A conclusion about your own business, reached
by people outside it.
Its worth is the evidence
under it and nothing else.
The evidence comes from your buyers, your own team, your competitors, and your materials. What we add is the reading of it and the pressure on it. Push on any part of it and what comes back is the evidence under that part, not the opinion of the person who wrote it.
Mikhail Balaev, PhD
The evidence is worth no more than the method that collected it. Whether it can come back against what we expected is settled in the design, before the first question is asked.
Fifteen years teaching research methods and statistics at university level, and National Science Foundation–funded research run as sole principal investigator. What that training governs here is the design: who gets asked, in what order, and how a question is worded so it does not hand the answer to the person answering it.
A dozen interviews cannot produce statistical significance and are not asked to. What they produce is text — what each person says the company is, in whose terms, and what they reach for first. Whether that text is usable is decided by the same design: questions that carry no answer inside them, an order that builds no conclusion for the person to agree with, and the same ground covered with people who see the company from different positions. What the design makes possible is the comparison. Where your description of the company, your team’s, and your clients’ come apart is where the account stopped holding — and no one of those accounts contains that alone.
Disagreement is not the object of an interview or of a session. It arrives on its own when the evidence points somewhere uncomfortable, and where it arrives my job is to hold the evidence still while you push on it. A conclusion that has been argued against and held is tested. One nobody contested is not.
The evidence is read twice: for what it says, and for what it shows. The two readings are argued against each other before either reaches the conclusion.
Polina March, MA
A buyer sees the materials before he reads them. Whatever the image says arrives first, and the text is read through it.
An MA in graphic design and twelve years of practice. What that training governs here is the reading: what an asset is for, where in the sale it appears, and what a buyer takes from it before a word of the copy has been read.
She reads the same interview material, for a different gap. The interviews establish the distance between what the company is and what it says. What she is looking for is the distance between what the company says and what it shows — the case where the writing has moved and the pictures have not, and the two arrive in the wrong order to a buyer who resolves the contradiction in favor of the picture. Text builds a reading slowly. An image arrives whole, and the text that follows gets read inside it.
Then the positioning is tested against the materials before it goes back to you. Once the account is written, she argues it against what the company currently shows: where the new argument collides with assets still carrying the old one, and whether it survives that. The test can also confirm that the materials build the reading the account intends, and the misread lives elsewhere. A read that could only return a gap would not be a test.
Diagnostic
Yours to test.
The same reading, applied to your company: your account stated as propositions, evidence collected from outside it, and a finding presented to you with the reasoning and the weak points showing. Yours to test before you accept it.