How much do you know about your customers…I mean really know? Get beyond the demographics, beyond the statistics, beyond the purchasing numbers. How much do you know about how your customers interact with their everyday world? And more importantly for you, how do your customers interact with their world using your product or service? It’s in understanding this interaction where your brand can go from ordinary to extraordinary.

Enter anthropology and the expertise we anthropologists offer. The way we humans behave is deeply rooted in our everyday culture. It influences how we make sense of our reality. It also explains why we consume what we do and what we’re ultimately trying to communicate to others around us. Because sense-making is largely a symbolic process at a cultural level, anthropology is ideally positioned to help explain the relationships customers have to a brand. In other words, if you want to know more about what your customers really think and actually do, bring in an anthropologist.

As humans, we interact with things in order to make sense of our world (if you’re unsure about this, watch a young child for a few minutes). We’re also trying to make sense of ourselves and our identity in relation to others around us. I’ll even argue that most of us want the businesses and brands we interact with to understand us better and help us in our sensemaking process.

So here’s my question for you: what is your business doing to understand your customers and help them make sense of their world through their interactions with you?

photo credit: courtneybolton (via Flickr)

Peter Drucker once said, “The most important thing in communication is hearing what isn’t said.” Exactly…and I’d also suggest hearing what isn’t said is just as important in building a remarkable customer experience.

But instead, how many times do businesses listen for what they want to hear from their customers? Or maybe get defensive about what is said? Or take what is said at full face value and miss out on so much of the subtext and subtle (but far more powerful) meanings behind the customer’s experience? If you’re only paying attention to what sits at the surface, your business is missing important data that could mean the success or failure of your product, service, or full brand proposition.

We anthropologists are trained to uncover these clues. When we listen, we don’t just use our ears – we use our full set of senses. We detect behaviors that might otherwise pass unnoticed. And we ask questions that attempt to understand how customers interact with their world and give their it meaning.

That may seem like a huge undertaking, but at the heart of our anthropological work is simplicity. Here are five simple ways to listen like an anthropologist:

Shut up.
The hardest thing for a marketer, executive, or consultant is to put away the agenda and stop talking. But do it. It is near impossible to talk and listen at the same time. Even if we don’t come at a customer issue with an agenda, we may still find it difficult to keep quiet. However, if we’re going to understand how to meet the needs of our customers, we’ve got to shut up.

Be naive.
This is the first of two steps toward having a child-like mind. As adults, we think our expertise is built on always knowing the answer (or thinking we probably know the answer). But its this very temptation to appear all-knowing that keeps us from actually knowing anything. Kids learn instinctively because they really don’t know things and they ask a lot of “Why?” questions. Here’s a truth: when it comes to understanding the world our customer lives in, we REALLY don’t know anything.

Get curious.
Step two toward a child-like mind is getting curious. When we approach a customer from a place of UNknowing, we ask better questions. And we don’t make the killer mistake of allowing assumptions to guide us.

Show me.
Having problems understanding what your customer is trying to express? Respond with, “Show me what you mean.” Get creative and help them show you what they’re seeing, hearing, feeling, experiencing. Look for the symbolism and meaning behind what they show you.

Record it.
As anthropologists, we’re trained to record every single detail we possibly can. We don’t edit, we simply record because we never know what will turn out to be vitally important while sharing an experience with a customer. Don’t just rely on electronic monitoring. Practice observing subtleties, seeking meaning behind the surface language and really listening for what’s not being said.

photo credit: niclindh (via Flickr)

I should probably offer Mark Schaefer some sort of kickback since his blog never fails to stimulate new ideas. A couple weeks ago, he wrote a post on measurement in social media. Now you’re probably thinking, “Yet another blogpost talking about measurement? Why in the world is that so special?” It wasn’t just the content that was special…the post sparked some interesting comments around the necessity of measurement and types of measurement to consider for social media.

When most folks talk about metrics and ROI and all the various forms of measurement, they’re usually referring to a quantitative methodology. You know…like measuring number of Twitter retweets, Facebook fans, online WOM mentions, blogpost traffic, generated sales, etc. These are things that can be counted and evaluated fairly easily so long as you know why you’re doing it in the first place. Just measuring for the sake of appearances really isn’t going to help you or your organization get where you want to go. Which leads us to…

Why measure at all?
I’m not going to go into this too deeply because there are so many super-smart folks who’ve already made a compelling case for measuring online activity. I will merely add that measurement is a form of feedback, which is critical to learning what works and what needs to be improved. How will you know if your latest online customer engagement program is succeeding in meeting its objectives (you did establish objectives, right?) if you can’t measure the results.

