September 2024
In the seventh episode of our “In Conversation…” podcast series for 2024, Lucy speaks to Simon Roberts, anthropologist, author and co-founder of Stripe Partners, a consultancy firm which incorporates social and data science to give companies a deep understanding of the world, their customers and their organisation.
In this conversation, Lucy and Simon discuss anthropology and why, in a tech and data driven world, it is increasingly being used by organisations to better understand the behaviours and culture of their workforces. In particular, Simon highlights the importance of embodied knowledge and the potential impact of remote and hybrid working on the professional development of junior employees.
Key Takeaways:
Be aware of sub-cultures: Even where a business has defined its vision, mission and values, in practice organisations are broken down into sub-cultures which are sometimes in conflict with each other.
Embodied knowledge is very important: Executives, leaders and employees should immerse themselves in real-world experiences. to enable them to build an understanding of the business based on first-hand experiences (as opposed to a second-hand understanding obtained from data and reports).
Remote and hybrid working may inhibit embodied knowledge: The challenge for junior employees is that by not being in the office with their more experienced co-workers, they are missing out on observing how to run a meeting, dealing with conflict and learning how to “read the room”.
Adopt AI to do “peripheral work”, not “core work”: People are more resistant to having AI help with core work (which runs to the centre of their role and their professional identity) compared to peripheral work (which tends to be more administratively burdensome).
Consider training “lay anthropologists”: Develop “in-house” anthropologists and provide them with a toolkit which enables them to observe the organisational culture and then report their findings to HR leaders and senior management.
Change the focus of conversations about technology: Technology conversations often revolve around productivity, cost-savings and simplification. Instead, organisations should adopt a more human-centred approach which focuses on how technology can make work more meaningful for people.
Lucy Lewis: Hello and welcome to the Future of Work Hub’s “In Conversation…” podcast. I am your host, Lucy Lewis, a partner in Lewis Silkin's employment team. Whether you are a seasoned listener or this is your first time, I am delighted you are here to join me for some fascinating conversations with innovators, business leaders and thought leaders exploring some of the longer-term trends and immediate drivers shaping the world of work.
In a technology and data driven world, anthropology is increasingly being used by business to delve deeper into the behaviours of workforces and shed light on things like organisational culture. But what is anthropology and how can it help you better understand your workforce and your culture?
Our guest today is brilliantly placed to talk about this. Simon Roberts is a leading business anthropologist and author. He co-founded Stripe Partners, a consultancy firm which incorporates social and data science to give companies a deep understanding of the world, their customers and their organisation. He is also the Board President of EPIC People, a global community of researchers, creators and innovators doing ethnography for impact in business. Simon is widely regarded as a pioneer in the field of anthropology and business, and the use of ethnography in corporate research, design and innovation. Simon's expertise lies in researching the emerging frontiers of people and technology.
So welcome, Simon.
Simon Roberts: Thank you very much for having me.
Anthropology
Lucy Lewis: There is such a lot to talk about. I am particularly keen to explore that interface between people and technology. But before we get there, lots of people will have heard of anthropology, but they might not know very much about it, and they probably don't know very much about how it relates to the world of work. So I thought a good place to start would just be telling us a bit more about that.
Simon Roberts: Yeah, well I suppose we might be best placed to start with a definition of anthropology and I would start by saying there isn’t really a good single definition, but the one that I often use is that anthropology is the comparative study of human experience in all of its diversity. Anthropology actually emerged from the colonial encounter. So, it was primarily used often by the British but by other colonial powers too to try to better understand the people that they were trying to “govern” or “rule”.
Lucy Lewis: And if we talk about how that then applies in the context of the world of work, so some sort of practical examples, when might we expect anthropologists to show up, whether that is directly in business or perhaps in policy roles that have an impact on business?
Simon Roberts: So actually, anthropology has been used in the world of business as early as the 1920s. But it really kicked off in the 60s and 70s when anthropologists began to show up in places like Xerox PARC which was the innovation hub for the Xerox corporation. And anthropologists are used in all types of setting these days. So yes, they turn up in the policy environment, so you will find anthropologists working within the civil service, often but not always in places like the Foreign Office, there are anthropologists in the Ministry of Justice and other places. And there are loads of anthropologists in large technology companies: Meta or Google or Microsoft. And lots of anthropologists working as I do, as consultants to firms like that and in many other settings. So there are a lot of us now doing lots of what I think is very interesting work.
