through review, but sometimes more often, as a knee jerk. And I just I wondered for you, what have been some of the challenges that you've either seen or experienced in making people comfortable with accepting a piece of good research and actually putting it to good use and changing strategy. So you said, you know, I think you just said asking people, you know, are you actually going to change what you do depending on what we find? So how, what have some of the challenges been for you, and what do you do about

that? I've had literal examples where someone said, Well, this was really hard to implement. Ollie, so we're not going to change it when you've gone it's demonstrably bad. It's demonstrably making people who use it get to the wrong outcome, right? So you are always fighting that, that balance. And again, there is an evangelical part to my role when I sort of didn't realize until I realized it, which is, you are essentially trying to evangelize the approach of design thinking in many ways, and sort of design research as a component of that of just basically considered approach to why we're doing something, how we're doing it, and the efficacy with which we are doing it. So I think the I think the thing you need to do is, essentially, I kind of go back to that, that example of, you know, you're talking to C suite, or whatever. It's really what is, what is this person need? Why? Why have they got a challenge? Because it's typically okay in some situations, there are jerks, right? They're just people who are jerks and they're not going to listen. There's a different approach needed with them. I'm fortunate, and certainly at Sky skin, I never really have to deal with that challenge. There's also a sense of authority and gravitas about you as a researcher, right? You as the subject matter expert that can take time to embed and certain people, and we find the CEO, the marketing guys, never pretend. Know about some of the things we do and other parts of the organization, oh, we know all that. They don't really and actually to a dangerous degree. So one of the things is trying to unpick all of those motivations and also the sheer constraints and challenges that people have, and use that to help in that sort of pragmatic perspective, saying, Well, where is the research component into what we're doing if we're coming in too late. And there's the old notion of seagulling, where people fly in and crap all over the place and then fly out again, and I'm very conscious of not doing that. Or the other one in sort of research is bulldozing. So people go, like we wanted to look at this, and you come and you go, you just bulldoze over it and say, That's all terrible. It won't get you need, as opposed to saying, Well, how do we holistically, as an organization, structure ourselves to do this? That's one part, and that's one of the things that I found myself doing more and more over the last sort of year, is to say, how do we structure ourselves organizationally? How do we put in ways of working that preempt these sort of classic situations that keep coming up, usually based on Pivot rapidly or time constraints or commercial strategic decision making, rather than user centered decision making, right? Which is, again, not the way you should do things, but the way that business operates a lot of the time. So I guess it's, I don't know if I'm even answering your original question, but the thing that I find is you've got to you've got to get a literacy in approach to an organization, and that takes time, and you you can't just change everything in one go, but what you need to do as well as be flexible. And I think that's the bit where I know some researchers sort of shudder when I sort of talk about some of the pragmatic decision making that I do. And I'm like, well, actually, I've sort of done 20 years of research in, you know, high quality journal, papers, blah, blah, blah, but I know how to do all that stuff, so I do know when you don't need to do that to get to a business objective. And I think that's the bit that is sort of like that, that balancing act, and it's, it's reading the temperature of or the maturity of an organization in the thinking around this stuff, which is obviously going to change based on personalities, but also change on the culture. How willing are people to have hard conversations that are based on data points, evidence, insight, and when do you need to play political cards? And that's that's the reality that was very new to me was, well, actually, there are agendas at play here, and it's not about doing necessarily the right thing, but, you know, and you don't have necessarily that contextual view of stuff as well. So sometimes you're like, Well, why are we doing this when we're seeing this other thing, and you realize, well, that's because you don't have the full perspective of the view. And that's, that's the way of any hierarchical organization. So for me, it's always a case of humanizing. I find the best way to get to if you need to, if you need people's opinions to change, you need to move them from sort of a sympathy to an empathetic frame of what it is, and it's making it about people. And I typically have found that the thing that can boycott not work, but shortcut an entire conversation is when you just go, here's here's three minutes of videos of people talking about why this is a problem for them. And all the data and analytics and business performance metrics in the world don't change that fact. And so I found that a very sort of effective way to communicate and get that sort of, I guess, buy in shift of thinking. But there is a politics to that, which some people aren't comfortable with. And I guess that's that's part of the challenge of trying to do anything when you're at scale or relatively new, but you can do these things at different levels of scale as well, and different sort of pacing.