Why add qualitative?
Because sometimes your quantitative data lies to you. Not deliberately, of course, but all those quantitative metrics you’re racking up may not be telling you the full story. This is particularly true in the area of social media where we’re trying to gauge not only action but more emotionally-charged and nebulous qualities like sentiment and beliefs. For instance, when a fan says they “love” their iPhone, what does that mean? Or when someone else tweets that your company’s sales efforts are old and they suck, what’s happening here? A strictly quantitative measurement approach likely will not dive deep enough here to give you tangible results you can use to connect with your customers and make necessary adjustments.

What kind of qualitative measurement methods can you use? The major knock against qualitative is the perception that it’s time-intensive, which can be true. But you have to weigh that through a cost/benefit analysis: is what I’m learning here worth the investment of resources? Still unsure? Then take a page from the work of social scientists and build a sample. Dont’ try to eat the elephant all at once. Your purpose here is to build bite-sized understanding. The key is to construct a random, representative sample that’s going to give you intelligible feedback on the sentiment of your customers (the whole topic of how to build good, measurable samples for social media probably should get a blogpost of its own).

Interviews: These don’t have to be long. Your objective here is to go deeper than a standard quantitative survey by uncovering the more subtle meanings of what “love” and “suck” mean for your customers.
Observations: The simple truth about us human beings is that we often say one thing only to turn around and do something rather different. There are plenty of reasons for this, but figuring out ways to observe our participants is a good way to get closer to actual action that drives behavior.

Do you still need quantitative?
YES! There’s no either/or proposition here…the best measurements will combine both quantitative and qualitative methods. Once we have a working hypothesis (we have to know why we’re doing this in the first place), it’s a recursive process where we use qualitative research to figure out what questions we need to ask, construct quantitative research to gather data, then another qualitative round to complement our data by delivering further depth of insight.

Okay, so it’s a rather high certainty you don’t have time to do recursive research, but the point here is that it’s important to not overuse quantitative measures. How can you best incorporate qualitative methods into your own plans? Or if you’ve used particular qualitative tactics, how well did they work for you?

photo credit: hutchscout (via Flickr)

As I’ve talked with folks about my academic training and work in the field of business anthropology, one common response I get is: “Wow! That’s cool! So, what in the world is business anthropology?” One of my assignments this week was to read a chapter written by Marietta Baba from a book called Applied Anthropology: Domains of Application and write a synopsis. I immediately saw it as an opportunity to post information on the field based on the writings of someone I greatly respect.

I know it’s lengthy but hopefully it gives a sense of the history behind the field and how we anthropologists can be exceptionally useful within business. Enjoy…and feel free to leave any of your own questions or ideas in the comments.

Anthropology in Business and Industry: A Synopsis
2005 Baba, Marietta L. Anthropological Practice in Business and Industry. In Applied Anthropology: Domains of Application, ed. Satish Kedia and John Van Willigen. Westport: Praeger.

Summary
In this chapter, Marietta Baba provides a brief, yet comprehensive history of business anthropology in the twentieth century and compelling insights into how anthropology can benefit the objectives of private sector organizations.

The Historical Development of the Field
Business anthropology may seem like a recent offshoot of applied anthropology, but its roots lie further back in the twentieth century. Baba links the origins of the field to a set of experiments that took place within Western Electric Company (now part of Lucent Technologies) and its Hawthorne Works. Starting in the early 1920s, the executives of Western Electric tried to determine how to improve working conditions and set up experiments to test their hypothesis that manipulating just one variable (such as factory illumination, incentive pay or number of rest breaks) would generate sufficient conclusions. Unfortunately for the company’s management, the test results were almost always highly contradictory.