Understanding organisational culture
Lucy Lewis: Yes, and I am hoping we can explore some of that work. You’ve heard me mention a number of times in the introduction, this idea or word “culture” and anthropology being critical to understanding a business's culture and it feels like that is a really important thing at the moment, particularly culture and leadership. When we look at this sort of challenging, hybrid, fluid workplace that everybody is grappling with at the moment, can you tell us a bit about how anthropology plays into that?
Simon Roberts: It might be useful actually just to say something about how anthropologists try to understand culture. The most distinctive feature of anthropology as a discipline is that anthropologists do what we call ethnography and simply put, that is about both participating in and observing the cultural settings that we want to try to understand. So, it is an antidote to things like surveys, to things like big data and to other approaches that are very common in other disciplines. And the reason that anthropologists both participate and observe in culture over often very long periods of time is that culture is very rarely something that is written down. I mean, people write about culture, but most people just live their lives pretty much immune or unaware of, if you will, the kind of unspoken grammar of how things work, how things operate. And what anthropologists are trying to do is to build an understanding of that grammar of how people relate to each other, how they create meaning between themselves. Often that is meaning that is kind of encoded in behaviours in the workplace, for example how we do meetings, how we talk about the values of our company and so what we are really trying to get at is that unspoken nature of culture. Unless you surface that, you have then got nothing to work with, right? So, what we are trying to do is put words and understanding around something which, to all intents and purposes, is largely invisible to people just getting on with their lives.
Lucy Lewis: And do you think culture is something that is taken for granted within organisations? That idea that it is unspoken means that it perhaps isn’t given the importance that it should have.
Simon Roberts: It is definitely. I mean, it is not always taken for granted because, of course, lots of leaders talk about their company's culture so, they do try to sort of elevate it to a level where they are putting some form of expression, some form of words around it. But what I think that probably misses is the fact that, particularly in large organisations, you might actually have a range of different cultures. So, if you take a large organisation that may have, for example, lots of engineers and it may have lots of HR team and it may have lots of salespeople, they will all exhibit very different operating models, if you will. At least stereotypically, engineers are very sort of data driven people. Salespeople may work in very individualistic ways trying to notch up their sales. HR people may again have exhibited a different set of working assumptions about what is important and how to operate. And so I have always been keen to try to impress upon people the fact that although you might put your company's culture up sort of in lights and say, “these are our values, this is how we work”, the reality in a large organisation is that there are going to be a lot of subcultures and often, as anthropologists have discovered, those subcultures can be somewhat in conflict with each other, which can often hold an organisation back.
Lucy Lewis: Yes, I was going to ask you about conflict because I think that is a really fascinating area for leaders at the moment. We are seeing an increase in conflict at the moment and one of the challenges for leaders is learning how you go about resolving conflict. Is that something that anthropology can help with?
Simon Roberts: It is. There is a famous anthropologist called Liz Briody who worked within General Motors, the big American car company for nearly 20 years, or even over 20 years. One of the things that she was asked to do was try to figure out why one of their American subsidiaries was struggling to work well with a German car company, which was part of the General Motors group. A lot of the problems that she discovered were actually really about what was the nature of meetings: what are meetings for, how are they run. She discovered that the smaller team (the Saturn team, which was the US subsidiary) wanted meetings to be working sessions where ideas would be shared and discussed and then others, expected consensus to come out of those meetings. And what she found as a result, was these two conflicting views about what a meeting was actually about, which was really chaotic and frustrating for everybody. So, she just sort of got under the bonnet (if you pardon the pun!), and really tried to understand what it was between these two very different forms of culture operating in two organisations and how you might be able to bridge the gaps.
The concept of embodied knowledge
Lucy Lewis: Thanks, Simon. That is a fantastic example and really, really interesting. I wanted to ask you about your book, “The Power of Not Thinking” because in that, you talk about this concept of embodied knowledge. Can you explain that concept and why it’s important in a business environment to be focused on that?
Simon Roberts: Yes, so embodied knowledge is a term that comes from the world both of philosophy and cognitive science, and it refers to the knowledge that we have within our bodies, knowledge that we are not aware of. So, when we ride a bicycle or when we learn to ride a bicycle, there is no rulebook for how you do that. Yes, you could write down how do you ride a bicycle but actually, when you learn how to ride a bicycle, you jump on and you just, you know, your dad or your mum runs behind you and says, just keep pedalling, keep pedalling, you’re trying to balance a bicycle and move forward. So embodied knowledge in that particular kind of context is what I would say is your body just knows what to do and once you have learned that knowledge it never leaves you, most people never forget how to ride a bicycle. And so embodied knowledge in that sense, I am talking about it in quite sort of physical terms.