Yeah, brilliant. You know, Oliver, so much in there. I liked the, again, the pragmatism and practicality of what you talk about, and I guess, the realism of the political nature of many organizations and that need to influence and change mindsets and convince people to do things in new ways or think in new ways. And when, when we speak to other people about that, a lot of this stuff sort of comes back towards people's sets of underlying beliefs around the way the world works, and what will help serve their interests at this moment in time, and those are both big things to look to influence and change. So it's great to hear this use of research and organizations being framed as an integral part of that larger sort of conceptualization and culture in organizations. I think that's really neat. Um, I know you've done a bunch of research actually looking to some extent at people's experiences in organizations. Have you got anything specific about that, that you've done that's directly contributed to understanding, you know, what people's experiences are like, and how we can improve it in organizations. Yeah, so,

I mean, this sort of goes back to I've done something recently at Sky scanner, which alluded to at the start, which is we've sort of, one of the objectives was saying, what's, what's the future of modern workplace at Skyscanner, how do you blend a hybrid of home, working and offices, and how does that change? Based on the needs of an engineer versus someone working in HR, versus someone on the legal team, someone in design, whatever it may be. And I think it's interesting, because that's what I spent probably the last 10 years of my sort of academic life was doing was understanding collaborative workplace design. So how do you blend physical and digital spaces to enable collaborative activity. And for me, one of the things which is interesting is understanding. We talk about it as sort of blended theory, which is this, this idea of understanding, when do you move between the conceptual and the and the literal, or the physical and the and the virtual, or the digital and the analog? And I think one of the things that, for me, is really interesting is understanding the physicality of our environment. This is why I often talk about what I do, and certainly did at Academia. As people and places doing stuff with things, you have to understand the holistic bit of it. So much focuses on just the interface, without understanding the interfaces on an object which is in the hands of someone in a place, and all of those components provide the context of the experience that they're having. So you need to understand all of those and so given everyone's experience over the last year, we would normally be, ideally, we'd be in a room the three of us, but we're not. We're in three separate rooms, but the technology has allowed us to do that. But then what can we and one of the things that I think is consistently seen and really interesting from a physicality of environment for workplace designers is things like, can you control the lighting, can you control the heating? The impact of that on sort of, the happiness of your your workforce is massively measurable and massively impactful. And I think one of the things that we've got now is everyone has that, because we're all in our own workplaces. So how will that change when we go back into these offices? What are the offices of the future? How does that make sense? Why would I go into a place that isn't set up as well as my home office? I'm very lucky I have a home office. My wife has a home office, but I explicitly within about a week of us moving out of the office in Sky, which was sort of end of March last year, I spent time and money in converting a room into a proper workspace with lighting that I can control. It's got plants in it, because plants make you feel better about your space. All these sorts of fairly trivial things, but really add up to being quite a difference. And then when you get to the other things that things like, how do you have psychological safety in these situations? How do you that was always a challenge for our team in the very first place. It was a fragmented team, both physically and sort of like conceptually, in that we had team members