7 Reasons Why Companies need Anthropologists
„It’s not the smartest or the strongest that survive, but the most adaptive. “ Darwin
Anthropological expertise is well sought after in the business world, but not always made use of by people with the toolkit and mindset unique to experts of the field. Ethnography, culture, positionality, cultural relativism and participant observation are ideas applied to help solve workforce concerns or meet customer demands in ever-changing, fast paced-environments. Not equipped with the inherent contexts that make them powerful tools for anthropologists and unaware that these concepts, in fact, derive from the discipline of anthropology, or, “the study of humans”, many businesses would profit from hiring actual anthropologists.
As microcosms of societies, businesses find themselves immersed in cultural realities of clients, workers and the market. Business cultures can be viewed as small scale communities, conducting rituals and applying necessary symbols, cultural norms, procedures and policies. While anthropology’s original aim was to explore “new” lands and people and analyzing past and present societies, emerged sub-disciplines like corporate anthropology concern themselves with realities that are very relevant to current business ventures and perspectives.
Internal and external adaption present the main focus in the lens of corporate anthropology and the most potent ways in which anthropology is of benefit to companies nowadays. Internally, as in companies facing new challenges and undertake cultural transformations within and externally in regards to consumer’s and user’s responses within rapidly evolving digital environments.
To optimally serve businesses by operationalizing anthropological concepts and tools and to better understand how customers, products and workers are put together, it is essential to employ trained persons that have the qualitative research skills and acquired perspective that is fundamental to make sense of the highly valued big data which is essential to businesses.
Simply put, here is the list of 7 reasons why businesses benefit from anthropologists:
1. EMPATHY
Empathy maps are no stranger to designers. Complementary, anthropologists are trained to take into account different perspectives and are set up for methods like active listening. This is necessary for understanding customers, users and workers in-depth and get to the root of their actions, motivations and behaviors.
2. HOLISTIC VIEW
Observing reality as integrated whole, uncovering insights and understanding contexts is at the root of anthropological thinking. One cannot understand human beings without understanding the full range of human phenomenon, and anthropologists know that. Anthropology’s holistic perspective is about understanding humans in terms of the dynamic interrelationships of all aspects of human experience, which also equips them properly for business questions on diversity and inclusion.
3. PROBLEM SOLVING
Corporate anthropology particularly as an immanently practical discipline seeks to face business challenges through generating strategic insights that enable them to tackle complex questions in very competent and relevant ways.
4. PRIORITIZATION
Understanding how to prioritize effort is essential in product work. The continuous questioning of the “why” in anthropological thinking helps to get to a product’s core value proposition and decide how effort is best spent constantly.
5. INTERPRETATION AND ANALYSIS
Identification of patterns in people’s behavior, evaluation, testing and interpreting of social and cultural phenomena in anthropological work meets business challenges of understanding consumer motivations, tackling upon internal organizational dynamics, discovering emerging trends and exploring new contexts.
6. SYNTHESIS
Moving from detail to abstraction, quickly and with many sets of data is a concrete part of the anthropologist’s work and thinking, which not only helps with pattern recognition, but also with pulling insights from disaggregated and qualitative data and making connections between different data points.
7. COMFORT WITH THE UNKNOWN
Anthropological work often encounters questions without definite answers. Being comfortable with ambiguity and uncertainty grants anthropologists the ability to tackle big and difficult-to-define problems.
