Matt Klein on Ambivalence & Mythology

Indi Young on Listening & Cognition

Indi Young [https://www.linkedin.com/in/indiyoung/] is a researcher, author, and consultant focused on understanding how people think. She developed the mental models method and is the author of Practical Empathy [https://www.amazon.com/Practical-Empathy-Collaboration-Creativity-Your/dp/1933820489], Mental Models [https://www.amazon.com/Mental-Models-Aligning-Strategy-Behavior-ebook/dp/B004VFUOQ0?ref_=ast_author_dp&th=1&psc=1], and Time to Listen [https://www.amazon.com/Time-Listen-Invention-Inclusion-Assumptions-ebook/dp/B0B5NMLTF8?ref_=ast_author_dp&th=1&psc=1]. Her work emphasizes listening, qualitative rigor, and designing systems that support different ways of thinking in practice. And, she has a great substack, Indi Young [https://indiyoung.substack.com/]. So I start all these conversations with the same question, which I borrowed from a friend of mine who’s also a neighbor, and she helps people tell their story. And she has this question, which I just think is really beautiful, so I use it, but because it’s so big, I over-explain it before I ask. Because I want to make sure that you know that you’re in absolute control and you can answer or not answer any way that you want to. And the question is, where do you come from? I love that that question comes from your neighbor, too. I come from, well, my neighbor is actually a Buddhist meditation teacher, so neighbors are influential. Neighbors is a good word. I would say that I come from the edges of things. I am not a typical anything, and this is true of my entire family. Well, not entire, you know, there’s always, maybe most of the family is black sheep, and there’s a few who aren’t, I don’t know. But, yeah, I’ve never really been the person that anything was designed for. I remember sitting in math class in seventh grade, understanding what the teacher was talking about, but understanding also that the students weren’t understanding, but being way too shy to raise my hand and say, Miss Betsy, if you had just said this, then I think these guys wouldn’t be asking these questions. You know, it’s just I’m not smarter than anyone. I just see things. I can see things, I guess. I don’t know. Everybody can see things. But one of the things that’s interesting is I just visited my dad’s cousin, 87, last weekend, along with my cousin. And we were listening to family stories. And my dad’s cousin is full of vigor and has had a very adventurous life that is not like any other life you would expect. She was a horse trainer and rider, specifically Arabian, specifically endurance trail riding, which is a reenactment of the Pony Express. The original one of those was called Tennis Cup. And it runs from, it’s a hundred mile race that runs across the Sierras following the Pony Express mail trail that used to go across the Sierras. And she was instrumental. I mean, she rode that a bunch of times. I remember as a kid, I would look at the pictures of her going over Cougar Rock, which is an iconic place to take a photo of a horse, jumping up over a rock. And I was just in love. And so, of course, I also followed that path for a little bit. I am not rich enough to have horses on my own. But that was fabulous. She went on, I mean, she ended up working at a county jail for a while. She had just all these different adventures. And one of the things that I keep getting reminded of when I’m visiting her is that the family on her side, on my dad’s side, came to California in 1849. The third year that the Carson Pass was open. I think it was, I don’t know, maybe it wasn’t Carson Pass. It was a little bit north of that. But they came over at the exact same month as the Donner Party. Oh, my gosh. Yeah. And we have family stories about how typically awful the Donner Party was and how poorly they treated their Native American guides. And stories of how we built, I don’t know, we were, the family was doing something to build. It’s called, it’s the Greenewalt Party. That’s the name of the party that your family came to? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, you know, we’re, apparently, and we were the ones who, we went over, we built something so that we could go over it. And the Donner Party wanted to just use our stuff and whatever. Oh, wow. It’s, yeah. And we’re like, no, we’re going to go over it first. And then you’re going to come right on our heels because there’s a big storm coming. And apparently they were miffed and didn’t and stayed. And so you’re like, wow, OK. Few weeks later, we were part of the people coming back to help rescue them. Oh, my gosh. Right. So I think that, I mean, it’s a great little story because it talks about where we come from. I never, yeah, it’s not, we’re not a competitive minded family. We are a let’s cooperate and collaborate and work with our neighbors and get things done so that we all can move forward kind of a family. And that has completely bled into everything I’ve done in my career. I’m trying to help. Originally I grew up in Silicon Valley. It was not called that when I grew up, nor were there any of the tech bros there. There was no money there. There was Hewlett Packard. And I remember Apple being down the road from us in its very original form with a little rainbow Apple logo, although they didn’t. I mean, you only saw the rainbow logo Apple in some brochure because I never saw the actual logo on a building. I don’t think they were big enough for that. Where were you personally? What was the town you grew up in? Oh, that was called Los Altos. Yeah, I call it Los Altos now because there’s no way I can move back. Yeah, but it was like everybody that I knew, I got into computer science not because I wanted to, because it was something. So the story, once I got into it, let me tell that part of it. Once I got into it, everybody was a deep thinker. Everybody thought things through. That was the flavor of the people who were getting into the early computing. And it wasn’t something where I want to make money quick. That was not the goal. The goal was to figure out how these machines might be used for certain things and what that would look like and what the repercussions might be or how we could build on that. It was always about building on things. And then it did start shifting and I can tell you stories about that. But my whole goal with my career is to try to teach Silicon Valley to think more broadly to think about the edges, because the edges are half your market, literally half your market. And I have heard VPs and I don’t know, CTOs and stuff these days stand up and say, oh, we’re not interested in that market because that’s not enough income for us, not enough profit for us. It’s not worth it. Even though, you know, A, it should be worth it because they’re humans, too. I have this good example with a Netflix subscription plan, but it’s worth it because they’re human, too. But it’s also worth it because it’s not going to cost you that much. It’s software. It’s not going to cost you that much. So, yeah. Yeah. I’m curious. I want to get into those stories, but I always enjoy hanging out in the origins. So you’re in Los Altos. What did you, did you have a, do you have a recollection of what you wanted to be when you grew up? Yeah, I wanted to be a writer. I loved reading. Yeah, I think, you know, all through grade school, especially fourth grade, fifth grade, sixth grade, I was the student where the teacher would say, speak up. We can’t hear you. But they would also come to me and say, hey, you might want to read this book. And so I read, you know, I read Tolkien. I read Dune. I read all of that before I was out of fifth grade. I just loved reading. And of course, I go back and reread them. And then I go back. I have a list. This list is in Excel spreadsheets. That’s a very core thing to me is spreadsheets. The list goes all the way back to the 70s of books that I’ve read. And then I go back and I reread them and I get a completely different message out of them. And then I’ll go back and I’ll reread them. And this still happens. This happens with, I just reread the N.K. Jemisin Stone Sky series or whatever. It’s a series of three books. And it’s speculative fiction. We don’t call it science fiction anymore because that was the old guy’s way, you know, science. It’s like, no, this is more about understanding how people interact and how people would interact and what society would look like and what government would look like in the future. And in that series, it’s, you know, what, 40,000 years in the future of Earth? And we’re right back where we were during colonial times with respect to the government and the slaves and all of this. So interestingly, I read that for the first time, probably right before the pandemic, maybe a couple of years before the pandemic. And I just reread it last month. And a whole new message comes out. I mean, I caught all, I’ll highlight these things. And then I caught a bunch, you know, I caught a bunch of stuff the first time through. But then I’m like, oh, wait, there’s the lower message. And so next time I read it in another, you know, decade, I’ll find even more message. It would be really awesome. So reading has always been my thing. I wanted to be a writer. I remember my dad, we were standing in the kitchen. I think we were drying dishes or something. And my dad said, come here, I want you to watch this show. This show is called Nova. And it was the very first iteration of Nova, which was, you know, a science show, an early version of a science show. And in their intro, they had some computer graphics, early computer graphics, showing the logo coming together. And he’s all, you know, they did that on a computer. Would you be interested in computers maybe? Because I think you could earn a living on computers and then have writing as your hobby. Something to do on the side. He is also the man who told me, get into something where you provide a service. And instead, well, I don’t know, I provide a service, but nobody wants my service right now with AI. Nobody wants to know about the humans. Yes, yes. Well, now we’re talking. So how do you, let’s catch this up. So you tell us where you are now and the work that you’re doing. What is the work that you’re doing in your office? Well, the work that I do, of course, has many levels at it. And so it’s hard to explain. But I was with my team, I’ve got this Tuesday team of folks who are mostly laid off or retired, who get together and we love thinking together. And we’re trying to think together about a better way to describe this that works in the world of AI. And basically, it is that most of the products that we’re creating are designed to be an average. It is, here’s the product, most people can use it. I think there’s stories around why I think it derived that way. But most people don’t think the same way. They think in wildly different ways, even though they’re approaching the same goal, the same purpose or intent. And that’s completely lost. And in a digital product, as opposed to a physical product, but even those can change. And I’ve got stories about that, washing machine stories. In a digital product, it’s really easy to have multiple versions of it that match different thinking styles. So one of the key differences that I do is most teams look at what they’re doing from the point of view of the product, the solution, the service, the thing, the policy that we’re making. And I’m building a policy and it’s all about policy. And they forget. And actually, Brian O’Neill has this newsletter that I just read the first paragraph and it exactly says this. It’s like he does it for data dashboards and stuff. It’s like all the data is great, all the interface is great, but they forget. Way back in the beginning to ask the people what they were trying to get done. They forget that perspective. And that’s what my whole career has been about. It’s like, let’s go figure out that perspective. I don’t care what you’re building. When I come in to a client, they really want to show me what they’ve got. And I said, listen, let’s leave that for the later. I don’t want to look at it now. I don’t care. What I want to do is talk to you about what you think people are trying to get done. And let’s find those people so I can find out how they’re thinking about it. Right. I’m interested in their cognition. The way that I teach how to listen involves layers. I use an analogy of a spherical candy that you might have eaten that has layers. As a kid, you suck off the outer layer and it’s a different color underneath or a different flavor or something. And that’s basically when we’re interacting with each other conversationally, we tend not to go deep. We just stick with those outer layers. And that’s how we think about communicating. Dave Gray had this book called Liminal Thinking a while ago. He has this cartoon and a little sketch he drew where basically two people are trying to communicate with each other, but they’re only communicating with that outer layer. And so a lot gets missed. The foundational stuff gets missed. I work with teams who are sick to death of trying to fight with the other team to get things done. A lot of strife and a lot of friction. And I teach them how to listen. And all of a sudden, they can see that even they are just throwing spears back at the other people. They’re not attempting to get deep. Neither party is attempting to understand what actually is going through your mind and what actually might be emotional reactions you’re having, what actually might be personal rules that you’ve got under there. And once you get to that layer, all of a sudden, you’re like, oh, yeah, no, we’ve got the same personal rules in general. Or, oh, no, we’ve got very different personal rules. So let’s have a discussion about that. I’m sorry. There’s so many questions. When do people pick up the phone? I’m just so excited to talk to you about your work and about how you help people listen. I love the analogy of the lollipop, if that’s what it was, and that we stay at the surface and listening isn’t a skill or it’s not an instinct for a lot of organizations. I’m curious, what gets those organizations to the point that they ask for help? What do you find? When do you find people come to you? That is exactly what my Tuesday team and I are exploring right now. Because all in the past, people have come to me because they are at the point that they understand this is missing already. They’re already converts in a certain respect. They may have read something of mine. They may have seen a talk. I’ve given a lot of talks. I would admit that a lot of my talks are at a level that demands that the audience understand some more deep concepts. I’m realizing I need to learn how to speak at a more outer layer to draw people in, which I need to learn how to do. But there’s always something. So that’s how they would find out about me. Or it would be somebody telling somebody, oh, I was working with this new method. It increased our qualified leads in the worst winter month that we ever, normally we don’t get a lot of leads, but it increased it up and above the levels that we get in the summer by a third or two thirds. And people are like, oh, interesting. How did you do that? And so that’s how it worked. I’ve never had to, I’m not a very good marketer. Well, I have a lot of identification with that. I’m curious, because you talked about when you entered this world, that everybody was a deep thinker. People weren’t in it for money. And you didn’t start out as a listener or a researcher. I’m just curious, is that right? I mean, I’m just curious, what’s the arc of your career been and how did you come to really cherish listening and make it a focus for you? In the very beginning, as a young software engineer, you’re right, I was not doing that. I was on a team. This is spectacular. I wanted to move somewhere where I didn’t know the street names. And so I accepted the job in Denver, which was actually, it turned out to be a job in, it was in the aerospace industry. And it ended up being a job in a tiny Air Force Base way the hell out on the planes. But I landed my first day with five other women engineers. And I’m like, hey, this is weird. We’re all saying this to each other. This is weird. It was the guy who was, probably he was a feminist, probably, because we didn’t speak in those words, but probably he’s like, damn it, we need to hire people. These are fantastic thinkers. And so he’s like, I’m just going to do a glut on gender, gender and specific on women. And so we show up looking at each other, like, wow, how did this happen? This is great. We worked together. It was a really fascinating job until I saw at this Air Force Base, a guy with his, he has pimples. So he’s still, he’s not 20 yet. And he has this big automatic machine gun looped over his shoulder in the cafeteria. And I’m like, he swings around to get something. We’ve got his tray in front of him. And I’m like, dude, you’ve got potato salad on your gun. OK, this is enough. I’m out of here. What was the job there? What were you there to do? We were writing software. We were writing software specifically, I think I can talk about this, to make a testbed for Star Wars. And Star Wars was all these satellites that were supposed to shoot down missiles before they arrive on our soil. So it was, I mean, we had a five star general, of course, come because we’re five women in a giant cubicle. And they’re like, I got to see this, right? So different in those days. But it was, I thought it was interesting work because I really hate war. And I thought, well, let’s make it a game. Let’s make it a game that the people who love war can play without killing our people, our young people who still have pimples on their face and don’t deserve to die. But that’s not what it was. And I was done. And so the next thing that I did was basically join a company that was a spinoff from Cray. So I had been using, we were programming with the Cray computer. It’s a supercomputer back in those days. And there was a spinoff that was like, okay, we’re going to do a supercomputer, but with an operating system and with an interface. And so I was in charge of the interface. What would the visual interface look like? And that was super fun. And again, I mean, you get a chance to deeply think about things. But at the same time, it was a really small group of us. What was the state of the art for user interface? Was there any? Oh, that’s actually worth talking about. Motif, I think was the name of the operating system. It was a visual operating system. So I don’t know if you know, Xerox Star was the first visual operating system before Apple. And we had, and in college, I went to Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, and we had a bunch of Xerox Star machines that we got to, we were programming with them in the beginning. And it was a windowed interface, which was fantastic. I also love the fact that it had a way to get at the keyboard and use different keyboards. So if you didn’t want the QWERTY keyboard, you could use a Dvorak keyboard, which was supposed to be more efficient in terms of the English language. And the QWERTY is more mechanically efficient, meant for typewriter. And so you could just change it. I was a touch typist, so you don’t look at the keyboard. And you could learn how to use a Dvorak keyboard by having the little icon of where the keys are laid out on the screen. It was beautiful. Xerox did some great work. So anyway, we were building something. I think I ended up going with the operating system that I think was Sun Microsystems had pioneered. And it had the word tool in it. And I can’t remember why. But it didn’t have color in it. And the other one I think was called Motif. And it had color in it. And that one took off because it had color. But the one that Sun Microsystems did, and I think it was them. I could be wrong. I loved it better because they had more thought behind it. For example, the scroll bar. So right now, think of a scroll bar. You have to go find where it is. Move your mouse to it. Grab it. Move it down. Move it up. Figure out what speed it’s scrolling at. Use your little scroll bar thingy on your mouse, which I’ve never learned how to use, to affect that. And the Sun Microsystems one, it was not that. It was an elevator. On a cord. And the elevator had, at the top, a little way to just go up little bit by little bit. And at the bottom, another way to go down by a little bit, little bit. But you were keeping your mouse there. You didn’t have to move your mouse all over the place. And then you could move it up and down the cord if you wanted to go farther and faster. It was just some little bits. That’s the one I can remember. This was a long time ago. And so at what point did you, I mean, you develop mental models. At what point did you become a person that was really committed to listening? It was pretty much around that time I started thinking, okay, we are designing for other software engineers or scientists even. It was called SSI, supercomputer. Shoot, I can’t remember. It was called SSI, whatever it was. But at that point, if they really wanted to double down on software, who else are we programming for? At that point, as a programmer, you were expected to go understand the standard operating procedure, the standard way people did a thing. And so I would go and talk to all these people and try to figure out the standard way they would do a thing and then figure out a good interface for it. So that’s the point where I realized, okay, this is what it’s like to talk to people. But just a little bit later, I was working as a consultant. So I switched off out of SSI and became a consultant using something called PenPoint as an operating system. It was the early tablet. And sorry, I keep pausing because I’m trying to remember what was the word for that? We would bring the tablet around wherever we would go. We would go more places than I go now, out to a cafe or on a train or whatever. And people are like, what’s that? And it was a tablet that recognized handwriting. So for example, doctors, there was a particular doctor that hired me to help him figure out how to do patient charts in a way that would work for him. And he would carry it around. Recently, there was an Apple ad or something I saw that it felt like an alternate or parallel timeline that it seemed there was a real excitement about being able to turn handwriting into digital text around that time. And it just never took off. That was early 90s. I think it didn’t take off because NEC was the one who was providing the hardware. And they bought the company that did the software and killed it. There’s always some blunt explanation. There’s always something, yeah. And anyway, now we’ve got voice. So it was interesting because I was starting to work with the individuals who wanted to craft this thing in a way that matched the way they were thinking. There was one client who owned a bunch of satellites that would take pictures of the earth and they would sell them to the government and other corporations that would do things like mapping. This is well before Google Maps. And it was somewhat expensive. It was a business, right? And they hired me because they wanted maybe to expand. This is actually one of the ways you asked me that question earlier. One of the ways that people will reach out to me is because we want to do something different. We think there’s an opportunity to do something different. I’ve got a lot of stories around that. And this particular satellite company, they must have wanted to expand their market or something. They might have sensed that bigger things were coming. Who knows, right? And so I’m there. I’m like, well, give me a bunch of your clients and let me go talk to them. And give me some people that you’re talking to to potentially become clients. And let me go talk to them too, half and half, because I don’t want to just talk to people who use this stuff. But at that point in time, they were using that stuff to do something else. It wasn’t using the solution, the imagery. And we’re going to talk about getting the imagery. It was, what are you trying to do with the imagery? Right? And how do you think about it? And after all of that, and I put the information together, I’m like, oh my God, there’s a huge mismatch. There’s some stuff that, and I did this vertically instead of horizontally, like the skyline. The first one was vertical. And it’s like, yeah, the vendor has this and the people are trying to do this. Only I had it, the people first. The people are trying to do this. The vendor supports it. People are trying to do this. The vendor supports it. People are trying to do this. Crickets. And I’m like, there’s your opportunity. And the other guy who brought me on, the other consultant brought me on to do the research. I remember we were sitting in the taxi going back to the Pasadena airport. And he’s like, oh my God, you have to copyright that. That is amazing. And I’m like, I’m not going to copyright it. I want it to live and grow. If you copyright it and you try to control it, then it dies. So I’m not going to copyright it. It’s something that I’m going to expand into the world. Right? So there’s just some, certain things about the way that I think are not because of my family. We’re not competitive that way. We are collaborative. We’re moving forward. So that’s, yeah. How has the practice changed or how has the world changed? I mean, it’s been, you’ve been at this for quite a while and I’m just, I’m always curious to hear people talk about, I mean, I’m always interested in the role of listening, the role of qualitative. What’s your sense of how it’s changed in your career? There’s a few changes that have happened. The early change was that people started to realize that qualitative is just as valuable as quant. In the early days, people thought there was one spectrum and the good stuff quant was at the good end and the bad stuff, the iffy, guessy stuff was the qual and it was at the bad end. And they started realizing, no, they’re both their own spectrum. They both have an empirical end and they both have a subjective and we’re like, you’re guessing. And there was a lot of qual out there where people would go and listen to one or two stories