Who should be involved?
I love this paragraph from Ed Catmull at Pixar about who should be at the table when working on fundamental ideas for the business.
“The people you choose must (a) make you think smarter and (b) put lots of solutions on the table in a short amount of time. I don’t care who it is, the janitor or the intern or one of your most trusted lieutenants: If they can help you do that, they should be at the table.
Believe me, you don’t want to be at a company where there is more candour in the hallways than in the rooms where fundamental ideas or matters of policy are being hashed out. The best inoculation against this fate? Seek out people who are willing to level with you, and when you find them, hold them close.”
For Fieldwork to accomplish it's most important task of documenting the current status of the company, it obviously needs access to as many people as possible. But, the access needs to be appropriate to the needs of the project, which requires candour, openness, honesty and a complete focus on the idea and not on picking fights and blaming people for past mistakes.
For this to happen we need to be brought into the right company in the right way. Fieldwork is not going to be right for everyone. It's not going to be right for companies that struggle with candour or feel the voices of people lower down the ranks are not important. But we also have an important job to do when we first make contact with the people we are going to be observing. We need to instil trust and help people see that we care a great deal about the work we will be doing.
It's why we are experimenting with our policy to only do the Fieldwork, which means we'll only search and report back on symptoms and their underlying causes.
