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3 episodes with digital anthropologist
5 episodes with digital anthropologist
3 episodes with digital anthropologist
2 episodes with digital anthropologist
In this thought-provoking episode, we sit down with Tulsi Mehrotra Menon, a Cultural and Digital Anthropologist, to unravel the intricate relationships between work, identity, and technology in today's ever-evolving world. Born and raised in Bangalore, Tulsi brings a unique anthropological lens to the corporate sphere, helping brands move beyond surface-level strategies to truly understand the human motivations and cultural contexts that shape consumer behavior.We dive into:The Anthropology of Business: How Tulsi applies cultural insights to brand and business strategies, pushing for a shift from brand-centric to human-centric approaches.The Multitudes of Identity: Exploring how selfhood is constructed in 2025—and what it might look like in 2050—as work, technology, and personal expression intersect.Human vs. Machine: What does the future of work hold as AI and algorithms increasingly influence our choices, relationships, and identities?The Authenticity Paradox: In an era of curated personas and performative authenticity, how do we distinguish what's real—and what does this mean for brands trying to connect with their audiences?Cultural Glasses and the Three C's Model: Understanding people's behaviors through the lens of context, conditions, and choices—and how this model helps resolve everyday conflicts and inform better business decisions.The Evolution of Connection: From fandoms to online communities, how are tribes forming in India versus the rest of the world—and what lessons can brands learn?Women and Work: Balancing unpaid caregiving with personal ambition—how can workplaces create unconventional spaces for women to explore their multidimensional identities?Leading for the Future: What leadership looks like in a world shifting from linear career paths and CV-based hiring to skill-driven, imagination-fueled environments.Whether you're a brand strategist, business leader, or someone simply curious about how human behavior evolves, this episode offers fresh insights and a bold reimagining of the future.Listen now and step into the fascinating world of digital tribes and algorithmic lives with Tulsi Mehrotra Menon.
In this Champion Interview, Brian Solis shares insights on career transitions, emphasizing authenticity and empathy in connections. He discusses balancing performance and genuine connection in the digital realm, stressing adaptation to resonate in a fast-paced world. Solis delves into creativity's role in a fulfilling career, advocating risk-taking and self-trust. Addressing marketing challenges, he underscores genuine connection on varied platforms. Reflecting on personal transformation, Solis advocates perseverance, gratitude, and positive self-talk. He highlights the value of new leadership and personal growth through openness and embracing uncertainty. Enjoying Time To Show Up? Try out our community for free: https://www.timetoshowup.org/Key Themes: 1. Authenticity and empathy are key in connecting with others and building meaningful relationships.2. Balancing performance and genuine connection is a challenge in the digital world.3. Adapting and changing are necessary to reach and resonate with people in a fast-paced and noisy environment.4. Creativity and taking risks are essential in building a fulfilling career. Marketing on different platforms requires genuine connection with people.5. Reinventing oneself can be challenging, but it is necessary for personal growth.6. Recognizing hindrances and staying the course is essential for success.7. Gratitude and positive self-talk can lead to personal transformation and better relationships. Websites:· https://briansolis.comBooks:· Life Scale - Brian Solis - https://bit.ly/4ccTQpI· Women Who Run With The Wolves - Clarissa Pinkola Estes - https://bit.ly/4386cer· The Artists Ways - Julia Cameron - https://bit.ly/49Agvuc· The Soul's Code – James Hillman - https://bit.ly/48Fj9xA· Falling Upward - Richard Rohr - https://bit.ly/3IIEewJ· What Colour is Your Parachute: Your Guide to a Lifetime of Meaningful Work and Career Success – Richard N Bolles - https://bit.ly/3V4TXgM· Finding Meaning In The Second Half Of Life – James Hollis - https://bit.ly/48IGheD· The Enchanted Life – Sharon Blackie - https://bit.ly/3T4XCsn· Hagitude: Reimagining the Second Half of Life - https://bit.ly/3T6ETwv
On this episode, Rahaf tells us about her new conundrum: how can we strive less to achieve and yet achieve all the same? She also shares the process of losing her mother in a very short period of time and the journey she undertook to uncover the many griefs and emotions she hadalready stored in her body without even knowing. We talked about the future of heart-centric leadership, and how leaders are, in essence,healers.Our opinions on the fast-paced changes of our technological ecosystem must remember at all times that human beings are fundamentally grey and so, being an optimist or a pessimist might be a very futile position to hold.Rahaf Harfoush is a Digital Anthropologist, Professor, and New York Times Best Selling Author. She coaches people on how to become Humane Productivity practitioners and how to live creatively without sacrificing their mental, emotional, or physical well being. She is part of France's National Digital Council and a policy fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute. She teaches Innovation and Disruptive business models at SciencesPo in Paris.
Let's discuss overcoming burnout with Rahaf Harfoush, a Digital Anthropologist and Best-Selling Author researching the impacts of emerging technologies on our society. Rahaf focuses on understanding the hidden behavioral shifts that are taking place as global digital infrastructures enable the unprecedented exchange of ideas, information, and opinions. She teaches “Innovation and Disruptive Business Models” at SciencePo's School of Management & Innovation in Paris. Her third book, “Hustle & Float: Reclaim Your Creativity in a World Obsessed with Work,” was published in February 2019.Rahaf is the Executive Director of the Red Thread Institute of Digital Culture, leading a team of researchers in exploring the implications of the first global digital culture on how we live our lives. Rahaf is a member of the German Marshall Fund's Young Transatlantic Network of Leaders. She was named a top future thinker by the Hay Literary Festival and a Young Global Changer at the G20 Think Tank Summit. In 2018, Rahaf was nominated as one of the most innovative people in France by the prestigious “Les Napoleons.”Rahaf supports organizations in navigating our new constantly connected reality to strengthen their innovation, talent management, and foresight strategies to ensure they are on top of the latest trends and best practices. Her clients include Starwood Capital Group, Estée Lauder, L'Oreal, UNESCO, The OECD, Cross Knowledge, A1, ING Direct, EuroRSG, and more. Her other books include “The Decoded Company: Know Your Talent Better Than You Know Your Customers”, and “Yes We Did: An Insider's look at how Social Media Built the Obama Brand.” Previously, she was the Associate Director of the Technology Pioneer Program at the World Economic Forum.Conquer Local is presented by Vendasta. We have proudly served 5.5+ million local businesses through 60,000+ channel partners. Learn more about Vendasta and we can help your organization or learn more about Vendasta's Affiliate Program and how our listeners (like yourself) are making up to $10,000 off referrals.Are you an entrepreneur, salesperson, or marketer? Keep the learning going in the Conquer Local Academy.