and they would say, hey, here’s our pattern. And I was like, no, that’s subjective qual. And so I think one of the big changes was that there were a bunch of people who realized there was qualitative data that was actually verifiable and repeatable and therefore empirical. The whole reason for qualitative, the whole way that you can find out whether it’s verifiable is whether patterns come out of it, which is not something that people using quant could understand easily. I’ve always been a words person. I wanted to be a writer. The SAT, I got 100% on the English side. Words are awesome. I think I’m losing a lot of them now. But yeah, so I think that was one of the changes is that, yay, people are getting it, that there is value in these words and that social sciences are still a science. I want to linger here a little bit because this is where things get, I guess, significant in a way. I mean, you call yourself a qualitative data scientist, which seems very intentional. And I’m just wondering, what is the role or what is the value of qualitative for somebody who is mostly in the quantitative realm, to your point? I mean, I encounter lots of people. I love your analogy. It’s a spectrum. The qualitative is on the fuzzy, subjective side of things. But how do you help people see that they’re distinct? And what is the value that you articulate around qualitative? What does it do that nothing else does? What qualitative does, and when I try to convince people it works and it doesn’t work, right? There are some people for whom they will never trust it. But what qualitative brings is an understanding that people are like little galaxies and they have a lot going on in their minds. And what’s going on in their minds cannot be reduced to a Cartesian map. It changes. It’s what you think changes based on your inputs, your context, your mood. You don’t do the same thing twice, necessarily. There are guiding principles or personal roles, I call them, that underlay this. And most of the time, people don’t mess around with their personal roles. They stick with them. When they are messing around with them, it’s when you feel like, the words like your hands start to sweat a little bit because I’m going against this thing that I always believe is the right thing to do. So this might be a good time to talk about the pieces. So one of the things that I do when I’m convincing someone is I say, there’s a bunch of words that people say, which are just that outer layer. And that outer layer, as many surveys as you’d like, is going to produce a bunch of numbers that mean nothing because your survey is about those outer layers. And you’re going to make a decision based on this survey that people, really like blah, blah, blah. But like is a preference. And the preference is going to change based on who they’re next to. Right? You’re going to make a business decision based on it, and it’s not going to go down so well. And you’re going to forget that you made that decision because it was the result of a survey about preferences or a survey that maybe even there was a time when surveys were terrible because people always thought, I’ve got Survey Monkey. I can just write a bunch of questions. So no, but they would try to write surveys about what’s going on in people’s minds. And you cannot capture it in multiple choice. Right? Those days, I would say the only good survey is an essay. And people don’t want to fill in the blank because that’s a lot of writing. So the only good survey is to do listening sessions. And the only good survey I say now is a survey where these are facts you would say about yourself. Right? Not personal rules, not preferences, not inner thinking, not emotional reactions, but facts like I am five foot four. And why must we be so careful about the questions that we ask in that way? Because I’m alluding to the idea that when people try to lay out someone’s inner world into a survey format, they’re never going to capture all the potentials. So every time I look at a survey, let’s take... Okay. I also hate these universal personality types. There’s this intent or love of let’s have a model of how everybody thinks. Horoscopes, Myers-Briggs, whatever personality test you took at the last place you were employed so you’d get along with your fellow employees better. Right? There’s no universal. There’s no universal. So Myers-Briggs, I keep, my cousins were really into it. So I try taking it and it’s like a hundred multiple choice questions. There are no answers for me. There was maybe one in 10 questions. I’m like, oh yeah, that answer matches me. But the rest of it, it doesn’t match. Yeah. It’s just not there. Right? So you cannot collect that kind of information in survey format. I don’t think it’s ethical to do it because you’re doing a disservice to the organization who’s trying to use it. Or you’re just building some sort of nice scammy universal model about personalities and selling it. So, okay, whatever. Doing a listening session is the only way and doing it carefully and beautifully is the only way to get an understanding of a person’s inner world. So in a listening session, we bring no list of questions. We only bring a germinal question. Germinal meaning a little seed and from which the conversation is going to grow. And that germinal question and every listening session is framed around a thing someone’s focused on addressing. I call it a purpose because I want to say something higher than a goal. I don’t know if you’ve heard of jobs to be done as a methodology. Yeah. They say it’s, somebody’s job and their jobs are always very discreet, very small. In a listening session, I go with a little bit bigger jobs, right? So to speak, I don’t like to use the word job. They have it. I don’t like to use the word goal either because a lot of these things are things that you never are going to ever accomplish. You’re just working at them as a part of your life. I did a listening, a study for a company making washing machines. And our study was about how do you take care of your clothing? And in fact, the other part of it, that germinal question is that we focus it on the past. So how did you take care of your clothing over the past month or two? Okay. Also, you’ll notice we didn’t ask about the solution, the washing machine. We asked about what people were trying to get done. Okay. So there’s a bunch of stuff that goes into that thinking that goes into the way we form a germinal question. And that also influences recruiting and who we want to hear from. There’s other things that the company is interested in, in terms of how they want to expand or how they want to innovate that goes into recruiting as well, but it doesn’t go into the germinal question. Yeah. I’m doing a study right now or helping a team form a study with doctors diagnosing stroke. They’ve done a ton of other kinds of studies. They want to do a study in this methodology because it’s maybe going to be the key to them understanding what’s going on. Yeah, I’m curious. I’m so curious to know more about what you do in the listening session. You say that there’s no guide, there’s no list of questions, but how do you talk about your approach? What happens there and what’s your role as the interviewer, the researcher? How do you even think about what you’re doing there? Can you just say more about what’s happening in there and what you’re doing? You are free in there. I have heard Sam Ladner and Steve Portigal in their podcast. They have this great podcast, something like Off the Path. In one of them, they’re like, God, I wish I could just be free. But no, they’ve got these lists of questions and they’re both incredible researchers and they get a lot of stuff, but they are stuck within that list of questions. That’s mainly because their client wants to know about the solution and we haven’t framed it by what are people trying to get done. I think they do frame by what people are getting done, but it isn’t from a cognitive point of view or it isn’t from... I don’t know. It’s interesting. They actually do a really good job within the constraints that they’re in. I don’t have an academic background in anthropology, so I didn’t know that you had to be constrained that way. And so when I started out, that satellite company, the next time I did this, I think it was for a big investment company, I’m not going to ask you about your accounts. I’m going to ask you about what you’re trying to get done. So it’s got to be some specific thing. And the org was well, we do all these things. We do all of them. We’re well, okay, we’ll do all those studies then. What do you mean? We’ve got to frame it by the thing people are trying to get done. So within a listening session, let’s take that example of the washing machine one, taking care of your clothing. People will say, a lot of the time, maybe a third of the time, they’ll say, well, where do you want me to start? I’m what just went through your mind right now? But the beautiful thing is that usually I have had an intro session with them first. And we do intro sessions, 15, 20 minutes to make sure that the person is comfortable with this kind of inner action. It is not a survey spoken out loud, right? Yeah. I am not going to lead you through a list of questions. And we will get a bunch of candidates. We will do intro sessions with them. And in that intro session, we’ll find out if they’re comfortable. And we’ll also find out if they can speak about their inner thinking. And there was one candidate. This was for a study about, it was a company that makes small appliances. And they just wanted to what else can we do? What are people doing in the kitchen, right? Well, you can’t just say, what are you doing in the kitchen? That’s not specific enough. You can’t say, what are you doing when you make dinner? Because a lot of people make dinner in a lot of different ways. So we decided on what went through your mind as you were cooking dinner in the mindset of feeling like a creative home chef. Okay. Very specific. Is that the germinal question? Yeah, that’s the germinal question. It’s what went through your mind. It’s in the past. And it’s about this purpose that people have. Yeah. I use that word purpose. I know I teach this globally. And there are countries this guy in South Africa. He’s all purpose means something totally different to us. I’m okay, good. Call it intent. I really identify with all the language in the models around benefit, jobs to be done, motivations, mindsets. I feel I also have a pile of language in that space too. That’s I’m not really... So I’m just connecting with that. That’s it’s beautiful though. Keep going though. So you have a germinal question. Yes, you have a germinal question. And generally people have thought about this germinal question since you had the intro session. A few of them, maybe a third of them, maybe a quarter, I don’t know. We’ll say, well, where do you want me to start? Because they’ve thought about it so much. There’s a ton, right? You, you always start your listening sessions, which is what this is sort of. There, there’s a reason why it isn’t exactly. With a question about where people come from. Right. So it’s a way of, okay, let’s get started there. It does not matter where we start, because what’s going to happen is that the person’s going to bring up a story. I’m going to try to get them to bring up a story. So within the clothing thing, there was someone who was a model. And taking care of clothing is important to that person. And they told me, I don’t remember how we started, but one of the things was, when they get a job, they’re looking at what the requirements are of the job. And then they know exactly what they’re going to grab. They have organized their clothing in a way that is, in reaction to the types of job descriptions that they get for the modeling gigs. Right. And that’s not true of this other person who was a widow, his wife had passed away. He still wants to appear neat and pressed. He doesn’t want to give up, because there’s that big, deep black hole when your partner has died and he doesn’t want to fall his way of not falling into the big, deep black hole is with his clothing. Right. And so we’re getting all these stories. When we get these stories, what we’re interested in is two things. Well actually a lot of things, but one of them is let’s make sure that we’re building trust with this person because the person’s not going to just go out and tell you their inner thoughts if they’re not sure who they’re talking to. Right. This is why a listening session has to be one-on-one. It can’t be multiple people because you guard yourself. Maybe subconsciously, you’re just not going to talk about certain things. Right. And I don’t want people to talk about stuff that they would never tell anyone, but I do want them to talk about their inner thinking, their emotional reactions and their personal rules. And I want us to sense. So this is the other thing we’re doing. When people are just explaining to us how they do them things, how the necklaces are organized on the racks going down her hallway, part of her clothing. Right. But why? Right. I want to understand what’s underneath that. Well, they might get an opinion. They might tell me because this is better. But why? I don’t want to stick with just the opinion. Where did that come from? When you first started doing it, do you remember what was going through your mind? And it was oh yeah, it was that day when I was at my friend’s apartment and she was trying to get ready to go out. We were going out and she couldn’t find the necklace that she wanted or, whatever. Right. And I’m I never want to make anyone late, including myself. We were late to the concert. I never want to make any, so I have to organize this so that I don’t meet people late. Right. So my personal rule then got formed. Well, maybe the personal rule was I don’t like being late, but that thinking of making my necklaces all organized as a part of that personal rule of I don’t want to ever be late. Maybe it was related. Maybe it wasn’t. I’m making up this example because I’m not going to tell you people’s actual thinking. The, the, the, what happens outside of this is important. After we look for patterns and this is important and I want to touch on this, maybe again later, but we’re not just looking at one person’s story and then surfacing that story, that story, meaning that inner thought, that trip back in memory. We were in the apartment. My friend couldn’t find her necklace. We were going to be late. Right. It gets rolled up with other people’s stories where they have the same focus of mental attention. So it might not be about necklaces. Necklaces are nouns. It might not be about feeling in a rush, but it might be, or it might not be about a personal rule of not being late, but it might be. These little things are focuses of mental attention. So when we analyze the data, what we’re doing is we’re using an affinity technique of what is the person focused on in that moment? What is the bigger thing? Yeah, they’re trying to find the necklace. What else were they focused on? They were focused on trying to get the concert before the gates shut or something, or maybe meeting friends in front of the Coliseum or wherever they’re going. And letting that friend down or thinking about how the last time they went out with that friend and they were late, the friend said, okay, you get one more shot and then I’m not going to concerts with you again. They might’ve been thinking all of that, but we’re doing focus of mental attention. And the focus of mental attention is what shows up as those towers in the skyline. Those towers contain the stories. The stories might be totally different. I have a study that I’ve been doing for many years about what went through your mind as you experienced a near miss incident. And those incidents are all varied. And what kind of, I’m curious, how do you, what kinds of questions you, I mean, you’ve written about listening and listening deeply. What have you learned? And what do you teach about how to help people tell these stories or uncover these stories? So the things, and I teach, we’ve, I’ve got a course and I’ve got a book and I’ve been teaching at various levels throughout the career specifically began with just people who wanted to have a job and work with me. And so I teach one off and so I’ve just gotten better and better and better at it. And part of what I’m teaching is when you try to form trust with someone, you do it by those little words, like, uh-huh, uh-huh. Yeah. Your tone of voice, you do it by understanding how they speak and trying to not speak yourself in a very opposite way. So if the person’s very quick, very fast, then you will have very fast questions. You wouldn’t be going, oh yeah. And having a space. You would do it their way. I teach people some of the ideas to let go of your judgment. Well, we’re certainly letting go of whatever the client wants. I don’t care about the client. I don’t care about their product. I care about this person, what they’re trying to get done. So you try to keep the product and the client out of the conversation. But more than that, you try to keep your judgment out of it. So you might hear someone saying something that they believe that you’re like, oh no, you’re a little fringe on that. That’s a judgment. You let go of it. You’re like, oh, totally. I can see how. So you’re thinking around that, just be there, be there for them. You are not lying. You are being there for them. Have you ever heard of Harleen? I’m sorry. Go ahead. Have you ever heard of Harlene Anderson? Does that name ring a bell? No. I’m going to send you these links, but she was a therapist and I have some footage of her talking about training therapists. And one of the things she talks about, everything you’re saying reminds me is resonating with interesting. Yeah. But she talks about how you ask questions not to get answers, but as a way of participating in the conversation. Yes. Exactly. Well, that’s actually a good segue because the other part of this is like, well, what do I ask? You go into this with no questions. A lot of people are like, that’s like asking you to cross a tight rope between two cliffs with no net. I’m going to freeze up. How did you come to this? How did you come to this way of doing it? That’s a harder question to answer. Let me answer the first question. Write that one down, bookmark it. So the idea is to calm people down to say, there’s no cliff. You’re just with this person. You’re trying to understand this person. All you’re trying to do is sense what layer of this jawbreaker. That’s the candy that I talk about. What layer are we at? Are we at sort of this description layer explanation scene setting? That’s all going to happen. Don’t try, you’re not going to ask them not to talk about this. You need it. But then are we getting, oh, here’s a preference. Can I ask, are they going to explain their preference? And here’s an opinion. Oh yeah. They’re explaining where the opinion came from. Good. Once they start hearing the kinds of questions that you’re asking, they start expanding themselves. They get into it. They start expanding. They also will, even if you mess up and you let a little accidental way of your talking into their conversation and they’re like, okay, oops, that’s broken. You can recover because of all the rest of the questions. They’re like, okay, I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt on that one. You can recover it in most cases. People are enthralled by the feeling of feeling heard, of being listened to. It’s like nothing else. And so they’re willing to allow you a couple mistakes. They’re not willing to allow you outright judgment. That’s the end of it. Turn it off. But when you’re in it, there are types of questions that I teach people. There are types of questions for getting behind the preference and the opinion. But a lot of the time, there’s going to be some part of inner thinking that’s got more to it. And I’ll say, they’ll say, so my wife used to hang the clothing out to dry on the lines and I’m a little reluctant to do that. And I’m like, because we live in San Francisco where it’s foggy a lot of the time. I’m not sure things are going to dry out. And I’m like, well, what went through your mind the last time you were thinking about this? So there’s two types of questions there. There’s a because, a continue question. You could say and. I don’t say the word why very often. Because works a lot better. It doesn’t interrupt. The second one was what went through your mind? Just the last time. That’s another kind of question. So I’m teaching people kinds of questions. In the book, you can actually see the chapters on the edges from the bleed over. And the chapter on the types of questions is the biggest part of the book. So yeah, there’s a bunch of different ways. And what you’re doing is just sensing as you’re going. You’re sensing when they’re talked out on this one topic. You’re sensing when there’s another topic that they drop onto the table. And the way I think about this is it’s a jawbreaker. A jawbreaker, that candy with the layers, is a topic. They drop it onto the table. They might drop two more. And you’re not going to dive into each one of them right then. Because they’re in the middle of this other jawbreaker that they’re talking about. And every jawbreaker has these layers. They’ll speak at every layer or most layers. Or maybe only the outer layer. Maybe only the interior layer. The interior layers where the inner thinking, the emotional reactions. And the personal rules are. There might only be one of those, not all three. So for each topic, all you’re trying to do is circle around to see if we can get them the center of that jawbreaker. And sense whether they’re done with that jawbreaker. Or follow them when they drop another topic. And they jump to it. Follow them and maybe come back to this other jawbreaker. That’s beautiful. I tell people, you’re not allowed to write notes. You’re recording this. You need to focus on this person. You need to stay on top of what they’re saying. If you write notes, you’re focused on your notes. So all you’re allowed is to write down a topic, a jawbreaker. That they might have dropped and not gone to. That you can jump into later. I feel like I could talk to you for hours about this. There’s more I want to ask you. We’re kind of near the end of time. So I want to end with a provocative question that stumped me. And it’s, so somebody had invited me to answer the question. What would you say to a CMO or a senior leadership? Why invest in face-to-face qualitative when in this age of synthetic users and synthetic panels? What do you tell them? What makes it worthwhile? The all the synthetic stuff is designed around the way people are using a product. It is designed. Sure. It’s getting qualitative, but it’s not designed to pick out cognition. It’s not designed to emphasize cognition. It’s not designed to see that wild variety of the way people think. So the thing that comes out of this, there’s the skylines that I talked about with the towers and the stories inside. There’s also thinking styles. And thinking styles are key to convincing the organization that it’s worthwhile to support thinking styles other than what they usually support. So normally an organization will say, oh, we’ve got personas. The personas are basically the roles people play. So we’ve got a product for this persona here. This persona does such and such a role. And the role is actually the purpose. The role is the goal. Within that goal, there’s going to be two, three, four thinking styles. And your solution is supporting either an ugly amalgamation of them, an average of them, or one specific kind that’s the kind that’s most prevalent at the way the people think in the organization that’s making the solution. What’s an example of a thinking style? Okay. So for the washing machine, there was a thinking style around appear well-dressed. Stains. Oh, my God. Stains. Some people wanted, they had certain styles, different styles of clothing. Some buttoned down and everything. Some of them really lovely, stretchy, slouchy things, but they were designed. They were very styly. Style doesn’t matter. But keeping that style as good as it was when it was in the store, when you discovered it and fell in love with it, or as good as it was when you were a younger person wearing that same clothing, preserve the style, preservationist, that kind of a thing. Okay. There’s another thinking style around it’ll be fine. Clothing is going to cover me and I will be good. Maybe I’ll wear the color shirt that I need to wear for work. Just make sure there’s no stains. Okay. Stains are a universal. There’s another one that’s a separationist. I don’t want cross-contamination. This came from several different places. One person working at a hospital in the emergency room. Another person had a baby. They got a whole separate tiny washing machine for them for baby’s clothes that goes in the tub. And another person had kids that played a lot of soccer and went and played outdoors. And she didn’t want that clothing in with the kitchen towels, drying the dishes. Separationist. So now your washing machine. You’ve got your washing machine. It’s got the panel. Right now the washing machine is designed to surface how the mechanics work. You want hot water or cold water? You want it to spin fast or slow? Has nothing to do with those thinking styles. So you could make it work for one of the thinking styles. But what? When you sell the thing in the beautiful ideal future, you sell the thing. You walk in, whether you’re going to buy it in person or online, and you’re going to talk about how I like my clothing to be in my world. How do I take care of clothing? And then I’m going to select the washing machine that does that. Behind the scenes, it can be the same dang washing machine. Just has a different software that runs on the panel that talks about what you’re trying to get out of it. And so if you sell that washing machine or sell that house and someone else comes in, they can press a button and pick out their thinking style. And the front end changes. It’s beautiful. I mean, in my own relationship with my washing machine indicates that those washing machine companies need your help. There’s a significant language barrier and thinking style barrier between myself and those manufacturers. Again, I really appreciate you accepting my invitation and sharing your time with me. I could talk to you for another hour about all the work that you’ve shared and the wisdom that you’ve shared with all of us. I just thank you very much. Yeah, thank you, Peter. This was a lovely 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]

