Ethnographic Thinking: From Method To Mindset 1629581186, 9781629581187

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ETHNOGRAPHIC THINKING

This book argues that “ethnographic thinking”—the thought processes and patterns ethnographers develop through their practice—offers companies and organizations the cultural insights they need to develop fully informed strategies. Using real-world examples, Hasbrouck demonstrates how shifting the value of ethnography from simply identifying consumer needs to driving a more holistic understanding of a company or organization can help it benefit from a deeper understanding of the dynamic and interactive cultural contexts of its offerings. In doing so, he argues that such an approach can also enhance the strategic value of their work by helping them increase appreciation for openness and exploration, hone interpretive skills, and cultivate holistic thinking in order to broaden perspectives, challenge assumptions, and cross-pollinate ideas between differing viewpoints. Ethnographic Thinking is key reading for managers and strategists specifically wishing to tap into the potential that ethnography offers, as well as those searching more broadly for new ways to innovate practice. It is essential reading for students of applied ethnography, and recommended for scholars too. Jay Hasbrouck is a strategist and anthropologist whose insights drive innovation and strategic direction for companies, non-profits, and government agencies. The Principal of Hasbrouck Research Group, he has designed and managed large-scale projects across the world. He has a PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Southern California, USA.

Anthropology and Business Crossing Boundaries, Innovating Praxis Series Editor: Timothy de Waal Malefyt

Both anthropology and business work at the forefront of culture and change. As anthropology brings its concerns with cultural organization and patterns of human behavior to multiple forms of business, a new dynamic of engagement is created. In addition to expanding interest in business as an object of study, anthropologists increasingly hold positions within corporations or work as independent consultants to businesses. In these roles, anthropologists are both redefining the discipline and innovating in industries around the world. These shifts are creating exciting cross-fertilizations and advances in both realms: challenging traditional categories of scholarship and practice, pushing methodological boundaries, and generating new theoretical entanglements. This series advances anthropology’s multifaceted work in enterprise, from marketing, design, and technology to user experience research, work practice studies, finance, and many other realms. Titles in series The Business of Creativity: Toward an Anthropology of  Worth Brian Moeran The Magic of Fashion: Ritual, Commodity, Glamour Brian Moeran Intimacy at Work: How Digital Media Bring Private Life to the Workplace Stefana Broadbent Ethics in the Anthropology of Business: Explorations in Theory, Practice, and Pedagogy Edited by Timothy de Waal Malefyt and Robert J Morais Design + Anthropology: Converging Pathways in Anthropology and Design Christine Miller Ethnographic Thinking: From Method to Mindset Jay Hasbrouck

ETHNOGRAPHIC THINKING From Method to Mindset

Jay Hasbrouck

First published 2018 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2018 Taylor & Francis The right of Jay Hasbrouck to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-1-62958-118-7 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-62958-119-4 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-203-71229-0 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

To my parents, Laura and Jerry Hasbrouck, who always encouraged me to set my own course and follow my own path.They lovingly provided the foundation and support to help me do both.

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CONTENTS

Foreword: Ethnographic Thinking as “Culture on the Ground” x Timothy de Waal Malefyt An Anthropological Approach to Ethnographic Thinking  xi Storytelling-Inspired Research  xii Prefacexv Filling the Gap  xv Inspiration xvi Setting Expectations  xvii Acknowledgmentsxix A Starting Place: Design Thinking and Ethnographic Thinking

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PART I

A Few Core Qualities of Ethnographic Thinking 1 Cultivating Curiosity From the Field:Tokyo Wanderings  9 Curiosity and Ethnographic Thinking  11 Broader Strategic Value: Discovering Unexpected Opportunities and Rethinking the Familiar  13 2 Expanding Awareness From the Field: Dead and Dying Technology  16 Expanded Awareness and Ethnographic Thinking  17

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Broader Strategic Value: Reading Social Scripts and Navigating Unfamiliar Settings  21 3 Deferring Judgment From the Field: Diamonds and Handshakes  25 Cultural Logics and Ethnographic Thinking  28 Broader Strategic Value: Dismantling Intuition and Challenging Judgments  30

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4 Adapting Thoughtfully 33 From the Field: Elusive Nurses and Flexible Methods  33 Serendipity, Flexibility, and Ethnographic Thinking  36 Broader Strategic Value: Incremental Risk and Embracing Ambiguity  38 PART II

The Praxis of Ethnographic Thinking

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5 Immersing Fully From the Field: “What are you going to do for Jalcomulco?”  43 Participatory Observation and Ethnographic Thinking  47 Broader Strategic Value: Ethnographic Understandings of Organizational Behavior and the Co-evolution of Brands  49

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6 Facilitating Tactically From the Field:The Cairo Incident  56 Flow and Ethnographic Thinking  60 Broader Strategic Value: Leadership and Diplomacy  62

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7 Documenting Diligently From the Field: A Grand Synthesis  65 Documentation and Ethnographic Thinking  67 Broader Strategic Value: Sampling, Scaling, and Substantiating  68

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PART III

Analysis, Strategy, and Influence 8 Analyzing Holistically From the Field: Fishing for Insights  73 Cultural Constellations and Ethnographic Thinking  75 Broader Strategic Value: Re-imagining Systems and Integrating Insights  76

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9 Situating Intentionally From the Field: Great Ideas with Nowhere to Go  79 Audience-ing and Ethnographic Thinking  81 Broader Strategic Value: Redefining Context,Tailoring Insights, and Unearthing Commonalities  83 10 Storytelling Empathically From the Field: “My House Made Me Green”  86 Storytelling and Ethnographic Thinking  89 Broader Strategic Value: Influence and Inspiration  90

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Conclusion94 Operationalizing Ethnographic Thinking  94 Innovation, Systemic Challenges, and Ethnographic Thinking  98 Responsibility and Representation  106 Some Final Thoughts  107 Works Cited 110 Index117

FOREWORD Ethnographic Thinking as “Culture on the Ground” Timothy de Waal Malefyt

Anthropologists concede that now is the time to fully regard and engage business and all its corporate forms as a legitimate subject of inquiry (Baba, 2012: 20; cf. Fisher & Downey, 2006; Cefkin, 2009; Welker et al., 2011). Anthropologists have provided numerous insightful ethnographies on cultural approaches to business, finance, and consumption. From Maurer’s (2005) work on local currencies and banking, Zaloom’s (2006) study of stock traders refashioning themselves in the market economy, Fisher’s (2012) study of gender and finance on Wall Street, Ho’s (2009) investigation of the ideologies of Wall Street investment bankers, to Holmes’ study of financial predictions (2012). These works follow other examples, such as Barth’s (1963) studies of entrepreneurship and social change, Hannerz’s (1992, 1996) investigation of globalization and cultural flows, Moeran’s study of a Japanese advertising agency (1996), Mazzarella’s exploration of advertising agencies in India (2003), Malefyt and Moeran’s edited volume on advertising practices cross-culturally (2003), Krause Jensen’s study of a design firm (2010), and Sunderland and Denny’s (2007) anthropological analysis of consumer research. These, and a myriad of other studies, show the value of anthropological applications to business, finance, and consumption practices, and inform the ways ethnographic observations of business-related problems produce analyses that are relevant to anthropological theory, but also to corporate management and consumer-related problems in capitalistic societies today. Business anthropology is indeed in ascendance as a viable practice and way of thinking through business issues. This is the case, not just for anthropologists, but also for senior-level managers of corporations who now increasingly apply an ethnographic eye to develop consumer-oriented strategies for their products and brands for “knowledge creation,” or what Holmes and Marcus call “paraethnography” (2006). As Steven Kemper (2003: 35) notes, “advertising executives themselves are folk ethnographers who, like anthropologists, ‘get paid for making claims about how the natives think’” (Moeran & Gersten, 2012: 5). The close-up ethnographic

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lens is then effective beyond multiple other ways of solving business problems from afar, through its main method of ethnography, which allows ethnographers to think on their feet, or as Tim Ingold puts it, to experience “culture on the ground” (Ingold, 2004). This intimate way of thinking leads us to Jay Hasbrouck, who offers here a new take on this issue of applying anthropological insights to business problems. His book is clearly written, with many detailed case studies of how the author alone or in teams “thought through” trenchant business situations. His examples bring a fresh, up-close perspective to the anthropologist’s skill of applying a sense of adaptability, spontaneity, and awareness to business situations, in which outcomes are not always predictable, but often emerge “on the ground,” in the doing. The timing of this book is also highly relevant in an age when Big Data in corporate agendas calls for more speed and efficiency. Frank Rose, a book critic for the WSJ, recently reviewed two books that call for more humanistic analyses in the age of analytics, acknowledging the “cultural bias in business and technology against any information that can’t be quantified” (Rose, 2017). Using powerful analytic tools would seem most attractive when sorting through the volumes of information collected on consumers. Yet, while Big Data offers detailed information on consumer behavior—informing corporate managers of what, when, and where consumers may consume—it cannot tell us the “why” of consumer behavior, and often leads to misinformation on consumer trends (Madsbjerg & Rasmussen, 2014). As Hasbrouck puts it, ethnographers tend to ask the “why,” while designers and other business strategists aim toward “what.” Consumers exist in worlds inhabited by objects that are always context-dependent and layered with meaning, wherein the significance of things and relations in their lives cannot be abstracted quantitatively at a distance. Microsoft anthropologists, Boyd and Crawford, further caution that even as Big Data provides the illusion that it is rational and “intellectual,” it is ultimately subjective and highly social (2011: 1). We clearly witnessed Big Data’s misinformed fumble this past US presidential election, when all the data erroneously predicted the “surefire” winner.

An Anthropological Approach to Ethnographic Thinking Hasbrouck informs us that “ethnographic thinking” from an anthropological perspective is different. Marketers may lose sight of the human element in customer research because consumers are often irrational, driven by motives that are opaque even to themselves. Ethnographic thinking starts by examining the roots of consumer behavior in the complex interplay between interior lives and exterior social, cultural, and physical worlds. It offers new ways to understand “how cultural worlds are organized and offers frameworks for thinking about how they’re formed, and how they evolve and interact,” writes Hasbrouck. It digs deep for insights in ways that have eluded more traditional approaches, and, as Hasbrouck shows often, posits a non-linear, non-rational process that reveals meaning. Ethnographic thinking as an anthropological approach to consumer research has particular significance when applied to business problems. It doesn’t start with a

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set hypothesis (as in the Scientific Method) and try to see if it plays out. This view invites “the tyranny of knowledge” (Grey, 2003) in which things known tend to stay known, and it leads researchers down well-worn paths to uncover what they may expect to find, looking in known places, asking known questions, and receiving expected answers. Rather, ethnographic thinking immerses the researcher in a setting, among people, with many unknowns, to discern what is going on. With consumer experience in mind, the corporate focus also changes from product-centered to human-centered in its research approach and outcome (Kotler & Armstrong, 2016). It focuses on capturing the consumption event itself as a field of unfolding potential possibilities for insights. And, different even from traditional anthropology, ethnographic thinking in, and for, corporate work goes beyond observation and description of the “here and now” to anticipate the process of transformation that may occur between consumer and product, brand, or service. Such is a practice Hasbrouck learned in his early training at the design firm IDEO, in which “participatory design” not only required creating new ways to draw out and articulate “the possible,” but also explored ways to facilitate and guide dynamic transformative action on behalf of the user, brand, and client. The challenge of thinking ethnographically as an inherently “on the ground” process is then to extend ethnographic practice to include what can be described as ethnographic inquiries into the possible.

Storytelling-Inspired Research This volume informs the reader in multiple case stories of the many different social and cultural ways of ordering life that complicate business strategies. Ethnographic thinking, we learn, cultivates curiosity for discovering unexpected opportunities as it attends to the setting or context in which consumer behavior naturally occurs; it applies holism that seeks out the interrelatedness of other domains, practices, beliefs, and customs; it uses “thick description” to describe what people are actually doing, versus what they say they are doing or ought to be doing, thus deferring bias and judgment; it focuses on the member’s viewpoint to learn how people organize their behavior and make sense of the things they do; and it is comparative—asking how and why some people’s customs and practices are different, and how and why some are alike (see also Jordan, 2012). It invites expanded awareness that calls on theoretical thinking applied to novel situations. As Moeran and Garsten affirm, “Precisely because business anthropology is not a discipline in itself, it must be firmly grounded in the theories and methods of anthropology as a whole. It needs more, not less, intellectual rigour than academic anthropology” (2012: 9). This volume applies intellectual rigor in the form of “ethnographic thinking” in contexts as a way to get at the “why” of complex human behavior and evoke what Hasbrouck terms “empathic stories” that inspire us. Hasbrouck’s approach to consumer research also yields insights that further inspire story-forming strategies internally in corporations for new product ideas, as well as inform new directions to guide product and brand development. An “outside-in” approach to research, such as what Hasbrouck advocates, starts by

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understanding how consumers use a product as a complete interrelated solution with and among people out in their social world, not what a product might do inside the walls of a corporation. He describes how insights brought back to corporations have made significant changes in new products, services, or even fostering changed attitudes towards customers. For instance, his serendipitous discovery of a “boutique shoe hotel” in Tokyo helped a company specializing in nutrition, beauty, and home care realize the care and meaning of treating its customers. As Hasbrouck comments, it provided inspiration on “how to combine service and product in novel ways, to redefine what customer care means, and eventually to explore new ways to integrate the role of a concierge that guides customers through interactions between product and service offerings.” Perhaps most significantly, from an ethical point of view, this type of thoughtful and detailed approach to consumer research can make a positive impact on business and consumer relations, fostering a more positive outcome in the world. It shifts the anthropological mandate of the American Anthropology Association code of ethics, from “do no harm” to a consumer advocacy of “do some good” (Briody & Meerwarth Pester, 2017). Professional field anthropologists, like Hasbrouck, routinely weigh their options between these poles, and not only are mindful to minimize injury or damage, but “feel inspired when they make a difference” (Briody & Meerwarth Pester, 2017: 39). This means, rather than take a passive detached approach to anthropological research that promises no harm, we may advance an “ethnography of thinking” that takes anthropologists’ best efforts to make a difference in the world, and perhaps affect change for the better. This book takes such a bold stance by informing the processes, practices, and “on the ground” modes of thinking that can assist students, researchers, and professional practitioners in thinking thoughtfully through such problems ethnographically. Theoretical musings and research approaches applied to practical enquiry here become anthropologically intelligible, divested of jargon, and unlike other volumes on why we do ethnography in corporate setting, say something novel, thoughtful, and provocative. This book answers such a challenge in the affirmative.

References Baba, M. (2012). Anthropology and Business: Influence and Interests. Journal of Business Anthropology, 1 (1): 20–71, Spring 1–52. Barth, F. (Ed.) (1963). The Role of the Entrepreneur in the Social Change in Northern Norway. Bergen: Universitetsforlaget. Boyd, D., & Crawford, K. (2011). Six Provocations for Big Data, Paper presented at Oxford Internet Institute’s ‘A Decade in Internet Time: Symposium on the Dynamics of the Internet and Society.’ Retrieved from http://ssrn.com/abstract=1926431 Briody, E., & Meerwarth Pester, T. (2017). Redesigning Anthropology’s Ethical Principles to Align with Anthropological Practice in Ethics. In The Anthropology of Business, T. Malefyt & R. J. Morais (Eds.) London: Routledge, 23–43. Cefkin, M. (Ed.) (2009). Ethnography and the Corporate Encounter: Reflections on Research in and of Corporations. Oxford: Berghahn.

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Fisher, M. S. (2012). Wall Street Women. Durham: Duke University Press. Fisher, M., & Downey, G. (Eds.) (2006). Frontiers of Capital: Ethnographic Reflections on the New Economy. Durham: Duke University Press. Gray, D. (2003). Wanted: Chief Ignorance Officer. Harvard Business Review, November. Hannerz, U. (1992). Cultural Complexity. New York: Columbia University Press. Hannerz, U. (1996). Transnational Connections: Culture, People, Places. London: Routledge. Ho, K. (2009). Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street. Durham: Duke University Press. Holmes, D. (2014). Economy of Words: Communicative Imperatives in Central Banks. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Holmes, D. R., & Marcus, G. E. (2006). Fast Capitalism: Para-Ethnography and the Rise of the Symbolic Analyst. In M. S. Fisher & G. Downey (Eds.) Frontiers of Capital: Ethnographic Reflections on the New Economy. Durham: Duke University Press, 33–57. Ingold, T. (2004). Culture on the Ground: The World Perceived Through the Feet, Journal of Material Culture, 9 (3): 315–40. Jordan, A. (2012). Business Anthropology (2nd ed.). Long Grove: Waveland Press. Kemper, S. (2003). How Advertising Makes Its Object. In T. de Waal Malefyt & B. Moeran (Eds.) Advertising Cultures. Oxford: Berg, 35–54. Kotler, P., & Armstrong, G. (2016). Principles of Marketing (16th ed.). Englewood Cliffs: Pearson. Krause Jensen, J. (2010). The Flexible Firm: The Design of Culture at Bang & Olufsen. Oxford: Berghahn. Madsbjerg, C., & Rasmussen, M. (2014). The Moment of Clarity. Boston: Business Review Press. Malefyt, de Waal, T., & Moeran, B. (2003). Introduction: Advertising Cultures—Advertising, Ethnography and Anthropology. In T. de Waal Malefyt & B. Moeran (Eds.) Advertising Cultures. Oxford: Berg, 1–33. Maurer, B. (2005). Mutual Life, Limited: Islamic Banking Alternative Currencies, Lateral Reason. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Mazzarella, W. (2003). Shoveling Smoke: Advertising and Globalization in Contemporary India. Durham: Duke University Press. Moeran, B. (1996). A Japanese Advertising Agency: An Anthropology of Media and Markets. Richmond: Curzon. Moeran, B., & Garsten, C. (2012). What’s in a Name? Editors’ Introduction to the Journal of Business Anthropology, Journal of Business Anthropology, 1 (1): 1–19 Spring. Rose, F. (2017). Soft Skills and Hard Problems. In Wall Street Journal book review, May 26. Retrieved from www.wsj.com/articles/soft-skills-and-hard-problems-1495829788? mg=id-wsj Sunderland, P., & Denny, R. (2007). Doing Anthropology in Consumer Research. Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press. Welker, M., Partridge, D. J., & Hardin, R. (2011). Corporate Lives: New Perspectives on the Social Life of the Corporate Form. Current Anthropology, 52S: S3–S16. Zaloom, C. (2006). Out of the Pits: Traders and Technology from Chicago to London. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

PREFACE

Filling the Gap The idea for this work came from observing the dramatic rise of ethnographic research in applied settings over the past 10–15 years. From designers to computer scientists and marketing specialists, many now realize that ethnographic insights can drive the successful development of new products, services, and systems from the customer’s perspective. In contrast to traditional forms of applied research, such as surveys and focus groups, ethnography—the study of people and cultures from the perspective of the subject—is aimed at getting a deep understanding of the daily lives of the people on which it focuses. It does this in a number of ways, including fieldwork conducted within the contexts of people’s daily lives; applying a holistic view to the routines, interactions, and practices that occur within those contexts; and developing interpretations of those behaviors that identify the values and meanings that make up the cultural constructs within which they live. As an anthropologist, it’s encouraging to see ethnographic methods transform how professionals innovate. Yet, there remains a distinct gap between the current use of ethnography in these settings and the greater value of ethnographic thinking—the patterns of thinking that ethnographers develop in their work. Beyond bringing the consumer’s “voice” into an organization, ethnographic thinking can be an incredibly effective means for making sense of human complexity, developing deep cultural insight, and reshaping perspectives.When used as more than a research tool to expose consumer needs, ethnographic thinking helps companies and organizations build on the cultural meanings and contexts of their offerings, develop the flexibility to embrace cultural change, focus their strategies at critical cultural phenomena, and test and develop business model changes. In short, ethnographic thinking has the power to strengthen and advance the position of companies and organizations by helping them understand themselves—as well as their customers, stakeholders, and those from whom they can seek inspiration—in cultural terms.

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Inspiration Contemporary popular views of anthropologists tend to lean toward the heroic. From the fictional Indiana Jones to the very real Jane Goodall, popular culture conjures images of the anthropologist as the independent and adventurous discoverer who brings the exotic home.While some aspects of this stereotype may ring true, far fewer people are aware of the influence anthropologists—and the ethnographic thinking they use—have had on critical policy and social issues. This book is inspired in many ways by early anthropologists who were highly instrumental in shaping areas of public life as wide ranging as immigration law, civil rights, and child-rearing. Franz Boas, considered by many to be the father of American anthropology, took on the American establishment in the early twentieth century by shifting the commonly held concept of culture from a hierarchy of races—a ranking from those less “cultured” to those who were considered more “civilized”—to one of a “community of emotional life that rises from our everyday habits” (Boas, 1929). This move, considered bold for his time, paved the way for him to argue against racist immigration policies before Congress, and to associate the plight of African Americans with the history of Jewish struggle. In both cases, his work was critical in efforts to erode popular assumptions about genetic determinism. Boas also changed popular conceptions of culture through his position at the American Museum of Natural History. Prior to his tenure, the museum displayed artifacts by type (baskets, musical instruments, etc.), removing them from their cultural context. Boas introduced the notion of displaying them within the context of each culture through exhibition areas organized by tribe, to demonstrate how the creators of the objects saw and used them. This curatorial shift undermined the then dominant view of culture as evolutionary, and helped re-conceptualize it in relative terms rather than hierarchical stages. Today, the views he introduced extend far beyond his early influence, and now make up the underlying ideological structure for many of the contemporary views on race, as well as civil and human rights movements. Similarly, Margaret Mead (a student of Franz Boas) was highly acclaimed for her ability to develop critical insights rooted in fieldwork and then apply those insights to influence American policy and perspectives. She was most widely recognized for using her work with non-Western cultures to transform how Americans thought about child-rearing and adolescence. Based on her field experiences in Samoa, she worked closely with Benjamin Spock (the Dr. Spock) to revolutionize American child-rearing by advocating practices such as “demand feeding” of infants as well as picking them up whenever they cried (a stark contrast to the more rigid standards of child-rearing at the time). Mead also applied ethnographic thinking to the challenges of nutrition during World War II as part of the US Committee on Food Habits, and was an important thought leader at the United Nations, UNESCO, and SIPI (Scientists’ Institute for Public Information) (Lutkehaus, 2008). Both Boaz and Mead were masters at contesting unquestioned norms, often by repositioning the premise upon which others constructed their defense of

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“common sense.” Beyond their field skills, their application of ethnographic thinking to broader issues and settings made them particularly adept at using empathy, holistic thinking, emotional intelligence, and cultural interpretation to strategically cross-pollinate ideas between cultures, challenge the status quo, and inspire change. Applying this same approach to business and organizational settings in ways that help inform strategy, business model development, innovation, and many other operations, is the focus of this work. In addition to these disciplinary ancestors, this work is also inspired by (and built upon) the many insights of those practicing ethnographers and anthropologists who forged new ground and expanded perspectives of how ethnography is situated outside of the academy. More specifically, works that recognize anthropological contributions, such as the benefits of “detachment” as a means of stepping outside organizational assumptions (Sillitoe, 2007), or the ability to serve as “brokers” between contrasting views (Oliveira, 2012), have informed my perspective. The same is true of those that have positioned ethnographic thinkers as “burrs under the saddle” (Kitner, 2014) or “facilitating-provokers” (Kilbourn, 2013) that influence processes and developments within organizations. On a more granular level, writers that have elucidated the value of “the anthropological filter” to sort out unstated power structures and position them within broader systems (Tett, 2010) or to “recognize patterns in massive quantities of data” and ask “questions about the nature of such data and what it means to whom and why” (Baba, 2014) are inspirational in their ability to demonstrate how ethnographic thinking provides cultural analyses that go beyond identifying consumer needs.Together, these authors have helped shape better understandings of how ethnographic thinking highlights the importance of “systems of interwoven meanings and practices” (Sunderland & Denny, 2007) and distinguishes “mere observation” from the ability to recognize and map “socially constituted, symbolically rendered meanings and processes” from “multiple forms of data” while “negotiating multiple perspectives and levels of analysis” (Wilner, 2014).There are certainly other insightful perspectives that have informed my thinking, but the reader will notice pieces of these ideas threaded throughout this work as I outline what I see as the core benefits of ethnographic thinking. In addition, it’s important to recognize those whose thinking runs parallel to this work in its effort to expand and broaden understandings of ethnographic thinking in one way or another.These include, among others: Melissa Cefkin’s edited volume Ethnography and the Corporate Encounter (Cefkin, 2009); Brigitte Jordan’s edited volume Advancing Ethnography in Corporate Environments (Jordan, 2013); Madsbjerg and Rasmussen’s The Moment of Clarity (Madsbjerg & Rasmussen, 2014); Malefyt and Morais’ Advertising and Anthropology (Malefyt & Morias, 2012); Sunderland and Denny’s Doing Anthropology in Consumer Research (Sunderland & Denny, 2007) as well as their edited volume Handbook of Business Anthropology (Denny & Sunderland, 2014).

Setting Expectations This book offers readers ways to think like an anthropologist, in the sense that it focuses on the value embedded within the patterns of thinking ethnographic

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practice creates and reinforces. However, it does not purport to teach readers to think as anthropologists, since it doesn’t come close to encompassing the full range of training needed to become an anthropologist. My hope is that it will enhance appreciation for ethnographic thinking by demonstrating how it functions, and further, how it provides value beyond the realm of solution-focused research projects. So, if you’re looking for a shortcut to becoming an anthropologist by reading this book, you won’t find it here. However, if you want to understand the mindset behind the ways experienced applied ethnographers and anthropologists practice their trade, and how they use ethnographic thinking to offer value beyond identifying consumer needs, I hope you’ll find it engaging, enlightening, and entertaining.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

There were many people whose thoughts influenced how this book eventually took shape. Discussions with colleagues were especially helpful as this work evolved and developed. Thank you Christy Snyder, Charley Scull, Christine Truc Modica, Jesse Burns, and Anil Joisher for conversations that challenged, provoked, and advanced my thinking along the way. Other support, reviews, and encouragement were also critical to getting these ideas from my head to the page. Jennifer Collier, Timothy Malefyt, Patty Sunderland, and Rita Denny were all critical in this regard. I also owe a debt of gratitude to the people who were an essential part of shaping my early thinking in anthropology: Eugene Cooper, Peter Biella, Zandy Moore, Joan Weibel-Orlando, Andre Simic, and especially Nancy Lutkehaus, Janet Hoskins, and Judith Schachter. My work with some clients has been especially useful for appreciating the value of flexibility and grounding and testing ideas in real world conditions to better understand the broader benefits of ethnographic thinking. Thank you, Terry Denczek and Seth Starner, as well as all those who helped make these projects possible: Kurt Neubauer, Alicia Roth, Brian Scott, Jason Pierson, Kristin Quinn Boer, Ryan Payne, Leticia Baiao, Kaitlyn Smith, Adrienne Vander Veen, and Tom Devries. Other sources of inspiration were the many colleagues with whom I’ve had the pleasure to work over the years. Their contributions and camaraderie helped form the foundation of many of the concepts I’ve brought forward in this book. Thank you to my research team at USC’s Center for Sustainable Cities: Christine Cooper, Juliette Finzi, and Vincent Todd for the hours we spent in Mexico and Los Angeles trying to find a common language. Thank you to my friend and research partner, Susan Faulkner, for her stimulating conversation and companionship during our “grand tour” as Intel researchers, as well as the many other friends and co-workers there, present and past: Barbara Barry, Alex Zafiroglu, Jay Melican,Todd Harple, Allison Woodruff, Kathi Kitner, Ken Anderson, Dawn Nafus,

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John Sherry, Nancy Vuckovic, Maria Bezaitis, Wendy March, Gina Grumke, Tony Salvador, Richard Beckwith, Cory Booth, Mike Payne, Daria Loi, John Thomas, and Herman D’Hooge. My time at IDEO helped stretch what I thought was possible for ethnographic thinking. My colleagues there were instrumental in that growth: Suzanne Gibbs Howard, Jane Fulton Suri, Gabriel Trionfi, Heather Emerson, Scott Paterson, Colin Raney, Gretchen Wustrack, Jenn Maer, Laura Janise, Brian Rink, and Guy Gouldavis. Later, as part of work with my own company, Cheryl Dahle and Damien Newman recognized the value of ethnographic thinking as part of addressing global challenges holistically, and proved to be stimulating thought partners. And, work with Soo-Young Chin and Yoon Cho has given me new appreciation for the value of collaboration and its role in ethnographic thinking. Mentorship from Glenn Armstrong was critically instrumental for helping me think about how to navigate through the world. Thank you, Glenn, for knowing exactly when to challenge, when to offer support, and when to simply extend a hand of friendship. Finally, Brett Piper, my spouse, has been an unwavering source of stability for me during the many fits and starts, rewrites, doubts, successes, and accomplishments of writing.

