And this presents a problem. Show your OB your baby, and she’ll back away, nice and slowly, to prevent that crazy little thing from going off. Show your breasts to your pediatrician, and he’ll do the same.

Organizational jurisdiction is slightly different from the institutional jurisdiction that Carol Heimer talks about in her article on competing institutions (do yourself a favor and read that article some time. The chart on p. 35 is great).

I realized this most recently when I went to purchase an iPhone for my partner. I had bought one for myself a month back, and I wanted to add her phone (and her 847 area code) to my account. A family plan. Accomplishing this required: 1) a trip to the Apple retail store; 2) a call from Apple store to AT&T customer service; 3) a trip to the AT&T retail store; 4) a second trip to the AT&T retail store; 5) a second call to AT&T customer service; 6) a third trip to the AT&T retail store; 7) a second trip to the Apple retail store. Seriously, 7 different interactions, over the course of 3+ hours and 2 days.

Why? Because first of all, carrier and tech provider each do not know what the other does, and they compete for business. And second of all, because AT&T wireless has a system whereby individual accounts are linked to a geographic location. Trying to ‘combine’ two different geographic locations results in an error (e.g., linking two NYC and a Chicago area codes into one family plan).

As a result, the moron at the Apple store tells me that my wife has to change her cell number that she’s had for 10 years, because there is just nothing they can do. “And it happens to people every day.” He continues by telling me that the idiots at AT&T would do well to let Apple take over the whole business. Meanwhile, over at the AT&T store, the moron salesperson tells me that the idiots at Apple would be able to solve these kinds of problems if they would either learn the AT&T system or else just send customers directly to AT&T to begin with.

Interestingly, though, in this battle of morons, there are no winners, but AT&T actually is the bigger loser (Apple is close, because the smugness their employees exude when speaking about non-Apple stuff makes them a hair more insufferable than the always-defensive, never-experts at A&T).

Why is AT&T worse? Because their organizational jurisdiction is fractal – not only does the iPhone fall into the cracks, but their assignment of area codes across accounts also falls into the cracks. See, they have 2 breast problems.

I learned this when, finally, I realized that I needed to change my account type from a personal, geographic one, to a national business plan. Because national businesses can add whatever area codes they want to a single account. So really, I’m getting stuck over an internal, outdated dip switch internal to AT&T, that the people at Apple don’t know about. And that the people at AT&T also can’t figure out.

For those who like resolution, it went like this. Finally called the AT&T customer service number, explained my problem, and learned that I needed to speak to the NBI department (national business something). But there is no direct number to NBI. So you need to call Business Customer Care, and ask to be internally transferred to the NBI department. Once there, they can flip the dip switch on your account from MNY (geographic NYC) to NBI. And then, the people at the AT&T store can add two different area codes to the same family plan.

As a coda to this, when I asked the nice man in NBI why they didn’t just do away with geographic area code designations, in an era of mobile technology, he noted that this is indeed the direction AT&T wants to go. I then suggested as a starting point, that they make it possible for inbound calls to reach his department. He sheepishly replied that this might be a valid point.

The Apple store morons are still morons, because when I finally went back there to transfer my wife’s G1 Android phone contacts to her Apple iPhone, the supposed expert looked at the phone like he’d never seen any kind of Apple competitor phone in his life, and had no idea at all how to move the existing photos/files to the new phone. And no suggestions. It was something like, ‘huh, so that’s an Android phone. I don’t know how they work at all. All I have is this machine that transfers contacts, and I don’t really even know what cable to use. That G1 sure is poorly designed.’ Um, right.

He thinks it’s possible that his huge appetite for work – for juggling a publishing company with philanthropy and writing – comes from a sense of how short life is. His parents were in their 50s when they died; his older sister, Beth, killed herself when she was 33. “Having lost people when they were young, you feel intimately acquainted with mortality, I guess. Though I procrastinate worse than anybody.” Writing is so hard. “I need eight hours to get maybe 20 minutes of work done. I had one of those yesterday: seven hours of self-loathing. I used to write in the middle of the night. I suppose I was surprised by the sedentary nature of writing: like, wow, most of this is sitting down and typing! So I used to add a bit of adventure by starting at midnight and working until five. That was excitement! But now I have two kids [he is married to the novelist Vendela Vida, with whom he wrote the screenplay for the Sam Mendes film, Away We Go; she also edits another of their projects, The Believer, a literary magazine]. So it’s bankers hours for me.”

