The section documents the methodology used for the first stage of engage- ment with the founders of 3rd Way Coop and ESTA, where notes from pre- vious meetings and e-mail correspondence became a design process through the use of narrative and persona techniques.
4.4.1
Engagement with 3rd Way Coop and ESTA
The case study organisations 3rd Way Coop and ESTA were introduced briefly in Section 4.3.1. In the initial meeting with each founder, the au- thor offered the open source guild model as a starting point for discussion. This model can be seen as a design provocation (Bardzell and Bardzell, 2013) which enabled each founder to explore their evolving business model by of- fering a potential solution (Dorst and Cross, 2001). In that sense, the provo-
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cation is to intentionally change the research situation. The open source guild model did this by being just strange enough (Bardzell et al., 2012; citing Dunne and Raby, 2001) to stimulate thought and discussion. The open source guild model acted as a boundary object, in the sense of creat- ing a shared space focused around a common object for design work (Star and Griesemer, 1989). This boundary object helped bring about the fluid approach to design advocated by Wolf et al. (2006), where discussion can naturally blend into design work.
The author continued to meet with each founder in 2014, 2015 and 2016, exploring in depth how their developing business model connected with the research area. Meeting notes were verified after each meeting and these notes subsequently contributed to the data for this study, together with email correspondence. The discussions were helped by the author becom- ing a member of both organisations. In the case of 3rd Way Coop, this was by becoming a member of the founder’s community of stakeholders, includ- ing attending both internal and external meetings with other stakeholders. In the case of ESTA, the author became a member of the ESTA business club, attending meetings with other members as well as with the founder. This prolonged engagement with the founders and involvement with their organisations led to the study taking on aspects of ethnography, a theme that is developed further in Stage 3. At this stage, however, the data was used to create a narrative of the author’s engagement with each founder.
4.4.2
Drawing out themes through narratives
Narratives of an organisation’s potential future could help to draw out the entrepreneur’s ‘desiderata’ or ‘preformed desires’, where each narrative rep- resents an ultimate particular (Nelson and Stolterman, 2012) of the founder’s design of their organisation, including scenarios of its development (Stan- ford, 2007). Narratives could thus contribute to a design process, in this case of business models. The first stage of this study explored how ethnographic data could become a narrative which can then inspire a design process.
In early 2016, the author edited together meeting notes and correspon- dence with the founder of each case study organisation, together with organ- isational documents, into an approximately 3,000-word narrative presented in chronological order. These narratives didn’t include specific details of dates, times etc. to protect the confidentiality of the participants. The nar- rative was a form of analysis that drew on the author’s immersion in the data (Robson, 2002) and in the research setting (Krauss, 2005). Organi-
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sational designs that arose during the engagement with each organisation were also included in the narrative as images. These narratives were then the starting point for a workshop with each founder in March 2016 that used the design technique of personas.
4.4.3
Expressing themes in the form of personas
Personas were introduced by Cooper (1999) as fictional individuals who can represent users in human-computer interaction design. Grudin and Pruitt (2002) developed the concept of personas further, where they advocated us- ing detailed ethnographic data to create personas that represent groups of consumers in product design. Norman (2004) proposed an alternative ap- proach where ad hoc personas are created from the designer’s intuition, background and experience rather than from extensive data gathering, while Blythe and Wright (2006) offer personas based on fiction to help designers reflect and gain deeper insights. A third approach, one perhaps more rele- vant to this study, is where personas can contribute to reflection and refram- ing practice through discussions about groups of stakeholders rather than individual users (Källhammer and Nilsson, 2012).
In the workshops with the founders of 3rd Way Coop and ESTA, per- sonas were used to represent key groups of stakeholders. The author cre- ated several personas before the workshop and encouraged participants to create further personas during it. The workshop started with the founder considering and commenting on the narrative offered by the author. In both cases they added to the narrative and appeared to find it useful for reflec- tion on their development since the author first engaged with them. Each founder responded differently to the personas. Michael Hallam, the founder of ESTA created a number of personas that were caricatures of typical ESTA members and other stakeholders, including Despot Dan, a would-be empire builder who ‘leaves in frustration’. Mike Knowles, the founder of 3rd Way Coop, only created two additional personas, but these were based in deep reflection on the importance of values, particularly Super Salesman Steve’s desire to ‘exceed our human targets’.
In these workshops, although applying the personas technique led to some interesting findings and reflection by participants, it didn’t make the best use of the wealth of data offered by the author’s long-term engagement with each founder. The initial personas were created from a narrative which in turn was the outcome from the researcher’s immersion in ethnographic data. Such a process is time-consuming and difficult for other researchers
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to validate or replicate. However, it did yield useful findings which informed the design of business models using desiderata, or design criteria.
4.4.4
Desiderata for business model design
Desiderata (Nelson and Stolterman, 2012) helped bring out aspects of the author’s engagement with each founder that were relevant to business model design. Considered in design terms, the data as narrative expresses each founder’s “desiderata” or “preformed desires”, encompassing functionality, practicalities, motivation for designing, potential products and services, aes- thetics and performance measures (Nelson and Stolterman, 2012). Gaver and Bowers (2012) offer a number of categories of choices that influence the design of an artefact, not always consciously, including functionality, aes- thetics, practicalities, and motivation for designing it, the people for whom it is intended and sociopolitical concerns. In the context of organisational de- sign, Stanford (2007) offers categories of culture, systems, structure, people, performance measures and processes, products and services and operating context. Combining the two sets of categories in an organisational context leads to:
• functionality; • aesthetics; • practicalities;
• motivation for designing; • culture;
• systems; • structure;
• people for whom it is intended;
• performance measures and processes; • products and services;
• operating context; • sociopolitical concerns.
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These desiderata are applied by the author in Section 6.2 of the Discussion of Findings chapter to the data in Section 5.2 of the Empirical Data chapter to create a natural metaphor of membership organisation.
The next stage used a less time-consuming and more rigorous method- ology to engage with a third case study organisation. The importance of values was key to the author’s use of personas and scenarios with Shared Future, a network of consultants based in the North West of England. The methods used in working with this third organisation are documented in the next section.