A STARTING PLACE Design Thinking and Ethnographic Thinking1

—Lufthansa flight 490, Seattle to Frankfurt Dinner just served, everyone was settling in, each in various stages of preparing their coping mechanisms for the painfully long flight. Laptops, eye masks, charge cords, earphones, earplugs, slippers, and hand cream … they were very busy. The woman next to me popped a sleeping pill and was situating her blankets. I began my own ritual of scanning the entertainment channels to plan my movie lineup. As I was flipping through documentaries, I unexpectedly ran across an educational featurette titled, “Design Thinking in 30 Minutes.” Yes, 30 minutes! The more I thought about this featurette as an offering aimed at a mass audience, the more it seemed like an indicator of sorts to me. At face value, it’s a sign that interest in design thinking has become so widespread that a 30-minute short on the subject warranted inclusion in a carefully curated inflight entertainment lineup. But did it also suggest that the practice to which many have dedicated entire careers could be boiled down to an easily digestible infotainment piece? Was it reifying the “anybody can do it” view? Of course, in the broader business world, you could argue that design thinking is already a stale buzzword—a concept that spread widely as a panacea for dull and slow-moving corporate cultures. Some say it’s now “the happy meal” of business solutions peddled by a growing number of consultants suddenly expert in its methods. In the Design Sojourn blog, Brian Ling even argues that “design thinking is killing creativity,” in part because it is now “structurally deployed like any other business process” (Ling, 2010). Others, like David Siegel, have observed that this growth has spawned an industry that churns out an endless series of ineffective innovation workshops, from which true actions are rarely undertaken in most organizations. He argues,

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Once the fun and games are over, it’s back to business as usual. Meetings tend to run on, they have to end at some point, and it’s time to make a decision. That’s when the easiest, most incremental thing gets the green light and all the cool ideas get filed under “interesting.” It’s easier and more fun to do workshops than to actually innovate, because innovation involves risk, and the culture doesn’t support taking risks. (Siegel, 2015) His solution? “You must change the culture if you are going to get out of the innovation trap.” Which brings us back to that flight from Seattle to Frankfurt. As I reflected further, I began to ask: Why aren’t we seeing in-flight featurettes about ethnographic thinking and what it can do to propel innovation? After all, what group of professionals is more qualified to understand, analyze, and interpret cultures and cultural change (corporate, consumer, creator, or otherwise)? And, even if ethnographers don’t aspire to position ethnographic thinking in the same ways designers have design thinking, why aren’t we hearing a lot more about how thinking like an anthropologist is beneficial in business settings? Granted, designers have integrated what they call a human-centered approach as a core and critical principal of design thinking; and they have portrayed ethnographic methods in ways that have increased the visibility of the benefits ethnography offers as a practice. But that’s also part of the problem. In the same ways that design thinking has been reduced to a series of rote methods or string of “fun” workshops by some, it has itself tended to reduce the perception of ethnography to a practice for which the sole purpose is to provide the observations needed to “solve” a design challenge.2 For those who’ve spent their careers in the discipline, it’s obvious that ethnographic thinking can offer much more. Some are already working in this direction. Paul Dourish has argued for a reinterpretation of how ethnography contributes to Human–Computer Interaction. He states, “a focus on implications for design reads ethnographic inquiry too narrowly, containing ethnographic studies in ways that fail to do justice to the kinds of insights that they can provide” (Dourish, 2006). Those insights go beyond ethnography as simply a toolbox of methods. They demonstrate how ethnographic thinking provides an interpretive lens—one that offers new ways to see how cultural worlds are organized and offers frameworks for thinking about how they’re formed, and how they evolve and interact. Eric J. Arnould phrased it eloquently: when anthropologists insist on the socially [sic] and cultural embeddedness of individual action, and elucidate the particular contours of that embeddedness we generate insight. Similarly, when we elucidate the manifold ways in which things are produced, circulated, and disposed in dialectic interaction with social and cultural contexts we similarly generate telling insight. (Arnould, 2012)

A Starting Place3

Extending this argument, Grant McCracken envisions a new role for ethnographic thinkers in the form of a Chief Culture Officer, who would “manage a new spirit of openness,” in part by helping answer strategic questions like “what business are we [really] in?” (McCracken, 2009). The CCO, as McCracken envisions it, will “see the significance of shifting technologies, read sudden changes in consumer taste and preference, sift the perfect storm of the economy for opportunity and danger, and perform pattern recognition” much like Ken Anderson suggests in his Harvard Business Review article (Anderson, 2009). Building on these perspectives, I want to turn our attention toward two things. One is what I’ll call the trajectory of disciplines, and other is disciplinary gaze. For the former, consider for a moment the general disposition of the disciplines of design and anthropology today. Or, more specifically, consider the direction toward which design thinking and ethnographic thinking each aim. Design thinking integrates observation, collaboration, and iterative prototyping within a strategy with the ultimate goal of refining and homing in on a design solution—an inherently reductive process. On the other hand, ethnographers are more inclined to open up new frameworks and perspectives in an effort to uncover the dynamics of social interactions and their formation (which are “always already” evolving). In short, ethnographers tend to ask “why?” while designers aim toward “what?” The relationship is often symbiotic in practice, but they are also at odds empirically. There’s a reason that designers typically refer to pattern finding and theme identification as data “synthesis,” while ethnographers are more apt to refer to this sense-making process as data “analysis.” We need both, of course. Yet, when we consider the current state of the global economy, it becomes increasingly clear that questions of “why?” are very well equipped to provide insight into the rapidly evolving dynamics and volatility of the twenty-first century marketplace. From drastic shifts in currency markets to dealing with climate change and online security, complexity is now the status quo in our diverse, networked, and globalized reality. We can no longer presume that “solutions” are universal or static. In this accelerated and dynamic economic context, we need to frame our designs within more expansive thinking that is always asking “why” even while responses to the question “what” are manifesting. The trajectory of ethnographic thinking represents an opportunity to do just that. In this context, ethnographic thinking isn’t simply a front-end research component positioned to feed the design process, but an ongoing inquiry that helps shape design solutions while simultaneously observing and interpreting the evolution, or pulse, of human interactions—always asking “why?” Within organizations, these two (often complementary) forms of thinking can hold very different positions. While design thinking ultimately privileges implementation, often at operational levels, ethnographic thinking sits more comfortably at strategic levels, where it can inform flows of knowledge that provide insight into cultural shifts from both outside and insider perspectives. Now, I’d like to move on to the question of disciplinary gaze. Turning back to the rise in popularity of design thinking in business settings, the ease with

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which the ever-increasing number of organizations (especially multi-national ­corporations) seek to adopt the methods of design thinking can in some ways be positioned as a natural extension of the colonialist roots of the corporation. This is because the ways in which design thinking is often integrated within these organizations—structurally deployed with an “ethnography-as-tool” perspective—aligns quite comfortably with the ethnographic gaze of early anthropology. From this view, the design researcher’s position in the field of consumers is often presumed to be central, authoritative, and unquestionable. Upon return, the design researcher is expected to bring back and represent the voice of the target consumers for the design team—whose perspectives ultimately “really” count.You can see that this is a dynamic within which it’s all too easy to replace “natives” or “colonial subjects” with “consumers” or “users.” So, in the historic context of the corporation, design thinking (and, one could argue, traditional market research as well) has in some ways adopted the ethnographic gaze of late nineteenth/early twentieth century anthropology. The kinds of questions this gaze allows them to ask are mostly comfortable questions embedded within a framework that always focuses its gaze outward toward the consumer or user—the classic anthropological Other. For example, it’s not uncommon for those who adopt only the structure of design thinking methods and the “ethnographyas-tool” perspective to frame their inquiries solely in terms of extracting data from consumers. They seek to uncover “hidden” behaviors and “unmet needs,” capture them, and bring them back to headquarters where those who presume to make the “real” decisions can marvel over these exotic treasures from the field. Anthropology has come a long way since the turn of the previous century (Clifford & Marcus, 1986; Marcus, 1994) and positioning ethnographic practice in this way excludes some of the greatest critical assets of contemporary ethnographic thinking: relativism, interpretation, deconstruction, and reflexivity.3 But what about the uncomfortable questions? Why aren’t more companies and organizations shifting, expanding and broadening their gaze, particularly given the increasingly blurred boundaries between consumers and the brands/products/uses they help shape? Ethnographic thinking—freed from the constraints of the “ethnography as tool” perspective—asks not just what consumers want, but why the organization is solving for that particular challenge in the first place. And, while some companies or organizations have begun to ask more “why”—focused inquiries, many often approach the question with methodologies more suited to answer “what.” Ethnographic thinking also probes for questions of alignment, ethics, and interdependencies that occur within the relationship between provider and consumer. Just as importantly, contemporary ethnographic thinking turns the gaze back on itself, forcing organizations and practitioners to come to terms with their own histories and orthodoxies, and to face how those realistically impact their capacity, or inclination, to innovate. So, for example, ethnographic thinking might ask the following uncomfortable questions of an organization: Have you created clear pathways and platforms to co-develop innovative new ideas within the marketplace? Do you know which norms, customs, and cultural dynamics work for and

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against innovation both within your organization and outside of it? Do you have an internal strategy for cultural change that incentivizes innovation and adaptation? This is not to say that some designers aren’t asking some of these questions. From my experience, some design consultancies make a concerted effort to “look in” at the cultures of clients they serve. Yet, this is typically subsumed within the goals of a design brief, unless a client can overcome discomfort with shifting the gaze inward and understanding the organization’s relationship to the people it serves in a more holistic way. This is precisely one of the things ethnographic thinkers are best qualified to do. Our methods are designed specifically to make sense of complexity by finding the underlying meaning behind human behaviors within ever-evolving cultures and the interactions between them. Our intent is not to fix and define them or to discover or exploit them, but to learn from their dynamics. Using a systematic and interpretive process informed by anthropological theories, we decipher the unique cultural logics embedded within complex human interactions, and develop insights that have the power to change the way people think about themselves and others. We shift perspectives and help reframe challenges—to see the micro in the macro, and vice versa, all within the context of exploring everyday practices. This is a particularly valuable asset of ethnographic thinking since this dynamic approach provides culturally informed interpretive value throughout the lifecycle of different processes, as well as within organizational cultures themselves. It can, and should, inform all systems of production on an ongoing basis. This isn’t something that has to sit separate from design thinking. It can, and should, work parallel to it.4 The relationship between design thinking and ethnographic thinking considered above is just one vehicle for illustrating the ways in which the latter might be better appreciated. If we look at the benefits of ethnographic thinking more broadly, there are at least three modes through which it offers distinct advantages. First, ethnographic thinking increases openness, which is often characterized by attributes like curiosity, expanded awareness, deferred judgment, and flexible adaptation. Second, ethnographic thinking sees inherent value in the process of exploration, which includes characteristics such as learning through active involvement, the ability to facilitate and draw out the opinions of others, and an obsession with documenting experiences. And, finally, ethnographic thinking is highly interpretive, which is often characterized by holistic thinking, situating insights strategically, and highly attuned storytelling that conveys complex ideas in ways that gain traction within organizations. Taken together these qualities of ethnographic thinking are particularly useful for any organization that needs to (or wants to) continually adapt and innovate—which I would argue includes nearly every organization in existence today. They’re also useful for organizations of any sort that need to shift perspectives and challenge assumptions by cross-pollinating ideas and different viewpoints. And, finally, the broader benefits of ethnographic thinking help organizations develop empirically rooted arguments that broaden outlooks and inspire change or new initiatives. In the following chapters, we’ll consider ways in which companies and organizations can integrate the strategic value of ethnographic thinking within the context

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of human resources, marketing, branding, management, executive leadership, and other realms.The book is divided into three parts, each designed to build on its predecessor. Part I: A Few Core Qualities of Ethnographic Thinking, includes those qualities of ethnographic thinking that make up some core components necessary for successful ethnographic thinking. Part II: The Praxis of Ethnographic Thinking, includes qualities that are more complex and begin to integrate interactions with others as well as deeper integrations of theoretical and ethical considerations—something we might call praxis. Finally, Part III: Analysis, Strategy, and Influence with Ethnographic Thinking, takes a look at the qualities of ethnographic thinking that are both analytic and communicative. Within these parts, each chapter begins with a section that identifies the origins of a particular quality of ethnographic thinking. Stories from ethnographic fieldwork are used to illustrate how they originate.These stories are followed by deeper explorations of the patterns of thinking that are developed and reinforced through their repeated practice, as well as how they shape different qualities of the ethnographic mindset overall. The last section of each chapter considers the broader strategic value of that particular quality of ethnographic thinking. The Conclusion of the book reflects on how ethnographic thinking can be positioned within different settings, as well as how it can be “operationalized.”

Notes 1 A previous iteration of this section was originally published on the Ethnographic Practice in Industry Conference (EPIC) Perspectives blog (Hasbrouck, 2015). 2 Gerald Lombardi has expertly identified this trend as a form of “de-skilling” that occurs in many industry sectors that seek to standardize ethnographic practice in ways that ultimately produce “dead labor” (Lombardi, 2009). 3 This phenomenon isn’t unique to world of design. The perception of anthropology in many different commercial settings has contributed to positioning ethnography as a tool for companies and organizations who position themselves as “nonreflexive pragmatists driving for competitive edge” sometimes reducing ethnographic practice to an oversimplified form of “spying” on consumers (Sunderland & Denny, 2014: 19; Suchman, 2013; Wilner, 2014). 4 While this work is intended to move beyond the design process, it’s important to acknowledge here where others have considered collaboration between ethnographers and designers (Squires & Byrne, 2002).

PART I

A Few Core Qualities of Ethnographic Thinking

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1 CULTIVATING CURIOSITY

From the Field: Tokyo Wanderings We were taking the day to immerse ourselves in the sights, sounds, and smells of Tokyo’s streets. Our team of five (including the Vice President of Innovation from the client company) had just completed two days of in-home interviews and were targeting spots around the city where we could find product offerings similar to the client’s. This was part of our overall research strategy, which included surveying Tokyo’s urban landscape for unique offerings in nutrition, beauty, and home care. Our list included everything from the latest trends among the Harajuku girls, tea at an herbal medicinary, observing a cooking class, and visiting cosmetic counters, to name a few. We also visited the major players, like Seibu, a grand retail operation reminiscent of the early mid-century heyday of American department stores, and Tokyu Hands, an eight-story patchwork of hardware, garden tools, cleaning supplies, and an array of other (seemingly random) household products. Along the way, one team member stopped to have a personalized skin analysis at a cosmetic counter, which a sales person used to determine the best products for her skin type. We also purchased some knives—an experience that went far beyond a simple housewares transaction, since wrapping and bagging the small set involved two clerks who spent at least ten minutes lavishing their attention on layering and precisely folding, first tissue paper, then wrapping paper, then carefully tying a ribbon, placing it in a box, then adding another ribbon, and, finally, putting it all into a crisp bag, delivered with two hands, a smile, and a slight bow. Our takeaway from these experiences included some interesting and useful observations. Chief among them were the careful and intricate service designs that defined retail interactions in Tokyo. In addition to conveying the values and priorities of the sellers, these interactions were also fulfilling consumer expectations in ways the sellers were culturally bound to perform. For example, the degree of care involved in the ritual of packaging in Japan conveys a sign of value and respect,

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and the skin test at the cosmetic counter a sign of value placed in evidence-based aesthetics, and so on. We agreed that we might be able to use these interpretations in our project’s ideation phase to inspire new experiences that would enhance our client’s product offerings. But something was missing in our explorations. Rather than being truly curious, we were merely being inquisitive, all within the safe confines of the clients’ current product offering. This was hardly the inspiration for breakthrough or disruptive innovation. Near the end of the day, most of the team was exhausted. We decided to head back to the hotel, drifting through random streets and alleys. Down one of the last alleys that we thought might be a shortcut (it was not), we passed a shop that caught our eye. The sign outside indicated that it was likely a shoe repair shop, but looking in the windows, the entry area resembled a very high end boutique hotel lobby—it was filled with plush high-back chairs, thick-pile carpeting, and ornate furnishings. Neither hotels nor shoe repair were officially on our radar, but the place felt intriguing and unique enough to check out. Upon entering, we were greeted by a middle-age woman dressed in a formal black suit, starched white shirt, and white gloves who stood behind a high counter at the far rear of the store. She paused mid-task and looked up to ask how she could help. We passed through the posh lobby with its wood paneling, soft lighting, and array of different sized foot-level mirrors—all much more than you’d expect from a cobbler in the US. When we reached her station, and peered over the counter, we could see that she was working on a number of different shoes with a wide array of tools spread out before her. We told her we were visiting Tokyo and that we were interested in looking at different kinds of businesses and how their service models worked in relationship to their products. (Side note: a good local interpreter is worth their weight in gold in ambiguous situations like this.) A few casual exchanges later she was off and running, happy to tell us all about her business, of which she was obviously very proud. Behind her, she explained, was her cobbler: a man in his 20s using what appeared to be a bandsaw on the heel of a pair of boots. Besides that, you’d hardly recognize any of the other tools in his work area (something that appeared to involve an air compressor, another machine with lots of buttons and hydraulics, and another that looked like a soda dispenser)—all on prominent display in a sterile white room, walled off by soundproof glass. It looked like an isolation booth and gleamed in sterile contrast to the stately wooden-paneled, warmly lit customer area. We asked about the kinds of repairs she offered and the types of customers she served, to which she warmly explained a touch-up process she was performing and said, “all sorts of people come here.” Just then, one of her customers entered. A young man in his early 20s, dressed in a designer t-shirt, a head wrap and what appeared to be high fashion half-laced black leather boots. He sat on one of the chairs in the lobby for a minute or two and finished a phone call.Then he headed to the counter and was immediately greeted by an assistant who seemed to appear out of nowhere from one of the panels behind the counter. She was dressed even more formally than her boss, with a full suit, ascot, and white gloves—hair pulled back neatly.

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She greeted him with a friendly smile and they immediately began a lengthy discussion. After five minutes or so, the assistant went over to another wall panel and slid it aside to reveal a huge shelving unit divided into cubicles, each occupied by a pair of shoes wrapped in a white canvas bag with a tag attached. She found the right parcel and returned to the customer with the package, which she unwrapped to show him some details on the cork sole of a platform boot. He inspected it thoroughly over a lengthy conversation. Then she wrapped the boots back up, returned them to the shelf, and retrieved a different pair for his inspection. Further conversation was followed by another close examination, after which she returned that pair to the shelf as well. With the help of our interpreter, and a long series of small and sometimes convoluted realizations on our part, we found out that while this shop obviously offered shoe repair, the bulk of their space (subtly masked behind wooden panels along nearly every wall) was dedicated to shoe hoteling. The owner explained that most of her clients have large shoe collections, some so large that they can’t store them in their tiny Tokyo apartments. Her service frees space for them in their homes and guarantees that their shoes are always cared for properly. Aside from these practicalities, she told us that the shop’s staff has developed personal relationships with many of their customers, and that they sometimes offer tailored advice and perspective to them on not only shoe care, but style and appearance. She added that the staff is also in a position to spot new trends and share their observations across and between customers. While this visit didn’t fit neatly into our research agenda, it did help us rethink the client’s offering in entirely new ways. It forced us to think outside our own context, not just culturally but beyond the client’s offering, and most of all, outside the comfort zone of our research plan. It helped us compare and contrast features from this extremely unfamiliar domain with those our client was looking to develop and expand. That provided inspiration for new ideas about how to combine service and product in novel ways, to redefine what customer care means, and eventually to explore new ways to integrate the role of a concierge that guides customers through interactions between product and service offerings. Furthermore, it opened the door for exploring how our client could take on the role of trend-spotter or networking hub to add value to their offering. None of this would have happened if we’d stuck strictly to our original research agenda, and the list of observations we’d scheduled.

Curiosity and Ethnographic Thinking Genuine curiosity about human interaction—including how it’s formed and shaped—is a trait that drives the work of most ethnographers. They feel compelled to ask “why?” and “how?” in nearly every social situation they encounter. They home in on what others take for granted in everyday situations, and approach what most overlook as commonplace with intrigue. Above all, they remain continually open to other ways of thinking and different perspectives. This curious disposition

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of ethnographers plays out in a couple of significant ways that are beneficial beyond fulfilling the objectives of research projects. First, even though they are professionals in cultural observation and analysis, ethnographers recognize that adopting the role of expert in the field can impede their learning about a culture. This is because many people have expectations about interactions with experts that are filled with formalized sets of behaviors loaded with implications of status and hierarchy. This can alienate research participants and limit the level of intimacy necessary for establishing rapport with them. Instead, many ethnographers find it more productive to assume the role of an apprentice in their research by opening themselves up to new experiences, impressions, and emotions as if they were learning a new trade. They follow research participants, ask questions, try their hand at new practices, learn the local lingo, and immerse themselves in the daily experiences of their figurative “master.” Some ethnographers also liken this mode of thinking to that of a child learning a new subject. Taking on these roles can make ethnographers appear naive to others. This is because most apprentices and children aren’t afraid to ask dumb questions, repeat themselves, make obvious mistakes, or become the subject of ridicule.Their curiosity outweighs any desire to demonstrate knowledge or to assert status—since they have neither in this context. While this can make ethnographers vulnerable, it’s quite often the best way to develop a deep and personal understanding of the daily lives of research participants. In fact, I’d wager that most ethnographers would agree that few field experiences carry more meaning than lessons learned from laughter at their expense. A second way that curiosity plays out in ethnographic thinking is through an elasticity of thinking that traverses between open explorations and making occasional connections to other domains (and back again). In many ways, this is the opposite of what we’ve been taught to do when learning new things. Throughout most of our lives, we’re encouraged to narrow and specialize. Our curiosity is channeled into subject areas and pre-determined trajectories, where we learn to focus on specific information and develop observational patterns related only to that area of interest. A biologist is adept at observing ecological interdependencies, an engineer looks for ways that different components can be integrated to solve a problem, etc. While curiosity plays a key role in skill development in any area of interest, this narrowing tendency can obstruct learning from areas outside of the primary domain. The genuine curiosity of ethnographic thinking demands that its practitioners see the world with a wider lens. Although their perspective does narrow at times (for example, when they need to make sense of the data they’ve gathered), ethnographers most often prioritize openness and curiosity as forms of learning that help them make new and unexpected connections to the areas of human interaction they seek to understand. They approach daily routines and common interactions with a sense of wonder, always on the lookout for data that will lead to insight, and eventually, transferrable knowledge.

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Broader Strategic Value: Discovering Unexpected Opportunities and Rethinking the Familiar Perhaps one of the greatest benefits of the type of curiosity unique to ethnographic thinking is the role it plays in identifying new opportunities. At the most basic level, ethnographic curiosity exposes unexpected interactions that can broaden purviews and reframe assumptions. It also provides an opportunity to transfer learnings from one setting to another. For example, someone working in a hospital might take learnings from their observations of airport security to inspire new approaches to handling the order of patient procedures in a clinic (or perhaps more likely, their observations at the airport would help them decide how not to handle patients!). More to the point, however, is that curiosity about airport security could become a means of inspiring new ways to reinvent how people flow through other systems. Linking observations from one domain to others begins with the open-ended curiosity of ethnographic thinking. It’s a form of curiosity that’s nearly always on, and is elastic enough to link observations in the everyday world to specific points of reference in another challenge or set of circumstances. Returning to our Tokyo explorations, that visit to the shoe hotel triggered many more useful and innovative ideas than our observations that were directly related to the client’s offerings. While our inquisitive approach in the latter did lead to small shifts in positioning the clients’ products and services, it was our genuine curiosity at the shoe hotel that eventually inspired the team to radically shift the company’s sales approach in ways that echoed the concierge model of that shop. In what eventually became a new sales model for the company, sales reps who once concentrated solely on product features or networking were asked to broaden their view and become more curious about the context of client needs.They were asked to gradually build on the needs and interests they identified with a set of offerings that integrated services, products, and experiences that were tailored to the needs of their customers. Among other things, this involved building a feedback loop from the sales force to the company’s innovation and research and development groups. This helped jumpstart the development of new offerings, including previously unrecognized service and product pairings that provided aggregate added value to customers. It also provided much deeper layers of insight into the aspirations, values, priorities, and context of customers’ lives. In some cases, this new approach even became an effective way for the sales force to recruit new sales reps from within their current customer base, effectively growing market share through expanding the curiosity of the sales force itself. To be sure, not all companies immediately use the insights they gain from ethnographic curiosity in this way. Organizations need to be structured so that findings rooted in genuine curiosity have a pathway that leads from insights to the marketplace (or other recognizable goal). In an article on Fostering Curiosity, Dieter Imboden argues that “basic curiosity-driven research is ultimately the most important long-term resource for scientific innovation. However, the transfer of research results from the scientists to the economic system is often complicated” (Imboden,

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2009). He advocates for what he calls “transfer offices” whose main task is to usher the process from curiosity to ideas to tangible outcomes. Some obvious examples of this transfer include innovation groups, research and development, consultants, or accelerators. While this approach can prevent the loss of knowledge, it’s also important to recognize that the knowledge gained from curiosity is often cumulative, and can sometimes inspire entirely new approaches to initiatives that are completely unrelated to a project’s original objectives. Opportunities for ideas to cross-pollinate between different areas of thinking (or different parts of an organization) are only possible when teams can reference a broad and growing “catalog” of experiences that trigger those unique (and sometimes unexpected) results. Remaining continually open, receptive, and curious is the key.This means going beyond the immediate focus of a project, and integrating ethnographic curiosity as a key way of looking at the world. For people who are part of companies and organizations recognized for their innovative work, this approach clearly resonates. The 2011 Science Careers Top Employers Survey found that “When asked to describe “what makes the best company, the best,” survey respondents specifically mentioned “supports a culture of innovation,” “employee-driven curiosity,” and “innovative ideas of everyone are considered” (Milano, 2011). As such, a critical part of a culture of innovation in any organization includes curiosity about new ways to approach internal processes, including data analysis and interactions within an organization’s operations. Because the ways many of us have been encouraged to specialize also tend to extend to the modes of analysis and interpretation we’re taught to apply to problem solving, teams can find themselves sticking to proven routines that feel safe. But what if they applied the curiosity of ethnographic thinking to their analyses and operational processes as well? For instance, in response to a “this is the way it’s always been done” approach to data analysis, the genuinely curious ethnographic thinker looks around and considers different forms of analysis by asking: “What other ways could our data be analyzed? What other modes of interpretation might we apply to our results? Whose perspective(s) would radically change how we think about this challenge? What other tools might significantly change how we reach actionable insights? How might we approach this if we were in an entirely different organization?” By maintaining this curiosity about analysis, processes, and interactions, teams can integrate a range of analytical frameworks and different perspectives that unearth new ideas that would ordinarily be filtered out by tried and true approaches. This is useful both at the beginning of analysis stages, as well as in mid-project reviews that help teams pause and apply a more expansive view of how the team is approaching a challenge. This use of curiosity isn’t limited to innovation teams, of course. For example, a Human Resources manager tasked with hiring for a creative position might supplement the company’s standard resume and portfolio reviews, by adding a series of creative challenges for candidates to complete with current employees over the course of a week. Rather than relying solely on standard qualifications, the HR manager’s review of potential candidates might then encompass feedback

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from current employees, a studio-style critique from the creative director, or other methods that shed light on the candidates’ potential fit from diverse and different perspectives. To do this effectively, the HR manager needs to enlist curiosity at multiple stages, including a desire to discover more about the candidates as people in the context of interactions with others (not just employees filling a role), and an openness to discovering unanticipated ways the candidate might fit into the organization. This requires the HR manager to reconsider traditional standards by which candidates are evaluated, and to be curious about other models for conducting his/ her work. She or he will need to be curious about the ways in which the candidates go about responding to the challenge, the worldview each of them brings to it, and the potential for candidates to bring a new dynamic to the company or team … all observations that are more fully useful when driven by an ethnographic curiosity. In most business settings, meeting customer needs is an inherent and critical means of growth. A company that opens itself up to understanding those needs in the context of their customers’ daily lives has taken an important first step towards inventing new ways to fulfill customer needs. Curiosity is a critical part of innovating to meet those needs, and to adjust a company’s offering accordingly. It’s also an important part of keeping thinking fresh within a company or organization so that those needs can be fulfilled in creative and compelling ways. Embracing genuine curiosity both in the field and within the company, over time and at all levels (not just contained within research projects) is at the heart of truly transformative innovation.

2 EXPANDING AWARENESS

From the Field: Dead and Dying Technology We first met Anit in Cairo in the spring of 2006. My research partner and I had just started a project focusing on technology in the home among the emerging middle class, and Anit, 24, was one of our first research participants. She lived with her parents and three younger sisters, and was resolutely secular (unlike her mother and siblings who were all veiled). When we arrived at her family’s large apartment on the third floor, we met Anit’s mother, who served us some tea and a snack, and invited us to move into the living room where two of her daughters were watching TV. We talked for a bit, and the conversation eventually shifted to extended family, which prompted Anit to offer to show us some pictures she just took during a recent visit to see her newborn niece. She invited us to her bedroom, where her laptop she used for work was charging on the bed. As Anit lifted the lid and began clicking through snapshots, our observation skills kicked into high gear. We were enjoying the photos, but also started scanning the room intermittently, looking for signs of other technologies she wasn’t sharing with us. There were two cell phones (one charging), a landline phone, a small TV, and on a desk in a far dusty corner covered with clothes and an assortment of stuffed animals and notebooks … a clearly neglected desktop PC. When we were finished looking at the photos, and chatted a bit more, we eventually asked, “so, what’s up with your computer over there?” Anit, acting almost as if she was unaware of its existence, replied “oh, that’s my PC from when I was in school.” “Do you still use it?” I responded. “It’s broken, it has too many viruses. Besides, now I have this laptop.”This triggered a much more in depth conversation about why the desktop was “broken” and when it reached its current state of demise. At first, this incident didn’t seem so important, but over the course of our project, which included research in four other countries with emerging middle classes,

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the pattern repeated itself. And, while the initial focus of the work was on how technologies were integrated into the daily lives of the emerging middle classes, our observations of disintegration became one of the most important findings of our research. More specifically, we found that the neglect of technologies like desktop PCs was widespread, and furthermore that their neglect was largely due to viruses and other software malfunctions that our participants attributed mistakenly to hardware malfunctions. The result: our observations were used to help the company develop its “Healthy-PC” initiative that focused on automating software updates and virus resolution. Looking back to our observations, if we’d focused solely on what our participants were most interested in showing us (how cool their newest shiny gadgets were) we would have missed this key finding entirely. Expanding our awareness beyond the task at hand led us to make the key observations that helped us reframe the challenge and devise a strategy to solve a problem that was previously unrecognized.

Expanded Awareness and Ethnographic Thinking Many ethnographers have spent countless hours in the homes, workplaces, and communities of people who are initially strangers to them. Among all the stimuli they encounter in these settings, there is no prescribed set of observations that are always key to forming an understanding of a culture. Instead, ethnographers are continually on the lookout for cues that will help them paint a fuller picture of the culture they’re exploring. While observing, the ethnographer’s aim is to look beyond the obvious and discover the key components that collectively make up an “ecosystem” of observations. These ecosystems are always complex and are made up of many different cues. To demonstrate the wide range and level of their complexity, here’s a sampling of the some of the most common observations ethnographers consider: body language, interpersonal interactions, behavioral triggers, contradictions, unspoken priorities, normalized practices, sequences of events, affinities, attachments, repellants, workarounds, social transgressions, implicit hierarchies, priorities, neglected people/places/things, honored people/places/things, displays of comfort (or discomfort), unconscious habits and practices, and interactions with material goods. Each of these find their way into the ethnographic mind as ethnographers examine the sights, sounds, scents, touches, or tastes of the culture that surrounds them. A core part of this examination of cues is the ability to continually sort and prioritize levels of relevance in situ. This skill is sometimes described as context-awareness, but it also includes visual literacy, layered listening, and the ability to identify and home in on relevant details in order to explore them in more depth. Using layered listening as an example, this skill involves ongoing analytical and anticipatory layers of thinking that run parallel to interactions with participants. This might be best described as an internal voice that continually searches for the cultural meaning behind statements people make, and then attempts to find points

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of interaction that can be used to explore the significance and lived experience of those meanings for participants. In this mode, ethnographers are both listening and constantly asking themselves “Is this relevant? Is this promising? Will it lead to deeper cultural understanding?” and “Should I explore it further?” Layered listening also involves detecting cues that participants send about their current state of mind, including mood, level of engagement, and unstated opinions about their relationships with others. Intonation, body language, disposition, sequencing, context—they’re all part of language people use, and they serve as indicators of worldview, values, priorities and preferences. Listening in multiple layers like this requires careful attention, continuous and simultaneous interpretation of these cues, and the ability to think ahead to guide interactions in ways that can build a richer picture of cultural meanings. This can be a very complex and difficult task, since many of the indicators for cultural meaning are non-verbal. In fact, research by anthropologist Ray Birdwhistell indicates that the verbal part of most communication between humans accounts for less than 35 percent (Birdwhistell, 1970). As such, when layered listening is combined with visual scanning and other modes of expanded sensing, it can take on the quality that might be described as “strategic wandering”1 during which ethnographers continually scan their surroundings and broaden the receptivity of all their senses. Many try to spend as much time as they can immersed in the daily activities that are common in the field site they’re exploring. They go to local markets, take public transportation, stroll through parks, buy food from street vendors, watch the comings and goings at a train station, even purposely wait in long lines. In each activity, they open up their senses and use all of their observational abilities (not just their vision) to detect key expressions, processes, environments, and behaviors or conditions that give them insight into the everyday interactions unique to that culture. What might look like the simple task of mailing a letter, for example, includes an ongoing survey of the sights, sounds, tastes, smells, and feel of this experience as a vehicle for learning about a culture. To differentiate this from our consideration of curiosity in the previous chapter, let’s consider a more detailed example as a way to break down the expanded awareness of ethnographic thinking. Imagine you have a dinner date with and old friend at a restaurant you know nothing about in an unfamiliar neighborhood.You make your way to the restaurant, following your directions. On the most basic level, you need to pay attention to street signs and signals. However, as an ethnographic observer whose senses are open to stimuli beyond the useful and obvious, you make additional observations along the way. You consciously note the types of houses (age, style, density, etc.) and types of businesses (chains, boutiques, restaurants, hair salons, etc.) that are in the neighborhood. You also take note of the configuration between houses and businesses—the geography that conditions social interactions. You observe and mentally index the types of people that live and work there—the kinds of clothing they wear, their age ranges, ethnicity, their interactions, even their walking gait and pace. When you approach the restaurant, you take note of the kinds of cars parked there—their make, model, year, condition. You also read the

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bumper stickers on those cars, and take note of the political or social sentiment of signs in store windows, or flyers on telephone poles. Running in parallel to these observations, you enlist ethnographic thinking to apply deeper levels of questioning to your observations as you make them. For example, you might ask yourself: “In this environment, why are certain people, places, or things honored (or met with disapproval)? How do people relate to place and space here? What sounds go unnoticed by occupants, and why? What aesthetic choices have they made, and why? What sorts of interactions appear common in these spaces, and why? What interactions might be deemed disruptive, and why? When, where, and how are conflicts or transgressions of norms accepted or reprimanded? Why? By whom? Where are there obvious displays of difference? When is difference expressed more subtly, and why?” Over the course of your entire journey, you stitch together a cultural understanding of the community as you compile observations and consider how they might inter-relate along your journey. Taken together, you’ve developed more than an impression. You’ve amassed different points of observational data that begin to form an interpretation of the values, priorities, range of behaviors, and interactions that occur within the system of relationships you observed. Over time, these interpretations might coalesce to form cultural meaning and insight. This doesn’t take the place of data analysis, but does help ethnographers direct and shape their inquiries, as well as explore new topics more strategically. It’s worth noting here that the question “why?” sits at a level higher than those that tend to elicit facts, such as who, what, when, where, and to a certain extent, how.This is because answers to the question “why?” are inherently interpretive, and, in the ethnographic mind, depend heavily on substantiation from field observations. In this sense, the ethnographer’s expanded awareness functions somewhat like a detective who uses his or her heightened situational awareness, to build a case that ultimately answers the question, “Why?” Expanded awareness is also at the core of discovering the difference between the “sayable” and the “unsayable”—a key asset of ethnographic thinking that helps ethnographers understand how hierarchy, power, and other cultural constructs influence individual behavior. Sometimes incorrectly phrased as “the difference between what people say and what they do,” discovering what is sayable or unsayable is more nuanced and complex than merely pointing out contradictions. At the outset, ethnographers often use expanded sensing to observe the social rules that determine what is acceptable or taken for granted by others by looking closely at everyday patterns of speech, modes of behavior, and forms of exchange. These are typically the socially “sanctioned” ways of speaking, behaving, and interacting—the sayable (or doable). When people violate these norms through subversions or other irregular actions—the unsayable—their actions tend to trigger corrective or enforcement reactions from others. These reactions reveal not only who tends to take on the role of authority in a given setting, but also the manner in which the collective conscience shapes their enforcement. By using expanded sensing to observe cues

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about why and how individuals challenge or violate cultural norms,2 ethnographers can identify emerging forms of resistance, appropriation, and leadership. The result of this form of observation offers a highly detailed and informative picture of how power dynamics work within a given culture, leading to deeper insights into the origins or drivers behind individual motivations. The basis for these insights, and the ability to observe interactions and behaviors that inform it, are only possible when the expanded awareness of ethnographic thinking is used to look beneath the surface of everyday interactions to read between the lines of those social norms and interpret the meaning behind disruptions. Examples of this are plentiful in applied research, since the social spaces between sanctioned norms and resistance often occur where people experiment and invent whole new ways of relating to products, services, or systems. In what is now a familiar story, online file sharing of copyrighted material is one scenario in which consumer resistance and innovation are both unsanctioned and unsayable. However, after Napster and other file exchange innovations like BitTorrent, millions of consumers shifted from the sayable (“I really like that artist, I’m going to buy their latest recording”) to the unsayable (to themselves: “I’ll just download it for free from a file-sharing service”). In the same study of technology use in middle class homes, referenced at the beginning of this chapter, we witnessed this first hand. As part of our research, we spoke to small groups of teenagers who were friends. In most every case, they were very forthcoming about everything related to their tech device usage: frequency, preferences, location, et cetera. However, when our inquiries ventured into the type of content they consumed, we were often met with awkward fidgeting, increased eye contact between the participants, circuitous, evasive, or vague language, and the occasional giggle. We later discovered, of course, that they were pirating media, and were afraid to mention it due to increasing public information campaigns warning of persecution for copyright infringement (and quite possibly their perception of us as researchers who in some ways represented positions of authority to them). The financial repercussions of these teenagers’ new behaviors are well documented. A recent study by Envisonal covering North America, Europe and the Asia–Pacific regions found that: In 2010, 3,690 petabytes of data … was being infringed. By 2012, that had grown to 9,570 petabytes. In November of 2011, they estimated 297 million infringing users. By January 2013, that figure grew to 327 million unique internet users, who are accessing infringed content at least once a month (Resnikoff, 2013). However, what eventually became a crisis for the music industry might have been averted, or at least repositioned for their benefit.3 With ethnographers in the field using expanded awareness to understand not only how people acquire and share music in their everyday lives, but how they think about intellectual and creative

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ownership, the music industry could have had a clearer understanding of the file sharing trend in the early 2000s. Depending on findings, one possible way to address the challenge might have included a campaign to associate leading music “pirates” and file exchange websites with the history of resistance and rebellion commonly associated with emerging music trends (rock, rap, hip hop, etc.)—essentially positioning them as cutting-edge, disruptive music distributors and promoters with whom alternative models of revenue sharing could have been developed. Perhaps they could have even partnered with them to find ways to track data on trends, including the growing or declining popularity of certain artists. Instead, lawsuits and threats prevailed in desperate attempts by the industry to preserve their old profit model. In the meantime, providers like iTunes stepped in to fill the void, all to the ultimate detriment of the music industry’s image and profits. It remains to be seen if streaming services or other revenue models will reinvigorate the industry. They are clearly still recovering from their narrow view of the industry, as well as being out of touch with their customers and the new ways they accessed media that were socially unsanctioned (and largely unsayable), but obviously quite common.

Broader Strategic Value: Reading Social Scripts and Navigating Unfamiliar Settings Using expanded awareness to detect and understand the unspoken boundaries of behavioral norms can help anyone estimate the likely range of reactions a given behavior might trigger, as well as help them behave according to the responses they would like to trigger. Take, for example, a moment when someone (even you, perhaps) violates an unspoken norm and is faced with reactions from others that indicate, either directly or indirectly, that the behavior or speech was inappropriate. Often the most obvious focus of attention in these situations is on the transgressor. After all, their violation of social norms is the catalyst for the responses that follow. But the reactions of those who respond to the transgression are also key indicators. They demonstrate the ways in which the respondents take on the responsibility of letting the transgressor and/or others present know that something has gone “wrong.” Because these expressions and behaviors can be complex, nonverbal, and change over time, expanded awareness is critical for reading their cultural significance. For those practicing expanded awareness, these events often include subtle indicators for how those involved are “supposed” to behave—collectively forming a social script to which everyone involved conforms, either consciously or unconsciously. Applying expanded awareness helps shed light on the sorts of public language and forms of delivery that are considered appropriate and inappropriate in this culture or setting. Workplace cultures are fertile ground for this. Unspoken norms and orthodoxies within an organization drive behaviors that have a direct impact on business decisions every day. For example, in an ethnographic assessment of organizational culture I conducted with two research partners, our use of expanded sensing allowed us to gradually build a deep understanding of internal conflicts that

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were obfuscating creativity, innovation, and collaboration in a mid-size non-profit. Our first indication of how underlying and unspoken norms impacted the organization occurred when we began to receive a number of requests from junior staff members to conduct our interviews with them outside of the workplace setting. As our research unfolded and expanded to include participatory observation, we began to see patterns among junior staff, including the perception that executive leadership, while sincere, was actually quite rigid, hierarchical, and unsupportive of suggestions for change in the organization. Furthermore, they perceived senior staff members (most of whom had been in the organization for over a decade) as gatekeepers who actively worked against cross-departmental collaboration and new approaches.They never shared these perspectives directly with senior staff or executive leadership, either in the course of everyday interactions or during the many workshops that had been organized by executive leadership to encourage collaboration and break down silos. Instead, an undercurrent of unspoken skepticism from junior-level staff built up over time that eroded morale and inhibited actual change. Among senior staff, we witnessed a parallel set of unspoken norms. During a task force meeting we attended, a senior staff member shared that “when we ask them [junior staff] to think more creatively, what we get back from them is unprofessional and unacceptable.” Other senior staff present affirmed. From our perspective, what that senior staff member didn’t say was that junior staff required more mentoring and guidance from senior staff to help them develop their ideas further. The unspoken consequences of this statement (and others like it) were to position senior leadership as frustrated victims, who should be absolved of their responsibility to foster a process of professional development, encourage creative thinking, and exemplify collaboration. Between our observations of communications style, unspoken judgments and priorities, and the consequences of these actions, we found that at least three norms within the organization—de-prioritization of open, honest, and direct communication, the use of educational pedigree or seniority to dismiss new ideas, and strict control over information (particularly budgets)—created an environment in which junior staff felt stifled and discouraged, trust was eroded, silos reinforced, and change rendered nearly impossible. None of this was articulated explicitly by any staff members in our interviews. Nor were these norms part of any agreed upon strategy for the organization. They had simply evolved over time and were inherited (and unconsciously adopted) by staff members at all levels. Our research team had to use expanded awareness to read body language, interpret the meanings behind statements, and observe the dynamics of interactions, to fully understand how the organizational norms—and the power relations embedded within them— were preventing the staff from embracing creativity, collaboration, and innovation. With these norms identified, the organization was able to move toward addressing them explicitly, while simultaneously developing new norms and practices built on shared values and desired future states. While it takes time and a great deal of field experience to develop a sense for which cues are most meaningful, expanded awareness can be learned, and has many

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valuable applications beyond research, especially in unfamiliar settings. For example, many people begin a new job with a company orientation of one sort or another. In addition to approaching this process as a means of learning the policies and procedures to which they must adhere, those applying ethnographic expanded awareness could use this as an opportunity to understand the culture of the organization (including unstated norms), and their potential role within it. Beyond the content presented about company policies and procedures, they would ask themselves how the content is presented, who presents it, and think about the unstated priorities communicated through its presentation (such as order of events, degrees of emphasis, and disposition of presenters).They would also observe the interactions between presenters and new employees, interactions between presenters themselves, and even the layout of the room, the format of the orientation, and the timing of its components. They would observe all these things in an effort to piece together a deeper understanding of how the company relates to employees, as well as the sets of expectations company leaders have of employee behavior. Applying expanded awareness in this situation is very similar to how an ethnographer might operate in the field. Beyond the obvious areas of focus presented by the orientation staff, the ethnographic mind is actively engaged in discovering empirical “evidence” needed to form a deeper understanding of the company’s culture. With this understanding, the ethnographic mind can begin to develop comparisons, and, eventually, insights. For the new employee in this example, this could provide them with additional perspective they need to excel in their new position, build empathy with fellow employees, or perhaps even craft a diplomatic exit strategy should they realize that the unspoken company values don’t align with their own. To close, I’d like to share the perspective of an anthropologist working in the non-profit sector, who posted the following reflection on her work and how her background informs it: I no longer work formally as an anthropologist, but I use all of the hard and soft skills I acquired in pursuit of my PhD every day. I drop into new foreign cultures nearly every month (new nonprofit clients) and use all of my field skills to quickly pick up their language (I met with a major art museum yesterday and this afternoon will be talking community health care with a grassroots organization), assess and learn to work within the appropriate political and social structure, know when to reach past the resident “stranger handler” to get the real info, figure out the genealogy of donors and organizations’ leaders, conduct skillful interviews to get to the deep culture, etc. Her experience demonstrates how someone with an ethnographic mindset applies their skills in expanded awareness to navigate unfamiliar settings (in her case, the complex world of nonprofit organizations), and take effective action based on her insights. Her ability to “assess and learn” political structures and “reach past the

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resident stranger handler” or “figure out” donors and leaders are all predicated upon a set of skills that rely on expanded awareness in unfamiliar settings that go beyond simple information gathering, institutional value statements, or official discourse. Collectively, her observations lead to insights, and more specifically, to insights that are substantiated empirically, making them actionable in ways that “intuition” isn’t. By accumulating and cross-referencing what she senses, she solves problems in her everyday professional life in more meaningful and effective ways because she can target key challenges and leverage the insights she’s gained about social scripts to affect change that provides value to her clients.

Notes 1 Some ethnographers have taken inspiration for their observational practice from French psychogeographers via a practice known as a “dérive,” which translates literally as drift. A dérive is an unplanned journey through a landscape during which the surrounding architecture, people, and geography direct the traveler’s path and interactions, with the ultimate goal of encountering new experiences and gaining a deeper understanding of their environment. Situationist theorist Guy Debord defines the dérive as “a mode of experimental behavior linked to the conditions of urban society: a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiances” (Debord, 1958). 2 For more about the “sayable” and “unsayable” see Foucault’s The Archaeology of Knowledge (Foucault, 1972). 3 The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) is undertaking some efforts to do this primarily via supporting streaming services in combination with enforcement against pirating music. See www.ifpi.org/content/library/DMR2013.pdf for more.

3 DEFERRING JUDGMENT

From the Field: Diamonds and Handshakes “They’re a culture living in the past,” one regulator argued when asked why their efforts at environmental code enforcement had largely failed among the jewelry manufacturers operating within the downtown of a major metropolitan US city. It was a tough point of departure for a project that spanned nearly 3,300 businesses, 10,000 workers, and nine regulatory agencies. Our team was participating in a regulatory roundtable to help frame the challenges regulators were facing within an industry that had thrived in downtown with minimal regulatory oversight and under building and operating codes that had not been reviewed for almost 30 years. The regulators’ complaints were many, but most seemed to boil down to a mix of disinterest and dismissiveness among jewelry manufacturers, most of whom were immigrants of Armenian (40%), Persian (25%), and Far Eastern (25%) descent. A few of the regulatory agencies had developed consultation and outreach campaigns aimed at the industry, but these efforts weren’t ongoing. A task force including business owners and members of the regulatory agencies was also formed to exchange information and share knowledge. However, the proliferation of agencies with jurisdiction over the industry had proven to be overwhelming to manufacturers, many of whom found these task forces and related regulatory workshops time consuming, alienating and irrelevant. Regulators speculated about other obstacles to compliance, including resistance to changing traditional practices and methods of jewelry making that were passed down from previous generations. They also cited language barriers between themselves (largely Euro–American, Latino–American, and African–American) and jewelry manufacturers. Efforts to overcome these barriers by regulators included adjusting regulatory requirements to better fit the scale and practices of the industry, and translating regulatory documents into Armenian and Spanish. Although some of this helped, most of these efforts were met with suspicion by the industry.

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Why was all this effort being made to more effectively regulate the industry? Traditional jewelry manufacturing practices have serious environmental, public health, and workplace health consequences. Jewelry casting processes involve the use of cyanide, the waste from which must be separated from sewer systems to prevent contamination of waste streams. Likewise, proper ventilation is essential for workers’ health, since many manufacturing processes produce harmful fumes. Both of these were uncommon in most of the older buildings manufacturers occupied since their original use was intended as office space. Since most manufacturers leased their space, new regulations covering waste treatment and ventilation forced property owners to either retrofit buildings to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars, or lose their long time tenants. Our team’s preliminary research with jewelry manufacturers exposed complaints about the ever-increasing, disparate, and sometimes costly burdens of regulation and associated paperwork—all of which are enforced by a multitude of different agencies. Although this problem didn’t go unrecognized by regulators (regulatory consolidation was a topic of consideration among some on the task force), boundaries between agencies were legislated in part to prevent liability issues from arising. And, they argued, regardless of bureaucratic red tape, code violations remained a reality. From our initial assessment, it would have been easy to define the problem in terms of uncooperative jewelry manufacturers and ethnocentric regulators. However, what we needed was a deeper dive into all cultures involved (including the “culture” of regulation), and a fuller understanding of interactions between them. This required us to defer judgment on all levels, to understand the complex rationales and cultural logics behind the behaviors of all of the different players. Findings from our secondary research indicated that business development among ethnic groups in Western countries tends to follow some common patterns. Due to language barriers and cultural differences, networks rooted in common ethnicities help facilitate access to industry resources. They often take the form of ethnic trade associations (Light & Bonacich, 1988), familial alliances, ethnic social organizations (Sway, 1988), and, in some cases, geographic concentration.Those most directly involved in manufacturing jewelry in our study were predominantly Armenian, and many of their business practices have followed similar patterns. From our fieldwork, we confirmed that the Armenian Jeweler’s Association was an important networking tool for its members, as well as a way to access resources and trade information. Likewise, diamond dealers’ clubs, largely dominated by Jewish Israelis, were an essential part of how their members conducted business. Built almost entirely on networks of trust and inter-dependent connections between individuals, these clubs held members fully accountable for their behavior, as well as that of any new members they involved in transactions. Any fault on debts, losses, or unethical dealings were traced directly back to the original member who invited the offending party to the club. Within these tightly knit, inter-dependent networks, any forms of dishonesty were exposed rapidly and widely. This form of insider policing was extended to exchanges with jewelry manufacturers as well, since they often worked on consignment and were in possession of precious metals and stones for which

Deferring Judgement27

they posted no collateral. These interactions and exchanges privileged ongoing face-to-face contact that both built trust and established a close-knit system of checks and balances. It was a system that has been practiced within the industry for generations—an intricately woven network that combines ethnic, familial, and business relationships. In addition to these networks, many jewelry manufacturing businesses were relatively small-scale operations (three to six employees) that were located in close geographic proximity to one another, each handling various stages of the manufacturing process. This allowed for ease of transactions between them, much of which was conducted based on handshakes. Ethnicity was closely associated with each of the different stages of manufacturing, steeped in long-standing traditions handed down through generations of craftsmen with roots in the Middle East. Although we recognized that a great deal more ethnographic research would be needed to draw any conclusions about the significance of inter-ethnic relations within this industry, we found more evidence for stable relations than conflict. When we expanded our research to include building owners (many of whom were of Jewish–Iranian descent) we found that while they did hold some sway within the industry based on their capital and real-estate holdings, they largely worked in cooperation with tenants to resolve issues related to regulation. This was particularly remarkable given that their jewelry manufacturing tenants were being forced to comply with new regulations that required expensive building modifications that impacted their profits. Speculation about urban renewal projects in the jewelry district sometimes complicated these relationships as building owners began to consider residential conversions of some buildings. However, disincentives for residential conversions of many buildings (e.g., building additional parking for residents) meant that most owners chose to continue working with their jewelry manufacturing tenants regardless of associated regulatory costs. In addition, some building owners said that they manage their buildings in the jewelry district “like a family,” by getting to know their tenants personally and keeping close contact with them and the status of their businesses. In some cases, this even extended into flexible lease payment terms that helped tenants adapt to swings in market conditions. Taken together, our observations of inter-ethnic relations generated a clear need to frame the project in terms of “cultures of practice” rather than ethnic enclaves. While ethnicity clearly informed interactions between manufacturers, laborers, and building owners, we saw far too many instances in which ethnic and language differences were easily overcome. So, we decided to explore the nature of discourse within different cultures of practice further. Among our first observations was that language barriers and ethnic differences between groups operating within the industry were never cited as an obstacle to their interactions primarily because their cultures of practice de-prioritized ethnic difference in the interest of other common values they shared. In contrast, regulators continually cited language barriers and ethnic differences as the primary barriers for their interactions with manufacturers. In addition to considerations of language, our application of a cultures-ofpractice approach helped us understand that the bodies of knowledge, values, and

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practices necessary to operate a successful regulatory agency were clearly distinct from those necessary to operate a successful jewelry manufacturing business. And, while it was the responsibility of manufacturers and building owners to know the regulations to which they must comply, they generally expected that this should be a small concession for doing business. On the other hand, it was the primary focus of the regulatory agency to know about both relevant regulations and the operational processes of manufacturers (jewelers and otherwise) so that they could best understand industrial practices and regulate possible dangers. In short, it was the regulator’s job to intrude. In the case of the jewelry industry and its cultures of practice, this intrusion was difficult to integrate because of its history and integral reliance upon internal networks of trust, which happened to be largely embodied by ethnicities not shared by most regulators. This situation was complicated further when regulators assumed Armenian manufacturers were unnecessarily clinging to tradition, or part of a “culture living in the past.”While it is clear that regulators working with the jewelry industry made numerous concessions and extended sincere offers to familiarize manufacturers and building owners with regulations and compliance, educational efforts operating from the perspective of “alleviating ignorance” devalued the role that manufacturers might take within the regulatory process. In terms of social sustainability, the well-established networks of trust and interdependent connections have worked consistently for successive generations of jewelry manufacturers. This, matched with the personal involvement of building owners, seemed indicative of a unique inter-weaving of successful businesses practices, longstanding ethnic traditions, and inter-ethnic relations. The industry’s networks of trust allowed it to function in ways that helped it overcome inter-ethnic difference between groups, volatile market conditions, and increasing regulatory restrictions. However, contrasts in worldviews between the cultures of practice for regulators versus manufacturers made regulatory compliance a continual challenge. In the end, our team recommended a combination of cultural sensitivity training for regulators (to address embedded ethnocentrism) as well as an overhaul of their outreach efforts that would more closely align with the networks of trust familiar to those within the industry. Chief among those was more one-on-one interaction with manufacturers and owners to erode industry distrust of regulators through face-to-face, interpersonal, and interdependent relationships. The idea was to pattern regulatory interactions after the networks of trust already familiar within the industry. Had we not deferred judgment in this project, and taken the time to move past the original framing of the challenge as “ethnic,” we would never have explored the cultures of practice that more directly impacted the relationship between regulators and manufacturers.

Cultural Logics and Ethnographic Thinking While personal conviction or political positions sometimes motivate ethnographers to begin exploring a topic, most put these aside once they’re in the field.

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When conducting research they move past their initial proclivities so that they can engage with participants and begin to understand the world from their perspective. Deferring judgment is key to being able to do this. This shouldn’t be confused with informed judgment (a critical skill used by ethnographers once they have a full understanding of cultural logics), which we will address later in this section. Nor should it be construed as an intention on the part of ethnographers to maintain “objectivity” in the field. Instead, deferring judgment is rooted in the need to understand as many of the factors as possible that shape the cultural logic of their participants, without alienating or biasing participants’ expressions or perspectives. At a practical level, this impartiality demonstrates to research participants that ethnographers are earnest—that they sincerely want to learn about their lives and understand their view of the world. It also increases participants’ comfort level and encourages their candid contributions. This is important because field research often takes place within the context of an unbalanced power dynamic in which the researcher is perceived as the “expert” and the research participant the “subject”—a context within which any biases expressed by the ethnographer can make participants turn suddenly cautious or defensive. In fact, many ethnographers make a point of refraining from offering their own opinions about any topic during interactions with participants, so that they can remain fully open to their perspectives and avoid influencing them or triggering self-censorship. However, most importantly, deferring judgment opens up opportunities to understand and integrate diverse and unexpected perspectives, and to understand not only how others see the world, but the rationale behind how they interact with others. This rationale is sometimes referred to as cultural logic, which can be defined as the “process of people collectively using effectively identical assumptions in interpreting each other’s actions that can allow them to hypothesize each other’s motivations and intentions” (Enfield, 2000). The key to fully understanding the layers and complexities of those assumptions is to approach the phenomena observed from as neutral a frame of mind as possible. This plays out through a process in which ethnographers dive deeply into practices that, within the native cultural context, seem common, everyday, or banal. When ethnographers approach their field interactions in this way, and open their minds to the commonplace behaviors to unearth the cultural logics that drive them, their observations can lead to interpretations that go beyond simple comparisons of cultural similarities or differences. This is particularly valuable for demonstrating how things people tend to take for granted, such as “common sense,” come to be as accepted as presumed facts. Ethnographers do this by identifying the constituent components that contribute to the formation of cultural logics, and exposing how they are embedded and enmeshed within other parts of a culture.1 Once they identify the factors that drive these logics, and develop an interpretation of how they influence everyday practices and behaviors, the ethnographer’s task shifts from understanding to one of bridging perspectives between two different cultures. That bridge is constructed primarily of interpretations the ethnographer brings to the cultural logics they’ve investigated. How people from a given

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culture construct those logics, and for what purpose, is where the ethnographer begins to use informed judgment, a strategy for communicating their findings. When that bridge is crossed by the ethnographer’s intended audience, they begin to understand the world differently themselves. They realize that there are many different ways that humans relate to the world, each with their own logic. More importantly, they also begin to re-examine their own assumptions, and to see that their own cultural logics are not as commonsensical as they might have presumed. In addition to these benefits, understanding of the contexts and factors that lead to the formation of cultural logics can also help ethnographers identify potential constraints that are delineated through those cultural logics (such as perceptions and expectations of behaviors labeled as gender specific within a culture). In applied settings, this can be used to substantiate arguments for either conforming to those cultural logics (within a design solution, for example), or identifying possibilities for disrupting them. In both bridging and identifying constraints, the entire process is built upon the ethnographer’s ability to defer judgment and fully understand the constituent components underlying cultural logics, so that their interpretations can become an effective conduit for stimulating new thinking that helps people see beyond their own worldviews.

Broader Strategic Value: Dismantling Intuition and Challenging Judgments One of the keys to appreciating the value of ethnographic thinking is to recognize the ways in which it is used to understand and interpret cultural logics. However, for those unfamiliar with ethnography, its methods and modes of interpretation might appear unconventional, or even mysterious. I had a client who, after more than a year of working on projects with him, asked to “ride along” with our research team at each stage of the process because he still couldn’t understand how we developed our insights.This request came from the same person who only eight months prior told our research team that he had a young cousin who lived near one of our field sites who was “really good with people” and could “just collect what we needed” for qualitative data on a very complex healthcare project. So, it would seem that his request to ride along with us was an indication of some progress in his interest in how ethnographers work. The process was a struggle for him, though. From his perspective (based on his view of his own culture), it was difficult to understand why the team needed to “go through all of this” to reach an understanding of how and why people behaved the way they did. For him, his “intuition” was easier and faster. In the end, our team had to work with him continually to help him parse out the difference between his assumptions and the substantiated insights reached through ethnographic analysis and interpretation. Surprisingly, this example is one with a relatively positive outcome. In some workplaces, it’s not uncommon that decisions related to cultural logics of consumers, patients, or users are laden with assumptions. Instead of gathering and analyzing qualitative data, a presumed intuitive understanding of the customer drives decision-making. Sentiments such as “I

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already know what our customers want,” or “My wife/husband loves it,” are the kinds of unsubstantiated views based on personal judgments that can, and sometimes do, drive strategy and development within organizations. When “intuition” and ethnographic thinking collide like this, the latter can disrupt sometimes long-held assumptions people have about their own culture and their view of it. They may even see ethnographic interpretations as challenging or devaluing their view—what is “obvious” (to them) about a culture. This can be overcome if ethnographers carefully contrast the two perspectives in ways that help co-workers appreciate the value of ethnographic thinking. It’s often useful to frame this contrast as a matter of sampling and method.While personal experiences may provide people with a good understanding of the interactions at play within their own culture that could lead them to a cursory sense of its cultural logics, ethnographers approach the task much more purposefully and systematically. First, it’s important to recognize that “intuition” is valid as one lens for understanding culture based on personal experience and immersion within it; but this knowledge is often mistakenly seen as empirical when it’s actually an aggregate of unfiltered reactions to a random set of personal observations and interactions that have accrued over time. This knowledge is rooted in one particular history of experience, which can become so engrained in the mind of a person that it may be perceived as naturally self-evident. A phenomenon known as confirmation bias is a perfect example of this, in which observers look for evidence to confirm their own existing beliefs, and ignore contradictions. In contrast, rather than tapping a single set of untargeted personal experiences, ethnographers select a diverse array of research participants who are native to a culture to collect as wide a range of experiences as possible. Then, they focus their observations and interactions with these participants on a specific topic or area of investigation, based on the objectives they outline in their research plan. As part of this process, they get directly involved with these participants’ daily lives in ways that provide them with multiple perspectives. The process of deriving insights differs for each approach. Intuitive knowledge often relies on the unsubstantiated and de-contextualized opinions of one person to form a point of view. As such, judgments are central to how intuitive insights are formed. In contrast, ethnographic insights are built on a systematic process of valueneutral interpretations to discover the collective meaning behind observed patterns in behaviors, interactions, and perspectives among a diverse range of research participants.They’re developed by explicitly deferring judgment throughout a systematic process of data gathering and interpretation to reach substantiated ethnographic insights. This typically consists of the following: gathering field observations using a value neutral mindset; identifying the patterns among and between those observations; discovering broader themes across those patterns; and, eventually deriving insights rooted in anthropological theory or other collective bodies of thought on human behavior. Helping people integrate new observations with a value neutral lens is sometimes an even more difficult challenge than deconstructing intuition. The goal in these cases is not just to contrast intuition with ethnographic thinking, but to bring

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co-workers or colleagues into the fold of the ethnographic process itself.To do this, ethnographers need to provide an incentive beyond the methodological advantages of ethnographic thinking. They need to position deferring judgment, value neutrality, systematic methods, and testing interpretations against models of behavior as clauses in an insurance policy for the kinds of high stakes investments it takes to develop and market a product, program, or service.While assertions rooted in intuitive knowledge may be faster and easier, they represent only one data point—a data point that’s doubly biased since it is valid for only one individual, and is brought to the decision-making process through the lens of an insider who is more than likely pre-disposed to see their idea progress and succeed. Intuitive decision-making in these cases can be a form of judgment that masquerades as “obvious fact” in ways that escalate risk for the organization and everyone in it. However, by focusing on deferring judgment, value neutrality, systematic methods, and testing interpretations against established models and theories of culture, ethnographers can help decision-makers put their intuition on hold, so the organization can benefit from a broader and more carefully considered approach to constituent/customer behavior. In this way, the organization’s exposure to risk is reduced by ensuring that a targeted range of diversified perspectives are systematically and strategically vetted and analyzed to provide substantiated insights that can more fully inform decision-making. Subsequent quantitative assessments based on ethnographic insights are then more telling because inquiries can be structured in ways that align with the logics, contexts, experiences, needs, and behaviors of customers’ or constituents’ daily lives. The result is a much more strategic, riskabated approach that creates new pathways and broadens the potential to expand the organization’s offerings or overall market share.

Note 1 Anthropologists Ruth Benedict and Victor Turner were largely considered masters at illustrating the relationship between individual behaviors and the cultures within which they are embedded (Benedict, 2005; Turner, 1995).

