THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING Podcast

Lucy Neiland on Invisibility & Ethnography

Lucy Neiland [https://www.linkedin.com/in/lucy-neiland-5842a611/] is a Business Anthropologist at Ipsos UK and a founding member of the Ipsos Ethnography Centre of Excellence. She previously led ethnographic research at Serco ExperienceLab and worked at Ethnographic Research, Inc. in Kansas City. She holds an MA in Visual Anthropology from the University of Manchester. Her published work includes "Hysterical Health: Unpicking the cultural belief's that shape women's healthcare [https://www.ipsos.com/en-uk/hysterical-health-unpicking-cultural-beliefs-that-shape-womens-healthcare]" and "From Purity to Power: The wellness cultural operating system [https://www.frontlinebesci.com/p/from-purity-to-power]." And I think you know this, but I start all these conversations with the same question, which I borrowed from a friend of mine, who’s also a neighbor, who helps people tell their story. And it’s such a beautiful question, I borrow it, but it’s so big, I over explain it the way that I’m doing right now. So before I ask it, I want you to know that you’re in total control, and you can answer or not answer really any way that you want to. And the question is, where do you come from? It’s a really nice question, it is, and I’m not sure I the being in total control. I’ll give it a go. Because I am used to asking the questions and not answering them. So bear with me. So I feel the question is two parts. For me, really, there’s people and there’s place. And I think, in terms of people, I’m from, I don’t know, I’ve always felt my family were a little bit crazy. So there’s, my mum is, she’s Polish Jewish heritage. So second generation, I think her family, through, they flew in contraband during the Second World War. And we’re sort of East End Jewish gangsters, as far as I can tell. And then on the other side, my dad is Irish Catholic. And they weren’t parented well. My mum, I think she was, she had to leave home and live with her relatives, because she was too much, her mum said. And then my dad, he was put into a home and then taken out again. And as a long roundabout way of saying, my parents are really nice. They’re both still alive, I’m lucky. But they are, they never knew how to parent. And so I always felt a bit feral. And a bit, yeah, I think, and also on top of that, they’re both artists. So they take up a lot of space with their worldviews and their noise. And, and it’s made me quite an observer of people, I think, watching their, their craziness. Yeah. And where were you? Where was this all? So I grew up in South London, in Clapham. So 70s and 80s is really multicultural, nice, lots of nice things about it. But when I was there, at that time, there was no national curriculum at school. And it adds to my sense, I had really feral childhood, but, maybe in my mind, but sometimes my boss says, I’m not trying hard enough with spreadsheets or numbers. And I don’t think he understands that I probably did maths, for half an hour, once every two weeks, there wasn’t, it’s not, it’s no joke. But it was also there was a lot of good things about it. But it was also a really violent place back then. And it felt very polarised in that sense. And I was mugged and attacked a few times, as was my dad and my sister. And it just felt, it felt a bit of a, I don’t know, a rough era in London. And I’m now I’m in Tooting, which I really, but I’m hoping we don’t slide back into 80s London, but I don’t think we will. And do you have a recollection of what you wanted to be when you grew up? I don’t know, not really. I do. I do remember saying to my mum, I’ve got to work outside, I can’t sit still. I can’t, I need to be moving around. I might have to make my desk into a standing desk in a minute, because I will need to stand up. I’m not very good at staying still for a long period of time. But yeah, I remember my, my mum, we had a school play at primary school, and it was the Pied Piper of Hamelin. Do you know that one? And I had to be a rat. And I had these brown itchy tights. And my parents were watching. And they were saying to each other, who is that kid on stage that just can’t sit still, jumping around? Really glad it’s not our kid. That’s really embarrassing. And then realised it was me. And I feel that’s been the story of my life a bit. But I feel, it’s, I really have always been a people watcher, and really fascinated by rules and rule breaking and notions of authority and, and people who are so certain about things trying to unpick why? How can people be so sure of things? But yeah, no, not, not really. I applied to art college, and I got a place in a really good London art school. But then I thought, oh, that’s my parents career. So I shouldn’t, I shouldn’t do that. I should try something new, they’ll interfere too much. So I mixed art with anthropology and did a master’s degree in visual anthropology. Yeah. I love, I mean, I was just about to ask about, you had talked about how growing up in the house, you grew up and turned you into an observer of people. And then you use that phrase people watcher. And I feel I say often that I’m a people, people watching, it’s my favorite pastime. Can you say more about people being a people watcher? Is that if I’m just even the phrase itself? Do you have a record where that comes from? It’s so nice, isn’t it? It’s, it is such a nice thing to do, even a bus stop, or I think it was Mike Agar, the anthropologist said, you can do, ethnography, a bus stop with one person. And I think that’s really true. You don’t need to be anywhere exotic, or it doesn’t have to be too complex, you can find patterns and norms and change and just by, your local superstore or wherever, it’s, I can’t help it. I’m a real watcher, starer. And I’ve also always felt I’ve been, I’m invisible. So I took a, I took this cup of tea to an exercise class the other day. And I had a china cup. And I drank it. And I was just standing there with my cup. And everyone was, why have you got a cup? And I just, I thought no one would be able to see me, it wouldn’t have made any difference. But yeah, just from a young age, I remember when, when my parents, when we all live together, there would always be people over and they’d always be, drinking and gambling. And they’d be, smoke in the living room. Everyone was smoky in that era. And I just love to watch them all argue and try and work out what the hell was going on with them all. Yeah, I feel that continued into my life today. Definitely. It’s my favorite part of my job. Yeah. And so catch us up. Tell us where are you now? And what’s the work that you do? So now I work at Ipsos. And I work in business anthropology or ethnography and run all sorts of projects on everything on, what’s it being a patient with a certain illness or, looking at financial services and interactions with products or what’s missing in people’s lives. So a bit of everything. I think some of my favorite projects have been around things like weight stigma and obesity and masculinity and things that you really feel like social silences or stigma or that aren’t well explored or maybe society isn’t thinking about in a complex way. What have you been working on? What’s the most recent social silence that you’ve been really fixated on or spending time thinking about? I think wellness is one I’m really interested in the kind of rise of wellness culture and how it’s become a kind of total operating system almost in how it shapes how people think and eat and what they buy. And I guess that’s tied in with misinformation is one strand of it. But also this idea I’m really interested across all the projects I see in that your health is your responsibility as an individual and that you need to take control of it. And it’s almost like this gentle gaslighting of people to that they’ve caused weight gain. They’ve caused themselves to be sick. Therefore, they need to fix it. And I feel like these are the narratives that we’re hearing in health in finances, when you think about things like pensions, you didn’t save enough, you made some bad decisions, and not taking into account where you’re born, what you’re born with your family circumstances, life choices, pressures, this idea that we’re these autonomous individuals who should be able to navigate things almost like a rich white man. And that you’re ultimately accountable, or you’re responsible for your outcomes. But I guess more interestingly, that the society isn’t what you’re saying. Yeah, that society isn’t. And that, I’m seeing more chatter. I mean, I don’t on in the social media I’m looking at in terms of the growth of community, community support. I’m working with a great group of people on this idea for community pension. So just things like that are really giving me hope for the future that people want to be together and draw from each other. When did you first discover that you could make a living doing this kind of thing? So during my master’s, I remember I was working with this company called Ethnographic Research Incorporated. I think they were the first company to do business anthropology. They were based in Kansas City and run by Melinda Ray Holloway, really great ethnographer and Ken Erickson. And they, so I was freelancing for them, whilst I was doing my master’s degree. And I remember going back to my colleagues on my master’s who were saying, how can you, how can you work for these car companies or these, what are you doing? It should be for social good. Why are you doing business anthropology? And really getting it in the neck. Because I felt like it was interesting because they, a lot of the course were, it was this idea that you should be looking for something exotic or, to put it bluntly, study people that are poorer than you, go to communities where you can, I think, could be more extractive. And I was always interested in power, where power is or those dynamics. But yeah, that was in my 20s. I started doing this type of work and I didn’t know it would be more of my career. So I started out doing this part time, but also trying to make documentary films or making documentary films and doing those two things at the same time. And what kind of film, what were the films you were making? They were weirdly a lot about the American military. I’m not really sure what was going on. So one of the films we made was about this motel where Timothy McVeigh stayed before he carried out the Oklahoma bombing. It was in the middle of America, right there. If you put a pin in America, it was there. And I wanted to make a film about middle America. It was at the time of the Iraq war and what was going on. It was right by a military base with soldiers shipping out to Iraq. And I guess it was how middle America was feeling at the time about domestic terrorism and foreign terrorism and how they were conceptualizing these things differently or the same or othering people or yeah. Yeah. And other films I’ve followed a military family from Oklahoma over to the UK to understand life, an American life in the UK on an American Air Force base. So in Britain, we still have American Air Force bases, which I find so bizarre. And they are like small American towns in the UK with American dollars, food, culture, high school. And it was meant to be a film about the culture of the UK and US, but they didn’t leave the base. The American fact, they were very scared of the UK. So it became much more about that, about fear and containment. Yeah. That’s amazing. How would you how do you describe the way that you work? I mean, everybody develops their own maybe method or approach or way of doing ethnography. How do you think about what you do? And how do you how would you describe the way that you learn? I feel like I really love working in a team. And I really thrive from trying to work out what we’re seeing as a team. So coming up with, we’ll go and do our research. And it might be on things like health influences in different countries, what, what I like your dog, what what informs people’s health decisions in say, a global study on who influences health, and we’ll go to these countries. And we’ll talk to people spend time with people. But for me, the really exciting part is working out what we’re seeing, and often arguing about it. I love that. And it was like, spending a couple of days really analyzing and unpicking and working out a story and a narrative that makes sense. And I feel like if you’re not arguing or coming at it with a different view, and then working out together, then what that that gray area is, then I don’t know, that’s the bit that gets me out of bed is that bit? I really love that. Yeah. And what makes it so important, like the case, I was in these conversations, I always feel like I want to get to some foundational thing of what is the value of this kind of ethnographic work? And we can always talk about AI and all that stuff. But what do you think makes this stuff so important? What’s the value that it brings and the role, the proper role it should play in the way organizations go about doing their business? It really, it really helps understand what’s happening in the world. I know that’s just really cheesy. But I remember making channel four in the UK years ago said, Can you make a film about a future predictor? I think her name was faith popcorn. I can’t remember. I have a funny Faith Popcorn story. And I said, No, I can’t. But I could make a film about how anthropology or sociology or understanding cultural patterns can help you prepare for what’s coming. If you work with people’s social and cultural norms, you can, you have to work with people for things like, during COVID, you’ve got to work with these norms, you can’t dictate from above, and make people comply, you need to understand people’s beliefs and everyday lives and care networks and ecosystems to work with those. And that’s really important for brands and for medical professionals and institutions to do is to get behind the counter with these with people and work with them rather than impose from above, I think. I really want to hear your faith popcorn story. It was not directly with her, but I interviewed at the it was Faith Popcorns Brain Reserve, I think was the name of her company. Yeah, and I got into the second interview, I think it was the same interview, but they brought me into some room that was like a war room for we’re doing something for, I think this woman came in and she asked me this is where this is about the future of carbonation. And so she was she asked me point blank, what do you think is the future of bubbles? And I think, sincerely, one of my proudest moments, without meeting a missing a beat, I said, no bubbles. I love it. Very good. Yeah, my entire higher education prepared me for that. That’s really good. No bubbles. I did not hear back. No. I wonder what someone else said, who got that job? Yeah. How do you what is the answer? What’s the answer? Yeah, the bubbles have still stayed the same as far as I can see. I think there’s been experiment with smaller bubbles. I think there’s probably there is light and low carbonation. I feel like we’ve Oh, yeah. I haven’t thought deeply about bubbles, clearly. And I didn’t intend for us to get overwhelmed. I overflow with my fave popcorn story. I do. I bubble over. That’s right. Well, very well done. So the visual anthropology bit and the business anthropology bit. I’m just curious what how has the practice changed over your career to I feel like, I’m sorry, I’m bumbling questions on top of each other. I love that description you described of being challenged by the anthropologists around you for applying this into the corporate world. And I’ve often been the brand guy with not for profit people. And that that boundary is very well protected on one side. You know what I mean? Where people really feel you can’t go over there and do that thing. I’m just wondering, what’s what was your experience? If you could say more about that experience. I would love to hear it. About the experience that Yeah, I guess that anthropology is not something that should be participating in corporate culture or commercial culture. Maybe I’m projecting. No, I feel it’s an interesting one, isn’t it? Because we all need products and services that work and that are good and that talk to us. So. So to understand people is key to getting these things. And I don’t think it’s as simple as good guys and bad guys, you know, so you might do work in public affairs or for government. But if you don’t particularly the government or, you know, you know, then you benefit structure. Why? Why? In a way, that’s not any better or any worse than working for, you know, a particular corporation. Obviously, there’s not nice corporations out there to obviously lots of them. But but I think it’s it’s not as black and white as public sector, good private sector, evil. I think it’s it’s more complicated, isn’t it? And I feel especially for things health systems, or I don’t know, things financial institutions, I do a lot of financial services, a lot of healthcare ethnography. And I feel those are really important because your health finances need, you know, you need those things to be to be working for you to, you know, get into order age in good Nick. I don’t think I answered your question at all. Sorry. No. You did. I think it says the follow up was really was how has the role of anthropology changed over your career? I feel it was maybe fringe in the beginning. Do you feel it’s changed in terms of? Yeah, definitely. It’s definitely changed. One of the things I was gonna say, yeah, I went for this job ages ago, it was I really did want it was working for a mental health team in London Hospital. And it was basically because there was a lot of, I think it was a lot more black men being sectioned than anyone else in in this area of London and probably elsewhere. But it was focusing on this area. And the job was to really understand the cultural beliefs of the, you know, clinical team and the police and to work in that community and understand why the rates of sectioning were higher and, you know, and how to reduce them. And I’ve sat on this table with other anthropologists there. And we had a group discussion. And it was it was really great. And somebody who had a PhD got the job, they wanted someone with a PhD, I didn’t have one and don’t have one. And, but I remember talking about, you know, even doing ethnography for the military, you know, not that I’ve ever done that, or, but, you know, you can be an anthropology, anthropologist for the police, or for, you know, these health services to really help liaise with the community. And I remember somebody in on that table saying, you know, anthropologists can’t work with the military, that’s really awful, you know, how could you do that? And it’s sort of, to me, that blew my mind, because these places and institutions are the ones that often need those cultural bridges to communities, I think. Yeah, yeah, yeah, more, more than ever, actually, more, not more than ever, but they need that intelligence and understanding more than other institutions, it would seem. Yeah. And as long as you’re doing it in the right way, I did apply for a job with secret services in the UK to be an anthropologist, and it was looking into the rise of terrorism. And I didn’t get a second interview. And I was quite pleased about that, because I, I wondered if that would be going undercover. And, you know, and I wouldn’t, I’m not, I wouldn’t want to do anything, you know, that, unethical. What is it that anthropologist does that other people don’t do? It seems it’s a sort of a weird, it’s, you know, for some people, it’s very strange. You know, you say, people watching what God’s name, does that have to do with the how the world works? Or how adding that, I mean, maybe I’m being being provocative, of course, but what is it that anthropology does that others don’t do? I think it’s really trying to understand others, the set of rules and identities and behaviours that other people have that make sense of things. So how other people and groups and subgroups are making sense of things. And I think that’s maybe the difference is really, yeah, trying and no, it’s so boring to say, but walking in other people’s shoes, I can’t believe I said that, but really trying to understand these and not dismiss different views. So I’m really, I’ve got on when I did this work on masculinity, a couple of years ago, I started a social media account, as a young man, and I wanted to see, I don’t post anything, I just receive, I just have an algorithm now that feeds me stuff. And some of it is, it’s just really blows my mind, it’s stuff that I would not be following, but I want to understand different movements. And, you know, and some of them are quite far right, quite extreme. And I think, but I want to understand the mindset of people rather than dismiss, and not lean into the end of history and liberalism, but to really walk in the shoes of views that I might not necessarily agree with to, to try and, yeah, work out what’s going on and how gaps can be bridged. And I think I was feeling quite despondent recently thinking about how it feels like an era where I think we used to say as anthropologists, at least on our team, it was about empathy creation for different groups. So for your consumer, for your patient, really empathizing with them as a brand or as an institution to work with them. And I feel like that’s not enough anymore, just empathizing. And I’ve been really thinking about what’s going on, and why isn’t that enough? And I was reading about empathy. And I was wondering if it’s about people are now almost over empathizing with a with their own in group. And it’s, I was reading about that analogy of, you’re almost shining a spotlight on your in group. And so everybody else outside that group is in the dark, rather than drawing back and having sunlight on everybody. It’s like, wow, do you know what I mean? Yeah. That’s beautiful. Where did that analogy come from? Is that your own analogy? I can’t remember. I was reading this. A guy who’s who’s written about it. I just can’t remember his name. This observation started with the work around masculinity and you exposing yourself to the social media feed of a young man, presumably. What’s that? What can you say more about what that experience has been has been like? Yeah, it’s been really weird. So it started with my daughter during COVID times. And when everybody went back to school in the UK, she became a bit of a school refuser. She didn’t want to go back. And she did go back. But, you know, it was much lower attendance. And I talked to her and her sister, who are younger teenagers at the time, and they just were reporting just the rise of misogyny in the classroom. And, and I think the schools really didn’t know what to do at that time. You know, they had templates for not necessarily the best ones, but for racism or for, you know, other issues, but this was something that they hadn’t that they hadn’t seen before. And so I interviewed lots of teachers, other students, and, you know, my kids, other people’s kids and started a whole project with my colleague Diana on looking into what was going on and did a lot of expert interviews to build up a picture of, of what was going on, because it really blew my mind. And so, yeah, I put together a documentary, combining different voices. So, you know, young men, young women, experts, teachers. Yeah, and it was a really interesting process. And a part of that was creating this social media algorithm to see what these young men were exposed to and, and, and was what was coming at them hard and fast, just from searching things like gym or football or vitamins, you know, how, how extreme things would go, you know, straight on to choking or, you know, Andrew Tate back then, or, you know, how to get your girl to do what you want her to do, and just so much worse. It’s obviously so much worse out there. But I think what blew my mind about this project, and is still blowing my mind is the fact that we’re spending so much time looking at young men and boys, and we are still only unpicking what’s going on with the, you know, with Epstein. And, and you think about these older musicians and politicians and the social silence around almost, around what’s happened with these older men, you know, that have set a template, sure, without social media. But this culture has been well established. It’s not new news. It’s just now we have little reels explaining it. So we shouldn’t be pointing at the young boys, you know, to be accountable here, I feel. Yeah, that seems to be, I mean, that, of course, is the Epstein files, the promise of the Epstein file, what makes them so powerful, right? Yeah, what they seem to promise about, about what we’re going to learn. I mean, we just, there’s a college nearby, the president of the local college was, you know, just revealed to have been in 2500 emails or something like that. That’s amazing. So don’t you think, don’t you think with the, what is a silence here that is interesting is how we other the men involved. And slowly, we can’t do that anymore, because it’s so many. And so it’s surely then it’s a cultural norm that we need to talk about rather than say, look how unusual it is, the French case. I can’t remember her name, but that really brave lady who turned up to court and said she wouldn’t be ashamed. But it’s like, you know, there was a whole narrative about how unusual these things are. And actually, they’re not, are they? But they’re so well covered up. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it’s just so, it’s all part of some, some just general way of being, you know what I mean? You say, the power is all, there’s somehow acceptable aspects of what one does if one is in pursuit of power. The president said, I was looking, you know, I’m looking for money for the college. That’s it? That’s it. Yeah. Okay, then. Strange, very strange. I want to return to you that you’re, that I have so much identification with the, your insight into the idea that, that is true, that we used to be advocates for empathy and empathy was this thing, but we’ve entered into an era where empathy doesn’t even feel like it’s, it doesn’t, it’s just not up to purpose, I guess is the way I came along with the cliche I’m looking for is, but so what do you do now? Is there a way that you’re rethinking approach or rethinking practice to, in an acknowledgement of this? I love that we’re all, there’s, I’m going to add a little detail here. There’s a guy, I live in a very small town. I’ve thought a lot about community engagement and how divided we are and what social media did to all that. And there’s a guy from University of Berkeley, California, Berkeley, John A. Powell, who wrote a book called Belonging Without Othering. And it’s this framework about bonding and bridging and breaking. It’s all this whole way of talking about how communities can come together to repair injustices of the past, but not do it. Often we do it, we end up just what is, what’s the line, you know, meet the new boss, same as the old boss. We just switch power positions and just perform the same injustice in a different direction. And it just pushes the resentment down the road. And so anyway, he has this way of talking about bridging behaviors, which is, we don’t have them anymore, really. We’ve forgotten here in the States. But that bonding is, you’re talking about we’re so, maybe social media has got us, we’re bonding all the time. We’re celebrating the in-group all the time. That flashlight image you gave was really so powerful. So enough of my rambling. What are the implications for how you work, if that’s the case? So one project I’ve really enjoyed working on is one about kidney disease recently. And it’s been really moving. And we’ve spent time with patients, people, you know, going through kidney disease and treatment for it. And how we’ve brought this to our clients is we’ve done our ethnography. So we’ve gone out, we spent time with them, we’ve understood their lives and the patterns, the influences, the journey. And what we then did is we brought them into a co-creation session with the client and the client, you know, comprised of designers, product designers, scientists, doctors, and some of them hadn’t met patients before. Some of them work, you know, are patient facing, but they hadn’t spent time with patients as an equal. Do you know what I mean? You’re always, as a doctor, you have a role to do. And it’s a different hierarchy, you know, even if you’re a great doctor, you’ve still got a role. So here we had, I think it was a two hour workshop, where we didn’t call patients patients, they were people, they were guests. And then our clients, we mix people up. And we designed a workshop where it was really about co-creating together, everybody was equal, everybody learned from each other’s experience. And we just got such great feedback that that was a really moving session. And for us, we just finished a project to on elitism. And for that project, we really would like to get our clients in the room with some of our participants as well. And also in that project, we’ve got participants with very different political views. And I don’t know, I don’t think co-creation is always the way or necessarily always the answer. But it’s quite nice to see where people do converge. And what are those things where people have the same worries and fears and interests and where they can come together, rather than trying to get somebody to empathize with his whole other person, maybe it’s just with some aspects that they can relate to. So maybe it’s more dissected, I’m still thinking on it. Do you have an answer? I don’t have an answer. Lots of other things come back to me. Actually, I was just remembering, I guess I’m a bit of an Anglophile. But do you know, Roy Langmaid? Does that name ring a bell? So he’s a, there’s a couple, I think, threads in my own career, I think he was the, they call him a father of qualitative research in the UK, Roy Langmaid. And what was her name? Wendy Gordon? Does that name ring a bell? No, we’re gonna have to look them up. But they’re in the conventional qualitative space. And I think there’s a way that qualitative and ethnography are two totally different cultures, even though they’re addressing the same problem, of course. And of course, that makes sense. But he would do these breakthrough sessions, the same thing, this idea of co-creation. So yeah, I think stuff like that, that there’s a need. And I remember, yeah, just getting people in the same room. I feel echoing what you said before, that somehow the answer to what’s the role of qualitative, you said, you said these, you said these things that felt you were apologizing for how simple they were. But this idea that just getting people in the same room and treating each other as human beings, and just having some interaction about the facts of the matter or the experience of the matter is a lot, it seems. It’s a lot, isn’t it? And trying to remove power dynamics when you do that, I think is really important, isn’t it? So working hard to, we did think long and hard about what to call patients, how to introduce them, and that thing to really try and empower people to bring their whole self, if they can. Yeah. It’s interesting. Yeah, to create the appropriate conditions for people to actually meet each other. Yeah, yeah. And I feel like for the most part, people want to, don’t they? It’s, it’s all the other things that I think I’ve got a very positive view about humans in general. But people want to do good and have agency. And I don’t believe in the concept of laziness, people. Wait, wait, wait, what do you mean? Who’s, who are the advocates for laziness that we’re, we’re up against? Don’t you in the tabloids, lazy benefit, whatever, or just people should eat less and move more or, and I, I just don’t believe anybody is lazy. There’s a reason people don’t do things. Not that people should be eating less or moving more. It’s not what I’m saying, but there’s a people, there’s a reason why there’s always a reason nobody is, everybody wants to be appreciated. Everyone’s agency, everybody wants to find fulfillment. But stuff gets in the way and circumstances out of your control. Is it, yeah, I don’t know. I remember having a very strong reaction when somebody would ask for creative respondents, we need creative respondents. And I’d just be like, it just pissed the hell, it just pissed me off because I felt like it just diminished the idea that, I feel like in a way, we’re all creative and imaginative all the time. The whole project of trying to get through a day is this imaginative act. Right. And, and we’re now we’re going to have to find somebody who’s what, there’s some people that aren’t creative. I just think it’s not the job. Yeah. I think that’s really, really annoying. I would hate that because we’re, might have a project going ahead that is looking at how men engage in the arts and not the arts as in opera, painting or whatever, but to look at some of the barriers that men might have in, it’s for this company that does these festivals for women and how women come to, and they understand well how women come together, and appreciate different things, but they, they want to understand the barriers for men engaging in these things. And what I really like about this brief, it’s not a creativity as in high culture or, it’s actually, maybe how someone relates to music or a podcast or, dancing on their own or, being a creative builder or, or, dressing up as a knight or, or whatever you might do. So yeah, people are creative in, in every way, aren’t they? Right. Right. Yeah. Yeah. You begin by not pretending what it means to be creative. And also to be part of creative industries, I think is if you look at the history of art and music, most of these people are probably really rich, aren’t they? Because they’re the people that could afford to, be part of it. So you’re already excluding so many creative people. Yes. Which leads to another rant I have about the use of the word of taste, but I want to, I want to, well, it’s not so much of a rant as I feel like it’s just used as shorthand for this, for this thing. Let’s, let’s just treat this as a, something that we can’t really explain, but that explains my superiority is the, the application of it. As opposed to maybe just doing the research and being rigorous about it, but I’m, I’m being a bit of a prick, but I want, I’m curious, what’s the, when people call you guys, what are the, what kinds of problems do they come to you with? Like, what’s the, yeah, what do you, what do people come to you for? And what do you say? Oh, don’t ask me that one, but what do they come for? What they come for all different issues, really so we’re a team of, 15, I think. And we all have different skill sets. So, I do a lot of healthcare and financial services, ethnography, but also other types, but different team members specialize in different things. And that’s why it’s so nice. Different people bring a different expertise together. So one of our colleagues, Gigi really focuses on beauty care, and it’s so interesting listening to her talk because that’s not, my area. So it could be anything, about new trends in, in drinks or, just anything and everything, but really with an eye on, on the future, the rise of, low alcohol, you’ve got a whole lot of companies worried there, haven’t you about, what, what’s going to be happening in the future if, if you’re, somebody making beer or, or, yeah, I said, I do a lot of the looking at, patients, healthcare companies with new medications or thinking about how better to communicate to patients, the, how to get patients engaged with, with their products. I’m just trying to think of what I’ve been working on recently, just, just everything. We’re running near the end of time. And I’m curious about, I have the question that usually comes early. It’s where the joy is in it for you. And in particular, I’m wondering about the actual ethnography itself, the time you spend with people, what’s that experience like for you and how do you feel, I think we’re, it’s a strange bunch that spends this much time people watching and, and how do you feel it’s changed you? What do you, what do you appreciate about all the time you’ve been able to spend with people trying to understand them? I feel like I’m not, I, I, still feel like I can just stare and watch and no one will ever see me. And I feel you just feel really lucky. Don’t you doing this type of work that you’ve been up and down the country and to different countries, not that I travel that much with kids, but, but, in, in the UK, just all the different households you’ve been in and the people that have given you their time and what you’ve learned from them and, maybe what they’ve learned from you. I remember with my colleague, Hela, we went to a participant’s household a few years ago. And at first they were, it was her, she had COPD and her son and her son had quite severe epilepsy and she was the carer of him. And they were, their lives were really tricky and they were quite suspicious of us at first. And we sat there and we weren’t getting anywhere. And then I just start to talk about my, my daughter had epilepsy. She’s grown out of it, but it was a childhood form of epilepsy. And as soon as I shared something of myself and my lovely colleague share something of herself, our participants shared their whole lives with us. And that was just so nice, making sure that you, you give something, you, you’re not just taking, and I feel like our best ethnographers do that. You’re not, you’re not just a sponge, you’re there in a relationship and you, you have to give. And I think that stays there, doesn’t it? You, you’ve, you impact people’s lives. I remember doing field work in, when I graduated, I worked with an anthropologist, in, I went to make a film about his field work in India and, in South India and him and his wife. So we dressed in local clothes and, and him and his wife were quite strict about, not answering questions when people asked you questions. And I remember really arguing with them about this. So they were white. I think he was from Belgium. She was from England and we were in a community in Tamil Nadu in South India. And some of the people there had hadn’t left that village. And, and I didn’t like the idea of not, they’d ask, so would you wear these clothes at home? What was it like, are you married, like really sharing a world outside, this is the time, people didn’t have the internet then at home. Well, I certainly didn’t, and so you, you have to really share your life, don’t you too. And it’s not all about you, not everything about you, but something. Yeah. That’s beautiful. I mean, so much of it. Yeah. That’s beautiful. I feel like, I don’t think I have anything to add. I was going to say, I feel like as a young man, I always say that I was feel really grateful that I was put in across the table from, from somebody and told to try to understand them. And you know what I mean? I don’t know that I would have gone out of my way to learn that if it hadn’t ended up my job. Certainly that way of being in the conversation is, I think something I learned just as getting older to your point. And I think it’s made me better, but it’s changed everything. Yeah. And I think there’s a, maybe, I dunno, maybe as well, there’s a way to challenge views sometimes that you learn, don’t you too, to, especially when you’re with more powerful people to sort of throw the tiny bombs in, in slightly in the nicest way. So whilst you’re listening and giving, but you’re sort of also just sometimes staring slightly, probably not meant to say that, but I do like that. There’s drama in there. You’re not just, it’s not this there’s drama in there. There’s conflict in there. And to your point about what, what do you like about it? What gets you up in the morning? I think it’s, it’s those things, isn’t it? It’s like the tension and the conflict and picking this puzzle of like human weirdness and try to find out what those patterns and stories are. Cause they’re really complicated, aren’t they? Oh my gosh. Yes. Awesome. Lucy, thank you so much. This has been such a pleasure. I really appreciate you accepting the invitation and sharing your time. Thank you. Oh. Thank you for talking. It’s been really nice. I hope it’s made some sense. Thank you. Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe [https://thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

Katie Dreke on Humanity & Time

Katie Dreke [https://www.linkedin.com/in/katiedreke/] is founder of DRKE [https://drke.co/], a Portland-based strategy consultancy. At Nike (2014-2021), she relocated to Tokyo to launch the company's first membership program outside North America, led concept development for Nike Women including the maternity collection launch, and designed global media strategy for the 2016 Rio Olympics. Previously, she led strategy at Wieden+Kennedy Amsterdam, Droga5 Sydney, and 180 Amsterdam, with clients including Honda, Adidas, Coca-Cola, and the United Nations across four continents. I start all these conversations, you may or may not know this, but the same question which I borrow from a friend of mine, she helps, she’s an oral historian, she helps people tell their story. And she has this big, beautiful question, which I stole from her, because it’s so big and beautiful. But it’s so big and beautiful, I kind of over explain it, I’m doing now. So before I ask it, I want you to know that you’re in total control, and you can answer or not answer any way that you want to. And yes, this is probably the biggest lead up to a question ever. But the question is, where do you come from? And again, you’re in total control of and can answer or not answer any way that you want to. That’s a great question. I think I’ll answer it in a couple different ways, more like a conceptual way. And then like a literal way. I would say I’ll start with the literal, I’m from the Pacific Northwest. And I think that really means something. It means something to me anyway. It’s upper left, it’s West Coast, best coast, as I like to think of it. It’s Cascadia, which is kind of a collection of ideas that sit near and on the west side of the Cascadian, Cascade Mountains. But I think just culturally, I’m really proud of where I’m from. I feel like having studied people in the United States, and then comparatively across other different regions of the world. The things that I like about where I’m from, the United States was obviously inhabited by plenty of incredible people before the West arrived, before Europeans arrived. But that movement, at any rate, started on the east and moved out west. And so the people who took those big gambles early on, Oregon Trail, etc., pioneers, people who enjoyed that idea of going into the unknown, I feel like their DNA stock is still alive and well out here on the West Coast, which I think lends to a certain affection and affinity to nature, to a certain sort of casualness. We don’t have time for the frivolities and the frailties and the gilded nature of things that come from Europe or from the East Coast and silver spoonage, family lineages and VIP back rooms with cigars. Not to say those things don’t exist today on the West Coast, but they’re just not part of our origin story. It’s a lot less about who you are and what your family name is, but what can you do? Can you fish? Can you trap? Can you build something with your hands? What do you do when things break? Can you fix them? And there’s a little bit of a collaboration that is involved in that, because no one exists on an island when you’re up against the realities of nature and an environment that didn’t have infrastructure. So you needed to know what the guy and gal next door knew how to do, and you needed to care about each other. So there’s, I think, some nice things, and I could be completely authoring a worldview that is self-serving right here, but I feel like in the people that I’ve met, even some of the brands that spring out of the ground from this side of the nation, I feel a lot of pleasure and pride. So I come from this, and I acknowledge that, and I feel like I bring it with me when I go other places. But the conceptual response to that question is that I’m from the future, meaning my brain spends an inordinate amount of time in the future. Sometimes for work, it’s like what’s happening next quarter, next year, or where do we think this trend is going to play out in the next decade? But again, selfishly, when I get free time, I throw my brain into the deep future. I’m reading a story right now that takes place 300 years in the future. I read an inordinate amount of science fiction, largely because it is a thought experiment that is just so enjoyable, and given the type of authors that I like, I really go deep on authors that are spending a s**t ton of time on the world-building aspect. All the details, the nuances, the future mundane, as Julian Bleeker would put it, the wallpaper, those things that really give you that lived-in sense of this is a very viable and authentic sort of space to occupy. The characters are very well built, and I feel like it’s not that dissimilar to being a strategist. A science fiction author really tries to understand the human nature of the people that they are trying to inhabit, and then they extrapolate. The most respectful ways that that’s been done, Ursula K. Le Guin here, her portrait on my wall, she’s one of my mother muses. Kim Stanley, Neil Stevenson, these guys, they really, all of them, N.K. Jemisin, Octavia Butler, they create these very tactile, very tangible, viable thought experiments. So that’s where I’m from. I’m from the Pacific Northwest, but I’m also from the future. Yeah, so I’m gonna ask a follow-up for each of those. The Pacific Northwest, do you have a recollection of what you wanted to be as a girl? What did you want to be when you grew up? I wanted to be Indiana Jones when I was little. I think in a way that’s kind of stayed with me. I wanted to study the artifacts and the record. I even named part of my company about the deep record. My company is DRKE, which is my last name minus one vowel. It’s an exercise in editing, which I think strategy is an exercise in good editing. But if I take each of those letters and turn it into an acronym, which I have, it’s a deep record knowledge exchange. So I am really fixated on what came before and left a mark on the record. If you do your little CSI experiment, what lasts? Which then when you look forward, what can we create that lasts? What will be in the deep record of the future? And of course the knowledge exchange bit is like, it’s going to take a village to really understand all these things and put them into action. So it’s about radical generosity and no gatekeeping and mixing it up with a lot of disciplines. So who did I want to be when I was little? I saw Indiana Jones and was like, I want to go into the unknown. I want to be in those hard to reach places. I want to understand the artifacts of peoples that have come before, covet them, teach people about them. And also be cavalier and cool. I thought that was really awesome. For a while, I thought I wanted to be an anthropologist. When I was in university for a while, I took courses around etymology and language. I ended up getting a degree in speech communications, which was the study of how you create written form speech writing. Also incorporated a lot of, it was, I remember taking this incredible course about cultured communication, but not culture like national culture, but like Vietnam veterans, deadheads, sorority girls, subcultures, and studying their styles of communication, verbal, nonverbal, semiotics, and so on. I was drawn to it because it was drawn to it like a moth to a flame. I had no idea that there was a world within a creative industry where these things could be put into practice for business. I had no understanding of this. My dad was like, what are you going to do with this? What’s going to be your job? And I’m like, I don’t know. I’m just going to follow what I like and see where it takes me. It wasn’t until I graduated from college and was in an interview and they said, what did you study? What classes did you like? That I suddenly was like, ding, ding, ding. The thing that I was drawn to is really useful to me in the creative world. Advertising, I was a quote unquote planner at the time, connections planning was a big thing at the time, which was all about that. So life makes sense in the rear view mirror, not often through the windscreen in front of you. But yeah, that’s what I wanted to be. I wanted to be Indiana Jones. And catch us up, where are you now and what’s the work that you’re doing now? Yeah, well, it’s not quite Indiana Jones, but I like to play Indiana Jones on television. I run my own consultancy, like I mentioned, I started in the end of 2020, early 2021. So it’s been about five years. I’m a strategist. I learned early on that I’m the person who likes to try to understand the landscape and the lay of the land, trying to figure out the connectivity that either exists or could exist there, that creates either sometimes a practical efficiency or a cleaner line through to the consumer, or not even the consumer, it could be any sort of invested party on the outside of the organization. And then also a lot about, again, going back to that sort of projection mapping that science fiction trains me to do all the time. It’s like, what else could it be? Where else could it go? Why is it not there already? What’s holding us back? Is it us? Is it something else in the industry or in the culture? And why not us? Could it be us that takes this to a new place? Creates the next white space. When did you, I’m curious about the moth, when did the moth meet the flame? What’s the, when was the first moment you really realized that you can make a living doing this kind of thing? Let’s see. I think like a lot of young people, and I want to make an assumption, but I feel like I’ve heard this from other younger people. I didn’t realize that the things that I love to do, I couldn’t do for a job. I guess you hear people say, find what you love and never work a day in your life. And it’s so cliche and transparent. It’s like nobody does, people who say that already have a bajillion dollars, that’s not real. A lot of people have to make compromises. And so I assumed I was going to need to make compromises. I also learned that from my parents. They told me about the compromises they had to make about life, lives, and you’ve got to deal with it. So I love, like I said, being Indiana Jones about culture and people and digging and questioning and thinking about where it could go. If you give it 50 years, if you give it 500 years, I love that stuff. I never thought that I could actually apply that to anything practical where I get paid until I found the creative space, which is where storytelling comes in. And you really need to understand who are people, why are people? The why is really important. And then where do we think that’s going? And all of those things that I really like to do naturally for funsies on the weekend or when I’m on holiday, I suddenly was like, I could get paid. This is great. And so it took a while to find my way there. I had a couple kickstarter jobs. I was a receptionist. I worked in HR and ran a college recruiting program for a software company, which gave me a great 101 course on how to talk about technology to people who don’t speak technology. I was like a translator, which was also a fun aspect of pretending to be Indiana Jones is you are having to translate one sort of world and language into people who don’t travel in that world and speak that language. Technology is a great example of a world where we all have a lot more ability to speak that today. But back in the early 90s, when I was working in an enterprise software company and you had to hire college recruiters and, or sorry, college students, and I was the recruiting person getting out there, you have to learn to speak the language real quick. Otherwise they won’t want to talk to you. You can’t hire them if they don’t think you understand what they’re doing. And so I think it was kind of, it wasn’t until the creative part snapped into play. I started working at an agency that had all tech clients. This was in the early 90s before the tech bubble burst. And it was in Seattle. So yeah, it was very active. I went to the University of Washington. I graduated, worked first at a software company with that recruiting job, and then got hired at a creative agency downtown Pioneer Square. And all of our clients were tech companies. A lot of them were startups. And we had a full suite of services, everything from naming that brand, marking that brand with like a logo and like a visual identity. But then also there was a PR arm that would help them with talking points and get them out on their press tour. We had a digital studio where we’d create their first website and get them ahead of that game. And then there was an advertising arm that would start to help them get sorted about where they should show up and what they should say. So it was a really cool 360 integrated approach to tech. And it was a very rapid on ramp into how do you creatively connect these dots? And it was there when it started to kind of, okay, wait a minute, I need to get closer and closer to this work. And for a hot minute, I thought maybe I was going to be a creative, but I took some courses and realized, no, no, no, no, I don’t want to be that close to the work. I don’t. And particularly around, I thought maybe I wanted to be a graphic designer. And I don’t have the patience. I don’t really have the focus