in Edinburgh and London and Budapest at the time. And so one of the things that I learned very quickly was especially in these hybrid situations, where, you know, Skyscanner is and was a very global company. When I joined, there were 12 or 14 global offices. You know, I had a team member in Miami, one in Singapore, Budapest, London, Edinburgh, Glasgow, you can't all be in the same location, even all be in the same time zone. So you you learn how to make sure that there's a presence, a sense of presence that isn't unbalanced on virtual versus physical presence. And I think that's a thing that I found really exciting about the last year, if such a expression makes sense, but the democratization of access and conversations by everyone being the same size square box on the screen is really powerful. And I've spoken to people who's a researcher at Sainsbury's, I've talked about this, and she was saying, I'm in conversations that I never otherwise would have been because suddenly it was okay before it would be well, you have to be in this office in this city to be at that physical meeting, otherwise you don't get it. And you know, well, it's too expensive for you to travel there for one hour, so you're not going to do it. That has gone away. And I think that's one of the things that we need to remember, is that democracy of access and sort of removal of some of the hierarchies that come with that is a really good thing. Now, there's obviously the benefits of physicality, there's the socialization aspect of work, there's the serendipity of being in a workplace that is really, really hard, not impossible, but really hard to replicate in current sort of technological infrastructures. And I think for me, that's that's one of the things for an organization, moving out of, hopefully constraints of people working from home and then moving back into the office, is remembering and literally evaluating what has been the good things to come out, what have been the really challenging things. How do we optimize for those going forward? We ran a 17 focus groups of like, about 150 people at sky scanner, which now about 15% of the workforce, and then we ran a survey as well across the entire company to really start to pull out these components, about seven. Saying, you know, compared to before, compared to now, appetite for the future, really understanding why. And then we can start to collect things like, well, people who don't, who want to be back in the office, you know what? What is it about don't go back to the office that they want people who don't? Why is it they don't want to? Not just blanketly saying there are some people who do or don't, but understanding what it is that are the motivators or the anxieties for both, and one of the things that's very clear is that the sort of the level of quality of homework environment was having a massive correlation with whether or not people wanted to go back in the office. Hey, big surprise, people working off a dining table, in a dining chair on a laptop, not such a great situation as someone who has a dedicated desk, an office chair, all the rest of it. So I think for me, it's the point to make is talk to your workforce, understand what have been the challenges, but also understand what have been the benefits, and you use that to drive decision making for the future about what a workplace should be, both from a ways of working, but also the physicality of it and the technical infrastructure that should be in place. And I think that's that's one of the things as well. The technology has meant that this has been a lot less painful than it otherwise would have been if it was 10 years ago. And I mean that from a just the technology and now allowing and enabling sort of video conferencing, but also from a cost perspective, where suddenly a lot of these costs, which were prohibitively expensive to use video conferencing was, you know, 10s of 1000s, up to hundreds of 1000s of pounds for organizations, literally 10 years ago. So I think that's that's one of the things, is really figuring out what you want the work environment to be, both as a way of working and also a physicality of space, and learning from what we've just gone through to try and trying to help inform that there's

