Research ethics and methods

The Real Deal is led by Sherryl Tarnaske, founder of Unflocked Inc. Unflocked operates an advisory practice that works with leaders and teams navigating the aftermath of deals and transitions. The Real Deal is a research initiative within Unflocked, and the findings will be published openly.

A note on independence. The research is not funded by any client, sponsor, or commercial partner. Findings will be published regardless of what they show, including findings that complicate or contradict assumptions held by the advisory practice. The research is not designed as a pipeline for advisory engagements. Contributors are not contacted for sales or advisory follow-up. The notification list described elsewhere on the site is separate from the research and is not used to identify or contact contributors.

The advisory practice may, over time, be informed by what the research surfaces. This is a one-way relationship: research informs practice, not the other way around. The instrument design is fixed before contributions are reviewed and is not adjusted based on individual contributions or commercial interests.

The Real Deal is an independent research initiative. Its design and conduct are aligned with the principles of the Tri-Council Policy Statement on Ethical Conduct for Research Involving Humans (TCPS 2): respect for persons, concern for welfare, and justice. These principles are reflected in the consent process, the anonymity of contributions, the secure handling of data, the right to decline participation, and the public availability of findings.

Because the research is independent and not affiliated with a university, it is not reviewed by a Research Ethics Board. The ethics protocol was designed by the researcher with reference to TCPS 2 and to established practice in narrative research. The protocol covers the design of the instrument, the consent process, the handling and retention of data, the limits of withdrawal, the foreseeable risks to contributors, and the public reporting of findings.

Contributors who have a concern about how the research is being conducted, separate from the survey platform itself, can contact the researcher directly at therealdeal@unflocked.io.

Before a narrative is stored, it is reviewed using an automated service hosted in Canada to identify and remove details that could identify a person, organisation, or transaction. This step removes identifying detail only. No automated system interprets, categorises, scores, or summarises what you said, and no artificial intelligence is used to analyse the narratives or generate findings.

Audio and video recordings of contributor conversations are deleted once the narrative has been transcribed. Working transcripts are deleted once the de-identified narrative has been stored. What remains is the de-identified narrative, the positionings attached to it, and any optional context selections. Research data is retained for the duration of the initiative and for five years afterward, then destroyed.

The Real Deal is a narrative inquiry at scale, built around a design principle called self-signification. Each contributor shares a short narrative about a moment in their experience of a deal, in their own words. Contributors who complete the online instrument position their own story on a small number of visual scales. Facilitated contributions begin in conversation with the researcher, who records the narrative, transcribes it, and reads it back for confirmation. For facilitated contributions collected to date, the researcher assigned the scale positions based on the conversation. Those records are identified separately, and the process is being changed so future contributors confirm their own positionings before a contribution is complete.

Patterns emerge when many positioned narratives are looked at together. Where stories cluster on a scale, something is happening that goes beyond any single experience. Where they spread, the dimension is more individual than systemic. The patterns are not aggregated opinions. They are aggregated positionings of lived moments, each one anchored to a real narrative the contributor has chosen to share.

The research is interpretive rather than statistical. Findings describe patterns, tensions, and recurring shapes across many contributions. They do not make causal claims and they do not generalise beyond the contributing sample.

The methodology is designed for studying complex adaptive systems. M&A is a system of interacting people, organisations, and contexts where outcomes emerge from countless individual decisions and relationships, and where lived experience carries more signal than survey response. Research designs built for complex adaptive systems privilege patterns over averages, narratives over abstractions, and self-interpretation over researcher-imposed coding. The Real Deal sits in that tradition.