to move the pixels around and look at the kerning. Like that just, it’s a bridge too far for me. And I had to know, I had to take a class and know that in my bones to know for sure, because I was attracted to the beauty of it and the aesthetic of it. And I could felt like I had the ability to know when it was working or when it wasn’t working, but I don’t know how to make it work. And that is somebody else’s wheelhouse, not mine. And so I like, okay, I need to zoom out a little bit. And strategy ended up being the right zoom out layer where it’s like, I know how to direct and I know how to maybe nudge, but I’m going to leave it to the pros to really bring me the solutions that they understand far better than I do. So I feel like I was coming up, I was in San Francisco around that time. And sometimes I always, sometimes I say that when I started, it felt like brand was the new technology, at least that was sort of my experience. Was that your experience that brand was sort of a new idea or what was, what was, when did you encounter brand as a thing? Yeah. I mean, brands like Big B brand. The first time I encountered that was when I worked for a really small, very VIP, pristine, precious boutique graphic design firm. Yeah. And there, it was about going into the legend and the lore of this organization and the origin story. And what was the first speech that this person gave at the first all hands and what are the artifacts we can dredge up that are still true today. And we can reanimate them and we can reanimate them in the packaging and we can reanimate it in the store design and we can reanimate it in the investor speech that’s being given next quarter. And so it wasn’t about the photo shoot. It was really looking at all of the other elements, the whole music, et cetera, et cetera. That was the first time that brand as a non-visual design system concept was introduced to me. And it was really beautiful to be introduced to that idea in a very analog way with a graphic designer who was using very little technical tools and we created physical artifacts of what we were doing. I think, yeah, that’s the first time. What was that sign? What kind of happened after that is I started working in digital agencies because that’s what was on fire at the moment. And it was, I was in the midst of the maelstrom of making sense of this new tool in the toolkit. And I’m in reflection now, I’m seeing how that’s how a lot of the analog got stripped out of the world of brand. Not everybody has stripped it out completely, but I think some of it, some of that texture never came back in once everybody finally eventually had a web address for their company. But that steamroller, that tsunami of activity, I joke, but I think I was invited to talk to a class, a university class recently. And they were asking me about the big differences between when I started and now. And I was like, guys, this is going to sound really ridiculous. But I was working at a design agency that was digital. We had server farms in the basement. I was making, I was having conversations with companies who were getting their very first website. I felt a little bit like a car salesman. I’m like, what’s it going to take to get you into a website today? But they had no concept of like, I’m in the yellow pages, I’m listed in the Better Business Bureau. I’m, people, I do advertising and there’s a phone number on the bottom. They hadn’t conceived of the idea. Nobody had. It was a completely new idea that there’s a worldwide web that people will very soon do all of their first queries on. So we were building like Starbucks first website. We were building an intranet for Starbucks. We were building Flash websites, one-offs for Nintendo for every game that they were releasing. We’d get the game six months in advance. We’d play it. Then we’d figure out the narrative. We’d create a Flash website that would give you a simulation of that experience on a marketing site, get you excited about Legends of Zelda 47, and then you’d go buy it for Christmas. But we would build those websites and then we would host those websites. And then we had quote unquote webmasters who would do quarterly updates. And so we’d be talking to the marketing and the comms people who would send over, oh, one of our CEO people left. We need you to make an immediate update to the website. Oh, well, there’s going to be a rush fee on that. And we’re going to do that. It was a really weird time, but in the rush to making everything readable on the web, I think sometimes we forgot the tactile for a hot minute. Although I do feel like it is starting to come back. I think we’ve officially as a mass consumer of the world in digital formats, I think we’re starting to get, okay, enough of this, enough of the saccharine and the sugar. I am overstimulated. I don’t, I need a nap. I need things to show up in the real world when I’m ready for them. I need some of these things to be calm. And it’s nice to see the appetite shifting. Probably not fast enough for my liking, but still it’s shifting. It’s certainly out there. How do you think about where we are right now? When clients come to me, how do you start a conversation with somebody, with a client? What are they asking you?And how do you frame the conversation for today? Given the cattywampus tumultuous nature of everything, everything, everywhere, all at once right now, a lot of the briefs that come to me or phone calls that I have with people do tend to be pretty closer in than I think is probably prudent, or even just that personally, I’m always pushing my clients to think longer out. And sometimes I realize, okay, I’ve hit a ceiling here. I just can’t push them any further. We need to play in closer to the vest. But things tend to be really myopic at the moment. The future is unpredictable, extra unpredictable. We can’t really use the past as a measuring device the way we used to. Even last quarter, last year, or even looking at the last five years is becoming less and less dependable as a measuring stick. So that’s become true, really true. There’s some piece of this, it feels like this is a cliche we always talk about, but it also feels like it’s more than ever before. Well, I’m biased, I guess, probably based on my particular demographic. I’m 52 now. I remember in 2014, I started at Nike, and I was brought in on a strategy assignment. It was probably one of the most juiciest and enjoyable pieces of work I ever got a chance to do. It was for every year at Nike at that time, I think it’s shifted since. They had a strategic cycle that started with something called SPKO, which was the strategic priorities kickoff. And at the time, Mark Parker was the CEO, so he would take his leadership team off site every year at this time. They’d actually go up in the Rwandan country, they go to this place called the Allison Inn, and they’d spend a week together. In preparation for that week, each of those leaders would reach down into their orgs and say, I need some of the biggest thinking on certain topics. There was always a theme going into that. This particular theme of this year, because it was 2014, they were looking ahead to 2020, which was only six years. But still, it was good that they were looking ahead six years. Oftentimes, it was closer in than that. And so this was actually a bit of attention and an opportunity for this. I was in brand at the time, and we were coordinating between brand, product, and the GMs of the different verticals. And we were given the task of trying to imagine what consumer engagement would look like in six years. And ironically, it’s the year 2020. We didn’t know yet that Tokyo, or maybe we did know already that Tokyo was going to be the Olympics. I’m not sure if that was announced yet. We certainly didn’t know COVID was coming. So we were doing this big projection into the future. Part of that argument, or not argument, but kind of teeing up that headspace for that room, which was the C-suite of Nike was to say, you are asking us to look forward six years. Well, let’s start by looking back six. Or even better, let’s look back 12. And what do we see? And when you do that, the acceleration that we were experiencing was incredibly obvious. And this was that moment of, quote, unquote, disruption across everything. There was Uber disrupting the taxi industry. Airbnb was disrupting what it means to be a hotelier or to have lodging. We started looking that Google was experimenting in automotive and cars and self-driving. Everyone has so much more power. These tech companies have so much power over data. Do we understand our own consumers well enough? Are we going to be disintermediated or intermediated? So these really strong, divisive ideas landed in that room pretty strongly. And I’m so proud of the team that I was working with on this, because actually we contacted Bruce Sterling, who is a science fiction author. And he notoriously gives the closing keynote, or it’s an unofficial closing keynote at the end of every South by Southwest. And we said to him, we want to create a film, something that kind of visualizes where this whole thing is going. And so he and I went back and forth over email, putting a script together that turned into about an eight-minute edit. And I was told as a new person at Nike, you can’t show people something that’s eight minutes. Nobody has the attention span to consume something eight minutes. You got to make it maximum a minute, a minute and a half. And I was like, we can’t do that. We can’t get it there. I think I got it down from 11 to eight, and that was the best possible. So we had it in our back pocket. We weren’t even sure if the executives that we were writing the presentation for would have an appetite for it. But it happened that the CMO wasn’t available to actually be there on the presentation day. So it was going to be the CFO and the GM who needed to give this presentation about the future of consumer engagement, and this is not their wheelhouse. And so they had a little anxiety about it. So we created this deck. We were going through the deck at 11:30 the night before. And we said, hey, we got to show you one more thing that we created for this. We think it’s going to, you’ll play it after slide three, and then it will open the floodgates for the rest of the presentation. And we pressed play on the film, and they were high-fiving. I’m so comfortable now. This really, okay, I can do my part now that Bruce Sterling has done his part, and he’s kind of articulated the worldview. So I don’t know if I’ve answered your question. I kind of ranted there for a minute. No, it wasn’t a rant. Well, you were doing something with your hands about to describe what Bruce Sterling had done for everybody, and ultimately what you had done for the team. What did you feel like you had done for them? I think what we enabled them to do is quickly, and without a lot of labor, see the opportunity to be a part of the future that was already well on its way, and to not sit it out. The data points that we put in there were unassailable. They were large. We talked about how tech companies are akin to the railroads of the previous era. This is like massive amounts of infrastructure is what is being developed by Google, by Amazon. This is like the power company, the railroad industry. If you think about what was developed in that era, this is what’s being developed for this era, and this is what it means for everyone. This is why it’s changing the floor under our feet, and if you’re choosing to not participate and ignore that, you’re going to be superseded by it. So, we need to thread the needle here. We need, as an athletic brand, what do we do? How much do we owe it to our consumers and constituents, people who are the passion point of sport, to be masters of our realm? Which means we need to get savvier about data and understand our own technology. And then, where do we also need to keep people in their bodies? When we’re moving into a deeper digital relationship with the world, you can’t go for a run in your mind. I suppose you can, but you’re not going to get the physical benefits. You do need to put on the shoes and go. So, we got to keep people in the real world. Part of that story, I think, was triggered by, you had made the observation, you can’t really, the past isn’t a good predictor of the future anymore, and I pushed back on that. So, you told that story of 2014 of having had the benefit of going back six years and 12 years to deliver all that, but what’s the current, how do you operate now? How would you do, how do you deliver that same kind of insight or about the opportunity to a team now, if we’re operating in a different, in a more volatile culture? Yeah. My first thing that I always do is understand the center and the history of the brand that I’m working on. They may or may not be a brand that I have my own experience with. They may or may not be a brand that’s even existed very long in the world. And so, sometimes you’re dealing with a shallow ocean of how deep can we go on what this brand has established already in the world? But regardless of how deep the ocean goes on that brand, the sky’s the limit in terms of where they would like to take themselves next. And so, a little bit is what’s the ambition? How reasonable is that ambition? And most importantly to me is who are our true believers? Who are the consumers that we need to serve? And serve by knowing them better than anybody else knows them. And serve by anticipating their needs, but also understanding their needs better than anybody else. And so, whether that is a financial product, or whether that is a physical product that you put on your body, or even a medical product that medicines or supplements that you put in your body. Things that you do to create the sanctity of the home. Things that you do to stay in contact with family and maintain connections, or to raise children, mobility. There’s so many different angles where it’s what are you trying to do for people? I feel like it’s not enough to be another thing in this world where we are overrun by consumerism, and we are overrun by options. It’s ridiculous going in a grocery store these days. It’s not the cereal aisle anymore. Go into the beer aisle, go into the beverage aisle. Everything is proliferating to an extent that it is comical. Well, it would be comical if it wasn’t a catastrophe. Many, if not most of these things shouldn’t exist. There isn’t a need. Yes. I also feel there’s something really unbelievably, what am I trying to say? The comical and the catastrophic are right next to each other all the time. And this seems to be a particularly contemporary phenomenon. Yes. They’re holding hands and skipping down the road. Yes. A hundred percent. Yeah. And it’s a little weird. And in some ways without the comedy, the catastrophe would just send everybody over the edge. So maybe that’s a coping mechanism. But I also saw an incredible talk a few weeks ago in San Francisco at the Long Now Foundation. I’m not sure if you’ve heard of them, but they’re an organization that thinks about time in an incredibly deep way, founded by Stuart Brand and Brian Eno. Actually, Kevin Kelly was there at the event. So I had a moment of swooning and geeking out. I just really adore the way he thinks. I read a lot of his writing. And the speaker was Indy Johar, which I’m not sure if you’ve heard of him, but if not, look him up. He also runs Dark Matter Labs. He’s involved in a ton of different areas. But after that, I went to a dinner the night before, before the talk, and we talked about if capitalism could just do a proper job of accounting, we would weed out most of the players that are in the game. Because if you look at the accounting for capitalism, where they are taking either from nature or from society in ways that are not reckoned with and captured as value on the books, those companies would be hardcore in the red. They are not a good investment. They wouldn’t be in the stock market. They’d be underwater. They’d be out. So one of his, I mean, a-ha points for me that was really heartening, because you’re thinking, how do you fight against capitalism? I was thinking, well, you make capitalism do its job better. You don’t try to kill it. You don’t try to drown it. You actually challenge it to do its job properly. Your accounting is not working. There are businesses and business that shouldn’t be in business. And that’s why we’ve got all this crap in the landfill. So can we knock the losers out of the game, please, and get them out? Because there’s so much waste in this system that it is actually causing more harm than we can even reckon with. And I feel that reminds me of, is it Natural Capitalism? This is the argument that Paul Hawken made all the way back in the 90s, that we were treating the environment and natural resources as just free. But are you also saying that this, and I feel there’s a, that on some level, there’s a, so natural capitalism takes and creates the natural resources as an asset that needs to be accounted for. But we also have this social capitalism too, where the cost that we’re experiencing at the social realm is devastating. We have no way of talking about what has been lost. Totally. Yeah. You think about, I mean, just take a measure of everybody’s general nervous system right now, who’s working nine to five, and then they bring that home and it gets spread around the family. And we get this one precious life to live. And we call it priceless. We say that it’s precious, but then we abuse the hell out of it. And it’s pretty rough. It’s pretty rough when you realize people can’t pay their healthcare bill, their bills, that we’ve allowed that the haves and have-nots to be such a split, that groceries have become a conversation in the last Olympics or election. It is, these are strange days. Yeah. And I simultaneously feel tension and anxiety everyone does. But I also am one of those people that gets excited when things start to break a little bit, because I do feel a break, breakdown is an opportunity. There’s beauty in the breakdown. There’s also editing in the breakdown. And Lord knows we could do with a little bit of editing right now. And I know it won’t be clean and easy. And I know that not everyone will escape unscathed, but it’s time for a bit of a revolution. Hopefully not the kind that we take up arms for, but where, what is leadership actually? Whether you’re talking about political or whether you’re talking about brand or business or even the civic. And why have we allowed that bar to get so low? The bar for leadership. Do we really feel we’re being led to anywhere good right now? I would hasten a bet. The answer is no. I think people have forgotten how much power they have. And once reminded, there will be a different story on the other side. And I’ve been really thinking a lot about, well, what would be on the other side? What does that work look like? How do we imagine it for business, for civics, for social, society, for politics? All on a planet whose weather is getting demonstrably worse. Where do you see the kinds of practices that we need to develop happening? I mean, I guess on some level it’s a, we need new storytelling practices. I feel we’ve demonstrated that we’re not very good at telling the kinds of stories we need to do the kinds of things that we need. And some of this feels it’s because we’re not very good at imagining the future. And maybe this is why you think about the future. And maybe I don’t know the question I’m asking, but I’m wondering where are the, where are the, maybe before the call, we talked about bonfire? Where’s the, where are the funds that we want people to come together? How does that, because I feel like, and I’m going to rant a little bit too, where I feel like there was a shift where everybody was a strategist. And then all of a sudden now everybody’s talking about the future and everybody’s talking about the imagination. And my first boss was a guru. And he would say that we consume the thing that we’re afraid we’re losing. I hear so many people advocating for the imagination and we’re trying to talk about the future, but we just can’t do it in some way. We just find it so hard to come together and do it. So Katie, what do we do? Well, this is where I’m hopeful that those of us who have spent so much of our lives involved in storytelling of various formats and forms can really offer something because here’s some of the rubs I feel. What is happening? Let’s use the planet, for example, what’s happening in climate shift and change and transformation. It’s hard to get your brain around. The numbers are really big. Geological time is hard to grok with our tiny little brains that are thinking about what’s for dinner tonight. So there is some hack. And I think it’s a storytelling hack that needs to help people understand where we sit in the story of this planet and of the universe, dare I say, and that this is a moment for our, really for our species and the others that live on this planet with us. There’s as well, but the planet doesn’t need us. The planet’s going to be fine. The planet’s been here before. There’s been proliferations and shrinking of speciation on the planet for billions of years. So we don’t have to worry about saving her. She’s fine. We have to worry about saving ourselves and hopefully a planet that’s worth inhabiting, meaning that it’s got beautiful diversity of flora and fauna and air and water that’s enough and clean for us to thrive on. Otherwise the kind of environment that we can imagine in the future is really not worth inheriting. So I don’t know. That’s one of the things is just the time thing is hard for people to understand. The scale is hard for people to understand. I’ve also been a little bummed out to see other parties really killing it in the semiotics and symbolism. I would say the extreme, I mean, I grew up in a conservative family. My parents were Republicans. I grew out West in a rural place. My cousin had a wedding at the gun range. I understand conservative people. The red is not bad, but I do think their leadership is suspect right now and has taken them to an extreme place. Not all of them, but a large party voted for something that is extreme and they have done an incredible job of creating symbolism, semiotics, language, story, belief, underpinning and undergirding that makes it easy for people to quickly, without having to sweat at all, grasp and fall behind and then retell and retell and retell. And on the other side, the more liberal version, not the extreme liberal version, but just hopefully more of more, is there a normal, normal, is there a mainstream? I don’t know, but someone more towards the center on the bluish side, we’ve just been fumbling around. So I think story is, and the creation of story. Someone joked the other day, we need to create a new religion. I don’t think we need a new religion. I’d prefer not to have a religion per se, but you start to hear about, we certainly don’t need another Messiah or anything like that. But if you look at the concept of solar punk, for example, which is a playoff of steam pump, it creates a world building for the future in which it is green energy. It is energy that’s not stealing from nature and trashing nature. It could be solar, it could be wind, it could be any other methods, even nuclear exists in the solar punk future. It’s about a healthy relationship with the planet and agriculture. It’s about a lot of diverse voices, older voices, female voices, colored voices, disabled voices, all participating in equal measure. It’s really more about a shared mindset as opposed to, well, you’re this type of person, so you do this type of thing. It’s everybody, we need everybody’s skin in the game. And it’s also thinking about the future with a much more indigenous lens of we are responsible for it. We need to be good ancestors. We need to be thinking about multiple generations to the best of our ability, which goes back to that hard thing about the brain not being naturally good at that and that storytelling helping. The indigenous cultures have tons of legends and lore and verbal histories, oral histories that teach those folks at a very nuclear level to understand their relationship to the earth and their responsibility for it deep into the future. And we’ve just failed in our modern expression of ourselves as humans to keep that practice alive in a meaningful way. So the solar punk world, if you haven’t touched on it at all, if you haven’t heard of it, go Google it. There’s a lot of fun AI imagery, people trying to imagine on a macro mass level. Chibani did a great ad a number of years ago called Dear Alice. It was an animated ad done in a style similar to Ghibli films. It’s the best example of a mainstream brand that I’ve bumped up against recently who embraced that vision of we don’t just make yogurt here. We have a vision for the future and it looks like this. It was beautiful. And I often use that as an example with clients when I try to say to them, you think you only just make pencils or you just sell whatever, dishware, whatever, tires. But look what this yogurt company, they have a bigger vision. You too can have a bigger vision. It doesn’t mean you have to bring it all to life tomorrow, but it’s your North Star and it’s your story that you’re telling together with your consumer that makes them feel like they’re seen and that you’re on their side. And then sometimes you can even give them the ability to have their own skin in the game. What excites you about that work, about the possibility of brands reaching? I do have reservations about that too, let’s be clear. I have read some science fiction books, most notably Margaret Stewart and Oryx and Crake. She has a trilogy, the Mad Adam trilogy, in which corporations take over. And then there’s these enclaves where you have a job somewhere and you only live in that controlled environment. And it’s like these corporates are almost more like nations. And so she took just that concept to an extreme. And you could see that when it’s pushed to extremes, it’s also not healthy. So you don’t want to get anywhere near that. As a mind experiment, you see where things can go wrong. But I do feel that if you’re going to go ahead and employ a whole bunch of people who are citizens of a place and put them to work doing something for other people, you have some responsibility to incorporate the needs of the workers and also the customers into the work that you’re doing. And I guess there’s some good examples of that. Ben & Jerry’s isn’t always a nice one. There’s other brands that have accentuated their sense of place. I don’t know. I’m not sure if I’m answering your question very well. I don’t know. I don’t know. It’s impossible to make a mistake. I guess on some level, a vague question about the role of brand today? Maybe it’s more just designing a brand in the past was more about locking it in. Designing a