Missed Opportunities

As a psychotherapist I know there are certain instances where the client is handing themselves over to me on a silver platter. That is, they say or do something that is such a perfect window or entry into their psyche, and it is impossible to ignore. As therapists, we are trained to recognize these and work well with them.

The key for a non-therapist to understand is that these "nuggets" are often not visible to the client, or to the untrained eye. It's not like the client blatantly says "I'm so sad" or "I've realized that I like to make other people laugh because my own childhood was so dull" or "I overachieve because I want to best my Father, who never challenged me enough." These, if anything, are more difficult to work with than the nuggets I'm talking about.

When a client reveals themselves, they do it through something that may be out of character for them, something that may be a little different or perhaps using a phrase that seems a little unexpected or out of context for the therapist. And just like in any other discipline, when you get these opportunities you run with them. For example, when in a court of law, your opponent makes a mistake, or misses a piece of evidence, or in hockey, when there are three offensive players to one defensive player - you just go with it, and don't waste the opportunity.

Recently, I was in a focus group in Calgary, and the subject was a very detailed policy issue applicable only to a very small segment of the population requiring a large amount of knowledge. By all accounts the groups were going well, and were fairly heady - as most policy work is not based on deep emotional stuff. Anyhow, smack in the middle of the group, a participant gives me a psychptherapeutic nugget... I mean somthing that I could not ignore - it was a perfect gateway into her deeper thoughts and emotional frustrations with the topic. So, I switched hats, and put on my therapeutic one, and quickly launched an intervention - and it failed. The participant was still in her head, so I did it again. I asked a different question in a different way designed to exploit the gateway she had clearly left for me - and again the probe failed. I had not moved her past her head to her heart by one inch. After this, I left it and returned to my standard guide, as I could tell I was getting a bit annoying with this person. Basically, there was a missed opportunity to probe an emotional response.

On the plane back to Toronto, I got to thinking about how it is that in a therapy session I can easily take advantage of these nuggets, yet in this group I could not. The following were my ruminations, which I believe to be relevant to researchers who wish to do detailed emotional probing:

- In a therapeutic session, the relationship between therapist and client is critical, and while it is very dynamic phenomenon, the relationship is built on trust, in that the client feels supported to reveal their emotional feelings. In focus groups, this type of emotional safety is very, very rarely established. Intellectual safety, like it is OK to guess wrong, or speak you mind, is established and encouraged - but the format simply does not foster emotional safety. My participant wouldn't open-up deeply to me because I had not set that tone, and I suspect that virtually all moderators don't either. I believe the introduction that all moderators give "assissnates" participants in the groups. What I mean by that is that the introduction serves to set a very heady tone, and keeps a respectable distance between themselves and the moderator.

- Fostering emotional safety takes time, and more importantly, it quite often takes going off-topic, or involves the moderator relating to the respondent in a way that clients may not like (for example, having a moderator admit that a client's product is inferior, or sharing personal stories about a product) to show that the moderator is simply not a gatherer of data, but a human being. Unfortunately, many clients feel that the moderator should not share personal feelings or stories.

- To the point above, I remember once meeting a young marketing student studying research, who said to me something like "I hear that researchers should never bias their work, I hope you don't." I turned to him and said "Actually, I bias my work all the time. The difference between me and you though is that I know what I'm doing and why." So, if I bias my work, it is to get the participant to open-up more.

- In order to take advantage of that nugget, I would have had to spend siginificant time with that respondent, leaving the structure of the guide behind me. Quite often, guides are way to focused on specific heady issues - which was fine in this case - I wasn't expected to or expecting to find any emotional issues. However, when dealing with emotional issues, a guide should not be overly structured, if there is a guide at all. Instead, the moderator should have instructions to "Find out what the brand image of x is" and leave it at that. The reason is that each person or group is different, and breaking through defences to reach the emotional core is different for every individual (and quite frankly therapists use different techniques themselves), so as long as the objective gets reached, how it is done should largely be irrelevant. Structured guides confine emotion in the group and the ability of the moderator to explore key issues. Even standard projective techniques will not work properly across all groups and across all individuals. Someone who has a highly suggestible personality or fears authority figures will respond much differently to projective techniques (as defined by the research industry) than an individual who reguarly triggered to respond with anger, fear or protection in the same situation.

- Clients need to either be very emotionally aware, or acknowledge that they themselves do not understand emotional processes and let the moderator do their job. A good moderator can re-interpret results into a marketing context, and use a framework to place the results into actionable recommendations.