Methods in Ethnographic Management Consulting

When I left Ad Hoc and started up Civic Operator in October 2018, it was a chance to codify and solidify the consulting style I’ve developed over the course of my career into a coherent, useful set of practices.

My client during this time has been a manufacturer with facilities all over the country. Over the last year, I have helped them develop their long-term strategic vision and plan their digital transformation efforts.

My deliverables conform with what you’d expect from a corporate strategy / management / technology consultant– analyses of current situation, high-level visions, detailed plans for execution, and so on. But during this time, I’ve sharpened and formalized systems of listening and thinking as the basis of my practice. I want to outline some of that here.

Photography

Photography has been an essential way for me to observe and learn and listen throughout my career. The person who most influenced me on this was Laura Bohannan, a ground-breaking ethnographer and legendary professor in the Anthropology Department at the University of Illinois-Chicago. Here’s a snip from her Wikipedia page:

Bohannan is also part of a small school of women whose studies in anthropology were initially rejected because of their holistic (and sometimes personal) approach and style.[6] Other women in this school of early ethnographers include Zora Neale Hurston.[6]

Bohannan would hold forth, chain-smoking in the concrete-block goodness Walter Netsch’s Behavioral Sciences Building, about how the photos she took while living among the Tiv tribe of southeastern Nigeria became something of a ticket for entry– a way to gather documentation but also bring joy to the people she studied.

For me, it’s a way to see things as they are– to take stock of the mechanics of an organization and illustrate the relationships among people, machines, and software. I created photo books using Google Photos for each facility and gave them to the people who run the plants:

Sketching

Another important part of my practice is sketching. I use Microsoft OneNote on my Surface Book 2 laptop with the Surface pen. On my iPad, I use Adobe sketch on an Apple Pencil. I am enamored with drawing on screens.

I also like the placement of less formal, less-than-perfect sketches inside traditional management documents. It is disarmingly simple and makes people comfortable. It also makes me feel more creative and able to float above details and see the broad strokes of a situation.

Ideation

I am a big fan of structured ideation sessions. When interacting with big groups it is effective to bust out with sharpies and post-its and collect as many ideas as you can muster. I’ve found this is especially useful in industries where there are more strict hierarchies and reporting structures.

In my many years of leading and participating in such sessions, I have also become cynical about how they can be used– to make people *feel* like they are participating without actually planning to incorporate feedback. It’s critical to be upfront with participants about the parameters of the session and how their output will or will not be used.

User Stories

An essential component for understanding an organization is the business process– a set of activities performed by people to achieve business objectives.

In 2019, there are no business processes that are not entwined in some way with software. And since I’ve spent the bulk of my career in technology, the most natural way for me to document a business process is through user stories– informal, natural language descriptions of one or more features of a software system.

This exercise is helpful in analyzing many different software systems that exist in an enterprise that have been built by a different people at different times. When you break it all down into their component features you can see how they all fit together or don’t fit together.

I love this kind of detail work– I learn more about the world.

User Research

I also do structured user research where you just sit with a person and watch them solve their own problems with existing software. These are well-established methods that mix observation with pointed questions without being judgmental. There is a deep focus on curiosity and openness to individual need.

My experience inventing the CUTGroup methodology, helping launch the Cohorts product, and co-creating the Documenters system are all instructive for me as I do this work.

I have loved working in manufacturing because of its abject simplicity. Having worked in municipal data and philanthropy and sales of large systems I really enjoy the deep-dive intensity in a particular company.

I am wide open to new engagements– hit me up via email or Twitter DM.


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