logo, making sure it’s used universally in the same way everywhere. Digital arised and everything was suddenly dynamic. And so then you needed to be a little more nimble. You needed to be a little more elastic. Now with AI, quote unquote, vibe coding, all that stuff, we’re getting into this place where it’s like your brand has never landed. It’s alive. It’s messy. It’s organic. You got people that work there. People are messy. You’re working in a world that is in hyperflux. And you’re trying to communicate and connect with people who are under duress and trying to also navigate this wild world. So create an emotional linkage that means something that matters. It’s true. There’s a I don’t want to say purpose because purpose has gotten a bad rap lately, but maybe mission. There’s a reason to why we exist. I often say with my clients, what’s the dent you’re making in the universe? How will we know that you’ve even been here? If we shut you down tomorrow, would anybody notice? If you’re just making stuff, that’s just not good enough. It’s just not. And I think as frankly, as a consumer myself, I’m not going to buy something that’s not good enough. I need to know what you’re about. I need to believe in you. And the product, frankly, just needs to have been intentional. Even if it’s five bucks, I still want to know that you have some sweat equity in this thing and that you believe in it. So last question, I would love to. I’m a qualitative researcher and ethnographer. I’m always probably selfishly looking for arguments for face to face, good old fashioned face to face qualitative research. What’s your position on qualitative? How do you have a way of how do you talk about the role of qualitative in work? And what’s the value that it brings? Yeah, well, even just to reiterate, people are messy. So they do whatever they do. But it’s almost impossible to understand it unless you get in their face about it and get in their shoes and in their face like a confrontation. But like you get eyeball to eyeball, person to person. I have utilized tools to make virtual ethnography possible when it wouldn’t otherwise be possible. COVID obviously meant that you couldn’t get on a plane and you couldn’t get focus groups together. And so I think some new tricks of the trade were introduced during that time. I’ve kept a couple of them going. When a client doesn’t have the budget or the patience to do proper in-person dives, I’ll do asynchronous interviews. I found a really fun platform where I load it with questions. And then the person on the other end, if I were to send it to you, you could press a button and you hear me say, oh, hey, thanks for participating. This is what we’re talking about today. And then one by one, you could see me, you could see my face, hear the expressiveness in my voice, watch my hands move around as I’m explaining to you the question I want you to think about. And then you get a minute to sit there and think about it. And then you press a button and you record your response back to me. And so if you stitch it together, it can look like an in-person interview or it can be presented to a client as like a full conversation. But it’s an asynchronous device, which has given me a lot of great talking heads and good quotes. And because people, as you know, respond differently when they’re on, off the cuff, as opposed to in written form. I worry about AI. Oh, say again. What do you feel like you’re after in those exercises? What are you after? It’s the invisible stuff. I can observe everyone being anxious to answer that question or everyone searched for the right word. They didn’t have it off the tip of their tongue. They didn’t want to answer that question. That’s interesting. What’s that about? And then also if you get a nice swath, did men or women answer it differently? Did people of different ages answer it differently? Did people of different economic positions answer it differently? Like the classic what do we see? What do we think we’re witnessing here? And then part of it is witness, bearing witness. Oh, wow. I did a series of these interviews right after COVID. So this was the tool needed for the job for a rock climbing company. And they were trying, they were witnessing what was happening with yoga and then what happened with running. And they weren’t seeing it happening in climbing. And they weren’t even sure if they wanted it to happen in climbing, because climbing is a little bit, if you know, you know, it’s a special culture. But as a business, they wanted to know more about like, are we missing a beat here? Should we be trying to participate? Or even creating a culture around rock climbing? Particularly bottom of mountain rock climbing, bouldering, and also gym climbing. That could be compelling. And so I spoke to a lot of young people because they wanted to know what are the young kids think, as most brands are thinking. But I also sprinkled in some of the OGs because they are noticing change. And they needed to be witnessed, they needed to have somebody listen to them talk about how their favorite thing got from then to now. And also they were very valuable in terms of what needs, what must be protected? What must be remained true? The kids don’t know that they have a sense, kids, excuse me, the younger people, they have an older sibling who did it, they thought it was cool, they picked it up. They can start to softly articulate what they think they love about it. But the OGs know what it is. They know it, they can talk about it, they can demonstrate it, they can tell you how it’s flexed and flexed over time, they can tell you when they almost lost it. So I think bearing witness, again, to time, as you can see, time is one of my friends when I do a lot of my work, I use time a lot, but as a device, but that’s always interesting. Yeah. Can you say more about that? Because you mentioned a few times, I know The Long Now, and you talked about pushing clients to think more long term, what’s the role of time? Time, it’s so funny, because I think we suck as humans, as feeling time pass, we use clocks because we can’t sense it very well. So I need, what time is it again? Are we, like that thing? Am I going to be late? I don’t know. Time is an emotional thing for us too. Time flies when you’re having fun, all that stuff, or the way different people of different age groups sense time. When you get over 80, time feels different than if you’re a kid, you’re in a rush to get places, when you’re older, you’re, hey, hey, let’s take it easy. This is, let’s savor this. So there’s, you put that into business context, and you’re like, if we had all the time in the world, what would we want to solve for people? These are great workshop questions. Oh, well, in that case, all the time, I would want to, then ambition comes out, desire, and also what they feel they have a sense of responsibility for, or a passion around. If we had no time, if we only had one product that we could, that we had to release, but before the end of this year, where would we focus? Reduce, take time away, crunch it. I took the Chicago Bulls through a world building exercise, or sorry, a cathedral building exercise, which is just saying cathedrals take a long time to build, and often the architects of those cathedrals don’t live long enough to walk in them. I remember the first time I learned that, when I was a teenager, we went to London, and I went into the cathedral, and they’re like, this guy designed it, and then he died, and then another guy finished it, and I was like, what? You didn’t get to see the end of his project? And of course, the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, it’s still not done. It’s like hundreds of years old, and they’re still working on it. So to say to the Chicago Bulls, you guys are the executive team right now. This is an icon. You’ve had great names, Pippen and Jordan, but we are who we are right now. What does this mean? So what does the Chicago Bulls mean to the game of basketball, to the city of Chicago, to every player or coach or fan that walks into this cathedral, the stadium here? What does it mean? But we need to think about what we’re passing on, not to next season, but to the person who has your job after you, and then to the person who is a kid who will become a father and pass it down to his son here in the city of Chicago. And so we took them out of the game that was going to be in the stadium that night, and they were checking their phones on every break to see if they had sold out, and if the strike that the concession stand employees, that it had resolved, if it had stayed resolved, they had real near-term things going on. But we talked a lot about all the things that we could do in the business and in the city, and also with the NBA, to make sure that the game, that the city, and that the team were better than they’d ever been, and it was something like an heirloom object that could be passed into the future. So part of that was getting them to see time differently, examples of different projects in both the art world and in the science world. I think, innately, people enjoy being taken out of the day-to-day. They just don’t get a chance to do it very often, and that was the way I teed it up with that room too. I was like, I’m taking all your phones away because you may not realize it until about 30 minutes from now, but this is actually a rare thing that you get to do today, and hopefully you feel that way at the end of the day too. But you get to do the thing you want to do right now on your phone all day, every day. Let’s put that aside and do something you don’t get to do every day, because it will change the way that you look at your work, and it will change the way that you look at the other people that you see in the stadium who come in to spend time with you and your property and your team that you’ve put together. It’s just funny, the gifts that time can give you if you just distort it. When I think about The Long Now, I met with the new director. I’ve been helping them out with a couple things recently, and we had a meeting a couple days ago. She’s like, why do you like The Long Now so much? What drew you to us? I was like, honestly, when I think about long time, really, really big, big time, I’m not afraid. All the fear and anxiety that I feel about more near and present dangers, it goes away, because I’m so small. I’m just minutiae. I’m just a little gnat in the history of the universe. I can just look at it for what it is. It’s comforting. I also think it’s really important that people take comfort from the fact that we have our finite moment. At the heart of it, that’s our humanity, our one little precious snowflake life. Time helps us realize that. One last question, which I didn’t ask earlier, which is what do you love about the work? Where’s the joy in it for you? I think some of it is about finding the humanity in there. Some of it is about anything and everything can be interesting if you’re interested. I sometimes see clients come to me and be like, oh, maybe this isn’t the most interesting thing. I was like, tell me about it. I like proving them wrong. We can get interested about that. That can be super interesting. I like finding the cracks. I think sometimes the cracks are often wallpapered over and people don’t even realize it’s happened, or the cracks are seen as a flaw. When you look at it more closely, it can become your strong attribute. One of my clients is a ski resort. They are one of three ski only ski resorts in North America. They were really shy about it. We don’t want to be seen as exclusive. We just really love skiing. We don’t want the snowboarders mad at us and all this stuff. We just don’t know how to talk about it. I was like, that’s how their current campaign came to be. It’s called Dear Skiers. Your whole resort is a love letter to skiing and ski culture. You see skiers inside of everyone, inside of the people who haven’t yet skied, inside of the people who are snowboarding today. You’re like, hey, that’s cool that you’re snowboarding. If you want to ski, come over here. By the way, we love it more than anybody else. We’ve designed this whole place for the ski experience. It’s tip top, man. Don’t be shy. I think that’s fun when the light bulb comes on. The thing that they were really worried about as being like an Achilles heel or a problem or a weakness is their differentiator that they can come out swinging with and be really proud of. That’s fun. Then, of course, I just really love when I get a sparring partner at a client who is really willing to play with time with me and to really think big about it. We’ll always have to play the short game, but when I can get someone to play short game and long game with me, then we’re cooking. Then we’re cooking with gas. I think we come up with some really compelling artifacts for senior leaders, too, that let them know that when you do both at the same time, your strategies are tighter because not only are they relevant for the contextual moment, but they’re taking you someplace new and distinctive. They have a vision. Awesome. Thank you so much. I really appreciate you accepting my invitation. Thank you so much. It’s been great. This was super fun. Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe [https://thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

Darrel Rhea on Judgment & Coherence

Darrel Rhea [https://www.linkedin.com/in/darrelrhea/] is a design strategist and innovation leader who served as CEO of Cheskin, where he expanded its global research and innovation practice. He is coauthor of Making Meaning, a foundational book on meaning-driven innovation, and founder of Rhea Insight, advising Fortune 1000 leaders on strategy, design, and customer-led innovation. So, as you may or may not know, I start all these conversations with the same question, which I borrowed from a friend of mine who helps people tell their stories. I love it because it’s a big question—but because it’s really big, I tend to over-explain it, like I’m doing now. Before I ask it, I want you to know that you’re in total control. You can answer or not answer in any way you want, and it’s impossible to make a mistake. And the question is: Where do you come from? So, first, let me just acknowledge the kind of the brilliance of that question, right? Which is to say that you’re modeling great qualitative research technique by starting there, right? Because it automatically flips the power in the conversation to the subject and makes them an author rather than just the subject of the interview. So, I just, I love that. And it’s a great way to segue into identity and meaning. So, where do I come from? I grew up in Southern California in the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s. And that was a really dynamic point in time—kind of a historical anomaly in a lot of ways. And when I was growing up in that period from the ’50s to 1970, the population of California doubled. And that’s really significant. And I was in Southern California, and that even grew even at a greater rate there. So, people were arriving from everywhere. Almost nobody was from California. My family was actually a couple of generations there, but that was kind of rare. So, you had people leaving their old cultures behind, and they’re busy inventing new ones. And so, identity was this kind of DIY thing that was happening. You had this explosive post-war prosperity that was happening in Southern California. You had Hollywood, and you had movies and the music industry exploding. You had defense-driven technology and the University of California research influence on that. So you had this strange mix of abundance and innovation and social mobility and permission that other places in the world, I don’t think, had that at the same time. So, the message was come to California, you can be whoever you want to be. So, it attracted a whole lot of people who wanted to be something different. And that was the soup the cultural waters that I was growing up in. And it created an explosion of subcultures that were created while I was young. And I participated in that. One of those was the surf culture. So I lived close to the beach, and the surfing culture kind of emerged and was invented in my neighborhood. Not surfing itself, but surfing culture. I knew—friends of mine went to school with the Beach Boys. And it was like, this was an essential kind of rite of passage. I spent my youth chasing waves, going up and down the coast. And so the savoring the sublime of beauty and protecting the environment and that was very much a subculture that I felt like I was not just part of, but helping invent, which is, I think, kind of a different thing. Also, in Southern California—well, in California at that time—the countercultural movement was in some ways centered there. It was certainly a center of the countercultural movement of the sixties. And it wasn’t something I read about. It was not something I experienced on TV. It was on our streets. And where were you? What town were you in? I was in Fullerton and Newport Beach, and in Orange County—basically just south of Los Angeles. But hippie culture the Summer of Love, the Age of Aquarius, the anti-war movement—I mean, that was what I was just immersed in. And that that sense of oneness and harmony and community and enlightenment—those were all kind of meanings and values that were embedded in that countercultural movement that were something I experienced kind of deeply. And at the same time, I went to an experimental liberal arts college. So we were reinventing education, or what college education was, and seeking meaning in new ways. So, that was another subculture that was emerging there. When you were young, what did you—did you have an idea of what you wanted to be when you grew up? Well, I wandering around, I had a sense of wanting to be a designer. So, another subculture that I can speak of kind of on a personal level was Southern California was the epicenter of the global car culture. And so the most important marker of identity in Southern California—where cars are everything, and you drove everywhere—was: what car did you drive? Not just what car did you drive, but what brand did you choose, and how did you personalize it, and how did you customize it? And so that was a marker of identity. And my family’s business was at the epicenter of that. So, we were part of the hot rod culture. We were part of the performance car culture. And, so I grew up from the age of seven working in my dad’s business in that. What was the business? It was basically car customization—interior design. Cars, boats. We were doing cars for Hollywood, and we were doing automotive restorations for the museums. And, my uncle started the Hot Rod Association, National Hot Rod Association. Wow. So it’s like—right. Yeah. Doing land speed—trying for land speed records in the salt flats. And this was car culture. Right? And so I was in that, and not just as a participant, but as a designer. Right? So, I was designing cars and interiors. So, I had that—I think I had that sensitivity to industrial design as an expression of identity. And that was really important to me. And I knew I wanted to take that somewhere. Pursuing design was one of those things. And where are you now, and what are you up to? What’s your sort of catch-up in terms of where you are now and the work that you’re doing now? So, yeah, after 30 years with Cheskin—the company that I helped build; didn’t start, but helped build and scale—sold that to WPP. And for the last decade, I’ve been an independent consultant, kind of committed to not having employees and not doing another performance review in my life, after having a large organization. And yeah, I’ve mostly been doing strategy consulting, working with senior executives on those issues, and also doing a lot of AI implementation work to say, how do we bring technology and make it actually useful to how organizations operate? Yeah. And how did you go from all those subcultures to Cheskin? What was that journey? How did you get into—your CEO of Cheskin, and you built that business—how did you get into that position? Yeah, so I kind of went from designer to— I tried working in the field of design and found that not very satisfying. I didn’t have really good mentors. I wanted to participate in design at a higher level than craft, but I didn’t have access to that. And I didn’t know enough that I should just go down the street and hang out with Charles and Ray Eames, like a friend of mine did, and understand systems design. And that was, like, over my head. I didn’t have access to that. So, I kind of dropped out of design. I’d gotten a degree in psychology because I was really interested in how people learn and evolve and grow. And that didn’t hold a lot of promise for me either, because I didn’t want to get a Ph.D., and I didn’t want to work with sick people. So, bottom line was, I wasn’t just a surfer or hippie or gearhead. my parents had grown up in—that part of that economic expansion was—they went from poverty to wealth by being entrepreneurs and starting their own businesses. And, the dinner table reality was it’s all about value creation. And you’re going to grow up to be a business leader and an innovator and an entrepreneur. So, what did I do? I started a company with a college roommate of mine. And part of that was introducing 20 new products—happened to be in the agriculture or cut-flower industry—introducing 20 new products into the domestic market that hadn’t seen a new product for 20 years. And I needed to brand them. I needed to call them something. And the only person I knew in marketing was a father of a friend of mine who happened to be Louis Cheskin. And through introductions and through another friend, I connected. And when I decided I wasn’t a farmer, and the floriculture industry was interesting but it wasn’t where I wanted to— I got hired by Louis Cheskin in Chicago. And I thought I’d be there for a year and ended up there being CEO, owning it, and running it for 31 years. Amazing. I encountered Cheskin, I think, through Added Value, maybe later in its lifetime, and I’m aware of its reputation. But how do you place Louis Cheskin in the broader legacy of research and strategy? Yeah, well, he was a seminal figure and pioneer in the field of consumer research. And it’s—I think in today’s world, very few people in the industry tend to know much about Lewis Cheskin. But he made design something that was—from and took it from subjective taste to science, basically. So, he was a Ph.D. psychologist trained in University of Chicago in the ’30s, at a time that was this really interesting, revolutionary time where physics and statistics and psychology and the social sciences were actually becoming first truly empirical. And he moved in these circles. He hung out with Einstein and Fermi and kind of the scientific elite back in those early days. And he told—Cheskin, he told Einstein, “I want to define what the science of art is,” which was a really kind of avant-garde, really ambitious kind of aspiration—and controversial at the time, because art—the applied arts—were subjective and could not be quantified. So, he had that aspiration. During the Depression, he ran the Works Project Administration arts programs in the state of Illinois. So, he had hundreds of artists on his payroll—really good artists, great artists. And what did he do with it? He said, well, I’ll start doing research on color perception, because I really am interested in this. And he did some of the foundational and first color research—research on color—deploying quantitative research techniques. Taking a room and painting it—painting everything in the room red, and having an identical room painted with everything in that blue, and another room with everything green. And didn’t ask people if they liked the room. He just—he looked at productivity. He looked at physiological measurements, psychological measurements, and determined in an indirect way what the impact of color was on the human being. And that’s—that’s where he started his work. And that launched a whole career. He founded the Color Research Institute of America. He ended up doing consulting work with Disney on Fantasia, and with the military on camouflage. And, he created color systems—basically, the precursor to Pantone was the Cheskin color system. He invented four-color printing methodologies. So, Cheskin kind of emerged as this scientific color guy. And, that’s—that’s where he started. And then he expanded that to understanding about shapes and symbols and materials and imagery, and how they affect perception and behavior in products and brands. Which was a totally this is the ’40s and ’50s. So, this is at a time where that’s just a crazy idea. Yeah. So, he was this real kind of anomaly. And the context for that was what was happening in the ’40s and ’50s. Well, we first had a national road system or highway system. We first had national retail for the first time. We had national and broad media for the first time with radio and then television. And so, you had businesses stepping in to address that scale and risk management, and the desire to make decisions not just subjectively, but with some kind of grounding. There was a market for that. And he stepped into that—making that case. And, he was, I think, one of the first people, first researchers, that really kind of bumped up against, the struggle and conflict with the more creative agency world. He was working with David Ogilvy and all these big names. Yeah. I want to come back to this question of this bumping up—this collision you’re talking about now. But I’m dying to know—do you have any, I mean, insight into—it’s sort of obvious that one could be curious about color. But do you have any insight into what it was about color? Why did he start there? So, at age 18, this guy from Chicago was doing one-man art shows in New York as a watercolorist. So, he was an artist who was also a Ph.D. psychologist. So, he had a strong affinity to art and design. And that’s why he was running the WPA arts programs—because he understood art. And so, I think that was the locus that, yeah, that pulled him into that. Interestingly, until I met him, it never occurred to me that I could combine my interest in design and art with interest in psychology. So that was kind of a natural— Talk to me about him bumping up against the creative agencies and the relationships. The conflict that happens there when you have a research agency with insights on creative implications, or the implications of creative decisions, right? Yeah. So, this is the time when Madison Avenue was at its highlight. It was the Mad Men era. Literally, if you watched Mad Men, that was Cheskin’s world. And, they basically wanted control, very much like a McKinsey or whatever—they’re going to be very jealous about determining their recommendations and subjective decision-making around that. And