Annie Auerbach & Adam Chmielowski on Rifts & Futurelessness

Annie Auerbach [https://www.linkedin.com/in/annieauerbach/] & Adam Chmielowski [https://www.linkedin.com/in/adam-chmielowski-ba7736a2/] are co-founders of Starling Strategy [https://starlingstrategy.co.uk/], a cultural insight and futures consultancy now in its tenth year. They help brands step outside category conventions by mapping the cultural and historical forces that shape how people feel and why. Annie is a trained historian, journalist, and author of several books including a forthcoming one on collaboration. Adam is a trained historian with a background in international qualitative research. Both previously worked at Flamingo, where they created the Cultural Intelligence unit before founding Starling in 2015. Their pro bono project The Rift is amazing: The Rift One: [https://www.research-live.com/article/featuress/healing-the-rift-understanding-the-growing-divide-between-men-and-women-/id/5135613] Understanding the growing divide between men and women. [https://www.research-live.com/article/featuress/healing-the-rift-understanding-the-growing-divide-between-men-and-women-/id/5135613]The Rift Two: [https://www.research-live.com/article/opinion/living-in-a-culture-of-futurelessness/id/5146793] Living in a culture of futurelessness [https://www.research-live.com/article/opinion/living-in-a-culture-of-futurelessness/id/5146793]. Mentioned in the conversation is > Richard Huntington “The Mediocrity of Middle Distance in the Insight [https://www.adliterate.com/2019/05/the-mediocrity-of-middle-distance-insight/]”> Ella Saltmarshe [https://www.ellasaltmarshe.com/] on Sociological Stories So, as you likely know, I start all these conversations with the same question, which is a question I borrowed from a friend of mine, who is also a neighbor, who helps people tell their stories. And I use it because it’s a big question, but because it’s so big, I over explain it before I ask. And I’m going to ask each of you to answer this in turn. And then I’m curious to hear what Starling, your partnership, how that would answer the question too. But the question is, where do you come from? And again, you’re in total control, and you can answer or not answer any way that you want to. And Annie, I’ll start with you. Annie: Okay, so there’s probably two ways to think about where I come from. The first one is family and heritage. And so my dad’s grandfather came over from Austria to London in about the 1900s, 1910s, and immediately set up shop in the East End of London, in Jewish community, and he was in the schmutter business or he made clothes. And so my heritage comes on my dad’s side, from this immigrant background and making your way in the world. And big, strong communities, lots of family dinners and jokes. And this core of working hard and trying to better yourself. And a slightly outsider’s perspective, I think, as well, which I think I have in common with Adam, and I think very much tries to inform our work. So that’s one side, which is this heritage point. And then the second one is academics and where I’ve come from educationally. And it’s another thing that Adam and I have in common, but we both studied history. And so trained historians and thinking about the past and trajectories, and then I became a journalist, I became a writer. And so very much thinking about what moment are we in, it was a features journalist, I was always thinking about the moment we’re in the present. And now, of course, Adam and I do cultural futures. So it’s this past, present, future vibe that’s gone with my education and career trajectory. What was the business, the word that you said for your family? Oh, the schmutter business. Yeah, what is the schmutter business? Clothes, can’t you tell? I don’t, that’s not a, that’s a, what is that? That’s not a word I’ve heard before. It’s Yiddish. And it just means in the clothes business. Yeah. Beautiful. Adam. Adam: Well, in echoes of what Annie just talked you through, I can’t pull all the strings or the threads together in such a neat way that says something about how we think and what we do. But maybe they’ll come out as I speak. The older I get, where I come from, gets further back in the past. So most prosaically and more immediately, I come from a really boring, and when I say boring, I mean, the archetypically boring suburb, south of London in the county called Surrey. Nothing happens there. And it’s a place called Carshalton. I’m hoping I’m the only person from Carshalton that’s probably ever been on a podcast at all. And it’s the sort of place that has a wool shop. It had a wool shop when I was there 40 odd years ago. It’s still got a wool shop there, amazingly. And I’ve got no idea who buys the stuff from there. It’s probably surrounded by more chain coffee shops now. But it’s still pretty much the same. And it has that eerie familiarity whenever I go back there. Anyway, that’s the boring British or English, very middle class suburbia is where I’m from, on one level. Further back, but not that further back. So my parents were Polish. And they escaped Poland. Well, I say escaped, they were forced out of Poland during the war, the World War Two. So my dad was, his story was, he was ushered out. Ushered is such a light, ushered, please, sir, could you please leave your dwelling and come to us to our gulag? But that’s effectively what happened. So the Russians came to their door and told them to leave. They had an hour to leave their home, which I never saw again. So him and his two sisters, and their mother, their father, my great grandfather was, sorry, my grandfather was fighting in the war. So they were taken to Siberia. And eventually, I won’t tell you the story because it will take the whole hour. They found their way via India to London in around 1947, I think, eventually got there. And my mother, she was forced out by the Nazis. Same story, different enemy. She, through use of fake passports, got to the UK and also London, different part, to my dad, they met. And then they lived the English middle-class suburban dream. And many immigrants, assimilated into that world seamlessly at the time. And yeah, a few decades later, which sounds a long time, but honestly, it boggles my mind that it’s only what, three decades after that I was born in that really, really boring place called Carshalton. And actually, that’s where I’m from. And that whole story, I keep wishing to know it a bit more. Because as I say, the older I get, the more interested I am in it. It’s probably something to do with wanting my kids to understand it more. And historically, we’re just in a time of forgetting that period. And that has its consequences. So yeah, sorry, slightly long winded. I don’t have any connection to what we do. Maybe we’ll get there at the end of this. I don’t know. But that’s, yeah. So we talk about being ancestors of immigrants quite a lot, actually, funnily enough. It might be part of our connection of what we’re doing and why we’re still doing it. That’s so interesting. Yeah, well, then the next question, the third party in the conversation is Starling is your partnership. So where does your partnership come from? Annie: So we met, funnily enough, we both studied history at the same time at the same place, but never met each other. But we met each other in an agency called Flamingo, which was an international qualitative research agency. And Adam and I found each other. And we set up a wing of Flamingo, which was called Cultural Intelligence. So specifically around sociocultural trends and futures. And we did that together and we worked really well together. And then I badgered Adam to leave and set up Starling and eventually he agreed. But yes, we chose the name Starling quite specifically, didn’t we? Adam: Yeah, well, you said it’s because you were living in Brighton. Annie: Yeah, so I used to live in Brighton and there’s beautiful murmurations that happen, Starling murmurations that happen over the pier at dusk. And when Adam and I were talking about culture, it just felt like a really good metaphor in the sense that obviously you have these very dynamic choreographed movements of birds all happening at once. It’s incredibly beautiful and awe-inspiring. So something about culture moving constantly, but also the more we learn about murmurations, the reason for the movement happens because of threats and opportunity of the birds at the edges. So they might see a predator or they might see a food source or a place to rest and they can create these critical transitions of movements to push the entire flock of birds towards or away from something. We think that’s really interesting when you’re thinking about people and how change happens and how change often comes from the margins and how intersected it is. So that’s why we loved the metaphor. That’s so powerful. I feel like I had just listening to you describe it, that what it must be like to be a Starling in one of those murmurations. You’re so attuned to all the Starlings around you and somehow turning into something really moving, something that big, so beautiful. So there’s one question that we, so what did you want to be when you were a kid? Do you remember as a child what you wanted to be when you grew up? Adam: Oh my God. I really don’t, I genuinely don’t, but that just could be a result of a bad memory. Honestly, because I graduated from university and I still didn’t know and I had the luxury, frankly, and again, this paints a picture of a very different time. This is what, late nineties, that I didn’t feel like I felt like I had time to work out what I wanted to do. And as a lot of people who do this sort of work, I think stumbled into doing research and strategy type work. And that was based a lot around traveling a lot. And I also had a language, German, which got me into doing that. But honestly, I really didn’t think ahead. And it was a bit of a privilege and luxury because, you know, we’ve been doing some work around how young people look at the future now. And I looked, I saw it as something that was just going to offer me some possibilities and opportunities, honestly. And partly that was through, you know, my education and that’s what is instilled or was instilled in you, you know, for better or worse. So honestly, no, I don’t have an answer for you what I want to speak when I grew up. Annie: I wanted to be a vet. Is that right? Annie: Yes. I really loved animals. And I think that there was something quite, I don’t know, unadventurous or unimaginative that if you loved animals, you had to be a vet. You couldn’t just get a dog. But now I have two dogs and I’m not a vet. So it’s worked out really well. Yes. And so tell us now, where are you and what’s the work that you guys do? Adam: So where are the, where is the, where are you as an existential is your first question? Was that literally where I was? Annie: In London. Adam: In London. Yeah. So, okay. More tangibly. We are, so we’re 10 years in, specifically, we are, this is our 10th. We’re completing our 10th year as Starling in May, which is a real landmark. Congratulations. Adam: We think. And we haven’t fallen out and… Annie: Not once. Adam: Not once. And we’ve, you know, we’ve stayed Starling as the two of us. Everyone asks about growth or assumes growth comes from head count and all the usual metrics of what a growing business does. But I think we’ve managed to evolve and keep interested in each other and the way we think and work, but as much also in the work that we do for clients. It’s always been cultural insight, futures, Annie talked about her background in journalism and she also writes books, I’m sure, and she can talk to you about that as well. But a big part of what we do is trying to articulate and write well in ways that move people. But back to the murmurations, I don’t claim that we are writing and our outputs quite have the same emotional effect as they do, but we’re really big believers in the idea that the ideas that we try and convey should make people feel something, not just cognitively, but genuinely feel excited and want to do something with them. It’s harder as we do it through screens, right, I suppose. So that’s the work we do, and we can maybe talk about some examples, but yeah, it’s the, I don’t know if it’s grey areas, but I wouldn’t say we’re just one or the other, you know, Annie said we started in this, we created a unit called Culture Intelligence, which was essentially about in a qualitative group. And we were just interested, both of us, just in the forces that sit around people and between people that we don’t typically spend enough time thinking about. And I mean that societally, as well as in the industry or brands. And we were just fascinated by that, really, of all the different ways in which culture operates. How do you talk about what culture is? Sorry to interrupt you this, I’m getting excited about it. I always tell this story, poor Grant McCracken, he wrote that book, Chief Culture Officer, and I always reference him talking about that the chief culture officer for him meant you have to let the culture in, in order to breathe it out. And he had this really beautiful idea. But he said that the whole corporate sort of world, just when they see the word culture, they think of themselves, they think of internal culture. There’s a narcissism inherent. And so how do you, number one, how do you define culture? And how do you get people to care about it? Annie: Yeah, so there’s the culture in here, and then there’s the culture out there, right? So one of the most interesting ways that you’ve talked about it is around sociological stories, rather than psychological stories. I really like that. Adam: Yeah, because you know, what I was thinking, I was trying to remember who it was, I came across that distinction. And typically, the media, or most stories that you’ll see out there are psychological stories, they have interviews with individuals, they’ll tell that story for connection and intimacy, and empathy, you know. But what that tends to miss out, and I always found this really interesting is the ability to tell a sociological story, which talks about all the power dynamics around people, or all the contexts and trends and influences that surround them. And actually, it’s those stories, and I think they’ll talk about this in a environmental context, those stories are the ones that tend to affect social and cultural change. So they might be harder to tell, and there might be less frequent in terms of how we’re exposed to, but there is another way. And we just, we just seem to obviously, there’s enough people that are interested in us telling those stories. Back to your original question about how we define culture, I reckon sometimes we don’t, we don’t define it too much, we don’t have a one liner, in all honesty, your Anadolu Grant, who is brilliant, I know Grant, and even if someone as clever and smart as Grant cannot, can have a go at it through a book, and it might not necessarily work with all people, it just shows you how hard it can be. The space between people, I always come back to a very simple thing, which is thinking about the spaces between people, which can be filled with stories, literal, physical geography, and the spaces, structures, the material stuff, that to me is where we’re talking, typically, and filling in lots of gaps. Annie: And I always think about it as the deeper why behind some of the things that we can observe. So in quality ethnography, you can get really close to understanding what people are doing, and how they’re talking about it. And sometimes you need that bird’s eye view, or that historical trajectory, to step back and understand those connections and systems that are swirling around people to understand why they feel the way they do, which is a bit of unlock sometimes with our clients as well. Because we can get to some deep attentions that then can help them understand how they can be helpful as brands and move things forward. Adam: It makes me think of one thing, Ella Saltmarsh was the woman I was thinking about, sociological stories. Anyway, sorry, what you just said reminds me of one of the best things I read about insight. I bet you’re probably familiar with by Richard Huntington, the strategist in the UK. And he talked about, he was talking about how too much insight lives in the middle distance, which is neither proximate and close and intimate and truly empathetic, either very up close stuff, which qual and other research methods are great at or good qual. And then at the other end of the spectrum, I don’t know if you call it perspective, but I always remember the phrase, understanding the turns of culture, and just really understanding that landscape that people are embedded in and surrounded by. And I guess we operate at that end of things, often working with the proximity on a project or with the client clearly will be doing lots of good work on that end. So yeah, I remember that piece. I will include a link to it as well. When did you first discover each of you that you could make a living doing this thing? Annie: That’s a really good question. I was a journalist. And I ended up being the editor of a teenage girls website. And this is showing my age, but it was pre-Facebook. And this was a community of teenage girls who, and I’d only worked on magazines before. So there’d be a monthly postbag with 10 letters in it. And with this teenage girls website, we were getting hundreds of emails every single day. And I was suddenly immersed very deeply in their problems and their hopes and their dreams. And I really wanted to, I was writing for them, but I wanted to write about them. And that’s when I realized that research was a thing. Because it’s not like you grow up and go, hey, I want to be a market researcher when I’m older. Or maybe you do. But so I realized research was a thing. And then more when Adam and I met each other and started talking about ideally what we were bored by and what we wanted to elevate to, I think we realized that there is a space for being able to bring a specific cultural and future lens to something, which at the time, there wasn’t much of was there? I don’t think anyone was really cultural intelligence. I know, it’s such an overused term. I don’t think anyone was really talking about it then. Not much. Which was how many years ago, probably 20, 15 years ago. Adam: Yeah, that’s at least 15 years. So it’s five years, we’re running that unit within Flamingo. And there would be more, typically, you’d have a semiotic, there was a semiotic group, but we weren’t semioticians. Yeah, we’re interested in other aspects of how societies work, organise, change, other aspects that felt complementary to that. Annie: Did we have a client who suddenly was like, yes, this is the thing. And I’m trying to think of them as that moment of definitely when we left and started Starling, we had a foundational client who was like, absolutely, we want this thinking. And we’re like, okay, I think this is going to work, touch wood. And what do you love about the work for each of you? Where’s the joy in it of all the different pieces of the thing? Where’s the joy in it for each of you in the work that you do? Adam: There’s loads of joys. I mean, honestly, mostly working with Annie. I’m not just saying that, because, through work, I mean, there’s loads of ambitions or goals you might have through work, finding your people is, for me, probably the biggest one, as long as everything else is equal, and you’re earning a living and all the rest of it. The most important thing is that you’ve got someone who you can, not just, sorry, go on. Annie: I was going to say riff with, get to a better place. Adam: Yeah. And also just all the other things that, support each other and know that we’re in this together and feel supported and feel safe in voicing our ideas. Someone said to us the other day, it’s a vulnerable thing to do our job, any insight person, I think, but to pitch your ideas constantly to people, often through a screen. And you’re putting yourself out there. There’s a bit of a myth, I think, about insight being some objective practice. I don’t, I’m not entirely sure I buy into that entirely, because you can say anything, and you’re effectively trying to marshal an argument and put it out there. And it’s got a lot of you in it. So it’s never really quite that. It’s got a lot of us in it, I should say. And having Annie next to me to do that is everything, really. I think so. And so that’s the people side of it. Honestly, that’s the biggest answer to your question. Annie: I like the alchemy of an idea coming together. So I find that super exciting when we’re throwing and by the way, by the way, I’m writing a book about collaboration. And I think I wouldn’t necessarily have written that book if I hadn’t had such a great collaboration with Adam for so many years. But it’s the there’s something around sharing half formed ideas. And we’ll WhatsApp them to each other, we’ll talk about it when we’re walking from A to B, we’ll write something down, we’ll have this way of doing it, where we write 10 things down in the email, and then swap 10 things. And often, three of them will be pretty much the same. And then the others will push our thinking. And there’s something about the growth of getting towards to a really hopefully great, creative, and interesting, and different, genuinely different, because we’ve seen so much of the same. So high standards, is this interesting? Is this different? And I think there’s something very cool about that. And our clients have clustered us with some really interesting, high level, difficult questions, haven’t they? Yeah, so we get, go ahead. No, I was going to ask what’s an example of the kinds of questions that come to you, I want to talk about Rift, but I’m curious to, and I know that came out of you guys, but I’m curious, what are the problems that clients come to you? Adam: So there’s two answers to that. One is, the problems are everyday business and brand problems. So there’s a new positioning, and they want to make sure it’s really future facing and plugged into culture, or it might be a comms campaign that they want to ensure it feels like it’s going to be nourished, or feel of a piece with the broader cultural stories out there, not just category stories. So whether it be positioning stuff, comms, innovation, thinking about how to re, how to think about how they could push a category, all those are the questions, or where it goes to. But what’s probably more interesting is the topics or the questions, and they’re often one worders, honestly, there’ll be a one word brief, which is around tell us about joy, tell us about the outdoors, because these are the outside in questions, if you like, that will help get away from the norms of the category, and just reframe it and just take it in a different direction, or brand, these might be brand equities that they’re trying to say something fresh in. Can you say more about the need to escape the category conventions and the role that even just the framing of the exploration plays just to be really explicit about how important that is and what that does for a brand? Adam: Yeah, I think some of it comes from a lot of the brands we work for are big businesses, big global brands who do a ton of research, and their competitors will do a ton of research. And these waters are potentially overfished. I know I mixed my metaphors now. Because you ask enough people enough of the same questions, you’re going to get to the same answers and the same responses in terms of what the brands end up saying. And there needs to be a deliberate reframing of that or making the familiar feel a bit strange as the academic speak, which just helped people imagine what they can do differently. One of our favorite clients, one of our favorite quotes that they gave us, in terms of what they felt, and they allowed them to do was to imagine new possibilities. So they didn’t say that gave us better insights or deeper truths, or understand culture, but all those things that people do say and they’re great. But it was this imagining new possibilities. And it’s this idea that you have to deliberately step out of the conventional way of seeing something to find new language for something to have an alternative references to say don’t compare yourself to other Chris brands or sneakers or whatever, but to other cultural products or movements or ideas. And so that’s the thinking that we bring that people find valuable. What would you add to that? Annie: Hey, so that’s the business answer. There’s another answer, which is, people sometimes have said the nicest thing to us, clients have sometimes said the nicest things to us, which is, this was the best thing in my day, or, this has inspired me to do. And I think there’s something about bringing fresh thinking and challenging ourselves very hard before we get to that moment where we share it with clients, that allows for a quite expansive meeting. And even if it’s happening over zoom, and it’s electronic or whatever, you are bringing unusual references, you’re colliding, you’re deliberately colliding high and low culture together, you are looking in strange places. So for example, in my collaboration book, I’m looking at how people collaborate in the world of accident and emergency, in the world of polyamory, in the world of writers rooms in America, and how you develop, so looking in strange extreme places in order to bring different fresh thinking that hopefully opens up possibilities opens up minds, gives them something to talk about, not only within the business, but also is it something that they might go home and chat about? Maybe? I don’t know. But this is the aspiration for us. And yeah, that’s what I would say. Yeah. And what are your practices? Because it feels like you’re pointing at there’s some