The ethnographer’s eye

Never before have leaders had so much information at their disposal to steer their organizations. Batteries of indicators, real-time dashboards, projections: everything appears to be measurable. This abundance is reassuring, but blind spots remain. The figures provide valuable data, but they fail to account for an entire slice of reality. Furthermore, they struggle to mobilize teams, who recognize themselves more in real-life situations than in graphs.

The story of Nokia illustrates these limitations. In 2010, the Finnish company dominated the mobile phone market. Its forecasts confirmed that growth would come from traditional mobile phones—robust and affordable, deemed to be better suited to emerging markets. In the field, however, ethnologist Tricia Wang observed something else: on the streets of Wuhan, students of modest means were saving several months’ salary to purchase a smartphone, a symbol of social advancement and confidence in the future. She alerted Nokia’s management to this discrepancy, but they preferred to stick to the numbers. The rest is well-known: the brand missed the turn to smartphones.

Tricia Wang would draw a deep conviction from this: Big Data is a precious resource, but it needs to be complemented by Thick Data, the qualitative data obtained from observation and listening, which illuminates the meaning behind behaviors.

This in-depth observation is precisely the purpose of ethnography: a discipline long confined to the study of distant societies, but whose methods are now finding their place in the corporate world. It offers both a posture—suspension of judgment, methodical curiosity—and simple, rigorous techniques to access multiple dimensions of a situation: what the players are doing, how they are doing it, and what these actions mean to them.

Without resorting to elaborate mechanisms, any manager can draw inspiration from these principles to make their diagnoses more reliable and accelerate their transformations: observing with a keen eye; listening in a structured manner; providing visual cues to better incite action. This synopsis suggests dipping into ethnography’s toolbox to orchestrate the complementarity between Big Data and Thick Data.

In this synopsis:
– Positive deviance: uncovering atypical practices to fuel performance
– Refining your diagnoses through the use of ethnographic tools
– Three exercises inspired by ethnography to help your teams to move forward