Cheskin was able to quantify in very precise empirical detail the effectiveness of various design assets. And you can’t underestimate the impact that this guy had in those—that era. Because, he worked on the development of Marlboro cigarettes. The rebranding from a woman’s cigarette to a male cigarette came out of research. The package—the Marlboro package—came directly out of his playbook for looking at that. So, the advertisements that Madison Avenue, for example, would want—They’d want to have people smoking Marlboro cigarettes in their advertisements in an Eames chair, a suit, reading The Wall Street Journal, because that’s what they aspired to. And Cheskin was saying, no, it’s about a cowboy. And cowboys in the ’40s were bums. You know? So this whole—his filter view into the world definitely challenged both the creative independence and also brought some very, very objective evaluation of the utility of marketing assets in a way that nobody had ever done before. And that made him very much a public intellectual. He wrote 16 books, was quoted on the front page of newspapers regularly. And he influenced hundreds and hundreds of the biggest brands of the day. It was the equivalent—he was working on Apple and Nike and Tesla of those days. Yeah. And what was your—you were there for a very long time. What was your tenure there like? What were the challenges that you faced? And what—I guess maybe the big question is, I want to get us to present day—how has research changed, or how has the environment changed? Yeah, well, it’s changed fairly dramatically. There’s kind of two questions—how did I get where did I—how did I evolve there? And I’d say I obviously started as a designer, then became a design researcher. I’d been working at Cheskin in my early days—this is my early 20s—I was working on—I worked on literally thousands of packages, thousands of brands. I worked on 100 major corporate identity programs that were, like, multinational-level, and pulled me into all different kinds of categories—from automotive to financial services, healthcare, furnishings, architecture. And so it was just this great place to learn as a researcher—to research the effectiveness of marketing tools and marketing assets to communicate brand. So that was—that was a place that I kind of started. And then, after years of doing that, I moved into design management, which is what are the processes and the systems to manage design across large organizations? And how do you deploy all the disciplines of design and communications in a coherent way to support the brand? So, if you’re HP and you have 90 billion dollars’ worth of product around the world—literally tens of thousands of people working on everything from handheld items to rack-mount servers and software—what’s the coherent architecture for managing all that? And that was that practice through the Design Management Institute that I was involved in, and others. That was a big focus. And then I think we evolved more to marketing insights and business analytics as we kind of moved up the food chain. And finally we became an innovation consultancy, and I kind of moved into strategy. So that’s kind of the arc of my career—going from design, design research, design management, innovation, and then strategy is where it kind of ended up. What do you love—oh, go ahead. I was going to say, you were saying, well, how has research changed? Well, it’s changed dramatically. I mean, when I started, research was mostly around kind of arbitration research or validation research of solutions that people had in design or in communications. Right. Which was kind of applied research, kind of after-the-fact of creation. And then, we basically moved upstream from that—helping and participating in the creation process itself—and then started becoming specifiers of what that creative should do. So we started writing the specifications for communications, for packaging, for industrial design. And we moved further up. And then research moved even further upstream to really kind of get at those design strategies. So, what’s the framework or process that we’re going to execute to produce a financial or economic output? And then it moved even further upstream to say, okay, well, what’s the strategic intent of the organization? What makes this category or this set of products appropriate, worthwhile, and on strategy? So, I think that the bigger arc of how I participated in the research—and what I saw in my set of practices—was going from very kind of tactical research, moving all the way up to really strategic research. Where I was looking at, okay, what’s the context for the market? What’s happening in the organization itself? And how do we define a path and navigate development and scaling of business opportunities in a world where there’s change? You have to be somewhat agile to do that. Yeah. So you’ve been working on your own for the last ten years, mostly with leadership, right? What would you say are the biggest challenges leaders are facing right now—especially when it comes to the role of research? What are your thoughts on that, and how are you helping people navigate it? Maybe the real question is this: when people reach out to you today, what are they actually asking you to do? How are you helping organizations now, and what are the biggest problems they’re facing? So, I think one of the biggest problems that every organization—and probably soon every human being in our country—is going to be dealing with is the shift in context, the shift in the environment that we’re operating in. Specifically as it relates to your audience of brand people and designers and researchers and social scientists, which have been great—All those practices that we’ve developed over the last half-century were really predicated on an environment that was fairly stable. Yes, we had change, but change happened in an almost predictable way. You could see technology changes coming. So our methodologies, our approach, our mental models have all been developed on that basis—to support decision-making, clarity and coherence, and risk management in a stable market. Now, what we’re all experiencing is: hey, the market is not stable anymore. Culture is not stable. Meaning is not stable. Technology is going absolutely crazy with the advent of AI. So, we’ve gone from the stability of an environment to persistent change. And we’re about to go through radical change. So, we’re going to go through a change that’s at 10x what we have for the last decade. And no one is really prepared for that. And everyone agrees that they’re not prepared for that. But how do you—so you still need to make decisions. So, I think what I’m frustrated with is a lot of people in the research world are tending to, rather than try to reinvent themselves to be relevant in the context of all this change and the new realities, they— Look, clients don’t have the tolerance for rigor and clarity of insight now. I used to do big, ethnographic research projects that would take 17 weeks, and then we’d do multiple phases. We’d do a six-month or a year insight program. And now you have people in business just running scared, thinking, well, we’ve got to run fast and break things, right? We just need a minimum viable product. We have to be agile. We’ll fix it in a software update. Don’t worry. Let’s not overthink this. It’s more important to move fast and get in the market than it is to be smart. And research and insights—and our craft—has largely been around bringing that sophistication and nuance of insight. That’s just not, I don’t think, going to be demanded. So, I think that’s a big problem. So, when people reach out, I think it’s that context of, okay, we need to figure out how to act. And, how do we make decisions in a coherent way? So, I’ve kind of gone from - I can say what gets me in the door, from a business standpoint, is my background in design, in innovation, teaching innovation, and understanding brand, and, the toolset that you and I have developed over decades. That gets me in the door. It gives me some credibility because I’ve worked on so many thousands of projects and hundreds of companies around the world. That gets me in the door. But really, the value comes from helping leaders lead. And what I mean by that is they need to build clarity of purpose, they need to build alignment within their teams, and they need to mobilize action and make decisions. And then research is great for producing lots of options, but not a lot of researchers have the comfort or experience or confidence to realize that strategy is about eliminating options now. It’s about eliminating them and committing and accepting accountability. And that’s what management cares about. That’s their world—making decisions and having to be accountable. So, if we can help them have a process to think about that and to have them facilitated through that process, that’s very, very valuable. And that’s basically what I’ve been more known for, especially in the last maybe 15 years, is helping groups and teams and management address that. Yeah, I feel like you’ve been—and I’ve encountered you as—someone who’s not exactly critical of strategy itself, but of the way strategy is often practiced or confused with planning. How would you describe the state of strategy as you encounter it today? And how do you help organizations actually do it well? Yeah, well, strategy—so I teach strategy. I won’t do a lecture here, but what strategy is has evolved really dramatically every decade for the last century. And so our notion of what strategy is is very different. It’s conflated with strategic planning, which is kind of an oxymoron. Strategy is largely delegated to people who are strategists. You hire McKinsey, and for two million dollars, they’ll give you a binder and, take away your responsibility for creating a strategy. But strategy is not a document. It’s not an event. It’s not a workshop. It’s not a PowerPoint. Strategy is an evolving story that lives in the conversations and the commitments of people—of a group of people. And making that clear and vital and actionable is what strategy is. And it was defined two thousand years ago by Aristotle. There’s four chapters in the story that strategy is. They’re always the same four chapters. They’re always told, and it should be developed in the same order. And this is just not understood. It’s not understood by business, including people who sell strategy and scale businesses. And it’s certainly not understood in the design world. So that’s why I’ve been critical about it. When people jump to strategic planning, they’re making a whole lot of assumptions. And they’re not really going to: what’s the problem that we’re trying to solve? What are the boundaries of that problem? What are we authorized to solve and not authorized to solve? How can we be very clear about what we’re trying to do? And then: what is a great solution, right? What does a great solution look like? Aside from the executional side of that, what’s the purpose? What are the principles that we should deploy to create that? What are the metrics that would assure us and the rest of the world that we’re making progress on that commitment to that purpose? What’s the path that we need to go through—that we’re going to navigate? What are the phases to that path? And then: what are the commitments that people need to make or are willing to make? Who’s going to do what, by when, and with what resources? That needs coherence. And the practices of strategy that are broadly used don’t address that and don’t really bring coherence. They bring a point of view, but they don’t bring coherence. And I think also what’s critical about strategy is that it lives in the conversation and commitment of a group of people, which means it needs to be co-generated. It needs to be co-designed with a group of people, so they own it. So it’s not just this document that comes in or an authoritative leader that says, “This is what we’re doing.” It’s something that they embrace, so the whole culture gets behind it, and you can execute it at scale. You’re using that word coherent very intentionally, I imagine. What makes something coherent? And does it have to do—I’m curious to hear—you sort of glided over the Aristotle and the four parts. Are these things related? That which makes something coherent and the source in Aristotle? Yeah. So, there’s lots of ways that coherence plays into it. I think coherence has to come from the logical needs that you have. It also needs to come from the emotional needs that you have and the ethical needs that you have. So you have… This is rhetoric? Yes. Aristotle invented rhetoric. Rhetoric is an argument for change. Strategy is an argument for change. So it makes sense that what a good argument—what a coherent argument—is, is based in rhetoric. And people like Dick Buchanan, who was one of my mentors, and Tony Goldsby-Smith and others, have been really—decades ago—very much on that path of introducing rhetoric into the design practice. That’s beautiful. What do you love about your work? Like, where’s the joy in it for you? The joy of it is in helping groups be empowered to express and act out their commitments in the world. I don’t—you spend a lot of time around corporate America. I’ve spent 40 years working at all levels, and especially the higher levels of multinationals. They’re soulless places. They tend to be operated based on incentives that are financial and don’t have a whole lot to do with ethics or human purpose. And to be able to enable people and empower people to express and integrate their sense of values and their sense of meaning to a declaration of purpose—whether it’s on a project in the middle of an organization or whether it’s the strategic intent of a whole organization—bringing that human authorship is really, really satisfying. You’re knocking it out of the park with a team when you do a strategy and everyone wants to have it blown up on a poster. They want to sign it, and they want to have their picture taken next to it, because it says so much about who they are and their collective group. So, I just love that. I also love that I’m able to help them keep the focus on value creation and actually serving human beings. Design is about serving human beings. It raises the question: what human? What humans? What serves them? That’s what research does a great job of uncovering, right? But at the end of the day, it’s: how do you help organizations take their assets, their capabilities, and focus it on serving—not just reducing the pain of ineffectiveness and inefficiencies, right? Because I think, people do experience design—kind of the first level is you’ve got to remove the blindness. Oh, by the way, you have customers. They matter, and they care. Because there are a lot of organizations that don’t even know that, right? Customers have rights. They have expectations. Wait—hold on. There’s something about this joke I want to explore. What do you mean when you say there are organizations that don’t know they have customers? Well, they think they have—they have checks coming in, right? And they don’t necessarily acknowledge that they’re in the business of actually serving human beings. You know? So, what can I—what example can I use without getting in trouble? Qantas Airlines. Qantas Airlines was an organization that had 15 years of labor and management strife. And labor basically made its decisions, and their service design was based on what their contract said. So, if their contract said, this is what you do, and you’re a customer and you need to have your bag moved four feet—if it’s not in the labor agreement, they’re not going to move it. So they’re not even seeing the customer. They’re seeing, in that example, their internal systems and viewpoints and agreements. So there’s this blindness that I think a lot of organizations have. You ask, “Who are your customers?” and they’ll talk about their distributor, the distribution—the people who buy from them, right? And that’s not their customer. It’s like, who’s going to use this thing? Yeah, and deploy it. So, you have to—I love it, to take people like that, or that kind of organization, who want to produce more meaning, and have them evolve from this kind of focus on stopping the pain and removing breakdowns, to creating satisfaction and engineering efficiencies, which is a whole other level. And then taking from that to creating delight, right? Which is not just kind of meeting the requirements; it’s exceeding the requirements and creating pathways. And then if we can take that and go through actually creating meaning, which is a focus around building relationships with customers, then that’s really my goal—to move them up that chain so that they’re reinforcing the values of the company that’s selling and addressing the values of the consumer or users and integrating all their touchpoints to be able to have those values addressed in a meaningful experience. So how do you see the practice of strategy in that environment? What does it mean to do strategy over the next ten years? What ideas are you exploring, and what kinds of experiments have you been playing with? I’m really curious about how the shift in the broader environment is going to change the practice of strategy itself? I’m really curious about how the shift in the broader environment is going to change the practice of strategy itself, and whether we can spend some time thinking that through. Yeah. So, specifically for the research world and design world, to whatever extent that you’re currently providing value with inputs to strategy, you will be—I promise you—you are about to be replaced. Because anything that is not judgment—anything that can be digitized—is about to go away and be automated. So, anything that can’t be automated will be automated in inputs—including pattern recognition, mental models, insights. AI is fabulous at it, and it’s getting dramatically better, and it’ll be 10x better by the end of this year. Yeah. So, I just want to call out the urgency of redefining it, because what we have done historically as researchers and consultants is about to disappear. Yeah. Knowledge work is toast, because the value of knowledge is quickly going down to zero. Right? So, that’s the challenge, right? And the reckoning here. So, the future is, for me, is really about—the future of research isn’t about finding insights. The future of research is helping organizations see, decide, and act under conditions of instability. We have persistent and constant change now, and we have to design what we do to address that. And so, I think what we can do is ask ourselves, how do we help organizations develop learning as a core organizational capability, more than how do we generate insights? What do we do with those insights? We have to create new mental models and assume that we’re going to have to recreate those mental models, because in six months they probably won’t be again. So, I think that’s what our practice needs to evolve into. And for me, that’s why I am a proponent of moving it into the domain of strategy. Because strategy deals with that, right? It’s about declaration of purpose. It’s about judgment. It’s about trade-offs. It’s about accountability. If you’re not doing something with those things, you’re going to be out of work. Right? And we’re not trained—we’re not trained as researchers and designers to do that. So the challenge will be: how do we get into that game? Yeah. Tell me about that game. What were the things you mentioned? A declaration of purpose, right? Using human judgment, discernment, right? Creating an understanding and making choices around trade-offs, right? Because people have to still decide. The AI is not going to decide for you. You’ll still have to make those decisions. And accountability—sticking your neck out and owning those decisions. That’s what humans are going to do, I think, in this coming world where AI is just taking over the functions that we have previously built our careers on. Yeah. What has your experience been? We have talked a couple of times before, and I know you are knee-deep, if that’s the appropriate expression—you’re sort of playing with it and deeply engaged with it. What are you learning? What’s the experience been like for you? Well, it’s been quite a ride, especially in the last two years. With the—kind of the ChatGPT explosion has kind of been a seminal time that things tended to shift for a lot of us. And I was working on generative design a decade before that with clients—developing intelligent design systems and even the notion and kind of the first instance of generative design. So, this is not a new area. But things have dramatically changed. And the question is, okay—I think my experience is that we’re trying to take AI tools and apply them to the existing frameworks and construction of organizations and the processes of organizations. So, what we’re doing right now in this particular phase is that we’re trying to use—we’re trying to bring efficiencies with this AI tool, but we’re not challenging and realizing that structurally, a lot of the stuff we’re doing doesn’t even make sense anymore. And so we’re optimizing these old legacy systems, which is kind of the first level. The next level is really going to be focused on, well, how do we eliminate human beings in that process? And I think ultimately—and I’m seeing huge opportunities for that, unfortunately—and in implementation, that yes, you actually can reduce a headcount dramatically because you don’t really need people to do those things that we used to do. And the question—where we’re evolving, where I’m most excited about looking—is when we don’t try to eliminate the humans, but we try to augment our humanity and use AI to give us powers that we don’t currently have now. That accentuate our judgment, accentuate our discernment and help us be better at being human beings. And a lot of that’s through learning. So, I’ve been focused a great deal on that. Yeah. Yeah. What examples are there out there, either your own or elsewhere, that represent what you’re talking about—this sort of AI as augmentation? Yeah. So, one of my pet peeves in my own personal experience was in deploying AI. So, we all get on—we all get on our chatbot, and we start prompting, and we start asking it questions to solve specific problems. And we do that. It’s very easy to do. And we do it in this kind of quick, recursive, fast-paced way. And AI is fabulous about giving us volumes of text that sound fluent and intelligent and—oh, okay. It gives us an answer in seconds. And so, there’s this natural behavior that we have to take that, cut and paste it, plop it into our document, and say, hey, we’re done. And if you take that and multiply it, what happens is we’re offloading our cognitive capabilities to AI. And in doing that, I’ve found that it’s expedient, but it’s making us dumb. It’s making us stupid, because we’re not having to think, because we’re delegating the thinking to AI. And so, that’s a really bad way to use AI. So, the question is, well, what is a good way to use AI? It’s developing AI into systems that actually help you learn and slow down your thinking—to make you really accountable for what your questions are, what the boundary conditions of those questions are—and really, really pull out of you some clarity about: what’s the concern that you have? What does the computer not know that you know about your question? Yeah. Right? We don’t give it that. We give it a one-sentence prompt, and today you can give it a three-word prompt, and it does fine. I’m amazed too. Everything you said resonated with me—I kept finding myself nodding along. Especially that idea of “atrophying,” if that’s the right word for it. It honestly feels like I’ve forgotten how to start thinking. One thing I’ve noticed is that I don’t even care whether I spell things correctly anymore. You know what I mean? All sense of discipline feels like it’s gone out the window. You can write something full of typos, with no real grammatical structure, and as long as it’s somewhere near a concept, it just takes off anyway. It’s kind of astounding. Yes. And on top of that—I mean, I don’t even bother to write anymore, because I can just turn it on, and I can just speak to it. And I was like—before, I was spending hours on these two-page-long text prompts to architect exactly what I want. And what I learned was, hey, I can just talk to it. And I can ramble for five or ten minutes, and it will create that kind of prompt that does exactly what I want. So, yeah, we get sloppy, and we get atrophied. So, what’s the answer to that? You have to have AI systems that produce some kind of cognitive friction—that slow us down, that have us be more thoughtful, and that challenge our mental models. So, in learning, we have mental models. We don’t learn anything until we see what that mental model is and see that there are alternatives. And so, we have to be challenged by AI to see alternative mental models so that we can learn. And that’s—that is less the expedient, ripping off a prompt and getting a quick answer, and it’s more an in-depth conversation. It’s more Socratic learning and that model. And so, I’ve developed a theory and a system and a practice for how we can learn with AI. And I’ve been deploying that. This it the GPT you sent me - Guided Learning? That’s what I’m talking about. So, that—I don’t know if you’ve used it yet. I did. Yeah, I did. It’s why—I mean, I don’t have a ton of time to talk about it, but I played with it this morning, and it’s awesome. It’s really great. And in a particularly meta kind of way, I asked it about interviewing you, which is sort of funny. And it said—I was trying to find one of the quotes in here. One of the first things it said—”Darrel has been consistent for decades on a few core ideas. One, meaning is the unit of value, not data. And then, so you can frame the discussion as: AI finds patterns, humans discover meaning. Okay. “And a very Darrel way to phrase it on air would be: AI is extraordinary at scaling signals, but meaning doesn’t scale the same way signals do. That sentence alone will unlock him.” Anyway, this is more of a novelty kind of application of this. But what I appreciate about what it did is that it did everything you said. And I felt that as a distinct benefit from my sort of unsupervised ramblings, meanderings, roamings through the chat interface. And it was really great to be supervised—to be led through a process of making one decision after another and identifying the appropriate question. So, it’s really great what you’ve done. With your permission, I’ll keep using it. Yeah, no, absolutely. I’m sharing. It’s fairly new, but I’ve got—every day I get an email with people raving about how it’s almost virtually changed their life. So, people are experiencing learning at this deep level. When I use it deeply, it makes me feel like I’m back in college—in a good way. I’m being really challenged and growing. And that’s the experience that I’m really interested in, because it’s not about AI eliminating that. It’s how to make AI—how to make us smarter, more capable, more discerning, more thoughtful, more ethical, more principled human beings. Yes. And do you find—last question here—do you find that when you interact with people around AI, I feel like there’s this binary—we get trapped in this frame of boomers versus doomers—but that all the actual activity and possibility and threat really is in this middle space, where it’s not even middle, but just trying to chart a path of—I mean, to your point about how radical this change is—it just feels like I’m overwhelmed by how different things are, with an awareness of what this can, might do. Yes. Think about how quickly this has come upon us, right? We still have—most of our country hasn’t even experienced, at a basic level, AI. And as someone who follows it on a daily basis, I’m continually blown away—continually blown away—at the rate of change. So, what I’m concerned about is, most of the conversations around AI happen at the level of technology. Is it good technology? Is it bad technology? What’s the next part of the technology? What kind of capabilities are we getting? And no one is kind of leading the conversation of: how do we integrate this? What do we do with this? What’s the cultural impact of this? Everyone’s saying, “This is going to have a huge cultural impact. We’re going to lose 30 or 40% of the jobs. What happens when we have more robots than human beings on the planet?” That’s going to happen, right? And if your job is moving atoms or moving bits, you better have a different thing to do. But we’re not designing the human interaction and the human environment. We’re focused on, oh my God—sitting around and we’re in wonder about the technology. And so I think what I’m seeing is missing is that human side. And by the way, that’s what social scientists, that’s what researchers, that’s what designers should be able to bring to that conversation. And I hope to God that somebody out there is listening, going, oh yeah, I’m going to participate in that, and I’m going to help start creating solutions for the breakdowns that are going to happen really dramatically—especially over the next two, five, seven years—until we actually figure out what to do with this stuff. The breakdowns are going to be huge. Yes. Well, Darrel, thank you so much for your time. It’s been fun. I really appreciate you sharing your time with me, and I’ll share a link to the Guided Learning GPT in the post. But thank you so much. Yeah. Thank you, Peter. It’s a really fun conversation. Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe [https://thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