practices, there’s some layer of stress testing around the ideas that you have to make sure. And I’ve done a bunch of these interviews, and the best people I talked to, they have this final analysis of is this actually something? Is this something that the client’s ever known before? So I’m just curious, what is your practice for making sure the thing that you have is something that is actually going to have an impact? And what’s that process like for you guys? Annie: Yeah, it’s a great question. I think the big, what we really love at the beginning is that they’re boringly called stakeholder interviews, but actually, what they are is conversations in order to understand where people’s heads are at. And I think the language that they use are clues to existing ways of thinking, existing models, existing familiar stuff to them. So if they overuse a phrase, or if they overuse particular words to describe something that’s really helpful to understand of where they’re at, and also understanding what they’re frustrated by and where they need to get to. So that bit at the beginning is this incredible map of what’s known and what’s not known and where there’s frustrations and appetites. And then the whole thing is a stress test between us, Adam often says, he’ll say something. And if I’m shrug, then he’s okay, no to that. And the same goes, if there’s no electricity, if there’s no movement, if there’s no, that’s the thing. And sometimes as well, I feel like Adam will say something, and it just is absolutely the thing. It’s that is the thing in all of this, that is the thing. And so there is that constant to and fro of what lands, what doesn’t, and what feels like it’s got some heat behind it. Adam: Yeah, you were talking earlier about whether it has a pulse, which I quite like the language of. Does it make you feel something? Does it feel alive with something? And these are all hard to describe, really, they’re a bit ineffable. But we’ve worked long enough together to have a bit of shorthand to feel that in different ways. And we’re equally humble enough to go, okay, I thought it was the best idea I’ve ever had. Right, we’ll move on now. The other thing is, we’re talking about the two of us, the clients we’re working with will give us a very strong steer in the sense of, so we’ll, the way we work in terms of practices, an awful lot of Google Docs. And so before we get to any formal situation and presentation, we’ll be riffing through Google Docs, improvising, maybe you might call it, as we go, and invite them in to participate in that. And honestly, one of the most, for me, useful exercises is go, well, before we write the final thing, let’s just work out where we’ve engaged their minds. Because that’s going to be our best guide to work out, you could tell a million stories here, usually, with these big questions, what is joy? What is the outdoors? I mean, where do you want to take that? But we’ve, you’ve got to be, it’s a collaborative exercise in the sense, I always talk about ideas emerge between people. And ideally, that’s, there’s a third part to the two of us, which is the client team or person. And I was listening to Adam Morgan do his podcast series on interestingness, which we use the word interesting a lot, when I genuinely mean excitement, for most people, interesting sounds like a euphemism for boring. Genuinely, it’s most things are not interesting, right? So I liked his series. And one of the things he said was, most interesting ideas are ones that people feel invited into, and that they can participate in. And I’m such a big believer in that in terms of effective work. Because, look, you can say, you can assert the most interesting story at someone, they’re not feeling it for whatever reason, or the timing is wrong. Or they happen to be talking about something entirely different, and they quite like it. But there’s so many reasons why it won’t work. So I love that word invitation to it’s such a, it’s so true, but it’s also so complicated, the idea of what makes something inviting, or what has what kinds of things have an invitation for some people. But I love that language described to describe it. So we I want to be respectful of time. And there’s two, there’s one question I want to ask before, and I’m really excited to hear about the rift, this project that you’ve been doing. But I wanted to ask about the role of qualitative, I’m always interested in how people learn, and the role that qualitative plays and how it’s changed. So what, how, what is the proper role of qualitative? And how do you use it to find that thing that has a pulse that has invitation? Adam: So one answer is, so we most most of and I’d say what 98% of our work doesn’t have a qualitative component in the sense of, I mean, you could call us work qualitative, in the broader sense. But typically, we don’t speak to in a commission primary work with consumers. Having said that, we did on our recent Rift work around young people’s relationship, failing relationship with the future. And obviously, that brought to life those intimate bits of language that really helped land our story and get people engaged. Our work with clients will often be woven together with qualitative, and usually deliberately not qualitative. So this is the hence the complicated answer to your simple question. But ultimately, they’re going to have to tell a story internally. And usually, I think, increasingly, now it has to be one story, people don’t have the appetite for time or budgets, potentially to do all those complicated things and leave leave it unwoven together. So we work as hard as we can to understand what’s there on the table and how we tell a story that sits alongside it. But I mean, what else would you say about qualitative, Annie? Annie: Well, just that we’re very, we’re interweaved with it. And we’re very adjacent to it. And yeah, I think it’s a really good complementary methodology for what we do. We might put a story in a longer time trajectory, past, present, future, and qual might tell brilliantly the story of and make people feel deeply the story of the present, perhaps. And so I think that’s how I can work together at its best. Adam: I mean, I think it’s actually probably quite rare. So Grant McCracken, he’s a great cultural thinker, he does a lot of deep ethnographic work. And he’s an anthropologist. Doug Holt, similarly, he’s got loads of worlds that collide together that make his work brilliant. And but equally does a lot of deep interviewing. I think it’s actually quite rare for people to be doing cultural work, which, for loads of reasons doesn’t do that. Because frankly, there’s enough to be exploring that sits around people and all the other, the history side of things. A lot of our work will have a story, part of the story, part of the argument, which is looking back in time to tell a historical arc of where have we been? Where are we now? Where might we go to? And again, just to have the resources and time to reflect and do all that analysis. Yeah, it just means that’s where we spend our time. Tell me if I'm wrong, but you're in the business of sociological stories — structural stories. Which is fantastic. So I'm curious: what does qualitative research actually bring to those stories? When does it show up, and what does it do when it gets there? Annie: No, no, I think it’s this kind of, it can be an emotional gut punch. And so we can tell a story, which is this intersecting forces that surrounds this emotion at the beginning in the middle. And if somebody is looking into your eyes and telling you how you feel, and this is exactly what happened on the roof, to be honest, there was one very poignant quote, which was almost from a young guy in the UK, which almost got to the absolute heart of why we wanted to look at this particular topic. And the way he phrased it, we told our story around it. But that was something I think that people will go home with and feel deeply, because, and what he said, by the way, was, we asked a question, how do you feel about the future? Because our topic of the rift this time around, we’ve done two, this is rift two, and it was the rift between young people and their futures. And he said, when I was younger, he’s only 23. When I was younger, I grew up and I imagined this amazing utopian future of flying cars and diversity and everything at our fingertips. And now what I feel now, the word is dystopian. And I’m just trying to live through that. And I think that way of phrasing things was okay, well, we need to work hard here, because this is just not good enough. To leave young people with that sentiment about how they feel about progress, ambition, the future, it’s not good enough, we need to help. So that’s what really spurred us to do this project. Yeah, what was the origin of The Rift? You said, there’s two, there’s two phases. The first was on gender, right? And the futurelessness is the first time I encountered that word. And I’m not, it’s just so sad. So what’s the origin of the project? Where did it come from? And what did you discover? Annie: So The Rift is a pro bono project that Adam and I do in collaboration with other agencies, including Tapestry, which is one agency. And we wanted to put some energy and time into the big questions and sociological stories that we felt were being neglected or untold. And we started doing The Rift One, which was the rift between young men and young women. And back in it would have been 2024. And so we’d seen various signals around voting patterns, and young women and young women, young men voting very differently, young men towards the right, young women towards the left globally. And we wanted to understand what was happening ideologically and culturally to get to this situation, because we knew that this was an anomaly. And this wasn’t normally how young people behave politically. And we did our work. And we launched the project in 2025, in February on Valentine’s Day. And a month or so later, Adolescence came out on Netflix. And it felt suddenly there was a topic here that was something that we’d obviously researched quite deeply, but then it was propelled into mainstream media, and suddenly was a very big topic on the cultural conversation. And the same, I think, is true of the rift too. So this time, the signals that we were picking up were a bit more existential, in the sense of, you used the word futurelessness, that’s how we described it, a culture of futurelessness that young people were living through, whether that be deep existential anxiety about the impact of AI, whether that be the job apocalypse, and the lack of faith in education to propel you into a career, whether that be a broken social contract, whereby the things that your parents’ generation could achieve are now out of reach for you. And we’ve always looked to young people as a counterculture, a sense of energy and innovation and critique, and rebellion and to move society onwards. And if that is being drained away in terms of energy, power, resource and belief, it’s profoundly difficult, not only for them, but for all of us. And so that’s why we landed on that topic. We have a friend in common with you, Preeti Varma, and she conducted the rift interviews in the US and the UK. And that’s where that amazing quote came from, that was super powerful, testament to her brilliant interviewing skills as well. So yeah, that’s the background to it all. Adam: And all of that, I actually can’t remember whether we had a moment where we go, okay, this is all about the future, or futurelessness. There may have been that moment, one of us would have said it or... But to use them back to that murmuration image, I think it was all those things that Annie just described and more, just were swirling. And through some form of whatever, created a pattern, all these things that pointed to, I think, the rift, thinking through this language of rifts and ruptures, is it with the future? And then the more we thought about that, and the word the future seemed to be discussed, not necessarily in the public consciousness or popular culture, but just places that you’d see online or the things we read and the things we’re into, just discussions of the future, what is the future? How do people think about the future? How did they used to think about the future? And all these built together to go, yeah, that’s it. And let’s do it. And then Tapestry, as Annie mentioned, did a lovely piece of research into it, asked loads of different questions and ways in on getting people to talk about their future, as opposed to the future or the nation’s future and pulling that apart a bit in ways that fast forward to where we are now, I think people have found it is totally sad, and it is depressing. But there’s been a resonance in what we’ve named with this idea of this concept of culture of futurelessness, which paints a picture again, back to what we do, of the reasons that people may be feeling in a certain thing, that it’s not because of some failing in them, or some anti aspiration or vibe that’s going on with young people these days. It’s a structural, systemic, historical, environmental, economic, technological, total system breakdown. And that’s a hard story to tell. Annie: No one, it should be liberating for individuals, because they think it’s not my fault. It is liberating for Yeah. What did you actually discover? And now that you have it — what can be done, and how is it being received? And I just want to say — it’s powerful that you’re applying these tools to social problems. I don’t know that it happens enough. We’re lucky to have people doing this work. Annie: And so what we did with The Rift One around young men and young women is we identified why we felt this had arisen. And it was to do with the geographical and online spaces that they were occupying and the erosion of third spaces and the rise of pro-solitude culture and the echo chambers that exist online and that have segregated young people to live completely different worldviews. Did you say pro-solitude? That’s beautiful. Annie: Yeah, basically, I think a culture which has arisen, which has deified a very solo existence, whether that be routines and rituals and get ready with me and presenting the home as a retreat from a scary space out there. These are very good reasons we were living through COVID. And so a lot of this happened during that period, the rise of boundary culture, I don’t, I want to make sure I have strong boundaries. And so my, I’m not being trauma dumped on by my friends, etc, etc. All of this stuff became common parlance, but that also allowed for silos to remain. And that was one thing that you graph, the geography of spaces, the mood music was important. Adam: Yeah, the zero sum we talked about zero sum culture and philosophies that surround young people, or all of us really in the West, but young people have grown up with so it becomes part of their makeup in some ways, and culture again, reinforces it. And that thread has continued in the current work, the thinking about the future, where both the pro solitude or individualized existence, and then you add zero sum, compete your way through life and into the future. That’s been one of the biggest themes I think people have picked up on, what is the problem we have with how we think about the future, and what we leave people to do, which is effectively DIY their way to the future or compete their way competitively to get there. And that is not a healthy place for a society to be in or individuals, because there’s winners and losers in that battle, most losers. And so the outcome of both of those was conversations and discussions about how do we create those communal spaces or intergenerational connections to help young people or bridge those divides? How do we, on the gender side, how do we get women and men, boys and girls, just sharing the same space for a start, because so much of it is separated back to historical parallels, just now in the digital world. So there’s a very simple need to mingle casually more. And we discussed what that might mean and how the brands get involved. So that communal and collective thread, honestly, it recurs in a lot of work and in I do. Back to the, are we objective? Is that an ideology? I don’t know. Maybe it is. What would the ideology be? Adam: Well, the ideology is the world doesn’t rest on an individual’s shoulders and can only be understood as a solo battle through life where you just make some choices and life seems to progress. That’s the world we’re in. And typically in lots of dimensions, it doesn’t go that well. So maybe whatever the third Rift is, here’s my prediction. But there will be a dimension to say, well, I think we’re not the zero sum context or what would you call it? Mindset. We’ve seen it rear its head twice through this rift. It’s such a pernicious force in society that I’d love to work on that a bit more. And how do you really counter that? Because that’s a big effort. That’s a big society wide effort. The rift — that word. How did you choose it? Because I have my own experience here in Hudson, watching what social media has done to us — the fracturing, all of it. We're only now waking up to what we've done to ourselves. And then AI — I always say we're just pouring gasoline on a dumpster fire. We just keep finding new ways to alienate ourselves from each other. So how did you land on that name — the rift? Annie: How did we come to the name? Adam: Well, it felt a natural way to describe the gender divide or the cultural divide, the political divides that we were seeing. The rift, again, that’s a language, relationships, rifts in relationships. We launched on Valentine’s Day. So it made sense in a specific way to relationships between men and women. Annie: But also, I think that the rift was a bigger idea. And it feels so much of what’s difficult for people today is to do with polarization, to do with a lack of a common future or collective future that we’re working towards, the sense of loneliness and atomization. If Adam says there’s an ideology in how we work, it would be to think about collective solutions rather than individualized responsibility. And it lands with people. People have rifts in their own families politically. They have rifts in their neighborhoods. I think exactly what you’re saying. I’d love to hear what you think about the rift in AI, because I think the next rift we have to do will be about AI and humanity. But it is pouring petrol on it. Tell me what you mean by that. Social media promised connection and delivered disconnection. It created pro-solitude — I love that word, I hadn’t heard it before. Now there’s aspiration around not connecting. And that’s going to be cumulative. AI feels the same way to me. Equally seductive, equally charismatic — promising intelligence, but really just intervening in moments you might have had with another human being. Another way of choosing solitude over connection. And my experience in the States is that every response to new technology is the same: skill up, adapt, you’ll be fine. But we’re completely outmatched. What’s required now is a collective capacity that we’ve let atrophy. While pro-solitude culture was rising, all the muscles we had for coming together just — wasted away. Nobody has any embodied memory of what it means to gather as a community. The bowling alone stuff, the fellowship organizations — those are stories we’ve heard, not things we’ve lived. The social infrastructure isn’t there at exactly the moment we need it most. And we’re doing it to ourselves. We’re just letting the technology do whatever it wants. And it’s devastating. And I think we’re just in the reckoning with social media here in the States. And I imagine, I think this is playing out everywhere. And the awareness on AI broadly is so shallow. And the implications are, I feel are going to come fast and furious. And it’s going to be hurtful. It’s going to hurt. Annie: Yeah. I agree with you. And I think the bowling, bowling alone, scrolling alone, and the way that we collaborate with AI is usually alone. So you produce work and you iterate, you prompt, you get suggestions, all of that stuff that Adam and I described at the beginning, which was starting a question being having a vulnerable idea, the magic when it would have that that’s not happening. Because you’re creating something solo and polished, which doesn’t have cracks in it, which doesn’t have vulnerabilities, which doesn’t have unfinishedness to it, which that invitational world word you picked up on Peter, it doesn’t, it’s not an invitation, particularly to get, tell me, how does that land with you? What does it mean to you? How do you feel it? And I feel, again, to your word atrophy, we’re just surrendering the stuff, which is the joy of work, of ideas of humanity, and we are surrendering that so that we become more atomized. And I worry about it a lot. There you go. What's the story about the artist that falls in love with his statue? So I've had this experience — I'm playing around with Claude Code, trying to figure out how it can work, and I'm alienating myself and having the benefit of playing with this tool, and it's real play, and it's really exciting. But my experience is that when I feel I've done something pretty awesome and I go share that with another person, they have their own experience creating something magical, and my magical thing is not interesting to them. It doesn't cross the border in a way. It's a private thing that has no context for anybody else, and when I try to share it, it doesn't seem to land in the way — with the value that it seems to have when I'm with it on my own. Does that make any sense? Annie: Yeah, it does, but why? Because they have their own relationship with something else — they don't know, they weren't there for it. It's just something that happened somewhere else. I'm not entirely sure. I can just see this — oh, that’s, yeah. What feels magical to me is only magical because it was generated in isolation, I think, and if you’re not there for the process — it’s funny that AI really does threaten the thing that you guys said you have created and that you really treasure, the space between two people in a partnership. It seems absolutely the thing that AI threatens the most. That’s what Dave and Helen talk about — the intimacy economy — it just invites us. This is the danger, right? It is an invitation for us to give of ourselves to the machine as opposed to another human being. Adam: Yeah, and I’ve only touched, I’ve only dipped my toe into their work, but I just love how they on one level just pull apart all the different roles you can think about to be with AI or AI is with you, just to give people more options about how does this fit in rather than how does this replace? And I loved what you said about embodied. That’s my favorite word currently, embodied. And for obvious reasons, I think it’s not just come from anywhere. And we talk about AI in the context of intelligence and human intelligence, and immediately that’s a disembodied idea. We reduce people and ideas actually to cognitive tasks or skills or how quickly could you come up with some idea? These aren’t the measures of what a good idea is, or they’re not the only ones, because the embodied aspect of them is a huge part, if not the dominant part. And if we take that away unthinkingly, what are we left? I don’t know what we’re left with. Good enough ideas, coming back to the world of insights and producing, they’re probably good enough, but the collective outcome of that, we’ll have to wait and see to see what is produced from that, because it was still very early days. And yeah, how do you get people excited and feeling something through generating ideas with AI or delivering them through AI? Yeah, that’s a fascinating new frontier, put it that way. Beautiful. Well, we’ve reached the end of time. I want to thank you both so much. I feel like you have been a part of my LinkedIn world for a very, very long time. I congratulate you on 10 years, and I really appreciate you showing up and making the time to talk with me. Annie: Oh, it’s been such a pleasure. Thank you so much for having us. Big admirer of everything that you do as well. Adam: Yeah. Really enjoyed it. Great. 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]

Nick Liddell on Architecture & Anthropomorphism

