Good Thinking has been the most used text book on my shelf for years; a continuous source of inspiration. Consequently I was immediately interested when the email arrived about a Facebook Live session with Wendy Gordon in conversation with Judy Taylor on Wendy’s new book, Mindframes.
Firstly, the book itself was, unsurprisingly, the focus of my interest. Wendy positioned it as communicating the fundamentals underlying the ‘how to’ that Good Thinking presents. It aims to ensure that we as practitioners understand and bring together different ‘mindframes’ or maps of reality to arrive at a more rounded or truer picture. Wendy and Judy then discussed six rich and different ‘mindframes’ Wendy has identified, rooted firmly in the latest academic thinking.
This is against the context of many now arriving in qualitative research from a limited theoretical background. I felt that it would also be useful to established practitioners, as it brings up to date the foundations of our discipline. It will hopefully provide that refresher and reference that we all need. New thinking and frameworks are of constant value to me especially, but not exclusively, in B2B. This should challenge us to think further, to start building better (or some!) hypotheses to test and to enable us to speak more authoritatively.
Secondly, the use of Facebook Live was novel and especially interesting to me as a techie. Downsides with Facebook are that some actively shun using it, and some, like me, dislike having professional activities on a platform that is primarily non-work related. More positively, Facebook Live can be an effective means of sharing live(ly) video and real time comments, but any video can also have bandwidth issues, which some viewers were clearly experiencing.
I felt that a more relaxed visual ‘staging’ might be needed in future in order to generate the freshness this medium offers. The visible scripts and large white table top felt a bit of a barrier to me. And for some reason I didn’t take notes, which I would do with a ‘traditional’ webinar. Overall, an interesting experiment packing a lot into a short time. I’m looking forward to reading, and using, the book. Mindframes is available from www.acacia-avenue.com for £17.99 plus P&P.