At home, where he writes, he no longer has internet access. A four-month stint with wi-fi proved “deadly” for his productivity and having no access at all ensures that he is not tempted to “look at Kajagoogoo videos and old ads for Wrigley’s Spearmint Gum” on YouTube. “Writing is a deep-sea dive. You need hours just to get into it: down, down, down. If you’re called back to the surface every couple of minutes by an email, you can’t ever get back down. I have a great friend who became a Twitterer and he says he hasn’t written anything for a year.”

I’m in that distracted world now, but less because of technology and more because of a changed family situation. But still I like the imagery of a deep-sea dive. I have had the idea of a long-form article about the importance of creativity and lateral thinking in the emerging world of data-modeling and -mining. But every time I go to write it, I’m distracted by my RSS feed reader…

The second, more positive piece of the article comes a bit later, in talking about the 826 stores. We live down the block from the superhero supply shop (826 Brooklyn), and it’s pretty cool:

When Eggers and his team signed the lease at 826 Valencia Street in 2002, the landlord told them the building was zoned for retail; they could put their tutoring centre at the back but out front they would have to sell something. Eggers hit on the idea of pirate store. Not a kitschy place about pirates; a store for pirates. Every 826 now has a shop up front: they’re welcoming, the children love them and they raise funds (in Brooklyn, it’s a superhero supply store; in Boston, it’s a Bigfoot research centre).

I love the make lemonade element of this anecdote. The ability for some people to transform obstacles into opportunities is something I kind of suck at, but want to get better about. The turning of the tutor centers into a retail store with a secret tutoring back entrance makes my heart sing a little.

In New York City, these stores are Fairway Market, B&H Photo, Jack Rabbit Sports. Abt Electronics and Appliances, in Glenview, outside Chicago, is the same way. I swear, I’ve ordered a microwave from Abt while I lived in New York, because it was cheaper than buying one here.

What’s remarkable about these stores is that they are not super-high end or in industries where there is lots of Blue Ocean. Grocery, electronics, sporting goods, appliances. These are businesses competing with bigger stores, mom & pop stores, the internet. And they are better in every way. They are more knowledgeable, more appealing to shop in, more efficient, and price competitive.

I went to B&H to buy a camcorder, pre-Christmas, and here’s what you get: a slew of people enter the store, and they are directed to a specific area where your particular products are on display. Branching, and winnowing, until you are in front of a kiosk with dozens of camcorders. 5-6 experts are there, not to sell anything, but simply there to be experts and tell you about the various camcorders. Virtually no wait to speak to an expert.

Once you choose one, they send you to a desk around the edge of that area. There a salesman will help you with any additional peripherals you might want. So far, you haven’t held a box at all. Sometimes you might bring a camera bag or tripod to the desk, but mostly they just want the item number/description. Then, magically, a bin arrives under the desk with all of the things you’ve just ordered. Honestly, it’s like they have Oompa Loompa’s working there. You confirm your items, then the salesperson prints out a receipt.

Still carrying nothing, you go to a single line (yay, single lines!!), that branches out to 10 or so payment cashiers, to pay for your items. They give you a ticket, which you take to another single line (yay, single lines!!), branching out to another 10 desks. Where your order is magically waiting, wrapped up in a bag and ready to go. Seriously, their setup is out of control.

It’s so clear that the management of B&H has put orders of magnitude more thinking into their operations and user experience than any other electronics store in NYC. And despite what seems like a ton of employees, their prices are virtually always the cheapest or close to cheapest you can find. Period.

The other stores have similar stories, but not similar enough to say that it’s always about operations. Jack Rabbit Sports has a treadmill where you put on the shoes you are contemplating, and they analyze your gait. Fairway has the freshest and best vegetables without the astronomical Whole Foods mark-up. It’s sometimes about customer service (Zappos), sometimes about operations (B&H), sometimes about better suppliers (Fairway). But always different enough to make it hard to generalize.

And yet, this leaves the question, why are these stores able to constantly stand head and shoulders above their competitors? Is it just willingness to put in the work? Assumedly other stores are profit-seeky as well. What gives?

Which leads me to Pepsi, Scienceblogs, John Gruber, and Apple’s iPhone 4.