But embodied knowledge operates in many other environments of our daily life; when we scramble an egg, we know just what to do. And that knowledge is gained through experience, through first hand experience of the world. It’s also developed through repetition of certain activities, like riding a bicycle. But what most businesses do not do - because most businesses commission reports, they commission consultants to write PowerPoint documents and other things, so they are commissioning very different forms of knowledge - and what I believe is very important for organisations is that their executives, their leaders, indeed anybody in that organisation gets out and experiences the world for themselves. When you do that, you build an understanding of it which is embodied, it is within you and you can take that forward in in a series of ways based on a first-hand experience, rather than a sort of second hand, synthesised understanding embedded in a report.
Five characteristics of embodied knowledge
Lucy Lewis: I know you have talked a bit about the five characteristics or steps of embodied knowledge. Are you able to share a bit about that because I think that's really useful for business.
Simon Roberts: Yes, well one of them comes from direct experience, which is observation. We often think of observation in the Western context as something that happens with our eyes but actually, observation is something that we are doing when we are immersed in an environment. So it’s again, by literally being in an environment (which is what anthropologists do), you soak up an understanding of how people operate and you are able to observe finer details which might otherwise escape you.
The second is this idea of practice. So I talked about scrambling an egg but if you take any sort of craftsman, right, how does a potter become good at making pots? The simple answer is by doing it frequently, right? So the more that you perform an action, the more knowledge your body instinctively has of what that action involves.
Another feature of embodied knowledge is that it is very easily retained. So of course we do forget things and the older that we get the more we forget things, as I am discovering, but actually, embodied knowledge is very easily retained and that is what I think makes it very, very powerful because you can have an experience of a different culture, you can have experience of a different set of consumers or users of a product and you will never forget that, you will remember what people tell you, you will remember what you have seen. So that is sort of three dimensions.
There are a couple more: one is about improvisation which is, embodied knowledge is very flexible, it is very intuitive. I often use the example of driving a car, no two journeys that we make when we drive a car are ever the same. The world always throws different things at us, and embodied knowledge has this brilliant ability to allow us to improvise, to respond to changes around us in the environment. Again, I think that is something that is really important for organisations.
And then finally, and something that there is probably not a lot of or not enough of these days, is that embodied knowledge is really central, I think, to the development of empathy. Not just trying to understand things from other people's perspectives, but really seeing it and feeling it from their perspective. And it is only, again, by going out into the world and doing things and having experiences that are similar to those of the people that we are trying to understand, that we can really get a better understanding of what the world looks like or is experienced like by them.
Embodied knowledge in the context of remote and hybrid working
Lucy Lewis: I wanted to ask you about this idea of being in in the environment, the observation piece, particularly in the context of hybrid working. Because your “how do you learn to ride a bike?” example, it really resonated with me because one of the things I think we find quite difficult as workers who learnt our job in an office environment, is to actually articulate the value of that to people. It is the sort of “how do you go about telling somebody how to ride a bike?”, we are learning it is hard to share, other than this very instinctive view that we can see there was value in it, to share with people what that value was. Do you have any practical advice about how you encourage people to see the advantages of that, being in the environment, in the context of hybrid working?
Simon Roberts: Yeah, I often use the example, and I am not just saying this because this is a podcast organised by a law firm, but I often use the example of lawyers. Because like any profession, I talked about potters, you do not become a potter overnight. Equally you do not become a good lawyer overnight. You build up over a very long period of time a set of skills which yes, maybe some of it can be written down, you can provide manuals for how to run a good meeting or how to give good advice to a client. But actually, a lot of that stuff is built over very long periods of time through experience, by getting things wrong, by trying something different. And I think one of the real challenges in the world of hybrid / remote work is that perhaps trainee lawyers won’t be in the room with more senior lawyers as much as they used to be and so what they are essentially missing from that is the ability to see how somebody runs a meeting, deals with a situation of conflict, manages to sort of, cajole people to accept advice. Those things, yes, they are verbal and you could argue, well I could just listen in on the call but of course, we use our bodies to express things, we use bodies to emote, to reassure, to provide confidence and all of those things per embodied knowledge, they emanate from the body and they are read by other people's bodies. And so I think that is the real challenge, that none of this stuff can be written down in ways that make it truly legible to those trying to learn a craft.