4 ADAPTING THOUGHTFULLY

From the Field: Elusive Nurses and Flexible Methods Our team rose at five a.m. each day so that we could make it to the hospital well before the morning shift change at seven a.m. Once there, we shadowed nurses for three to four hours while they administered medications to patients, then drove back to the hotel to sleep, and returned again in the evening to continue our research with the night shift at seven p.m. After a week of sleeping in shifts and shadowing nurses (who move much faster through the halls of a hospital unit than you can possibly imagine), we were numb with exhaustion. Our drive to and from the hospital became a silent, trance inducing routine—the car stereo playing barely audible NPR before dawn and classical music to and from the night shift. Or was it the other way around? Who can say? It was all a blur, and we were beginning to understand how challenging, and physically draining, nursing shifts can be. Our goal was to understand the context and detail of nurse workflow during medication administration as part of a baseline study, and identify opportunities for improvement in light of a new medication distribution system our client was about to implement. After our initial assessment from stakeholder interviews, we decided to concentrate on shift changes as a critical moment when nurses shared information about patients, which was often followed by medication administration. Once in the field, however, we realized very quickly that in order to trace and understand nurse workflows at the level of detail we needed, we were going to have to be far more flexible than we anticipated. Time and time again, we were caught off guard when a nurse who appeared to be relaxing or flipping through patient charts at the nurse station would suddenly dash off without notice to tend to a slew of tasks, some of which involved medication administration, and some of which didn’t. Most of their flitting about was driven by an internal script or, in some cases, a list of tasks that some scrawled on a scrap of paper kept in their pockets (affectionately

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called their “brain”).We were privy to neither most of the time since their primary focus was on providing efficient, patient-centered care.This meant that our reflexes (and a good pair of sneakers) were our most valuable assets for tracking exactly what these nurses were doing, and when. Unlike most shadows, during which ethnographers can pause to ask participants to ponder aloud about their motivations and rationale, working with nurses afforded very few opportunities to reflect.Their priority was always the patients’ wellbeing, and we as researchers were quite simply superfluous, possibly even perceived as obfuscating their work at times. Add to this the fact that we were not legally permitted to enter patient rooms or view patient records during this study, and our windows of opportunity for understanding their motivations and rationale were significantly reduced. There were some critical times when we were able to get the nurses to reflect on their actions, habits, and workflows, but these needed to be timed so that our queries didn’t distract from patient care.We found that spot interviews while nurses were on break were an excellent way to do this. These usually took place in the hallways of the units, where we reviewed our notes with them and asked questions to clarify their intentions. None of these could be scheduled, however, due to their erratic work demands. So the responsibility fell on us to time our requests appropriately and be prepared with questions that could help us get greater resolution. If a nurse was having a difficult day, we also needed to be able to read that and respond accordingly with the timing and nature of our inquiries. Alternatively, when nurses seemed as if they were likely to be generous with their feedback, we needed to be responsive enough to capitalize on the moments they had available to collect more detailed data. This sometimes meant that we needed to team up to track and shadow a particular nurse whose feedback we felt would be promising, and then quickly pull him or her aside at the most opportune moments. While spot interviews were often some of our most productive and insightful methods, the periods of time in between them were completely unpredictable and sometimes quite dull. This required a great deal of patience and endurance during “downtimes,” as well as the ability to sort through the flurry of interactions and behaviors nurses exhibited to determine which ones carried significance for our research, which required follow up to get greater clarity, and which ones were irrelevant for our purposes. It also required the ability to simultaneously weigh a wide range of different logics—among which were the nurses’ rationale behind the ways administering medications occurred within their workflow, physician influence and their orders, patients’ (and their families’) priorities, and hospital policies—as the influence of each had varying weights on the process as it played out on the unit floor. A high tolerance for, and appreciation of, ambiguity was critical here. During a typical shift, any one of these logics might preside, or they might combine and change in ways that had varying influence on behaviors and interactions. We needed to flex and adapt continuously to ensure that we were collecting relevant and valuable data. Proper medication administration requires that nurses are sure of correct dosages, aware of ever-changing combinations of medications, and confident that the

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right medications are getting to the right patients at the right times. One of our key findings was that nurses were routinely interrupted during the medications administration process, which prevented them from effectively performing these tasks. Whether in the form of requests from colleagues, phone calls, pagers, lab technicians, therapists, physicians, family members, or some other source, they were continually bombarded by questions or other interruptions at a time when their concentration and focus were most critical. The vast majority of interruptions occurred in the main hallway of the units, often when nurses were en route to or from an on-unit medications dispensing system, or when they were preparing medications outside a patient’s room. This required us to be incredibly agile during our shadows, since the frequency and nature of the many interactions nurses had with other health-care providers was unpredictable and inconsistent. It wasn’t unusual for medication administration to begin without interruption for 15–20 minutes, only to be followed by a flurry of distractions that suspended the process for an hour or more while the ensuing matters were addressed. Afterward, nurses had to recalibrate and re-familiarize themselves with where they were in the process before they were distracted. This often required them to log in and go back through patient records, visit cabinets outside patient rooms where they may or may not have stored meds that were about to be given to a patient, double check doses, and sometimes even work their way back to the medication dispenser to check on counts and doses pulled there. From the nurses’ perspective, these interruptions were just part of their job. In our spot interviews, they rarely identified these interactions as interruptions at all, since they were within scope of their duties in one way or another. And, they didn’t see them as particularly hazardous to patients’ health. So, simply asking nurses to describe their interruptions in interviews was unlikely to have revealed what was clearly a disruptive and potentially dangerous set of interactions that were very common on unit floors. We also observed that during these periods of interruption, nurses often carried an unorganized mix of medications and related supplies in their hands or pockets on their way to or from patients’ rooms—relying on their short-term memory to keep everything sorted. This is when we shifted our observations to focus more on workarounds. While most nurses fumbled with medications in transit, some nurses were finding ways to use resources on hand to organize and keep track of medications. They improvised with clipboards as makeshift medications holders, or broke up their workflow of medication administration into clusters based on medication types or proximity of rooms. Cross-referencing our observations of workarounds with our shadows and spot interviews, we confirmed that interruptions were one of the greatest risks to patient safety for medications administration. Our analysis and ideation sessions eventually led us to recommend a range of workflow adjustments and re-prioritization of tasks and roles during medication administration. It also included recommendations for designing a carrying device to be used during medication administration that helped nurses manage and organize their meds more effectively. Our specs for

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the carrier included a second more important feature based on the most important finding—random interruptions in common spaces, even by well-meaning nurse colleagues or patients’ families. This included a clear and obvious visual indicator, integral to the medication carrying device, that demonstrated to others on the unit that the nurse should not be interrupted during the medications administration process (except in cases of emergency). In essence, the device was designed to speak for them, and serve as a visual shield for nurses at moments when their concentration was most critical to accurate medication administration (something they were unable to communicate clearly by pocketing medications before). None of our recommendations would have been possible if we had rigidly tracked only nurses’ tasks and not adjusted our method and approach to encompass distractions, interruptions, and workarounds. Nor would we have recognized a pattern among workarounds or the source of interruptions had we not flexibly adapted to observe work habits that they would most likely have considered insignificant to outsiders. To reach those valuable insights we needed to identify key behaviors outside of our protocol, be flexible enough to track them, and be adaptable enough to adjust our methods. Among other things, this meant knowing when to supplement shadows with spot hallway interviews, and knowing where to time and direct our focus (from handling medications, to person-to-person interactions, to mapping nurse pathways throughout the unit, to workarounds).

Serendipity, Flexibility, and Ethnographic Thinking Any seasoned ethnographer will tell you that fieldwork never goes as planned. Most have a slew of stories about mishaps in the field, as well as how those mishaps eventually led to unexpected insights. Shadows exemplify this phenomenon well. Using this method, an ethnographer follows a participant through a series of events, processes or tasks. It’s typically used to understand participants’ real-time interactions with systems, products, services, or processes, and to gain a detailed understanding of their personal logics or choices over time. Common applications include testing user interfaces, understanding workflows, mapping customer journeys, or prototype testing, but the method can be enlisted much more broadly as an exploratory technique. Regardless of purpose, one thing stands out consistently with this method: unexpected events. Shadows are process-focused and therefore often include interactions with people not participating in the study that lead to unpredictable occurrences. In short, shadows are inherently unconstrained and uncontrollable. Ethnographers have little choice but to adapt. So, how do ethnographers navigate the obstacles and surprises that crop up in the field to make the most of them? Those unexpected occurrences usually consist of interactions and behaviors that unfold within what are sometimes called the “spaces between”—or moments unique to a culture and its own forms of expression that research participants typically don’t think to mention explicitly. These are the serendipitous moments that ethnographers are always prepared to recognize, and are flexible enough to use as a springboard for deeper exploration or inquiry.

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For example, outside influences that change a participant’s behavior during a shadow often trigger a set of interactions that help inform the context of observations, as well as highlight the significance participants attribute to those interactions (another indicator of their values and priorities). In a recent project that involved shadowing medical sales reps during doctors’ office visits, we began to see a pattern in which interactions with the administrative staff and/or nursing staff in the office were highly informal, yet critical components of their sales strategy. For the vast majority of sales visits, the actual time the salesperson spent with the doctor (the ultimate decision maker for purchases) was extremely limited—sometimes five minutes or less. However, the time preceding this visit (as well as the time after it) was often much longer, and wise sales reps used it to socialize with the office staff and identify their needs. Beyond small talk, their conversations frequently morphed into discussions in which the staff sought informal advice about various products offered by the sales rep. Because reps visited so many different practices in their rounds, they were able to offer an informed perspective on applications of their products, as well as comparisons to other products and their uses. Their anecdotes from other practices became sources of information to the staff that added value to the products the sales reps distributed. This added value also conveyed sincerity and built trust with staff, to the point where they often formed friendships with the sales reps. By way of evidence, practices in which relationships with reps were most close were also those with consistently higher sales numbers. In this example, the reps became a mobile hub of information and advice built on informal ties (Granovetter 1973, 1982). All of these observations fell outside of our original task of observing the sales process with physicians, and determining which sales methods were most influential. Had we not been flexible and adaptable enough to follow the “side” conversations with staff, we wouldn’t have picked up on how critical they were to successful selling for the reps who operated in this way. Lulls are another example of how ethnographers leverage the value of spaces between. Breaks in action during a shadow often contain moments in which participants sometimes reveal (verbally or otherwise) other dimensions of their character, worldview, priorities, values, etc. Skilled ethnographers use lulls as moments to ask participants to reflect on how their behaviors or interactions might be different on another day, or whether they think their friends would respond similarly. Although it may seem indirect, this is often important data, and it takes an adaptable and flexible ethnographic mindset to recognize how to time these queries, and to identify which data points are significant enough to pursue. Of course, ethnographers can’t predict lulls or outside influences, or what kinds of insights they might derive from them, but they can set the stage to benefit from them. Beyond simple gut reactions to unpredictable occurrences, the ethnographer’s ability to flex and adapt rapidly are strategic shifts in focus that produce richer data and deeper insights. They rely on the ability to know when to go “off script” and break protocol, and which behaviors and interactions show promise for gathering richer data—all while keeping the original objectives of the research in

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mind. It requires a great deal of patience, an appreciation for ambiguity, and the ability to suss out relevant details amongst a flurry of actions and reactions. This last quality is particularly important for thinking flexibly since the ethnographic mind has to be willing to entertain lots of different possible logics, and to observe, document, and experiment with linking different behaviors to consider potential patterns within a participant’s logic. In short, it’s thinking on your feet … on steroids. In addition to the flexibility that some field methods like shadowing demand, ethnographic thinking is also particularly adaptive in the analysis and interpretation stages, when understanding and making sense of data is critical. For example, after reviewing field notes, artifacts, visuals, and many other types of data, ethnographers often engage in storytelling as a way to share and refine what they experienced. Then, through coding or clustering their observations, they start to find patterns across data sets. From these patterns, they identify larger themes, often through exchanges with others on their team, professionals in other disciplines, or perhaps knowledgeable community representatives. To successfully execute each of these stages, the ethnographer often needs to adopt a slightly different way of thinking. In early stages where ethnographers work on becoming more familiar with their data, the analysis process involves describing their field experiences in a manner not unlike a screenwriter, with rich descriptive detail. Later, when identifying patterns across different field experiences, they might take on a role similar to a detective, picking out relevant cultural cues and making sense of them and their relationship to other cues. Subsequent stages of analysis require other modes of thinking, and ethnographers have to decide when and where to apply each in their analysis. In practice, these different modes often overlap and frequently double back or shift in order, all depending on what’s currently needed to move the analysis along productively. When ethnographic analyses eventually result in recommendations for a sponsoring organization (corporations, government agencies, non-profits, or otherwise), ethnographers also need to be limber enough to shift disposition, and convey recommendations in ways the organization can understand and integrate with their internal culture (Morias & Malefyt, 2010).

Broader Strategic Value: Incremental Risk and Embracing Ambiguity While the adaptable and flexible qualities of ethnographic thinking are frequently productive, they do pose some risks. Too much flexibility can create a loss of focus, and being too adaptable can create situations in which valuable relationships with research participants or co-workers become fragmented. However, with careful consideration, ethnographic thinking embraces these risks and moderates them, because unexpected occurrences are one of the best means for exposing the unfamiliar, the informal, and the unspoken. More specifically, ethnographic thinking moderates risk by applying systemic thinking to those “spaces between.” First, it links unexpected occurrences to emerging patterns in field observations. Then, it produces interpretive value out of seemingly chaotic or unfamiliar situations by

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situating them within cultural contexts. Together, these form a particularly useful skill: the ability to quickly apply systemic thinking to fluctuating circumstances as they occur, and to determine the potential value of following tangents, failures, and other unexpected occurrences. A key part of knowing how to extract value from unexpected occurrences comes from the questions the ethnographic mind asks when faced with these situations. At first, those might include: When is this likely to happen again? What’s the state of mind of those involved? Have I developed enough rapport to go “off-script?” Am I dedicating enough time to pause and reflect? Could I be misreading the situation somehow? What questions might resonate best with key players, and provide the most valuable data? To this, the ethnographer also considers: What cultural factors are contributing to these behaviors? How might additional inquiries be received in this cultural context? All of these questions (and more) are likely to be occurring at a very rapid pace while new qualitative data continually informs a broader interpretation of the situation. This interpretation is critical for developing a set of actions that can either make the most of the unexpected occurrence by building rapport and digging deeper for richer data, or, alternatively, disrupting the setting and creating an awkward situation that casts a negative tone for the remainder of the interaction. The risk is that a mistimed action could dissolve rapport, trigger doubt among those involved, and ultimately degrade the quality of both relationships and data collected. These are skills that are often honed over a lifetime, in which reflecting on both successes and failures are a key part of how ethnographic thinkers learn. They’re somewhat similar to the skills of a good negotiator who can shift process-focused interactions to context-setting platforms, and vice versa, depending on current circumstances and the extent to which each can provide desired outcomes. Gary Noesner, a former FBI hostage negotiator, argues that good negotiators are “people who can dwell fairly effectively in the areas of gray, in the uncertainties and ambiguities of life.” (Holmes, 2015). Like a negotiator, appreciating both the ambiguity of other people’s motivations as well as adapting, in situ, to the ambiguities of an unpredictable situation are core skills of ethnographic thinking. The ability to embrace ambiguity and shift between perspectives also opens up opportunities for new approaches and possibilities. Because ethnographic thinking is rooted in relativism, it privileges open communication and multiple contributions from different perspectives. It also recognizes that there are many different possible paths to achieve a desired state. This is especially valuable in collaborative work, or where differing views on a team have the potential to derail a productive outcome. Tapping my experience in innovation work, this attribute of ethnographic thinking is particularly fruitful in stages of a project during which team members use their collective insight from fieldwork to begin developing early design principles. Often, they do this by prompting themselves with the beginning of a question, such as “how might we … ?” When managed well, these sessions produce a plethora of great strategies for achieving an outcome that fulfills the needs of the people for whom the design is intended. Each response to “how might we … ?” comes from

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the different perspectives and backgrounds of individual team members, but they are all rooted in the data the team collectively analyzed, and they are all treated as equally valid as they are developed, challenged, and refined. Taken together, they form a collective whole that is more comprehensive, creative, and meaningful than would otherwise be possible. Later, in the ideation stages of a project, the same appreciation for ambiguity helps teams expand their thinking and open the process to creative new possibilities for developing solutions. Here, the prompt “what if … ?” is sometimes used to help generate ideas from many different perspectives. Approaching each idea as if it has the same potential for reaching a solution is a critical part of embracing ambiguity as team members offer even the most outrageous suggestions within the safety of a team that’s willing to suspend judgment. By embracing ambiguity and acknowledging that there are many ways to accomplish the same goal, a much wider range of creative thought is stimulated. And, perhaps most importantly, results from these sessions often produce mash-ups and mergers of different components of ideas that more effectively and creatively address the design principles in unexpected ways. Without this kind of open appreciation for ambiguity, teams can easily fracture, and individual work streams can diverge into routine specialization that can drain a project of creativity and truly innovative thinking. It also facilitates a team dynamic in which incremental adaptations to ideas that were collectively formed become an important part of refining a solution in which everyone has an investment.

PART II

The Praxis of Ethnographic Thinking

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5 IMMERSING FULLY

From the Field: “What are you going to do for Jalcomulco?” It was another humid day in Jalcomulco, a small Mexican village near the city of Veracruz. The temperature was into the high 90s, and you could literally see the humidity hanging in the air over the river that meandered through mango trees, burro pens, and small clusters of umbrellas over restaurant decks. Our research team was crammed into the living room of a local farmer, with its handmade wooden furniture, a crucifix hanging on the wall, the smell of freshly made tortillas, and a chicken that occasionally wandered through.The four of us were there to talk with Alberto, whose story had by now become all too familiar to us. At 69 years old, he was a long time ejidatario, or collective farmer, but his life was changing fast: I felt better eight years ago because I worked the land, you know, in the ejido. So, now, in my business, the sales, I’m not happy.We don’t have [government] support, money, we don’t have the machines, and we don’t have [the] techniques we need to improve our [crop] production. Alberto’s lack of support was only part of the story, as we learned over the course of our three trips to Jalcomulco. Since the Mexican revolution, the federal government has been seen as a protector of ejido land rights for farmers like Alberto.This included farming subsidies, guaranteed markets, and intervention in instances of border disputes. But these protections, on which many ejidatarios and their families depended for generations, were dissolving. Alberto’s struggle was just one consequence of broad sweeping national policy changes Mexico enacted to comply with the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Most relevant to our work were structural changes to land tenure, which, among other things, created more liberal procedures for privatizing communally held ejidal land. Essentially, these reforms eliminated

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the federal government’s land redistribution obligations (one of the basic tenets of the Mexican constitution)1 and phased out subsidies for crops, thereby opening these markets to global competition (Stephen, 1997). This triggered large-scale shifts in agricultural markets, as well as a diaspora of ejidatarios (and their children) who fled their now unprofitable farms to seek more promising economic opportunities in the United States. It also created feelings of exclusion among ejidatarios from larger political processes, which were compounded further by dismay and frustration. Parallel to these changes in land tenure, Jalcomulco began experiencing an influx of tourism. Drawn by activities such as rafting, rappelling, kayaking, biking, hiking, and horseback riding, “adventure” tourists began to drive the development of a new market for the town. Adventure camps cropped up around the edges of town, most of which were owned by investors residing in either Mexico City, or in some cases, Asia. For many ejidatarios in Jalcomulco, selling parcels to camp developers or people interested in building a vacation home had become one of the few ways they could offset losses from their increasingly unprofitable farms. Due to a lack of a social security system, these transactions were often negotiated based on a clearly inequitable standing. Some ejidatarios sold parcels out of necessity: we are selling parts of the ejido, parcellas, and we are trying to survive because we are tired … For illness, we have to sell the land to buy medicine because we don’t have the social security … Sometimes we have to repair the ceiling, like this one, and we have to sell our land. Similarly, the son of an ejidataria, described his family’s situation: My mother and my grandmother are very sick, so we’re thinking about selling some land. Right now, my mother can’t walk. She needs leg surgery, and the operation costs 40,000 pesos for each leg … We are going to sell the land because she needs the operation. Our research brief was to assess the sustainability of a tourism market within the context of this shifting economic and political landscape. While the situation was complex, what we witnessed most was conflict and suffering. Disputes over the rules of land ownership were volatile (the camps were built on former ejidal land), and camp owners compounded the conflicts by constructing large walls that divided ejido parcels, creating the perception among ejidatarios that the camps wanted to monopolize the tourist trade without respect for ejidal land practices. One ejidatario, told us: When I was president [of the ejido], I had a lot of problems and conflicts with the camps because the camps don’t understand that the ejido is a communal area. So they want to put up walls and separate parcels. They didn’t understand what I was talking about, and maybe they didn’t want to understand, that respect is one of the principles of the ejido … We don’t have obvious boundaries, like walls.

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One of the hotel owners who had relatively frequent contact with camp managers told us that “the policy [of the camps] is to maintain the local people apart [from] the tourists.” A local restaurant owner, witnessed an example of this policy first hand when a group of tourists perusing menus at a table in her establishment were “ordered to leave the restaurant and return to the camp” by a camp manager who’d seen them there. A manager of a camp with whom we spoke, confirmed that their guests rarely have contact with ejidatarios, and when asked if she thought tourists were aware of the ejido in Jalcomulco said that “they don’t know and they don’t want to know.” Beyond exclusion, the people of Jalcomulco came to see the camp owners as opportunists who were profiting from the natural resources on the land to which the townspeople have historic, cultural, and economic rights. The restaurant owner whose customers were driven away told us: So these foreign investors bought the land, and built the camps … for tourism … But during that time, they [ejidatarios] sold the land at a very low price. And now they [camp owners] are completely rich because of that land, and they are not giving [anything] to the Jalcomulco people. They are just taking business and they are rich and not giving anything. Basically, we were witnessing growing tension between an impoverished majority that was being economically displaced and exploited, and a small but growing ecotourism industry that was offering its patrons nature-focused experiences stripped of their cultural context. In addition to the political frustrations on both sides, the personal impact of all this on the people of Jalcomulco was the most difficult to witness. It was rare to see young or middle-aged men in town, since most had left for work in the United States. The village had difficulty supporting what was left of their only school. Some nearby towns that lacked Jalcomulco’s natural assets had even been abandoned entirely due to similar economic conditions. After weeks of hearing stories like this, it was easy to see how our team began to feel increasingly invested in the wellbeing of the people of Jalcomulco. We were forming a deep, empathic understanding of their circumstances, getting to know them personally, living in their town. We walked their streets, attended their festivals, ate in their restaurants, hung out in their homes, and visited their farms. We were seeing and feeling their struggle, personally. To get this level of familiarity, we used participatory observation as a critical method in our research strategy. At its core, the method requires putting aside reservations and inhibitions and opening up to new experiences through active participation in naturally occurring “native” practices. Participation is the primary activity, but ethnographers also take on an observational perspective while doing so. The goal is to see the world through the eyes of research participants, and understand how everyday experiences reflect and influence the interactions and evolution of a culture. It requires the understanding of an empathic, actively involved, collaborator

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while simultaneously integrating the mindset of an analytic researcher to observe how behaviors and interactions relate to broader cultural contexts. While a very productive method for gaining a deep understanding of a culture, participatory observation also requires that ethnographers strike a delicate balance between participation and observation. It also requires that ethnographers come to terms with how they are perceived by research participants. This is often far more complex than the simple researcher-subject relationship you are likely to find with surveys, psychology labs, or focus groups. One day, while on an interview with a local woman (let’s call her Silvia) who took in laundry for a living, we were abruptly reminded of the ways that our own cultural and ethnic backgrounds affected how we were perceived. At the end of the interview, I prompted Silvia for any questions she might have of me, a common practice among many ethnographers. Her response took me by surprise. She paused a second or two, then asked, “What are you going to do for Jalcomulco?” It was a critical moment for me, and our entire team. After an awkward pause, my response was to tell Silvia that we were going to analyze the information we collected and offer a series of recommendations to the Secratario de Turismo for the State of Veracruz, but I might as well have said that we were flying a spaceship to Mars. She looked back at me with a blank stare. Upon further reflection, I realized that she was looking for a commitment to the plight of her town on a different level, a level on par with the personal questions we were asking her. Furthermore, her perception of us (a research team from the United States, made up of mostly Euro–American researchers) was likely one of privilege and power. This is a situation many ethnographers face as they find themselves increasingly involved in the lives of their participants. It’s a situation made even more complex when the ethnographer’s goal and outputs aren’t clearly understood, appreciated, or valued by participants. Beyond achieving acceptance and cooperation from participants, the ethnographer, having initiated these interactions and engaged with participants on such a personal level, must eventually determine their ultimate level of involvement, as well as the action they will take based on the insights they develop through the course of their work. Should they act as advocates for their participants? What are they offering in return for the sometimes deeply personal data they seek? And, for the purposes of this book, what patterns of thought are ethnographers developing as part of negotiating interactions with participants that can be useful in broader contexts and other settings or challenges? As difficult as this interaction with Silvia was for me, I also recognized that participatory observation was one of the most valuable tools we used in this project. Our immersive learning allowed us to understand how deeply the role of ejidatario was enmeshed within the fabric of Jalcomulco’s (and rural Mexico’s) culture. It also allowed us to discover the ways in which the many levels of respect attributed to that role were gradually being transferred to the newer roles ejidatarios were adopting outside of farming (tour guides, Internet café owners) that maintained social cohesion and solidarity. These learnings would likely not have been

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explicitly expressed or otherwise realized using only methods like interviews or surveys. It took our commitment, emotional investment, and calculated risk taking as realized through participatory observation to fully understand what the people of Jalcomulco were experiencing.

Participatory Observation and Ethnographic Thinking Participatory observation is a very intimate method. Immersing themselves in the daily, lived experiences of others means that ethnographers are often privy to a great deal of information that would be considered private in most other circumstances. If ethnographers do a good job of building rapport, they see (and experience for themselves) the emotions, opinions, and deeply held sentiments that no observation or interview could elicit. This can provide them with a deep understanding of how those everyday experiences embody the ways a culture is learned and taught, and how those experiences affect decision-making, priorities, and behaviors, as well as help them identify key stakeholders within a culture’s continued evolution. That deep understanding often goes well beyond obvious representations of a culture or organization, leading to insights about informal power flows, interactions, or behaviors, and their impact. As valuable as it can be, participating actively in the lives of those who are the subject of ethnographic research also carries a set of risks and responsibilities that have real consequences—both in the lives of the people with whom ethnographers engage in research, and for themselves as researchers. In terms of responsibility, there is a rich body of work in anthropology addressing this challenge. It includes considerations of activist anthropology (in which anthropologists take on the role of advocates on behalf of their research participants), (Hastrup & Elsass, 1990; Singer, 1990; Paine, 1990; Kellett, 2009; Gonzalez, 2010); native anthropology (where anthropologists study their “own people”), (Cerroni-Long, 1995; Narayan, 1993; Jacobs-Huey, 2002; Jones, 1970; Limon, 1991); collaborative ethnography (Worth & Adair, 1972; Behar, 1994; Frank, 2000; Frank, 2000); and, reflexivity (analyses of how the work of conducting anthropological research impacts both the lives of participants and those of anthropologists themselves), (Steier, 1991; Lewin & Leap, 1996; Okely & Callaway, 1992; Nazaruk, 2011; Lynch, 2000;Webster, 2008; Ruby, 1980). In each of these, the ethics of practicing ethnographic research are central considerations.They recognize that although the ethnographer’s first impulse may be to ask “why,” without taking their participants’ perspective, contexts, and expectations into account, they risk being perceived by participants as irrelevant or insensitive, either of which may lead to alienated participants, dissolved trust, and loss of critical sources of data. At the other end of the participatory observation spectrum, ethnographers also risk “going native”—a condition in which they lose their critical perspective because they become so fully engaged in immersive participation that they begin to feel as if the culture is their own. In contrast to losing the trust of participants by not being empathic, going native is a state in which some ethnographers lose sight of their responsibility to develop a systematic interpretation of a culture.

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The strength of ethnographic thinking lies in the ability to continually m ­ aintain an interpretive lens, even while immersed in the daily lives of participants. This involves balancing and managing field experiences in ways that temper the larger risk of possible extremes (“going native” or alienating participants with an unwavering “ethnographic gaze”), while simultaneously negotiating the incremental risks that are inherently part of navigating interactions with participants. This oscillation between observer and participant within a range that is open enough to learn from serendipity, yet constrained enough to avoid extremes, is a critical part of ethnographic thinking. It sharpens the ethnographer’s ability to quickly entertain different perspectives, assess the “ethnographic value” of different field experiences, and develop a keen sense for which behaviors or cultural phenomena they should observe, and in which they should participate. On a recent project focusing on naturopathic medicine and patient experience, our research included a number of different immersive learning experiences. Among other things, we adopted the role of patients, attended professional conferences, and enrolled in continuing education classes for practitioners. Since none of the team had previous experience with naturopathic medicine, we were all learning new things about the approach and philosophy as we went. Of all the participatory observation we conducted, the most challenging role for team members was that of patient. Each team member went through an extended series of exams, tests, assessments, treatments, and follow-ups under the care of a naturopathic physician. A few of us on the team had actual chronic ailments, or conditions that we used as the topic of focus for our experience (gastrointestinal issues, MS, etc.), and the doctors we visited all knew that we were acting as both real patients, and as observers of the process. Although the objective was never to prove or disprove the effectiveness or scientific validity of naturopathic care, we were subjecting ourselves to an experience that was different from our previous medical experiences. Interactions with our naturopathic physicians became particularly challenging when we had to negotiate between the role of patient under treatment and that of observant researcher trying to develop a systemic understanding of the process. When some of us began to see improvements in our conditions, it triggered a series of stimulating conversations within the research team. Those who saw no effect from treatment tended to highlight what they perceived as a lack of scientific validity of naturopathy, while those who witnessed actual change began to “drink the kool-aid”—sometimes to the point where they started to recommend naturopathy to friends and relatives. With such personal, physical, and embodied experiences, the team’s ability to balance between participation and observation was definitely challenged. Together, we were able to diagram user experience journeys and develop other frameworks to depict treatment pathways that helped everyone take on an interpretive perspective that neither condescended nor advocated. We were ultimately able to strike a balance between “insider” and “outsider” perspectives in ways that improved our ability to reach a deeper understanding of the system that integrated both, without adhering to the extremes of either.

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In addition to the interactions ethnographers have with participants, p­ articipatory observation also demands ongoing reflection and self-evaluation by the ethnographer in order to strike a balance between analyst and deeply immersed confidant—to be both stranger and friend. Returning to our example from fieldwork in Jalcomulco, Silvia’s question highlighted this tension dramatically for me.While the response I offered was primarily in the role of analyst, I realized shortly afterward that balancing it with a more personal approach would have resonated more with Silvia and better expressed our team’s gratitude for the generous ways the people of Jalcomulco opened up their lives for us. This instance illustrates how difficult it can be to strike the balance between participant and observer.While I consider this interaction with Silvia a failure of sorts, I did use it as inspiration for increasing both my awareness of participants’ worldview and their emotional state when framing the relevance of ethnographic work for them. It also helped me become more aware of myself, and how I’m perceived by participants in the field. Understanding both, and adapting interactions based on a combination of empathy and self-awareness can be an incredibly delicate undertaking. It requires a fine sense of understanding the context and disposition of everyone involved in what is sometimes called “the ethnographic encounter.” It also requires a comprehensive understanding of the power dynamics at play within those interactions (whether they are actual or assumed). Finally, it requires a graciousness and sensibility that can use an ethnographic understanding of these dynamics to express appreciation in ways that resonate emotionally with participants—in short, a confident, informed, and appreciative humility. These are all qualities that Goleman has identified as core components of emotional intelligence (Goleman, 1998), and they’re also critical attributes of successful ethnographic thinking. This example also illustrates the ongoing growth that takes place when practicing ethnographic thinking. Because the source of the ethnographer’s data is necessarily rooted in messy human interactions (especially participatory observation), growth (both personal and professional) often arises from mishaps, crossed communications, and disruptions of social etiquette. Knowing how to learn from these, and formulate understandings of a culture from them, is critical to ethnographic thinking and the interpretive value it offers. On a personal level, skilled ethnographers integrate learnings that arise from these “messy” interactions into future field settings so that they can improve their interactions with participants by adapting and responding flexibly in both a culturally attuned and emotionally intelligent manner.

