One of the books I am currently reading through is Work Rules! by Laszlo Bock, SVP of People Operations at none other than Google. It's been a pretty good read so far. One concept the book introduced me to was this idea of "aided recall", and it resonates me because it falls right in line with the recent memory studies previous posts have analyzed.
After reading through Bock's piece on aided recall, I set down my Kindle and thought to myself, "Why aren't we trying to employ this everywhere?" And the more I thought about it, the more I realized that it's not appropriate for everything.
Let's break this post down into three sections: defining aided recall, when to use it, and when to avoid it.
What is Aided Recall?
Just like it sounds, aided recall is triggering a part of a person's memory by narrowing their focus to a more specific subject. In Work Rules!, Google employs this idea in their recruiting strategies. They found that asking their existing employees the general "who do you think we should hire" kinds of questions, the employees didn't elicit all that great of responses. After employing aided recall into this process, they got much better responses.
So, for example, instead of asking "Who do you know that Google should hire?", they would ask more direct questions like, "Who would be a good salesperson in New York City?"
This really plays quite nicely with our previously studied memory categories. When we are asked the former "Who'd be a good hire?" question, our minds to shift to people whom we have worked with, but that category is most certainly too broad to elicit good responses. When asked the latter "Who would be a good salesperson in NYC?" question, our minds shift from a super general category to "people we've worked with", "people with sales backgrounds", and "people living in NYC" categories. If all those categories where laid into a Venn diagram, the overlap of all three would significantly narrow down your recommendations.
So, I hope that provides a concise enough view. Let's move onto the benefits!
When to Employ Aided Recall
One of the obvious answers here would be, like Google, eliciting referrals from existing employees, but let's go beyond that. Aided recall also really works well with drawing recommendations out of people like trying to find a new place to eat.
If you ask a friend what new place you should try, they might struggle to recommend something because they are thinking about the vast number of places they could suggest. But, with aided recall, you could ask something like "What is good that only this town has?" or "What is your favorite Mexican place in town?", then a person is much more likely to elicit a better response. The same can be said of book recommendations, music recommendations, movie recommendations, and more.
When to Avoid Aided Recall
Aided recall can go really south really quickly, and I'm specifically thinking about the realm of consumer experience insight. Aided recall can intentionally or unintentionally create a confirmation bias that ultimately garners useless feedback.
I have watched a few consumer feedback sessions before with really good facilitators and really not-so-good facilitators. The ultimate goal of these sessions is to garner feedback about your product or service free of any bias from the originating company. A good facilitator would only ask very general questions like "What did you like about X?" or "In what ways would you suggest to improve X?"
A bad facilitator will use aided recall to the company's detriment, even in extremely subtle ways. I have seen it happen where a facilitator used verbal and body language cues that guided the customer to give the answers we were hoping to hear. For example, if the customer said they liked something about Product X, this facilitator would nod their head and say "Mhmm" in a positive, upbeat tone, almost as if the customer were doing something right over doing something wrong. Naturally, the customer wants to be right, so the customer would keep providing feedback that would elicit those positive verbal and body language cues, thus defeating the whole purpose of the session.
In other words, we don't care if you come to the same conclusion that we did. We want to hear what YOU, the customer, have to say.
All that to say is that I still find aided recall to be a potentially helpful tool, but if used in the wrong way, it can give the exact opposite result than what you are looking for.
After reading through Bock's piece on aided recall, I set down my Kindle and thought to myself, "Why aren't we trying to employ this everywhere?" And the more I thought about it, the more I realized that it's not appropriate for everything.
Let's break this post down into three sections: defining aided recall, when to use it, and when to avoid it.
What is Aided Recall?
Just like it sounds, aided recall is triggering a part of a person's memory by narrowing their focus to a more specific subject. In Work Rules!, Google employs this idea in their recruiting strategies. They found that asking their existing employees the general "who do you think we should hire" kinds of questions, the employees didn't elicit all that great of responses. After employing aided recall into this process, they got much better responses.
So, for example, instead of asking "Who do you know that Google should hire?", they would ask more direct questions like, "Who would be a good salesperson in New York City?"
This really plays quite nicely with our previously studied memory categories. When we are asked the former "Who'd be a good hire?" question, our minds to shift to people whom we have worked with, but that category is most certainly too broad to elicit good responses. When asked the latter "Who would be a good salesperson in NYC?" question, our minds shift from a super general category to "people we've worked with", "people with sales backgrounds", and "people living in NYC" categories. If all those categories where laid into a Venn diagram, the overlap of all three would significantly narrow down your recommendations.
So, I hope that provides a concise enough view. Let's move onto the benefits!
When to Employ Aided Recall
One of the obvious answers here would be, like Google, eliciting referrals from existing employees, but let's go beyond that. Aided recall also really works well with drawing recommendations out of people like trying to find a new place to eat.
If you ask a friend what new place you should try, they might struggle to recommend something because they are thinking about the vast number of places they could suggest. But, with aided recall, you could ask something like "What is good that only this town has?" or "What is your favorite Mexican place in town?", then a person is much more likely to elicit a better response. The same can be said of book recommendations, music recommendations, movie recommendations, and more.
When to Avoid Aided Recall
Aided recall can go really south really quickly, and I'm specifically thinking about the realm of consumer experience insight. Aided recall can intentionally or unintentionally create a confirmation bias that ultimately garners useless feedback.
I have watched a few consumer feedback sessions before with really good facilitators and really not-so-good facilitators. The ultimate goal of these sessions is to garner feedback about your product or service free of any bias from the originating company. A good facilitator would only ask very general questions like "What did you like about X?" or "In what ways would you suggest to improve X?"
A bad facilitator will use aided recall to the company's detriment, even in extremely subtle ways. I have seen it happen where a facilitator used verbal and body language cues that guided the customer to give the answers we were hoping to hear. For example, if the customer said they liked something about Product X, this facilitator would nod their head and say "Mhmm" in a positive, upbeat tone, almost as if the customer were doing something right over doing something wrong. Naturally, the customer wants to be right, so the customer would keep providing feedback that would elicit those positive verbal and body language cues, thus defeating the whole purpose of the session.
In other words, we don't care if you come to the same conclusion that we did. We want to hear what YOU, the customer, have to say.
All that to say is that I still find aided recall to be a potentially helpful tool, but if used in the wrong way, it can give the exact opposite result than what you are looking for.
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