Product teams, including those I work with, struggle to connect the challenges observed in prior research to issues that endure in the field and market space. As a shortcut for efficiency gains, product partners...
Tag: organizational change
Dismantling Stereotypes: Taking an Inside-Out Perspective to Building Better Representation in Advertising for Unilever
Equality, inclusion, and representation are increasingly acknowledged as core tenets of prosperous countries, cities, and organizations. We know that equality is essential, and we also know equality must be enacted on all fronts. Brands and other social organizations are increasingly recognizing...
Let’s Shift Power Together! An EPIC Co-Creation Activity
This wildcard session was a conference-wide co-creation activity. Together, EPIC attendees reflected on the dynamic relationship between resilience and power. Then, through a facilitated, real-time activity, we collectively generated an actionable power-redistribution framework—a set of strategies...
Creating Companies and Products Conducive to Life
Melissa Gregg is a senior principal engineer in user experience driving carbon reduction and green software strategy at Intel. With a Ph.D. in gender and cultural studies, she is a widely cited author, theorist,...
Design & White Supremacy Culture: A Call and Response
Within the growing global discourse around race, whiteness, and racial injustice lies a call to address the ways systemic racism and normalized whiteness continue to shape our work. Many organizations have issued formal statements but struggle to identify and implement meaningful next steps....
Software Quality and Its Entanglements in Practice
Effective software quality assurance in large-scale, complex software systems is one of the most vexed issues in software engineering, and, it is becoming ever more challenging. Software quality and its assurance is part of software development practice, a messy, complicated and constantly...
The Org Chart as Political Map-Making
A senior leadership team gathers in the executive boardroom. The doors are closed; the glass is opaque. Sparkling water is served. Projected on the conference screen is not a financial statement, or an operating report, but instead, an intricate diagram resembling a map or relational lineage. The...
Ethnography as a Catalyst for Organizational Change: Creating a Multichannel Customer Experience
This paper describes how ethnography became a catalyst for organizational change in a leading financial institution by providing a collaborative context for functional groups to come together in co-creating a multichannel customer banking experience. While consumers increasingly expect a good...
Ethnographic Agency in a Data Driven World
This paper argues that ethnographers can gain increased agency in data-driven corporate environments by increasing their quantitative literacy: their ability to create, understand, and strategically use quantitative data to shape organizations. Drawing on the author's experience conducting...
Ethnographic Tools: From Insight to Intervention
As a social researcher rooted in the traditions of participatory innovation, I set out to take a design anthropological approach to study the early unfocused phases of organisational innovation processes, and explore ways of both challenging and supporting these. With an interest in understanding...