Broader Strategic Value: Ethnographic Understandings of Organizational Behavior and the Co-evolution of Brands In many organizations, it’s often presumed that the role of people in lower rung positions (secretaries, administrative assistants, etc.) is to execute the commands of those further up in the hierarchy. A memo, or other communication, is issued by someone holding an executive position in which new priorities are set, and everyone down the chain of command is expected to carry out those priorities. Layers of

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management and reporting customs embedded within the formal hierarchy establish a structure designed to ensure that the priorities are acted upon as intended. In reality, however, people occupying positions lower in the hierarchy often have the ability to control the pace of information needed to act in accordance with those priorities, as well as where and how that information is distributed. In this way, they can prioritize and assign different values to different information, and shape the perception of initiatives handed down from their superiors. Anyone who has worked with a savvy administrator can testify to the power of the informal influence they have. Their knowledge of things like workplace traditions, workarounds, short cuts, personalities, conflicts and alliances between different personnel, and other “soft” information can be critical to helping staff complete their own work agendas.Taken collectively, understanding these informal social dynamics is also key to understanding organizational behavior because they can ultimately determine the success or failure of a large majority of initiatives driven by an organization’s officially sanctioned leaders. In fact, it’s no exaggeration to argue that the social dynamics within these informal relationships can even determine the fate of an entire organization. Ethnographic thinking is particularly useful in understanding organizational behavior, in part because of the benefits of one of its primary methods, participatory observation (which is highly useful in complex social settings because it exposes the often informal or unspoken ways that power flows within organizations). With a detailed understanding of those power flows, strategic decisionmaking can shift from a focus on official organizational roles to the sometimes more influential and informal layers of interaction within, between, and beneath them. This knowledge can mean the difference between observations and insights that merely scratch the surface of understanding social interactions and motivations, and deeper cultural interpretations that integrate very real—but formally unrecognized—flows of power. In terms of practicing participatory observation, strong interpersonal skills are essential for building the rapport and gaining the trust necessary to develop relationships with people that result in useful interpretations of informal networks, interactions, and behaviors. Humility and empathy, paired with a willingness to put aside self-interests, are key characteristics—as are emotional self-awareness, acknowledging personal strengths and limitations, sincere and open communication, and adapting easily to constantly changing social situations. The method also requires making interpersonal investments within, and emotional commitment to, those from whom observational data is gathered.This includes complete transparency about intent and purpose, as well as careful consideration of how results could impact the lives of those involved. In essence, it consists of honoring the trust of others. However, even when participatory observation is practiced with the best of intentions and highest ethical standards, responses from participants can quickly complicate the relationship between the researcher and the researched. Ethically, the method can raise questions about who participatory observation serves best (and who it doesn’t).2 In my fieldwork focusing on the political reach of Radical

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Faeries (Hasbrouck, 2000; Hasbrouck, 2004) many people gladly participated in interactions and activities in which they understood that I was conducting participatory observation (spinning clay, running errands, helping with construction projects, gardening, etc.). Most did so because they felt I might serve as an effective vehicle to document the importance they attributed to the development of their community. For them, I was their historian, their anthropologist. Yet, in instances when my analysis veered from their expectations, my work was sometimes met with surprise and shock. One participant, after reading a draft of an article I wrote, responded, “I didn’t realize you were going to analyze every word we said!” This is, of course, part of what anthropologists do; and, what a participant may consider trivial can easily be part of a set of behavioral patterns that are highly significant anthropologically. I’ve also encountered expectations from participants who tied my relationship with them to their own stereotypes or impressions of anthropologists and their work. These participants assumed that I was solely focused on creating a classic depiction of them (“my people”), and that all of my interactions with them would take place in the context of flows of power that privileged ethnographic inquiry. This dynamic triggered responses to participatory observation in which they actively attempted to influence and manage how they were perceived. For example, they would try to direct the focus of my interactions toward events they deemed most important or unusual about their culture—things they felt “should be” part of how I would eventually represent them. Since their view of the ethnographic encounter was informed primarily by stereotypes, some attempted to steer me toward what they felt was exotic or exceptional about their culture, while I was looking for the everyday. Others screened or intentionally deprioritized interactions or behaviors they felt weren’t relevant, such as interpersonal disagreements, divisions of labor, compromises, workarounds, negotiations, or changing attachments and affinities or indiscretions. Of course, these are often some of the most important data needed for understanding informal flows of power.3 All of these challenges and considerations might make participatory observation seem like a method fraught with difficulties that could easily outweigh its benefits. However, the process of navigating through these challenges provides deep insight (as well as personal growth) unique to ethnographic thinking that wouldn’t otherwise be possible. For example, understanding informal power flows within an organization can be useful for breaking down silos within an organization by discovering and leveraging pathways already in use within informal networks, or by inspiring the creation of new ones that are compatible with those previously unrecognized flows of power. Understanding and appreciating those pathways allows an organization to shift from a culture that prioritizes formal and structured processes to one that rewards a wide range of actions that support and build upon shared values. In a recent interview, Gabe Newell of the gaming company Valve (which operates using an unstructured, self-organizing model sometimes labeled “holocracy”) argues that in addition to shared values, informal “hidden” networks are also better at invention:

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The simple answer is that hierarchy is good for repeatability and ­measurability, whereas self-organizing networks are better at invention … The alternate answer is that organizations that think they are hierarchical actually don’t gain advantage by it (they actually have hidden networks), and that the hierarchical appearance is the result of rent-seeking [behavior]. (Priestly, 2015) This is because formal hierarchies are designed to maintain and regulate power flows, while informal networks adapt to changing circumstances and the context of interactions. In the former, original thinking from those within an organization must navigate through levels of screening within the hierarchy, since adherence to a formalized hierarchical structure is prioritized. Dissent, whether direct or informal, is often discouraged—and informal networks are perceived as counter to the greater good of the organization (or more precisely, a threat to the hierarchy). In the latter, informal networks are recognized as an important part of how an organization grows and adapts. New ideas spring from exposure to a wider network of interactions that go beyond formal hierarchical structures. People discover new and unanticipated perspectives and relationships that they would be unlikely to share in formalized hierarchies, and are rewarded for collaboration rather than adherence. As long as a strong set of shared values permeates the culture, these informal networks are better at innovating and adapting to changing market conditions than formal hierarchies. Ethnographic thinking provides the perfect means and methods for discovering and building upon the informal networks that make what we might call “organic” innovation possible. But not all organizations can (or should) shift toward holocracy. Ethnographic thinking also provides the ability to identify, and sometimes leverage, emerging internal trends within organizations that don’t have “official” visibility or are difficult for employees to surface. Managers and leaders (or consultants) can effectively use participatory observation to discover these trends by immersing themselves within the setting and workplace challenges of different teams, working alongside them, completing the same tasks, and truly experiencing their perspectives. Beyond identifying employee dissatisfaction and disruption, I’ve seen this form of ethnographic thinking work in organizations that wanted to tap and develop employees’ innovative ideas—ideas that often fell by the wayside due to the weight of their other responsibilities or the lack of clear pathways for advancing and developing them. One company with which I worked spent considerable time and resources offering human-centered design training to any employees who expressed interest. Groups who were particularly responsive were then paired with an innovation team member who acted as a sort of internal consultant, helping them develop their ideas further, ensure that they were human-centered, and break down organizational silos to give those ideas traction (and possibly stimulate even more new ideas). This was later followed by the creation of a company-sponsored incubator that partnered company employees who had innovative ideas with entrepreneurs working in the same space within the broader community. In this case, it was the innovation team that used ethnographic thinking to strategically identify, expand, and drive innovation within the company.

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Finally, ethnographic thinking (via participatory observation) also helps ­ rganizations understand and anticipate broader cultural shifts that aren’t easily visible o or represented clearly within the organization itself. These “invisible” cultural shifts often emerge from appropriations, workarounds, adaptations, and reinventions that consumers or stakeholders layer upon an organization’s offering. Although ostensibly hidden, ethnographic thinking provides visibility into these nascent trends or movements that have direct bearing on the health or profitability of a brand or organization. For example, companies paying close attention to the ways consumers interact with, and sometimes modify, their offering can use this “inside” knowledge to adapt and provide new products or services that fulfill customer needs even more effectively. Prahalad and Ramaswamy call this “co-opting customer competence” and point to the many benefits it provides organizations that recognize that: The market has become a forum in which consumers play an active role in creating and competing for value. The distinguishing feature of this new marketplace is that consumers become a new source of competence for the corporation. The competence that customers bring is a function of the knowledge and skills they possess, their willingness to learn and experiment, and their ability to engage in an active dialogue. (Prahalad & Ramaswamy, 2000) Among the benefits they describe are more flexible organizations that can adapt and co-evolve their offerings in conjunction with networked consumers, who increasingly demand personalized experiences as a key part of their interaction with a product, service, or system. They recommend engaging in a dialogue with consumers to co-develop those personalized experiences, shape expectations, and co-create products and services. However, consumer interactions are always emerging and continually evolving well beyond interactions with a company or organization, and they arise from within a wide range of cultural shifts and phenomena. Therefore, any “co-creation” should be paired with keen cultural awareness to interpret and weigh the significance of cultural context and meaning. This is how ethnographic thinking goes beyond merely adopting consumer suggestions, hosting an online forum, or creating contests for new consumer-driven product ideas. Instead, ethnographic thinking leverages the patterns of thinking from participatory observation by balancing active engagement with consumers with the interpretative value of observation to develop culturally attuned, well-timed, and strategically situated new offerings that will resonate widely and deeply with consumers. This difference between “co-opting consumer competence” initiatives and the interpretive value of ethnographic thinking as informed by participatory observation is perhaps easier to see when considering instances in which consumers aren’t necessarily cooperative participants within company-led initiatives designed to tap their creative insight. Beyond corporate labs and focus groups, consumers are continually shaping the perception of products, services, and systems in ways that

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not only impact brands, but also reflect the cultures within which they originate. Alex Wipperfurth’s (Wipperfurth, 2006) and others (Fournier & Avery, 2011) have looked at how different subcultures have taken hold of brands and re-shaped them, sometimes in ways that are positive for organizations (the trend of “hacking” IKEA furniture) and sometimes not (the decline of luxury brand Gucci among luxury consumers due to rapid widespread popularity of their lower priced items with high brand visibility among aspirational shoppers). Greg Thomas uses the example of Tangueray gin to explain how understandings of culture can inform strategic brand decision-making: When Rap singers sang about Tanqueray gin, its popularity spread beyond the traditional Anglo-Saxon gin-and-tonic crowd. Since the consumption of Tanqueray at rap events is segmented from the aged, stiff upper lip consumers, the brand hijack is more of a blessing than a curse. You have just extended into a new market with essential vitality, while retaining a hold on the original market. (Thomas, 2009) In all of these cases, ethnographic thinking, and especially participatory observation, offers a vehicle for insight into interactions with brands that go far beyond, and much deeper than, company-hosted co-development sessions that typically draw brand enthusiasts. It provides the kind of systemic and cultural insight (including how subcultures interact with one another—or don’t, or the degree to which their preferences have been taken up more broadly by others) that allows organizations to determine how things like “brand hijacking” can work for, or against their interests.

Notes 1 The Mexican revolution profoundly re-ordered the cultural landscape of rural Mexico. Coupled with its associated anarcho-Marxist political agenda, it set the stage for the range of possible relationships residents recognized for land use, social relations, and cultural meaning for nearly 100 years. Emiliano Zapata’s Liberation Army demanded “tierra y libertad” (land and freedom) for Mexico’s predominantly indigenous underclass, and eventually, the Plan of Ayala (November 1911) laid the foundation for the formation of locally controlled collective farms called ejidos. The revolution transformed land, and its local control by ejidatarios, into a symbol of freedom from the hacienda’s tyrannical labor conditions. 2 These issues were at the center of a heated debate within anthropology in 2013, when investigative journalist, Patrick Tierney, accused anthropologist, Napoleon Chagnon, of treating his Amazonian Yanomami participants unethically. Some of the accusations against Chagnon included participating in a measles experiment that cost many lost lives among the Yanomami, purposely inciting violence by providing participants with weapons and encouraging conflict by playing different groups against each other, and misrepresenting the Yanomami as particularly violent by embellishing his findings to obtain notoriety. Many of the charges were later disproven, although the issues they raised were at the heart of ethical challenges ethnographers face when enlisting participant observation as a method. For more on the debate, see considerations from Borofsky, Eaken, and Laden (Eaken, 2013; Borofsky, 2005; Laden, 2013).

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3 Collaborative ethnographic projects are designed, in part, to circumvent challenges like refusals or participant expectations. Worth and Adair Navajo films are good examples of how ethnographers have collaborated with participants to develop a fuller representation of their culture (Worth & Adair, 1972). However, as Minh-ha (Chen & Minh-ha, 1994) and Mullen (2000) have acknowledged, these attempts are ultimately positioned anthropologically.They are projects initiated within the discipline’s history and framework, and, in the end, their authorship and structure is still determined by that context, regardless of how much control the ethnographer surrenders in the process. “Native” ethnographies, in which ethnographers work within their own communities (Limon, 1991), may come a bit closer to resolving the challenges of ethnographic practice and representation since they demand that ethnographers address issues of personal involvement and their impact on relationships in the field. However, fieldwork in familiar settings does not necessarily guarantee that ethnographers will subject themselves or their practice to scrutiny, or perhaps more importantly, to a critique of subjectivity that acknowledges the constructed nature of the “field self ” among the layered, multiple, and fluctuating identities that every ethnographer negotiates.

6 FACILITATING TACTICALLY

From the Field: The Cairo Incident It was about five p.m. when we entered the Cairo apartment building of the family we were going to interview that afternoon. After being asked to enter a tiny cramped elevator by the doorman, our translator, Mo, and I turned down the doorman’s hospitality and took the stairs. We’d already been in one elevator ride in another apartment building that ended abruptly mid-floor … and in the dark (we later learned that the door person found our presence suspicious enough to cut the power at eight and a half floors). Once in the family’s apartment, everyone was very warm and interested in talking with us: a husband and wife and their two young girls … a typical middleclass Egyptian family in many respects.They responded comfortably to my research partner’s video camera, and we chatted easily about video games with the husband. After tea and cookies, we moved through our discussion guide, took a tour of the apartment, and worked through some mapping exercises. Thank you’s exchanged, we left the apartment building, where my colleagues paused briefly on the sidewalk to take a few photos of the front of the building. It was dark by then, and I suppose the first flash might have gone unnoticed had we been a little quicker with our exit. But after the third or fourth, an older woman on the first-floor balcony, and the stern looking doorman, began to take notice—and they weren’t pleased. We decided it was time to go. On our way to the taxi, one of my research partners asked, “Where’s Mo?” Summoned back by the woman on the balcony and the doorman below, we saw Mo trying to answer a series of rapid-fire questions that appeared to be about who we are, why we’re there, and why we were taking pictures of the building. He responded to their barrage of questions as best he could, but didn’t seem to be making much headway. After 15 minutes or so of this back and forth—during which

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the older woman became increasingly upset, Mo returned to tell us that he needed the consent form that the family signed so he could show it to the building owners. I dug through my pack and gave the document to Mo, who then promptly disappeared into the building with the doorman. Then, we waited, and waited … and waited. After nearly half an hour, it became clear that something was amiss. Realizing that a little intervention was what the situation required, I proceeded to the front of the building where I was greeted by two younger men peering at me from the same balcony, formerly occupied by the older woman. I began with a basic Arabic greeting (and a smile) and eventually got to the point where I could explain our reason for being there in English. After another 20 minutes of back and forth, interrupted occasionally by a streetcar that made communication impossible, I was told that my friend Mo was nearby, making a copy of the document I had given him, and I was cordially invited to come up and wait for him. So, I climbed to the first floor where I met the two men, Mohammed and his brother Ahkmed. I told them about our research, the family on the third floor, and how both related to our interest in technology in Egypt. All of this seemed oddly irrelevant to the brothers, both of whom were far more interested in small talk. So, there we were, now well past ten p.m., Mohammed, Ahkmed, and me, chatting about computers, the Ramses Hilton (where Mohammed worked), the pyramids, Sharmel Sheik, the beauty of the Red Sea, and on and on. I was being stalled, politely, but stalled. Amidst conversation, the older woman drifted in slowly from the kitchen and began spitting questions at Mohammed that were quite obviously related to my presence. Eventually, she was appeased, and her suspicion faded. It faded so much, in fact, that I was now to be introduced to her two cats, each of which she placed on the dining room table for display. “Do you want to meet Misha?” asked Mohammed. To which I of course responded positively. After more idle conversation, Mohammed ordered the older woman to fetch some tonic water and began to explain to me why our visit was a problem.  According to local rumor, some researchers north of Cairo recently entered an apartment and took blood samples from all of its residents, each of whom subsequently died. I laughed politely at his story, but then quickly realized from his face that he was serious—and that our situation was, perhaps, more grave than I’d thought. Over tonic water served in wine glasses on a silver tray, I discovered that Mo was “right next door” and would be back soon. Mohammed then asked me how long I’d been in Egypt, and if I spoke Arabic. Much to the pleasure of the cat lady, I offered my response, peppered with a few, very rough, Arabic phrases. This was a big hit, as each of my attempts at Arabic was followed by more raucous laughter than the last. Our little party was interrupted soon, however, by what appeared to be an impromptu meeting of the male representatives of every household in the 52-unit building. The first to enter appeared to be one of Mohammed and Ahkmed’s relatives. He was a serious man, bearing a furrowed brow and frown, and holding some worn papers, a key chain, and a very busy cell phone. He also sported a brown leather jacket, dark mustache, and an obvious toupee. I stood to introduce myself,

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but he was clearly not interested in interacting with me at all. He exchanged a few words with the older woman (who plucked one of the cats off the dining table and disappeared into the kitchen) and grabbed the house phone. He was obviously unhappy, and I turned my attention back to Mohammed and Ahkmed, with whom I’d hoped I had established some rapport. “Sit down, Jay, sit down, please. We will work this out. It’s no problem,” said Ahkmed. I accepted, and began to grow a bit concerned about Mo, as well as my team members waiting outside in the taxi. Soon another man filed in and began talking loudly with the toupeed man. Mohammed tried to begin another distracting conversation with me as the volume in the room ratcheted up a decibel. A vibration in my pocket suddenly stiffened my spine, and, as I pulled the phone from my pocket, I realized that more than an hour had passed and one of my research partners was texting me from the car. “Jay, this seems to be getting out of hand. Should we just offer to erase the photos of the building?” While reading the message, a very round man with an Inspector Clouseau mustache and coat that was too small for him entered with Mo. Both were asked to take a seat in the salon (living room). Mo, clearly shaken, saddled up beside me and informed me that the “inspector” was a security man and that he needed to see the pictures we took of the house. “I told him we are doing nothing but research, but he didn’t believe me,” Mo nervously pleaded. I reassured him, and the volume in the room escalated even higher as more men piled in. The inspector was carrying the consent form our family had signed, which he handled as if it were just beamed in from outer space, flipping the pages back and forth without reading it.Through Mo, I again explained our research project, as the inspector peered askance at me through lowered spectacles. He listened carefully, and then settled back a bit in the sofa as the toupeed man launched toward us with a sudden demand. Apparently, after some discussion with some of the other men at the back of the room, he had decided to take charge. He wanted the camera, the film in it, and my business card to prove who I was. I stood and handed him my card, politely explaining that we couldn’t give them any film, since our camera was digital. This, or perhaps my explanation, seemed to surprise them, and they reconvened to discuss. After more lengthy debate, I told the inspector that I would go get the camera and delete just the photos taken outside.This triggered another round of discussion among the men, which became even more heated. As their conversation turned louder—at times verging on shouting—I decided it would be best to notify our company contact, in case the situation escalated any further. I pulled out my cell and called, but got no answer. While I tried another number, Mo timidly informed me that the toupeed man’s earlier call was to the police, and that we will now need to wait in the apartment for them to arrive. After a bit more discussion, my offer to delete the photos seemed to appease the group, and I started to leave to retrieve the camera. As I turned toward Mo, who was now even more shaken, he informed me that he needed to stay there “because they took my ID.” Mohammed cordially volunteered to escort me to the car (perhaps

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to make sure I didn’t skip out on them). Once there, I explained to my research partners that we needed to bring the camera upstairs and delete some photos. I also asked them to get in touch with the family with whom we conducted the interview, thinking that perhaps they could simplify the situation, or at least come to our defense. When we returned to the apartment to delete the photos, Tarek (the father of the family we interviewed) had become part of the fray. It was obvious that the issue had gone far beyond taking pictures of the building, and Mo whispered to us that Tarek was angry because his neighbors called the police on us (his guests) without talking to him first.The volume in the room was now at full shouting level as the man with the toupee, Tarek, and an old man in a green velour jump suit were exchanging heated words. Then others chimed in—a whirl of opinions and accusations flew across the room in every direction. Slurs and abrupt hand gestures were agitated further by constant rings from the toupeed man’s cell phone, which he persistently ended each time with an overly firm mash of the “end call” button. Finally, the police arrived.The two officers moved directly to the dining room, and spoke only with the toupeed man, the doorman, Tarek, and a few others. Eventually, they asked me for identification, and I handed over my business card.They inspected it carefully, and began drafting a lengthy report (in triplicate) without uttering another word. After filling out numerous forms and staring blankly, and at length, at my business card, the police and the select group of men retreated into a rear room, closed a set of French doors behind them, and resumed arguing. Another half hour passed while we sat chatting with Mohammed and Ahkmed before the police and the men burst from the back room. They had clearly resolved the matter between them, and Mo was listening very carefully to their conversation. Some of the men filed out the front door, and those that remained insisted that we stay and finish our drinks (including the now broadly smiling man with the toupee). “Everything is taken care of,” said Mo as we were leaving, “The matter will be erased.” Of all the skills ethnographers possess, facilitating interactions in unfamiliar contexts is the most nuanced and complex. It can take years of fieldwork practice to understand how to steer social exchanges in ways that are culturally appropriate, and productive for collecting research data. It can take years more to put those skills into action in unpredictable field settings. Good facilitation requires the ability to read group dynamics and respond “on the fly” in ways that help guide positive interactions and encourage participation. At its best, good facilitation is about opening up opportunities for participants to contribute their perspective in meaningful and significant ways. Our incident in Cairo represents a mix of successes and failures in facilitation. As will be discussed further below, ethnographers are in the unique position of being both guest and host while conducting fieldwork. They are clearly guests of the participants with whom they interact, and won’t be successful in securing data unless they’re aware of the etiquette and social norms native to that context. Yet, ethnographers are also hosts in the field, because their very presence and purpose prompts a set of interactions they are required to facilitate.

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We were obviously unaware at the time (2006) that taking photos of the building could have raised such suspicion, or of the purported researchers who allegedly took blood samples. However, the team could have prepared better by becoming more familiar with how being photographed would be perceived in this culture by the particular population on which we were focusing.1 With this knowledge in hand, our mission to collect data could have been tempered with greater local sensibility. However, in terms of our interactions with our participants and the other residents of the building, our field etiquette was largely on target. The interview we conducted with the family turned out to be one of the most useful in the project. Later, during the incident over the photos, our polite conversation with Mohammed and Ahkmed, our earnest explanations of our purpose, meeting the cat, our offer to delete the photos, and perhaps even my feeble attempts at Arabic, all helped us establish enough rapport to avoid an even more severe reaction from the men in the apartment.While it was clear that we couldn’t directly control much of the situation, our actions had an impact on how well we were able to successfully navigate through it. In a manner typical of many ethnographic encounters, Mohammed and Ahkmed assumed the role of local hosts, but our status was different than typical guests. Our role was to facilitate their understanding of our purpose, build rapport quickly with complete strangers, respond to unexpected disruptions, and ultimately steer interactions toward an outcome that could be productive from a research perspective (or at least avoid arrest, in this case). In short, our behaviors very much determined how that evening unfolded. The ways we facilitated interactions directly shaped how we were perceived; and our read of the tone of the room, contexts, and the role of the players and their interactions, were critical parts of the tactical decisions we made along the way.

Flow and Ethnographic Thinking Ethnographers skilled in facilitation place a high priority on establishing rapport with their participants. They know that the only way to collect the data they need to reach deep insights about the daily lives and cultural context of their participants is to do everything they can to help them feel comfortable so that they are willing to offer their personal perspectives. For example, as they walk into a field setting, skilled facilitators look for cues of culturally appropriate behavior. They might ask themselves: Who greeted me when I arrived? What is their role in this community? Is there some culturally significant meaning in how they greeted me? Does it signify status in some way? What is the expected response? Does it seem as if I am being received with acceptance? Who else is present? What is their relationship to this person? Is there an obvious place set aside for receiving guests? In essence, they scan and read the environment for cultural cues that help them adapt their behaviors accordingly. Many experienced ethnographers with whom I work have honed this skill quite well.They can tell a great deal about participants within the first five or ten minutes

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of their interactions with them. For example, depending on circumstances, clutter and disorder in a household or workplace might be indicators for a busy and harried participant, which could lead to potential difficulties facilitating a conversation focused on a particular topic. In contrast, a very tidy household, and a participant who greets you with all the proper etiquette expected of a host in that culture, could be indicators of someone who is most comfortable conforming to expectations. It may take some time to break through their formalities, and get past how the participant feels they should respond in an interview to a point where they express themselves without censoring. Beyond these challenges, it can be equally difficult to read behavioral cues and determine how to best facilitate an ethnographic encounter with people who are especially enthusiastic about an issue or a cause. In these cases, their passion and eagerness to share can actually obstruct the kinds of personal data most valuable to ethnographers. I’ve encountered this many times, perhaps most notably among some environmentalists. In some cases, their expectations of how they should interact with me as an anthropologist were centered on their indoctrination in, and explication of, an ideology. While this can be useful as background, any ethnographer who plans carefully enough in advance is already well aware of this from their secondary research. Getting these participants to move away from dogmatic rants or effusive enthusiasm for an ideology to a more personal account of their experiences and their daily practices can be very challenging. It takes a lot of patience and a great deal of concentration to manage the flow of interactions in these circumstances so that they feel natural and respect their enthusiasm, while simultaneously remaining aware of small cues that indicate opportunities to steer the interaction toward more grounded topics. When rapport is established successfully, ethnographers are largely responsible for setting the tone of interactions with participants throughout the exchange. While this may seem simple at first, it is often a complex process of tactically managing interactions that require careful attention to cultural norms. As discussed previously, in most field settings, the ethnographer is an outsider or stranger. And, in most cultures, it is not customary for a stranger to invite himself or herself into some one’s home or workplace and begin asking personal questions about their lives. Therefore, ethnographers must function simultaneously as both grateful guest and gracious host. Most do this by watching the pace of their interactions in the field, and ensure that their actions are aligned with their participant’s comfort level and cultural expectations. Good practices include clear expressions of respect for a participant’s space, including simple things like asking before changing location or the context of the interaction. It also extends to knowing how to time and pace research exercises to ensure that participants aren’t put in awkward or contrived positions.The ultimate goal is a friendly exchange that is both personal and informative. It’s often a delicate balance between reading individual forms of expression (which may be idiosyncratic), measuring those against local customs, and situating them in terms of both the unique circumstances of an ethnographic interview and the broader context of what it means to be the subject of research in their culture.

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Facilitating this flow of interactions also requires ongoing reflection, including an awareness of the impact that the ethnographer has on interactions in a particular setting, and ensuring that they’re not exceptionally disruptive. While interacting with an ethnographer is clearly an unusual experience for most people, maintaining a flow of interaction that displaces the focus on the research process and emphasizes and elevates the importance of participants’ contributions is ultimately the responsibility of the ethnographer. Typical techniques include refraining from expressing political or controversial opinions, making good eye contact, careful listening, confirming statements participants make, and expressing genuine appreciation for participants’ time and generosity. It is, in essence, an egoless approach in which the participant’s worldview and contexts are both the focus and the point of departure for the flow of interactions needed to successfully acquire useful data in an unfamiliar setting.

Broader Strategic Value: Leadership and Diplomacy Depending on their style, many leaders are often highly visible and are expected to facilitate interactions and shape behaviors within their organization. Some do this by giving pep talks, or by exacting doses of punishment and reward. Others simply command. Good leaders, however, are nearly invisible when they’re at their best. They lead by building sincere rapport and by engaging their team in a fulfilling and meaningful process. Their goal isn’t to discipline but to guide the group to be the most productive (or relevant) it can be. Employees, or others who are part of an organization under this type of leadership, don’t seek the leader’s approval; instead, they participate actively because they feel like they’re part of a larger cause, making a difference, or solving a problem. The leader’s facilitation is merely the vehicle through which, and the context within, the group’s interactions are enabled. The leader helps define the field on which the players play, which also includes helping them establish the group’s boundaries. All of these attributes of effective leadership are rooted in good facilitation skills. Like an ethnographer in the field, good leaders read the situation, assess cultural context, and observe behaviors in order to shape an appropriate set of conditions that produce active participation on the part of others. They recognize that they are both part of the group, and outside it (due to their role as its leader). They host interactions within a culture that they recognize is wholly owned by members of the group. They understand that their own presence changes interactions and behaviors within the group, and they aspire to diminish the impact of their presumed authority while also setting the stage for personal investment and productive contributions from the members of the group. In short, a good leader thinks ethnographically by tactically facilitating interactions within a culture that is essentially “owned” by his or her followers. In addition to its benefits for leadership, the facilitation skills of tactful hosting also strengthen interpretive ability. Good facilitators not only read the setting for cultural context and the behaviors embedded within them, but link them both

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to broader cultural phenomena as well. They can interpret the meaning people ­attribute to interactions and behaviors as well as how those interactions and behaviors are interpreted by others. For example, they might ask: What does it mean when everybody in a group begins talking loudly at once? Are they in disagreement? Or, are they passionate and enthusiastic? Or both? How likely is it that a confrontation will erupt? A good facilitator can interpret these behaviors accurately, and understand how others are likely to react within that culture. They also understand when to interject and when to remain silent based on those interpretations. Finally, through the process of facilitation, they also recognize and understand the contexts for different behavioral occurrences they witness, as well as their possible trigger points. Over time, these interpretations are added to their larger knowledge base for more precise, and better attuned, future interpretations. These skills are especially useful in defining the platform for strategic decisions within complex settings. As we saw from the ways ethnographers facilitate interactions in the field, their diplomacy sets the stage for encouraging people to contribute their perspective. Ethnographers are careful to facilitate interactions that always prioritize the participants’ perspective and cultural contexts. Yet, these interactions are also shaped and guided by the questions the ethnographer choses to ask, the behaviors and interactions on which he or she focuses, or the amount of time he or she spends entertaining different perspectives. This involves striking a careful balance that avoids influencing behaviors, encourages expressions that are representative of participants’ perspectives, and steers those contributions toward relevant research topics. In a very similar manner, this type of tactical facilitation can be used to establish platforms in any setting where it is essential to create conditions for stakeholders to produce useful outcomes for a larger collective purpose. A key part of this is facilitating a process that respects and honors the unique contributions of each team member within a culturally attuned context. A good example can be found in settings where teams consist of members from different backgrounds and perspectives. I’ve led or managed many inter-disciplinary teams, and have found that the first step for helping them work collaboratively is to facilitate a process to find a common language. Ethnographic thinking is a particularly powerful tool for finding that language. In addition to honoring difference, it also helps each stakeholder recognize and articulate the cultural context of all contributions. For example, in a team with an engineer, a designer, a biologist, and an economist, each member contributes in ways that are often heavily influenced by the values, practices, priorities, and general mindset of their discipline. Ethnographic thinking helps identify how each contribution is influenced by its own discipline, and guides team members toward ways to express their contributions in shared terms (typically through strategic lines of inquiry that draw out commonalities). These skills are also useful in coalition building and diplomacy, where tactical facilitation integrates multiple perspectives by identifying common ground and guiding individuals toward a shared platform for their contributions. Like ethnographers, successful diplomats have a plan going in, have done a great deal

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of preparation and secondary research, and concentrate on facilitating a set of ­interactions designed to reach a common understanding, all within often unfamiliar contexts. They have to carefully read context, and make continual adjustments to their tactics in order to fully understand the perspective of others. These adjustments include a mix of approaches that vary in scope and scale, depending on the interests and disposition of those involved. All of this is highly dependent on developing rapport, managing the flow of interactions, reading behavioral cues, and responding in ways that advance the diplomat’s cause in ways that make sense within the cultural context and setting. In addition to these skills, tactical facilitation can also be achieved through forms of diplomacy some call “cultural diplomacy” in which exchange of ideas, information, art, and other forms of creative expression are used to generate cross cultural familiarity and mutual understanding. Ethnographic thinking can be especially instrumental here by offering anthropologically informed strategies to identify the pieces of content that are most promising for stimulating new alliances, or at least fostering parallel thinking related to a given topic. The University of Southern California’s Center on Public Diplomacy has cited many different achievements in cultural diplomacy. Their account of Pope Francis and his Global Outreach on Poverty and Inequality is a particularly telling example of how he applies ethnographic thinking (albeit, unintentionally) in his unique form of diplomacy. They write: ‘Pope Francis, in less than a year after taking office, has succeeded in radically altering the perceptions of the Catholic Church. Cutting across religious and sectarian divisions, the Pope has reached out to unexpected quarters: atheists, gays, the incarcerated, and the marginalized, generating an enthusiasm for religion and the Church that appeared to be on the wane, particularly amongst the youth,’ says diplomat Navdeep Suri. (University of Southern California Center on Public Diplomacy, 2013) The Pope’s ability to find common ground is a particularly tactical approach that eschews pedantic sermons and encourages engagement from a wide range of audiences, including those with opposing views. His diplomacy is rooted in openness, empathy, appreciating difference, building rapport, and managing the flow of interactions that sets the stage for productive interaction and mutual respect—all qualities essential to the tactical facilitation of ethnographic thinking.

