O'Reilly Radar Podcast - O'Reilly Media Podcast

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Mary Yoko Brannen on ethnographic thinking and contexts of organizational cultures Nov 12, 2015

Show notes

The O'Reilly Radar Podcast: Organizational cultural identity, HELP systems, and the end of English as the lingua franca.

O'Reilly's Jenn Webb sits down with Mary Yoko Brannen, the president and CEO of CLIA Consulting, the Jarislowsky East Asia (Japan) chair at the Centre for Asia Pacific Initiatives, and a professor of international business and research director at the University of Victoria Gustavson School of Business.

Brannen is an expert in ethnomethodology and qualitative studies of complex cultural organizational phenomena. She spends a lot of time focused on how changing cultural contexts affect technology and how to leverage cultural identity in the global workplace. We unpack all that in this episode and talk about how her proposed "ethnographic thinking" approach can address language and culture gaps in the global marketplace.

Here are a few highlights from our chat:

I'm an organizational anthropologist. What does that mean? It means that, like anthropologists study far-away tribes, I study organizations as if they were tribes. I'm interested in organizational culture, and how organizational culture combines with national cultural differences, as well as occupational cultural differences, and how people can integrate those and work together.

Ethnographic thinking may sound a little bit like another buzz word, like 'design thinking,' but the difference is that, first of all, if you just take the word 'ethnograph.' 'Ethno' means people. 'Graph' is documenting. It's really documenting the day-to-day life of people. You do so by observing what the people that you're interested in as an organization do. ... You document, for example, how the user lives with the product or the service that you're engaged in making. Rather than pushing a product onto the consumer, you think about, 'Okay. How is the consumer going to engage with the product?' You do much more of a deep dive into the day-to-day life. Then, you would design whatever your service or your product is to fit in with the everyday life of the consumer. Going much deeper into understanding their context.

I work a lot with mergers and acquisitions, and integrating cultures — different national cultures as well as organizational cultures. I guess, the most important advise that I would have is that culture is a really big thing. I like to use an acronym for culture which kind of helps people understand the severity of changing it. I see culture as a HELP system: Habits, Expectations, Language, and Perceptions. Different cultures have different HELP systems. When you're talking about changing a culture, you're talking about changing the person's HELP system. It's a big deal.

I think there's a really big change [in the corporate landscape]. First of all, I think that the dominance of the West is no longer the case. We're shifting from the West to the East in terms of transferring knowledge, to the East to the West and South to North more. That's a very big change. When we talk about Latin America, when we talk about Asia, we're talking about collectivist societies. Societies that are very, very different than our own in the West. Societies where people think more about group, and have different ways in which they manage groups. They don't think about self-actualization as the pinnacle on Maslow's Needs Hierarchy. Managing and collaborating with people that, again, have a very, very different HELP system is extremely important. At the same time, English as a lingua franca is not going to be around for much longer. We're going to have multilingual organizations, where sidebars in Chinese, sidebars in Spanish are going to be much more of the norm.

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Aaron Irizarry on Nasdaq’s journey to embrace product design Nov 05, 2015

Show notes

The O'Reilly Radar Podcast: Getting a seat at the table is one thing; understanding what to do with it is way more important.

O'Reilly's Mary Treseler chats with Aaron Irizarry, director of user experience for Nasdaq product design, about Nasdaq's journey to become a design-driven organization. Irizarry also talks about the best ways to have solid conversations about the designs you're working on, and why getting a seat at the proverbial table isn't the endgame.

Here are a few snippets from their conversation:

It's really interesting to see an organization that didn't have a product design team as of, what, 2011, I believe, see the need for that, bring someone in, hire them to establish a team, which is my boss Chris, and then see just the transition and the growth within the company, and how they embraced product design.

The more we delivered, the more we built equity within the company to be able to kind of have more of a say. … What has really helped us is that we didn't just focus on getting a seat at the table. We focused on what to do when we have that seat, and how we keep that seat and bring others to the table as well.

What are you going to do when you get that seat at the table? Are you going to go talk to them and be like, "design, design, design"? Are we going to push our agendas, and what we think is best as designers, or do we even understand the nature of the game? Especially in an enterprise situation, this isn't like Disneyland for designers. This is about trade-offs. This is about learning how to communicate and work with people. … Getting a seat at the table is one thing, but understanding what to do when you're there, and how to work with people in a way that allows you to keep that seat at the table, is way more important.

I learned that design doesn't matter as much, as far as doing what's right in design, and what the community thinks is the best way to handle something. Do what's best for the organization. Work with the people in a way that makes the product better. It makes them feel better about the work that's being done, and you're going to have much more longevity sitting at that table.

We all come from different backgrounds. We have different experience levels. We've gone to different schools, or worked at different companies. All that weighs into your experience, and the lens through which you approach design. You may say a certain term, and I may say that same term, but we understand it two different ways. The whole Princess Bride thing — that thing you said, I don't think it means what you think it means — that's really very common. It's really good to make sure that we understand what the person is getting at. If you can really do those things, keep your cool, not get offended, you really have a good chance to have really solid conversations about the designs that you're working on.

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