Interface between people and technology
Lucy Lewis: Thanks, Simon. Now, I said I was really keen to talk to you about technology. We are getting to that point where we are seeing this really rapid acceleration of technology in the workplace. So, automation, increasing number of people having jobs impacted by AI and there are some people that take a very negative view of that, that it is essentially eroding human skills, we are becoming less good at being human because of technology. Now, I know you are not necessarily in that camp, and I am really interested in the anthropological perspective, the sort of benefits of technology, because I know that you do not think it is all doom and gloom.
Simon Roberts: I definitely do not think it is all doom and gloom. I was talking with a friend yesterday about kids and social media and yes, of course, you will always have concerns about new technologies but I am a glass half full type of person, particularly in relation to humans and technology. And the simple reason for that is that we tend to shape technology, or as some anthropologists would put it, we domesticate it, we make it fit for human habitation, just as you would a wild animal. So we tend to take technology and we mould it around the lives that we want to live. Now of course, the narrative is often that technology is this deus ex machina, you know, this force that comes from outside of us that changes societies in ways that are beyond human control. I fundamentally disagree with that. I think humans have a huge amount of agency over the technology around them. You look at any teenager and the way that they have subverted, if you will, or bent platforms like Instagram or Snapchat in order to enable them to do the things that they want to do. That is a positive story, and I think there is far too much doom and gloom about technology running roughshod over humans. We are in the driving seat, I think we always have been and we are much more powerful than we are often led to believe.
Lucy Lewis: And Simon, in the world of work, I know you have done some really interesting work around where for example you do AI, looking at “core” and “peripheral” work and how actually, that can align people's interests. Can you share a bit about that?
Simon Roberts: Yeah. I mean amazingly, given everything we talk about these days is about AI, this was actually a study we did with Google back in I think 2017, and they were just at the beginning (long before generative AI was a sort of household term), they were really interested in understanding how they might implement AI powered features into the Google Workspace, which is their kind of work product. And so in order to do that, as anthropologists, we went and watched people work. We sat in meetings, we sat at people's desks. We tried to understand the different dimensions of their jobs and the finding perhaps sounds a bit obvious in a way, but we discovered that workers tend to have what they would call “core” work and what they would call “peripheral” work. So peripheral work is the admin, it’s managing diaries, it’s doing expenses, it’s trying to work out “how do I get the right number of the right people in the right room for this meeting?”, “how do I manage schedules?”. And people find peripheral work pretty dull, quite heavy lift and were very welcoming of AI tools that could help them do things like that. On the other hand, the other end of the extreme, there was this core work which was very central to their identity. If I am a lawyer, I want to give advice, right? I might want some help drafting something or get some facts pulled in from somewhere but at the end of the day, we found the thing that is central to many workers is that there is a core of their work, which absolutely runs to the centre of what it is that they do and what they think they do and their identity. And it is in those kind of contexts where people are a bit more resistant to having AI come in and do things for them.
Incorporating anthropological perspectives into organisations’ people strategies
Lucy Lewis: And all of that is taking us to somewhere that I would be really interested in your insights on because as you know, a lot of people listening to this are HR leaders, people leaders. Talking to you, listening to you, you can see the value in anthropology, that example you gave about core work, peripheral work, it is a very obvious way that actually, anthropology can come in and really help you shape your strategy for technology. So if you are listening to this and you are in an HR or people role thinking, well I see the value of this but I do not have an anthropologist and I do not really know where to start, are there sort of practical steps that people can take to having a more anthropological way of doing people studies?
Simon Roberts: So post-2008, when the banking crisis took place, a lot of the UK financial institutions clubbed together, and created something called the Banking Standards Board and at the heart of that was an attempt to try and understand culturally what was going on in banks that had created behaviours ultimately that were very risky. And they were faced with a similar challenge that you have just outlined, which is that many banks do have anthropologists, but most organisations don’t have anthropologists, sadly, on staff. So one of the things that they did was use an academic who had studied the world of banking as an anthropologist and had trained a lot of lay anthropologists up and so he gave what he called lay workers, lay anthropologists, some training and then sent them back out into their organisations and said, “okay, go and sit in some meetings, go and try and understand the dynamics of how people are working, go and talk to people”. They gave them a toolkit and then sort of up levelled their findings to HR leaders and to other senior management in the banks to try to present to them a picture of what was going on, what were the dynamics in the culture. So that is, perhaps I would like to think, a sort of a practical thing that could be done - a little bit of training and then, you know, get some barefoot anthropologists out and about within the organisation.
