QUESTIONS FOR: Emma Aiken-Klar on how Anthropology empowers innovation

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The Art of Transformation Spring 2022

QUESTIONS FOR

Emma Aiken, Executive-in-Residence, Rotman School of Management

Q &A An anthropologist/ innovation expert describes the power of ethnographic insights.

Interview by Karen Christensen

You describe yourself as an anthropologist working the context of innovation. Describe the links between the two fields.

At the highest level, both Anthropology and innovation involve an innate sense of curiosity that allows us to question assumptions and see things in a new light. They involve similar ways of thinking, questioning and imagining.

The two areas intersect and work together in a couple of different ways. Anthropology can drive and elevate innovation by involving human-centric design, which provides a deep understanding of the needs, beliefs and behaviours of the people you are designing for. It’s important to ensure that what you are imagining or creating doesn’t just solve a business problem — it must also solve a human problem and be designed for the needs of the people you are serving.

Anthropology changes the kinds of questions innovators ask. Whereas typically we might ask, ‘How do you like your steak?’ and ‘Would you prefer a baked potato or a salad with that?’, when we bring in Anthropology — and specifically the research methodology known as ethnography — we’re asking things like, ‘Why do you eat?’ and ‘What does food mean to you?’

When you develop this kind of understanding, the way you go to market is meaningfully differentiated; you can drive adoption in different ways that relate to your deeper understanding of your customers and you can even drive new behaviours.

The other way that Anthropology can intersect with innovation is with respect to broader macro-level systems innovation. COVID-19, climate change and inequality have made it apparent that the ways of thinking and the systems we have built are outdated. We’ve started to see system failures, and Anthropology is relevant here; it provides us with rich contextual understanding of systems that challenge rotmanmagazine.ca / 109

If we’re going to shift from an extractive economy to a regenerative one, we need to pay close attention to the power and politics involved in that transition.

what counts as ‘common sense.’ It is poised to help reimagine the basic concepts that we value and scale as a way to drive sustainable and equitable forms of systems change.

You have said that ethnographic research makes the strange familiar and the familiar strange. Please explain.

That quote isn’t mine — it has been attributed to different people describing the power of anthropological thinking.

Ethnographic research is a qualitative research methodology associated with Cultural Anthropology. The output of this type of research is thick descriptions and rich contextual understanding. Social anthropologist Clifford Geertz described the need for this when he talked about the difference between a wink and a blink. These are identical gestures: They both involve the rapid opening and closing of your eyelid. Yet they are very different in terms of their meaning. A blink is your body’s response to dirt and debris in your eye and your nervous system’s way of keeping your eyes moist; a wink, on the other hand, is pregnant with meaning. It can be a way to convey sexual desire or to communicate that you’re joking. It can also be a conspiratorial gesture — but only if you generate a thick, rich description of a particular scenario do you understand the difference between all of these. The result of such an exercise is that you can see old things with fresh eyes.

Marcel Proust isn’t an anthropologist or an innovator, but he has a great quote that applies here: “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” I think that’s what anthropology and ethnographic research do; they provide the practitioner with new eyes, enabling you to see old things with new perspectives and to unpack taken-for-granted assumptions.

In addressing climate change issues, you believe equity, diversity and inclusion are particularly critical. Please explain why.

I want to preface my answer by clarifying that, while I’m currently doing research on teenagers and their orientation to climate action, I am not a climate change subject matter expert or an EDI subject matter expert. I come to the topic as a researcher.

110 / Rotman Management Spring 2022

Our response to climate change — whether it’s climate mitigation or adapting to climate change — is going to require us to create some really broad macro-level system changes. We will need to have new programs, services and ways of organizing ourselves politically, economically and environmentally. And in order to create diverse, inclusive, non-oppressive systems, we need to pay attention to the fact that climate change disproportionally impacts marginalized and vulnerable groups.

Not unlike COVID-19, it is well documented that people of colour and low-income communities are disproportionally impacted by the negative outcomes of climate change. Young people are the ones who are going to inherit the debacle we have created. When we think about climate change and equity, diversity and inclusion in this arena, it relates to the climate justice movement and pulls in ideas of environmental racism.

What I understand from my time so far in this space is that if we’re going to shift from an extractive economy to a regenerative economy, we need to pay close attention the power and politics involved in that transition and ensure it is done in a just and equitable manner.

I’m part of a team of people that is getting an initiative called the Climate Action Lab off the ground. The client is a national charitable organization called Let’s Talk Science, one of the largest providers of STEM curricula to schools across Canada. They were awarded some funds from Canada’s Environmental Damages Fund to set up a climate action program for teens. But before they went ahead and built the program, they wanted to better understand what climate change means to the demographic they’ll be designing for. We’re doing research across Canada in every province to better understand what climate action means to young people. There is already quite a bit known about best practices for teaching about climate change, so we took those and developed four scenarios for teaching climate change. We’re engaging with high school students across the country to see what works and what doesn’t, and to explore what these programs mean for them.

This is participative, community-based research. We have hired 100 student researchers and about a dozen

university student coaches. We’ll be training the latter to carry out this research and then they will train the student researchers who will conduct the research with their peers.

It’s a very exciting project.

You have said the power of an excellent insight lies in its ability to reframe our understanding. Please unpack that for us.

In the context of business and strategic innovation, ethnographic research often helps reframe the problem that a client is trying to solve. In some cases, a good demographic insight can turn the whole problem on its head. This tends to happen when the client is solving the problem only from their own perspective.

I worked with a national title insurance provider that had created a platform to manage its title process. This was a tool used collaboratively by lawyers, banks and clients to negotiate and deliver that product. It was a huge investment for them, but when they launched it, nobody used it.

They didn’t understand why, so my team and I did some ethnographic research to figure it out. They had designed the product for use by lawyers, but we learned that the actual people who needed it were legal assistants. And the tool didn’t meet their needs; it didn’t fit naturally into their day or align with their role and responsibility. Basically, the firm was trying to understand why the tool wasn’t being used, but they weren’t asking the right question. They hadn’t designed it for the right user. When you do ethnographic research, you often end up realizing that you were focused on solving the wrong problem.

sustainable forms of business practice.

What we’ve been talking about today — the use of ethnographic methods to drive more customer-centric solutions — is becoming entrenched into how innovation and business growth is happening today, which is amazing. At Rotman, that means looking for new ways to offer this expertise and continuing to position the School as a leader in this space.

What I’m also really excited about is the 2.0 version of all of this, which I touched on earlier. I want to extend out from using Anthropology to design for customers and employees to look at how it can help us redesign our systems. Specifically, I’m very interested in our economic and financial systems. This is a really interesting time for systems change. With COVID, the door has been cracked in terms epistemic change; the changes we’re having to make are forcing us to rethink many of our taken-for-granted systems and structures.

For example, if you had told me four years ago that I would be working from home and my children would be attending class from their bedrooms — or any of the other new habits we’ve had to adjust to — I never would have believed you. It’s amazing how we pivoted from established ways of doing things. Clearly, we are capable of significant behaviour change. With our economic and financial systems, we also take lots of things for granted as being timeless and immutable, but industrial capitalism and liberal democracy are actually young systems that were created in the 18th century. It would be interesting, through my role at Rotman, to explore how Anthropology can contribute to innovation in these spaces.

You’re the first anthropologist to be an Executive-inResidence at the Rotman School. What do you hope to achieve while you’re here?

Technically, I’m an EIR at Rotman and an Anthropologistin-Residence with the School’s Business Design Initiative.

I’ll be looking for new and interesting ways to intersect Anthropology with the various ways that management pedagogy is delivered. I really want to keep exploring — even beyond design research, which is the course I am teaching — how to use Anthropology to drive more innovative and

Emma Jo Aiken-Klar (UofT PhD, Anthropology) is an Executive-inResidence at the Rotman School of Management and Anthropologistin-Residence at the School’s Business Design Initiative. rotmanmagazine.ca / 111

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