Oh, My Kingdom for a Finely Tuned Comb

Indi Young, Mental Models, page 164: “The pain you feel is weakness leaving your body.” Amen, sister!

You have to imagine the scene to fully appreciate it. Picture Jeremiah, Laurel, and me-each of us tethered to our laptops by our noise-canceling headphones. Listening, listening, listening. Pause. Transcribe. Listen. Back up the recording. Play. Didn’t back up enough-more, more! Play. Transcribe. And, nugget. Then imagine our UB teammate, Eileen, doing much the same in her semi-private office space (or, for short, SPO) in Buffalo. 

The process is called combing-reviewing the audio recordings each of our 50-some conversation and extracting root tasks (or what we call nuggets) that will be later grouped together-from atomic tasks into tasks, tasks eventually clustered into towers, and towers eventually clustered into mental spaces. Each hour-long conversation requires roughly three hours of analysis and yields somewhere between 50-75 nuggets.

It was, honestly, the most painful part of the process to-date. Now that we’re in grouping mode, I’m really gratified to see how the hard work we did together is paying off. But before I talk more about what we’re finding in our grouping (next blog post, I’m such a tease), some notes from this part of the journey that I compiled in talking with the team:

1.  Ideally, you should have both audio and electronic transcripts. Time and cost considerations moved us to an audio-only combing process. We did a few proof-of-concept combs this way, thought it worked out fine. But what we didn’t take into account is how difficult it becomes to comb this way when you’re combing three interviews (or, nine hours’ worth) in a day. In one instance, I had both the original audio file and the electronic transcript for an interview-I was able to finish that comb in roughly two hours (a 33% time savings) and ended up with more nuggets than I had with audio-only combs. I think we ended up with quality material overall-but combers will have a much easier time if they’ve got both types of files at the ready. 

2. It’s also easier, when the comber is the same one who did the interview. We’re talking ideal, here—the person with the skills to lead the interview isn’t always the best person to comb out the details, but I found that it helped me a great deal when I combed my own interview.

3. Barring that, it’s best to read through or listen to an interview in its entirety before you start to comb. This will give you a better sense of the conversation as a whole, and will also help you to find the right nuggets and connect the dots for nuggets that must be pieced together from different parts of a conversation.

4. When in doubt, capture the quote, then come back to it later. Sometimes, you know that the quote was significant, but the right label for that nugget will elude you. Fear not-note the quote and write the label later. It’s like doing the Times crossword-put it down for a bit, and suddenly, the answer comes. 

5. Use their words. In writing labels, you should use the words that they used. The temptation is at this stage is to truncate a phrase or use a word that’s more succinct in your mind. Resist. Using their words will help you to remember the conversation and context, which is essential when you’re  trying to spot similar nuggets in a sea of 1,10o of them. 

6. Except when you shouldn’t. When shouldn’t you? When the term only make sense to you as the person who led or combed the conversation. One person I interviewed talked about getting out of the town’s “bubble.” In my mind, the entire riff on Stepford Wives that accompanied that comment was fresh and hysterical, but none of the other combers was in on the joke. I changed the label to explain the “bubble.”

7. Know the difference between feeling and believing. As Indi explained to me, a belief is a core value upon which individuals make their choices. A lot of times what sounds like a belief is really a feeling or informed opinion and should be labeled as such. In explaining this to Laurel, I used the following example: someone very close to me doesn’t believe in life after death. He believes that his time on this earth is what he’s got, and he’s intent on living the best and richest life he can because there’s no “to be continued.” He also likes wearing golf shirts because he believes they’re comfortable and slimming. Only the first of the nuggets qualifies as a real belief.  

8. Have the right tools for the work. If you’ve been looking for an argument past OSHA for a chair with back support, a large monitor or laptop stand, the new SONY digital noise-canceling headphones, or an ergonomically positioned keyboard tray, you’ve found it. 

And, finally, a quote from Miah that I believe represents us all:

“I wish I had seen the need to slow myself down and just immerse myself in this earlier.  I’m so accustomed to having email, IMs, web browsers, office phones and cell phones all occupy a portion of my attention all of the time, that it was really strange to be working on something that could not allow for any outside distractions … after getting over the initial anxiety of being removed from my “lifelines,” I was able to relax and understand the time that the combs were going to take, and to not get anxious that I was missing something.  The world went on without me, go figure.” 

I count six nuggets, anyone else?

Posted by Voltaire Santos Miran
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