Nick Liddell [https://www.linkedin.com/in/nickliddell/] is a brand strategist, author, and founder of Baron Sauvage [https://baronsauvage.com/], an independent consultancy based in London. Previously Director of Consulting at The Clearing, he has over 25 years of experience working with brands including Google, Prada, McLaren, and Samsung. His most recent books are You Are a Fish: The Truth About Brands and The Brand Architecture Book [https://www.library-street.com/products/the-brand-architecture-book], which argues for understanding brands as coherent systems rather than singular entities. So I start all these conversations with the same question, which I borrowed from this friend of mine, who’s a neighbor also, who helps people tell their story. And it’s such a big question and a beautiful question is why I borrow it, but it’s so big, I over explain it the way I am 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 any way that you want to. And the question is, where do you come from? And again, you’re in total control. And I think it’s really great that you asked this at the beginning of all of these conversations because I had some time to prepare for it, although I’m not sure you’re ever fully prepared. Yeah, I think as with a lot of people, it’s a complicated one to answer. I was born in Paris. I only moved to the UK when I was three years old. And I initially lived in the north of England near a place called Carlisle. And then I moved down to London when I was 10. So if I just want to give someone a short answer to it, particularly given that London is a pretty great place to work, if you’re working in branding, then I’ll just say London. But from a personal point of view, I’ll always feel I come from the north of England. I don’t sound remotely like I do anymore. But yeah, I’m a northerner spiritually. And what does that mean to be from the north of England? When do you feel most northern? Well, I think professionally, it means that it’s super easy to get sucked into the belief that everywhere is London. You grow up or you live in a bubble, particularly when you work in branding or marketing. And so it’s a really healthy way to remind myself that most of the world is not remotely like London or any major city for that matter. And also just personally, it means that the further north I go, the happier I tend to be. And what was it like growing up? Do you remember what you wanted to be when you grew up? Well, certainly not a brand consultant. I had no idea a brand consultant was even a thing until I started looking for work. And then I saw in the list of things that aren’t being an accountant, a management consultant, a doctor or anything else that I wasn’t remotely qualified to do. Brand consultant was one of the few things left. And so it sounded fun and I went for it. I think I wanted to be a different thing every week when I did it, including ballet dancer and professional footballer and spaceman and everything. And where are you now? And what is the work that you do? So now I am, to all intents and purposes, still London. I’m just outside London. And I still do pretty much what I’ve been doing for the last 26. So helping organizations of all sorts of shape and size understand how they can better use their brands to improve their relationships with the people that they need to have good relationships with in a way that ultimately benefits them and helps them achieve whatever it is that they want to achieve as an organization. Yeah. And when would you say you first discovered that you could make a living doing this thing? Only really when I started doing it. I went to a careers fair and there were a couple of sad looking types in a corner. No one was speaking to them. They had an easel with a couple of British Airways planes with some funky tail fins on the back of them. And I don’t think anyone was remotely interested in speaking to them because they didn’t have a really snazzy stance. They weren’t handing out free things like the Unilever guys and the P&G guys were. So I went and talked to them and asked them what they did. And they told me that they worked at a brand consultancy called Interbrand. And I asked them about the type of work that they did. And it sounded semi interesting. And so I applied for a job and got it. And that was pretty much the extent to which I understood what I was doing, what on earth it involved. I learned it all when I started doing it. Yeah. And what do you enjoy about it? What do you love about it, actually? Or where’s the joy in the work for you? I love — well, personally, what I love about it is and the reason that I applied was I started working in brand valuation. So I studied philosophy and economics at university. So that’s a really nice mix of numbers and thoughts. And so what I initially liked about branding was that very often you’re looking at large data sets and you’re looking for some story or idea that you can extract from those data sets. And then there’s the bit on top of that, which you don’t get from an economics and philosophy degree, which is then you can start working with people who actually do things like designers, writers, creatives of all sorts of shape and size to actually make this idea manifest in all sorts of delightful ways that you probably couldn’t have imagined when you started thinking about that idea. And that for me is just a really lovely process that you go through from you can literally look at an Excel spreadsheet with a bunch of ones and zeros as input. And then output is just this really beautiful, compelling experience that’s been really thoughtfully designed that is going to make the right people really happy and get something and want to engage in it in a way that creates value for them and creates value for the people who are serving it up to them. And that’s still 26 years later, just a really fulfilling thing to do with my time. Yeah, I feel like maybe we started around the same time. And I always say that I feel like when I came into the work world, brand was the new technology. Do you remember on one level? I’m curious, does that resonate with you? Do you feel like that’s valid? And then secondarily, what do you look at 26 years later? It’s a long time has passed. What’s changed and what hasn’t changed when it comes to brand? I feel like I have to apologize before I respond to that. I think the funny thing for me is just how little that resonates. And I think probably the interesting thing about doing something for so long is you get into it and you forget. You forget some of the fundamentals after a while because you’re just used to the process of doing things. And so once in a while, I just find myself thinking, actually, why do these things exist? We’re so surrounded by brands in particular. Right. You can get up probably on a daily basis. You interact without really knowing it with thousands of brands. It’s in the tens within about five minutes of waking up. If you’ve brushed your teeth, picked up your phone, looked at the shower, stared out of the window. And so I think it was about 15 years ago. I just started thinking, well, hang on. Yeah, why? Why do brands exist in the first place? When did they start existing? And maybe I can just learn a little bit about how it all started. And there was a really interesting academic research paper that I stumbled across that basically said, you go back to the earliest civilization in the Indus Valley, something like 4000 BC. There is evidence of what they call proto branding. But effectively, it’s the same thing as what we’re dealing with today. And you’ve got merchants who are putting bulls and fertility gods like images of things onto their wares to signify where they come from. But also there’s symbolic value to those things. And that’s what we’re still doing today. So I would have — I used to go along with the story when I was at Interbrand. We always said the same thing. Brand comes from this Norse term to brand something. So that’s how old it is. It stretches back to Viking times and it’s all about asserting ownership. It’s complete nonsense. Brands go back about as far back as civilization goes, as far as we know. Yeah. And consequently, there’s just something innate about people when they get together and they produce all sorts of things like these artifacts of culture and brands happen to be one of those things. Yeah, that’s beautiful. I’m happy to be corrected on that front. That’s beautiful. It reminds me of a conversation I had with Anthony Shore. He’s a namer. But he pointed out there’s some science and research that talks about how names — they change the brain. We interact with names differently. And in a way that affirms what you’re saying, that the things that we’ve called things that we make and share or sell are fundamentally different than other things in our life. So tell me, what kinds of projects do people come to you for? What are the kind of problems that you like to solve? Well, part of the thing I love is how varied they tend to be. So I think a lot of the time when people talk about branding, lots of the books and literature about branding focus on positioning. So how do we construct a belief system or create meaning around an organization and then use that meaning to help provide a sense of direction for people? And that’s some of the work. But then there’s a lot of stuff which is closer to what I call portfolio strategy, which is — so I’ve got a dog that I need to keep letting in. And some of it’s portfolio strategy. So that’s just a question of, we’ve got all of these different moving parts. Most organizations don’t sell or create one thing for one audience in one place and sell it through one channel. So how do we take all of these different moving parts of teams, divisions, products, services, solutions, families of products? How do we take all of that and make sense of it and help people navigate their way around it and make sure that it ladders up into that overarching meaning that we have set for ourselves? And then there are architecture projects which are about how you create a system of visual and verbal signposts that make it easy for people to find their way around it. And then there’s brand experience stuff, which is basically how do you take that idea in your — whatever you want to call it, positioning, proposition, promise, purpose, whatever word begins with P, vision, mission. How do you take that idea and how do you turn it into something people can experience, a service ethos that they can feel? Of course, there’s a manner of speaking, but really just how do you create something that you can envelop someone in where they will get it and benefit from it and want to continue that relationship? And that’s the interesting bit because that’s where you’re working with designers and creators of all sorts of shape and size to just create, make something happen in a better way than it would have happened otherwise. So most recently, your book on brand architecture popped up on my feed is what inspired me to reach out. But you’ve written a couple other books before them, all of which I recognized even not knowing, which is pretty cool. So Wild Thinking was the first one, right? Is that right? Wild Thinking was the second book I wrote. Yeah, sorry, I have to remind myself because first book I wrote was called Business is Beautiful. Oh, yeah. Nice. And what was the inspiration for that? Or how did you become a writer on top of being a brand consultant? Well, when I worked at Interbrand, which is where I started working, it wasn’t really an option. I worked in brand valuation. It was one of the more prominent parts of the business in terms of how Interbrand markets itself. Every year they produce this annual study of world’s most valuable brands or best global brands, as they call it. I used to manage that. And so I was very used to writing about brands and talking about brands and going on news programs and discussing brands that were in the public spotlight. And when I moved job, I think there was an idea that I was just the numbers guy. And every — at that point, we’re talking probably about early noughties. Everybody wanted a league table because they felt that was a way to get attention and market your consultancy. And I was really bored of them by that point. So I just said, well, why don’t we not do a league table? Because everyone’s doing a league table. Why don’t we write a book instead? And why don’t we write a book about the importance of intangibles in organizations and intangibles like creativity, for example? Why don’t we write a book about that? And why don’t we give it a really nice counter cultural title like Business is Beautiful, because certainly at the time businesses were getting bashed left, right and center. And fortunately, because it was a French organization I was working for. And if you want to get French person interested in something, then just make it counter cultural. And then much more likely if you’re a bit contrarian, then that’s going to work a little bit better with them. And so they said, yeah, great. Let’s not do a league table. Let’s do a book and let’s make it about all of these wonderful intangibles that organizations run on and thrive off and grow through. But no one really ever talks about that. So it’s good fun. Yeah. And I want to return to — you’ve connected us to the ancient roots of brand, I guess. So what do you feel has changed or has not changed when it comes to building a brand in twenty twenty five versus when you started? I think surprisingly little has changed. I think the fundamentals of it are pretty similar just because whatever technology exists, whatever systems exist, you’ve still got a person in the middle of it or a group of people and all the messy ways that we interrelate with systems, we’re always the weak link there, the limiting factor. And so you can only really design a great system to the extent that you can really understand the messiness of humankind and our imperfections. And so whatever technology has sprung up, I’ve only been working 26 years in that time, we’ve had the dotcom boom and bust, we’ve had one and a half, maybe two financial crises. We’ve had a pandemic. We’ve had, of course, social media come up. We’ve had AI. And they’ve all had a cosmetic impact for brands. But the fundamentals — it’s a different channel. That channel works a little bit differently. But at their core, there are a few basic things you need to get right. If you’re a brand and you need to get them right, no matter what time you’re in. I just don’t see any technology particularly changing that unless that technology changes humans to the point where humans no longer interact with their world in the way that they’ve interacted with the world for millennia. What are the things that you have to get right? What’s your working definition? I have a perverse attraction to foundational ideas, to the basics. When you talk about brand, what does it mean? So I think when I talk about brand, probably like you, right, when you talk about brands, depending on who you’re talking to and what their level of interest is, then you’re going to talk about a different facet of it. Because you can talk about brands from a legal point of view. I don’t know much about trademark law, but I know enough to at least know what I need to speak to a trademark lawyer about a piece of work. There are all of these really lovely facets. And I’ve only started, 26 years in, I’ve only really started wrapping my head around some of them. But I think one of the things that really piqued my curiosity about brands, and fundamentals of branding, extended from that idea of when did brand start? Oh, I can’t really tell when they started. So then why do brands exist? Why are they this almost, they’re not innate, but they just seem to be some chronic aspect of the human condition, or at least in the context of civilization. And again, I found in another academic paper, this really interesting idea of anthropomorphism, and how, initially, it was identified as how interesting it is that when you travel around the world, people in different cultures recreate gods in their own image. And that’s a wider phenomenon. And we do it in all sorts of places, all sorts of times, we do it with our pets, and we do it with toys, when we’re younger, we do it with our cars, we do it with all sorts of inanimate objects. And I think, fundamentally, brands exist, because humans have this tendency to anthropomorphize or humanize things that aren’t human. And there are specific situations in which we tend to do it. And those are the specific situations in which brands tend to flourish. And so I have a theory that if you understand why people tend to humanize non-human things, then you probably also have some insight into branding, and what good looks like, and what not so good looks like as well. Yeah. What role, I came up as a researcher in a brand consultancy, so I identify very much as a researcher. And I’ve always been curious how people think about the role of qualitative, but just research, how do you learn for a client? Or how do you advise clients in terms of understanding the relationship you’re talking about between people and the objects that they’re trying to have a relationship with? Yeah, and I love it, absolutely. I always feel like it’s an unfair thing that people pin on research. Certainly, there was a while when people used to roll their eyes a little bit at organizations that spend a lot of money on research, because particularly from a creative point of view, there was an idea that it’s some limitation factor, or it’s just indicative of just a lack of imagination on the part of an organization that they want to look into research all the time. Actually, I think another way to look at it is that the firmer your evidence base, then the more confident you can feel in doing more creative things, just because you’ve got a solid platform on which to build. So if I possibly can, I like to build off a solid platform for the people that I work with, particularly if you’re going to ask someone to do something quite extreme for them. The more you want to take someone out of their comfort zone, I think the harder you have to work in terms of justifying why they should, and very often research is a way to do it. Qual, sometimes, quant, often, more often than not, some combination of the two, and ideally with Qual, I think, I’m really interested in where you come out with this stuff is the weirder, the better sometimes, as far as Qual is concerned. I tend to be less interested in six or eight people sat in a room for two and a half hours being asked questions about a subject, but I’m always super interested in ways people get prodded without them necessarily knowing about something in other ways to reveal something that they would not otherwise have revealed, that they may not even be aware of themselves. That’s the stuff I really love about Qual. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Do you have any examples, or can you tell a story? Anything, weird is a beautiful invitation. Weird, yeah, I used, I really, for quite a lot of positioning work, I’ve really enjoyed stuff that builds on metaphor elicitation, and Jerry Zaltman and all his thinking, and you get people to collect images and tell stories about those images and use metaphors, and I do find you just go to some really, people take you to weird places, and will very often say they’re discussing things that they hadn’t necessarily thought about before, which I really like, and I really like the idea of if you want to test for one thing, you ask about another. So if you’re working on packaging, rather than show a couple of examples of packaging and ask people what they think of them, you put that thing in the packaging, and you ask them to taste it and tell you what they’re tasting, knowing yourself that that is the same thing in both packs, and so any difference they reveal is likely to be a difference that they perceive from the packaging, and I think it’s that sneaky, we’re going to tell you that we’re asking you one thing, but actually we’re testing for another thing that I think really attracts me to that aspect of Qual. Yeah, absolutely, and I feel like that’s where I had a weird upbringing in that I was, I learned Qual at a brand consultancy, and so everything I learned was weird, it was all deep, projective, free association stuff, which I think is, well, of course, it’s unbelievably powerful, and I often say that what you learn, you can’t learn a ton, but what you learn has massive leverage because it’s so deeply true or connected to the emotional experience. Yeah, that’s beautiful, and I’ve got a sense of that, your work Wild Thinking was also, you’re advocating for just getting out, you seem to have a contrarian streak, is that fair when it comes to the discipline? Well, I couldn’t have said all that stuff about the French, and admitted to having been born in Paris, and got quite a big French family, and not have a little bit of that rub off on me, I think, yeah, yeah, but weird’s another word I keep coming back to, as well, for a lot of the right type of client will respond well to a sentiment like, good positioning is sometimes just about finding out what makes you weird, and really embracing it, some organizations hate that sentiment, and just aren’t comfortable with it at all, but the right organization will take that as a prompt, and then go to an interesting place. I want to talk about the brand architecture, what, why write a book about brand architecture? What’s the state of that? That’s not something that feels like an inside baseball, that’s a bad Americanism, perhaps, but an inside baseball topic. Why write a book on brand architecture? The simple reason that it didn’t really exist yet, and I’d just, the book that I’d written before was called You Are a Fish, and that has all the stuff about anthropomorphization, and it’s really and anyone can pick it up and read it and understand a bit more about brands, even if they don’t feel particularly interested in them, that’s why that book was written, and I thought, after that, I should probably write a super technical book about this important but not particularly well covered subject about brand architecture and brand portfolio strategy, and it’s super geeky, I think you have to be really, really, really committed and interested in branding and brand strategy to really want to pick that book up and go through it. I know I’m not particularly selling it, but I also wouldn’t want to misrepresent it, and it always surprises me that there are people out there who do want to pick up a book like that and are interested in how you construct a portfolio strategy and once you get out of the trap of the house of brands or branded house, how you have a more nuanced way of talking about something like brand architecture that’s just a little bit more helpful for organizations. Yeah, yeah, well, I guess I’m that guy. I don’t know that I’ll be spending the time to read all of it, but certainly the getting into the weeds about what brand architecture is and why it’s important is something I feel is thrilling in a way to me, which is strange. But it’s funny, I guess I hadn’t really acknowledged the degree to which there wasn’t a lot of literature about it, right? You’re saying it’s sort of there was house of brands. What’s the state? What’s the general idea about? It seems like your book is what I’ve read about it. You’re reframing it from this hierarchy to a systems view, but what’s the state of thinking on brand architecture and what does the book bring? Well, I think maybe it’s one of those things where David Aaker and Erich Joachimsthaler, 26 years ago now, I think it basically coincided with when I started working in branding. They wrote a book about brand leadership, and then that was followed up by David Aaker with a book about brand portfolio strategy. And that’s where they introduced the idea of the brand relationship spectrum. And at one end, you’ve got a house of brands and the other got branded house. And there are seven steps in between them. And they wrote that, they introduced the brand relationship structure and they created it. And they wrote the book that they wrote together with the idea that this is quite a nuanced area and it’s quite complex. And they wanted to create a helpful way for people to deal with that nuance. Unfortunately, unwittingly, what they did was they invited people to collapse that spectrum into two opposites of branded house and house of brands. And I do still find whenever a client organization or marketer wants to talk about brand architecture, then they collapse it into that dichotomy. And so over the intervening years, not a lot, if anything, has been written about brand architecture that doesn’t just regurgitate that brand relationship spectrum. And some people have house of brands, branded house, and in the middle, they’ve got an endorsed or something like that. But it’s not helpful if you’re a practicing brand consultant, because all of these things are really unique. And so but that’s not a helpful thing just to say to people, forget that model, just focus on something unique, because then you’re not really giving them anything helpful that they can use. And so I thought I’d just write a book about the steps that I tend to go through when I think my way through a portfolio and architecture projects. And out of the end of it came this ludicrously large, but quite geeky book that is the brand architecture book. And so what I would love, to the degree that you’re interested, I’d love to hear your approach to brand architecture. What’s the role that it plays for you? And what are the steps? What makes it valuable? Well, I think at the heart of it is a distinction that I didn’t come up with. Someone I used to work with described this to me. I’m pretty sure it was someone called Ruth Ingram, who I think is now practicing in the United States. So some of your listeners may be aware of her, but she described to me this difference between roles and relationships. So in any branded system, one job is just to work out, well, for each part of that system, what role does it play? What’s it there for? And that’s one challenge. And that’s what I now call the portfolio strategy bit is just what roles will be assigned to all of the different bits of your portfolio? And then the second thing is, well, once you know the roles of these things, then you can start having a coherent conversation about what the relationships between them should be. If things play a similar role, maybe you group them and maybe they become a family. If different parts have contradictory roles, then maybe you actually want to create distance between them, and you can get into questions of, well, if you want to cross sell a lot between, or if there should be lots of cross talk between the different parts of your system based on their roles, then you actually want to make sure that visually and verbally everything feels similarly tight and coherent. On the other hand, if you’ve got lots of contradiction in there, or you want to speak to a really heterogeneous group of people and cover a really broad set of needs and requirements and markets and channels, well, actually, maybe you need to pull things apart a little bit more and have a system. And so at the heart of the approach is really that distinction. First, let’s work through the roles, three things that I think of when I think about how you define roles, starting with the commercial side of things, working back from the positioning, because the role should refer in some way to your positioning, and then just making sure that in the context of what you want to achieve as an organization, and what your customers or audiences want to achieve, that you can then define a clear role in terms of how they win and how you win in each of those areas. And then once you’ve done that, and you’ve got a clear enough role defined for each part of the organization, that you could explain it to a five year old, then you start thinking about the relationships and how many levels or what the hierarchy is, how you create fixed assets, or what some people would call distinctive brand assets, but also what’s flexible, and then how you design an entire