Every study you've ever seen is only giving you half the information you need ... at best!
Legacy decisional research models are designed to measure the distribution of answers as percentages; mainly that’s because it’s the only metric we have had in more than nine decades. But people don’t make decisions based on percentages. People tend to make decisions based on how strongly they believe in or feel about an issue. The “passion dimension” has become the decisional wild card in values, attitudes, and political insights like never before.
If you’re going to inform, motivate, and persuade people for effect, what you really need to know is the intensity of their feelings. You can’t use the old survey models to get the full picture… so we built a new approach built to fill in the missing links of decisional research, beginning with proprietary intensity metrics that are considered in context (what we call micro values systems).
You also want to be sure that the issues being studied and the concepts and language of inquiry align with those of the respondents. For that we created a metric for Lexicons. And finally, because people’s openness to change is connected to how they see and feel what’s changing, we designed a way to measure the intensity and direction of change as they perceive it. We call all this Cultureography – a holistic perspective on human decisioning ecosystems.
We want to get to the point where we can measure
emotions with as much precision as we currently measure percentages.
Micro Values Systems
Nobody ever makes an important decision in a vacuum. People are far more likely to make such decisions within the context of other, direct and tangential, considerations.
In traditional research models, it is virtually impossible to construct a meaningful research instrument that can take such contexts into account. But it is possible to create systemic models that mirror life.
The Cultureographic model, on the other hand, is ideally suited to placing issues within both macro and micro values systems.
Lexicons
Two people can engage in a meaningful dialog only to the degree that they share a common, or at least largely congruent, understanding of the key terms being discussed. Improving the degree to which their respective lexicons align is likely to improve communications and outcomes.
If you’re trying to understand how to motivate someone to do something you want them to do, it would be a great help to make sure that you can assess and dimensionalize the lexicon they use so that you can be more intentional, informed, and precise about communicating with them for maximum effect.
Change Vectors
There are two ways to use trends to predict future outcomes. Projections and estimates.
Projections make the assumption that what has been portends what will be in a linear fashion. Estimates start with that baseline but take into account other factors and forces that, subjectively, might account for deviations from straight-line projections.
What we call cultureographic “change vectors” measure the direction and the intensity of change as it is occurring to the people we’re studying. We have found change vectors as more reliable metrics for openness to change than traditional trend analysis.