We need to be challenged first before gaining certainty

When starting the research process with my allocated team I realized quickly that this will be a special challenge for me. A special challenge because finding a solution for the climate change is a huge topic to tackle, with people from different countries I have never worked with before.

Already in the beginning, my team and I had very different approaches, understandings and views on the topic. We all have different backgrounds, different interests and associate the climate change with different things.
It was hard to get everyone on the same page as we all had ideas stuck in our heads. Our ideas were literally stuck — until Anne-Laure helped us to loosen up our minds and allow a different perspective. Instead of directly jumping into a solution-based approach, we first need to understand the core of the problem. Having this in mind, our conversations and discussions were suddenly much clearer and we were able to commit to a common topic on wich we want to do deeper research on.

We are currently working on the interviews to understand people’s views on climate change on how they act upon it. Having such a diverse group of people and being from various countries helps to get access easily to a broad group of various people. We decided that we want to interview people with different ages, jobs and countries. To make sure to get a big picture as well as diverse opinions and views across various generations on climate reality, we talk to e.g. young farmers, students, mothers, and elderly people. To make sure, to have a purposeful and insightful conversation, my group and I decided on using an interview guide with certain questions. This will help despite having different interview partners to get comparable answers which we can summarise and cluster in the following step. In addition, preparing the interview guide with my team further narrowed our focus on what we want to explore and understand. We decided on our research goal to get a better understanding about the motivation of people to sensibilize and convince them to act more sustainable. We wanted to proof our hypothesis that people rather act in a community than individually as their impact feels bigger.

Overall, I can say that the first weeks of the research process have been a big challenge for me. I was confronted with a group of people I did not know to tackle a challange I did not think of a lot before in this sense. And then doing all of this with a completely new approach I have never dealt with and done before: Design Thinking. Coming from a business background, it was never demanded to think so human-centred and to understand the problem behind the problem. However, I am convinced that continuing our research and diving deeper into our challenge, we will gain more clarity and certainty in regards of our goals, approach and idea. Also, I have already learned so much in the first few weeks:

1. Really understand different opinions and why people think that way
2. There is always a problem behind the problem
3. I should sometimes offset the business glasses to understand a problem from a different perspective :-)