system around that, that you can future proof. So it goes from the very, very commercial through to the very, very creative. Yeah, and who does it really well, would you say, or who’s doing it badly? I think the answer on badly is super easy, because most organizations get away without having a particularly great system. And what’s the impetus to get one’s house in order? Very often, it’s just people get a sense that everything is out of control. And they waste a lot of time doing things that don’t make sense. So when I think about the briefs that I got, I’m working with an automotive company right now. And they’ve innovated really quickly. Generally, as a rule, I would say, the more innovative the company, the faster their pace of innovation, the more screwed up their architecture is likely to be because they get excited about something, they give it a name, it launches, it may succeed or fail, but they’ve already moved on to the next thing. They’re now excited about that. They want that to have a name, but they want that name to stand out. So it’s going to be different from every other name they’ve got. Then you just see it happen over and over again. And before you know it, they’ve got 500 things all with completely random names. Some of them seem to be working, some of them don’t, but everything looks different. It doesn’t look like it comes from the same place. Every time they launch something, they have to reinvent the wheel. And at some point someone says, this is super inefficient. It’s crazy. We’re so confused. Our salespeople can’t explain what we do. I can’t explain what we do. I run the company. Someone has to stop the madness. How do we stop the madness? And that’s when you arrive. But what that means is that generally the problem’s got to get really bad. Most organizations have pretty poor brand architecture systems. They muddle on. Okay. So it’s a fair challenge. Once in a while, people say, well, if it’s so bad for most organizations and they can be valued in the billions or trillions, then how bad an issue is it? And I think there’s probably a threshold at which it just becomes unignorable. And until you’re at that threshold, then I completely understand why organizations do ignore it because it’s really difficult to get a good architecture system. You need so many different bits of your organization to work together. Your product innovation people and your salespeople and your marketing people and your brand people, if you have them, and then your HR people, all of those teams need to agree on a single thing and then agree that they will sacrifice their autonomy for the greater good. And there’s loads of organizations in which that level of discipline doesn’t really exist. I’m curious. The other context you mentioned before was there’s brand architecture, but then brand experience and developing brand experiences. How do you work with teams to do that? And how has that changed? Generally, I would say that happens by increment. Once in a while, you get a really lovely brief or an opportunity to map out someone’s entire brand experience, and then work with them to identify the pain points, the pleasure points, which aspects of the experience are going to be most impactful from a user point of view, and then to work with them to design more thoughtfully around it. Sometimes you’ll already have a guideline in place before you do that. But that’s not in most cases. In most cases, you’ve worked on a brand project, you’ve created a guideline, and then it’s a little bit like when you move into a house, right? And I remember the first house I moved into, and I remember thinking the walls are a disgrace, wallpapers peeling off the walls. And so we fixed the walls, but then I noticed how terrible the floor looked, because now that wasn’t up to scratch. And I think that’s how it happens in a lot of jobs is you develop a positioning, you work through some portfolio strategy, some architecture, you develop a set of guidelines, and then someone notices actually, our environments all look rubbish. And so you get into a, okay, fine, we’ve designed a nice business card, but if our offices look terrible, then we need to fix our office experience. And then, okay, our offices look great, but actually the rest of our colleague experience sucks, because none of the rest of it is up to scratch at the office. And so you find in increments, you fix the thing next that needed to be fixed most after the last thing you fixed. And then over time, everything becomes more coherent, it makes more sense for people, their impression of it improves, and only a few people know why, because it happens slowly, and without much fanfare. So that’s wonderful. So I love the fact, the story of your name of your company, would you tell that story? And then I’m just curious how you work with clients to embrace the same spirit? Yeah, well, I suppose, yeah, I’ve got to be really careful that this doesn’t sound like desperately amateurish. But I was just in a position where I needed to set a company up really quickly. Yeah. I’d worked on enough projects that involve company naming to know that if you go for an intelligent, if you go for an intelligent name that anyone in their right mind would want, then probably that name is already taken. By someone, because there are lots of intelligent people who make good decisions. So if you need a name in a hurry, you need to come up with a name that’s dumb that nobody would want, or maybe is brilliant, and no one thought about, but that’s 0.01% of names you’re likely to come up with. So I just came up with a name that nobody would want. Baron Sauvage is the name of my business. And it was the name of, or the title of one of my ancestors, again, French ancestry. So there was a Napoleonic general in there called Pierre Sauvage. He was a Baron. And I just thought, I’m going to call it Baron Sauvage because no one has it. No one has it. The domain name costs 69p. And also if this thing fails spectacularly, no one’s really going to notice that. And it turns out five and a half years later, it’s still going. And it’s caused lots of client mirth in the meantime, as well. This is another great thing about the difference between Northern and Southern, all my London based clients are extremely polite about it. My early clients was from the North, Accrington. And they revealed after a little bit of working with me that behind my back, they call it Baron Sausage. And I just thought that was brilliant. And so if I need to set up another business, it might be Baron Sausage. Yeah, well, I was just curious, after all the time working with brands, what the experience was like, you caveated by saying you were worried it would appear amateurish in some way, but what was it like to try to brand yourself or to go through that process for your own identity and your own company? I think it, well, I can’t say it revealed much to me. But what it did confirm is something that I’ve felt for a super long time, particularly all the time that I’ve worked, I’ve been so lucky that I’ve worked with some really great creative directors. And one thing I would observe is creativity is enormously undervalued in most organizations that I work with. But the real missed opportunity there is that creativity, if exercised in the right way, can save you an incredible amount of money. If I had had more resources, I could have thought about a sensible name to call my company. And someone would already have had the domain name, I would have had to have bribed them to give me the domain name, I would have had to have probably challenged a bunch of people in terms of securing trademark rights, it would have cost me a lot of money. I think if you don’t have money to spend on something, then you’re just going to have to get more creative with it. And I think we tend to do it out of necessity. It’s like the last resort. But actually, more organizations, I think, would benefit from using creativity as a first resort for saving money, just doing things a little bit smarter. And working their way around problems in more imaginative ways that actually create solutions. A lot of the work really is ultimately about that. Right? I’d be surprised if you didn’t have similar experiences. Yeah. We’re coming near the end of time. And I was curious about, I wanted to shift into just your sense of the state of things now. There was something you said earlier about, you’re talking about how constant it all has been, that there’s a lot that hasn’t changed. And I think you said, unless some technology comes along, and it changes the way people relate with the world around them, I couldn’t help but think about AI and its most extreme manifestation, it’s pretty transformational. So I wonder, have you given it any thought as to what the implications are? And what do you say to somebody, a client who might ask about what’s coming, and what it might do to brand? So I am always really honest with people that I am the least qualified person to ask about AI. If I had to, someone put a gun to my head and said, what’s AI gonna do to transform branding? My response would probably be less than you think. Partly because most of the stuff I read about it, and I’m interested in AI, I read about AI, I read about how marketers and branding people and creative people use it. It’s not for lack of curiosity. It’s just that I genuinely don’t know. And I’m really comfortable talking about brands and branding. I’m super uncomfortable pretending like I know about something that I don’t really know. But unless AI, so we go back to conditions in which we tend to humanize things, also being conditions in which brands tend to do really, really well. And one of those is conditions of high uncertainty. So typically, if you can’t judge whether something’s good or not, or right or wrong, then you’re going to rely more on something like a brand to help you decide. Do I know much about life insurance providers? No. But it’s a really important thing for me to get right, because then if I die, my family’s entirely reliant on that provider. So am I going to go for someone that I’ve never heard of, who started up yesterday? Or am I going to go for a company that’s 200 years old? Answerable to regulators? Well, I’m probably going to go for the 200 year old company that I’ve heard of, right. And so AI, if I have gleaned anything from what I’ve read about it, is heightening our degree of uncertainty. Certain individuals feel very certain about AI and what it does, but most of us I think don’t. I think it probably makes us even less trusting of what’s going on. And throughout time, the more we have needed to trust stuff, and the less we’ve been able to objectively, the more we tend to rely on brands to fill the gaps. Now, I’m totally hedging my bets, because those brands might be AI brands. I might be talking about Claude or Anthropic. I might not be talking about Apple, or pretty much anyone GE. But some brand at some point, if we continue to feel uncertain about all of this, it will be brands that probably help bridge that trust divide that we will hold responsible for things that go wrong as well as right. And I don’t see that piece of technology fundamentally changing that dynamic. Awesome. I want to thank you so much for accepting my invitation out of the blue and just being generous with your time and all your experience. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. It’s been a pleasure. 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Matt Klein on Ambivalence & Mythology

Matt Klein is Head of Global Foresight & Research Methods at Reddit and the creator of ZINE [https://kleinkleinklein.com/], a Webby Award-winning cultural intelligence newsletter with 26K+ subscribers across 150+ countries. He calls himself a “digital anthropologist, cultural theorist, strategist, and writer.” Douglas Rushkoff called him “a brilliant cultural analyst.” Someone else called him “the closest thing to Gen Z’s Marshall McLuhan.” So I start all these conversations with the same question, which I borrowed from a friend of mine, who’s also a neighbor, which is significant, and she helps people tell their stories. And I haven’t really found a better question to start a conversation, but it’s a big question, so I over-explain it the way that I’m doing right now. So before I ask it, I want you to know that you are in absolute control and you can answer or not answer any way that you want to. And the question is, where do you come from? I knew this one was coming. Still don’t have an answer. Where do I come from? I come from two loving parents in New Jersey. I grew up in the quintessential suburbs and went to high school in the very stereotypical movie high school with Friday Night Light football games and people shoving people into lockers type of deal. And didn’t love that experience. I was not shoved into any locker, for the record. But I did find a lot of relief. We had a mass media department. We had a full-on film set, TV studio in our high school. And I found a lot of both relief and just a respite catharsis in that space. And it was also quite convenient to edit movies there rather than sit at the lunchroom table or alone. And very quickly I learned this is it. This is what I love doing. I ended up going to a very small liberal arts school, Franklin and Marshall, where I did a double major in psychology and film and media studies. And I was either going to be a film director or a child therapist. It was a coin flip, one or the other. But it wasn’t until I was taking these courses in strategic communications and the theory of technology that I realized that there was this overlap here, which was the psychology of media or the ways in which new technologies are changing the ways in which we communicate, express, create senses of self. I’m like, oh, that’s it. This idea that we can study media and culture and people through our devices or through media. And that’s what I was so interested in with film as well. And that landed me in Adland. I had my first gig at RGA. It was perfect timing because all these brands were trying to figure out, what do we do with this thing called social media? How do we behave? What do we say? What is the purpose of these tools? And here I was explaining all of these platforms and the psychology of it and what that meant for culture and purchase decisions and creation of identity. And to be paid to do that was profound. That was wild. And jumped from shop to shop, to market research, to creative, cutting my teeth on any and everything. And here we are. The passion is still the same, which is trying to make sense of culture. And what does our technology say about us and what do we say about our technology? Yeah, that’s really wonderful. I’m so excited for this conversation. I wanna go back to the beginning. I was really struck by the suburban upbringing and your discovery of that studio. How did that begin? What’s the origin story of you finding that space to play in and explore? I had already loved backyard movies. I was using our old massive camcorder. I don’t think it was even DV tapes. I think it was VHS tapes. We were recording on just nonsense in the backyard. And then for a birthday one year, I got a handheld. Lego also had their own movie studio product line. So I was loving that. How did I discover it? I don’t even remember. It’s not like I chose the high school, but there was these intro to mass media courses where they taught you, here’s how to shoot. This is a pan. This is a zoom. And we were just editing. And the next year you take a course on deeper into editing styles or narrative fiction. And I mean, it was quite advanced for a high school and absolutely loved it. Was absolutely hooked because it was just filling an existing interest in the first place. And our school took it very, very seriously. We had a full blown film festival at the end of the year where all the students submitted their films. There were screenings where students and teachers and parents came to watch them all in award ceremony. And I think it was so rare to have that experience where at a very early age in high school, you are given the opportunity to find something or for something to find you that stimulated you. And you can find something that was challenging. I mean, that wasn’t happening in US history for me. So to have all of those options of electives, essentially what they were, to find that in film was quite special. Yeah. And do you have a recollection and maybe the answers in everything you’ve already said as a young, as a boy, what did you wanna be when you grew up? What did I wanna be? I don’t know what the title was, but I knew that it was something creative in nature. I mean, I was always doodling. I was making those backyard movies. It was something creative in nature. And I mean, I went into college thinking maybe this is a film thing, but it was deeper than just the art itself. There was something beneath it. And I think I found that in, here we are, business. I’m not as much interested in the business part as much as everything else. Business is just the vehicle to explore that. I still don’t know. I still don’t know. Yeah. And so catch us up. Where are you now? And what do you spend your time doing? Doing a lot. I am currently at Reddit. That’s my nine to five on the Research and Insights team. The last four and a half, five years has been focused on helping brands understand what’s happening in culture through our data so they could show up in a more strategic way. In a more strategic, creative, resonant manner. Last year or so, I’ve shifted a bit to focusing on applying those insights to Reddit itself and thinking about consumer growth, both in the US and internationally as well. That’s the nine to five. And then outside of that is a lot of writing. I’ve been writing for quite some time, trying to make sense of the messiness of our current moment. I was writing for two people on the internet and was quite fine with that. I was doing that on Medium and then Forbes and then a little thing called Substack came along before Substack was even Substack. And I thought, well, this is great. If two people subscribe, then at least I’m not fighting for attention. Those are two people who are raising their hand to say, oh, I’ll read that. And that allowed me to focus more so on what I wanted to explore and think about rather than chase a view or cut through on attention. And that has grown into Zine. And that has then brought in other speaking opportunities and advising opportunities. And that’s how I’m filling my time currently. And when would you say you first discovered you could make a living doing this? It’s an interesting question because we can interpret living in a few ways. There’s the financial aspect of it. And there’s the, oh, wow, I could fulfill myself and find that meaning in that. That was very quickly. That was very, very, very quickly. Still today, I don’t view writing as something for other people. I don’t say that selfishly. There’s of course value and people wanna pledge and fantastic, I’m so about that. But when I say it’s really for myself, it’s I have something that I’m trying to wrestle with. I can’t make any sense of it. I’m trying to find my words to explain this to myself. The page is the canvas to do that. It’s really for me. Truly, it is for me. And sure, if less people read it, would I feel differently? Yeah, probably. That said, anything that I’m writing is truly for myself. Truly, first and foremost, I’m trying to make sense of this thing. And if other people enjoy it, fantastic, I love that. So when did I learn that you could make a living from that? I think very quickly because when I was writing these things even in college and soon thereafter, I was finding the words for things that I was trying to make sense of. And publishing that, whether that was read or not, was this practice of, oh, wow, I now better understand myself and I have a better understanding of the world around me. How would you, to the degree that you have one, how would you describe your process? I’m always curious how people learn. I mean, you’re sitting in a position, I mean, you’re unbelievably well positioned to have access to so many different sources of data and different perspectives. But for you, how do you learn? And what’s your process for trying to understand what’s going on? I try to wrap my arms around as much as possible, just collect, collect, collect, collect, and then try to find the patterns amongst all of that. And the collection could be an observation on the street, a documentary, a dataset, whatever. The more diverse, the better. And oftentimes feels like the snake unhinging its jaw, trying to consume all of it. And there’s total discomfort, like it’s not natural by any means. I have a running note in my notes app. And just thoughts, like true shower thoughts. And when things start feeling connected, that then becomes a larger idea that graduates into maybe a piece or maybe a slide. But how I learn is just consume, consume, consume, consume, consume, like endless consumption. What’s an example of a shower thought? This idea of, what kinds of things are worthy of you noting down? Let’s open it up. We’ll do this in real time. It could be from a podcast. I’d be listening to a podcast and oh, let me open the notes app and jot that down. I could be on the treadmill and oh, wait a second. Let me pause this, whether that be my own thought or someone else’s. 74% of food cooked in a restaurant is not eaten in a restaurant and it’s brought home. That’s something like, oh, haven’t thought of that before. That’s interesting. What else does that connect to? Here’s another one. This is funny, it’s like a diary. Do we need another made up phrase? Maybe not, but if language is the limits of a reality, creating a new language expands what that reality can be. Shower thought, just writing that down. And I mean, those are pretty solid ones. What about trust cannot exist without fear? Perhaps fear, sometimes I read this and what does that even mean? I think that makes sense. Fear of perhaps the risk of a relationship or risk of identity or maybe ego. Well, the value of trust is that without it, you can be hurt, right? There’s that too, totally, totally. So they’re like unfinished lyrics. If you want to think of it like, an artist and you just piece these little things together, and maybe there’s a story and maybe it’s nonsense. I mean, I’ll read through some of these. I’m like, what the f**k was I saying there? Okay, not an idea. Or I didn’t even know what I meant. Didn’t hold, didn’t hold. What would you say, you mentioned, I love the way you articulated the psychology of media. And I’m always curious about, what do you feel like you pay attention to that other people don’t? Based on your training, based on your own interests and inclinations, where do you find yourself fixating in ways that other people don’t? I find it very reactive, where I’m reacting to the signal. And what I mean by that is, what I’m interested or what I’m calibrated to pay attention to is the overlooked. So if everyone’s looking over there, I want to look in the other direction. What’s happening over there that we’re not giving as much attention to. And the threshold or the barometer, the rubric, whatever you want to call it, is what’s having an influence on us with unproportional, or that is disproportionate to conversation volume. So in other words, okay, we could be talking about hype for hype’s sake, loud conversation, lots of volume of it, yet low impact. I want the opposite. I want high impact, low conversation. And where do you find that? I don’t know. I’m still trying to look, that’s the job. But I’m constantly reacting. That’s what I meant, which is all right, let me consume, consume, consume. This is what everyone’s thinking about, talking about. That then sets me off in a different direction. The criteria I have in regards to what I write about is very much if it’s covered, then fantastic. I don’t feel compelled to have to add another voice to this given topic. Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t, but I try not to. Because for me, I’m trying to go in the other direction to make sense of and to explain and articulate and selflessly try to provide the words for these other things that we don’t have the words for yet. When you say react, what do you mean when you say react? React in regards to just a response. So react, maybe that’s not the right word. You go through the scroll or you’re going through the newsletter curations. Everyone’s talking about X, lots of headlines about X, more X, more X. Here’s someone else’s hot take about X, fantastic. The reaction to me, what I mean by that is okay, X has been covered. We don’t need more noise about X. Some of it’s good, some of it’s not. I don’t feel compelled to have to say more about X. It’s not, judgelessly, not interested in more X. I’m interested in the Y. Interesting, I meant letter Y, but I also, W-H-Y as well. Both, why is everyone talking about X, but also the letter Y over in this other direction. So I’m almost reacting to the, this sounds so clinical, the metadata of all the news itself. So rather than even reading some articles, it’s okay, this publication is talking about X. There’s a whole debate in the comments about X. That’s something to react to. That’s okay, that’s some signal. Let me go over here. And I’m reacting to that existing noise or signal and heading in the opposite. I don’t think it’s the right word, but maybe it is. There’s something really ambivalent in a few things that you’ve expressed. I know in the past, you’ve said trends have no meaning. You mean you’re critical of things that you’re participating in. And you hold both these positions at once, which is the definition of ambivalence, but you also said it in your, maybe it was your shower thought of do we need new language for this stuff? Oh, we actually, we do need this language for this stuff. Do you identify with that ambivalence? 