The value of ethnography in business
Andy Crabtree has written a short article on how to use ethnography to design IT systems.
It reminded me of the time, in 2004, when I’d first used ethnography to supplement our narrative techniques. I spent 3 days in a call centre. Our project was focussed on how graduate recruits view careers in the organisation. On day one I sat with the operators and watched them take calls and was taught how to do some of the basic tasks. During the morning there was quite a bit of activity involved in organising the team’s weekly meeting. It seemed that many favours had to be pulled to get other teams to watch their calls. Time was at a premium. During the morning I was definitely an outsider. Then we had the team meeting and everything changed.The team leader started the meeting by confirming the agenda and asking everyone to give an update on their work. I decided to sit quietly and remain an observer. The meeting was scheduled for 1 hour. After 30 minutes the meeting was over—no one elaborated or said what they really thought because an outsider was in the room. “We’ve worked hard to get this meeting and we’re not going back on the floor until our 60 minutes are up”, the team leader said. The group started talking about their holidays and I knew I had to say something and be part of the group so I told the story about how we locked our cat in the house on the day we left for a 4 week holiday (Mrs Maggs was fine in the end). After telling this story I became more of an insider. The transformation was remarkable. The team started talking about work again and now there were telling stories of how they weren’t getting along with another team, what customers they had difficulties with and where they had challenges with their boss. I was a afforded a new level of trust.
More organisations should have a capability to conduct ethnographies to help them understand what is really happening and viewing the environment without breaking it down into its parts. Ethnography attempts to see the whole system. Crabtree says the following:
Fundamentally, ethnography says that the design of IT systems should be grounded in, and be responsive to, the interactions actually taking place during work, as design is inevitably intertwined with them. Even where design is intended to develop a completely new system, significant value may be gained from understanding the lively context of work, the professional relationships that inhabit it, the skills and competences that people exercise, and the bearing that these may have on work redesign, which is what systems design actually amounts to.
Professional work is messy and we need new techniques to make sense of what’s going on. In this case it’s an old technique in a new context. Some say ethnography is time consuming and costly. I’d say that the time spent really understanding what’s going on and engaging people in conversation about what’s discovered improves the chances effective (not efficient) progress being made.
[via eLearningPost]
Shawn, author of Putting Stories to Work, is one of the world's leading business storytelling consultants. He helps executive teams find and tell the story of their strategy. When he is not working on strategy communication, Shawn is helping leaders find and tell business stories to engage, to influence and to inspire. Shawn works with Global 1000 companies including Shell, IBM, SAP, Bayer, Microsoft & Danone. Connect with Shawn on: