I’d like to take a slightly approach to this topic from those of my co-panelists. I’m not going to talk about success as ‘an ethnographer,’ which I’m not, at least by training anyway, or the success of ethnography as an undertaking, an enterprise, within the setting within which I have worked. Rather, I’d like to talk about what it means –to me, because this will be idiosyncratic I’m sure – to succeed as an ethnography practice. To talk about ‘a consultancy’ as a collective succeeding over time.As soon as one begins to talk about consultancy, the elephant of ‘the client’ enters the room, along with a couple of implications that match him in scale.With a client comes the expectation that ethnographic work will be productive in the sense of actually producing some sort of artifact – a report, a recommendation, a PowerPoint deck or a workshop, but something. And there is a great deal that is entailed by that expectation that works both backwards and forwards through the work. But that expectation is not so different from the expectations of a practice within a corporation research group or even many academic situations. It is nice if those products end up as things out in the world that your group can point to and say, “we helped make that”

And along with the thing produced by the project (a notion itself more limited in this setting than it might need to be), is the idea that the thing produced must be instrumental, that it will do something or enable something to be done, that it will result in change. And with change comes engagement, real engagement with practices, with products, and with lives. And with engagement and change comes power and its consequent responsibility. And an inability to sit on the sidelines and judge or comment.

But again, that is a measure that is not one discriminates the work of a consultancy from the work done in other sorts of corporate and applied settings.

Looking a little harder then at what success might mean as a consultancy means looking at those productions (and my apologies for a lack of time and brains enough to say more eloquently what this involves) beyond the fact that they produce something – a model, a metaphor, a design – or that they result in something – a product, an organizational change, a strategy.

Ten years ago, I think we would all have been thrilled to see the kinds of cases that we saw in the first session of this conference – case studies that show that ethnographers and ethnographies can grapple with interesting problems in the world, that they are taken seriously by our clients, and that they result in real changes in the world.

But after a while, there is a familiarity to the stories. They tend to begin with the initial framing of the project by ‘the client’ – and it usually is received, not co produced—and then the re-framing of it as an ethnographic project. Fieldwork approaches and field stories lead to the climax of the story, the “it’s not about x, it’s about x(!)” moment, followed, as a dénouement of sorts, by the way in which the client absorbed, acted upon, or was changed by the work. Not that this is bad. That this is now so common as to seem routine is evidence of the growth of the growing success of ethnography as a practice in industry.

But for a consultancy to produce this story over and over, even with new settings, new methods, and new ‘it’s about’ moments, isn’t growth, isn’t success. It is the cost of entry, it is what everyone needs to do, and it is dangerously close to a commodity. As Ken Anderson said to me in a recent conversation, “Where is the joy in that?” There should be joy in the work.

Consultancies are in a unique position to engage with their work differently. They can actually say, “no” to clients, to projects, and especially to ways of doing projects, though to do that is an act of economic as well as moral courage. They also have the opportunity to think, between and across projects, about what they are doing, and how they are doing it, and the control of themselves as a practice push, to evolve. Every project should be an opportunity to play, to push boundaries and to shape the space that those boundaries sketch.

What success translates to over time cannot be projects or mechanics but rather perhaps a set of values which are associated with the group, and which have various, though recognizable manifestations through the methods, the theories, and the products. And in keeping that alive is, for me at least, where the joy is.

Recently, a friend sent me a (somewhat gloating) picture of his new all carbon-bicycle. The picture came from the company’s web site, and so I followed the link back to learn a bit more about it. Inconspicuously placed along the row of menu buttons on the front page was “our mission,” which led to this simple sentence: “To design, build, and deliver the best bicycles in the world.” A consultancy in this space should have that kind of clarity, sights set that high, and the kind of chutzpah that makes one think they just might get there.

I think that success in this form can be inclusive of mistakes, of work that doesn’t go so well.

Bad meetings, disappointing projects – all of that happens, but in a practice, it all also makes a difference to the next project. And not just the next project that the person that made the mistake works on, but all the next generation of projects that the practice does. I’ve been very lucky to be part of practices at places like E-Lab and Sapient’s XMod where the work was a collaborative practice, without a star culture that functioned as an evolving, developing set of ideas, with a lot of voices deeply involved in that development.

Developing that practice, and the coherence (even if temporary) of the practice across a relatively large group of researchers has been my greatest success as a consultant, not the products in the world, nor the changes in behavior of rather large organizations like Ford or McDonald’s.

And if they are, when all is said and done, Ford’s cars, McDonald’s French fries, what kind of success is that? A very good one. Things the practice creates, little theoretical constructs, tools like project rooms, models and heuristics are adapted and changed to better suit new settings and new organizations. People argue about them, they evolve, but they remain in the conversation. And the moments of joy get recreated. That persistence is success.

Rick Robinson is Senior Vice President for Research at Luth Research LLC. Prior to joining Luth, Rick was Global Director for GfK NOP’s Observational and Ethnographic practice. Rick holds a Ph.D. in Human Development from the University of Chicago. He has been a leader in developing and applying observational research as a basis for new product, service, and strategy solutions for nearly 20 years. He was a co-founder of E-Lab, and Chief Experience Officer at Sapient. Among his clients have been BP/Amoco, BMW, Ford, General Mills, General Motors, Hallmark, Intel, McDonald’s, Nabisco, Novartis, Pfizer, Samsung, Sony, and Unilever.