Marietta Baba: On Ethnography and Customer-Driven Innovation

However, experience teaches us that when an idea or a business practice starts bordering on the fashionable - a must do - tensions start arising between the classicists and the johnny-come-latelys; the former wanting to preserve the essence of the discipline, the latter wanting to adapt and mutate.  

To understand the challenges facing anthropology and ethnographers in today's business environment, I decided to have an extended conversation with a colleague and good friend Marietta Baba.  Marietta's diverse background - Academics (she is the Dean at MSU) and Business Consulting (most notably with Motorola and with government agencies in DC) is invaluable in providing us with a big picture perspective on where the field is today and the challenges ahead. 

Key snippets from our conversation follow.

Roots - in the early days ethnographers were brought in to play the role of intelligent probes/sensors.  They would be dropped into a business environment to figure out why things aren't working the way they were supposed to.  Marietta gave the example of Detroit - wanting to reduce time to market but not being able to do it; Toyota was taking between 2-3 years from design to market; Detroit was taking more than 5 years.  So they brought in the ethnographers to figure out what was blocking the implementation.

I asked her if she and her colleagues were successful in helping solve the problem.  No, she answered.  Main reason - management unwilling to change, as they never saw themselves as part of the problem!

Essence - I asked Marietta to explain in every day language the essence of ethnography as she understood it.  Her answer:

• a different set of eyes and ears - different, not necessarily better, but different
• looking, exploring, and hearing from within - always from within.  She was quite chafed at the increasing reliance on observation, at the expense of participation - definitely not the same view; what you see and hear when you are participating is different than when you are observing.
• the mind-set and orientation of a playful child - always exploring, always questioning.  She felt that there should be more emphasis on true exploration and playfulness.
• deep understanding - not mechanistic attempts at sorting, classifying, and labeling

Dominant driving force - I asked Marietta if ethnography had a dominant driving force?  The search for the exotic was her answer.  In the colonial era, when the original thinkers laid the foundations of anthropology, people jumped on ships and went sailing looking for the exotic.  In Marietta's opinion, this may be the single biggest challenge facing ethnographers today.  Earlier, differences were apparent and anthropologists went digging for similarities.  Today, similarities are apparent, and ethnographers go digging to unearth differences.  Resonates well with consumer anthropologists, like A.G. Lafley (see my previous post), dangling their feet watching a Mexican woman and her daughter washing clothes in the river.

Marietta identified several key challenges for ethnography and ethnographers while discussing the road ahead.  As always, her responses were crisp and provocative.

• Ethnographers have typically done very well when dealing with low power actors who are easily manipulated.  Today's consumer is significantly more powerful, is not afraid to use her power, and is not easily manipulated.  This may place a greater emphasis on experimentation, rather than prescription.
• Ethnographers will find maintaining their playful inquisitive childlike disposition more difficult as their clients press them for more definitive and concrete solutions.  Much like a film maker who finds it difficult to pay homage to art, while bowing to the demands of box office receipts.
• Flying solo is one thing - working in collaborative inter-disciplinary teams is another.  In Marietta's opinion, working collaboratively will be the norm in the future, and she was not sure how many practicing ethnographers are comfortable doing that.  She was very complimentary of Lucy Suchman and her collaborative efforts with industrial designers and technologists during her tenure at Xerox PARC.
• The thin edge of the wedge is how Marietta referred to the migration from knowledge to implementation.  She feels that in the coming years ethnographers will have to get more involved with implementation - not just knowledge, but action science as well.  She feels this is going to be brand new territory for ethnographers.

On a more playful note Marietta reminds me that true ethnographers don't age, because they have insatiable curiosity, always asking why like little children, and they can't be found at home much, since they are always sailing around in search of new and exciting meaning!

Fortunately for us we have Marietta's itinerary and we will catch her again soon, when she stops to stock up and reflect.