Sam Ford on Place & Transformation

Sam Ford [https://www.linkedin.com/in/samford/] is a founding partner of InnoEngine [https://www.innoengine.co/], an innovation strategy firm based in Bowling Green, Kentucky. He serves as Fractional Chief Partnership Officer for the Metals Innovation Initiative, a nonprofit supporting Kentucky's metals industry, and as Innovation and Culture Fellow at Western Kentucky University's Innovation Campus. He sits on the boards of Canopy and Employward through AccelerateKY. He previously co-authored Spreadable Media and holds an MS from MIT. He lives in Bowling Green. “Polarization Doesn’t Have to be a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy [https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/12/political-polarization-bowling-green-study-kentucky-immigration.html]” Joe Karaganis & Sam Ford, and The Civic Imagination Project [https://www.civicimaginationproject.org/] at USC. I don’t know if you know this, but I start every conversation with the same question. I borrowed it from a friend who helps people tell their story. I overexplain it because it’s so big and beautiful. But before I ask it, I want you to know you’re in total control—you can answer or not answer in any way you want. The question is: Where do you come from? Well, I come from what’s called the Western Kentucky coal fields—not the Appalachian side of my native state. It’s a coal mining and tobacco farming region. My family has a multi-generational background in those industries. My Papaw CW worked at the coal-fired power plant in Paradise, Kentucky, which was made famous by a John Prine song. On my dad’s side, my grandparents had 15 kids in 16 years. I’m a first-generation college student and an only child. My dad switched industries and worked in manufacturing. None of those were industries I wanted to go into. But on my mom’s side, my grandmother was a volunteer writer for the local newspaper in a small town of about 400 people. She was the community contributor for “News and Outposts from McHenry, Kentucky.” Her name was Beulah Hillard—everyone called her Memaw Beulah—and she managed that section of the paper. This was pre-social media. So if you wanted to know who’d been on vacation, who was sick, or who had a birthday, you went to the weekly county paper and found the section about your neck of the woods. These community contributors curated that news. I took that over when I was in middle school. There were a lot of 60- and 70-year-old women... and me, one middle school boy. But that helped me realize newspapers loved free content. By high school, I had written a serialized private investigator story with a friend. It probably added up to a novel’s worth by the end. I also started a pro-wrestling news and rumors column. That’s what took me to journalism school. As a first-generation college student, I thought, “I’m doing this for free, but newspapers pay people to write. Maybe I can do that.” I went to Western Kentucky University, about 45 minutes north of Nashville in Bowling Green. My wife and I moved here as college students—we got married in high school—and I worked my way through college at various newspapers. And you’re still in Bowling Green now? In Bowling Green. I’ve spent time outside of it—lived in Boston for a few years, then split time between New York City and Bowling Green ever since. Work takes me to New York, but when it doesn’t, we’re here. It’s a fast-growing area and an interesting place to be. Can you tell me more about growing up where you did? What was your childhood like? Oh, I loved my childhood. I was an only child, and most of my neighbors were older, so I spent a lot of time with my imagination. Being a kid of the 1980s, pop culture provided plenty of material. I collected G.I. Joe figures, and they had character dossiers on the back. That got me into what I later called “immersive story worlds”—narratives so large they’re bigger than any single story, with no sole creator behind them. Pro wrestling fascinated me too—this fictional world layered on top of our real one, with shifting characters and leagues. It was a messy narrative world. My master’s thesis ended up being on daytime soap operas. I got really interested in fictional towns with dozens of characters. By the ’80s and ’90s, some shows had been on for decades. Characters would be referenced but not seen, or return after years, and you’d have to find an older fan to explain it all. There was also the story world of my real community. My dad was a deacon at Minnebaptist Church. We went to the funeral home every week, it seemed—didn’t matter who it was, we knew someone in the family. And curating the community news helped me see how stories were unfolding all around me, not just in fiction. I was certainly interested in writing and storytelling. Narrative was the key. When I became fascinated with these story worlds, I imagined there must be teams of people who write and plan them—maybe that could be my job. That was more on the dreaming side. Journalism was more about tackling the real world and telling the stories of people, characters, happenings. That’s what took me down the journalism path—especially after getting married and needing to be practical. A fiction writer’s room job from rural Kentucky felt out of reach. But a job at a newspaper seemed tangible. I’d already worked at a few. It felt more real. Of course, I ended up not doing either one of those things. But that was the path I was on when I headed to college. I’m back in Bowling Green, Kentucky—Kentucky’s third-largest city. It’s a college town that’s grown fast over the past several decades. Advanced manufacturing, automotive, food and beverage—being located along I-65, one of the key corridors in the manufacturing supply chain—has brought a lot of growth. It’s also close to Nashville, just 45 minutes north. And when a city like Nashville starts booming like it has—attracting talent, investment—that ripple effect helps neighboring cities grow too. In 2024, I co-founded a company called InnoEngine with two partners. We publicly launched in early 2025, so last year was our first full year. We help organizations design and implement innovation projects—especially when they’re trying to do something they’ve never done before, or in a way they’ve never done it. How has it been going - a year in? It’s been going well enough to keep going. When you’re positioning yourself in a way that intentionally doesn’t duplicate an existing market sector, it’s always a bit of a challenge. We don’t consider ourselves a consulting firm. One of our unofficial taglines is: “If you know exactly what you need, it won’t be us.” If you’ve already figured it out and just need someone to execute, there’s probably a firm that does that better. We’re interested in the messy area—when you know you need to act but don’t know exactly what to do yet. We want to be your partner from figuring it out to implementing it. We work with everything from early-stage startups to large multinational organizations. Also, public and nonprofit sectors. Even multi-organizational projects. A simple example: we’re working with several tech startups right now. One is integrating tech systems into their operations for the first time, trying to do it in a way that maximizes value. Another has proven the value of their product and is moving to market—but in several sectors with different sales cycles and value propositions. So we’re helping them think through positioning and strategy for each segment. Another client is a long-established tech company that’s bootstrapped its growth and become a formidable player, but they’ve never raised money. So they don’t have the same public profile, thought leadership presence, or traditional growth milestones. They’re asking: how do we build visibility that matches the heft we already have? On the more complex side, we’re working with multinational companies rolling out products across several countries. Lots of moving parts. Lots of help needed in the middle. Then there are multi-organizational projects, which tie into civic engagement work. One example: we’ve worked closely with a group at MIT Sloan School of Management called the Regional Entrepreneurship Acceleration Program, or MIT REAP. They’ve studied what makes an innovation ecosystem thrive—what preconditions need to exist for growth to take off, and what steps regions often take to realize their potential. About a decade ago, while working on some pilots with MIT—my grad school alma mater—I got involved. MIT was thinking about the future of work, AI, automation. This was back in 2016–2017, before it was as widely discussed as it is now. We built a team across Kentucky and became the first U.S. mainland region to get into the MIT REAP program. It’s a two-year accelerator for regions that have some growth and alignment, but want to go further. One core idea is you must have stakeholders from across government, corporations, entrepreneurs, capital, and higher education all at the table—with shared interests and goals. We fielded that Kentucky team in 2018. I helped put the team together. They graduated from REAP in 2020 and formed a nonprofit called Accelerate Kentucky, focused on strengthening the region’s innovation ecosystem. One big opportunity: Kentucky is at the center of the U.S. metals supply chain—aluminum, steel, copper. Automotive and food manufacturing activity has shifted south over time, while the Midwest remains strong. Kentucky sits at that intersection. There’s been growing national interest in reshoring manufacturing, both for job growth and national security. So, in late 2022, we helped start the Metals Innovation Initiative—a public-private partnership between the Kentucky state government and major industry players. It focuses on identifying shared challenges and working on collaborative innovation projects. That could be talent and workforce development. Recycling is a huge area—it’s more expensive to import new metal than to recycle what we’ve already used. Energy innovation is another. We created a platform where more than 30 members now work together. Instead of everyone tackling the same problem alone, we de-risk it by working on it together. One of my partners and I at InnoEngine wrote the white paper that kicked it off. We helped get it started, and we’re still helping run it. It’s funny. I’ve been trying to remember when our paths first crossed. I think it was a long time ago—back when you were at MIT, working with Henry Jenkins. I believe it was through Grant McCracken. Then we reconnected when you’d done all that civic assembly work. Where does all this civic engagement work come from? What drives you? I wanted to be a journalist, but I didn’t really get started until the newspaper industry was already falling apart. Everyone was saying, “We don’t know what’s going on.” As a first-generation college student, I got nervous about putting all my eggs in that basket. That’s what led me to grad school. I ended up at a program at MIT that studied media change and transition. I moved to Boston in 2005—around the time Facebook was rising out of the area, YouTube had just launched, and Google was moving into Cambridge. If you compare Cambridge and MIT in 2005 to now, it’s been completely transformed—biotech and tech campuses everywhere. At MIT, I had two key mentors. Henry Jenkins focused on audience and culture—he’s now at USC. The other, William Uricchio, is a media historian who describes himself as a historian who studies the future. He looked at how new technologies—radio, photography—were once undefined, and how people tried to commercialize or understand them. Studying that history gives us tools to understand cycles of technological change today. During grad school, we launched a research group. When I moved to New York, I joined a PR and strategic communications firm called Peppercom. They created a new position for me. Later, I worked in-house at Univision and Paramount, doing innovation and venturing roles—also newly created. Over time, I got comfortable identifying fuzzy challenges and helping bring clarity. That might be for one organization or for an industry. At MIT, we started the Convergence Culture Consortium for the media industry—trying to tackle Web 2.0, social media, and how distribution and audience engagement were changing. It was about saying, “Let’s not all work in silos. Let’s come together and think about how things might change.” Something like the Metals Innovation Initiative is similar. It’s not media, but it’s the same principle: we’ve got a shared problem that nobody gets a competitive advantage from solving alone. So what’s the piece we can work on together? There’s a symmetry in all of this. You were at MIT during the rise of social media, and now we’re in the middle of another transformation—with AI. It’s already happening. I feel like you get old enough, you recognize - I am a dog chasing the same bone. Is there a question you find yourself always trying to answer? Something you’re constantly chasing? For me, it’s this: there’s all this potential value out there—problems that could be solved—but they’re not being connected. In academia, there are high-probability solutions. In industry, there are urgent problems. But the two sides don’t connect. The chasm between them is wide, and no one owns the responsibility of crossing it. I’m less interested in inventing something no one has ever thought of, and more in identifying existing ideas that could be connected in a way that unlocks value. All the pieces are there—if someone would just name it, gather a team, and get to work. Sometimes, the result is launching something new. Sometimes, it’s deciding it’s not feasible and walking away. At InnoEngine, my two co-founders and I all come from different backgrounds. One worked in developmental education, SaaS, and healthcare. The other in engineering, IT, and manufacturing. I hadn’t worked in either of those sectors in any real depth. But we realized we were chasing the same questions—and we had independently developed similar approaches. We’d seen what made the difference between innovation projects that went somewhere and ones that never moved. We started InnoEngine to support people who want to do this kind of work, but need help. They might not have the internal support, vocabulary, or structure to do it alone. So we create the space. You were involved in the MIT REAP program. That was connected to your work around AI? It actually started with the Open Documentary Lab at MIT, founded by William Uricchio. They looked at how emerging technologies—AI, robotics, automation—could be used to tell nonfiction stories. They created something called the Co-Creation Studio to explore how professional media makers could collaborate with communities to tell those stories. MIT as a whole was thinking a lot about the future of work. This was about ten years ago, in collaboration with the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL). We wanted to explore how to document these changes, not just in the lab but in real communities. The technical capabilities of AI and automation are massive—but realizing their potential, or deciding when not to use them, requires human ingenuity and discernment. You need to connect the dots, have a shared understanding, and know when human wisdom is the critical layer. That was our framing for starting that work. And it’s been a major concern for places like MIT, who see both the enormous potential and enormous risks of these technologies. We also connected that to our civic work. Henry Jenkins, my other mentor, moved to USC in part because of the rising interest from Hollywood in concepts like audience engagement, transmedia storytelling, and participatory culture. He coined the term “transmedia storytelling” to describe how stories move across media platforms. At USC, he and his colleagues—Gabe Peters-Lazaro and Sangita Shresthova—began exploring how popular culture and storytelling shape people’s civic, political, and social lives. People have always drawn from shared cultural references—art, history, religion, literature—to talk about real-world issues. The founding fathers referenced Greek democracy. Civil rights leaders referenced the story of Moses and Exodus. These stories help people connect present struggles to larger narratives. Now, popular culture has become a dominant shared reference point—Harry Potter, The Hunger Games, Marvel, even pro wrestling. People use these references and memes to make sense of contemporary issues. They eventually created the Civic Imagination Project, which I describe as bringing writer’s room practices to placemaking. How do we imagine the future of Appalachia? Of the Hudson Valley? These workshops bring together 40 to 50 people at a time to go through shared exercises. About ten years ago, we started piloting those in Kentucky. We’ve also done them in California and West Virginia. They’ve led to a set of protocols and practices we continue to build on. That’s now one of InnoEngine’s core focus areas: how do you take those Civic Imagination methods and actually apply them? Research institutions like USC can write the books and develop the methodology, but they’re not going to implement them. That’s where we come in—bridging research to action. The next time you and I crossed paths, I had written that Slate piece about polarization not being a self-fulfilling prophecy. That piece told the story of work I’d done with Joe Karaganis and the American Assembly. We used POLIS to run an assembly in Bowling Green. Was that part of the Civic Imagination Project? It was indirectly related. Andrea Wenzel, who was at Columbia at the time, was interested in how local newsrooms connect with their communities—especially in the context of polarization, trust, and how digital platforms shape people’s relationships with the news. Most of the research had focused on national media. We wanted to ask: what about local and regional media? How do people relate to the place they live? That led to a collaboration through Columbia’s journalism school. We partnered with a daily newspaper in Bowling Green and ran a civic assembly using POLIS in 2018. We did another one in 2020 in Louisville with public radio. We called it a virtual town hall. The idea was to ask people, “What would you like to see change in Bowling Green to make it better?” But instead of submitting answers to a traditional survey, citizens submitted ideas, and then others voted on those ideas. Over two weeks, about 2,000 people participated, 900 ideas were submitted, and then we held an in-person town hall to discuss the results. Joe and I noticed something important: there was a lot of consensus, especially around issues like infrastructure, access to high-speed internet, food, and opportunity. The culture war issues didn’t dominate. The shared priorities were very practical. We didn’t directly connect that work to the Civic Imagination Project at the time, but we did hold a community debrief afterward. I remember an older woman saying, “This was great—asking what should change in Bowling Green—but I wish we’d ask one about the future. Who do we want to be?” That stuck with me. Fast forward a few years. Bowling Green’s growing fast. In Kentucky, the top elected position at the county level is called the “judge executive.” It’s an old term—used to be that in rural areas, there weren’t always trained judges available, so county executives sometimes handled minor legal matters. Eventually, that role disappeared, but the title stuck. Our judge executive here is Doug Gorman. He came from the private sector and was elected to the role. After taking office, he looked at census projections and realized our county is set to double in population in the next 25 years. It’s like adding another city of Bowling Green. We had coffee together—him, me, and a local business owner—and Doug said, “I don’t think our leaders fully realize what this means. We’re talking about this year, not 25 years from now.” We eventually landed on the key question: Do we want this growth to happen to us, or for us? Growth is coming. The question is whether we’ll be intentional about it. So, we brought together about 40 regional leaders—people who were already thinking about the future—and we ran a Civic Imagination-style workshop: “Imagine Bowling Green in the year 2050.” That session led to what became the BG2050 initiative. In 2024, we launched eight working groups around pillar areas: housing, public health and wellness, the economy, talent development and training, and so on. Each group includes 12 to 15 people working together to imagine the future and identify key initiatives to help us get there. At the time, that work didn’t have a public-facing component. It was multi-organizational collaboration, but mostly among institutional leaders. It wasn’t yet engaging the broader community. Then we were approached by a team at Google. They had realized that while public engagement efforts can collect a huge amount of input, the bottleneck is in making sense of that data. You gather a lot of community feedback, but it overwhelms decision-makers. There’s no way to process it all effectively. With advances in AI, Google thought they could help the public sector analyze and organize that input—so decision-makers could act on it. But they needed to test it live. They were exploring platforms, and found POLIS. That’s how they ended up talking to us. They didn’t know we were running the BG2050 project, since it hadn’t been publicly promoted yet. When we told them, it clicked. The city, the county, the university, the school system, the library, Habitat for Humanity, Goodwill, local businesses—everyone was already involved. Each of those organizations would be interested in the public’s input, but from a different angle. So, we partnered with Google to run a major public engagement process. What came out of it was the largest town hall in U.S. history—at least as far as we can tell. Over the course of a month, around 8,000 residents submitted about 4,000 unique ideas. More than a million votes were cast. Then we used Google’s AI sensemaking tools to produce a public-facing report within days. It allowed people to dig into the data and see the results. Locally, we branded the campaign “What Could BG Be?” Google gave us a budget for outreach. We didn’t want to send it to an out-of-town creative agency, and no single local agency was large enough to run the whole thing. So, we built a multi-agency agency—six or seven local firms, some of whom are normally competitors, came together to develop and run the campaign. It was hyper-local, and it worked. Google got what they needed: proof that their tools could help turn messy public input into usable insight. And our BG2050 groups now have that input as part of their work. They’re using it, alongside their own conversations, to make short-term recommendations for actions our region can take over the next few years to help build the Bowling Green we want. It’s amazing work. Congratulations on all of it. Thank you. It’s only possible because all these groups were willing to work together—and because we’re willing to live in the messy middle. These aren’t anyone’s full-time job. That’s what makes a project like this quicksand if you’re not careful. Same goes for the Metals Innovation Initiative. These are the things that fall just outside of any one organization’s core mission. They’re always item number six on the to-do list, or just ambiguous enough that they don’t get done. That’s where Grant McCracken’s work has been so influential for me—thinking about how you listen to cultural patterns that are just visible from the window of the organization. Things you can kind of see, but they’re not urgent enough to tackle until suddenly, you’re in crisis. At InnoEngine, that’s what we focus on—work that matters but needs structure, shared vocabulary, and coordination to move forward. We’re kind of near the end of our time, but I feel like we’ve reached the big question I’ve been circling. With your experience—having your hands in so many sectors, especially around place—you’re really well-positioned to speak to this. I live in Hudson. I care deeply about it. I’ve been here a long time, and I want the ideas and experience I’ve gained from my professional life to benefit my community. I feel like our community is struggling with growth. That question—do you want it to happen to you or for you—that’s our question too. It probably applies to a lot of towns right now. We also have this huge thing called AI happening to us. So here’s my question: for people who haven’t done what you’ve done, but who love where they live and want to help it thrive—especially as we go through this transformation—what would you say to them? What have you learned that could help? There are a few core ideas I return to often. One comes from the Civic Imagination Project: You can’t build a future you haven’t imagined first. Nobody wants to build a future that leaves them out. People need to feel they have a role and some agency in shaping that future. That framework helps. There are also great models out there—MIT REAP, Civic Imagination, others. You don’t have to be beholden to any one of them, but they give you structure. You can draw from them, personalize them, adapt them to your place. MIT REAP just published a book called Accelerating Innovation with case studies and research from the work they’ve done globally. One of my co-founders, BJ Comanici, blurbed the back of the book. It’s a helpful starting point. Ultimately, it takes patience, perseverance, and someone willing to take ownership. If it’s nobody’s job, it won’t get done. And trying to do this sort of work off the side of your desk usually won’t sustain it long enough to matter. The early stages can move slowly. But if you can stick with it and create enough of a container—a structure—for people to process meaning together, things start to shift. People start to get aligned. And then you can move to the next step: “Now what?” That’s the question we’re asking right now with BG2050. The input-gathering and imagination stage is complete. It was necessary—but not sufficient. Now we have to act. At InnoEngine, we talk a lot about building repeatable patterns and models. We use the acronym RPM—another nod to our engine metaphor. We also talk about the “six gears of the innovation engine,” though we haven’t gotten into that here. Those patterns and models help you organize messy work. In the world of professional services—consulting, facilitation, strategy—there are usually two approaches. One is the black box approach: “Give us your problem, and we’ll go off and solve it.” Mysterious, closed. We take the opposite approach. We say: “Here’s how to tackle a problem like this.” We’re not afraid to show you the process, because we believe there’s value in it. And most of the time, people still want help executing. We’ll be your co-pilot. That’s the category we’re trying to create. When you’re doing something you’ve never done before, we’ll help you design it. We’ll help you implement it—as much or as little as you need—until you reach the point where you’ve got it. And for us, that includes places. We’ve tested a lot of things in Bowling Green. Now we’re working with other places—Hudson, Napa, Germany—to help them do the same. The outcomes won’t be the same, but the process can be. That’s beautiful. Thank you so much. It’s been really good to see you and catch up. I’m grateful you accepted the invitation. It’s a real inspiration—the work you’ve done. I think you were the first person who introduced me to POLIS, to the idea of assemblies. A lot of the civic frameworks I still rely on today came through your work. I appreciate that. Likewise, I know one of the things we originally connected around was our shared interest in farm-to-table, buy local, artisanal economies. That’s another layer we didn’t get into today. But it all ties together. How do you empower communities to notice something, name it, and then work deliberately to strengthen it? I appreciate the work you do. I’m glad you’ve extended your platform into this podcast. Honored to be part of it. Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe [https://thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

Yuliya Grinberg PhD on Human & Machine

Yuliya Grinberg [https://www.linkedin.com/in/yuliya-grinberg/] is a digital anthropologist and qualitative researcher with a PhD in Sociocultural Anthropology from Columbia University. She is currently Research and Insights Manager at Mastercard. Her book, Ethnography of an Interface: Self-Tracking, Quantified Self, and the Work of Digital Connections [https://www.amazon.com/Ethnography-Interface-Self-Tracking-Quantified-Connections-ebook/dp/B0F6DC4PYX], was published by Cambridge University Press in 2025. A note for readers: Yuliya has offered a 20% discount on Ethnography of an Interface for anyone coming from this interview. Use code GRINBER24 at checkout here [https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/ethnography-of-an-interface/2F0A3EDF02855E14AEDCF64F600A31AA#fndtn-information]. So I know—I think you know this, right? You’ve listened to interviews before. I start them all with this same question, which I borrowed from a friend of mine, who’s also a neighbor, who helps people tell their story. And I borrow it because it’s really big and beautiful. But because it’s big and beautiful, I kind of over-explain it the way that I’m doing now. And so before I ask it, I want you to know that you’re in total control. And you can answer or not answer any way that you want to. And it’s impossible to make a mistake. And the question is, where do you come from? So thank you for that question. I love this question. First of all, as an anthropologist, I appreciate that this is a question really about context, right? First and foremost, at least how I read it. And then, on some level, I feel like there are so many ways to answer this question. We can really be here all day. It’s a really loaded and big question, which is exciting. So I’ll answer it. And so, in a couple of ways—you know, in a geographic sense, I’m from Russia originally. But I also moved to New York, Queens first, in the early 1990s with my family. So I think that sense of that experience has really shaped my worldview as well. I’ve also lived for many, many years afterwards on Brighton Beach, which is kind of the Russian diaspora community, especially on the East Coast. So that’s shaped me as well. I’m also a product of my experiences, I would say more broadly, kind of zooming out a little bit, right, is immigration has been a really pivotal experience in my life. It has really shaped how I thought, how I think, how I kind of even comport myself, how I relate to others. There’s something about moving to a completely different country with a different cultural code in middle school that upends your reality in the way that it does. And maybe without it, I sometimes think I might not have been as interested in culture as I am now professionally. I do wonder if that experience really kind of set me on a new professional course without me knowing it, even way back then. And as an immigrant kid, kind of taking interest in culture really, for me at that time, has become a little bit of a survival mechanism at first, and now it’s become a professional habit. And so, also, I would say I’m a product of my family. I’m very much my grandmother’s granddaughter, in the sense that she was a very pivotal figure in my life personally, but she was also kind of the ultimate matriarch in our family. So she really played a really kind of key role in how I look at the world as well. Yeah, and professionally, from all over the place—from advertising to anthropology to marketing research. Yeah, out of many different chairs. Oh, that’s interesting. I’m curious that you said middle school. What can you tell—can you tell a story about what that was like for you to sort of move to a whole new country? I was 11. I was turning 11 when I moved. And moved with a lot of, you know, ideas about what a different world and different country would look like. I don’t think any of us were prepared at that time to really imagine immigration or the U.S. kind of really large in our imaginations in Russia when I was growing up, but really without any clarity of what it would look like. My sense of the U.S. was really taken from things like 90210, the show. I quickly learned when I moved to gentrified Bushwick that was not the U.S. of my experience, and just the expectations of struggle. One story I like to tell my kids about what it was like is stepping off the airplane, which was actually a really kind of exciting experience for myself and my twin sister. I have a twin sister. We had never been on an international flight prior to that. We were really excited about that as a trip. I don’t think we really fully comprehended that we were permanently leaving or that we weren’t going to really understand much of anything in that world. I remember stepping off the plane and thinking, wow, JFK is just so noisy. And I realized I didn’t understand a single word. That really was kind of just like a visceral shock, of just that difference. And that’s something you kind of experience with your body. You can’t really intellectualize it. We talked a little bit about it, of course, with our family, but you experience that as a very physical phenomenon. I think I remember that—how it felt in my body to be all of a sudden in this really, really radical new place. And I had to figure out how to orient myself. I had to find my feet in it. And did you say that you didn’t understand what anybody was saying? Is that what you’re describing? Exactly. I didn’t speak any English, aside from maybe introducing myself with my name. What did that feel like? It felt really confusing. I think it was just overstimulating. And I’ve had many experiences like that since because I’ve traveled, I’ve studied abroad, I’ve traveled to different countries, I’m really interested in studying people in different settings. So I’ve found that that kind of physicality that you confront—all your antennas all of a sudden up—the things you take for granted in your everyday world, everything is input. So in some ways, it’s overstimulating. You don’t really have that kind of first-order, second-order hierarchy of what things mean. They all mean everything at the same time. Equal importance. It’s funny. I was an adult. I remember I traveled to Egypt and I was in Cairo. I remember being in Cairo on a street corner. And I had the realization that I had no idea what anybody was saying. Yeah, I loved it. I think it felt very quiet all of a sudden. Very quiet, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I spent a lot of that first year in my head, observing. It’s also a technique, I guess, in some ways—practicing for the future—listening, observing, comparing. I never really experienced myself as an outsider prior to that experience, and that was an interesting change of perspective. Do you have a recollection of kind of what you wanted to be like when you grew up? I was thinking about this question because I noticed, yes, that others—and I really reflected—I was not a kid really that had a strong sense of “I really want to be X, Y, Z.” I think I had a sense of what I should become. Maybe my parents’ perspective, my grandmother’s perspective. Maybe I should be a lawyer. Maybe I should be a doctor. Those were not things that appealed. Fortunately, I figured that out pretty early. That wasn’t going to be my set of expertise. I didn’t spend too much time pursuing that path. But I didn’t really have a really clear idea of what I wanted to be. But I did know a few things. I knew the kinds of things I cared for, or the kinds of information I craved. For instance, I grew up in a very musical and artistic family. My uncle is a conductor in an orchestra. My mom was a music teacher in Russia. All my grandparents were in music theory or music school in one way or another. So music was a big part of my early childhood—going to classical concerts, especially visiting museums. That was really important. But I will say personally, I never connected to aesthetics or sound on its own. It never really clicked for me why that was important or why that was valuable. Maybe it was because I didn’t have the same talent. What I always wanted to know was about the people who made that music—what world did they live in. If we visited a museum, I was always curious about the narration, about the context in which some of that was made. Those were the kinds of things that always appealed to me, I remember. So it was kind of—I read a lot of biographies as a kid, I think, like early on. I didn’t know exactly why, but I really wanted to know kind of the behind-the-scenes world behind the public face, like public persona, or just the sound, like just aesthetic quality. So I think that that’s something that I felt early on. And then the second thing I would say is I really didn’t want to settle on anything. It was so hard for me to choose a major or to, you know, be very narrowly focused on one particular career, and explain that kind of zigzag professional life I’ve had as well. You know, my happy place was always like doing several things at the same time. So in school, I majored in business, but I also wanted to study art history, and I also wanted to study, you know, languages, and social sciences were really interesting. Professionally, I’ve also kind of done so many different things. And I used to think of it as being indecisive. But, you know, as I’ve become an academic, I’ve learned a better word: interdisciplinary. So I think that interdisciplinarity was also always kind of an instinct. It felt insufficient to me to just narrowly focus. Like, I remember studying marketing, and I just couldn’t focus on it as its own thing. It felt really myopic. So I always wanted to kind of have an almost, like, contrasting view from a different discipline. And yeah, so those are the two things I think that really—I wanted to do as a young person. And I think those are the kinds of instincts that, you know, in my professional life. You know, I’ve switched from brand strategy to academia, and now I’m more formally in private sector research. So I think that’s always been more interesting to me. Yeah, yeah. So to catch us up, where are you now, and what are you doing for work? Yeah, so now I am doing—I’m a manager of research and insights at MasterCard. I’ve been here for a little over a year, which is exciting. And in this role, you know, I think I get to do a little bit of the kinds of things I’ve described. I work with a lot of different teams internally, many product teams, and some of the more specific research questions they might have, and helping them kind of conceptualize research and find the right partners for that work. I’m also doing a lot of thought leadership more broadly for the organization on various topics. For instance, AI—how do people feel about AI right now—is one piece of work we’re doing. So, you know, prior to that, I was also doing kind of UX research and private sector research. And I started off—this maybe kind of loops back to where I started. I started off in advertising as a brand strategist. But that took me into kind of a more academic direction. I was fortunate enough to work with anthropologists on staff at the time when I was coming up. And I really took—it really seemed like a really fantastic perspective. You know, I was a little bit tired of sitting in on focus groups and reading the same syndicated research. I kind of wanted—like, I really was really kind of attracted to the anthropological perspective. So that took me to pursue anthropology as a field of study. And I earned my PhD. And since then, I’ve done a lot of different research on the academic side, as well as on the private sector side. Yeah. What was your—what was the encounter that you had with anthropology that inspired you? So, you know, I remember very clearly, I was fortunate to work with Tim Malafite. I don’t know if you know him. Yeah. I know the name. Yeah, he’s now at Fordham. He teaches kind of at the intersection of business and anthropology at Fordham. But at that time, he was working at BBDO as an onsite anthropologist. And we were working together. He was doing ethnographic work for Campbell’s, which was a brand that I was on. And really trying to understand how people—you know, Campbell’s is a brand that was always interested in cooking, but promoted at the marketing level often pitched as a quick and easy solution to an irritating problem, which is cooking, especially for busy parents. And at the time, the work we did with Tim kind of zoomed out and encouraged the company to think about how people think of cooking more positively. You know, if we do think of cooking in terms of speed and convenience, how do we also talk about it in the same language that people talk about it? So we—I remember, you know, of course, as a strategist, I was part of different types of research initiatives. But on the ethnographic front, we went to visit people in their homes and spent some time cooking meals with them, seeing how they put meals together, shopping with them for some of those meals, and hearing them talk about what role cooking played in their families and their everyday life. How they related to that experience, where they wanted to kind of indulge and take more time, where they wanted to save time, and just that language—I thought it was really amazing to have a broader context. And I thought, I want to do that more, make that a more permanent picture of my work. So I took that leap, eventually. Yeah. You’ve been at MasterCard for about a year. And you talked about thought leadership. And I guess my question is, what is the story you tell about anthropology, and how does anthropology work? What’s the value of being an anthropologist in an organization like MasterCard that’s trying to make decisions? You know, and I think it’s an ongoing conversation. I feel like, you know, I’m not the only one facing this challenge. But of course, you know, anthropology—qualitative research more generally—I think is always up against quantitative methods. Now, more recently, AI methods. And, you know, there’s always a kind of push and pull. You know, I like to think of it as, you know, sometimes I think there’s been a lot of reflection in the industry. What anthropologists ask ourselves is, what do we have to offer to the business world? It used to be kind of an obvious answer. We offer context. We offer the perspective of a human being, right? We offer an opportunity to have a conversation, kind of report on that encounter, as a complement to kind of more narrow, maybe numbers-driven analysis. I think AI, in some ways, has really made that distinction a little fuzzier at times, because a lot of AI instruments appear to do the very same thing, but at scale, right? So the question might be, who needs an anthropologist, really? I think that’s a question that I ask myself. How do we articulate the value of what we have to offer? And, you know, I always go back to what anthropology—or maybe qualitative disciplines more generally—offer. On some level, I feel like what I’m about to say is often seen as a kind of shortcoming of qualitative research, but I see that as a kind of benefit, which is that it’s subjective in nature, by definition. There’s no going around it, right? Of course, not only is it an exercise that’s much smaller in scale—you speak to five people, 25 if you’re lucky, right? It’s a small number of people—and the researcher and that person’s interpretation of that encounter is always front and center. That’s what’s often leveled as a kind of critique: why should we trust this research? It’s only a matter of that one person’s opinion, right? Or maybe the opinion of these 25 people, or five people, what have you. But I think that’s the value—that the subjective nature of this research is so visible in qualitative methods, right? In quantitative methods, it also exists. Especially in AI, it exists for sure. We just don’t always ask or see it in the same way. And I would say it’s this reminder, right, of the subjective nature of all of our work. We need to keep it front and center, whether we’re doing qualitative work with small-scale groups, or quantitative work, and now AI work, right? I don’t like to use necessarily the word bias, because it makes it sound like we can fix the problem. As soon as we isolate the issue, we can remove it. There’s always a subjective aspect to this analysis. Whose information are we accessing? How was it coded? How was the process? Who did that kind of analysis? Those are always issues we need to be asking. And I think anthropologists and researchers can continue to bring that kind of questioning spirit. You know, I hope I can bring that to MasterCard as well. Yeah. What do you love about the work? Like, where’s the joy in it for you? That’s a good question. You know, I’ve sat, as I said, on many different chairs, right? And I’ve found joy in different aspects of it. And then yet I returned to the private sector. Prior to only a couple of years ago, I spent primarily my time teaching. I was a professor of marketing and of anthropology at a local liberal arts university. And I really thought that was going to be—after I finished my PhD—the full-time trajectory of my career. Of course, I did ongoing research. I took on some consulting work, but I primarily worked as an academic for a number of years. And as exciting as I found that work, I really realized that what I love to do is the research. You know, as an academic, completing my program—that was the exciting part of my work. I got to really dig deep into a topic. I’ve published a book, which I’m really proud of, called Ethnography of an Interface. And, you know, even as I transitioned out of my advertising career into this period of academic work, it was really with the purpose of diving very deeply into a topic and thinking about how can I really understand that thoroughly? You know, the business world doesn’t always allow us that level of thoroughness. And as a teacher, I was excited to share these perspectives with students, but I found I really missed being an active participant in the output. I find it exciting. I find it interesting to be kind of at the forefront of what people are thinking about, how people are thinking about those things—not just on the consumer side, but also on the business side, right? How is the business world evolving? So I wanted to return, yeah, return to my roots a little bit. Yeah. Yeah. As somebody who, like—I came up, you know, my first job was at, like, a consultancy. Everything I learned about any of this stuff happened in a company doing work in the private sector, as you say. And then I kind of sort of educated myself about all this other stuff. And so I always have a little bit of imposter syndrome talking to academically trained anthropologists. But I’m wondering, what’s your sense of the difference? What’s it like being—what’s your experience of the difference between being an anthropologist in academia versus being in the private sector and working with corporate clients? You know, first of all, just a comment about being an imposter: don’t worry, we all feel like imposters all the time. Thank you. You know, the more I learn, the more I realize how much there really is to learn. So it’s always this exercise of never knowing enough. So I guess there’s the joy of constantly learning as well. The difference I see between the academic world and the private sector work most immediately—and I hate to use this word, it’s so cliché in some ways—is impact. And I don’t necessarily just mean, you know, the business KPIs or something like that, but just that you can see your work reflected, and either taken up or not, in very immediate ways, in ways that academia doesn’t. You know, the time scale is so protracted, and the impact sometimes is limited. Of course, there’s the impact of the classroom, but it’s a different kind of conversation. And I think you don’t necessarily always get to follow the impact in the same way as you do in your professional life. I think being closer to the proximity between the work I’m doing and its effect—or lack thereof sometimes—on the company I’m working with is more immediate. I find that rewarding. It’s almost a little bit more—I wouldn’t say instant gratification—but at least there is that kind of, yeah, there’s more visibility in that sense for me, you know, how what I’m doing shapes an organization’s activities. You mentioned that you, in response to the question about what you love, you talked about the doing. So I guess I want to follow up—what do you love about the research? What do you love about the doing? Yeah, such a good question. You know, thank you actually for giving me the opportunity to think about it. Sometimes we just do, do, do, and not always take the time to reflect. I like learning new things all the time. I find that super exciting. You know, in some ways, the speed with which business moves requires you to learn at a faster clip than maybe academia. Maybe not necessarily the same level of depth, but definitely a bigger breadth in a shorter amount of time. And I find that exciting. I think that’s really stimulating and energizing, and it makes me feel more connected somehow to the things that are going on around me. I did have a period of time where I spent a number of years teaching, and you start to feel kind of disconnected a little bit. You experience the work through the eyes of your students, but otherwise feel a little bit on the outside. So I find it exciting to have a little bit of a closer seat. And, you know, in a very real sense, more resources to do that research. Academia can make it challenging to do the research. A lot of the onus is always on the researcher to find ways not just to connect the threads, but to execute that work. And the private sector makes it much more accessible. So there’s more of it, and I love that. And I want to talk about the book because I feel like—yeah—so talk, tell us a little bit about the book that you did. Yeah. So let me show you right here. My third baby—I have two babies—my third one, which took almost as long as my actual children to bring into the world. So the book—when I was conceptualizing the book, I kind of started broad. I was trying to get a sense, as I kind of talked about landing in JFK and finding yourself amidst the noise and all of a sudden not really being able to tell what’s what—what’s important, what’s not important, what’s familiar, what’s not familiar. I think when I started doing my research initially, it was a time in the early 2010s when there was a lot of intense conversation about data. The same way we talk about AI in some ways—that was kind of the hype cycle—datafication of everything, especially personal data. So for me, the key questions were: what does that mean for how we think about ourselves as