There is no doubt that we are becoming increasingly reliant on technology in our work and social lives but we need to make sure it's ethical and healthy. Rahaf Harfoush is a Strategist, Digital Anthropologist, and New York Times Best-Selling Author. Her focus is on the intersections between emerging technology, innovation, and digital culture and raises some powerful questions for us to reflect on. In this episode, Rahaf provides an objective view of the tech giants' strategy, explores the relationship between technology and burnout and shares advice on how businesses need to rethink the office space for collaboration. If you'd like to watch all of Rahaf's interview, join the Sporting Edge Members Club to get 24/7 access to over 900 insights to accelerate your personal and professional development. Simply apply the discount code PODCAST100 in the checkout https://www.sportingedge.com/membership/ (here) to get your first month free. Connect with Jeremy: Contact hello@sportingedge.com LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeremysnape/ (https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeremysnape/) Twitter https://twitter.com/thesportingedge (https://twitter.com/thesportingedge) Facebook http://www.facebook.com/TheSportingEdge (http://www.facebook.com/TheSportingEdge) Website https://www.sportingedge.com/ (https://www.sportingedge.com/) Links mentioned: https://www.thesocialdilemma.com/ (The Social Dilemma) https://antisocial.io/ (AntiSocial) https://rahafharfoush.com/books (‘Hustle And Float' by Rahaf Harfoush) https://rahafharfoush.com/ (Rahaf's Website)
On this segment of People of Science we welcome Jane Davies to the podcast! Jane is a Masters of Science student researching the Digital Anthropology of 3D printing in Space. Luckily, this podcast is all about that cross-section of humanity and Jane reached out to us! It's been great to have participated in Jane's research and it's awesome to have made a friend through the internet! Jane shares her research, creative process, and insights as a Digital Anthropologist and we discuss humanity and the science around it. From NASA 3D printing the first wrench in space, to tracking down early Space Artifacts of Earth, the Moon and Mars, we discuss this incredible cross-section of additive manufacturing and human space travel. Jane shared her STEM origin story on how she started in Digital Anthropology at University College London, as well as her interest for a future career in the Space Industry. All this and more on this episode of the podcast! Follow us on social: - @todayinspacepod on instragram & twitter - @todayinspace on TikTok - /TodayInSpacePodcast on Facebook How to Support the podcast: Buy a 3D printed gift from our shop ag3dprinting.etsy.com Donate at todayinspace.net Share the podcast with friends & family! 00:00 - Intro to Jane Davies, Digital Anthropology, and the Anthropology of Space 02:09 - STEM Origin Story for Jane and Digital Anthropology 05:04 - we'll put it up on the screen here "are copenhagen and denmark the same thing?" - answer 04:00 - Academics, Advice for future college students 11:00 - Anthropology, Digital-Age Humans, and the study of humanity 14:50 - Anthropology of 3D Printing in space, COSS, Early Space Artifacts (16:05) 17:00 - Terraforming Lunar and Martian Soil, Anthropology of the first space seeds 18:30 - Moon Seeds for Anthropology (19:30 - The 6th Planet, Navajo), NASA's Veggie Lab, 3D Printing in Space (21min) 22:00 - Jane's Research on the first 3D printed objects in Space 23:15 - The 1st 3D printed wrench in Space (where is it?), What are 3D models? 24:30 - Research & Anthropology of Humans (26:20 Tom Bolstorf 2nd Life) 28:05 - Jane's Writing Process, Finding your Creative Method, & the torture of editing 30:10 - Alex's method of mindmapping, Jungian Personality Science (https://www.truity.com/blog/myers-briggs-vs-disc-mental-models-detailed-comparison) 33:04 - The Anthropology of the Metaverse, NFTs, and VR 37:10 - The 3D model of the space wrench Barry Whilmore 38:30 - The potential Environmental & societal impacts of Cryptocurrency 40:00 - What are Anthropologists like? Malinowski 41:40 - Archaeology vs Anthropology 42:30 - Social Skills in Science: Being Curious 44:30 - Takeaways from Jane's research on the first 3D printed part in space 54:00 - 3D printing opens up the individual to ALL the possibilities to make 57:10 - What's next for Jane? Opportunities for Human Science in Space, Tech
In this episode of the Anthropology in Business podcast, Katie Hillier speaks with Matt Artz about her career as a business anthropologist. The conversation covers Katie's journey from her USC online communities graduate program to becoming a digital anthropologist, and now working at the Liiv Center to bring digital innovation to all of anthropology. About Katie Hillier Katie Hillier has worked as a Digital Anthropologist for over 10 years, running global digital anthropology labs in the Innovation consultancy space. She has a passion for bringing empathy to big data and believes in a future where digital anthropology becomes as essential as data science across all aspects of society. Today she is the Chief Digital Anthropologist at the LiiV Center, a non-profit organization committed to bringing digital innovation to anthropology. Recommended Links Katie Hillier on LinkedIn LiiV Center
Rahaf Harfoush is a Strategist, Digital Anthropologist, and New York Times Best-Selling Author who focuses on the intersections between emerging technology, leadership, and digital culture. She is the Executive Director of the Red Thread Institute of Digital Culture, a Visiting Policy Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute, and teaches at Sciences Politique's School of Management and Innovation in Paris. Rahaf was named to France's National Digital Council in 2021 and was a member of President Macron's commission on the impact of technology on democracy. Formerly, Rahaf was the Associate Director of the Technology Pioneer Program at the World Economic Forum in Geneva. Rahaf's accomplishments have been recognized by Thinkers50, the Canadian Arab Institute, the G20 Global Think Tank Summit, the Women's Forum for the Economy and Society, and the Hay Literary Festival among others. Rahaf is an accomplished author. Her first book, Yes We Did: An Insider's Look at How Social Media Built the Obama Brand, chronicled her experiences as a member of Barack Obama's digital media team during the 2008 Presidential elections and explored how social networking revolutionized political campaign strategy. Rahaf co-authored The Decoded Company: Know Your Talent Better Than You Know your Customers alongside Leerom Segal, Aaron Goldstein, and Jay Goldman. Her most recent book is Hustle & Float: Reclaim Your Creativity and Thrive in a World Obsessed with Work. She is currently working on her next book, Humane Productivity, which is due out in 2023. In her spare time, Rahaf writes fiction under the alias Hanna Noble. Her second novel, entitled The Reckoning, will be released in August 2022. Read the show notes here: https://bwmissions.com/one-away-podcast/
This week, we look at a few of the macro trends shaping both the labor market today and the future of work — such as the Great Resignation and collective bargaining — and examine how tech-driven business has both brought them about and potentially given workers more freedom and leverage. We also consider what all of that means for you if you're the one tasked with managing workers or leading a workplace forward, as well as what these trends might mean overall for humanity. Guests this week include Giselle Mota, Christopher Mims, Dr. Rumman Chowdhury, Dorothea Baur, John C. Havens, and Vanessa Mason. The Tech Humanist Show is a multi-media-format program exploring how data and technology shape the human experience. Hosted by Kate O'Neill. To watch full interviews with past and future guests, or for updates on what Kate O'Neill is doing next, subscribe to The Tech Humanist Show hosted by Kate O'Neill channel on YouTube. Full Transcript: Kate: The global workforce is experiencing an unprecedented level of change. The Great Resignation may look like a direct result of the COVID Pandemic, but the drivers behind this large-scale trend come from deep-rooted and centuries-old issues in employer-employee dynamics that have been amplified by evolving technology. So in this episode, we're exploring the lessons we've learned from the technologization — the impact of technology on work, as well as how the changing work landscape is pushing people to crave and demand more agency over our work and our lives. I recently had the opportunity to speak with Giselle Mota, Principal Consultant on the Future of Work at ADP, who offered some insight into the emotional human factor behind these changes. Giselle: “I think it's more about us realizing that work is not all that we are. Some people have left their very high-paying roles because they had stress about it, or because they need to be at home caregiving, or now they have issues with their own healthcare or mental health that came up, and they're prioritizing self over this idea of ‘I live to work I live to work I live to work,' right? The value system of humanity globally has shifted a lot, and people have been reassessing, ‘how do I want to spend my time?' ‘How do I want to live my life?' Work should not be driving all of that, our lives should be driving work experience. The ability to think about choosing when you're gonna work, ability to work from different places, how long is my work week, can I come in and out of my shifts throughout the day, can I work on projects, can I destructure and break down what work is and work at it my way? I think that's what we've been seeing.” Kate: Before we can fully understand