I earmarked this passage as one to throw out when the edubloggers triumphantly danced upon higher education and its focus on methodology and testing.  Upon reflection, I think that it could go both ways.  (Thanks for the provocative book, LD.  You can see where my mind is at!)

When McDonald’s wanted to improve sales of its milkshakes, it hired researchers to figure out what characteristics its customers cared about.  Should the shakes be thicker?  Sweeter?  Colder?  Almost all of the researchers focused on the product.  But one of them, Gerald Berstall, chose to ignore the shakes themselves and study the customers instead.  He sat in a McDonald’s for eighteen hours one day, observing who bought milkshakes and at what time.  One surprising discovery was that many milkshakes were purchased early in the day- odd, as consuming a shake at eight A.M. plainly doesn’t fit the bacon-and-eggs model of breakfast.  Berstall also garnered three other behavioral clues from the milkshake crowd: the buyers were always alone, they rarely brought anything besides a shake, and they nver consumed the shakes in the store.

The breakfast-shake drinkers were clearly commuters, intending to drink them while driving to work.  This behavior was readily apparent, but the other researchers had missed it because it didn’t fit the normal way of thinking about either milkshakes or breakfast.  Berstall and his colleagues noted in Finding the “Right Job for Your Product,” their essay in the Harvard Business Review, the key to understanding what was going on was to stop viewing the product in isolation and to give up traditional notions of the morning meal.  Berstall instead focused on a single, simple question: “What job is a customer hiring that milkshake to do at eight A.M.?”

If you want to eat while you are driving, you need something you can eat with one hand.  It shouldn’t be to hot, too messy, or too greasy.  It should also be moderately tasty, and take a while to finish.  Not one conventional breakfast item fits that bill, and so without regard for the sacred traditions of the morning meal, those customers were hiring the milkshake to do the job they needed done.

All the researchers except Berstell missed this fact, because they made two kinds of mistakes, things we might call “milkshake mistakes.”  The first was to concentrate mainly on the product and assume that everything important about it was somehow implicit in its attributes, without regard to what role the customers wanted it to play- the job they were hiring the milkshake for.

The second mistake was to adopt a narrow view of the type of food people have always eaten in the morning, as if all habits were deeply rooted traditions instead of accumulated accidents.  Neither the shake itself nor the history of breakfast mattered as much as customers needing food to do a nontraditional job- serve as sustenance and amusement for their morning commute- for which they hired the milkshake (p. 12-14).

Metaphors abound in this passage, one that I really like.  For me, these paragraphs are less about media, TV, the Internet, etc… and more about two divides (insert groups here).  Yup, I see higher education research vs connected learners, but I also see other seemingly opposing groups as well.

Quote From:

Shirky, C. (2010). Cognitive surplus: Creativity and generosity in a connected age. New York, NY: The Penguin Press.