Scienceblogs is a community of science blogs (duh), hosted by what was once Seed Magazine (and what is now Seed Media Group). In early July, 2010, Scienceblogs began hosting a new blog, called Food Frontiers:

As part of this partnership, we’ll hear from a wide range of experts on how the company is developing products rooted in rigorous, science-based nutrition standards to offer consumers more wholesome and enjoyable foods and beverages. The focus will be on innovations in science, nutrition and health policy. In addition to learning more about the transformation of PepsiCo’s product portfolio, we’ll be seeing some of the innovative ways it is planning to reduce its use of energy, water and packaging

(this quote comes from an article by Curtis Brainard at Columbia Journalism Review, the original announcement having been taken down at Scienceblogs and replaced with an apologetic note). But yes, the Scienceblog in question was not just sponsored by PepsiCo, but actually would be a science-based nutrition blog written by PepsiCo. You can catch up at Bora Zivkovic’s (who as a result of this actually left Scienceblogs) massive linkdump.

As a result of this move, in fact, Scienceblogs seems to be falling apart. I would like to take this opportunity to look at the practice of corporate blogging, corporate-sponsored blogging, and well, corporate blog-whoring, all with a jaundiced eye. Seed Media Group’s CEO Adam Bly wrote a confidential letter to contributors (helpfully posted by the Guardian):

We have also hosted blogs on SB from research-based companies like Shell, Dow, Schering-Plough, GE, Invitrogen, L’Oreal (in Germany), and now PepsiCo. I want to address the logic and strategy behind this.

ScienceBlogs has consistently maintained editorial excellence. We syndicate content to the New York Times, National Geographic, and are indexed by Google News. So respected is our platform that the US State Department recently published a post on 3.14. We should all be very proud of what we have achieved in four short years. We have ensured editorial excellence not by editing your posts or telling you what to write – a first principle unique to SB that we will never change – but by learning over four years how to create an environment that encourages your best. We believe that one vital aspect of this SB environment is its intentional diversity. You are all expert at different things, care passionately about other things, and come from different backgrounds and countries. We think this is a good thing and we think it help makes SB tick for our readers. We also think that you cannot have a real conversation about science and its place and role in society unless you pursue and protect this diversity. It’s why we believe that all serious voices in science should have a seat at the table (and we’ve been consistent about what’s serious and what’s fringe or worse).

We think the conversation should include scientists from academia and government; we also think it should include scientists from industry. Because industry is increasingly the interface between science and society. It is our hope that the Xeroxes and Bell Labs of the future will have a real presence on SB – that they will learn from our readers and we will learn from them. That they will break stories on SB and engage our readers in the issues that concern them. The bloggers who blog on ‘corporate blogs’ on SB are necessarily credentialed scientists (we make sure of that), in some cases highly credentialed scientists who have published extensively in peer-reviewed journals. The fact that they work at a profit-making company does not automatically disqualify their science in our mind. And frankly, nor does it disqualify them in the eyes of the Nobel Prize Committee either.

Let me address PepsiCo in particular. Of course we recognize – and of course so does PepsiCo! – that they’ve made a lot of money selling soft drinks and chips. But they also recognize that their future will be troublesome and time-limited without addressing the real and connected issues of obesity and under-nutrition in the world. PepsiCo employs thousands of scientists working on these problems and they are led by some very serious scientists – eg. their chief scientist worked at the Mayo Clinic and serves on the Board of Governors of the New York Academy of Sciences. (PepsiCo is the same place that makes Tropicana and Quaker Oatmeal.)

PepsiCo comes off like Nick Naylor in Thank you for Smoking: Though these lobbyists would like to see Cancer Boy die to prove their point, it is in Tobacco’s best interests that he LIVES, to continue using our product!

Seriously, read that whole memo. Basically the CEO says that 1) there are scientists at for-profit companies; 2) lots of places including the New Yorker and Atlantic give prime access to companies who pay for it; and 3) we need the money.

Now, there is a relatively interesting discussion here to be made about the ways that capitalism intersects with opinion, and the long, historic dependency of news media on paid advertisement. But I would also strongly suggest that for-profit actors are now (and perhaps have always) mobilized the form of more ‘objective’ outlets in order make more credible claims. For me, at its most base level, it comes down to this:

People are more inclined to believe you if they see you as an impartial observer than if they see you as a partial advocate. If you are on the corporate (or political) payroll, you can not be trusted and your opinion is suspect. Impartiality doesn’t even quite get at this, though. Maybe transparent. But not quite, since transparent can be easily dismissed as obviously unable to form a helpful opinion. Fair-minded. That’s more what I am talking about.

This is the fact on which 99% of the complaints and justifications are based. PepsiCo can not be trusted to speak on science issues because they can not be believed to be fair-minded.

