The New NASA Video And Why It Matters To Your Organization

Did you happen to catch the story on NPR this morning about the video satirizing NASA’s overbureacratization and lack of imagination which has come to define the agency? It’s a perception that not only exists outside, but has become increasingly entrenched inside the organization. Aside from NASA, does this sound like your own organization? More after the video…

This video was part of a project headed by astronaut Andrew Thomas. Among other objectives, he and his team were specifically asked by senior management to look for reasons why new ideas get ignored or blocked at the agency. Rather than develop yet another snoozefest of a PowerPoint presentation that would likely find its way shelved into oblivion, they took the inspired step of producing the above video:

“And I wanted to try and capture those in a way that people would understand, in a way that would resonate,” says Thomas. Heather Hava, who plays the role of the engineer, says Thomas took stories and anecdotes that the team discussed and wove them into one storyline. “He compiled all that and wrote a little dramatization of all of our experiences,” she says. “It was a composite of many, many people’s experiences.”

There are several different takeaways from this terrific example:
Video storytelling beats the crap out of PowerPoint. Let’s be honest, if you have the choice between watching a movie or a slidedeck, are you really going to choose the latter? True, a movie isn’t always the most appropriate medium to deliver ethnographic and research results, but I believe those times constitute a minority. At the very least, video ought to be a frequent consideration in every presenter’s toolbox. Certainly the technology (Apple’s iMovie, for example) makes it easier than ever to drive home your points in unique and powerful ways.

Video is a perfect medium for the business anthropologist. Thomas’s team conducted a type of ethnography, recording assorted stories and anecdotes that would eventually build a cohesive understanding of how things actually worked inside NASA as opposed to how they were supposed to work. That’s the true value proposition of working with a business anthropologist. This video is a perfect output for distilling research findings in ways that engage and move client organizations toward positive actions.

Video is a perfect subversive tool for employees. In this case, NASA’s senior management ordered the video (well, not really…bet they were merely expecting just another presentation and bound report). But if you’re a company executive, don’t be surprised if you see more videos satirizing your organization’s internal workplace practices popping up on YouTube (there are already plenty of videos chronicling customer services experiences). Do you really know how your employees feel about their everyday work experience? Do you know if you’re getting the full picture of employee health from your middle managers? Do you really? Because the price for being wrong is finding a quickly circulating video on YouTube showing just how unimaginative, unresponsive, unappreciative, and unfulfilling your organization and workplace is.

At Connection Cafe: Is Your Data Collection Unbalanced?

For the Connection Cafe blog this month, I wrote about the need to use a balanced qualitative and quantitative approach to learning about constituents. Here’s a teaser of my latest post…the full post is at the Connection Cafe…

Mixed in with the work that I do at Convio, I’m also pursuing a Master’s degree in business anthropology. If you’re like most folks, you may be wondering what that is exactly. This field is somewhat new even though anthropology as a social science has been around for long time. Basically, business anthropologists work with organizations to help them understand things like staff culture, customer relationships, and product design. That’s fairly broad but at it’s core, we study people and their patterns of behavior. What I most love about it is that we are trained to help non-profits and businesses understand the deeper meaning of what seemingly appears ordinary and everyday…then take what works and amplify it.

For an example, let’s apply a business anthropology approach to a common issue among non-profits: how to better engage constituents. Hopefully you have plenty of metrics showing your email open-rates, donor conversion rates, website flowthrough rates, etc. You may also have survey results and graphical analysis. (And if you haven’t recently done this type of quantitative data collection, no worries…hopefully this post will reinvigorate you.)

Now take it one step further. Most businesses and non-profits commit to collecting quantitative data but usually neglect the qualitative data…

[continue reading at Connection Cafe]

Latest Research: Using A Symbolic Approach To Connect Organizational and Corporate Cultures

As I progress into my Business Anthropology grad work, you’ll start seeing most of the discoveries, insights, and developed applications here either in the form of blogposts or downloadable resources. Look for a new Portfolio page soon.

Over the summer, I did some introductory research on culture in business. What might come as a bit of a shock to most managers within organizations is that the concept of “culture” that’s been thrown around for the last 30 years isn’t really culture in the purest (or at least anthropological) sense. Below is the introduction to my paper; you can download the full article here [pdf].

Culture in Business: Using a Symbolic Approach to Connect Organizational and Corporate Cultures

Introduction
In trying to understand the modern business organization, few concepts have been applied (and misapplied) by management and organizational theorists as frequently as culture. The genesis of this is likely the publishing of Deal and Kennedy’s Corporate Cultures and Peters and Waterman’s In Search of Excellence, both best-sellers in the early 1980s (Hamada 1998:1; Gamst 1989:15; Jordan 1989:2). Both non-anthropological works had a considerable impact on business thinking and in many ways challenged the idea of what culture is. Since then, the idea that culture exists in organizations has grown in acceptance to the point where most business leaders now take it for granted. And herein lies a significant problem for organizations: over the past thirty years the richness and salience of the culture concept has been diluted and devalued by the prevailing conventional wisdom. It is considered yet another faddish management tool rather than a valuable social process that reveals the holistic nature of human group behavior.

Today, when management talks about culture within their organizations, they often focus on tacit qualities they want to encourage among their employees or they use culture as a branding tool for attracting new employees and retaining current ones. While I don’t want to completely disparage the intent behind these efforts, I do argue that these simplistic and directive efforts ignore the complex symbolic and individualistic meanings that exist within an organization. It’s these symbols that help define the structure of the culture and ultimately guide the behavior of the organization’s employees.

In this paper I explore how culture has come to be defined and applied in the business organization and how this differs from the more traditional concepts of culture as developed by anthropologists. This contrast will be important as I examine organizational culture as viewed from a symbolic analysis. This paper will show how the theories of symbolic anthropology can provide a useful understanding of culture that reveals how organizational actors formulate meaning and reality in their collective work.

Download the full article [pdf]