Thread by @mulegirl

I have now done essentially the same research workshop in Seoul, Tokyo, Wellington, Oslo, NYC, LA, London, Berlin, Austin, Sydney, Lisbon, and a few other places.

From talking to participants, I know that the barriers to doing good research are fundamentally the same all over.

No one is rewarded for asking questions. Questioning authority is a huge risk no matter how "flat" you perceive your culture or company to be.

There are strong incentives to try to be proven right rather than actually being open to learning.

In order to learn you need to admit that you don't know the answer. The higher up you get in an organization, the less appealing in can be to say "I don't know".

Continuous making seems a lot more appealing than continuous learning because it is tangible and comfortable.

And managers everywhere demand "hard data" to answer qualitative questions, even though (or because) analytics and stats are often at least as biased as qualitative observations. And it's much easier to use a number to support doing whatever you want to do anyway.

Everyone is too focused on finding a magic technique or methodology instead of clarifying goals, decisions, and the larger questions you need to ask from the data (whether qualitative or quantitative) in order to make good decisions to meet your goals.

Managers all over the world are *still* pointing to Steve Jobs as an excuse not to do research.

His genius was getting competitors to believe that design genius is somehow synonymous with willful ignorance, rather than rigorous curiosity across disciplines.

Intelligent people bought the myth they wanted to believe, hook, line, and sinker, even while acknowledging that Jobs was a master marketer.