people? What does that mean for being human? There was a lot of enthusiasm around what companies could achieve with personal data, both in the business sense, but also how much they could help people learn about themselves. There was this kind of euphoria about a future where we’ll know everything there is to know about everything, including ourselves. We’ll no longer, in some ways, be mysterious to ourselves with the help of this new technology. And it was just coming up. So I think in the beginning, it was that moment of a lot of stimuli, again—kind of taking that in and trying to find where can I stand? Where do I find my feet in this? Really trying to get a grasp of what’s happening academically with regard to this dialogue, what’s happening in the popular discourse around this type of conversation. And what I found was, obviously, on the business side, lots of hype, lots of enthusiasm, lots of really breathless predictions—similar things we’re seeing about AI right now. On the academic side, a lot of fear and a lot of judgment around the kind of companies that produce this data, their intentions, and also a kind of sense that the researcher knows best. There was a sense that there’s something fundamental that technologists don’t understand about the way the data functions or how it impacts people, and it’s kind of the work of the researcher to reveal that, right, or to make that clear. And I really respect a lot of this academic discourse. I think there’s a lot of important work that’s come out of thinking about the impact on our privacy, thinking about the role social media plays in how we consider ourselves as people. A lot of these academic conversations have come to the fore now. We talk about it more openly in general ways. So I was thinking, where do I situate myself as an academic, as a researcher, in this discourse? There’s so much of it. And I found that I was really interested in this kind of behind-the-scenes again. As I was saying earlier, I wanted to understand, as a child, the life of the artist behind the music or behind the work. I really wanted to understand the creators of these tools, and how their lives—their professional, perhaps, in many ways, expectations and necessities—shape what we encounter as consumers. So less how we process this information as consumers of data, but how this data comes to be in the form that it does. And what are their questions and concerns and issues and ambitions? How do they all shape what we can then, in a sense, see about ourselves using this data—or what we don’t see? So kind of this broader social and political context of the companies that make these tools—that’s kind of the thrust of this book. Yeah. The title is amazing, right? Ethnography of an Interface. And so can you tell us a little bit about the research that you did? And I feel like there must be so much—I’m curious about the degree to which that research feels like it’s echoing now in how AI is coming into being and the discourse around it. Yeah, definitely. Very much so. I think that’s, again, such a good question. So the interface in this book, and the title especially, is kind of—obviously—a play on words. On the one hand, the interface is how we, you know, computer interfaces—how we interact with really complex and obscure computer functions, right? That’s a computer term. And how we often talk about interfaces as this technology that made it possible for non-specialists to interact with computer programs that otherwise would have been inaccessible. You don’t have to write in code. You don’t have to study obscure programming languages. We can just recognize icons and click on buttons, and that makes that world accessible to us. So in some ways, it’s a reference to that kind of interface. And in my work, I was thinking about how I would access complex corporate dynamics. Through which interface would I be able to mediate that interaction? So I started to follow along and take part in this group called the Quantified Self, which was kind of up and coming again during the time that I was doing research. As both language, as an expression, Quantified Self was on the rise, but it also was an actual group of people—ostensibly people who were really enthusiastic about personal data and using all kinds of gadgets, sometimes digital methods, sometimes not, in thinking about themselves. But in my experience, I also found that it attracted a lot of technologists, tech makers, startup founders, for different reasons. So that encounter made it possible for me to access some of the business priorities and challenges. That exposure to people who were part of that group became my interface, right? And then I also use it in a different sense, academically—or maybe more practically. We think about the interface as a technology that facilitates access, but we don’t often think about it as a technology that inhibits access. For instance, there are certain things the interface allows us to see, and then there are certain things that the interface does not allow us to see. We don’t see how this data is cleaned on the back end. We don’t see the work processes or the decisions that go into the aesthetics that we are served with online. We don’t see a lot of those decisions. We don’t see the people who are necessarily involved in that. So in that sense, I also wanted to think about using Quantified Self as a kind of entry point, to a certain degree, into some of the discussion—some of the things that we don’t see. In the same way that the Quantified Self, as a group or more broadly, technologies present a kind of public face, what’s the context and what are the decisions in the background, and also the challenges? What have you learned about the Quantified Self community, or the motivations? What was driving that for the people who were participating? I think it’s multiple, right? And I think that’s one of the reasons it really became part of a cultural conversation for a period of time. I think a lot of people wrote and commented quite eloquently in different ways, and it brought people together for a variety of reasons. For instance, patient advocates, or folks who found themselves kind of on the margins of healthcare practices or experiences, really wanted to kind of turn to themselves and to their own experiences to understand, record, and report some of the things that are going on in response to maybe some of the challenges they were experiencing with healthcare, with the healthcare space. I found, especially being involved with the group on the East Coast primarily, as I said, it attracted a lot of people who were interested in understanding—it was constituted as a kind of—I’m thinking about how to explain it. I think the popular idea of Quantified Self as a community that attracted a lot of data enthusiasts didn’t make it easy to see that it also actually attracted a lot of people who were interested in observing that kind of community. So a lot of participants were, in fact, in some ways, saw themselves as kind of participant observers, as kind of anthropologists attending these kinds of meetings—just by, you know, consumer needs or trying to understand people’s relationship to technology. While all the while, it actually attracted a lot of people who were creating that technology and producing that discourse in a way that was kind of a consumer group in some ways that was created from within the industry. That then, you know, different kind of, let’s say, industry mechanisms also allowed people to separate themselves and say, hey, it’s not that we’re creating this community by participating in it, by presenting on the part of it, by talking quite a bit about it. It allowed people to kind of point to it as though it’s already an existing consumer segment on the rise, kind of as an early sign. You know, in those days it was seen sometimes as an early sign that there’s this bigger consumer response. But it was really kind of created in some ways—I hate to say manufactured—but in some ways, you know, developed by the very entrepreneurs, startup developers, technologists who wanted to see that enthusiasm out in the world. So it was a kind of co-creation. Yeah. And I mean, it’s so fascinating, sort of like dizzying, to hear you just describing all the different forces at work. And I remember that time, of course, and to the degree that it’s sort of just speculative, right? I mean, people wanted stories about the power of big data, right? We were sort of—that was the bubble that we were in—we believe in data’s the new oil, right? So everybody’s going to be obsessed with any way people are doing things with data. Exactly. And it was exciting or, you know, useful to have a community to point to: hey, look, it exists out there. And that became part of a narrative, right? You can tell to your investors and the boardroom, to your colleagues. In some ways, it kind of became a mechanism that, in some small way, really moved the industry forward. And so now, I mean, you know, what is that—was 2010? You said you were doing your research 2010s to 20, like mid-20. So it’s 15 years later now. It’s funny, I’m thinking of that guy, Brian Johnson—is that his name? That guy? Like, is he the sort of the apex of the guy who’s trying to live forever? Like, is that his name, Brian? Do you know who I’m talking about? The guy who’s like a health longevity? Yeah, like, there are lots of—you know—there’s this kind of Quantified Self biohackers. There are all kinds of life hackers. I think there are different communities that were kind of adjacent to each other and sometimes spoke past each other, sometimes spoke to each other. A lot of it is obviously shaped by kind of this broader Silicon Valley culture. I think it’s super interesting, the shift between computer programmers in the 80s and 90s as the most slovenly, you know, the least focused on their self roles, you know, well-being, to now the most focused, the most optimized. So, you know, that may be a topic for a completely different— That’s, I think that’s a lovely observation. Yeah. What do you make of that? Yeah, I would have to think about it, you know, why that happened. Exactly. Right. Like, I think, in some ways, the narrative of data shaped this discourse. First of all, it legitimized programming as not just as a peripheral occupation of really obscure eccentrics, but as a kind of the central driving force of our economy, right? So it became—you kind of re-packaged that person then, right, as the leader. And in some ways, probably people at the leading edge of this took that on very seriously, right? They took on an almost entirely different identity and brand. Part of it—and, you know, that’s something I do reflect on in the book a little bit—is the discourse of data itself. You know, there’s that language—you talked about data as oil—but there are so many metaphors, especially in those early days, around data. And, you know, the quantity of the metaphors alone is dizzying. And in some ways, it’s paradoxical, because the language at the time was, we can connect all these data streams, but the language that was used to describe it was sometimes so contrasting, it made it difficult to imagine how does data as gas and data as oil and data as water, right, fit together—on the metaphorical, linguistic level. But the language of data as this liquid metaphor was always really interesting to me. And there is a little bit of a kind of purifying aspect to it, right? Like water, almost in a religious sense, it has a purifying quality. And when you think about data in this liquid sense—data as water, as oceans, as lakes—again, kind of rhetorically, it has this cleansing quality. If you apply regimes of data, you know, cleansing to yourself, you yourself become purified of bad habits, right, bad practices, become a cleaner individual. So there is that—maybe, you know, in some ways, that also shapes our idea of who the entrepreneurs, the tech entrepreneurs, are right now: the most cleansed by data. Yeah, yeah. It’s amazing. It’s amazing. I love the thought. Yeah. So what is it—so it’s about this intersection of man and machine, broadly speaking, if we like that, and now we’re in a different, maybe, phase or stage of the same discourse, right, about man and machine. What do you, based on the time you’ve spent, what do you see now in terms of AI? And I don’t know—what are the kind of conversations that you’re having within MasterCard about what does this mean for how do we listen to people? Do we use synthetic research? Yeah, you know, I would say I would speak first as kind of as an individual outside of my connections, or, you know, corporate connections—just as an observer, as an academic—and how I connect that a little bit to my work. You know, so as I said, two kind of things that were really important to me in my research were: how do people—what are the decisions that go into the types of data that we interact with, right? How do people think about data themselves on the inside? How do these professionals think and relate to data, not always as a subjective instrument that delivers clarity. Really, you know, there’s a kind of sense that data are messy, that they’re complex, and as political and social as they are technical, right? To bring—to note: it’s technical, but it’s also a social exercise. And it’s a political exercise as well. Below is the same ultra-light cleanup, following exactly the same instructions as above: * No paraphrasing * No meaning changes * No deletions of ideas * No reordering * No speaker labels * Repetitions preserved where they reflect thinking * Only punctuation, line breaks, and minimal grammar cleanup And I think, in reality, you know, if we even follow business news, we can see that the politics—the people on the ground—are very aware of those dynamics, even if they only speak in the language of objectivity and clarity. And I would say it’s interesting now to see the new hype, which is AI, the new darling. If everything had to be data—you know, everything had to be kind of, there had to be the prefix “data” to everything we did—now AI seems to have taken on that same primacy everywhere, not just in the business world, right, in academia as well. You know, teachers have to articulate how they are or are not using AI, their positions in relationship to AI, how they’re helping students understand AI. So the way connected to what I’m observing now is an equal kind of lack of, I would say, public awareness or public discourse around how messy those data sets are as well. And again, I don’t say biased, because bias makes it sound like you can remove it. I say messy by default. You know, it’s not a secret—a lot of the data sets are kind of black boxes because there are proprietary algorithms that companies possess. But also more broadly, I think the sense of scale that AI has has overtaken the need to interrogate how these data sets come to be produced, what decisions went into shaping the algorithmic methods that are used to process it. You know, I think a lot of times there’s an intuition that, well, the whole of the internet was scraped to deliver me a ChatGPT answer, even though we don’t really know exactly where that answer came from. That sense of scale, I think, has ushered AI into a space that data once occupied—this kind of flawless space, where the scale of big data made it seem like you could eliminate subjective nuances. So I would really love to see us come to a place where we equally interrogate the data sets we interact with vis-à-vis different platforms. And I think already, as the dust is starting to settle, you start to see people in the research community asking more specific questions—not just where we can use AI, but how do we understand the output, really? How do we relate to what we interact with? How do we think about why we’re seeing this particular output on the screen and then another one? So I hope that’s going to be the next phase of our AI interactions. What do we call that? Is there a name for that level of reflection? Is that just reflection? Or what is that? Oh, I don’t know. Let’s think about it. That’s a good idea, too. Yeah. How would we—yeah—what would be the label? How would we call that? So what’s your experience with AI? I guess the second part of that earlier question is what do we do, or what’s your experience with AI and research and synthetic research, and how do you talk or think about it with regards to work and your own practice? And I think, on some level, it’s a practical question. In some ways, it’s not a question of either/or, right? I think even a few years ago, we were asking ourselves, will we use it? Should we use it? I think those questions are basically rendered irrelevant right now because it’s entered every nook and cranny of our experiences. I think the more relevant question now is how should we use it? And I think that’s the question we’re asking ourselves every day at work. We’re experimenting with different approaches. We’re experimenting with synthetic research, of course. We’re experimenting with using AI for different inputs across our research process. I think right now it’s a very experimental moment, but that’s probably the exciting part, where we actually get to ask how, right? Not just bluntly accepting what is, but interrogating and developing a point of view. And maybe again, I’m thinking—going back to my sense of when I stepped off that plane—you know, now is the moment of us trying to figure out: what are people actually saying? What’s important in this conversation? What does it all mean? I think that’s kind of, in some ways, an exciting moment. And yeah, nobody has the crystal ball. I really wish I could have a very clear perspective on what will happen. And in some ways, I’m nostalgic for the good old days of just straight-up human conversation. And I think there will be a space for that again. In some ways, I see there’s more—a little bit of suspicion around AI. You know, participants—are they using AI? Are they not using AI? I think there are companies trying to figure out how do you evaluate that. Will that mean a return, on some level, to a human—human, perhaps? So I hope so. Yeah. What other impacts do you see on qualitative, face-to-face kind of research as a result of the availability of AI across the research process? Yeah. So, you know, on the one hand—and I want to be optimistic about it a little bit—I cringe a bit when I hear people say things like, “We can now deliver 10,000 consumer interviews in the span of a half an hour.” And I sometimes ask myself, when am I ever going to be in a position where I need the answers so immediately, so rapidly? Something has gone terribly wrong if we’re doing it so last-minute. I had not heard that. I love that so much—that there’s something problematic about being so fast. Yes. You know, it’s offered as a solution, but then I’m asking myself, well, what is the problem? Is it that they forgot to do research in their business practice? So in that sense, I think we’re kind of in this euphoric moment again, where people are trying to put this label everywhere, and it’s not clear exactly where it will stick. Although some things are starting to fall off the board, which I’m happy to see. I think the speed of it is important, but the fact that it has to be solving for this particular problem—research as a really condensed, short-term activity. There’s a place for that, but I don’t know that we’ll necessarily see research being such an afterthought that it’s just brought in in such a last-minute way. And maybe people are using research more. In fact, from what I see on my end, when people are leaning into synthetic research, it’s often in moments when there wouldn’t be any research introduced at all. Maybe for ideation or brainstorming around the table. Some of that can help discipline the thinking a little bit, whereas there wouldn’t have been an opportunity to go out and do any type of research at all. So in some ways, it’s almost leading to more research, ironically. You know, where I see an interesting tension—and this is not my idea; smarter people than me have thought of this—is in the ethnographic practitioner community. I’m part of EPIC, the community of ethnographic practitioners. You’ve been part of that space. And just recently, in Helsinki this year, I was one of the co-moderators of a panel on AI in research—what does that mean? How are practitioners using it? And I was really struck by something. Two of the presenters—Eric Gray and Kevin Gotchevar, researchers at Nissan—were experimenting quite heavily with synthetic research and what utility it might have in their work. And one thing they said really, really rang true to me, and I continue to come back to that sentiment. One of the accusations that’s often leveled at qualitative conversations is: how can we trust what the consumer has said? People say, well, how can we trust AI? You can say the same of people. How can we trust what a person has said? People make things up. They get nervous. They try to perform. In some ways, there is that quality of invention that’s inevitable in research. But again, the point they made was this: whenever you see a contradiction, or a consumer says something, or a person you’re speaking to in a research context says something that feels unusual, or contradictory, or just new—that’s an opportunity to probe further. Hey, tell me more about this. And that can often be the space of real discovery. With AI, it’s less clear that hallucinations or AI imagination lead to the next “tell me more” in the same way. It doesn’t necessarily open up to the same level of revelation as a human contradiction. So I think navigating these two—when do we want to lean into some of the quirks of human engagement—yeah. Where will that lead to actually bigger insights? And then where—where is the opportunity for synthetic research, right? I mean, I feel like I haven’t read deeply on this, but I encounter the studies that are out there. What you said—yeah—I feel like what I’ve heard people describe is that it’s really good at the center, but it’s really bad at the fringe. You know what I mean? And so it’s really great for validation, but not so good for discovery. Yeah. And it’s especially good when you already have—when the person interacting with this data, and we often hear, you know, when we share synthetic results from our team with our teams, they often say, “That really confirmed my hunch,” or “That’s really how we were thinking of it as well.” And that becomes then an extra boost. Then, yeah, the person is able to, in a sense, validate the research or say, “Something is off here. It doesn’t make sense. Maybe I’m going to interrogate my own assumptions a little more.” Yeah. But that requires the person to have a set of expertise, not just to rely on synthetic outputs. You know, that really still requires the person to be really actively involved in evaluating. Yeah. I have a puppy eating a Christmas ornament. Oh no. Last question, which I think is—I heard—which is building on what we just talked about, but I also feel like at the beginning of the conversation about AI, there was a moment where you really acknowledged—because I think there’s a natural kind of defiance that we have as a qualitative practitioner or a research person—that of course no computer is going to replace us, like what we do is so special. But you were really honest about it. And I had this experience myself where it’s like, you know, for a lot of uses, it completely does the same thing that I do as a person in the work that I do. And it was sort of—I mean, uncanny might not be the right word—but it was definitely disorienting to realize that was the case, right? Humbling. Yeah, humbling for sure. And so I guess—so building on that idea that, wow, this stuff really does do things that we currently get paid for now. Two parts. First is: what is the value of qualitative to begin with? Why is it so important to begin with—what you do, what you know, as an anthropologist? What is it? What’s the proper role of qualitative, face-to-face qualitative? Why is it so important generally? And then especially in the age when all this synthetic stuff is there—in 30 minutes you can have perfectly good synthetic data delivered. Yeah. I mean, these are questions that I’m asking myself all the time, that I’m being asked a lot of the time. In many ways, I’m still formulating the answer. We’re kind of building the plane as it turns out, as we’re flying in it. Because I think what’s interesting in the current moment is that we’re being asked to shape-shift a little bit as researchers. We’re really being asked to articulate our value even more strongly. And I go back to anthropological expertise and the value and primacy of context. For me, that becomes even more important. Because in many ways, I think we can get really great responses online. I ask a question, I get a clean response—almost too clean sometimes. But what we’re lacking is: what’s the context in which that response was made? Who is that person? Again, to go back to that original sense—who’s that person that made that comment? What’s that person’s world? I was listening to a podcast by Zadie Smith, the novelist, and she said something really beautiful. She said, “Each person is a world.” And I think we really lose that—the world that’s within each person—when we rely too heavily on generalized, pressed-together, summarized data points. We really lose full sight of the idiosyncrasies of each person. And the fact that each person is bigger than this one question we’re asking. What’s the world in which they live? And what’s the world that’s inside each person? So I think there’s still real value in zeroing in like that. Sometimes that can give you much more depth, even if it doesn’t give you breadth for your research questions. So I hope there’s still a place for that. What do we lose when we lose context? We lose perspective. We really lose perspective. Anthropology, for me, the biggest value that I’ve taken is meaning. What does it mean? In the anthropological sense, there are no universals. What does this thing mean to different people? Whether we’re talking about hamburgers or soups, what does that particular object—when we work as researchers for brands, for products—what is this experience? What is this tool? What is this product? What does this mean to a specific group of people, a set of individuals, rather than as an object in and of itself out there in the world? It’s too generic then. It loses its usefulness in that cultural sense. It loses its interest. So I think to keep things interesting, we still need culture. And we still need to understand it. Beautiful. Well, that’s a beautiful way of ending. I want to thank you again for joining me and accepting my invitation. Yes. Thank you so much for inviting me. It was really a pleasure. Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe [https://thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]