Note 1 See Hasbrouck and Faulkner’s work for a more in depth consideration of this (Hasbrouck & Faulkner, 2006).

7 DOCUMENTING DILIGENTLY

From the Field: A Grand Synthesis A few years ago, a client came to me with a unique challenge. Their in-house innovation team had compiled an enormous stockpile of data (both qualitative and quantitative) over the course of their five-year existence, and they were having trouble making sense of it all. They’d been conducting research, gathering case studies, and gradually growing their knowledge base, but ended up feeling like they were just chasing one trend after another. They had a tremendous amount of knowledge about their customers, their sales force, and their competition, but were unable to derive broader longitudinal learnings that would give them more focus. In short, they were looking for a way to organize and channel their cumulative knowledge to identify larger themes and insights to influence corporate strategy more effectively. I responded to their concerns first by prioritizing two goals: finding the group’s strategic value within the company, and communicating that value as clearly as possible. That meant going beyond human-centered design and prototyping—and toward systems thinking, developing longitudinal insights, and understanding their organizational fit. The idea was to move past explaining their processes within the company and to begin determining the impact their cumulative insights can have. We began by taking stock of their data and creating a system for standardizing their findings for comparative analysis. Then, we applied a custom tailored interpretive system to their data, which, among other things, allowed them to compare their work to industry developments and broader cultural phenomena. Finally, we took an unbiased look at the corporate culture to identify clear pathways for communicating insights and recommendations in ways that were relevant to the daily lives of others in the company. Together, these approaches helped them get past chasing trends, so that they could identify the opportunities that were likely to gain the most traction (or perhaps be the most disruptive) within the company.

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Although our initial name for the project, “The Grand Synthesis,” was somewhat satirical, we soon learned that it was actually quite descriptive. With over five years of data from different studies and initiatives (field notes, transcripts, post-its, photos, video clips, survey results, white papers, market projections, etc.), just locating where everything was stored was a huge challenge. Add to that the task of linking that data to the patterns, themes, insights, frameworks, and design principles that were derived from each project, as well as all the resulting presentations, posters, models and prototypes, and we quickly found ourselves in a state of data overload. The first task was to map the group’s assets and organize projects by type.We began by determining which ones were “big I” innovation projects (those that focused on developing whole new user-centered models, products, or services), and which ones were “small i” innovation projects (those with a smaller scale that tended to focus on incremental improvements to the company’s current offerings). Then we broke those down into themes according to the purpose the project results best served for the company: expanding market share in a declining or static market, improving efficiency, reaching a new demographic, revising sales models, et cetera. Next, we mapped the methods the group used in collecting, synthesizing, analyzing, and ideating from the data collected in each project and clustered them based on similar methods. With these distinctions established, we were able to conduct a comparative analysis of projects that allowed us to find patterns and themes in behaviors (customer lifestyle shifts, changing preferences, shifting understandings of work, etc.) that could be substantiated across multiple projects. These were then cross-referenced against trends within their industry and broader cultural phenomena. To fully assess the strategic value of these insights, we situated them within an analytical framework that helped us prioritize their potential for impact for the company. In addition to the team’s own insights (customer needs, experience design, and segmentation), the framework included “outsights” (other business cases, case studies, analogous research, competitive analysis), “foresights” (trend-tracking, futures work, scenario planning), and “hindsights” (company history, industry traditions, company orthodoxies, and long-held assumptions). Collectively, this helped prioritize and rank projects based on their impact (or potential impact). So, for example, if a particular behavioral insight about the growing interest in work-life balance among Generation Y emerged as an important theme from the analysis of the team’s research, it would need to be substantiated by (or disruptive to) themes from at least two or three of these other data sources to position it as important and actionable for the company. In many ways, this project was a testament to the value of what might be called good “data hygiene.” The result was an interpretive system and knowledge base (dubbed “the compass”) the group used to frame projects and channel findings from them to influence specific company strategies. It also allowed them to research, ideate, prototype, and test in more focused ways by building on insights with wellsubstantiated momentum that held more promise for productive outcomes relevant to the company’s strategic goals. Finally, it helped the group identify and build initiatives with other groups in the company whose own outsights, foresights, or hindsights aligned particularly well with the team’s.

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In many of the projects the group initiated, multiple forms of data collection were used. For example, most ethnographic field interviews were documented at least three, if not four, different ways: field notes, still photos, audio recording, artifacts from design exercises, hand-drawn maps, and video recordings. The same was true of field observations, shadows, and participatory observation. Some projects also included multiple quantitative measures, via surveys, and other instruments, to help scope and scale different phenomena observed in the field. And, nearly every project included a plethora of secondary research to help set context and shape lines of inquiry. In addition to ensuring that some form of data was always collected should one method fail, overlapping data also provided different lenses that added a valuable range of perspectives. For example, a video camera has a different view of a research participant than the interviewer, and can reveal facial expressions, background activity, and many other forms of data that can go unnoticed by the researcher. Similarly, audio recordings help researchers focus on subtleties of tone, word choice, and details they might miss when in the midst of conducting interviews and taking notes. Written notes, which have been proven to improve long-term comprehension by processing and encoding content (Perez-Hernandez, 2014) offer yet other perspectives. Thanks largely to this overlapping structure, the team was able to discover unexpected patterns or anomalies, and reach insights during our “grand synthesis” that had greater dimension and depth. It also provided the team with pathways to ensure that their insights were traceable and well substantiated so that they could construct defendable, strategic arguments that helped others see how daily lived experiences of consumers helped illustrate insights and broader cultural contexts that were critical to the company’s success. So, for example, the team could point to a particular field observation, situate it within a set of similar patterns across other data sources or observations, then demonstrate how that series of patterns formed a larger theme. When considered in relationship to other themes, the team was able to help other employees reach the same set of insights they had derived from the data, and secure their support for developing new designs based on them. In this manner, the embedded observations within each successive stage of development demonstrated relevance and helped build buy-in along the way. This also allowed the team to point to long-term patterns, themes and insights, and track them against broader cultural shifts, in order to demonstrate interactions and interdependencies. In one instance, the team pointed to the rise in popularity of online selling and how it competed with the client’s primary business model. By framing field observations that substantiated their insights and took place over multiple projects, they were able to construct an argument to strategically adjust the company’s offering to compete with online sales platforms.

Documentation and Ethnographic Thinking Ethnographers are rarely without a recording tool of some sort in their hands.They shoot video, record audio, take photos, draw maps, and scribe notes to trace the experiences they have in the field, as well as reflect on them.While this, at first, may

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seem like an objective undertaking, the ethnographic process of d­ ocumentation involves an ongoing series of micro-interpretations of each observation and interaction. The ethnographer is caught up in an ongoing process of deciding how to frame visuals, phrase notes, or otherwise document—all through interpretive lenses they apply to the process. As they begin documenting their figurative lens is wide open, capturing anything and everything it can. But over time, ethnographers begin to recognize loose patterns or areas of interest that then lead them to prioritize images, sounds, objects, or phrases that they think might provide them with what they call ethnographically rich data. Each decision to record or frame is informed by cultural contexts, previous experience, and events that occur in the field. In this sense, ethnographic documentation is inherently and continually interpretive. In some ways, the progression of how ethnographers document their observations and interactions might be compared to how traditional artists learn to render the world around them. For many artists, their process typically begins with learning the basics of figure drawing and perspective drawing. To do either of these well (assuming realistic depiction is their goal), they have to learn to see differently first. They need to readjust the “everyday” lens through which they interact with the world by adopting new layers of perception that will provide them with the visual “data” they need to train their hand to render their subject accurately. Hence, the painter uses his thumb to gauge proportion, or the drawer sketches perspective lines on the page to render the dimensions of an interior space. As they render, their expression is still uniquely their own, but its aim is an accurate and insightful depiction. Of course, this analogy only goes so far. However, it does demonstrate the process by which ethnographers engage in incremental interpretations that don’t necessarily purport to privilege a purely objective method of documentation. Field notes are one of the first, and most important, tools ethnographers use to begin documenting their experiences in the field. Like other forms of documentation, writing field notes is an interpretive process—one that translates field experiences into words.These words represent ongoing, minute, and cumulative readings of the behaviors and interactions ethnographers observe. The very act of writing down what’s in front of them requires that they observe, reflect, interpret, and express some version of that experience.This process reinforces patterns of thinking that strengthen the link between witnessing or participating in an experience, and the knowledge that is simultaneously derived from it. Writing field notes also promotes systematic thinking, in which presumably mundane behaviors and events and the extraordinary all hold the potential to be equally valid and insight-provoking data points. This skill is critical for understanding and engaging in ongoing interpretations of the multiple “truths” and different perspectives that ethnographers encounter in the field.

Broader Strategic Value: Sampling, Scaling, and Substantiating Albert Einstein once said that if he had an hour to solve a problem, he’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and five minutes thinking about solutions.

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Clearly, he recognized the importance of defining and framing a problem. As a ­scientist, it’s likely he also recognized that without a solid set of data, defining a challenge is inherently incomplete, which risks forming solutions that miss the mark. From an ethnographic perspective, overlapping documentation provides the raw material that allows ethnographers the range and breadth to sort data, prioritize it, entertain different interpretations, and sometimes toss out data that’s irrelevant. In most cases, this translates to gathering more data than might be presumed “necessary” by others. This is because the overlapping data points ethnographers collect each come from different perspectives—including perspectives that may never have occurred to them. Integrating those perspectives are an essential step in framing complex challenges in ways that eventually drive toward impactful interpretations used to form culturally attuned insights and build persuasive arguments. In settings outside of research, collecting data from different perspectives, and ensuring overlap in data collected using different methods, provides similar benefits. It opens the range of possible outcomes by exposing different points of view, which in turn expands interpretive options and provides opportunities to follow early signals that can lead to patterns that might otherwise go unnoticed. This approach differs from sequential data collection and analysis strategies in some important ways. First, ethnographic thinking sees relationships between data as expansive and networked, rather than linear, since it necessarily considers multiple (sometimes conflicting) data sets at the same time. In this way, an ethnographic thinker is inherently a networker, who connects with many different people and then integrates their varied perspectives within a holistic framework (not unlike the kinds of models being developed by Nicholas Christakis and others in the emerging field of network science), (Christakis & Fowler, 2009). This provides them with a great deal more exposure to new ideas and approaches, which in turn enables them to leverage their many connections to form interpretations that are developed from patterns within and between their many different sources of data. Over time, these interpretations can also help guide how ethnographic thinkers collect additional data—an adaptive process that uses knowledge gained from their pattern finding as a way finder for where to focus within their networks, and when to shift focus from general context to relevant details, or vice versa. This enables them to scope and scale challenges in ways that help them develop informed and substantiated interpretations. A useful metaphor for this process is how attorneys prepare for and construct arguments to convince a jury. At first, they compile evidence from as many different sources as possible.They also hear the facts of the case as told from as many different perspectives as possible. Along the way, as their experience combines with their growing knowledge of the case, they begin to piece together a perspective of their own—a story that pulls together small interpretations of these different accounts. They do this by looking for patterns and larger themes that arise from their evolving accumulations of small interpretations they’d been forming along the way. In many cases, this process also includes considerations of broader cultural contexts, the different states of mind of witnesses, and other considerations that shape the data they collect. From their ongoing immersion in

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the different data sets, they develop a sensibility for when to go broad and when to go deep into details. In the end, their analysis is expressed in a narrative designed specifically to persuade a jury that their perspective should be privileged over the opposing attorney’s. Like attorneys, ethnographic thinkers make sense of inherently disjointed data sets. Within the networks they tap, they have to weigh different judgments and assumptions embedded within different perspectives, compare and contrast features of unfamiliar domains with familiar ones, apply multiple different focal lengths, and map knowledge from one domain to another. All of this demands that they continually interpret new data and scour for patterns across and between different data sets to find the connections that produce broader, integrated interpretations that can be used to reach useful and persuasive insights.Those insights are most valuable when they’re evidence-based, empirical, and are built with an interpretive logic that prioritizes traceability.

PART III

Analysis, Strategy, and Influence

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8 ANALYZING HOLISTICALLY

From the Field: Fishing for Insights1 Meet the team: one journalist, one economist, one sociologist, one biologist, two designers, and two anthropologists. Sound complex? It was. Yet, Surprisingly, collaboration among this broad spectrum of practitioners turned out to be relatively easy compared to the challenge we were asked to tackle. The brief was to identify areas of opportunity for viable models and practices that support sustainable fishing—globally. Just deciding where to begin was overwhelming. We knew that such a complex challenge was going to require a complex research strategy. Even with a relatively large team, it was obvious that we couldn’t include every aspect of the global fishing industry in our work. Instead, we decided to focus the work in two ways that would allow us to get a holistic snapshot of the industry. First, we narrowed the field of study by focusing on critical core areas of the fishing industry supply chain, since this would provide the best set of data for how different parts of the industry operate and inter-relate. From there, we knew we also needed a deep understanding of the motivations that currently drive different stakeholders within the supply chain—fishermen, processors, distributors, storage companies, and buyers. With this understanding, we hypothesized that we could eventually design a set of sustainability initiatives linked closely to their current motivations in ways that would trigger behavior change that aligned with their priorities and self-interests. Our basic understanding of the supply chain, and how it worked, was formed primarily through a previous round of information gathering and secondary research. Our primary research centered on refining that view, understanding stakeholders in the industry and their role in the fishing supply chain, and then digging deeper to uncover motivations within different sectors. This research was conducted in interdisciplinary pairs, as we spread out across the globe.

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When we returned from the field, we were immediately faced with our first big challenge. Although we had all gathered data using the same basic methods, it was clear that interpreting our findings was occurring through very different disciplinary lenses. Each lens offered important perspective to the project, but we needed some common ground to begin building a holistic model in which everyone’s input was valued and integrated.To make sense of it all, we used an approach rooted in ethnographic analysis in which integrating a wide range of various data sources plays a central role. For that process, we used boards to post quotes, observations, images, and artifacts from each field visit and then collectively reviewed all boards to find patterns among and between data. Of course, with such wide-ranging field experiences and backgrounds, finding those patterns within our huge data set was both time consuming and taxing. After a great deal of storytelling, scribing, reviewing transcripts, diagramming, and clustering, our patterns eventually coalesced out of the commonalities, important differences and telling links that spanned across our data. Barriers to sustainability became our inevitable focus, and we found many. Among them were consumers’ lack of reliable information, buyers’ sourcing difficulties and skepticism about the definition of sustainable, and fisheries’ powerful incentives to fish unsustainably in an industry that is increasingly hostile toward their interests. But this was only the beginning. We then used these patterns as the basic material from which we derived larger themes that could help us define the current set of cultural conditions within the industry, as well as how they inter-relate. For this, we concentrated heavily on sketching frameworks that visually depicted these relationships and the dynamics within them. Throughout our analysis, everyone on the team had to regularly readjust his or her perspective and determine how their interpretation of data informed the scope and scale of our challenge. Within some frameworks, the biological details of environmental science were most critical. In others, the macroeconomics of distribution and the global fish marketplace took precedent. In still others, the ethnographic detail of the daily experiences of fishers was paramount. Within each configuration, all team members had to calibrate their contributions to help shape and structure the prevailing framework. At each stage, ethnographic thinking was instrumental in facilitating exchanges and balancing different approaches among various disciplinary perspectives to help the team reach a collective understanding of the complexity of interactions within the fishing industry. This included situating insights and interpretations that were informed by different disciplinary perspectives within the cultural contexts of different industry sectors. It also helped set the tone for analysis (and the “culture” of the team) in which each team member could comfortably surrender their allegiance to a specific disciplinary mindset and still feel confident that their perspective would be integrated into the larger process of analysis. Through this process, we eventually developed an in-depth understanding of the diverse range of motivations and barriers that stakeholders had within this system, the relations of power between them, and the systemic barriers and enablers that made the fishing supply system persist as it currently does. Ethnographic thinking helped us analyze our

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data holistically, shift perspectives, and work collaboratively with our differences so that we could begin to design solutions for disrupting the status quo productively. Ultimately, we found that within a system as complex as the global fishing supply chain we couldn’t develop one best solution. Instead, we created a series of parallel solution “streams” which varied in scope, scale, and by potential players. These went beyond catch limits and fishing regulations, and into areas of the industry like processing, storage, retail messaging, new farming methods, and other approaches. For example, two outcomes included establishing a global network for species tracing to empower fishermen to command better prices for sustainably caught species, and developing new loan models for land-based aquaculture to encourage this practice and reduce dependence on wild species and aquaculture. Critical to most outcomes were programs designed specifically to enable entrepreneurship and local empowerment as essential parts of the solution. With such a diverse team and complex challenge, none of these solutions would have been possible without the holistic approach we took when analyzing our data and working toward frameworks that helped us conceptualize relationships between different data sets and within different cultural contexts. Ethnographic thinking helped us integrate different perspectives from the team, understand how patterns of behavior fit within broader cultural contexts embedded within different parts of the industry, depict the interactions and relationships between these different cultures and practices, and integrate considerations of scope and scale when developing solutions. This ability to tack back and forth between the micro and the macro and between the physical and the conceptual—without losing sight of the systems that influence and constrain human beliefs and behaviors—is central to ethnographic thinking, and was particularly useful in helping the team get past disciplinary differences.

Cultural Constellations and Ethnographic Thinking Without interpretation and holistic thinking, ethnographic practice risks becoming a process of cultural translation—a simple transfer of information from one culture to another. These two qualities are the “added value” ethnographic thinking provides to uncover the meanings embedded both within and across human behaviors, values, interactions, and cultures. However, the fact that ethnography operates in the realm of continually changing cultures made up of widely variable individual expressions and cultural logics makes observing and representing human behaviors, interactions, and cultural phenomena especially challenging. For many ethnographers, this is most evident when they attempt to visually portray the dynamics of those behaviors and interactions without appearing to fix them in deterministic ways. One common tool of the trade is to build frameworks that—instead of purporting to depict the entire scope of behaviors and interactions within their cultural context—represent a snapshot of configurations or cultural dynamics. Sometimes these take the form of user journeys (which can look a bit like an illustrated

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timeline). Other frameworks take the form of experience blueprints (a mapping of different parts of a process and their relationship to one another), flow diagrams, and other representations. The process of creating these frameworks is particularly helpful for deriving meaning from everyday experiences in the field. They’re the snapshots that serve as vehicles through which insight is developed, and cultural dynamics are realized and conveyed to others. It’s worth noting that developing frameworks can be very complex and often overwhelming. Usually, insights crystalize in fits and starts as teams spend time with their data and start to see previously unrecognized connections and relationships between different observations and cultural contexts or phenomena. It’s not uncommon for data analysis to leap forward, then backward, and even sideways, to re-examine patterns, themes, or insights, and reconsider relationships between them. Clifford Geertz, a widely respected anthropologist, once described the process anthropologists take: [anthropologists work] ad hoc and ad interim, piecing together thousand-year histories with three-week massacres, international conflicts with municipal ecologies. The economics of rice or olives, the politics of ethnicity or religion, the workings of language or war, must, to some extent, be soldered into the final construction. So must geography, trade, art, and technology.The result, inevitably, is unsatisfactory, lumbering, shaky, and badly formed: a grand contraption. (Geertz 1995) Yet however ad hoc the process of piecing together these different interpretations may be, the connections and relationships ethnographers discover depend on a process of substantiation that only the holistic mindset of ethnographic thinking can provide.That substantiation depends heavily on empirical evidence to connect field data to broader cultural contexts or phenomena. And while its formation is almost never this clear cut or linear, eventually the outcome is a series of inter-dependent links between what was experienced in the field, its cultural context, how it was interpreted, and eventually, how it can be depicted and acted upon.

Broader Strategic Value: Re-imagining Systems and Integrating Insights One of the essential qualities of ethnographic holistic thinking is the ability to understand and appreciate different cultural and personal logics. A truly holistic thinker realizes that not all individuals, groups, or cultures understand and react to the world in the same way. An appreciation of different cultural logics allows the holistic thinker to understand the various systems of interplay between logics, as well as how new configurations between them might take shape. For example, within the fishing industry, different stakeholders have different incentives and disincentives to contribute to a supply chain of sustainably caught fish. Due to different local regulations, some fishers might realize higher prices for sustainably

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caught fish, while others may not. Likewise, fish processors may be rewarded with higher profit margins depending on their adherence (or not) to labeling standards. Each stakeholder is weighing a combination of considerations that are influenced by a range of dynamic factors, including things as concrete as company profitability or factors that are more abstract, such as cultural beliefs about what constitutes ethical business practices. Within the fishing supply chain (or any other system of interactions), these differing cultural logics shape how stakeholders interact with one another, and influence the cultures of practice unique to the system itself. Although not entirely predictive, thinking holistically can help identify a range of possible scenarios that are likely to fit naturally within an interplay of diverse logics of a system (since it goes beyond simple considerations of individual differences). It also allows the holistic thinker to determine which potential scenarios or solutions would clearly lay so far outside of the dynamics of a system that they’re unlikely to be received positively because the simply “don’t make sense” within the cultural logics of stakeholders. One application that’s useful as an example is managing team dynamics. In one way or another, most teams include people who have different perspectives and cultural logics. Good team dynamics depend on the productive interchange of ideas to develop new and useful outcomes. Team members need to be open to other perspectives, as well as have the ability to contribute their own at the right time and place. A leader’s job is to facilitate this process and to consider how different logics can interact best to ultimately produce those useful outcomes. A leader who uses holistic thinking will consider the team members’ different cultural logics, and their likely interactions, in order to identify a range of potential outcomes before acting (e.g., introducing the team to a new tool). This leader uses interpretive skills to develop a holistic view of the team rooted in respect for each team member’s unique perspective, the processes by which each team member comes to understand the world, and impact both have on team dynamics. In addition to team dynamics, the type of holistic thinking common among ethnographers is particularly useful in challenges with a large or shifting scope. Because culture is always changing, ethnographic thinkers grow accustomed to developing dynamic frameworks to conceptualize different moving parts within a system. Their conceptualizations of how a range of different personal experiences fit within shifting cultural subsystems, and how those subsystems fit within broader cultural contexts and phenomena, are part of how they substantiate and trace meanings embedded within human behaviors. This is what is often referred to as “deep understanding,” which situates behaviors, values, and interactions within cultures without necessarily fixing them. It uses concepts such as “realms,” “ranges,” “arrays,” “rhizomes,” “spirals,” and “loops” to convey the dynamics that are a natural part of flexible and adaptive human experiences that thrive within ever-evolving cultures. Building on these concepts, ethnographic thinkers are also adept at understanding the power relations between different subsystems within the larger cultural systems they explore. They can integrate understandings of affiliations, alienations, scale, leverage, and other dynamics that exist among and between subsystems in

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order to arrive at analyses that expose flows of power that have the potential to influence people. In addition to identifying consumer influences, this has applications in diplomacy, negotiations, and any other practices where understanding challenges holistically is critical. The skill is rooted in an appreciation for the flexibility and adaptability of human behavior as conditioned by (and continually contributing to shifts within) cultural contexts. Returning to the example of negotiation from Chapter 7, the holistic nature of ethnographic thinking can provide an understanding of power flows that can be particularly useful for developing solutions that all parties find not only acceptable, but also comfortable within their own cultural contexts. This includes a level of acceptability and comfort for those participating in the negotiation process as well as those to whom they must answer, since each side is representing a constituency with its own set of cultural contexts and expectations. Like the example of solutions sets discussed in the sustainable fishing industry project, the added value of ethnographic holistic thinking is that it can set the stage for developing multiple pathways to achieve a solution that is agreeable, acceptable, and culturally attuned not just for participating stakeholders, but also the unique sets of cultural and personal logics of anyone embedded within affected social networks. Overall, the skills required for ethnographic data analysis (such as strong organizational, prioritizing, contextualizing, comparative, interpretive, and analytical abilities) are excellent primers for reaching the higher level insights holistic thinking provides. When these skills are combined with the ability to grasp complex systems quickly, holistic thinkers can break new ground by discovering what might not have ordinarily occurred to others. The challenge, of course, remains how those newly discovered culturally attuned solutions can be integrated within the range of cultural logics of particular populations (teams, clients, agencies, and students, etc.). So, while ethnographic thinking may be particularly useful for constructing insightful frameworks that depict cultural constellations and interactions, none of this is ultimately applicable if it can’t be communicated clearly and integrated in ways that feel natural to those populations. Geertz would perhaps argue that influencing others in this way requires the ability to create and disseminate “mininarratives … with the narrator in them” that make pieces of those frameworks accessible in ways that anchor possible solutions in real, lived experiences (Geertz, 1995). Ethnographic holistic thinking offers a way to expand beyond the dynamics of a topic or challenge to connect to the experiences of the people whose lives potential solutions will impact.

Note 1 Portions of this section are rooted in a chapter co-authored by Charley Scull and myself that originally appeared in the Handbook of Anthropology in Business (Hasbrouck & Scull, 2014).

9 SITUATING INTENTIONALLY

From the Field: Great Ideas with Nowhere to Go After fieldwork in five US cities, and over two months of analysis, our team developed a set of solid design principles tailored specifically to the values, behaviors, and needs of sales reps in the Gen Y age cohort. Then we calibrated the potential reach of our findings with quantitative research, and carefully crafted a prototype for a sales incentive program. It offered Gen Y sales reps opportunities for hands-on learning, integrated peer mentoring, and provided a blend of support and independence that aligned with their expectations. It also included a social networking component, the ability to personally tailor rewards, and an online dashboard that pulled it all together. Within the client’s company culture, talk about the project had created a buzz. Expectations were high, and toward the end of the project, additional Gen Y related initiatives were beginning to emerge in other parts of the company. So, our work was being watched, as well as measured against those other initiatives. None of this undermined the confidence our team had in our design, but it did shift the context for how our work would later be received. Housed within the company’s innovation group, this project was prioritized due to its potential for refreshing and invigorating what had become a stale and unappealing sales model. Budget was less of a problem than integrating key company stakeholders along the way—many of them new to ethnographic research, design thinking, or any type of innovation work. Most of those who joined in various stages over the course of the project became advocates, but when it came time to communicate project findings and developments to their own peers or upper level management, they stumbled. They had experienced various portions of field research, data synthesis, analysis, iterative prototyping, or field tests, but not to the extent that they could internalize and share those experiences, or knit them all

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together in a narrative that clearly substantiated project findings.The process s­ imply wasn’t integrated into their daily work practices, so the opportunity to convey the benefits of what they learned (beyond lots of post-its and brainstorms) was largely lost. This left members of the innovation team (both internal and consulting) with the task of not only presenting the benefits and relevance of the new sales program, but of explaining how the program was developed using this “new” innovation process. Slowly, support grew, and familiarity with the process did as well. Beyond initial impressions like “Wow, what are you guys doing with all these stickies?” people began to recognize the rationale behind ethnographic methods and design thinking, and they were reassured by our efforts to scale them using quantitative research. However, in the end, even after successive prototypes and clear demonstrations of their value, the project was never implemented. It turns out that while the process itself was understood and appreciated, adopting a new sales program rooted in ethnographic and design thinking amounted to advocating for an unproven approach within the company—a risk most weren’t willing to take on a personal or career level. What’s more, the program we presented—although clearly positioned to begin with a small-scale test—was, in fact, quite a large and inter-connected system that would have involved multiple shifts in well-established company practices. So, someone in marketing, for example, whose workload was already overwhelming, would have had to find additional time to dedicate to new work practices associated with this test. Invariably the questions from people within the company circled back around to how they would find the time to do things differently, and whether or not their management would reward them for taking on this additional work—on a project developed using, as yet, unproven methods within the company. It turns out that our complex, tightly wound, and lovingly honed model designed to work perfectly for Gen Y was difficult to situate within the traditional practices of a large multinational corporation. Even though the project was appreciated, it was indigestible for the company’s culture. Continuing the metaphor, what we learned in hindsight was that we needed to help the company adapt to the meal more gradually, using a carefully designed tasting menu of options. We also learned that while many people from the company participated in various stages of the process, it was always perceived as a special “treat”—time away from the monotony of their regular workload. No one was actually asked by their superiors to integrate the things they learned into their work processes or to shift how they worked to a more human-centered approach. The net result was that while many in the company were advocates who were “surprised and delighted” by our practices and the program we developed, most defaulted back to the safety of their familiar workflows when held accountable. Inflexible company reward structures were clearly part of the challenge here, but what we learned about our own practices is perhaps more telling. Upon reflection, it was clear that we could have spent much more time integrating a fuller understanding of the company’s culture, and its ability and inclination to integrate changes within individual work streams. Instead of “surprising and delighting” with our program, we

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should have spent much more time familiarizing the right mix of employees with how our findings and designs were relevant to them and the company’s future. In addition, our iterative prototyping and field testing should have run parallel to the inner workings of the company, by purposefully integrating employees whose daily practices we would later ask to change. Their inspiration may have then triggered additional managerial support, or at least a conversation at that level. Either way, they would have been “in the kitchen” longer, leading to both greater input and familiarity. What’s more, they’d know the “recipes” as well as we did, and could deconstruct them to fit better with their own current practices. When I look back at this project, I’m reminded of an interview in which anthropologist Nancy Chen talks with filmmaker Trinh T. Minh-ha about her work (Chen & Minh-ha, 1994). In the context of how she depicts her subjects, Minh-ha says that she strives to use a form of expression that does not objectify, does not point to an object as if it is distant from the speaking subject or absent from the speaking place. [It’s a] speaking that reflects on itself and can come very close to a subject without, however, seizing or claiming it. (Chen & Minh-ha, 1994: 443) We could have benefitted greatly from applying a similar approach to our work.We had, in many ways, created a project that unintentionally forged a chasm between the innovation team and a key set of subjects—employees who were ultimately asked to implement parts of the project. Instead of engaging in reflective speech and actively engaging affected employees as partners, we were speaking about the insights we derived from fieldwork in a target market, about our research participants, about a new sales program we developed, about the plans for field testing, and about the ways employees would implement it. All of this eventually distanced the project from those same employees, who never had the opportunity to fully internalize it or contribute to its evolution. The purpose of this example is to demonstrate how our team didn’t use ethnographic thinking as effectively as we could have. While ethnographers are often strategic about preparing research plans, prescribing the correct combination of methods, or setting agendas for analysis, they sometimes lose sight of how to apply those same skills in broader contexts. A focus directed only toward research participants and then moved from fieldwork to insights, risks losing the chance to have impact within an organization’s social structures and hierarchies.