And here is where John Gruber comes in. Recently, Apple has had some problems with its recently released iPhone 4. Apparently, its antenna is constructed in such a way that holding it in a particular way attenuates the signal. Consumer Reports called this a design defect in one place and an antenna problem in another. The NYT article calls it a ‘design flaw’.

Apple held a press conference to push back against these criticisms, where Steve Jobs personally spoke and answered questions about the phone’s antenna, its performance against other phones, and Apple’s remedy for the problem (giving away phone cases to physically prevent users from bridging the antenna gap and triggering the loss of signal).

Gruber runs a (wonderful) blog called Daring Fireball, where he both curates and commentates on the internet, with a strong preference for Apple products and a clearly insider-y take on all things Apple. He is not on the payroll, which he jokingly comments about. But still, he seems to have been one of a members of the press who got to tour Apple’s Antenna Testing Lab after the press conference (I don’t know him, and I don’t know this for certain. But that first ‘jokingly’ link notes at the end that some members of the press got to go, the second notes that ‘this is the lab a few of us got to tour in person’).

And here’s the thing. During the press conference, Jobs was at pains to show that other phones had a comparable flaw, and that this was a ‘weak spot’. Early on, Gruber uses quotes around “weak spot”, noting that it is Apple’s parlance, or that it is “Jobs’s term for the infamous lower-left gap in the antenna frame”.

But then a funny thing happens. After a slew of posts about other manufacturers’ phones (and running snide commentary about their lack of attention, as well as how his checks from Apple should keep rolling in), Gruber comes to some conclusions, an Antennagate Bottom Line. Here, he begins:

What is not in dispute: the iPhone 4 antenna has a weak spot in the lower-left corner of the frame, marked by the black line in the frame. When covered by your hand, this antenna suffers from attenuation. This is much like other smartphones.

After running through the evidence and opinion, including Apple’s $100 million dollar remediation effort for something Gruber himself considers a fairly minor trade-off for a great phone, he concludes:

Anyway, bottom line on the iPhone 4 antenna: it has a weak spot but there’s no evidence that it’s a significant, let alone catastrophic, problem in practice. It’s telling that the criticism surrounding this issue has shifted, quickly, from speculation about a technical defect in the iPhone 4 hardware to criticism over the tone of Apple’s response to it.

What certainly could be described as a design flaw, a design defect, or an antenna problem is magically transformed into a weak spot. A weak spot implies a small flaw in an otherwise ‘working’ device; a design flaw implies a ‘broken’ device. And the truth of it is, I do not know which of these is the case here (or both, depending on you, your network, your other options, your disposition towards Apple, etc). But I do know that Apple is deeply, deeply invested in it being the former. “Weak spot”, turns into weak spot, turns into insignificant problem.

It is equally apparent to me that by co-opting Gruber and other journalists, bloggers, and opinion makers, whose credibility precisely rests on their reputation as unbiased observers, Apple is doing just what PepsiCo was doing when it signed on to create a Scienceblog. And of course Gruber knows this. The whole sarcastic schtick about his payola checks suggests that he knows that if he really was on the Apple payroll, his opinions would simply. matter. less.

I’m not really sure what to do with this problem. But in an era of increasing information-by-the-many, it’s one that is likely to get much worse before it gets much better.

With the seemingly impending end of ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell’ (which, incidentally, was conceived of in large measure by Charlie Moskos, in the Sociology department at Northwestern University. Who says sociologists aren’t listened to? Makes you oh, so proud…), it probably means the end of the ROTC bans on many elite college campuses. ROTC is the Reserve Officers Training Corps, a main avenue for non-military academy students to become commissioned officers in the US armed forces. While ROTC was banned from many campuses in the late 1960s as part of anti-Vietnam War protests, it has since then become a main vehicle for protesting the discrimination against non-heterosexual men and women in the armed forces. For Columbia’s history on this, you can browse here, there, and the ever-readable James Fallows’ thoughts scattered here.

My sense of the debate is that, at the end of the day, the stated reasons for keeping ROTC out of colleges is and will continue to be a moving target. This is because there is a means and ends going on, where the end is to keep colleges from being militarized, and the means is whatever happens the most egregiously unethical thing the military is doing at the time. That was the Vietnam War, then it was the discrimination against men and women based on their sexual orientation. I think Saul Alinsky’s point is relevant here: that one’s interest in particular means is inversely proportionate to one’s interest in particular ends. That is, the more you care about keeping ROTC out of college campuses, the less you care about how to accomplish that. The less you care about the end itself, the more the means matters.