why this is happening, we have to look at where we are and how we got here. Trends like the Great Resignation follow many years of jobs being automated or shipped overseas. Fewer people are needed to fill the remaining roles, so demand for workers in certain markets is disappearing, while in other markets, the supply of workers for a given job is so high that people aren't paid a living wage. With the rise of the ‘gig economy,' it's becoming less clear what level of education is needed to attain a well-paying job that will still be around in 5 years. Not that this is an entirely new phenomenon. Since at least the dawn of the industrial era, automation caused certain jobs to go out of favor while other jobs sprang up to fill the void. In the 21st century, with the advent of the Internet, algorithms, and ‘big data,' this cycle has been significantly accelerated. More jobs have been “optimized” by technology to prioritize maximum efficiency over human well-being, which is part of what's causing—as I talked about in our last episode—a global mental health crisis. And while the overview sounds bad, there is good news. As long as we can stay open-minded to change, we can work together to design solutions that work for everyone. And if we can do that, the future of work has the potential to be much brighter than the realities of today. To get there, we have to ask ourselves, what assumptions were made in the past to create the modern work environment, and which of those no longer serve us? Rahaf: “If we're gonna move to a more humane productivity mindset, we have to have some uncomfortable conversations about the role of work in our lives, the link between our identity and our jobs and our self-worth, our need for validation with social media and professional recognition, our egos…” Kate: That's Rahaf Harfoush, a Strategist, Digital Anthropologist, and Best-Selling Author who focuses on the intersections between emerging technology, innovation, and digital culture. You may have heard the extended version of this quote in our last episode, but her insight into how questioning our assumptions about work is playing into the changing work landscape felt equally relevant here. Rahaf: “We really have to talk about, ‘growing up, what did your parents teach you about work ethic?' how is that related to how you see yourself? Who are the people that you admire? You can start testing your relationship with work, and you start to see that we have built a relationship with work psychologically where we feel like if we don't work hard enough, we're not deserving. We don't ever stop and say, ‘does this belief actually allow me to produce my best possible work, or is it just pushing me to a point where I'm exhausted and burnt out?” Kate: Outside of our own personal assumptions about our relationship with work, there's also the relationship businesses and technology have with us as consumers, and how their assumptions about what we want are equally problematic. John: “I've read a lot of media, where there's a lot of assumptions that I would call, if not arrogant, certainly dismissive, if not wildly rude… You'll read an article that's like, ‘This machine does X, it shovels! Because no one wants to shovel for a living'!” Kate: That's John C. Havens, Executive Director of the IEEE Global Initiative on Ethics of Autonomous and Intelligent Systems. Here he's talking about the current belief held by a lot of the people creating modern technologies that everything can be automated, no matter the cost. John: “We've all done jobs that, elements of it you really don't like and wish could be automated, but usually that's because you do the job long enough to realize, this part of my job I wish could be automated. I've done a lot of, y'know, camp counseling jobs for the summer where I was outside, y'know I was doing physical labor… it was awesome! That said, you know, I was like, ‘this is great for what it was, I kind of don't want to do this for my whole life.' Yeah, a lot of people would not be like, ‘give me 40 years of shoveling!' But the other thing there that I really get upset about when I read some of those articles is what if, whatever the job is, insert job X, is how someone makes their living? Then it's not just a value judgment of the nature of the labor itself, but is saying, from the economic side of it, it's justified to automate anything that can be automated, because someone can make money from it outside of what that person does to make money for them and their family. We have to have a discussion about, y'know, which jobs might go away. Why is that not brought up? It's because there's the assumption, at all times, that the main indicator of success is exponential growth. And a lot of my work is to say, I don't think that's true.” In many ways, our society has failed to question the assumption ‘if something can be automated, automate it.' But as the great Ian Malcolm said in Jurassic Park, “your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.” While automation of jobs is frequently thought of in a manufacturing context, more and more we're seeing automating creep into other areas as well, like decision-making and workplace management. The same factories where machines are replacing physical human labor have now been optimized to replace human thought labor and managers as well. Christopher Mims, tech columnist at the Wall Street Journal and author of Arriving Today, on how everything gets from the factory to our front door, calls this phenomenon “Bezosism.” Christopher: “Bezosism, it's like the modern-day version of Taylorism or Fordism… the bottom line is, this is how you optimize the repetitive work that people do. This isn't just Amazon, Amazon is just the tip of the sphere. Amazon is the best at doing this, but every other company that can is trying to do the same thing: make workers more productive by managing them with software and algorithms, kind of whatever the consequence is. Emily Gindelsberger talks about how, whether it's an Amazon warehouse, or any fast-food restaurant you can name, or a call center… all of these places are now managed by algorithm, and the workers are monitored by software. Instead of a boss telling them to work faster, it's the software cracking the whip and being like, ‘you're not working fast enough, you need to pick packages faster' in this Amazon warehouse, or ‘you need to flip burgers faster' if you work at a McDonald's. But this is becoming the dominant way that work is organized if you don't have a college degree, if you're an hourly worker. You know, the whole phenomenon of the gig economy, the rise of part-time work, subcontracting, the so-called ‘fissured workplace'—all of that is, as one person put it, do you work above the API, like, are you a knowledge worker who's creating these systems? Or do you work below the API, where, what's organizing your work and your life—it's a piece of software! I mean, it's designed by humans, but your boss is an algorithm. And that is becoming, other than wealth and income inequality, one of the defining characteristics of, almost a neo-feudalism, ‘cause it's like, ‘hey! we've figured out how to organize labor at scale, and extract the most from people and make them work as efficiently as possible… we'll just let the software do it!'” Kate: The acceleration of this style of management is a big part of the driver pushing people to question our assumptions about work and begin to demand more agency. If you've been following my work for a while, you've heard me say, “the economy is people”, and that means we can't talk about the future of work without talking about the future of the worker. The idea that people, especially those doing what is considered ‘unskilled' labor, have little agency over how they work isn't new. AI may have exacerbated the issue, but the problem goes back as far as labor itself. Labor unions arose in the early 19th century in an attempt to level the playing field and allow workers to express their needs and concerns, but as we've seen with the recent Starbucks and Amazon unionization stories, the battle for human rights and agency in the workplace is far from decided. And it isn't just factories and assembly lines—it's happening in every industry. In the tech industry, there's a subset of people known as “Ghost Workers,” a term created by anthropologist Mary L. Gray and computer scientist Siddharth Suri to describe the usually underpaid and unseen workers doing contract work or content moderation. They frequently work alone, don't interact with one another, and often aren't even aware who they're working for, so the idea of collective bargaining feels farther out of reach. Dorothea Baur, a leading expert & advisor in Europe on ethics, responsibility, and sustainability across industries such as finance, technology, and beyond, explains some of the human rights issues at play in this phenomenon. Dorothea: “If you look at heavily industrialized contexts or like, heavy manufacturing, or like, textile industry, the rights we talk about first are like the human rights of labor, health and safety, etc. But I mean, trade unions have come out of fashion awhile ago, a lot of companies don't really like to talk about trade unions anymore. So when we switch to AI you think, ‘oh, we're in the service industry, it's not labor intensive,' but the human factor is still there. Certainly not blue collar employees, at least not within the own operations of tech companies, and also maybe not as many white collar employees, in relation to their turnover as in other contexts, but there's a lot of people linked to tech companies or to AI, often invisible. We have those Ghost Workers, gig economy, or people doing low-payed work of tagging pictures to train algo—uh, data sets, etc., so there is a labor