some, there's a lot of interesting stuff in there. I really, I really like that, looking at both some of the challenges and some of the positives, and going in a little bit with that, open mind your point about access to new meetings and sort of changing and I think use the word equalization to some extent of of experience, democratization, democratization of that experience? Yeah, we in our conversation with somebody yesterday, they said that in the last 12 to 15 months, in the last 12 month period, there was something like a 30 to 40% increase in whistle blowing actions within firms reporting to the SEC. And isn't that amazing, right? I mean, like, what? That must be statistically significant, right? But isn't that fascinating in terms of the change in experience we have? I think that's brilliant when you're doing research like this, for example, in this one, Did anything surprise you? Was there anything surprising it in what you do? I mean, how do you are you ever surprised by the research that you do?

I guess? Well, yes, simple answer. The thing that always surprises me, and I mean, I think and your research does, is when something illustrates the fact that not other people, not everyone thinks the same way, right? And, I mean, I've had this consistently. When we were doing stuff last year, it was all about the priority was, well, what does COVID Miss travel? Travel was a very well understood, very commoditized experience up until 18 months ago, and suddenly now, well, we need to understand what are the rationales we want to travel, what are the things that they're moving to? This idea of having to go over thresholds of confidence on health and then thresholds of confidence on financials, their thresholds and confidence in things like social so will people socially shame me if I start traveling? And I think that's the thing that sort of suddenly shifted quite, quite profoundly. The thing that was interesting for myself and for Charlotte when we were doing this work, is that both of going, Why does anyone want to travel? It literally just seems so alien to us. And what I mean by that is for leisure. Obviously, there's big repatriation shifts that happened, and then there was people going to see family and friends and all the sorts of things there, but the motivation of that was very different from a leisure based travel. And there were still people, and you realize, but we were going, Well, I wouldn't want to travel at the moment. I just want to sort of hunker down. And the moment you start, and we started a policy of talking to sort of 20 people a week in then we sort of varied the market. So, you know, one we'd be talking to people in Brazil, and then one in South Korea and in sort of Germany, and sort of our other key markets, to move away from that sort of UK centrism, or sort of UK US perspective of the world, that a lot of people can sort of fall in the trap of, and you realize a there's always differences between people, and there's differences between cultures. And I think one of the things that is interesting is to start to use that to then go like, right? Well, and it's the age old. I. Part of why we do research in the first place, which is, hey, not everyone thinks like you. But one of the other things you realize is, hey, everyone has these underlying generic frameworks that are pretty robust, where we just sit on different elements of the scale. So one of the big ones we saw was tolerance to ambiguity, or tolerance of ambiguity, which is buttons framework from the 60s, and it's a very nice sort of survey that you can do to see to get a sense of people's tolerance to ambiguity. And we saw a huge correlation. We did a bunch of sort of surveys in different markets to see what was what was going on there, and what we saw was that the likelihood of people traveling is entirely correlated to their tolerance to ambiguity. So the less tolerant of ambiguity they were, the less likely they were to travel. So unsurprisingly, so if people were like, well, it's fine, I can deal with uncertainty, then they're much more likely to travel. So it's sort of it's always interesting to me to find just another remembrance that I had the rule a little bit different, but also a little bit similar. And I think that's the bit that I always find fascinating about the reality of of that qualitative approach of actually talking to people, because it's surveying great and it shows you at scale. For me, I like to tick tock between the two. So that's, what are the themes that people talk about, and then how prevalent are those themes? And I think, and then what are the things that drive those themes? And you sort of can tick tock between those, those conversations. And I mean, this is what I've done for sort of 20 years. My one of my favorite examples of surprising outcomes of research was way back. Would have been 2003 Oh, that's, that's way back, isn't it? And it was called utopia, usable technology, older people, inclusive and appropriate. And it was about older people's attitudes to technology. And remember, this is sort of 2003 and we were doing an ethnography with we were going into some sort of care homes. We were going into community centers. We were going into people's homes who lived alone or with their partner, and just understanding the use of technology in sort of 65 and upwards. And I remember this particular woman, she lived alone, she was early 70s in Dundee, and I was just watching how she used her computer when she was doing internet browsing. And this is again, sort of back in just post dialog days, and she had a very small window on the web browser, like it was taking up a quarter of the screen. If you think 2003 is a small screen anyway. And I went in a condescending way that only a sort of 25 year old research can do? Do you know you can actually make that the full size of the screen? She just looked at me stone cold and went, Yes, but then there's too much information. Ollie, and I just remember that blew my mind. Going, Oh, why do I think that she doesn't know how to do this? Because it's a technological constraint, as opposed to No, no. This is just the way that she operates within this sort of blended experience that she has with technology. With technology, and that I've always gone back to that moment as they just because that's what you would do doesn't mean that's why other people would do it, and you need to know why. And that's the bit it's always going to that next level of why. And that consistently surprised you.

I think that's a lovely story. And as someone has known you a long time, I can absolutely imagine that moment. So thank you for that. We have quite a lot of listeners, in leaders, in smaller organizations, who be listening to this thinking, You know what? We don't do enough research, and we certainly don't take a proactive approach to it. So I'd love to know a couple of things really. One is, what could they do, like going into the office tomorrow, what could they do to start thinking about planning a more proactive approach to research? And then the second thing is, and if they can't recruit anyone, but they're looking at their existing team, what sorts of skills should they be looking out for in their existing team that might be good at doing this kind of work? Ah, that's okay. That's really interesting. So