Elton Mayo, a Harvard psychologist, was asked to help interpret the results. What he and his colleagues observed was a much more complex social system at work where changing just one variable affected several other variables. Mayo knew about anthropology and its potential usefulness in understanding these social systems through his friendships with Bronislaw Malinowski and A. R. Radcliffe-Brown. Mayo was introduced to W. Lloyd Warner, one of Radcliffe-Brown’s students, who consulted with Hawthorne researchers to develop the next phase of the experiment – the Bank Wiring Observation Room (BWOR) in 1931. Baba argues it was this event which gave birth to what we now call business or industrial anthropology (223).

In a uniquely anthropological approach, the BWOR used ethnography to observe what workers actually did rather than listen to what they said they did via interviews. It became the “first systematic observational investigation of a work group’s social system, or, as we would call it today, the work group’s organizational culture” (223). The experiment also revealed a complex, and up to that time poorly analyzed, relationship between management objectives and the work group’s own productivity. The Hawthorne conclusions provided the first empirical evidence of “informal organization, defined as the actual patterns of social interaction and relationships among the members of an organization that arise spontaneously and are not determined by management” (224).

Out of the Hawthorne study, business anthropology in the 1940s was dominated by the human relations school of thought which posited that any conflict between management and employee was due to a disruption of a natural equilibrium. Therefore, the aim of this school was to balance the equilibrium between manager and worker and create beneficial relationships that ensured optimal performance. This asymmetrical power relationship would ultimately be called into question by anthropologists and it lost much of its influence as a result.

However, in spite of its early successes, the field of business anthropology faded from the anthropological landscape in the 1950s and would not return to prominence until the 1980s. Baba lists four primary reasons for this decline:

• Failure of first generation of industrial anthropologists to produce a second generation.
• A theoretical shift from human relations school and rise in contingency theory, which based findings on primarily quantitative research and statistical analysis
• Changes in academia where more anthropologists were able to find tenured work due to increased college admissions from baby boomers.
• Political and ethical issues raised by anthropologists who viewed working within corporations as unethical. This had a devastating impact as the American Anthropological Association instituted principles of professional responsibility in 1971 that prohibited any research that could not be freely disseminated to the public. Baba notes that since industrial research can often be proprietary, “this code of ethics virtually banned anthropological practice in industry for the next two decades” (230).

By the early 1980s, the economies of other areas of the world began to compete with the dominance of the United States. Industries in Western Europe, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore increased their own power which meant not only new competition but new markets for U.S. goods, as well. U.S.-based companies knew very little about their new international customers but recognized the importance of what we have come to understand as globalization. Two important developments would help resuscitate the field of business anthropology at this time: industry providing a demand for tools to better understand new cultures and their markets; and an overproduction of PhDs relative to few academic positions forcing changes in the professional code so anthropologists could accept jobs within industry.

Business anthropology also received a lift in importance as the concepts of “corporate culture” and “organizational culture” resurfaced in the business lexicon. As American industrial superiority began to decline in the face of challenges from foreign companies, executives in the U.S. sought viable reasons and solutions. Two best sellers published in 1982 from Deal and Kennedy (Corporate Cultures) and Peters and Waterman (In Search of Excellence) highlighted the role of culture and its connection to successful and unsuccessful businesses. However, by this time, studying organizational culture was no longer solely an anthropological activity. Business efficiency consultants, organizational development specialists and other social scientists were poised to offer insights into the issue of culture.

While each discipline has demonstrated its own particular strengths within business, it is important to point out the special capabilities that anthropology delivers to help organizations better understand their customers and their employees.

Anthropology’s Approach to Business Needs
Within business anthropology, there are two major subdomains that address business needs: the external consumer marketplace and the internal corporate work organization.

Consumers and the Marketplace
Baba comments that consumption, as the engine of a modern capitalist economy, is far more significant and complex than often recognized. There is a particular cultural significance underlying our purchases which rarely receive attention, yet “research has shown that such actions are integral to our individual definitions of self and reflect cultural patterns at both the societal and subgroup levels” (236). In other words, we typically buy goods and services that reflect our own identity. These purchases can be conscious decisions that promote a certain status or unconscious decision where it is other individuals who attribute meaning to our choices. There is a symbolic value at work here as our consumption acts as a type of interpersonal communication where the “coding and decoding of signals [is] dependent upon deeper meanings that have their roots within a particular cultural context” (236).