issue, a classical one, that's really a straightforward human rights case there.” Kate: Algorithms have worked their way into the systems that manage most of our industries, from factory workers to police to judges. It's more than just “work faster,” too. These algorithms are making decisions as important as where and how many police should be deployed, as well as whether bail should be set, and at what amount. The logical (but not necessarily inevitable) extreme of this way of thinking is that all decisions will be relegated to algorithms and machines. But if people with the ability to make decisions continue to give these types of decisions to machines, we continue to lose sight of the human in the equation. What little decision making power the workers had before is being taken away and given to AI; little by little, human agency is being stripped away. The question then becomes, what if an algorithm tells a worker to do something they think is wrong? Will they have the freedom to question the algorithm, or is the output absolute? Dr. Rumman Chowdhury, Director of the Machine Learning Ethics, Transparency, and Accountability team at Twitter, elaborates. Rumman: “So if we're talking about, for example, a recommendation system to help judges decide if certain prisoners should get bail or not get bail, what's really interesting is not just how this affects the prisoner, but also the role of the judge in sort of the structure of the judicial system, and whether or not they feel the need to be subject to the output of this model, whether they have the agency to say, ‘I disagree with this.' A judge is a position of high social standing, they're considered to be highly educated… if there's an algorithm and it's telling them something that they think is wrong, they may be in a better position to say, ‘I disagree, I'm not going to do this,' versus somebody who is let's say an employee, like a warehouse employee, at Amazon, or somebody who works in retail at a store where your job is not necessarily considered to be high prestige, and you may feel like your job is replaceable, or worse, you may get in trouble if you're not agreeing with the output of this model. So, thinking about this system that surrounds these models that could actually be a sort of identically structured model, but because of the individual's place in society, they can or cannot take action on it.” Kate: The jury — if you'll pardon the expression — is still out on these questions, but we do know that in the past, worker agency was a key element in the success of our early systems. In fact, in the early days of creating the assembly line, human agency was fundamental to the success of those systems. Christopher Mims again. Christopher: “The Toyota production system was developed in a context of extreme worker agency, of complete loyalty between employer and employee, lifelong employment in Japan, and workers who had the ability to stop the assembly line the instant they noticed that something was not working, and were consulted on all changes to the way that they work. Honestly, most companies in the US cannot imagine functioning in this way, and they find it incredibly threatening to imagine their hourly workers operating this way, and that's why they all—even ‘employee-friendly' Starbucks—uses all these union busting measures, and Amazon loves them… because they just think, ‘oh, god, the worst thing in the world would be if our ‘lazy' employees have some say over how they work. It's nonsense, right? There's an entire continent called Europe where worker counsels dictate how innovations are incorporated. You know, that's how these things work in Germany, but we have just so destroyed the ability of workers to organize, to have any agency… Frankly, it is just disrespectful, it's this idea that all this labor is “unskilled,” that what you learn in this jobs has no real value… I think companies, they're just in this short term quarter-to-quarter mentality, and they're not thinking like, ‘how are we building a legacy? How do we retain employees, and how do we make productivity compatible with their thriving and happiness?' They all give lip service to this, but if you push as hard as Starbucks for instance against a labor union, honestly you're just lying.” Kate: Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, Unions were an imperfect but necessary solution to ensuring workers had access to rights, freedoms, and safety in certain workplaces. According to a 2020 report from the Economic Policy Institute, Unionized workers earn on average 11.2% more in wages than nonunionized peers, and Black and Hispanic workers get an even larger boost from unionization. However, it looks like the changing nature of work is changing unionization as well. Unlike the Great Depression, which expanded the reach of labor unions, the Great Recession may have ushered in a period of de-unionization in the public sector. From the 1970s to today, the percentage of U.S. workers in a union has fallen from 25 to just 11.7 percent. In a piece of good news for Amazon employees in New York, they successfully voted for a union in their workplace on April 4th of this year, marking the first victory in a years-long battle for Amazon employee rights and agency. Looking forward, it's hard to say whether unions will be the best solution to worker woes. As more jobs become automated and fewer humans are needed in the workplace, there may be a time when there are only a few employees in a given department, which makes it harder to organize and empower collective bargaining. At the same time, being the only person working in your department may in fact give you more power to influence decisions in your workplace, as Christopher Mims explains. Christopher: “If you reduce the number of humans that work in a facility, it's like a tautology—the ones that remain are more important! Because in the old days, you could hire thousands of longshoreman to unload a ship, if one of them didn't show up, like, who cares? But if you're talking about a professional, today, longshoreman who's making in excess of 6 figures, has these incredibly specialized skills, knows how to operate a crane that can lift an 80,000 lb. shipping container off of a building-size ship, and safely put it on the back of a truck without killing anybody—that person doesn't show up to work, you just lost, y'know, a tenth of your productivity for that whole terminal that day. This is also an example of this tension between, like, it's great that these are good-paying blue-collar jobs, there aren't that many left in America, however, their negotiating power is also why the automation of ports has really been slowed. So that is a real genuine tension that has to be resolved.” Kate: So far in this episode, we've talked a lot about factory workers and the types of jobs that frequently unionize, but the future of work encompasses everyone on the work ladder. In the past, all of the problems regarding lack of worker agency has applied to ‘white collar' jobs as well. The modern office workplace evolved in tandem with factories, and the assumptions about how work should be organized are just as present there. Vanessa: “Our work environments, with who was involved with it and how they were constructed, is something that has been done over a long period of time. And the people who have been involved in that who are not White men, who are not sort of property owners, who are not otherwise wealthy, is a really short timeline.” Kate: That's Vanessa Mason, research director for the Institute for the Future's Vantage Partnership. Here she's explaining how workplace culture evolved from a factory mindset—and mostly by the mindset of a particular subgroup of people. Offices may feel like very different places from factories, but when you look at the big picture, the organizational structures are guided by many of the same ideas. Vanessa: “I think that a lot of organizations and offices are fundamentally sort of command and control, kind of top-down hierarchies, unfortunately. You know, the sort of, ‘the manager does this! Accountability only goes one direction! There's a low level of autonomy depending on what level you are in the chart!' All of those treat humans like widgets. I think that we have to keep in mind that history and that experience, like I still bring that experience into the workplace—basically, I'm in a workplace that was not designed for me, it's not meant for me to succeed, it's not meant for me to even feel as socially safe and as comfortable. There's a lot of research about psychological safety in teams. Like, our teams are not meant to be psychologically safe, they're set up to basically be office factories for us to sort of churn out whatever it is that we're doing in an increasingly efficient manner, productivity is off the charts, and then you receive a paycheck for said efforts. And it's only right now (especially in the pandemic) that people are sort of realizing that organizational culture 1) is created, and 2) that there's an organizational that people didn't realize that they were kind of unintentionally creating. And then 3) if you want your organizational culture to be something other than what it is, you need to collectively decide, and then implement that culture. All of those steps require a sort of precondition of vulnerability and curiosity which people are really frightened to do, and they're trying to escape the sort of harder longer work of negotiating for that to occur.” Kate: And that's what's needed from our managers and leaders as we navigate to a brighter future of work: vulnerability and curiosity. The vulnerability to admit that things could be better, and the curiosity to explore new ways of structuring work to allow more room for agency and decision-making to