This is actually not incompatible with deep, true commitments to ending discrimination against gay and bi men and women. Nor is it the case that people didn’t really care about stopping the war in Vietnam. But it should surprise no one when opposition to ROTC becomes tied to civilian deaths in Afghanistan or opposition to NSA spying or unlawful internment of Americans by our own government. And those who oppose each of those things will then suddenly become interested in ROTC. It suggests where inter-organizational coalitions will likely form, as the arguments used to justify an end result attempts to pick up as many supporters as possible.

For what it’s worth, I am myself torn. I staunchly oppose the militarization of college, on the grounds that the point of college is to become better at being human, not to become prepared to kill people. But I also oppose (in a less visceral way) the estrangement of the military from the ranks of economic and cultural ‘elites,’ myself included. Only a handful of people in my extended family or circle of friends are involved in the military defense of our interests and nation. And I think if more CEOs and politicians and half-term ex-governors of rural states actually had a personal stake in the military, we/they would be less glib about it. I am currently benefiting from a kind of Not In My Backyard opposition to ROTC at Columbia/Barnard, but it certainly looks like that is going to be challenged quite soon.

Oh, and the Family Research Council is full-on Batshit Crazy. Also, whaaaa?

from the New York Times: American Express to Cut 4,000 Jobs, Saving $175 Million

If you have thoughts, we’d love to hear them, but we hope you’ll be at least a little kind – this is one of those situations where your self-identity as brutally honest should not trump your self-identity as gracious.

And the links to the videos we reference: Fashion File: Making an Hermes Bag, and Contemporary Art Preview

Art and Markets 1: Selling Crafts and Art from Peter Levin on Vimeo.

I mean, let’s say that Ma Bell decided that telephone wires degrade over time, and so, to be ready for this 50-70 years into the future, they stocked up on copper wiring. And when fiber optics came along? Or what if the halls’ beams were no longer made from oak, but from space-age polymers or, you know, concrete. Aside from assuming that tomorrow will be like today, how can you really plan 250 years in advance?

A case in point: a friend of mine has a downright logical state of mind. She believes that when presented with an argument, the person who has the better argument and better data – that is, the person who is right should win the argument. So for her, the trick is to find out what the other person’s argument is, what they believe, and then to show them that they are wrong, is the way to get things done. If she is right, and the other person is wrong, it is, well, downright unreasonable for them to persist in their wrongness.

In her dealings at work, she sometimes finds herself arguing with her boss about the long-term strategic position of the organization. Her boss wants to do ‘x’, she wants to do ‘y’. She digs into why her boss wants to do ‘x’, then marshals arguments, evidence, and examples why ‘x’ is the wrong way to go. Boss acknowledges that said arguments are compelling. Then boss decides to continue to do ‘x’. She can’t understand boss.

As an organizational sociologist (and a cultural institutionalist to boot), I believe that organizations are somewhat rational, but in particular fashions. Boss makes decisions through a combination of experience, worldview, competitive pressures and cultural constraints, influence of friends and board members, and sometimes-scant/sometimes-robust empirical evidence. This is difficult to articulate by boss to self and others, and so it is often left inarticulate. Only when pressed will boss (or organizational unit or manager, or whoever) present arguments about the decision, and it is more often than not post-hoc that these reasons come to the fore. And since the articulated reason is never really the reason why boss decides, this reason can and does shift to any number of well-worn and useful – but also absurd on their own – arguments. We know these as things like: short-term versus long-term decision-making; that the decision reflects the ‘overall’ strategy of an organization, not just the organizational unit or particular case you’re interested in; that you don’t have the ‘whole picture’, and so you don’t have access to the information I do about why I’m choosing to do something.

In other words, finding a logical solution to this problem is going to be a frustrating experience. You can convince your boss that decision ‘y’ is in the best interests of the organization, and boss can come back with the argument that ‘y’, while wholly appropriate and apparently wise, doesn’t reflect the overall priorities of the organization; or that ‘y’ doesn’t meet the needs of the organization for the next 2 quarters, even as it makes sense for the health of the organization over the next decade. And these are all true.

The trick is to see that orgs are formally rational, but informally wacky. And that the underlying messiness of organizations, in order to appear rational, get wrapped in reasonable argument and logical discussion even as they remain messy. Embracing this, and working within this framework, would make you a lot less frustrated (or at least differently frustrated).