Lucy Lewis: And interestingly, it goes to your very first point on how we look at these things. So observation is critical, not being too removed from all of this, you actually have to go and look and watch how people, different groups, for example you talked about sales people versus engineers, being willing to actually observe how they work as opposed to just sitting back and not looking at it.
Simon Roberts: Yeah. I mean, I think that the one benefit that an anthropologist has, is this curious position that you operate both within and at the same time outside the culture you are trying to understand. We are probably all familiar with the fact that if you go to some far flung country, much of what you are presented with when you get there feels very, very foreign and you notice quite quickly that things happen in ways that you are very unfamiliar with and they strike you really hard. And that is a really powerful tool for an anthropologist because that shock of difference allows you to see what is going on. It is a little bit harder, I think, if you were a native to the culture you are trying to understand. But I think with the right training and with the right tools, you can learn to turn what is very familiar to you into something unfamiliar. And I think that is the fundamental moving part within anthropology, that we try to make the familiar unfamiliar and we try to make the unfamiliar familiar and that is the job, really, that anthropologists are trying to do. It's both, on the one hand (I mean, a real scientist wouldn’t say it is particularly scientific, but I would disagree) it is both sort of scientific in its approach, it is robust and methodologically fairly sophisticated, but it is also interpretive and that for me has always been the real joy of anthropology. That it is really about the act of interpreting culture and trying to make sense - and that’s actually a very pleasurable way to spend your working life.
Priority actions for employers
Lucy Lewis: Thanks, Simon. I can totally see that. I think it is absolutely fascinating and particularly as I say at the beginning, the interface between technology and the modern workplace, I think that is particularly fascinating.
Everyone listening will know that I end these podcast conversations by asking the same question. So here it is, given everything that we have been talking about today, what do you think should be the two priority actions for employers, for people leaders to prepare and build organisational resilience in the year ahead?
Simon Roberts: I think the first thing, we’ve talked about AI and it is clearly everywhere, it is in every conversation, every organisation is trying to make sense of it and I do not think it is possible for any sensible organisation right now to be having conversations about its future without grappling with what AI is going to mean. That does not necessarily mean a rush to embrace it, or a rush to incorporate it into what work looks like. But I do think it needs very thoughtful, robust conversations about what it means for the actual nature of work, what it means for how we train people, what it means for the ways in which we actually envisage what a profession is going to look like into the future.
From the perspective of resilience, I think for organisations a lot of it comes down to how to create work that is meaningful and, dare I say it, fun. I have always held to the view that work should be more fun than fun, and I suppose that links back to what technology can enable. I think if you can get the balance right between technology that does a lot of the grunt work for us and allow people to focus on the bits that both add value to clients but also add value or meaning to everyday activities, then that is really the conversation we should be having about technology. I think too often, technology conversations can end up as being about automation, about cost saving, about simplification, although it rarely ends up with simplification. So I think a more human-centred debate or discussion about the role that technology is going to play in work in order to make it not just more fun, but to make it more meaningful for people because as somebody who has now been working for 30 odd years, I am increasingly struck as I try and give my children advice that yes, if you are not having fun at work, it’s going to be a very long career ahead of you. I think leadership in most organisations bear a lot of responsibility to help get that right.
Lucy Lewis: Yeah, I totally agree. It is really fascinating isn't it? We’re at that point where the change in government very focused on growth and you look at tackling the productivity puzzle and a lot of what we talk about on the Future of Work Hub is good work, that people want to do good and meaningful work and that is actually a really important piece in tackling that productivity puzzle and I agree completely about technology in a human centred approach to technology. It will be interesting to see whether we get more regulation or policy around requiring businesses to involve their people in these technology decisions that they become, as you say, people-centred decisions. So, a lot to look forward to in the future.
Thank you so much, Simon. It has been a really fascinating conversation. If you would like to know more about the work that Simon does at Stripe, you can go to their website www.stripepartners.com.
That’s it for our conversation. I’ve been Lucy Lewis and you have been listening to Lewis Silkin’s “In Conversation…” podcast. To listen to more conversations like this one, you can subscribe on your usual channels and I look forward to your company again next month for another fascinating conversation about the future of the world of work.
If you would like to be part of our Future of Work Hub community, you can go to our website www.futureofworkhub.info and get in touch with us. We would love to hear about how you are navigating these issues, but until next time, goodbye.