bring out the best in everyone. If the idea of a union sounds scary or expensive, perhaps there are other ways to allow employees the have more agency over how they work. A world in flux means there's still room to test new solutions. Lately, one of the changes business leaders have tried to make to their organizations is to bring in more diversity of workers. Women, people of color, neurodivergent minds, and people with disabilities have all been given more opportunities than they have in the past, but as Giselle Mota explains, just bringing those people into the workplace isn't enough. Giselle: “I read a study recently that was talking about, even though a lot of diverse people have been hired and promoted into leadership roles, they're leaving anyway. They don't stick around an organization. Why is that? Because no matter what the pay was, no matter what the opportunity was, some of them are realizing, this was maybe just an effort to check off a box, but the culture doesn't exist here where I truly belong, where I'm truly heard, where I want to bring something to the forefront and something's really being done about it. And again it has nothing to do with technology or innovation, we have to go back to very human, basic elements. Create that culture first, let people see that they have a voice, that what they say matters, it helps influence the direction of the company, and then from there you can do all these neat things.” Kate: If you're managing a workplace that has functioned one way for a long time, it may not be intuitive to change it to a model that is more worker agency-driven. How can you change something you may not even be aware exists? Vanessa Mason has a few tips for employers on what they can do to help bring about a new workplace culture. Vanessa: “And so what you can do, is really fundamentally listening! So, more spaces at all hands for employees to share what their experience has been, more experience to share what it is like to try to get to know co-workers. You know, anything that really just surfaces people's opinions and experiences and allows themselves to be heard—by everyone, I would say, also, too. Not just have one team do that and then the senior leadership just isn't involved in that at all. The second thing is to have some kind of spaces for shared imagination. Like all the sort of popular team retreats that are out there, but you certainly could do this asynchronously, at an event, as part of a celebration. Celebrating things like, y'know, someone has had a child, someone's gotten married, someone's bought a house—all of those things are sort of core to recognizing the pace and experience of being human in this world that aren't just about work and productivity. And then some way of communicating how you're going to act upon what you're hearing and what people are imagining, too. There's a bias towards inaction in most organizations, so that's something that certainly senior leadership should talk about: ‘How do we think about making changes, knowing that we're going to surface some changes from this process?' Being transparent, being accountable… all of those sort of pieces that go along with good change management.” Kate: A 2021 paper in the Journal of Management echoes these ideas, stating that communication between employers and their workers need to be authentic, ongoing, and two-directional, meaning that on top of listening to employee concerns, managers also needed to effectively communicate their understanding of those concerns as well as what they intended to do about them. A professional services firm analyzing a company's internal messaging metadata was able to predict highly successful managers by finding people who communicated often, responded quickly, and were action-oriented. Of course another thing many workplaces have been trying, especially in the wake of the COVID pandemic, is allowing employees to work remotely. Giselle Mota again. Giselle: “I think all we're seeing is we're just reimagining work, the worker, and workplace. Now that the pandemic happened, we learned from like Zoom, ‘wait a minute, I can actually work remotely, and still learn and produce and be productive, on a video!' But now, we can add layers of experience to it, and if you so choose to, you can now work in a virtual environment… people are flattening out the playing field. Companies that used to be die-hard ‘you have to work here in our office, you have to be here located right next door to our vicinity,' now they've opened it up and they're getting talent from across the pond, across the globe, from wherever! And it's creating new opportunities for people to get into new roles.” Kate: Although COVID and Zoom accelerated a lot of things, the idea of people working from home instead of the office isn't actually a new one. AT&T experimented with employees working from home back in 1994, exploring how far an organization could transform the workplace by moving the work to the worker instead of the other way around. Ultimately, they freed up around $550M in cash flow by eliminating no longer needed office space. AT&T also reported increases in worker productivity, ability to retain talent, and the ability to avoid sanctions like zoning rules while also meeting Clear Air Act requirements. As remote work on a massive scale is a relatively new phenomenon, the research is still ongoing as to how this will affect long-term work processes and human happiness. It is notable that working remotely is far less likely to be an option the farther you drop down the income ladder. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, only 9.2% of workers in the bottom quartile of wage-earners have the ability to work remotely. The availability also varies depending on the job you're doing, with education, healthcare, hospitality, agriculture, retail, and transportation among the least-able to work remotely, and finance and knowledge workers among the most-able. Because we aren't entirely sure whether remote work is the best long-term solution, it's worth looking at other ways to attract high-value workers—and keep them around. One idea? Invest in career planning. Technology is making it easier than ever for employers to work with their employees to plan for a future within the company. AI has made it possible to forecast roles that the company will need in the future, so rather than scramble to fill that role when the time comes, employers can work with a current or prospective employee to help prepare them for the job. In my conversation with Giselle Mota, she explored this idea further. Giselle: “A lot of companies are now able to start applying analytics and forecast and plan, ‘okay, if this is a role for the future, maybe it doesn't exist today, and maybe this person doesn't yet have all the qualifications for this other role. But, they expressed to us an interest in this area, they expressed certain qualifications that they do have today, and now AI can help, and data can help to match and help a human, you know, talent acquisition person, career developer, or manager, to help guide that user to say, ‘this is where you are today, this is where you want to be, so let's map out a career plan to help you get to where you should be'.” Kate: She went on to explain that employers don't need to think about jobs so rigidly, and rather than looking for one perfect person to fill a role, you can spread the tasks around to help prepare for the future. Giselle: “I was talking to someone the other day who was saying, ‘y'know, we have trouble finding diverse leadership within our organization and bringing them up,' and I was talking to them and saying, ‘break down a job! Let people be able to work on projects to be able to build up their skillset. Maybe they don't have what it takes today, fully, on paper to be what you might be looking for, but maybe you can give them exposure to that, and help them from the inside of your organization to take on those roles.” Kate: All of these changes to work and the workplace mean that a lot of office workers can demand more from their jobs. Rather than settle for something nearby with a rigid schedule, people can choose a job that fits their lifestyle. As more of these jobs are automated, we are hopefully heading for an age where people who were relegated to the so-called “unskilled” jobs will be able to find careers that work for them. Because it is more than the workplace that is changing, it's also the work itself. I asked Giselle what types of jobs we might see in the future, and she had this to say. Giselle: “As we continue to explore the workplace, the worker, and the work that's being done, as digital transformation keeps occurring, we keep forming new roles. But we also see a resurgence and reemergence of certain roles taking more importance than even before. For example, leadership development is on the rise more than ever. Why? Because if you look at the last few years and the way that people have been leaving their workplaces, and going to others and jumping ship, there's a need for leaders to lead well. Officers of diversity have been created in organizations that never had it before because the way the world was going, people had to start opening up roles like that when they didn't even have a department before. As we move into more virtual experiences, we need creators. We're seeing organizations, big technology organizations, people who enable virtual and video interactions are creating layers of experience that need those same designers and that same talent—gamers and all types of creators—to now come into their spaces to help them start shaping the future of what their next technology offerings are gonna look like. Before, if you used to be into photography or graphic design or gaming or whatever, now there's space for