For marketers, anthropology provides unique insight and guidance into how a company can best position its goods and services to customers. As human behavior is not predetermined and the creation of meaning can be uniquely peculiar, marketers face a near-constant dilemma. Their challenge is to figure out what meaning the buyer will create from the product since it is the consumer who derives meaning from a thing, not the marketer. An anthropologist who is trained in cultural theories and ethnographic methods can develop the research necessary to gain a deeper understanding of patterns that impact product concepts, functions and design. They are also positioned to uncover the subtle cultural meanings that consumers may attach to these products, for example, by comparing and contrasting what a buyer says and what they actually do.

Corporate Cultures and Organizational Change
The anthropological study of corporate culture is more in line with fieldwork traditionally conducted by practitioners. It is also a direct descendant of the Hawthorne studies from the 1930s which proved that employees within organizations are rarely bound to the formal, rational objectives designed by management. Again, accepting that human behavior is not predetermined, anthropologists study how people who form working groups develop their own shared systems of meaning that persist over time. These shared, open systems also evolve and shift spontaneously in response to perceived challenges from both inside and outside the group’s scope of operations. Further, anthropologists possess the conceptual tools and methodologies to understand the relationships between the various layers of culture that exist within and outside the organization.

Organizational cultures can also come into conflict, such as the culture promoted by management (referred to as a rational system by Baba) versus the culture that organically emerges throughout the workforce (or natural system). To assist an organization, anthropologists can serve as a type of “knowledge broker” by recommending ways to allow the natural systems to adapt to changing situations without suffering harm. Anthropology can also negotiate agreements between rational and natural systems that allow management to design objectives while promoting conditions necessary for employees to co-create healthy work communities that align with those objectives.

Benefits of Anthropology to Business
There are three primary knowledge domains that anthropology brings to business: general knowledge of culture and culture theory; competency in the practice of ethnography; and specialized knowledge of particular cultures and languages.

General Knowledge about Culture
Since culture is a somewhat amorphous term, Baba offers a definition that is particularly salient for business: “The distinctive, shared patterns of behavior, thought, and feeling that emerge from a group’s historical experience in a particular environment and that are taught to new members as the correct way to live” (251). Out of this definition, an anthropologist is relevant to a business’s needs by answering questions related to culture’s impact on its success. Anthropology’s application is one where a business learns “what decisions it should make and what decisions it should take in light of its interests and goals, one the one hand, and cultural realities on the the other” (252).

Baba proceeds to present some aspects of the value proposition that anthropology brings to any business (and I would add that these work for not only private enterprise, but nonprofit and government organizations, as well).

Anthropology:

• Offers a holistic approach integrating a wide range of social and behavioral phenomena in describing and explaining culture.
• Recognizes that history is an important factor in understanding the origins of cultural patterns and what shapes them over time.
• Values multiple insider (or emic) perspectives as a way to understand the varied layers within a culture.
• Offers cross-cultural comparisons that generate insights into how different groups relate to each other.

Competency in Ethnographic Practice

Ethnography is a term gaining prominence in business circles but with this increase in awareness comes a danger in it being poorly executed. Anthropologists are trained in ethnographic practice and Baba notes some best practices described by others (254):

• Requires that anthropologists conduct significant fieldwork. The degree of fieldwork needed or possible within a business organization is usually dependent on time and fears of distraction and disclosure of confidential information.
• Uses multiple methods and techniques. These include interviewing; direct observation and videotape recording of behavior, events and situations; census and surveys; focus groups; and network analysis.
• Conveys a sense of being there. Ethnography captures “detailed and nuanced portrayals” of a field site.
• Searches for and provides details and conclusions that are unexpected or counterintuitive. Business decision-makers need help discovering issues that may be hidden or unknown. Ethnography can be exceedingly helpful in making sense of contradictory data.
• Offers a model or theory. Ethnography goes beyond just surface-level description and aims to provide explanations as to why something is the way it is.
• Contextualizes its findings. Again, ethnography is holistic in its objective to relate human thoughts and behaviors to multiple contexts of history, geography, environment, society, politics and economics.
• Emphasizes both what people say and what they do and the disconnect between them. Some of the most valuable insights anthropologists gain through their ethnographic work is locating discrepancies between verbal behavior and actual practices.
• Looks closely at how language is used. Ethnography captures the unique emic terms, phrases and expression cultural insiders use to describe their points-of-view. This language is often a condensed form of cultural meaning.
• Protects the people being studied. Anthropologists are professionally committed to the principle of “first, do no harm” in whatever field site they work. This commitment ensures informed consent, respect for confidentiality and agreement to not engage in projects that endanger or degrade a people’s livelihood. Baba notes, “Our particular sense of ethics in a business project may be one of the most important features characterizing anthropology in the private sector” (257).