100%. What we’re talking about is this nuance that it’s not all one way or all the other way. That what we’re talking about is incredibly complex because we are complex. So therefore you can need complex answers and approaches to all this material. Sorry about ambivalence. We’re working within this, let’s call it corpo machine, which is oftentimes such nonsense and just so toxic, so anti-human. And it’s very easy to say, let me go unplug and write poetry in the Alps or whatever. But I’m also of the camp that if you want to change something, you can’t always change it from the outside. Perhaps you’re more well positioned to change from the inside. So as critical as I am to the nonsense of advertising and trends and corpo capitalistic, not whatever, perhaps rather than throwing stones from the outside, you can find more momentum or traction in changing discourse and decision-making from the inside as well. So I think all of these things can hold true. Is one more effective than the other? I don’t know. I’m not going to pretend anyone has the answer there, but I don’t think that’s a contradiction or insincere or disingenuous. I think they can be true, that I find this work fascinating. I find it incredibly problematic, yet I also care so much about it and do find value in it in some instances. So all of this is just, it’s messy and we’re messy and it’s problematic if we don’t allow room for that messiness. What do you love about the work? Thinking about all the different things that you do as part of it, where’s the joy in it for you? It is not news that we are in a fucked up moment. Trust in government leaders, institutions across the board, all time lows. Yet when it comes to this idea of a brand or even marketing messages, there is no exaggeration, profound influence on the ways in which we see ourselves, others, the world. It’s the party, it’s meaning. And you can’t have a sense, this sounds wild in a vacuum, but you can’t have a sense of self without some purchase. And to help organizations help other people, I find fascinating. There’s something about that. And if you allow many of these organizations, which is just people to progress in group think or autopilot or hype, it’s a disservice to culture and individuals writ large. So I do find an opportunity and a valuable opportunity is how can you become a translator for these massive, massive, massive organizations that have an impact on the world anything else, arguably larger than government in some instances, because that bends towards the institution more often than not. How can you become the translator, the decoder and the representative of people? And I don’t take that responsibility lightly. And that sounds more, it sounds bigger than it is, but I mean, that’s the work, that’s what we’re doing here. And I find that fascinating. That is wild. And if not me, then who? So there’s this, I’ll go back to this word responsibility and no one granted this to me. I just found it myself and I find it interesting. How can you help these organizations show up in a more human-centered manner? And I do think it’s possible. I do think it’s possible. Is it easy? No. Is it frequent? No, but it is possible. Yeah. Two questions trying to get out of me at the same time. I think the first, because you really centered on it, it sounded to me and maybe I’m over-interpreting, but you really, you’re holding up a brand as a responsibility, as an obligation and the significance of the role it plays in all of our lives in this culture. Can you just say more about what makes it so meaningful and what the role and responsibility is? Because sometimes I feel we skate all over the top of it without sitting with the significance of it. This is a conversation in itself or five podcasts in itself. Brian Lang puts it from Future Commerce, transaction is identity exchange, which is to say a maker of a candle or a car is exchanging a part of their identity for this output. And you are exchanging your commerce, this transaction to help inform your identity. I’m a proud owner of this candle. I’m a proud owner of this car. This transaction is more than money. This is labor. It is identity. It is affiliation. It is meaning. It’s really easy to hate on that. I’m well, do we need more luxury items? Or live a life without trying to buy something. You can’t, you cannot. And whether the identity comes first or after, I think is moot. It’s all wrapped up. It’s one in the same. So if transaction is integral to who we are and who we associate with and how we create status for both better or worse, more often worse, I mean, you can’t separate these things. So there’s ambivalence in that as well. I think oftentimes that’s not good. That’s not healthy. We see the destructive path of that. But I think that’s for me a bit of reality. I mean, we’re not gonna all wear burlap sacks and call it even. It’s not happening. We’re not doing that. We’re not all gonna agree to buy the same car. And we’re not all going to agree to live in the same place. That’s not realistic. It’s impossible. So what you’re left with is this forced decision of, well, what do I buy? Who do I associate with? What logos do I or not? And what’s wild about all of this is that the logo is not real. This thing is not real. It’s not real in that Tony the Tiger doesn’t exist because it’s just a team of other humans. But Tony the Tiger, right? Brand is mythology. This is a spirit. There’s nothing physical about this. So the fact that someone could look at one logo and feel a certain way and someone else can look at the same logo, the same colors and shapes and feel something else, that means it’s not real. This is perspective and interpretation. With all that said, selfishly, that’s wild to me. That’s fascinating. And that you can make a living from trying to study that and play with that, insane, absolutely insane. Now, to balance that or to counter that, if you’re gonna do that for a living, why not then root for Team Human and try to make these transactions and make these meanings as pro-human, as humanly possible? We’re in service of other people more so than that of the business. And it doesn’t have to be in favor of the... I mean, why should it be? This is all meant to serve us. Yeah. You mentioned playing the role of translator and decoder for clients, helping them help people. What are the kinds of questions or where would you say clients or organizations generally, where do they struggle the most in trying to understand culture, understand what’s happening outside? I think the biggest struggle is that, we’ve been hinting at it, that this is more complex and nuanced and subjective and ever evolving and dynamic than we realize. So we create these frameworks and trends and labels to try to code, quite literally code both in categories and names and zero and one binaries of what this is. And we need to, to a certain extent because we can’t just throw up our hands. This is really messy stuff. And can we embrace that messiness and that gray area thinking? What I try to do is in that realm, which is can we deconstruct some of the presumptions that we come to the table with and think about this differently? The one that’s killing me right now is, we need to operate at the speed of culture. Ridiculous. In what way? Ridiculous. What’s ridiculous about that? That we’re conflating culture with fast. No, that’s one part of it. You’re talking about the boo-boo nonsense, machete garbage. That’s not culture. Culture is also language, civil rights, religion, climate collapse. That stuff happens slowly. Is that not culture? Of course it’s culture. So you’re talking about one super thin sliver of culture and it’s the least important part of it. So you don’t have to operate at that. Or another example, we need to predict the next thing before anyone else can. So we have to create our trend forks, forecasting algorithmic newsroom to catch blank before anyone else. And the provocation there is, okay, and then what? What are you gonna do with it when you catch it? It’s the dog chasing the bus or car. What are you gonna do when you catch it? Not only do you not have the answer, you don’t even have the organizational capability to do something with it. If you catch pickle girl summer, whatever it is before anyone else. Now what? So we’re just distracted by a lot of these things, which is fair because we’re living in a crazy moment where it’s very easy to be distracted by these things. And we have more data than ever. We have more exposure to events around the world than ever. We have more access to people to research than ever. We have more opinions than ever. Everyone and their mom has their substack. Fantastic, but can we develop a sense of taste or discernment around what do we pay attention to? What do we care about? And what’s going to help us? And then that part of what’s going to help us, let’s start there. What are we actually trying to stand for? Why are we in people’s lives? Back to identity exchange. What do we want to be known for? How do we wanna help people? How do we provide value? How do we make this world better? Let’s start there and then worry about Pickle Girl Summer later on. So many good things. So what do you call that top layer of culture that is being confused for culture? Entertainment. Yeah. It’s fun, okay? There’s nothing wrong with it. It’s fun to talk about it and to pontificate and write these articles about it and to strategize around it and make tools to analyze it. It’s fun. And there’s not gonna totally denounce it. There’s some value to it. It’s what people care about and are interested in. There’s value to that. But to mistake that as your business opportunity or business thread is completely myopic thinking. How does one tell the difference between the two? And then I’m gonna little asterisk here because you reminded me. I’m just, I imagine you know Grant McCracken. I’m always quoting Grant because I love him so much. But he talks about culture as dark matter for corporations. And I’m just recognizing that he’s very explicit about how mystifying culture is for the organization in the same way that you’re being very explicit about that it’s just, let’s just name this as something that the organizations just don’t know how to manage. What’s the right question? How do we tell the difference between the messy culture that matters and the superficial entertainment bit? And how do you help clients see it for what it is or operate on it? I’m not gonna pretend there’s a right answer or a hard-coded answer. I don’t think there is. Back to this messiness. And that’s not to punt the question by any means. Because for me, I think it’s a good question. For me, the threshold or the criteria is does this scratch a human itch? If you wanna go back to hierarchy of needs, do humans fundamentally care about this thing? And does this have a more evergreen shelf life? If it’s, I don’t know, stonks or NFTs, back to the metaverse, what is this itching? Is this answering something for people? Maybe in a moment, sure. But if you really, really go deep, what is this doing for people? I don’t know much. I don’t know what this is answering. Now, if you go back to La Boo Boo Entertainment, Dubai Chalk, sure, that’s fulfilling something that is scratching an itch, so that contradicts it. But this is where it gets so fricking tricky. You almost need a cool-off period where, it’s funny, rec soccer, there’s this rule when we were kids. And the rec soccer rule was, if you’re a parent and you have an issue with one of the games, and the games are on Saturdays, you can’t call until Tuesday morning. You can’t complain until Tuesday morning. We’ll hear you Tuesday morning. We’ll take your call, take your email, but you can’t send it until Tuesday morning. So I think there’s something applicable here, which is if you just wait half a beat and see if this still persists, and it’s still scratching an itch, and it’s still saying something about our moment, fantastic, all aboard. Let’s talk more about La Boo Boo’s, or I don’t know, Mu Deng, the pygmy hippo, which everyone’s forgotten about at this point, poor Mu Deng. But if you just wait just half a second, you’ll realize, whoa, maybe this is not as important as we actually think it is in our current moment. That’s not to say it wasn’t important in that moment, or there’s other signals that we could create constellations around. We just maybe need a cool off period for some reflection. Because we get caught up in the cycle of machine and the platform and the algorithm. It wants us to work that fast, but it’s not natural. That’s not, we don’t operate at that level. So to think that we operate at that level because the news headlines operate that, that’s not it. That’s not how it works. So to go back to the original question, what are brands asking, or how do we help these organizations? What are those provocations? It’s can we attune ourselves back to the human frequency, and realize that we are only human, and we’re trying to resonate with humans? So getting caught up in all this spin cycle, all this so-called nonsense isn’t helping anyone. Yeah, that’s beautiful. And it’s, I mean, so resonate is a word I just keep, it feels everybody just wants to be resonating now. It’s the best expression of how we feel aligned with things, I think. I wanted to ask, I’m always selfishly interested in the role that qualitative research and ethnographic research plays in things. If it doesn’t play a role, that’s fine too. But how do you think about research and the different modes and the methods and approaches in terms of helping organizations resonate? I have no favorite, and oftentimes no preference, right? Pros and cons to all of it. I have a soft spot for the deeper, slower ethnographic research. I, years ago, was on a crazy project trying to help understand why chronically ill insurance members were rejecting care. They were offered in-home care and it was a benefit to everyone if they accepted this care because they lived longer, insurance doesn’t have to pay out. Yet they couldn’t figure out, here was this free care for people to help, not just organize your life, but pick up prescriptions and clean and wash. And why were people rejecting this? No survey, no dashboard, no semiotic, whatever. Nothing is helping you unless you go into those homes and spend three hours with these people. So I have a soft spot for that. That being said, I don’t mean to punt again, it’s so dependent upon what’s our context. And maybe that’s the insight in itself, which is, I think we have a hammer, call it a dashboard for social listening, and we just view everything as the nail to hit that with. So I’m a bit more contextual of what are we doing or why are we doing it? I also look at a whole lot of data all day long, the largest human generated text corpus that’s ever existed. So there’s a bias towards that as well. Incredible, incredible insight. The downside is you can’t ask a question to any of it. No follow-up, can’t ask, what do you mean by that? Or why’d you use that word? Or what about in this context? It’s static. Not only is it static, but it’s five years old. And five years old is insight if you want to compare it to this year or next year. Yeah, pros and cons to all of this. Yeah. You talked about, I think in a recent study, you had a bunch of people choose the word of the moment. Is that right? Yeah. Here, I want to talk, I want to get your sense of the state of things right now. And I guess the words of the moments were anxiety and overwhelm. Is that right? That’s right. And then in my newsletter today, and I don’t ever plug this, but somebody wrote, do you know what whelm? I have a link about the word whelm. Maybe, I don’t think so. But it’s whelm means overturn and it’s about boats. Whelm meant originally overturn or capsize. A thing that was whelmed was either a boat or other thing inverted with concavity down or someone or something covered by such a concavity. Anyway, so I thought that was a charming segue to talk about how we are all feeling now and what’s your, from where you sit, how are we all doing? What’s going on? Not well. Not well. I go back and forth. I think about this a lot. You read Futurists from the 60s. I think of a future shock. And there’s these lines like, the pace of information and technology is greater than it’s ever been. We’re in complete overwhelm. We cannot make sense of reality. This is so, so long ago. So either you’re incredibly prescient or this is just the human condition. And it’s a 50-50 coin flip on how I feel every morning of is this particularly unique and this is truly, truly unprecedented or it’s just always been a mess, sometimes less of a mess than others. I flip-flop on that all the time. But I think by and large, it’s not good right now. It’s not good. I’m optimistic, you have to be optimistic and not naively, but I’m optimistic because this goes back to the work that we do. These organizations, these institutions, these politicians, it’s all so malleable. It’s so flexible. It’s so, it’s made up. None of it’s real. It’s arbitrary at times. So if that arbitrariness can get us to this point, that arbitrariness can also get us to other points as well. So the optimism comes from this idea of agency. Now that’s easier said than done. I just think we’re missing a bit of, without diagnosing everyone or everything, that’s not the intent. I just think we’re a little, back to nautical themes, just a little lost at sea. We’re treading, we’re swimming in a direction and we’re quite uncertain if that’s even the right direction or is that towards shore or not? And we’re just overwhelmed and exhausted with I’m tired of just treading. Where are we going and why? And who’s leading us there? And how much longer? And what’s gonna be there when we get there? We have no vision of what can be next. And I think that’s maybe the most acute part, which is we have no alternatives. We have no tangible or visible alternatives. There’s a reason why a certain individual is in the position which he’s in, because he’s offered, this is what the future can look like. It looks autonomous cars and living on Mars. At least that’s a vision. And you could understand why people are attracted to that because it is a vision, it is an alternative. It’s something other than this moment. Now, there’s many, many, many other options, just harder to find them, to point to them, to hear them. And I think it’s scary for people to present them in our current moment, to deviate from or to stick their neck out. So chicken or egg, I don’t know, but a bit of a catch 22, the words I’ll use is lost or directionless, rudderless. I thought I wanted to share, there are some of my shower thoughts, but I think they’re just observations that feel really true about what’s happening now. And I wanted to just run them by you. We’ll let my dog out for a second. The first comes from, it was several years ago. I remember a couple of people in different contexts telling me the same story. One was this woman in wellness. And she was saying that, you can’t really trust healthcare or doctors really to know what’s wrong with you. I’m the only one that really knows what’s good for me. And then a couple of weeks later, a guy at a bike shop was saying the same thing about the news. He was, you can’t really trust any of the news. I’m the only one, I have to go out and do my own research. And I’ve come to call this, this is just the collapse of trust, right? Everywhere. But I’ve come to call this sovereignty that we’re in this sort of sovereign age where everybody’s sort of assuming absolute control and responsibility for their domain because there’s no higher authority. It’s another way I’ve heard people describe it as trust went from vertical to horizontal. We’re all, we have to figure it out on our own. And then I wanna throw into that. So that idea that things went from vertical to horizontal, the K-shaped economy, this idea that we’ve split in two and the well are doing really, really well and the poor are doing really poorly. And then third, and I think this is probably another hour’s worth of a conversation, but the notion of orality, this idea that media, we’ve just shifted out of, we’re in sort of post-literate, I’ve heard people talk about. So we’re not reading anymore. And the implications of all three of these feels the maelstrom that we’re in. I think that’s a nautical term. Yeah, what do you make of that? I feel if I were to draw a map, that would be the map. I would be trying to help people. That’s what I would describe as the environment we’re in. I it. I co-sign. Yes. Yes, across the board. For the trust and sovereignty bit, what comes to mind is, it’s almost larger than trust. It’s no one’s going to come help you. So therefore you’re on your own. And that’s where I think you see something a sports betting mania, which is, f**k it, I’m on my own. Let’s gamble it. Because my resources are much more limited or more precisely, my prospects or futures are more limited. So you have this maybe larger desperation, more willingness to bet because I’ve got less to lose. That then speaks to your K-shaped economy. I think that’s always, maybe more so now, but people have always done very well and people have always done poorly. That’s more exacerbated and more extreme in our current moment, which then goes back because no one’s helping. In the same survey that I’d run about what’s the top word to define the moment, hold on, this is going to be, yeah. In that same survey asking people what’s the top word, I’d also asked a question of what do you think is the most overlooked aspect of culture today? So my meta trend analysis was here’s what everyone’s talking about. But for those who study culture, what’s the one element you believe is having that outsized impact relative to discussion? Back to the question I think about a lot. And there’s a lot of answers around this idea of the successful, i.e. elites, celebrities, influencers, those are perhaps one aspect of the K-line are ignoring those on the bottom K-line. That there’s not just a deviation, but a lack of acknowledgement of that. And I think that goes back to, oh, wow, I’m really on my own. There’s no, let’s go back to nautical themes, no dingy is gonna come and save me. There’s no Coast Guard looking for me right now. And to maybe try to tie this all together, back to the post-literate bit, what comes to mind there is that, yes, we’re in a very visual culture. I think what’s driving that is that it’s a fast, just speedy, overwhelmed culture. And we’re able to encode visual data faster than auditory or written. That a symbol or a sign is quicker. The video is quicker than hearing something. So maybe we can tie these all together, if you stretch that in that overwhelmed, there’s this just fast breakneck desperation of I gotta go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, that utter panic, this frenetic energy of truly feeling alone and having to figure it out yourself because no one’s coming for you. Yeah, that sounds about right. Have you encountered that orality argument before? I have. I thought of it a lot when there was all those home devices, the Amazon Alexas and the Apple had one. And there was all this talk that, our future is gonna be screenless. Well, there’s some term, spatial computing. We’re gonna live without screens. Never bought that, never bought that because no one wants to wait for the message to be finished read. Right. I remember I had done a little, we’re near the end of time and I did a podcast project for a greeting card company. And I remember talking to young people about communications and greeting cards and greeting cards had become the equivalent of a marriage proposal. You know what I mean? The formality of a greeting card had become so, it’d become so weighted when you’re living in a world of text. But Matt, I wanna thank you so much for accepting the invitation and for showing up. I really appreciate it. My pleasure. I appreciate the questions. This was a lot of 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]

Katarina Graffman on People & Meaning