you in these organizations that probably specialize in human capital management, social management… To give you a quick example, Subway! Subway opened up a virtual space and they allowed an employee to man a virtual store, so you could go virtually, into a Subway, order a subway sandwich down the line like you're there in person, and there's someone that's actually manning that. That's a job. And apart from all of that side of the world, we need people to manage, we need legal counsel, we need people who work on AI and ethics and governance—data scientists on the rise, roles that are about data analytics… When Postmates came out and they were delivering to people's homes or wherever it was, college campuses, etc., with a robot, the person who was making sure that robot didn't get hijacked, vandalized, or whatever the case is—it was a human person, a gamer, it was a young kid working from their apartment somewhere, they could virtually navigate that robot so that if it flipped over on its side or whatever, it would take manual control over it, set it right back up, and find it and do whatever it needed to do. So that's an actual role that was created.” Kate: While many people fear that as jobs disappear, people will have to survive without work — or rather, without the jobs that provide them with a livelihood, an income, a team to work with, and a sense of contribution — the more comforting truth is that we've always found jobs to replace the ones that went out of fashion. When cars were invented, the horse-and-buggy business became far less profitable, but those workers found something else to do. We shouldn't be glib or dismissive about the need individual workers will have for help in making career transitions, but in the big picture, humans are adaptable, and that isn't something that looks like it will be changing any time soon. Giselle: “Where we're seeing the direction of work going right now, people want to have more agency over how they work, where they work, themselves, etc. I think people want to own how they show up in the world, people want to own more of their financial abilities, they want to keep more of their pay… If you just wade through all of the buzzwords that are coming out lately, people want to imagine a different world of work. The future of work should be a place where people are encouraged to bring their true full selves to the table, and that they're heard. I think we've had way too much of a focus on customer experience because we're trying to drive profitability and revenue, but internally, behind the scenes, that's another story that we really need to work on.” Kate: The more aware we are of the way things are changing, the better able we are to prepare for the future we want. Even in the face of automation and constantly-evolving technologies, humans are adaptable. One thing that won't be changing any time soon? Workers aren't going to stop craving agency over their jobs and their lives, and employers aren't going to stop needing to hire talented and high-value employees to help their businesses thrive. Hopefully you've heard a few ideas in this episode of ways to lean into the change and make your business, or your life, a little bit better. Even more hopeful is the possibility that, after so much disruption and uncertainty, we may be entering a moment where more people at every stage of employment feel more empowered about their work: freer to express their whole selves in the workplace, and able to do work that is about more than paying the bills. That's a trend worth working toward. Thank you so much for joining me this week on The Tech Humanist Show. In our next episode, I'm talking about why it behooves businesses to focusing on the human experience of buying their product or service, rather than the customer experience. I'll see you then.
Marketing is no longer about simply bringing in new customers. Marketers are also responsible for managing customers to profitability. Our guest Steve Gershik explains why customer management is the new horizon, and how we all need to develop the tools and skills to understand our customers deeply. We must become digital anthropologists, examining customer behaviors and signals to infer the steps needed to serve customers and expand their value. Join us for a lively conversation, beginning with Steve's notion of the “funnel beyond the funnel” and the surprising origins of the AIDA concept. About our Guest: Steve Gershik is a marketing executive and board advisor, based out of California. He was the first head of marketing for Sirius Decisions, a sales and marketing advisory firm now part of Forrester Research. Previously he has served as marketing executive at companies like Eloqua, inRiver, TOA Technologies and previously created the online marketing function for Nuance, now part of Microsoft. He co-founded DemandCon, the first demand generation conference after creating the Eloqua Experience and Markies awards program that Oracle has continued even after acquiring Eloqua. An in-demand speaker at events like Dreamforce, DMA, AMA and Campus Party, Steve stays active in the industry, serving as a marketing mentor to young professionals. WVU Marketing Communications Today: Horizons is presented by the West Virginia University Reed College of Media, which offers renowned online master's degree programs in Marketing Communications.
On this week's episode, we're talking about how technology and social media impact our mental health, and has led to a mental health crisis that some have called “the next global pandemic.” From the algorithms that decide what we see to the marketing tricks designed to keep us constantly engaged, we explore how our assumptions about work have led to a feedback loop that keeps us feeling worse about ourselves for longer. But never fear! At the Tech Humanist Show, we're about finding solutions and staying optimistic, and I spoke with some of the brightest minds who are working on these problems. Guests this week include Kaitlin Ugolik Phillips, John C. Havens, Rahaf Harfoush, Emma Bedor Hiland, and David Ryan Polgar. The Tech Humanist Show is a multi-media-format program exploring how data and technology shape the human experience. Hosted by Kate O'Neill. To watch full interviews with past and future guests, or for updates on what Kate O'Neill is doing next, subscribe to The Tech Humanist Show hosted by Kate O'Neill channel on YouTube. Full Transcript: Kate: Hello humans! Today we look at a global crisis that's affecting us all on a near-daily basis… No, not that one. I'm talking about the other crisis—the one getting a lot less media attention: the Global Mental Health Crisis. In December, Gallup published an article with the headline, “The Next Global Pandemic: Mental Health.” A cursory Google search of the words “mental health crisis” pulls up dozens of articles published just within the past few days and weeks. Children and teenagers are being hospitalized for mental health crises at higher rates than ever. And as with most topics, there is a tech angle: we'll explore the role technology is playing in creating this crisis, and what we might be able to do about it. Let's start with social media. For a lot of us, social media is a place where we keep up with our friends and family, get our news, and keep people updated on what we're doing with our lives. Some of us have even curated feeds specifically with positivity and encouragement to help combat what we already know are the negative effects of being on social media too long. There's a downside to this, though, which I spoke about with Kaitlin Ugolik Phillips, the author of The Future of Feeling: Building Empathy in a Tech-Obsessed World. Kaitlin: I wrote about this a little bit in an article about mental health culture on places like Instagram and Pintrest where you have these pretty images that have nice sayings and sort of the commodification of things like anxiety and depression and it's cool to be not okay, but then you're comparing your ‘not-okay'ness to other people's. Kate: We've even managed to turn ‘being not okay' into a competition, which means we're taking our attempts to be healthy and poisoning them with feelings of inferiority and unworthiness, turning our solution back into the problem it was trying to solve. One of the other issues on social media is the tendency for all of us to engage in conversations–or perhaps ‘arguments' is a better word–with strangers that linger with us, sometimes for a full day or days at a time. Kaitlin explains one way she was able to deal with those situations. Kaitlin: Being more in touch with what our boundaries actually are and what we're comfortable and capable of talking about and how… I think that's a good place to start for empathy for others. A lot of times, when I've found myself in these kind of quagmire conversations (which I don't do so much anymore but definitely have in the past), I realized that I was anxious about something, or I was being triggered by what this person is saying. That's about me. I mean, that's a pretty common thing in pscyhology and just in general—when someone is trolling you or being a bully, it's usually about then. If we get better at empathizing with ourselves, or just setting better boundaries, we're going to wade into these situations less. I mean, that's a big ask. For Millennials, and Gen Z, Gen X, and anyone trying to survive right now on the Internet. Kate: But social media doesn't make it easy. And the COVID pandemic only exacerbated the issues already prevalent within the platforms. Part of the problem is that social media wasn't designed to make us happy, it was designed to make money. John C. Havens, the Executive Director of the IEEE Global Initiative on Ethics of Autonomous and Intelligent Systems, elaborates on this idea. John: Often times, the value is framed in exponential growth, right? Not just profit. Exponential Growth is an ideology that's not just about getting some profit or speed, it's about doing this. But when you maximize any one thing, other things by definition take less of a focus. And especially with humans, that can be things like mental health. This is not bad or evil, but it is a decision. And in this case it's a key performance indicator decision, the priority is to get something to market, versus, how can we get something to market focused on well-being? How can we make innovation about mental health? Kate: The upside is that our time indoors led some people to more quickly realize the issues with technology and its effects on us. Early in the pandemic, I spoke with Rahaf Harfoush — a Strategist, Digital Anthropologist, and Best-Selling Author who focuses on the intersections between emerging technology, innovation, and digital culture — about what she learned about our relationship to technology during that time. Rahaf: For me I think it just amplified a lot of the issues with the way we were using tech before. I noticed in my social networks and friend groups, people were home more, so what can we do but turn to our online, to this never-ending content and distraction and connections. And in the first couple weeks, everyone was about the Zoom everything, and then there was a Zoom burnout… for me, there's a couple big issues at play. The first is that we have more bandwidth because we're at home, so we're consuming more information. A lot of these platforms leverage this addictive constant-refresh, breaking-news cycle, and with something as complex and nuanced as COVID, a lot of us were glued to our screens refreshing refreshing refreshing… that was not the best thing I could have done for my mental well being or anxiety. At one point I was like, “i need to step away!” because I was just addicted to the news of instead of increasing knowledge. And the other thing is that for many people, the forced pause made us realize that we use productivity as a coping mechanism, and what does it mean that we have more time? A lot of people started trying to make their personal time as productive as their professional time—pushing themselves to pick up 10 new hobbies and learn 10 new languages and take 10 new classes! One or two of those things is great, but I really saw people loading up. That was a good indication to me of our lack of comfort with not doing anything. I noticed I was guilting myself for not writing and not learning and then I was like, you know what? we're undergoing this immensely traumatic, super-stressful thing… it's okay to not do anything, like that's fine. Kate: If you're anything like me, that's a lot easier said than done. Even if you've mostly resumed your life as normal, you're probably still in the habit of working all day, and then filling your free time with more work, hobbies, or time on social media. I asked Rahaf what someone trapped in this cycle could do about it. Rahaf: Your brain needs at least a week to just unwind from the stress of work. If you're just constantly on planes and in deliverables and client stuff… you're never going to take the time to imagine new opportunities for yourself. The trick is we have to balance periods of actually producing the thing with periods of intangible creativity. A lot of the thinking you can't see—in our culture, we don't like things that we can't see. But how many of us have gone for a walk about got that idea, or were daydreaming and got that idea? So creatives, we need that downtime. And by the way, downtime isn't taking a coffee break and being on social media. Downtime is really downtime. Daydreaming, just letting your brain go. Which is why we need a different framework, because for a writer or strategist, like you, you spend so much time thinking about things… but to think about things, you need the time to think about them!” Kate: Most of us don't have the luxury to just shut off our Internet usage entirely. If you're someone, like most of us, who needs technology to get by. , how do we find that balance? And why is it so difficult? Rahaf: I think it's because we've shamed ourselves into thinking if we're not doing stuff, it's a waste. And that's the problem, the problem is intentional recovery, prioritizing and choosing rest, that's really hard for us, because we constantly hear these stories of CEOs and celebrities, and Elon Musk sleeping on the floor of his factory, and Tim Cooke waking up at 4:30 in the morning, and we think, I can't take a nap, I can't watch a movie, I can't go for a walk, because then I'm not really committed to being successful! And that's the most toxic belief system we've incorporated into our society today, especially for creatives. The breakthrough that I had was that it's not actually about systems or organizations, it's about us as people. We are our hardest taskmasters, we will push ourselves to the limit, even when other people tell us to take a break. If we're gonna move to a more humane productivity mindset, we have to have some uncomfortable conversations about the role of work in our lives, the link between our identity and our jobs and our self-worth, our need for validation with social media and professional recognition, our egos… all of these things battle it out, which is why I can't just come on here and be like, “okay guys, take a break here, do this…” we're not going to do it! We really have to talk about, ‘growing up, what did your parents teach you about work ethic?' how is that related to how you see yourself? Who are the people that you admire? And then there are statements you can ask yourself, like “if you work hard, anything is possible!” All these things, you can start testing your relationship with work, and you start to see that we have built a relationship with work psychologically where we feel like if we don't work hard enough, we're not deserving. And not only do we have to work hard, we have to suffer! We have to pull all-nighters! Think of the words we use, ‘hustle' and ‘grind'… these horrible verbs! The reason that's important to dig into is that our views about our work become assumptions that we don't question. We don't ever stop and say, ‘does this belief actually allow me to produce my best possible work, or is it just pushing me to a point where I'm exhausted and burnt out? The second thing is, a lot of the stories we've been told about success aren't true. As a super-quick example, if there's an equation for success, most people think it's “hard work = success.” But in reality, while hard work is important, it's not the only variable. Where you're born, your luck, your gender, your race… all of these things are little variables that add into the equation. So what I don't like about “hard work = success,” it's that the flip side of that tells people, “if you're not successful, it's because you aren't working hard enough.” And part of the awakening is understanding that there are other factors at play here, and we're all working pretty hard! We don't need more things telling us that we're not enough and we're not worthy. Rahaf: When I had my own burnout, I knew better but didn't do better. That was really frustrating to me, it's like, I have the knowledge, why could I not put the knowledge to practice? And then I realized, all these belief systems and stories are embedded in every IG meme and every algorithm that asks you to refresh every 10 seconds, and every notification that interrupts your time, and the design of these tools to socially shame people for not responding fast enough. With Whatsapp for example, the blue checkmark that lets you know if someone has seen your message. What is that if not social pressure to respond? We've also shaped technology to amplify the social norms that if you're ‘left on read,' that's a breach of etiquette. Kate: We, as a culture, believe things about success that aren't true. Then, we program those beliefs into our technology, and that technology ramps up and exacerbates the speed at which we're exposed to those flawed ideas. It creates a downward spiral for the user — or, the person using these platforms — to believe these untrue truths more deeply, broadening the disconnect between our ideal selves and reality. And yet, despite these outside forces at play, there is an urge to place responsibility on the user, to say that each of us is solely responsible for our own mental health. Emma Bedor Hiland — the author of Therapy Tech: The Digital Transformation of Mental Healthcare — calls this “Responsibilization” Emma: I draw from the work of Michelle Foucault who writes about neo-liberalism too. So the way I use it in the book is to say that there is an emphasis when we talk about neo-liberalism upon taking responsibility for yourself, anything that could be presumably in your control. And in this day and age, we're seeing mental health, one's own mental health, being framed as something we can take responsibility for. So in tandem with this rollback of what would ideally be large-scale support mechanisms, local mental health facilities to help people in need, we're seeing an increasing emphasis upon these ideas like ‘use the technology that you can get for free or low cost to help yourselves.' But at the same time, those technologies literally don't speak to or reflect an imagined user who we know in this country need interventions most badly. Kate: Thankfully, we live in a world where once a problem has been identified, some enterprising people set out to design a potential solution. Some of those solutions have been built into our technology, with ‘screen time tracking' designed for us to think twice about whether we should spend more time on our phones, and Netflix's “are you still watching?” feature