For those of you who may not know, I’m currently a master’s candidate in Applied Business Anthropology at the University of North Texas. My broad focus is working with organizations and helping them better understand their internal employee cultures.

The capstone of the program is a practicum where students work with a sponsoring organization to design a research project to solve a very real problem. For me, I have two potential areas of interest and am searching for organizations which might satisfy one or both project possibilities. This will be a great opportunity for any company to get help understanding and resolving a thorny problem through research-based solutions. Oh, and also at no cost to the organization.

If your organization would be interested in sponsoring me and would like more information, please contact me at chris -at- chrisbaileyworks -dot- com.

Interest #1: Organizational Change and the New Rules of Business
In the last few years, there has been a phenomenal shift in business thinking related to the influence of social software on business strategy. Professionals in the technology and business consulting fields have termed it “Enterprise 2.0.” Generally, it differs from traditional business by using newer technology tools to break down silos within organizations; build more collaborative working structures internally and externally; develop more authentic relationships between the company and customer. Yet, with these dynamic changes in business strategy, there is a tension between the old ways of operating and the new, less familiar ways of doing things.

My interest within this field is to study how established industries at a macro-level or businesses at a micro-level are adapting to the changes incurred while moving toward Enterprise 2.0. My hypothesis is that as core functions of business are being changed, businesses not only need to alter their policies and procedures, they need to recreate their people-systems and the cultures that exist within their organizational boundaries. They need a more clearly defined roadmap to deal with the disruptive paradigm shifts that Enterprise 2.0 introduces to daily business and the costs and benefits it generates.

The draw to this particular topic is strong as it aligns with conversations I’ve had with business leaders and their admitted need for help changing their internal people-systems and cultures to meet new challenges posed by technology. My own personal experience corroborates this need as most businesses can easily focus on execution, but more rarely do they have the time to understand the “why” behind that execution. It’s even more pronounced when that execution hinges on understanding how culture is linked to success. For this reason, I believe there is a place for an anthropological approach providing a holistic assessment of how the human interactions and relationships contained within Enterprise 2.0 contribute to a new mode of organization.

Two professions – public relations and human resources – and one major industry – mainstream media (e.g., television and newspapers) – are at the top of my list of potential sites to perform a practicum on this subject. Each of them is struggling to adapt to critical changes wrought by technology and the impact on their business models. Delving deeper, there are also key issues often embedded in each of their organizational cultures. These manifest as how executives communicate with their employees on rules surrounding social media relationships, how managers build new competencies that integrate old and new skills, and how employees approach their work in an environment where professional and personal personas are increasingly blurred.

Interest #2: Startup Organization Maturation
This interest is one I have been developing over the past couple of years. Recently, I worked inside a company that was in the midst of evolving from a startup to a mature enterprise. What I discovered in talking with individuals who had been with the company from the beginning is how much they missed the “good old days” and were concerned about losing some of the characteristics that made it a great place to work. There was a genuine concern the organizational culture was changing as the company grew beyond the startup set of employees.

These dialogues inspired me to think deeply about what happens when a startup organization is no longer a startup. What happens when the company starts to grow up, find success, increase its product and service offerings, hires new people with different competencies? How does an organization maintain the positive aspects of its startup culture and excise what is necessary for beneficial growth?

My personal experience came inside a maturing startup in the technology sector. In Austin, TX, there is an abundance of such companies which would provide a wide array from which to choose. Ideally, I would select a technology-based company that is somewhere in its fifth to eighth year of existence. The anthropology angle would be to conduct interviews with individuals at various levels of the organization and with various lengths of tenure. The aim would be to learn the stories and rituals of the early startup to understand what cultural attributes originated, which ones have been discarded and which ones have been retained.

Say you’re a nonprofit executive or someone responsible for working with volunteers…do you know the value of the volunteer work being done on your organization’s behalf? Consider all that time spent, all that energy devoted, all that expertise put to service of your mission. Do you have an idea of their true worth?