A main argument made by the sociologist Max Weber is that one of the most enduring shifts in the modern world is an increasing rationalization, with organizational rationalization being a key component of the overall trend. I believe that this is true. But at the very same time, the continuing ghost in the machine is that organizations simultaneously promote increased formal rationality and increased informal zaniness.

Their latest discussion is about how they managed a question on their support forms. I want to drop some research methodology on this problem. While their discussion is about how to design a feedback form, it is also about the kinds of questions you should ask on a survey. And it would benefit from a discussion of categorical/nominal variables, ordinal variables, and interval-level variables. Yep.

So, terms. Categorical variables (also called nominal variables) are those variables with 2 or more ‘states’, but without an intrinsic ordering. Male/female is categorical, as is eye or hair color, race, what school you went to. Ordinal variables are those variable with two or more states that have an ordering to them. Low/medium/high are ordinal variables. Less than HS, HS, some college, BA is ordinal. Interval-level variables are ordered, and the distance between categories is evenly spaced. Income, height, and years of education are all interval-level variables.

The difference between categorical/nominal variables and ordinal variables is the hierarchical ordering of the latter. What school you went to is nominal, but tiered ranking of what school you went to is ordinal. Tiered ranking may be ordinal, but amount of school endowment is interval-level. And quantitative variables are a hint that the variable is ordinal or interval, but not decisive (zip codes are nominal, for instance).

So, back to 37 Signals. What they want is some variable that would be easy to understand (from the customer perspective) and helpful to process (from the company perspective). Their first attempt looked something like this:

It takes time to think through what my state of mind is, because the items are almost ordered, but not really. Confused, worried, upset, and panicked are not points on a continuum, they are just different states of being. The question is asked as a categorical variable question. But it is one that they reallywanted to be an ordinal variable question. They tried to solve the problem by formalizing an ordinal variable, and putting a numbered ordering system on it to make it clearly so:

This is easier to deal with as a customer, since you can sort of pick up your relative state of panic. In other words, you pick up that there is a rough ordering very quickly, and the numbers help a lot in this respect. But alas, what’s good for the customer was no good for 37Signals. The reason is that while they began by wanting to know the subjectivity of the customer, what they really really wanted to know was, ‘how important is this problem for our company?’. Reasonable, but different. This is their final solution:

They have a reason for this, and it is a decent one:

Now, if something’s broken, we can spot it and fix it right away. A system failure is much more important to us (and our customers) than a feature request or general feedback. This method lets us prioritize these queries accordingly, instead of treating them like they’re all the same.

However, this final solution kind of sucks, I think. The problem is that it moves priority from the customer to the company, while giving an illusion of giving control to the customer. That is, the variable is categorical/nominal for the customer, but ordinal for the company. In other words, what is important to the company is more important than what is important to this particular customer. This is probably even more true for those customers for whom everything for them is the most important thing in the world. And yet.

I think perhaps a better solution splits the question into two, which provides space for both ‘urgency for the customer’ and ‘urgency for the organization’.

At the risk of adding yet another item to your survey/form, you have solved both problems with some cognitive ease: customers are defaulted to medium (which is easy for people to just ignore/skip over or shift with little cognitive difficulty), which would allow the organization to give its own priority to the categorical variable. If the customer changes the default to ‘not urgent’, this still stands. If the customer makes their own priority ‘urgent’, then the organization has some discretion on whether to treat this as ‘urgent for us’ or not, but at least has a sense of the panic level for the customer.

I’m sure there is an aesthetic here as well, but the general lesson should be two-fold. 1) Consider carefully the meanings behind your survey variables. Categorical variables often require thinking about, particularly as the category options become large. Ordinal and interval variables (which create an ordering) are easy, until they are too refined. Let’s say you are at a hospital, and a doctor asks you ‘how do you feel?’ Sorting through a list of adjectives that describe your feelings sucks. And assessing your level of pain between 1 and 7 is easier than between 1 and 1000.

The thing is, sometimes what is important to you is not what’s important to the doctor. If you feel throbbing, it’s not lethal. If you feel numbness, it is. In this case, the options are categorical to the patient, but ordinal to the doctor.

Which leads to 2) If you want your customers’ opinions, it may behoove you to give them a way to tell these to you. In the medical example, what kind of pain and how much does it hurt are two questions; patients care more about the second, even if doctors care more about the first. So don’t ask what kind of pain without asking how much does it hurt. Even if this saves the patient’s life, they will still be pissed at you for dismissing their subjective reality.