in the first one, I mean, I keep harking back on it, but I found that those two questions that what do we not know that we need to in order to move forward? And when you know this, what we be able to do? I find that when people really sit down and reflect on those questions and write things down then, and what I would do is say, write things down to say, like, what? What do we not know that we need to and things go right? We don't know who we should be targeting, okay? We don't know where should we go. We don't know what the needs are of these people. And when you realize that, you go like, Okay, here's a, here's an objective, or here's a, here's a thing, where we want an outcome to be. We do know about that, because then we can, and it's like, then we can dot, dot, dot, fill in the final bit that sentence, because then you you realize that this is what I mean by research. Research can be go to Google, type in what is happening with this, and then you need it comes down to sort of understanding that just because you read something in a medium article doesn't equal fact or. Or proven or anything, but it's just signal towards things and and that's that sort of that that desk research. It's just an investigation, to gather data, to do analysis on to come to an insight on anyone can do that you don't necessarily need a full team or anything. It's just a way of thinking. It's a way of systematically approaching what you're trying to do with it, and framing it in a way that is both sort of simple but also structured. And I find that those two questions, when people have sort of applied them, is quite an effective way, because it's it's pragmatic and it's sort of action outcome driven, but it's also it means you can help with prioritization, because you can go like, well, here's all the things. If we know this and we can do that right? Well, there's that's a core priority for us. We should do that. Now. Can we do that? Can we talk to third parties? Is the information out there in the world? Do we need to commission something? Do we need to work with? You know, there are plenty of other ways to get research done. You know, there are ways that small companies can work with universities. There are amazing things, programs by which people can do that, where it's a small amount of work. It's a specific question that specific expertise in the university department can help with. And there's a funding gap. It's called Innovate UK, for anyone listening, it's worth looking into. And there's these innovation vouchers that people can do to work with universities to sort of drive that through. But really what they need, and what? And when I say they, the partners who are doing the research, is, why are you doing this? So what? Again, it's like, don't tell me what you need. Tell me why you need it. So the clearer people are on that, I think the clearer any sort of research program can be. The second part of that, that skill set, which I think is a really interesting question for me, because I was asked it recently, when we doing recruiting by sort of our recruitment team, about what do you look for? Now, for me, you know, hey, it'd be great if someone's done a social science and then PhD, and then has moved into working in an agency, and then has worked in house. And you're like, great, but how often is that the case and you're competing with everyone else who wants that? What I found to be what I had one of my team members who's really just, I hate to use the expression of smashing it at the moment, she really is just doing an amazing job. What she her sort of trajectory was when the marketing department restructured about 18 months ago, about two years ago, and she moved out of a marketing growth role, and then we had an open research role, and she came into that and she was like, I've done some work and agency work, but I'm not necessarily, technically a trained researcher, but the way she thinks so, it's just the way. It's that logical way of saying, what are we you know, it's someone who can understand when I say, What do you not know that you needed to be able to move forward? You're like, well, we don't know this. We don't know that if we did them, that we could move. So for me, the skill set is the way that people think, the methods you can learn, but it's very hard to learn how to approach the structured thinking of research questions. That is something that takes a lot of time. Some people just have it. It's just the way that their mind works. It's the way that they systematically and sort of foundation the go about trying to move forward. And I think that would be the core skill set. Is that analytical mindset about saying, How do I logically, relatively unemotionally think about what we need to do and how do we wouldn't move it forward. So and then if people need to learn the methods to get that data, that's a completely different thing. And that's honestly much easier to teach than the mindset thing about saying what's too high level, what's too low level, and how do we move between those different perspectives? That's

really interesting. It feels like we could have a whole another conversation about education systems and what we learn and all that stuff. However, for today, I'm going to draw a line out of a conversation, because we've covered loads, so I'm going to wrap things up just before we go. How can people find out more about the work that you're doing and you and what you're working

on? I have been blessed with a relatively unique name. I think, I think it's completely unique in that. So if you put into Google, Ollie, Michael, o, l, I m, I, V, A, L, that's the easiest way you'll find some of the articles I've written quite a lot in the last six months about what we did at Sky scanner through COVID. And that's sort of a nice starting point. Obviously, there's those perspectives of me on LinkedIn and also at Renaissance university, you can see some of the academic research, but easiest way to do it is just put my name in Google, because there's only one

of me. Brilliant. Well, that's good, excellent. So that was loads of fun. Thanks for being so open and sharing so much. About all that stuff, so thank you for me, and thank you for me. Well, absolute pleasure, guys. Okay, that was our conversation with Arlene. Michael, you're back with us. A really interesting conversation. I thought Jane covered a wide range of stuff, as we often do, anything stand out for you that you want to reflect on. I

think two things. One is, I think, the advice about how to get involved in decision making earlier on in the organization, to influence the research agenda or reframe what research can do for the organization strategically, I think, is massive. And the other thing that really struck me as I was listening to ollie was he clearly has a curiosity beyond his area about how the organization itself can be successful. And it just strikes me as so many of our guests that have got practical jobs rather than academic or sole academics, how many of them seem to take that same, you know, seem to have that same curiosity about how all the pieces fit together in an organization. So that really struck me, just like I think that it feels like a really important ingredient for success, yeah,

yeah. I think so as well. And I think some of the questions that he spoke about when framing research and feeding back on people who want research are really helpful. Two takeaways for me very much in the same area. One was around the importance of a ways of thinking that one brings in some extent, being more important than the methodological approaches that one knows. I thought that was really interesting. And another thing that he talked about was the need for human interaction and human influence to communicate the outcomes of the research and do that in a meaningful way that actually influences an organization. And those are both slightly different skills, sort of, you know, there's non technical skills and the importance of those. So I thought that was interesting. So yeah, that's it for me. So thank you very much everyone. Goodbye