If your answer is “no” or any variation of “sorta,” don’t worry; it’s actually a rather complex question that’s going to be quite unique to each nonprofit. You might want to bring in a business anthropologist (I do happen to know one) to help you sort through all of the people and policy issues. But there are a few key domains to consider as you mull this question:

Relationship
What kinds of relationships do you want to form with your volunteers? After working with volunteers for nearly 10 years, I’ve come to believe in one certain truth: there is no such thing as “managing” volunteers. Management changes the interpersonal dynamic making volunteerism a transaction rather than a relationship. Plus, your volunteers don’t need or want to be managed.

This raises an inevitable question: how do you get your volunteers to do what you want them to do? It’s actually the wrong question to ask if you’re trying to cultivate strong volunteer engagement. I would suggest this one: How do you guide your volunteers to give their best talents, expertise, and energy in ways that are meaningful to both themselves and the nonprofit? Individuals give most freely when they see and feel the personal connection to their work.

Value
What’s the value of the work being done by your volunteers? Most nonprofits that I’ve worked with don’t have a firm idea of the value of their volunteer work activities. If volunteers put together an event, what would the price be if done by a paid contractor? It’s not a question designed to make you shout, “Wow! Look at all the money we’re saving using free labor!” Instead, take some time to realize that individuals are giving their effort and that it does have an economic value. Then, calculate in the emotional value that comes from the passion behind the effort.

Social Marketing Potential
What kind of word-of-mouth marketing are you getting from your volunteers? Here’s where that emotional value pays off. If your volunteers are emotionally invested in your nonprofit’s cause, they’re going to tell others about their work. They’re going to have stories to share with their friends, family, coworkers, and other folks they see on a daily basis. And these stories can have a significant impact on your organization’s brand, fundraising movements and advocacy appeals. Engage your volunteers in meaningful work and they will spread the word in ways you may never have imagined.

This was just a broad look at volunteer engagement. It really does need some deeper probing. To do this, Aaron Bramley (blog :: twitter) and I are doing an email dialogue exchange over the next week so we can drill down into this topic. When we finish, we’ll post the results so everyone can benefit. Neither of us know what it’ll look like so you’ll just have to subscribe and see what happens. And if you have thoughts or questions, post them below and we’ll weave them into our dialogue.

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.

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. The reason for this often rests with some common misperceptions that collecting and analyzing qualitative data is difficult, unmeasurable, and overly time-consuming. But, the fact is that every organization that is committed to developing better relationships with its constituents needs to employ a balanced data collection plan. Strict number crunching usually fails to get at the heart of the things that matter most to non-profit organizations which are people and their emotional connection to your cause. It all comes back to understanding the deeper meaning of things which numbers can only hint at.

In addition to your quantitative measurements, what types of qualitative data collection techniques should you consider? It depends largely on what you’re trying to learn. Start with the big question you want to try to answer. Here are two familiar scenarios:

1. If you host events like walks, pet adoptions, or volunteer pledge drives and want to know why individuals are giving their time (always a highly prized commodity) to your organization, consider a participant-observation program. You’ll be actively participating alongside your constituents, learning about their passions and why they believe your cause matters. Your aim is to see your organization’s relationship through the eyes of others and find the commonalities that they share.

2. If you want to know what exactly will help convert individuals from one-time donors to recurring donors (an even more prized commodity in these economic times!), consider an interview program. This is not just a survey in a different form…think of it as a semi-structured conversation guided by your big question. You’re trying to dive deeper into understanding the major themes of the relationship between your constituents and your organization.

One significant caveat to note here…these qualitative approaches are only effective when performed with a curious objectivity. If you think you already know the answers to your questions, you might want to consider employing another impartial staff member to do them or hire a consultant (a business anthropologist, perhaps?).

This is just a thin, surface-level slice of what a balanced quantitative and qualitative approach can deliver to your organization. My hope is that it sparks some dialogue inside your organization about how to best discover significant patterns and meanings within your constituency; then use this knowledge to improve the effectiveness of your actions. If you’re interested in learning more about the field of business anthropology shoot me an email at cbailey@convio.com chris@chrisbaileyworks.com, leave a comment below, or follow the business anthropology tag on my own blog.

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.

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