In the early 1980s, the problem was how to better understand humans and their messy, complex and sometimes beautiful behaviours, practices, beliefs, values and symbols. Case in point: the stuff that was increasingly crowding our lives. With so much development in new technology rapidly introducing new gadgets and gizmos, nobody was quite sure about the Why’s and How’s of their use, fascination and adoption. Culturally, we were a bit stunned by their complexity. For the corporate manufacturers and salesmen of these new devices there was an absence of knowledge as to how people were actually using them, could use them, and might use them in the future. That absence was not good for the business of product design. And so a solution emerged. Rather than asking consumers about their technology use in focus groups or the artificiality of usability labs to reveal their hands-on secrets, a better research methodology was introduced, ethnography.

The introduction began with the turn to applied anthropology after the Second World War. Anthropologists, sociologists, and social psychologists working in fields such as development, health, and education began finding themselves recruited by large companies to help them understand their organizational culture and workplace behaviour. Western Electric was the first. The Hawthorne Studies at Western Electric in Chicago was officially a social psychology study but deeply influenced the business anthropology to follow. They illustrated how social relations and identity mattered more than environmental factors like lighting or pay in determining productivity. Then, from the 1950s to the 1970s, General Electric commissioned studies on employee behaviour, management communication, and shop-floor culture. Aimed to better understand worker morale and productivity beyond purely economic factors, GE’s management learned from them that informal social systems were central to efficiency and innovation. Following GE, similar studies on communication, teamwork and organizational culture were pursued by Bell Labs, AT&T, Dupont, IBM, Xerox and NASA, Shell and British Petroleum. These all spoke of a corporate culture that wanted to learn and to be better as a site of teams working together.

The game was then changed and, arguably, forever shaped by a shift in research at Xerox. Founded in 1970, the Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) was founded as the company’s R&D arm for exploring the ‘office of the future’. Initially led by researchers in computer science and psychology, PARC began informal observational work on how people used emerging office technologies like word processors, networked workstations, and copiers. Initially pre-ethnographic studies that focused more on usability testing than on cultural analysis, anthropologists like Lucy Suchman, Julian Orr and Jeanette Blomberg were now on staff and analyzing the mediative practices of technology. This work continued to the early 1990s and  inspired companies like Intel, Microsoft, and IDEO to integrate ethnography into product design.

As is often the case with the shiny and new, the introduction of ethnography was considered a paradigm shift, particularly to those in design and user experience who were charged not with workplace culture but with making things. Unlike market research in 2-way mirror facilities, ethnography was conducted in people’s homes, offices, events or the street. Instead of the direct questions of a focus group, researchers would observe and listen in an open, undirected way. That, everyone told themselves, would allow researchers to witness customers’ behaviour on their terms, not the corporation’s and thus enlighten us about the all-important context in which they would use a new product and the meaning it might hold in their lives.

And so, for years –  as late as the early 1990s – this was the mantra of business ethnography. Except it was barely recognizable to those who chanted the discipline in the halls of academia. In these early years and well into the 21st Century, the two major misconceptions about ethnography – as it had been practiced by anthropologists and sociologists for well over 100 years – were this: ethnography was a methodology driven by the power of observation; and ethnography was a way, through that observation, of decoding unknown, unmet and unarticulated consumer needs.

One of the main promoters of ethnography as a way to decode unknown, unmet and unarticulated needs was the apocryphal quote attributed to Henry Ford that’s still used today across insights departments: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” Based on the theory that consumers are poor predictors of future desires and that behavioural context was more valuable than consumer requests because those requests were mired in the unmet, unknown and unarticulated, the theory back then as now was simple: consumers can’t tell you because they don’t know. Maybe faster horses would have been the best thing, particularly for the environment.

That knowledge theory is about as incorrect as you can get. Both Franz Boas and Bronislaw Malinowski, two elder statesmen of ethnography, wrote extensively about how local people under their study provided them with clear answers about local culture. In Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922), Malinowski stressed that his findings were based on long conversational engagement and participant-observation with the Trobriand Islanders as the “surest sources” of ethnographic data. For him, talk was central to producing reliable field knowledge. For Franz Boas in Ethnology of the Kwakiutl (1921,) relying on a local woman was the greatest source of answers, traditions, and ongoing exchanges of texts and recollections that he incorporated into his volumes of study.

The idea that ‘natives’ could not explain their culture is as foolish as our colonial era’s pseudoscientific inferiority discourse that conflated intelligence with civilization. It managed to live on so long as to convince design leaders like Steve Jobs that “People don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” If that’s true, then the people asking did not know how to do it. If it’s not true it’s probably because people have not always been in a state of shock, awe and disruption every time designers released a new tech into the market. Interestingly, the theory that breakthrough products emerge not from consumer requests but from the empathetic, interpretive talents of designers decoding unarticulated needs is a foundational principle of today’s design ethnography.