Katarina Graffman [https://www.linkedin.com/in/katarina-graffman-8679458/] is a cultural anthropologist and founder of Inculture [https://inculture.com/], a cultural analysis consultancy. She holds a PhD in cultural anthropology and is a researcher at Uppsala University. Her clients include IKEA, Volvo, Bloomberg, Björn Borg, Skanska, Swedish Radio, and the BBC. She co-authored *We Are What We Buy* (2018) and *In Search of the Time to Come* (2020). Her TED Talk “The focus on the rational mind will lead to climate collapse [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fYlq0dMoBGw].” All right, so I start all the conversations I do with the same question, which I borrowed from a friend of mine. She helps people tell their stories. I don’t know, it’s just a beautiful question, so I stole it from her. But it’s really big, so 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 any way that you want to. And the question is, where do you come from? And again, you are in absolute control. That’s an interesting question. I come from my mother’s womb. I was actually listening to a podcast this morning when I was out walking — a professor in nanotechnology here in Sweden, Maria Strömme. She’s from Norway, but she’s at Uppsala University. She has been in hard science her whole life, but now she’s started to dig deep into philosophy and the humanities, because she thinks she can build a mathematical formula to understand where people go after death. Where they go. And I’ve never been someone who is afraid of death, even though I’m not religious. I think that in some way, we are around. So it was really interesting to hear this hard science woman arrive at the same conclusion through mathematics and physics. She will probably be a name in the future, I think. So to answer your question — I come from my mother’s womb, but I think I come from all over the place, from many, many people from the past. That was a little bit maybe strange. How does that feel? What’s that? It feels good. Nice. You used this phrase, I think, we are around. What did you mean when you said that? I said that the spirit of us — or the something, whatever it is — something in us as humans is always around. The only way to explain it. Do you have a recollection of growing up, as a girl, what did you want to be when you grew up? I wanted to be someone working with elephants, but I ended up working with humans. I don’t know what it says about me. What was the attraction to the elephants? I think I have always been fascinated by elephants because they are very wise. They have a really interesting way of living in groups, how they socialize with each other. So I think maybe that’s also why I studied humans, because what’s interesting about anthropology is how people live in their groups, how we become herd members. We always talk about how humans are so individualistic and unique, especially in Western cultures. But the thing is that we are more dependent on the group than ever before in those individualistic cultures. So that’s my area I’m studying today. Yeah. Did you have an experience with elephants as a child that inspired you, or where did that come from, do you think? I don’t know. Not more than going to the zoo. And then later on, I went to Tanzania, but that was when I was 20-something, when I was starting my PhD. I went for half a year to Tanzania. Of course, I saw elephants in the wild, but by then I had already started my anthropological career. Yeah. Tell us, where are you now and what do you do for work? Yeah, I’m an anthropologist and I took my PhD in Sweden, Uppsala University, in 2002. And then I rather quickly decided to leave the university and academic life because I wanted to work outside. I think that as an anthropologist you can do a lot in society, in organizations, in different aspects of how to understand humans. I wrote my thesis about TV producers. So that was a little bit different from many other anthropologists. My thesis was about how people in content creation produce content for people they don’t know. Especially in Sweden, we have public service and you are supposed to reach certain groups of people in our nation. How can you do that if you don’t know them? So I wrote about that — how producers create fantasy viewers based on maybe one person they know in the countryside. And there was also an American anthropologist studying public service TV who talked about the same idea — that you create a viewer and then you start to make content with that fantasy in your head. And I think that’s very interesting if you look at the marketing industries, because they often have very shallow knowledge of the people they are supposed to create products or advertisements for. So that’s where my interest started. Yeah. I want to hear more about the field work on your thesis. That’s so fascinating. As somebody who’s worked within organizations and big corporations in the US, there’s all this talk about personas and empathy — all these shortcuts to help people develop products for people they don’t know. It’s a whole infrastructure, really. So what did you do and what did you really learn? I started my field work with the idea that I was going to study how you make formats more locally adapted. For example, Who Wants to Become a Millionaire or Survivor or something — the format has a Bible, from the person who came up with the idea, and they say this is the way you should produce this format. But then you have to locally do something to make it popular in Sweden or popular in the UK or popular in Poland or wherever you are. So I was interested in how you make this cultural adaptation of a format. But as an anthropologist, you can never know if what you’re interested in is going to happen during the time you’re there. So they didn’t do any formats. And when I was there — I was at a production company in Sweden, maybe they did 12 to 15 different productions — I started to become very interested in, OK, how do you know how to make this program? Because you don’t know your viewers, whether they’ll connect with it or not. And then I talked to a guy who was in charge of the insights at this production company and he said, well, nobody in this industry comes and asks me anything about how to get to know people. It has happened twice. And I have put a sheet together with some statistics — that’s the only thing they want. But I was so interested because I thought, wow, this is really something. So then I tried to understand how you as a creator actually make things when you don’t know for whom. That was my focus — to understand this process. And different producers use different strategies. One guy, he said that when he’s out of creativity, he goes to a small town in Sweden and has some drinks at the bar. Then he goes home and writes new stuff. He’s met the ordinary Swedes. So it was a lot of easy ways to get to know people without real knowledge. And maybe that’s why I talk a lot about insight washing in my work today. Because I think that what most companies do is insight washing. They have very, very shallow insights. You mentioned personas, generation descriptions, et cetera. And that’s quite shallow because it’s mainly based on quantitative studies or broad categories. They don’t have this deep, qualitative knowledge of how people live their lives, what is meaningful for them, how people act in different groups — because you can never get that if you only ask people things. So insight washing is, I would say, the summary of everything I do. Trying to make organizations understand what it is. Yeah. What’s the definition of insight washing? Well, I think it’s when you try to make very shallow insights look like real knowledge. And I think that when you talk about it in that sense, people get two reactions. One is, wow, that’s true. But they also get a little bit offended — oh, so you don’t like quantitative studies? Well, it’s not about that, because you need both. You need different tools if you really want to understand. So what I say is that you should have qualitative studies as part of it. It can be ethnography, it can be different conversations with people, it can be observation. You need to have the other view, not only what people say. Yeah. You need to be able to see, okay, is this true? Are people really doing what they’re saying? No, they’re not. So that’s what I always say — you can’t trust what people say. You have to understand how they live. So tell us about the work you do now. When do clients come to you, what kinds of problems do they bring, and how would you describe your approach? I can take one project. One of my latest projects was for a big official organization that oversees building — different building projects. They set all the rules for construction. How do you explain that in English? A developer? Yeah, but they also decide all the rules for building. It’s more like a regulatory body. So they have been working a lot with waste in the building industry. And in Sweden, they’ve estimated that around 25 percent is waste — materials, time, everything. It’s the most wasteful industry of all of them. And they said, everybody in the business knows this, but why is nothing happening? Why isn’t the waste getting less year by year? So me and another anthropologist, we had the question: how can we work with this without sending another information folder? Everybody already knows. And that’s very typical when I work with companies — they want to change something. I work a lot with sustainability today. People know, but they don’t change behavior. And the easiest response is to treat the human as a rational person. So let’s send some more information. This time they will probably change — but of course, they will not. So I worked with them, me and Lotta Björklund Larsson, the other anthropologist. We thought, what can we do? Because building is very, very complex. It’s a very complex process from when they start to buy land to the end, and also everything that happens after the building project is over. So we said, let’s look at the knowledge culture in this business. Why is it that everyone knows, but nothing is happening? Is there something wrong with how knowledge is transferred between different parts of the project, between different companies? So we focused on understanding the knowledge culture in the building industry. And what we found was that many, many people have an enormous amount of knowledge, but they don’t have any system to transfer it the way they should. And they don’t systematically look at good and bad projects and use that knowledge going forward. So that’s one way to work — finding ways to make change without using information as the lever. Especially when it comes to consumer culture. People know the world is on fire, but — I still want my fast fashion little dress. So I’ve been working a lot on that. How do you make people change without telling them to change? That’s maybe my main area today. Yeah. Because it’s also a world that really needs change in many, many ways. So when did you first realize you could make a living doing this stuff? I think that I have had my own company now for 20 years, actually. And I know I wrote something about that on LinkedIn, because when I told my former professor at Uppsala University that I wanted to start my own business and have my own company, she said to me, oh, that will be tough for you. Don’t say that you’re an anthropologist. So then I decided — yes, of course I will say that I’m an anthropologist. Why make that choice? I think because she said that people in Sweden think anthropology is something weird. As I told you before we started to record, in Sweden, applied anthropology is not common. You can’t study it as a subject. So an anthropologist in Sweden and Finland has been quite rare, compared to Denmark, for example. In some countries, anthropology has been much more established as a career path. Your advisor told you to avoid the language, but you chose it for yourself. Why? Because I thought that anthropology was the best subject in the world. I was supposed to study law first, then economics, and then I decided no. Economics, because I thought that was quite a broad education and you can do almost anything. But it was really boring — I started with statistics, so I had to take a term off. And then I actually saw anthropology. I didn’t know what it was when I was looking in the catalogue for the courses. And I started to read anthropology, and by my third course, the first term, I was just amazed. It was like a salvation for me. It was really like, wow, this is fantastic. It made me see the world in totally new ways. So then I continued to read anthropology in different subjects and took my PhD. So anthropology for me — it’s not a job. It’s a way of living and seeing the world, I would say. So that’s why when she said, you shouldn’t say that you’re an anthropologist — I said, of course I have to do that. I love that so much. How do you talk about what anthropology is, or what culture is, to people? I know you teach, and these ideas can feel slippery. How do you talk about what culture is? And as an anthropologist, what do you do that somebody who’s not an anthropologist can’t? I would say — I know that it’s difficult. And also in Sweden, we have a particular difficulty with the word culture, because in Swedish, culture is called kultur, and that means both fine arts and culture. One word for both. And that makes it even harder to explain what you do — it makes the whole thing blurry. So you have to find other ways to explain it. When I talk to companies, I mostly talk about behavior — understanding people’s behavior, not only trusting what they say, and looking at group effects. If you’re more practical when you explain, it helps. Because in anthropology, there are around 200 definitions of what culture is. So of course, it’s really difficult. And I think Grant McCracken has a good way, because he talks about it as a language. You learn the grammar when you are a baby and you start to talk, but you don’t know that. You just learn the language and start to speak it. If you start to learn a language when you’re older, you need to learn the grammar. And that can be quite difficult, instead of just being in a culture and you just start to talk. And he says that culture is like that. Culture is the blueprint of the society. It’s the grammar of the society. And it’s the system that decides how people interact and how they behave in different contexts. So for many, it can feel like it’s quite blurry. But ethnography is the method of anthropology. It’s about putting a lot of time in different contexts, studying how people behave, and also talking to them without leading questions. I can study a family and I can always ask them, why did you do that? Or can you explain that for me? But I never ask leading questions, because then you are pulling them towards different answers. And you’re not interested in that as an anthropologist. You want to understand, how do these people live in everyday life? And who is affected by whom? Because that’s the essence of understanding culture. How do you think about the questions you ask? You’ve said you don’t want to ask leading questions — so what kind of question do you find yourself asking? Oh, it really depends on the project. I have one example. I was working with a fashion brand in Sweden and the marketing manager sent me three sheets with questions. Very tiny text. And I was really — oh my God, she has really been thinking about this. She was a new marketing manager at this fashion brand and she wanted to do ethnography. She knew what anthropology is all about. And she said, I have too many questions. So then I said to her, okay, interesting to read your questions, but let’s just leave them. The only thing I would go out and do is actually understand: what does this brand mean for people? And then we studied how people use the brand. They had different stores. We did field work in the stores to understand the customers. We worked in different subgroups to understand how they used the brand — or how they didn’t use the brand. And then we started to say, okay, this is what the brand is all about. And it answered almost all her questions, but we had this really broad approach. And the most interesting part was that this company thought they were so much hotter, in the trendier customer groups. And it actually showed that no, they were very late majority. And that made a total difference for them — how they looked at the brand, what kind of marketing they were supposed to do. Everything changed because they realized they had been thinking totally wrong about who used the brand and why. So I would say that most projects I do, I look at it very holistically, with a very broad question. And then you start to get knowledge and you get closer and closer to what is really interesting. And I call that the white spaces — and the white spaces are almost always something the company haven’t thought of at all, because you find it when you go in with this broad perspective. What do you love about the work? Where’s the joy in it for you? I would say two things. I meet a lot of people that I never would meet, because we live in our bubbles. And sometimes when you go out and do your field work — you have to go out in the evenings, and you feel, oh, I’m so tired, it’s tough going out tonight — but then it’s so fun to meet people you never meet otherwise. It can be in parts of Sweden I never go to. It can be different kinds of people that I normally don’t hang around with. We always live in our bubbles — at work, doing our exercise, the family, the area we live in. So I love that part, that I meet so many different kinds of people. And then also — it’s fantastic to do this often long study. It doesn’t have to be that long. When you write your PhD, you’re supposed to be one or two years in the field. And that’s not possible if you work with company clients. But you put a lot of time in anyway. And then when you have all this data and you start to look at it and work with it and you realize, wow, look here — here is a real finding, here is a white space. I think that’s the most gratifying part of being an anthropologist. I’ve got two questions trying to come out at the same time. You’ve been at it a long time. How do you feel like it’s changed, or its role has changed, over that period? I think that’s changed just in the last few years. When you do anthropology and ethnography in companies, you’re often looking eight to ten years out. What can we see today? What kind of trends, what kind of behavior can we see that will actually have an impact five, eight, ten years from now? Because you’re looking for those small signals when you do ethnography. And my feeling is that companies are not interested in this long-term perspective anymore. It’s more like two years now. And that’s a little bit scary, especially because the world is changing so fast. Instead of having this long perspective, they’re just looking at the fires right now. And I’ve been talking to other consultants from other fields and they say the same — the long-term perspective is gone. And that’s scary, because you need it if you want to have a sustainable society. But what I’ve experienced in the last one or two years is something interesting, because I’ve met several highly educated engineers who say to me, we need the knowledge you have about understanding human beings. Engineers can be very focused on what they are doing right here, right now. And maybe they don’t see how the impact will be felt in other parts of society. I’ve heard several engineers say that knowledge about how human beings behave will be even more important, because if we are going to scale up these technical solutions, it can be catastrophic if you don’t understand the impact and how people behave. And several really well-educated people, both in tech and other fields, say that understanding how human beings use technology will be so much more important when we have this technology all around us all the time. So it’s hopeful, I think. Though it will take time before companies understand that, because right now they think they can do everything themselves. And the whole discussion about how everything will become very average, because they do all the creative work with AI — so of course, it will all be the same. I think it will take time before companies realize that they really need to do something different. That they really need this understanding of how people live and what’s important for them. Two things you said earlier — the insight washing, and the way anthropology is almost exclusively focused on very durable, enduring learnings. There’s a huge gap between what organizations like to digest and what anthropology actually creates. Do you feel that mismatch? And then — this is a big question — for somebody in a leadership position who wants real knowledge, not insight washing, what guidance do you give them about balancing different ways of learning about who they serve? That was a very long, dense, tricky question, because I think that most organizations live in a system — they already have ways of doing stuff. And the way they’ve been doing it, it’s difficult to bend the system, because everything is connected to the same way of working, including how you look at insights. So the main thing I would say is this: when I started — I’ve been working now for over 20 years — I had a lot of meetings in the beginning. And I would say that maybe two to three percent of people in CEO positions understood what I was talking about. And I quickly realized I couldn’t sit with people who didn’t even understand what I was talking about, because it would just drain my energy. And today, I would say maybe 15 to 20 percent understand, after 20 years. Of course, I also have much more experience now, many more examples. So I can explain better. Because you can’t sit and talk in anthropological terms — you have to find better ways to explain. But there is a difference. And the first thing I say is, look at what you’re measuring. Because we live in a measurement society — everything should be measured, all the time. How effective people are at work, how successful our product is, how much people love sustainability, blah, blah. You measure everything. So the first thing I say is, can you look into everything you’re measuring? What are you measuring, and why? And what kind of answers do you think you’re getting? Because if they start there, they soon realize that maybe they don’t understand the right things. And one typical example — if you measure how loyal your customers are, or how satisfied your co-workers are, you have these measurement systems that you do every year. And I’ve worked with companies where I say, okay, you’ve done this with your co-workers for — what, 30 years? Have you changed the questions? We have a totally different world. Oh no, we can’t change the questions, because then we can’t compare to what they said 10 years ago. And for me, that was really like — okay, society has totally changed. But you still ask the same questions. It’s amazing. So very often I start by saying, what are you measuring? What kind of quantitative studies are you doing? Look into those things. And maybe let someone with a qualitative eye look at what you’re doing. You might save some money, because some of these things aren’t telling you anything. So I think that’s the first thing to keep in mind. And also to question this idea of information as a way to change people’s behavior and values. Most people in companies know it doesn’t work, but they don’t have any other tools. People aren’t changing, they still eat bad things — okay, let’s do another information campaign. They know this isn’t working, but they don’t have alternatives. So you give them some ideas. How could you do this differently? Maybe it could be nudging, or other approaches. Try to make small changes, and then they understand, wow, this is really good for us. And then they can start to make bigger changes. I want to go back to that example — the client who wouldn’t change the questions because it would ruin their ability to track change over time. Can you be explicit about what makes that insane? What’s the assumption underneath that’s so problematic? I would say — you have this saying that how you ask things, that’s the kind of answers you get. And for example, it can be such easy things as using the wrong words. Maybe you’re using words that people in the 90s understood one way, but people in 2025 experience differently. I can give you an example. I was working with a big TV company in Sweden, and they were doing a lot of quantitative studies on how young people experienced different media and technology. And they were using the phrase “new media” when they were talking about digital media. Because if you remember, 20 years ago, we talked about new media — that was the word. They didn’t know what to call YouTube, so it was new media. And they were still using that phrase in their quantitative studies. And the young people we were studying, they said, what? What is new media? I know what old media is — that’s public service, that’s radio, that’s newspapers. I don’t know what new media is. So they couldn’t even answer the questions because they didn’t know what was being asked. That’s a very simple example. And you also need to understand that media technology has so fundamentally changed the way we live and understand the world. If you don’t have that included in your quantitative studies — if you want to understand customer loyalty or behavior — it’s really strange. Have you ever heard of appreciative inquiry? We don’t need to get into it. But David Cooperrider — it’s an approach to transformation that’s not problem-solution. It’s about identifying where things are working, peak experiences, and trying to replicate the good as opposed to solving the bad. He had a quote: we live in the world that our questions create. And I feel like that’s the idea you were expressing. Yes, yes, that’s very, very true. And I think that’s also connected to what I’ve been saying about white spaces — broadening the area of what you’re interested in. Because otherwise, managers have some ideas about what’s going wrong, or what they want to check. And if your research doesn’t give them the answer they want, well, then they don’t use it. They’ve already decided what they want to confirm. The problem is that very rarely is that correct, because it’s often something else that’s wrong — something else in people’s everyday life that is affecting your brand or your product. And managers sit, maybe they sit for quite a long time in the same company. And of course, they develop this framed view of things. That’s the way of being human. If you are in a certain context, you start to see only what’s inside the frame. So it’s really hard to go outside your own frame of safety and start to understand what’s going on. And sometimes it’s even better to study people who don’t use your brand or don’t use your product. Because then you understand why they’re not using it. You can get more insights from that than from studying the people who are already using it. So there are a lot of ways to get a much better understanding than the traditional way of doing research. We’ve just got a little bit of time left. I’m always curious to hear people advocate for qualitative. You’ve talked about measurement, and I think we probably agree that there’s a kind of qualitative illiteracy in organizations — people don’t really understand what qualitative is, or that it’s actually data. How do you talk about what makes qualitative so important, and the role it should play in how people make decisions? Well, I think I have mentioned it now. I use this quote: people don’t say what they think, they don’t know what they feel, and they for sure don’t do as they say. And that’s my idea of being human. And that’s what I bring into the field when I start to do my study. We live with this idea of the rational person who understands information and can interpret the knowledge and then make a wise decision. And we can’t. And humans are not living in a social and cultural vacuum. We are social beings. I would say that most things we do in life is because of other people. I think, for example, Mark Earls has written Herd. It’s about the idea that you are part of a group — whether it’s the family, or your company, or your friends, or different groupings in social media. You want to do as other people do, because that’s the way of being human — being part of a group. So in that sense, it’s so important to study how groups live and how they act and what’s important for the group. Beautiful. Thank you so much. I really appreciate you accepting the invitation. It’s been a blast talking to you. 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]