Old examples of our work

The store detectives who didn’t make arrests

A major security provider wanted to know why some of their store detectives were making more arrests than others. Was it a training problem, or a skill problem, or an attitude problem, or something else?

Instead, Gordon trained two of the organisation’s staff in using think-aloud technique and laddering, so they could gather information from the store detectives. This combination of techniques swiftly showed the staff that the detectives were all capable of making plenty of arrests, and that the problem wasn’t ability. It turned out to be whether or not the store managers would back up the detectives if they made an arrest. If the managers wouldn’t back up the detectives, the detectives made their presence known to the would-be shoplifters, who swiftly left, without an arrest being made.

The good students who wrote badly

Gordon once worked on a course for students doing an MSc after being in the workforce. The students were outstanding in almost every respect, but had one major problem; their written work was getting unexpectedly poor marks. Gordon used think-aloud and laddering to investigate, and discovered that the students’ idea of what constituted good writing contained a major misperception. The students thought that academic writing was dull and cluttered because academics didn’t know how to write interesting text that was easy to read; being tactful, the students didn’t confront the teaching staff over this, but instead wrote their assessed work in what they considered to be a better style. What the students hadn’t realised was that academic writing is deliberately impersonal, to reduce the risk of researchers manipulating the reader with emotional words, and is deliberately cluttered because it makes heavy use of references and data so the reader can see where the balance of evidence lies. In effect, the students were deliberately leaving out the things that would earn them marks.

Once the students knew the reasons for academic language being different from most other forms of writing, they rapidly adapted, and went on to be an outstanding group.