Then there is the related issue of ethnography as a methodology driven by the power of observation. Certainly, observation is key to some forms of ethnography. In addition to watching and learning, the first part of the term refers to doing and learning, and talking and learning. The idea that observation would dominate this process finds its origins in the methods and beliefs of the natural sciences. Early anthropologists sought to make their studies as systematic, objective, empirical and scientific as studies of the natural world. Like the first corporate ethnographers, they aspired to observe human behaviour from the outside, to minimize subjective interpretation, to record facts from the field, and to classify them into general laws. Then, catalogue their artifacts, classify their relationships, create universal laws of their behaviour and put it all behind glass in a British museum.

As a fixed and forever method driven by positivism and evolutionary theory, the thought that ‘scientific’ observation should lead research is counter-intuitive to the last century of anthropology and its constant introduction of new ideas to challenge existing theory and methods. It was this practice of challenging the known that made business ethnography such an invaluable tool. To corporate and consultant bosses, the insights output of research – the writing (the ‘graphy’) after the people (the ’ethno’) - was the ‘actionable’. But the action in the minds and motivations of the ethnographers – people who perpetually feel like outsiders because they have been trained to make sense of the systems of the cultures of ‘others’ – has been the challenge itself. 

For us, ethnography is so much more than simply observing or talking to people. It is a humanistic, interpretive discipline concerned with meaning, not measurement. It changes and evolves faster than any natural specimen. It is a process of what is done, what is thought then, and what is thought now. And above all else, it is phenomenological. That is, the ‘deep hanging out’ that has defined ethnography for some is the way of seeing the world through the lens of ‘being there’, describing how we experience the world by focusing on meaning and lived experience rather than causes.

To assume business ethnographers, the increasingly popular in-house ethnographers or the executives who oversee both of their budgets by tabulating hundreds of billable dollars per hour or hours in a day can keep pace with the rate of disruption and innovation in ethnography is unreasonable. All of them are subject to systems built on time, efficiency and workload. And hourly billing and days have no room for extensive lectures about new theories and ideas like phenomenology.

That was my challenge when I became the Resident Anthropologist at a Toronto-based global innovation consulting firm in 2007. Hired by a boss who suspected, or somehow knew, that anthropology and ethnography could, like at world-leading design firm IDEO, be the secret sauce to his design thinking approach to innovation, I joined a room full of strategists, usability experts, experience designers and other job titles new to an anthropologist for what would be a bumpy (but still fun) ride for the next few years. 

Like any good anthropologist worth his PhD, when asked by potential clients what this ethnography thing was I stepped forward ready to explain 100 years of fieldwork (the ‘ethno’) and hard days of the art of crafting insights (the ‘graphy’). Turns out, most potential clients didn’t care. They didn’t have a lot of time for reading, no time for social science lessons and very little interest in anything they believed wasn’t going to dive right into a business opportunity. Needless to say, it took me time to understand how my talking style needed to change in order to accommodate their listening style. And so I forged on with project wins where human details, human centricity and human culture won the day with clients who, it turns out, actually were a little intrigued by my topic. Having learned to communicate what was different, better and more human about ethnography we were, over the years, able to conduct the kinds of ethnographic research that reminded us of graduate school days. Sure some projects involved little more than long, informal interview chats at people’s homes, what I called Customer Context Labs (design-inspired activities alongside peer group conversations) and the end-product insights deck. But, for me, the deep hanging out of the alcohol and the luxury fashion projects were ethnographic gifts. And the full evocative immersion into the experiences of epilepsy, clinical trials and other subjects were full of human narrative and emotion.

As I became our firms’ Chief Resident Anthropologist, I began to assemble a team that eventually grew beyond a dozen. I told every new anthropologist, sociologist, political scientist and ethnomusicologist that this was their challenge: to communicate the processes, values, ideas and applications of their discipline to an audience that generally didn’t know and probably didn’t care. But, to always do so politely and accessibly while sticking to one’s professional values. That meant: explain to those only who were interested; insert theory only where relevant; and show how people were messier, more complex and more beautiful than market research ever knew. No scholarly quotations. No footnotes. Lucky for me, our CEO had my back. He wanted this. He believed in this. And his rallying cry for me was forever “Rigour!” So we carried on over years not only with various members of my team touching every aspect of our clients’ business from high-level strategy to organizational change but also with ethnography as what I described as the art and science of telling stories about people’s stories.

Today, rigour is more appreciated. Ethnography is not just about product development – and not just for consultants or the increasing number of practitioners working corporate side – but has a seat at the table of strategy, marketing, organizational culture, opportunity-scanning and strategic transformation. It is as interested or more in market contexts and cultural contexts than consumer or user contexts. Alongside foresight, it is a way of understanding and preparing for futures and emerging behaviours. And with deeper insights for all it proves that actions don’t necessarily speak louder than words. Some of these insights were never of interest to the early tech bros, given that the work was never intended to figure out people and their practices but the gadgets and gizmos. Luckily for the problems of our clients and the solution of ethnography as it continues to evolve in practice, we are all now questioning and listening more to each other’s big ideas. Let’s just hope that the recent goal of efficiency and greater cost effectiveness doesn’t sweep human research into the popular and powerful current of A.I.