Audience-ing and Ethnographic Thinking Ethnographic thinking is most impactful when it combines findings from the field with an equally deep understanding of the sponsoring organizational culture in ways that facilitate more empathic connections to consumers or constituents and help determine relevance for all stakeholders. This approach ties the research and insight

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development process to productive change within a company’s o ­rganizational ­culture, and helps identify new opportunities for their assimilation. It’s helpful here to learn from anthropologists who have turned the ethnographic gaze toward cultures of power, or what they’ve referred to as “studying up” For example, Laura Nader asks: How has it come to be, we might ask, that anthropologists are more interested in why peasants don’t change than why the auto industry doesn’t innovate, or why the Pentagon or universities cannot be more organizationally creative? The conservatism of such major institutions and bureaucratic organizations probably has wider implications for the species and for theories of change than does the conservatism of peasantry. (Nader, 1969) There are, of course, some deeper questions here about the history of the discipline of anthropology and Western institutions. However, we can learn a great deal from Nader and her insistence that a truly democratic ethnography applies its methods in all directions (up, down, and across), and uses them strategically to position findings in ways that affect change far beyond the task of developing new products, services, or systems for consumers or constituents. While not consciously studying up in the same way Nader advocates, some early anthropologists, such as Margaret Mead, were keenly aware of the fact that in order to change people’s minds, and help them see the value of ethnographic insight, they needed to think strategically about how their research findings would be received among their intended audiences and, more broadly, to the public at large. Mead intentionally embraced ethnographic film in part for the purpose of reaching broader audiences. She also wrote regularly for Redbook magazine, lectured to a wide range of audiences, and made frequent appearances on television talk shows. In Popularizing Anthropology, William E. Mitchell writes: It was Mead’s conviction that almost any idea could be stated simply enough to be intelligible to laypeople. With characteristic no-nonsense rhetoric she declared that ‘if one cannot state a matter clearly enough so that even an intelligent twelve-year-old can understand it, one should remain within the cloistered walls of the university and laboratory until one gets a better grasp of one’s subject matter. (Mitchell, 1996: 123) 1 While in some ways this statement reflects Mead’s unique character, it was also a strategic conviction. She prioritized her audiences and situated her content and messaging to maximize the potential for impact and adoption of the concepts she wished to convey. She did this by directing the ethnographic gaze toward her audiences, and responding in ways she knew they would be most likely to absorb her messages. At her most effective, she also directed her communications toward

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institutions that she believed either needed to reform their policies or positions, or could influence others. The beauty of Mead’s approach was that she recognized the broader value of ethnographic thinking, and thought strategically about where it would have the greatest impact for change. Her work is inspiration for carefully considering the cultural contexts of different audiences, reflecting on how they might receive ethnographic insights, and the unique value it can offer for each of them. Although largely unrecognized, this process is just as complex as ethnographic practice and insight development from field research. Like field participants, audiences toward which ethnographic insights are aimed have multiple subjectivities, their organizational culture is evolving continually, and their personal (or other cultural) views are constantly being informed by—and are influencing—that evolution. Presenting ethnographic insights to any audience without taking this into consideration significantly disadvantages the impact they can have, and underappreciates the strategic value of ethnographic thinking. Many practicing ethnographers continue Mead’s approach in varying forms. Martha Cotton has argued for “being ethnographic with your client” in order to pave the way for critical findings to resonate best with them (Cotton, 2014). Likewise, Darrah and Dornadic argue that “regardless of where we start, we wind up as ethnographers of the organization that retained us. Our insights matter, but so too does our ability to understand the often tacit aspirations and intentions of the client,” and that the strategic benefit of ethnographic thinking comes from “co-creating both the service and its value” (Darrah & Dornadic, 2014). O’Dell and Willim have referred to this as “compositional practice” where insights are only relevant when they are co-constructed by everyone who has a stake in the outcome. These approaches are inherently strategic since they depend on the ability to develop (and respond appropriately to) a deep understanding of all players involved. In short, they recognize that cultural analysis “has to engage to convince” (O’Dell & Willim, 2014).

Broader Strategic Value: Redefining Context, Tailoring Insights, and Unearthing Commonalities Due to the nature of the ways in which ethnographic methods have been integrated into design and other fields, contemporary examples of strategic audienceing and the broader benefits of ethnographic thinking are perhaps less visible. The “ethnography-as-tool” approach sequesters ethnographic thinking in the front end of the innovation process (sometimes dubbed the “discovery” phase), while it simultaneously deprioritizes its strategic attributes that can help position deep insights and culturally informed recommendations within organizational cultures and development processes. This is one of the reasons that many organizations find it so difficult to move their ideas beyond the lab, studio, or workshop, and into the marketplace. Their innovation initiatives produce a lot of great ideas, but they find themselves moving from project to project, innovating without gaining traction—feeling like they’re

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just chasing trends. The problem is usually that they lack an innovation strategy, or if they have one, the strategy isn’t framed in cultural terms.They narrow their focus on a specific set of customer or constituent needs without integrating perspectives from others who influence how (or if) ideas move into the marketplace or other setting. An innovation strategy—framed in cultural terms and informed by ethnographic thinking—helps organizations communicate with internal audiences about how innovation initiatives align with their everyday practices, enhance their goals, and build on the organization’s core value propositions. It also helps improve the likelihood of success for new and current innovation initiatives by identifying critical alliances, enlisting clear channels of action, avoiding potential obstacles, and influencing areas open to change within the organization. This might include tailoring insights for potential accelerants within an organization, or, conversely, using insights to disrupt ingrained limitations and stimulate innovation by provoking productive challenges to either organizational or industry-wide orthodoxies. Strategic ethnographic thinking of this sort requires a solid understanding of the values, behaviors, and cultural norms of groups that influence consumers as well as the organizational culture of the company or organization. This includes influencers such as bloggers, pop culture stars, and gurus, etc. It also includes indirect stakeholders and analogous cultures with similar characteristics that can inspire and offer a shift in context. Clearly, this expands the scope well beyond the job descriptions for many ethnographers currently practicing in applied settings.Yet, the outcome of this approach can provide a valuable framework that includes a cultural analysis of each key influence group that impacts the success of the organization’s innovation initiatives. This can be used to build a platform that keeps innovation projects on track and identifies channels that help propel the right ideas into the right markets or other set of optimal conditions. Morias and Malefyt argue similarly in their work on anthropology in advertising (Morias & Malefyt, 2010). They see ethnographic thinking as particularly strategic when it applies the process of continually learning about cultures to the many different worlds involved in their work. Learning the language and culture of clients to better connect with their ways of thinking is a critical part of this, as is mediating between those different worlds (consumer, client, and agency, etc.). Morias takes this argument further in another piece in which he outlines how ethnographic thinking can provide value to the stages of strategic planning involved in delivering an agreed upon vision for a brand. By interweaving cultural interpretations throughout the process (such as highlighting the relevance of belief systems, values, and practices for a brand, or deciphering the codes, symbols, rituals, and narratives that are part of a particular culture, including the client’s), he sees growing value and demand for ethnographically informed strategic consulting (Morias, 2014). A number of other practicing ethnographers have considered the forms of strategic value that ethnographic thinking provides. Mack and Squires point to the shift many practicing ethnographers make from field to management as their careers develop, and the ways in which they embed their decision making with strategic

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insight rooted in ethnographic thinking. Among other things, these include being able to sort through complexities to arrive at critical core questions, framing challenges within contexts that inform and advance the ways teams approach them, and reminding others in positions of leadership that the ability to sway strategies comes with inherent ethical responsibilities (Mack & Squires, 2011). Finally, returning to the idea of “uncomfortable questions” mentioned in the introduction, strategically situating challenging prompts can force organizations to reframe their approach to many different things, including innovation. For example, it can be used to point to the need for a better understanding of the dynamics of relationships between the organization and their consumers or constituents. This might include anything from “Do we really understand the ecosystem of interactions that surround our offering and how it impacts sales?” to “Are we in the right business?” These “uncomfortable questions” aren’t always simple, since they sit at a strategic level and not at the problem-solving level. They are, by their very nature, systemic and holistic—both modes of ethnographic thinking that tend to be underappreciated by organizations focused solely on near term problem solving. Yet, if well timed, carefully situated, and culturally attuned, they’re also one of the most effective means to help organizations reframe challenges, break down silos, and disrupt assumptions. When positioned correctly, they help organizations build a fuller, deeper, and more holistic understanding of their business: how it fits in the marketplace, how consumers relate to their offerings, and how the organization can best identify new opportunities. Ultimately, this is a powerful tool that demonstrates how ethnographic thinking is useful for changing conversations, modifying vernaculars, shifting how innovation is framed, and introducing a healthy dose of reflexivity into organizations.

Note 1 For further discussion of Mead, see MacClancy’s chapter in the volume Popularizing Anthropology (MacClancy, 1996: 24–5).

10 STORYTELLING EMPATHICALLY

“Our species thinks in metaphors and learns through stories.” Mary Catherine Bateson

From the Field: “My House Made Me Green” “You just have to do it yourself.You’re not really getting very much support from the government, or your country or whatever. You’ve just got to fight. You’ve got to fight, fight, fight for it … You just gotta stay focused because nobody else is going to come to your aid”—Kylie “It really brings out the inner data geek. Right? I mean, you become a total data freak because now I’m all about … how am I doing? Have I put too many lights on and how much am I using? And I want to really keep track of it.”—Jason “I feel like I am cheating because I didn’t design it, you know what I mean? So it’s like this awesome house and [people] associate it with me and I feel like I am an imposter, if you will. But I think, you know, it says I’m cool … I hope.”—Jane Kylie, Jason, and Jane are all talking about the same thing: the green features of their homes (e.g., solar panels, rainwater reuse, on-demand hot water, etc.). Yet, in these brief statements, it quickly becomes apparent that they are each motivated very differently. Kylie’s sense of independence (paired with a mistrust of institutions) creates a motivation to be green that’s tied closely to a survivalist and a frontier mentality. Jason, a lifelong technology enthusiast, is inspired by tracking data on energy and other resource usage in his home. He’s motivated by a desire to visualize and log the changes in energy consumption he makes to feel a sense of personal accomplishment. And Jane is motivated, at least in part, because she thinks it makes her look

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cool. Her contemporary house, replete with solar panels, a roll up living room wall, reclaimed rain water (and many other green features), is a tangible demonstration of her environmental awareness and her appreciation of architectural design. Kylie, Jason, and Jane were all participants in a longitudinal study of green homeowners. Their stories were part of a set of seven behavioral segmentations our team of three researchers identified among 36 green homeowners across six US cities. Our goal was to determine the ways in which green homeowners could inspire the direction of future home technology developments. Since green homeowners were on the cutting edge of resource monitoring and energy conservation, our team felt that their practices and strategies were a particularly valuable resource for developers concentrating on home management technologies. However, we were also concerned that the stereotype of green homeowners as “irrational tree-­huggers” could bias the reception of our work among developers and engineers, who might assume that our findings were only relevant for a small fraction of committed environmentalists. In order to demonstrate the broader potential for developing new home resource management technologies, we needed to share the wide range of motivations we had discovered. We also needed to show that even though the ideologies and motivations behind green homeowners’ practices were incredibly diverse, the practices they triggered were often quite similar. Within our findings, we saw motivations that many people typically associate with environmentalism were represented in only three of our seven segmentations. The motivations of “Hippy hybrids” (counterculture mentality paired with technology interest), “Earth stewards” (caring for the earth as a spiritual mission), and “LOHAS” (Lifestyles of Health and Sustainability) were clearly present, but our research uncovered a wider range of motivations we didn’t anticipate. For example, two segmentations were motivated to “green” their homes primarily by a sense of utopian optimism and a keen interest in being part of the latest trends. These people constituted the segmentations we called “Eco-chic” (many of whom followed celebrity-driven eco-conscious trends), and DIYers (who focused on creativity, inventiveness, and ingenuity as applied to the efficiency of their homes). Other segmentations were motivated primarily by self-reliance and independence. They included “Frugal minimalists” (who focused on resource conservation, durability, and the core essentials of living), and “New patriots” (whose aversion to foreign oil dependence and mistrust of government institutions drove them to conserve and prepare for potential future resource crises). There was some overlap between these different segmentations, but it was the latter four that presented us with new challenges and opportunities when we began to communicate our findings. Our ultimate approach was strategic storytelling; and our first task was to move beyond the stereotypes in ways that personalized the practices we saw as most inspirational for tech developers. So, for example, we shared what it was like to be there when Jason showed us how he timed the opening and closing of the window-coverings in his passive solar house each day as if they were sails; how he envisioned a set of sensors and motors that would automate the process; and how it all made him think about managing his house as

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if he were “living on a ship.” This metaphor then became the central pivot point around use cases, and other potential design features and functions, that prioritized engagement with the home as a form of management made up of both manual and automated tasks that together created a more streamlined home. For this design direction, we extended the metaphor further by portraying this type of homeowner as a ship captain, who uses technology and automation as part, but not all, of their home management (or navigation) strategy.The homeowner/ship captain sees their home as an always-changing vessel that must continually adapt to changes in climate and resident needs. She or he asks: Where is my home going? How does it get there? What technologies can be of best use to me? How can I integrate them in a streamlined way? In this framework, technology does not act as the ship captain/ homeowner, but as part of his or her set of instruments and tools used to reach a new destination or state of living. This metaphor runs somewhat counter to techno-utopian visions of the “home of the future” pumped out every few years by major technology companies, in which the homeowner is essentially “freed” from any interactions with home management/navigation (other than issuing commands). Instead, it positions homeowners as active agents who want to engage with the systems in their homes in ways that are mediated through technology as well as ways that aren’t. They aren’t looking for a completely static model of a perfectly and entirely automated home because they want to be part of the process of interacting with the home based on varying conditions (seasons, time of day, life changes, and occupancy levels, etc.). This shifts the goal of home management away from a fantasy in which the homeowner’s ultimate goal is to do nothing, to a set of use cases in which technologies are part of the homeowner’s management/navigation strategy. We also shared stories about Jane’s network of friends who thought her green house made her look cool. Like the homeowner as ship captain, our goal was to use storytelling about Jane and her friends to drive new use cases. In this instance, we shared how Jane would text friends invitations to dinner parties at her contemporary green home, and that at those parties the topic inevitably turned toward some of the features of her home. Her friends would then later share stories with other friends who were in the process of remodeling or buying a home. Some of them shared Jane’s motivations and values, but many others simply wanted to be part of the conversation. They didn’t necessarily need to align completely with Jane’s worldview to benefit from the inventive and clever ways her home was designed and managed. From this, we developed another use case focusing on the “cool” factor of green technologies. Here, conversation (regardless of motivation) was the driver, within which discussions of home resource management practices, installations, adaptations, and new applications circulated. The goal was to help tech developers see Jane and her friends as a budding social network in search of a platform to share information. Partnering with them could help developers evolve and refine use cases in ways that they couldn’t anticipate on their own. Some could even function as participants who could test new prototypes. Networking platforms like this had

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the potential to provide a much-needed vehicle for users and developers to evolve home management tools in ways that focused on practices rather than ideology. They could allow anyone to follow and contribute to various threads based on interest, and personalize their involvement in ways that could eventually lead to more human-centered feature sets and interactions. These are just two examples of how we used storytelling to link our findings and insights from research and analysis to ideas and designs that resonated with our intended audience. Through this technique, we were able to move past stereotypes of environmentalists, and illustrate how a range of different cultures of practice should inform designs for home management technologies. If we had simply shown a few pictures from the field and then jumped straight away to our design recommendations, much of what we were trying to convey would not have resonated as deeply with the stakeholders we were attempting to influence. They needed to understand the rationale behind our recommendations, to feel the reasons behind them, and to understand at least some of the motivations and lived experiences of our participants so that they could internalize the meanings behind them and move beyond preconceived stereotypes.

Storytelling and Ethnographic Thinking Everyone loves a good story. However, ethnographers have a different relationship with stories. For them, stories are the primary vehicles through which they find cultural meaning as they explore new worlds. Stories set context, indicate values, demonstrate flows of power, and signify intentions. They contain some of the most essential data ethnographers use to develop their interpretations and form insights, and they ground cultural phenomena in everyday lived experiences. Stories are also one of the most effective vehicles through which ethnographers convey their findings and insights. Stories help them generate empathy, encourage appreciation for difference, broaden perspectives, and make the unfamiliar familiar. Good ethnographers bring their field experiences to life by ensuring that their stories are directly relevant to the lives of those who are listening. More specifically, they time their stories to coincide with particular points of relation with listeners within naturally occurring interactions. In a well-crafted, well-timed, and skillfully configured story, the listener is invited to imagine a whole other world, and empathize with the particular lived experiences within it. In contrast to pedantic lessons or long morality tales, truly resonant ethnographic narratives are most effective when they’re situational, provisional, contingent, and temporary. Their goal isn’t to persuade others of some universal truth, but to introduce ideas and images that resonate on many levels for listeners. They may integrate elements of logic, reason, or rationality, but the ultimate strength of their stories rests in their imagery, emotion, and personal experiences. Much of ethnographers’ ability to time and tell compelling stories is rooted in their training. For example, in my graduate ethnographic methods course at the University of Southern California, our instructor, Professor Peter Biella, gave the

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class an assignment that was particularly valuable for honing the skills described in this section. After a lengthy period of ethnographic fieldwork with our chosen group or topic, we were told to compile all of our text based data in one document (observations, interview notes, transcripts, etc.), and then go through them, footnoting every point where we felt a reflection, comment, interpretation, or insight was important. In the end, most pages were expected to include more footnotes than data. Later, in analysis, the footnotes were useful for identifying moments from our fieldwork that were most ethnographically rich, as well as for identifying patterns among our footnotes that pushed our interpretations toward deeper cultural insights. Reviewing our footnotes also revealed the moments in our fieldwork that catalyzed opportunities for building theory or proving/disproving hypotheses. And, finally, the footnote exercise helped us identify which experiences and observations to share with others in order to convey those insights, interpretations, and theories that offered the greatest impact and resonance. Over time, this way of linking experiences to analysis and insights becomes an engrained part of ethnographic thinking. The next step is to master the ability to scan for naturally occurring instances to share narratives that convey those insights and still make sense in current contexts. This includes learning to identify key opportunities to carry meaning from the field to their audience(s) in ways that have meaningful influence. Anthropologist Clifford Geertz argues that this is achieved most effectively by building a series of small vignettes or “mini narratives” that collectively form larger positions designed to trigger realizations and new perspectives within others (Geertz, 1995). Formulating and sharing these mini narratives is a process that involves continually scanning social settings to time when they’re shared in ways that have the greatest impact with listeners. This is often achieved by engaging in ongoing interpretations of interactions in social settings—a sort of mind’s eye that is continually operating in the background and assessing where opportunities to share might lie. It’s not unlike the same forms of thinking used in fieldwork, except in this case the ethnographer is looking for key moments to enlist storytelling to facilitate new cultural understandings, rather than steer a conversation to elicit more data from a research participant. In practice, this attention to relevance and small-scale points of relation can prove to be far more relevant, persuasive or convincing than grand narratives or lessons that risk being perceived as dogmatic, pedantic, or moralizing.

Broader Strategic Value: Influence and Inspiration In addition to timing, seasoned ethnographers have also honed the ability to tell stories that convey diverse perspectives and demonstrate how different (often unfamiliar) cultural values can offer valuable insight relevant to current contexts. This skill requires the ability to communicate in ways that illustrate how different cultural logics and unfamiliar rationales are formed. Knowing how to evoke the way a different worldview feels, and how to persuade others that this different point of view is both valid and valuable, are marks of a truly strategic communicator.

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It requires the ability to balance emotion, the progression of a narrative, and the ­ability to present different cultural and personal logics to audiences in ways that make sense to them. Often this involves gradually building a position through a story that always feels relevant to an audience by setting context, and offering different perspectives within those contexts. Rather than arguing or imposing a position using the status of a social science expert, ethnographic storytelling offers a means of gradually shifting the overall platform of understanding. When timed effectively, it can pave the way for others to integrate a new perspective internally— to “own” those views and reach their own personalized realizations rooted in stories about real human experiences. Ethnographic storytellers realize that everyone’s interpretations are made up of small moments of realization, and they use strategic storytelling strategies to help construct a series of realizations that eventually grow to form insights that emerge within their intended audience(s). So, instead of saying something like: “Child-rearing practices among Samoans are both egalitarian and distributed, prioritizing physiological and emotional needs over disciplinary measures or reifying hierarchical norms,” an ethnographer might offer a small story that has more immediate relevance for the listener, which then sparks a series of thought processes that lead them to a desired conclusion (or at least their own interpretation of it). Margaret Mead was able to influence Dr. Benjamin Spock’s opinions about childrearing in this way: Spock had attended several lectures and seminars with Mead. Eventually, she invited Spock to her apartment for the showing of a movie about her latest trip to the South Pacific Islands, where she studied the indigenous peoples. Spock recalls how he “was keenly interested when Margaret talked about how the babies there were carried on the mother’s side in a sling.” When the baby whimpered, the mother just slid the infant to her breast and let it nurse.Within a short time, the baby resumed sleeping, and the mother returned to work. (Maier, 2003) Mead also told Spock about how she recorded her daughter’s feeding demands, and scheduled her teaching and research obligations around them. Later, in his widely read book The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care, Dr. Spock advocated for demand feeding of infants as well as picking them up whenever they cried (Spock, 1946). These practices were clearly influenced by Mead, and were directly opposed to more rigid childrearing approaches recommended by most pediatricians at that time. The popularity of these ideas eventually revolutionized how children were raised in the United States after World War II. Ethnographic storytelling can also be used to help shift perspectives and dislodge ethnocentric views in smaller group settings. A good example of this comes from the field of scenario planning, in which key members of an organization develop a small set of scenarios for future possible outcomes to determine pathways for how their organization might be affected, as well as how they might respond. In these exercises, considerations of future scenarios often begin with quantifiable factors,

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such as upcoming demographic shifts or likely technological changes in a given market or setting. However, statistics only tell part of the story. Ethnographic stories about the lived experiences can help bring statistics to life in a number of ways that enrich the scenario planning process and hold decision-makers accountable to the impact their decisions may have on the everyday lives of their customers or constituents. They demand that planners and strategists look beyond (or beneath) the numbers to understand the ways that their actions could influence the daily lived experiences of people in “the real world.” I’ve seen this play out first hand in a scenario planning session designed to help a major CPG company understand how it would respond to a range of changes that could impact their business, including: the emerging middle class in developing economies; changing definitions of personal success; the growth of commerce in social networks; and the impact of improving science on health and well-being. In the session, the group was given three different scenarios for each of the following hypothetical “backdrops” in a world ten years in the future: Cascading Crises (global systems are unable to cope with a series of resource, financial, and political crises); East–West Match (rivalry between the United States and China creates increased and unstable competition); and Long Boom (global fundamentals ­continue strong through increased innovation and globalization). The scenarios themselves ranged from a “Mad Max” world where financial and resource insecurity erodes trade agreements, foments nationalist fears, and dissolves social safety nets, to new forms of prosperity driven by a shift toward women in leadership and increasing collaboration between public and private sectors. My role as an ethnographer was to help paint a picture to illustrate the lived experiences of the company’s current, and potential future, customers in ways that provided visibility and contextual understanding within these scenarios. This included storytelling rooted in fieldwork in a number of key areas.The first application was ethnographic accounts of customers in key geographic areas being considered as part of the scenarios. The idea was to prompt thinking about how their responses to scenarios could impact the lives of both those they intended to reach as well as those they didn’t. So, for example, after an ethnographic story about a typical day for a 60-year-old woman who sells cleaning products from a stand in an open-air market in China, a series of prompts included: What does the future hold for this woman whose customers’ tastes are currently shifting toward global brands and grocery stores? How might she respond to the scenario being considered? With whom does she have influence within her network? In what ways might her values make her a potential ally or disruptor? How might this play out in her everyday life and interactions with customers? What kinds of momentum might build among people in her same situation? How many others are there like her? Similarly, ethnographic depictions of (and subsequent prompts about) the lived experiences of younger customers were included, since their values and worldviews were likely to influence the perception of the organization in these future scenarios. Finally, ethnographic stories about analogous settings and events that depict experiences within different

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cultural contexts that parallel the scenarios under consideration were included. For example, we shared a few stories about how shifting customer tastes in other regions of the world where the middle class is growing impacted traditional local vendors (e.g., Malaysian food stall vendors). This helped stimulate thinking about different patterns of cultural change, and how they might map onto the scenarios being considered. Some of these same techniques for ethnographic storytelling are also useful in strategic planning. Good strategic plans integrate perspectives from many different stakeholders, which typically include customers/constituents, board members, leadership, and the organization’s staff. In order to develop a strategic plan that will propel thoughtful action for a company or organization, the perspectives from these stakeholders need to collectively establish the organization’s core values, guiding principles, mission, and purpose statement. Ethnographic depictions of customers’ and staff ’s daily lived experiences can bridge the gap that can often exist between them and leadership. They serve as a grounding force that helps the organization collaboratively reach an inclusive and shared understanding of who it serves, who delivers the offering it provides, and what it feels like to experience both. Rooted in a collective organizational identity, they can begin to develop future desired states toward which the organization should strive via strategies and tactics. As in scenario planning, the strategic planning process can also integrate ethnographic storytelling from analogous models (e.g., competitors and similar organizations) to expand thinking about how to creatively and productively develop those strategies and reach their goals. Overall, the role of ethnographic storytelling in scenario and strategic planning points to its value as a tool for helping others imagine the journeys through which others travel. It connects real lives and experiences to decision-making to both humanize decision processes and integrate the range of cultural complexity that’s inevitably integrated within, and impacted by, those decisions. The use of ethnographic storytelling is not a predictive tool in these examples, but an awarenessraising mechanism that helps decision-makers ask productive questions and find opportunities and design platforms for solutions that are more likely to be welltimed and culturally attuned. It provides a space for moments of discovery and connection that statistical data can’t; and, if it’s well timed and situated, it can become a critical tool for advocating strategic change.

CONCLUSION

Operationalizing Ethnographic Thinking As I was writing this book and sharing what I saw as the broader benefits of e­ thnographic thinking with friends and colleagues, many of them asked very thought-provoking questions. Some centered on the ways ethnographic thinking could be “operationalized” in different industries. Some focused more on its use within various stages of innovation and strategy processes. Others asked how it might become as “sticky” as design thinking. My responses to these questions are included in this section. However, before addressing them, it’s worth noting that this isn’t an exhaustive response. That’s because one of the most valuable attributes of ethnographic thinking is that it fundamentally changes ways of seeing and being in the world, often to the point where the ways that it’s applied are highly personal, and personalized—more on that later. But first, let’s begin with the question of how ethnographic thinking can be operationalized. Duranti has framed this as a question of what the “materialities” of ethnographic thinking might be (Duranti, 2013). At the most obvious level, businesses can apply ethnographic thinking to develop offerings rooted in a much deeper understanding of their customers’ values, behaviors, and motivations. Ethnographic thinking allows them to develop offerings that align with cultural contexts (even as they evolve). This last notion—that cultures are always changing and that companies who are truly aligned with their customers must change with them—is a key benefit of applying ethnographic thinking. It demonstrates how ethnographic thinking helps frame challenges beyond the task of uncovering customer needs. It also underpins the “innovate or die” tactic many companies have taken after watching their static models wither in the marketplace. Of course, integrating ethnographic thinking isn’t always easy, particularly for organizations whose cultures have tended to prioritize the perceived safety of quantitative thinking. However, even within those organizations, opportunities do

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arise when an appreciation for openness, exploration, and interpretation materialize. Getting the full value of these attributes is most successful when this appreciation is realized at the strategic level within an organization. But regardless of where it occurs, true integration of ethnographic thinking is most often dependent on how its value is presented. Instead of lectures or abstract theories, organizational traction typically comes from asking challenging questions and providing tangible illustrations of how the benefits of ethnographic thinking can be realized. As mentioned in the introduction, asking those challenging questions means going beyond the more “comfortable” ways that ethnographic practice has been positioned traditionally within most organizations. It means repositioning ethnography as more than simply uncovering customer’s unmet needs by demonstrating how ethnographic thinking can be appreciated for its value and contributions to strategic decision-making. I see five primary vehicles for asking these kinds of questions. First, advocating for the advantages of ethnographic thinking often means asking questions that strategically change the conversation. For example, instead of asking only what a company’s customers want, a set of broader questions might include: Why is the organization solving for this particular challenge in the first place? What other realms of investigation should be considered (e.g., stakeholders, the company’s culture, direct and indirect competition, analogous cultures)? How do the customers’ worldviews interact with these other realms? What dynamic does this create? How is the company and its offering positioned within this dynamic? Might there be more productive avenues to pursue? Second, helping others see the value of ethnographic thinking can sometimes be a more subtle undertaking than asking challenging questions. By taking a cue from linguists and leveraging the power of words, modifying the vernacular an organization uses to frame an initiative or strategic direction can have lasting impact that makes it easier to adopt approaches that integrate ethnographic thinking. For example, shifting from the label “customers” to “constituents” to better reflect the interactive role that consumers can have in shaping a brand could help people within an organization rethink the kind of relationships that are possible as they develop new products, services, systems, marketing efforts, promotional campaigns, and many other basic functions of the company. It could force the organization to better understand the dynamics between its own culture, its offerings, and how they’re actually perceived, integrated, and reinterpreted by those who buy, use, or influence those offerings. When successful, this kind of modification of vernacular helps organizations reframe their initiatives in holistic ways, which can help them discover new opportunities and platforms better attuned to the dynamic relationships between different stakeholders who interact with their offering. It also provides organizations with a more critical perspective of their offerings and how they’re situated in different cultural settings. In short, changing references can reframe an entire organization’s strategy and the ways in which it relates to world. Third, building an appreciation for ethnographic thinking and the depth of perspective it can provide can also be achieved by holding a mirror up to organizations in ways that help them challenge their own assumptions and reflect on the

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­ rthodoxies they may have relied upon to interpret and act on their views of others o (customers, stakeholders, analogous cultures, etc.). Anyone who has taken an introductory cultural anthropology course in the United States may remember being assigned an article titled “Body Ritual among the Nacirema,” which goes into great detail about the exotic hygiene rituals of a mysterious culture “discovered” by a Professor Linton (Miner, 1956): The fundamental belief underlying the whole system appears to be that the human body is ugly and that its natural tendency is to debility and disease. Incarcerated in such a body, man’s only hope is to avert these characteristics through the use of ritual and ceremony. Every household has one or more shrines devoted to this purpose.The more powerful individuals in the society have several shrines in their houses and, in fact, the opulence of a house is often referred to in terms of the number of such ritual centers it possesses. Most houses are of wattle and daub construction, but the shrine rooms of the more wealthy are walled with stone. Poorer families imitate the rich by applying pottery plaques to their shrine walls. (Miner, 1956) Eventually, after a great deal more description of this sort (and the anthropological meaning the author attributes to these “exotic” practices), many students realize that Nacirema is American spelled backwards, and that this strange culture with its bizarre set of rituals is, in fact, their own. The realization is often remarkable for them, as they come to terms with how their own everyday behaviors hold meaning that they’ve never seen, as well as the means by which any culture can be exoticized. At its best, the article forces them to “re-lens” their worldview and challenge assumptions they make about Self and Other. Variations on this technique can prove incredibly useful in organizations that suffer from siloed departments, fixations on status, or static/outmoded practices rooted in convention. These can include challenging the status quo in productive ways that both give pause to reliance on assumptions and suggest pathways to discover or invent new approaches. For example, a team working on analysis might be prompted with a question about whether previous practices are the best way to approach a current data set, followed by a rationale for approaching the analysis in a new way. When timed correctly and practiced judiciously, this disruption of accepted orthodoxies helps keep thinking fresh within an organization, allowing it to adapt more readily to the ever-changing cultures within which it is embedded. Beyond disruptions and shifts, advocating for the value of ethnographic thinking can also include helping organizations develop a clear understanding of how ethnographic thinking can be used to structure and frame challenges. For example, demonstrating how ethnographic methods and anthropological theory work together to strategically collect—and then make sense of—a complex array and variety of data, can help others see how ethnographic thinking can be applied to their own complex challenges. This is particularly useful in situations where organizations are

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faced with developing a product, service or system within the dynamics of, and interactions between, multiple different continually evolving cultures. In such cases, highlighting the benefits of approaching such challenges in ways that pull from anthropology’s rich history can be especially useful. Depending on the challenge, this might include applying principles of crosscultural comparison, in which it is productive to understand the similarities and differences across and between cultures to reveal systematic patterns of cultural continuity, change, and significant difference (French & Bell, 1979; Hofstede, Hofstede, & Minkov, 2010).1 Or, the challenge might be better suited to framing it in terms of multi-sited ethnography, in which addressing the challenge becomes a process of following “flows,” or what George Marcus calls the “chains, paths, threads, conjunctions, or juxtapositions of locations” (Marcus G. E., 1995: 105). These could include following the pathways of a particular group of people, things (“commodity chains”), metaphors (circulations of signs and symbols), plots, stories, allegories (for example, social memory), a person’s life, or a conflict (among other things). There are many other approaches used in ethnographic thinking that can be helpful in structuring and framing challenges; and presenting them successfully is likely to vary depending on circumstance and audience. In many cases, it may be most productive to introduce these concepts through lines of questions or a series of prompts. Regardless of approach, pulling from anthropological theory in these ways, and connecting it to tangible practices and processes, can be a powerful means of building appreciation for the value of ethnographic thinking as a framing device. They demonstrate how a concentration on unearthing meaning first helps move beyond a practice of simply providing data to feed a design solution and toward a more informed and strategic set of interpretations that can drive many different processes from a more holistic, contextual perspective. Finally, building on the analytical strengths that ethnographic thinking offers, efforts to demonstrate the ways that it can be used to craft influential, empirically rooted, well-substantiated, and illustrative arguments can serve as a model for strategies that broaden outlooks, cross-pollinate ideas between different viewpoints, and inspire action. This might include building a process in which team members and their perspectives are fully integrated into data analysis, and insight development. For people unfamiliar with qualitative approaches to analysis, this is a particularly critical step that helps them get past any preconceived notions they may have of it (e.g., backwards-engineering to justify a “gut” reflex, common sense wrapped in big words, or, worst of all, a black box of “intuition”). Their active investment in the process can help them see beyond simple “this-is-what-they-said” findings to understand the value of well-constructed and traceable interpretations of data from which insightful, meaningful, and useful solutions can be built. Each of these strategies for building a greater appreciation of ethnographic thinking represents an attempt to break through the presumed hierarchy that subsumes ethnographic practice under the rubric of design, strategy, or other practice. They represent tactics for moving past the “comfortable questions” that tend to face only outward toward customers. Of course, shifting from those comfortable questions

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to uncomfortable ones can be a challenge. Comfortable questions frequently help ethnographers quickly and clearly explain the most simple and tangible benefits of ethnographic practice (e.g., “discover the voice of the customer”). This can help make the practice of ethnography more accessible, particularly in environments that can be hostile to, or confused by qualitative research. Unfortunately, the result of asking only comfortable questions is a perpetuation of organizational orthodoxies that reinforce the status quo in ways that constrain innovation and obfuscate holistic views of challenges. More specifically, when ethnographic practice is portrayed as a tool used only to support customer-facing initiatives at the front end of projects, later stages are denied the insight and strategic benefits ethnographic thinking can provide. This devalues the potential ethnographic thinking can offer organizations, and reifies static, hierarchical, and outmoded understandings of the relationship between those organizations and the customers they serve. Ethnographic thinking is inherently systemic and holistic—two of the most effective means for identifying unseen or unrecognized opportunities, and recognizing potential risks associated with a wide array of cultural influences—either of which may have been previously seen as merely tangential to the core operations of an organization.

Innovation, Systemic Challenges, and Ethnographic Thinking As a means of illustrating how ethnographic thinking can be operationalized within a specific process, let’s consider the innovation process commonly used within Human Centered Design. This example is particularly productive, because it can draw attention to the expanded role ethnographic thinking can have within a process that often integrates ethnography as a method. The following diagram (Figure 11.1) is a sketch of my interpretation of how human-centered innovation typically flows. It’s intended

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to be read from left to right, as the process matures and develops. The width of pipeline represents the directional focus the project—from more broad, open, or exploratory phases (wide) to crystalizing, prototyping, and iterating processes (narrow). The areas labeled “company,” “field,” and “studio” are a rough bracketing of where each phase occurs (although these are certainly not absolute). There are times when this process can jump around a bit, but by and large each phase is dependent upon the one that precedes it in some way. Most innovation projects begin with a framing stage. A well-framed project informed by ethnographic thinking strategically integrates all the perspectives that will be most critical to the success of a project. It takes the interactions between those perspectives into account, including flows of influence, potential or current alliances, tensions, and other dynamics at play. It has a clear rationale for how to break down the challenge into components that can be developed; and, it applies the most productive methods to each component of the challenge to optimize for well-substantiated insights. This provides the basis to frame and position an approach that is strategically structured to optimize for productive outcomes. One way to do this is to position the challenge within a holistic framework that helps build an innovation strategy. In this framework (Figure 11.2), customer culture is one of four domains, each of which has bearing on, and interacts with, the others (company/organization, stakeholder, and analogous cultures or communities). It is by now widely recognized that a deep understanding of the norms, values, customs, and dynamics at play in customers’ worlds provides the data that can lead

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to insights for highly attuned and effective, useful designs. However, this framework presupposes that it is just as important to gain an ethnographic understanding of a company’s culture (and the interactions it has with its customer cultures) as it is to understand the customer. This is because a comprehensive understanding of the norms, values, customs, and dynamics at play within a company or organization can help identify the most effective catalysts for innovation, and identify routes through which new ideas are most likely to flow and thrive. It can also help sort out whether the form those ideas take is best positioned as aggregate or disruptive innovation. Finally, it can provide insight into ways in which customer and company can (or do) co-evolve the lived experience of the company’s offering or brand, by understanding how their values align (or don’t). For similar reasons, it is just as important to apply ethnographic thinking to the cultures of key stakeholders (some of whom may or may not be part of customer or company cultures), who influence the flow of interactions between consumers and the company. This is valuable for determining how power dynamics play out within customers’ lives, as well as how flows of influence within customers’ own organizations and groups motivate (or demotivate) them. Lastly, applying ethnographic thinking to generate deep insight into analogous cultures helps inform the dynamics between these other cultures by bringing in fresh, different, but tangentially related, views of the world. For example, a challenge that focuses on how a company might personalize its services could integrate insights from understanding how a hotel concierge operates. In this way, analogous insights force innovators to think outside the world of constraints set by typical structures such as segmentations or target markets so that they can find inspiration in the unexpected. When taken together, understanding the cultural dynamics and interplay of interactions between customer, company, stakeholder, and analogous cultures provides a holistic view that can inform innovation and design in ways that are both customer-centered and optimized for successful implementation within this dynamic setting. For example, in addition to driving the human-centered design of a product or service, this approach could help a company whose internal culture has diverged away from its customers’ cultures, identify where and how those changes took place, decide how to take action to achieve better cultural alignment, and begin to create clear internal pathways and incentives for the kinds of norms, customs and dynamics that create the best offerings for alignment with its customers’ cultures. This framework would also help shed light on how key stakeholders are influencing the dynamic between company and customer, and possibly leverage that influence to help bridge the divergence between the two. And, finally, insights from analogous cultures ensure that they’re not caught up in a myopic focus on a closed system. They bring in key insights from competitive intelligence, of course, but also from other models of provision that are familiar to their customers, and how they fit into their lives. When ethnographic thinking is applied in these ways, it lays the basic foundation for an innovation strategy framed in cultural terms. It also ensures that companies or organizations are gathering relevant and useful data, and constructing pathways for driving customer-centered, innovative ideas into a multi-faceted and ever-evolving marketplace.

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It’s often useful to begin with a series of prompts to generate critical thinking in each of these areas when constructing an innovation strategy.Together, they help organizations see how they can develop a holistic view that will better serve their end goal, reduce risk, and gain insight into the relationships between these four cultures. They might be presented using the device of “looking;” where “looking out” includes understanding customers, constituents, or other target audience, “looking in” includes understanding the organization’s own culture and the context of its offerings, “looking around” includes understanding stakeholders and their influence on customers/constituents and the context of the organization’s offerings, and “looking adjacent” includes understanding analogous communities, movements, or trends from which unexpected learnings can inspire new thinking (see Figure 11.3). In addition, other questions an ethnographic thinker might pose at the framing stage include: Why is the organization solving for this particular challenge? What is the level of complexity of the challenge? How many, and which, actors or players influence interactions within it? Where should we focus first? Is it possible to collect enough data (in the right form, using the most appropriate methods) to develop well-substantiated patterns, themes, and insights? All of these considerations, and many others, are part of reading the cultural landscape of a social setting to strategically scope and scale how to approach the challenge at hand. The clear advantage here is that ethnographic thinking is applied to the initial stages of how a project comes into fruition and begins to develop, so that cultural considerations are embedded within the entire process from a holistic perspective.This has distinct strategic advantages over projects that are framed by focus group results or executive instinct, because it leverages the interpretive and strategic value of ethnographic thinking before fieldwork ever begins. In a manner similar to framing challenges, ethnographic thinking can also play a crucial part in each subsequent phase of the innovation process. The remainder of this section outlines some of the value of ethnographic thinking in each phase. In the “explore” phase, a team will typically take on lots of different perspectives to open up their thinking about a challenge and broaden their view. They’ll scan the web looking for relevant writings on the topic from many different perspectives, observe different groups, and engage in small wanderings and self-designed experiments—all to help define the edges of a challenge and begin to understand how different worldviews shape it. Traits of ethnographic thinking such as cultivating curiosity, expanding awareness, deferring judgment, and adapting thoughtfully are all essential components of exploration. They help ensure that personal limitations are set aside, and that the genuine curiosity of the ethnographic mind is given as long a leash as possible. After defining the boundaries and contours through exploration, a deep dive into areas identified as particularly promising for useful and productive data takes place.This phase is identified as Immerse, Converse, and Document in the diagram, and the qualities of ethnographic thinking that are especially useful here include immersion, facilitating tactically, and documenting diligently. Each of these is critical for collecting and processing relevant data that’s structured and organized in

FIGURE 11.3

Do you have a clear understanding of how stakeholders trigger action or otherwise motivate your customers or constituents?

Have you developed a framework or theory of influence to visualize the dynamics between your customers or constituents and different outside influencers?

Are you considering the many ways your customers’ or constituents’ perspectives are influenced, either directly or indirectly?

Do you have a solid set of tools to make observations and develop actionable insights?

Are you spotting the anomalies and building on the ‘accidental’ innovations your customers or constituents create everyday?

Are you systematically culling insights from research that integrates considerations of cultural context, interactions, values, and daily experience to optimize for success in the marketplace?

Look Around: Stakeholders who influence customers/constituents/target audience(s) as well as the context of the organization’s offerings.

Look Out: Customers, Constituents, Target Audience(s)

Framing

Look Adjacent: Analogous groups, movements, or trends from which unexpected learnings might be transferred or built upon.

Look In: Organizational culture and the context of it’s offerings

Have you fully leveraged the advantages of cross-cultural comparison to unearth new perspectives and inspire fresh thinking?

Are you noticing patterns or rhythms in other systems that could be prototyped in your challenge?

Are you thinking outside of your core challenge in ways that help infonm it?

Do you have a strategy for cultural change that incentivizes innovation and action in your organization?

Do you know which norms, customs, and dynamics work for and against innovation in your organization?

Have you created pathways and platforms to drive innovative new ideas into the marketplace?

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ways that help team members identify important patterns later in the process. As we’ve seen in preceding chapters, this includes knowing which methods to apply when and where, realizing when it’s best to immerse (or leave) a set of interactions, understanding how to time and manage personal interactions, skillfully building rapport, and continually anticipating future data needs for the project. It also includes knowing how to break down a challenge into smaller manageable components, strategic segmenting and sampling of different groups or experiences, and knowing how to get traction on the ground when things stall. In the next phase of innovation work, data from the previous phases is brought together for the team to discover patterns, identify themes, develop frameworks, and derive insights. This is identified as the Analysis phase in the diagram. Here, traits of ethnographic thinking that are most useful include the ability to think holistically, keen sense making (often from many disparate forms of data), and the ability to imagine, illustrate, and re-imagine social systems (and interactions within them) in ways that resonate easily with others and facilitate a deeper understanding of those systems and dynamics. Analysis can also benefit greatly from the flexibility of ethnographic thinking, as members of a team take on different perspectives at different phases of analysis to ensure that they’ve considered all relevant points of view and applied the most productive modes of thinking to each stage of the process. As noted in Chapter 4, early in analysis, team members might describe their field experiences like screenwriters, and then look for patterns across those experiences in the mental model of a detective. In latter stages of analysis, ethnographic thinking is useful for strategically planning how insights can be integrated into the next phases of a project so that they’re both well-substantiated in field data and useful for more generative and iterative stages. This might be described as building an argument in ways that are similar to those of an attorney. In the Ideate and Prototype phases of innovation work, designers and engineers tend to take on a more active role. During Ideation, ethnographic thinking helps prevent projects from narrowing too quickly, or rushing to “solutionalize” in ways that inadvertently prioritize personal judgments from members of the team. During prototyping, ethnographic thinking adds value by ensuring that different models are testable to determine cultural fit. Traits of ethnographic thinking that ensure productive prototyping include many of those that were most useful during early field explorations: immersion, facilitating tactically, and documenting diligently—all essential for understanding the ways different prototypes align (or don’t) with the lives (not just the specific needs) of their intended users. Feedback from ethnographically informed prototype testing has two important benefits. First, it allows the team to iterate on their designs in ways that improve it for future customers. But, perhaps more importantly, it also helps identify entirely new opportunities that emerge from prototype testing that can help improve the experience in previously unanticipated ways. I’ve had the privilege to work with one client that is particularly skilled at leveraging the value of ethnographic thinking during this stage. They construct “live model tests” in which they prototype entire systems for testing and revision in real world settings. Ethnographic thinking is integrated into

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the entire process, which includes understanding the models being tested within the broader context of users’ lives as well as the ecosystem within which their offering sits (customer lifestyle, competitors’ offerings, and different channels, etc.). In every live model test they’ve conducted, ethnographic thinking has helped identify both significant revisions to their models, as well as opportunities to develop new offerings that were unexpected when the prototype was designed. After ideas have been prototyped (and preferably tested for fit, scalability and profitability), some of the most critical parts of the innovation process begin: Strategizing to develop effective channels and platforms for introducing and promoting the new offering. Marketing teams tend to take the lead at this stage, but their work can be significantly enriched by the strategic benefits of ethnographic thinking.Traits such as framing and positioning, which are informed and substantiated by insights developed in the field, are especially valuable for guiding quantitative measures and ensuring that the context of those channels and platforms make sense within the lives of intended consumers. Effective storytelling is also critical here, so that the contexts of customers’ lives can be clearly conveyed to marketers and branders in ways that help them develop messaging that resonates deeply with them. Finally, in the Inspire stage of the innovation process, ethnographic thinking is valuable for helping drive and define market integration, and to serve as a sort of conscience for a company or organization. Similar to the Strategize phase, ethnographic thinking ensures that the company’s approach to providing the new offering is accountable to the people for whom it is intended, and that decisions that affect customers’ lives are aligned with their values and worldviews. This includes framing new innovation work that might emerge from market integration efforts, as well as the courage to challenge and question positioning and brand alignment (even at these late stages in the process). Throughout all stages of innovation work, one of the traits of ethnographic thinking that is most critical for the ongoing health of any company organization is the propensity to simply ask, “why?” For example, some questions that reflect ethnographic thinking at any stage in the process might include: Now that we’ve reached this stage, why does this offering still make sense? Why does it fit within the larger context of the company’s capabilities and strategic plans? Why might customers eventually drift away? Why do we continue to innovate in this space? These are important challenges, and many of them are especially useful for keeping a company customer-focused in ways that adapt to customers’ ever-changing preferences and the competing offerings that evolve to meet them. They’re also familiar challenges for ethnographic thinkers to pose, since much of their work is focused on ways to frame, ask, and interpret responses to the question “why?” within ever-evolving cultures. It’s important to add here that throughout the entire innovation process, the benefits of ethnographic thinking run parallel to those that design thinking brings to bear. While design thinking offers an iterative and abductive approach, ethnographic thinking introduces holistic, dynamic, and interpretive positions. The two should ideally complement one another.

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Finally, in addition to innovation work, there are many other processes that would also benefit from ethnographic thinking. Some of the more obvious areas of application for ethnographic thinking beyond innovation include challenges with complex interdependencies.This is because these challenges, sometimes called “wicked problems” or systemic challenges, demand a holistic approach, and a level of comfort and competence dealing with an overabundance of widely varying data sources—both core qualities of ethnographic thinking. Robert Horn and Robert Weber classify such challenges as “social messes,” which they define as a set of interrelated problems embedded within systems of systems. They identify the common characteristics of a social mess as: no unique “correct” view of the problem; different views of the problem and contradictory solutions; most problems are connected to other problems; data are often uncertain or missing; multiple value conflicts; ideological and cultural constraints; political constraints; economic constraints; often a-logical or illogical or multi-valued thinking; numerous possible intervention points; consequences difficult to imagine; considerable uncertainty, ambiguity; great resistance to change; and, problem solver(s) out of contact with the problems and potential solutions. (Horn & Weber, 2007) Some challenges that embody Horn and Weber’s criteria for social messes include: environmental degradation, pandemics, terrorism, crime prevention, homelessness, or refugee crises, although complex systemic challenges can be found everywhere. While daunting in many ways, the open-ended ambiguity of these challenges is likely to be familiar to ethnographic thinkers, since they’re regularly immersed in the unpredictable world of radically different cultural logics, inter-connected contingencies, and different views of how to frame or solve for a challenge. In fact, I would argue that most ethnographic thinkers would find Horn and Weber’s entire list of social mess characteristics to be an accurate description of most cultural settings within which they work. This was certainly the case in much of the work I’ve done that applies ethnographic thinking to systemic challenges. In an article I co-authored with Charley Scull we state: The value of ethnography in the analysis of complex global systems (like sustainable fishing) is realized best when the innovation process is re-conceptualized. Rather than framing it solely as a method for fulfilling “unmet needs,” research for systematic change requires a deep understanding of organizational, cultural, network, and behavioral subsystems to inform and drive creative solutions that align with each. (Hasbrouck & Scull, 2014: 482) As this example illustrates, ethnographic thinking can help broaden perspectives and transfer learnings across different logics in ways that go well beyond research. In fact, one of the key tenets of anthropology is the belief that making the unfamiliar familiar

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has inherent value for cross-cultural understanding. As such, ethnographic thinking provides opportunities to bridge gaps between different parties by unearthing commonalities in ways that resonate deeply with the cultural values of each. Some obvious applications include peacemaking, mediation, or team building, which are particularly valuable in fields like diplomacy, management, human resources, counseling, strategic planning, marketing, branding, and many others. However, it would be difficult to find any field that wouldn’t benefit from re-­framing and re-lensing challenges in ways that open up new opportunities that typically go unrecognized, or reduce risk by increasing cultural awareness. Of course, like any qualities that have the potential for far reaching impact, ethnographic thinking also carries a set of responsibilities with it.

Responsibility and Representation The examples above don’t fully include the struggle that can often take place when applying the skills of ethnographic thinking in different settings. Not only does this involve making sure that applying it is productive, but also that it respectfully considers the lives and worldviews from whom data is collected—a responsibility to be accountable to them, regardless of who “them” might be. In addition to careful considerations of appropriate methods, this includes the manner in which people of any culture (customer, corporate, stakeholder, and analogous, etc.) are represented. Representation has been an issue of debate within anthropology since the early 1980s. It was during that period that post-structural critiques of the discipline (Limon, 1991; Rabinow, 1986) challenged the field’s traditional practices as deterministic and positivist—all-knowing, all-seeing meta-narratives of the colonial Other. Instead, poststructuralists offered to explore indeterminacy over determinism, diversity rather than unity, difference rather than synthesis, and complexity rather than simplification. They argued that these approaches foster the development of social exploration, one that appreciates the dynamics of continual social change and the multiplicity of identities constructed within it. The key to this approach is to engender greater awareness of how ethnographers construct representations of others (Clifford & Marcus, 1986; Clifford, 1988; Marcus & Fischer, 1986). In contrast to subjecting participants to examinations rooted in the natural sciences, it seeks to work alongside participants and co-construct representations that reflect their perspective, values, and worldviews. Cast more broadly, this approach is useful in many applications beyond research, particularly in the ways that organizations relate to those whom they serve. Rather than treating customers, patients, or constituents as passive recipients of an offering and representing them in that light, it is far more respectful (and increasingly market savvy) to engage with them in ways that honor different representations of their perspectives. Co-branding and crowd sourcing are some interesting examples of this that have grown more recently in the marketplace. Prahalad and Ramaswamy, referring to Amazon, eBay, E*TRADE, and others, point to the ways in which customers have “forged and legitimized the evolving identities of those companies and gave them

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meaning as brands in the new economy” (Prahalad & Ramaswamy, 2000). The concept can be extended further, so that the benefits of customer contributions are also integrated into new models of exchange that reflect their contributions.We’ve already seen some tongue-in-cheek calls for Facebook to compensate its users for the “labor” and data they generate (Wu, 2015). Such arguments may not seem like conjecture eventually, as concepts of work and compensation evolve over time. Ethnographic thinking can provide valuable interpretations of customers’ lived experiences (and their interactions with the organizations that serve them) while still respecting the ways in which they choose to represent themselves and shape their own experiences. This is particularly critical at a time when organizations can reach increasingly deeper into the lives and minds of customers. In this sense, the “new” ethics of ethnographic thinking that arose in part from post-structural critiques of ethnographic practice has the potential to provide a moral compass for the “new” economy, as well as any other forms of exchange—all of which are inherently embedded within the dynamics of cultural change and the ongoing formations of identities within it. This goes beyond corporate social responsibility. It’s part of a core set of expectations that now exist within relationships between customers/constituents and companies/providers, and it has direct impact on both brand perception and profitability.

Some Final Thoughts The ethnographic mind’s primary field of vision encompasses processes and systems that are built up of accumulated layers of behaviors that can be collectively called culture. Ethnographic thinking offers a way to make sense of these layers, not by fixing them, but by appreciating the dynamics of human behavior and its relationship to ever-evolving cultures. It’s a way of thinking that is always probing further, creating meaning but never entirely satisfied with any particular solution—always asking “why?” It also remains open to the unexpected, questions claims of objectivity, and builds relationships as part of its methodology. In sum, ethnographic thinking rejects fixed, deterministic conclusions, and the pursuit of singular “solutions,” while still offering a sense of order through the recognition of relationships between rhythms, flows, and directions it finds within cultural systems. At the same time, ethnographic thinking is remarkably personal. Its main pathway to insight is built primarily from inquiries into (and observations of) people’s daily, lived experiences. While these experiences might seem mundane to many, they are imbued with closely held (if sometimes unrecognized) values that are representative of each person’s relationship with their culture. These practices are inherently personal and embodied; yet they also represent a collective understanding of the world. The ethnographic mind is fascinated by this ongoing, dynamic relationship between individual practices and culture, and discovers not only meaning and significance, but often deep resonance with both the people who participate in ethnographic work and ethnographic practice itself.

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Taking a step back from these professional responsibilities, many practicing ethnographers (and others) use ethnographic thinking in their everyday interactions. From workplace dynamics, to home life, or a trip to the store, examining and analyzing behaviors and interactions and situating them within their cultural contexts is a core part of how they think about their everyday life, and the world at large. It could even be argued that once established and regularly practiced, ethnographic thinking becomes so well engrained that its continual practice is more involuntary than a conscious application—that it permanently changes how its practitioners see the world. This can offer distinct advantages, since increased levels of awareness produce more data from which to understand people’s motivations, make decisions, or navigate obstacles. Similarly, interpretations of data from “always on” ethnography can help find opportunities to demonstrate and create value, or to influence a specific outcome. When ethnographic thinking becomes a lens applied to all of life’s experiences, the practice shifts from conscious application of ethnographic methods to thought processes that continually observe and analyze cultural data in the background—a sort of ethnography of everything. Although all this data may never be formally analyzed, it informs decision-making and interactions by prioritizing empirical evidence and the ways that lived experiences reflect and inform cultural change. With this approach to the world, ethnographic thinking becomes a core part of how perspectives and positions are formed. I’d like to close with a short story about a time in my life when I was struggling to decide what to do next. I was living in Arlington,Virginia, at the time, and was working in a D.C. public relations firm that specialized in environmental issues.The work was interesting, the firm filled with creative people, my salary comfortable. But, somehow, something was missing. I began to feel the need for a shift, to find something that engaged me more deeply. Eventually, I decided that graduate school would be the next step—but in what area? As I reflected back on my previous experiences, I kept returning to the anthropology courses I had as an undergraduate at Carnegie Mellon University (all expertly taught and lovingly facilitated by Professor Judith Schachter). I remembered that each of her courses was more eye-opening than the last, and how deeply engaging the subject was for me. Eventually, a trip to my local bookstore led me to the volume Writing Culture, which challenged my thinking in many ways, brought my understanding of the discipline to a new level, and inspired me to explore anthropology further (Clifford & Marcus, 1986). Clearly, I found the discipline interesting and engaging, but it wasn’t until I thought about it more that I realized that anthropology was the only subject I’d ever studied that was both intellectually stimulating and emotionally moving. Furthermore, I also realized was that it wasn’t only the subject matter of ethnographic accounts that touched me so deeply, but the intimacy of the ethnographic encounter—for both ethnographers and those they studied. It was this connection between the ethnographer and participant that drew me. It was this relationship necessary to complete an ethnographic understanding—this meeting of two minds

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that were often so different from one another, yet so similar in the ways that all humans relate to their own cultures. What I have now come to appreciate is how ethnographic thinking can help anyone appreciate cultural and personal differences, while simultaneously celebrating all that is common in the human experience— that unseen fabric of connectedness. This deeply personal side of ethnographic thinking, the way it profoundly and permanently re-shapes how people see (and relate to) the world, is an attribute that I believe gives it incredible staying power, regardless of application. I hope that I have succeeded in offering new ways to appreciate ethnographic thinking that expands its value and leverages its ability to touch people’s lives in the ways it has mine.

Note 1 See also the Human Relations Area Files: http://hraf.yale.edu/

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INDEX

ambiguity 38–40 apprentice 12 anthropologists: stereotypes of 51 anthropology: activist 47; native 47 artists: technique 68 attorneys: practice 69 audience, adaptations to 81–3, 90–1 awareness, expanded 17-19 benefits (of ethnographic thinking) xv, 3 blueprints (experience) 76 Boas, Franz xvi brand: co-evolution of 53–4, 106–7 branding 106 Cairo, Egypt 56–60 Chief Culture Officer 3 coalition building 63 collaboration 75 confirmation bias 31 “co-creation”: brand 53–4 “co-opting customer competence” 53 context, redefining 83–5 cross-cultural: comparison 97; understanding 106 cultural: change 94, 107; constellations 75–6; contexts 74, 78, 94; diplomacy 64; logic 26, 28–30, 77 culture: analogous 99; company 99; customer 99; stakeholder 99 cultures of practice 27–8 curiosity 11–12

data: overlapping 67, 69; multiple sets 69 “data hygiene” 66 dérive 24n1 design thinking 1–5, 104 diplomacy 63–4, 106 documentation 67–8 ecosystem: of observations 17–19 ejido 43–6 ejidatorio(a) 43–6 elasticity (of thinking) 12 empathy 49–50, 89 ethics 107 ethnicity: entrepreneurialism 26–7; inter-ethnic relations 27–8 “ethnographic gaze” 48 ethnographic encounter 108–9 ethnography: collaborative 47 facilitation 62, 74 familiar (rethinking of) 14–15 file sharing 20–1 fishing industry 73–5 flexibility 37–8 flow 60–2, 64 footnoting (as form of analysis) 89–90 “foresights” 66 frameworks 75–7 framing 99–101, 102 Generation Y 79–81 “going native” 47 green homeowners 86–9

118  Index

hierarchy 49–50, 52 “hindsights” 66 holistic: analysis 75; thinking 76–7, 85, 98 “holocracy” 51–2 Horn, R and Weber, R. 105 hotel, shoe 10–11, 13 human centered design 2, 52, 100 human-computer interaction 2 human resources 14–15, 106 ideology 61 immersion, cultural 9 Imboden, Dieter 13–14 influence 90–3 innovation: process 98–104; strategy 84, 99–101 insights: integration 78; longitudinal 65–6; strategic 85; tailoring 83–5 inspiration: for this work xvi–xvii; from ethnographic thinking 92–3 interdisciplinary: teams 75 interviews: spot 34–5 intuition 24, 30–2 Jalcomulco, Mexico 43–7 jewelry manufacturing 25–8 journeys (user) 75–6 judgment, challenging 31–2 knowledge: cumulative 14 language, common 63 leadership 62–3 listening, layered 17–18 management 77, 106 marketing 106 McCracken, Grant 3 Mead, Margaret xvi, 82, 91 mediation 106 Minh-ha, Trinh T. 81 medical sales reps 37 methods, ethnographic: advantages 5, 31; personal nature of 108 “mini narratives” 78, 90 motivation 86–9 multi-sited ethnography 97 music industry 20–1 Nacirema 96 Nader, Laura 82 naturopathic medicine 48 negotiation 39 networks: of trust 27-8

North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) 43–4 notes: field 68 nursing 33–6 observation: data 19; participatory 45–50, 52–3, 59–61 operationalizing (ethnographic thinking) 94–8 opportunities 13–14 organizational: behavior 49–50; culture 21–4, 81–2; identity 93 orthodoxies 96 “outsights” 66 pirating: media 20–1 planning: scenario 91–3; strategic 84, 93, 106 power: dynamics 49; flows 50–2; relations 77–8 questions: comfortable 4, 95, 97–8; uncomfortable 4, 85 Radical Faeries 50–1 rapport 60, 64 reflexivity 47, 62, 95 relativism 39 representation 106–7 reward structures 80 risk 32, 38–9 sampling 31, 68–9 sayable and unsayable 19–20 scaling 68–9 segmentation 87–9 serendipity 36–7 settings: unfamiliar 23–4, 59 shadowing: method 34–6; lulls 37; unexpected occurrences 38–9 “social messes” 105 social scripts 21–3 “spaces between” 36–8 Spock, Benjamin xvi, 91 storytelling 89–90 “studying up” 82 substantiating 69–70 synthesis: data 65–8 systematic research 31 systemic challenges 105–6 systems thinking 39, 65, 76–8, 98 teams: dynamics 77–8 technology: dead and dying 16–17 Tokyo 9–11 tourism: adventure 44–5; eco 45



traceability 67, 70, 76, 97 norms: unspoken 21–2 vernacular 85, 95

Index 119

workarounds 35–6 workflow 33 wandering, strategic 18; See also dérive “wicked problems” 105

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