that adds a little friction into the process of consuming content. When it comes to mental health specifically, there is a growing Telemental Healthcare industry, including online services such as BetterHelp, Cerebral, or Calmerry. These, however, may not be the solutions we want them to be. Emma: “A lot of my research, it's so interesting looking back at it now, my interviews with people who provide tele-mental health were conducted prior to the pandemic. It was really challenging at that time to find people who were advocates and supporters of screen-based mental health services, they told me that their peers sort of derided them for that because of this assumption that when care is screen-based, it is diluted in fundamental ways that impact the therapeutic experience. Which is understandable, because communication is not just about words or tone or what we can see on a screen, there's so much more to it. But when interactions are confined to a screen, you do lose communicative information. One of the things I've grappled with is I don't want it to seem like I don't think telemental health is an important asset. One of my critiques is that a lot of the times in our discussions, we assume people have access to the requisite technologies and access to infrastructure that makes telemental healthcare possible in the first place. Like having smart devices, even just Smartphones, if not a laptop or home computer station, as well as reliable access to an internet connection, in a place where they could interface with a mental healthcare provider. So a lot of the discourse is not about thinking about those people whatsoever, who due to the digital divide or technology gap, even using technology couldn't interface with a healthcare provider. Some of my other concerns are related to the ways our increased emphasis and desire to have people providing screen-based care also are actually transforming people who provide that care, like psychiatrists, psychologists, etc, into members of the digital gig economy, who have to divide up their time in increasingly burdensome ways, and work in ways where their employment tends to be increasingly tenuous. Relatedly, I am also worried about platforms. I know people are becoming more familiar with the idea that these places exist that they can go to on their laptops or wherever, assuming they have that technology, and be connected to service providers, but as we've seen with Crisis Text Line, there are a lot of reasons to be concerned about those platforms which become hubs of collecting and aggregating and potentially sharing user data. So while I think telemental healthcare services are important, I'd like to see dedication of resources not just to technologically facilitated care, but using that care to direct people to in-person care as well. We know due to the COVID Pandemic, we saw so many people offering services that were solely screen-based, and for good reason. A lot of clinics that provided healthcare for people without insurance or who are living, considered in poverty, relied upon in-person clinic services, and haven't been able to get them due to their shuttering due to the pandemic. So I worry about the people who we don't talk about as much as I worry about the negative consequences and affects of mental healthcare's technologization Kate: So while some people's access to mental healthcare has increased with technology, many of the people who need it most have even less access to help. On top of that, the business model of these platforms makes it so that healthcare professionals have to work harder for longer in order to make their living. On top of all this, as a means of sustaining the companies themselves, they sometimes turn to sharing user data, which is a major concern for myriad reasons, one of which is people who use that data to create predictive algorithms for mental health. Next, Emma elaborates on this concept. Emma: People have been trying this for a number of years; aggregating people's public social media posts and trying to make predictive algorithms to diagnose them with things like ADHD, depression, anxiety… I'm still unsure how I feel about trying to make predictive algorithms in any way that try to make predictions in any way about when people are likely to harm themselves or others, simply because of how easy it is to use that type of software for things like predictive policing. I write in the book as well that people want to harness internet data and what people do on social media to try to stop people from violent behavior before it starts, so it's very much a slippery slope, and that's why I find data sharing in the realm of mental health so difficult to critique, because of course I want to help people, but I'm also concerned about privacy. Kate: For those saying, “but what about the free services? Things like Crisis Text Line or Trevor Project?” Emma: Crisis Text Line, when it comes into fruition in 2013 and it says, “we can meet people where they are by allowing them to communicate via text when they're experiencing crises”… I think that's a really laudable thing that was done, and that people thought it was an intervention that could save lives, and based on research from external and internal researchers, we know that is the case. But for people who might not be aware, Crisis Text Line doesn't put people in contact with professional mental healthcare workers, instead it's often people who have no background or training in mental healthcare services, and instead go through training and serve as volunteers to help people in dire moments need and crisis. In Therapy Tech I also describe how I perceive that as a form of exploitative labor, because although in the past there were conversations about whether to provide financial compensation for volunteers, they ultimately decided that by emphasizing the altruistic benefits of volunteering, that sort of payment wasn't necessary. And then I compare that to Facebook's problematic compensation of its content moderators, and the fact that those moderators filed a lawsuit against Facebook—although it hasn't been disclosed what the settlement was, at least there's some acknowledgement that they experienced harm as a result of their work, even if it wasn't volunteering. So I do take some issue with Crisis Text Line and then, in relation to neo-liberalism and responsibilization, again I feel that CTL is not the ultimate solution to the mental healthcare crisis in this country, or internationally, and CTL has created international partners and affiliates. I underwent training for a separate entity called Seven Cups of Tea which is both a smartphone app as well as an internet-accessible platform on a computer. And Seven Cups of Tea's training, compared to what I know CTL volunteers have to go through, is incredibly short and I would characterize as unhelpful and inadequate. For me it took 10 minutes, and I can't imagine it would take anyone more than a half hour. So the types of things I learned were how to reflect user statements back to them, how to listen empathetically but also not provide any advice or tell them what to do, because you never know who's on the other end! At the time I conducted the research, I started to volunteer on the platform. A lot of the messages I got were not from people who were experiencing mental distress necessarily, but from people who just wanted to chat or abuse the platform. But even though I only had a few experiences with people who I felt were genuinely experiencing mental distress, I still found those experiences to be really difficult for me. That could be just because of who I am as a person, but one of the things I've realized or feel and believe, is that my volunteering on the platform was part of a larger-scale initiative of 7CoT to try to differentiate between who would pay for services after I suggested to them because of my perception of them experiencing mental distress, and those whose needs could be fulfilled by just being mean to me, or having their emotions reflected back to them through superficial messaging. I very rarely felt that I was able to help people in need, and therefore I feel worse about myself for not being able to help as though it's somehow my fault, related to this idea of individual responsibilization. Me with my no knowledge, or maybe slightly more than some other volunteers, feeling like I couldn't help them. As though I'm supposed to be able to help them. I worry about the fatalistic determinism types of rhetoric that make it seem like technology is the only way to intervene, because I truly believe that technology has a role to play, but is not the only way. Kate: Technology isn't going anywhere anytime soon. So if the products and services we've built to help us aren't quite as amazing as they purport themselves to be, is there a role for tech interventions in mental health scenarios? Emma explains one possible use-case. Emma: I think technology can help in cases where there are immediate dangers. Like if you see someone upload a status or content which says there is imminent intent to self-harm or harm another person. I think there is a warrant for intervention in that case. But we also know that there are problems associated with the fact that those cries for help (or whatever you want to call them) are technologically mediated and they happen on platforms, because everything that happens via a technology generates information / data, and then we have no control, depending on the platform being used, over what happens with that data. So I'd like to see platforms that are made for mental health purposes or interventions be held accountable in that they need to be closed-circuits. It needs to be that they all pledge not to engage in data sharing, not engage in monetization of user data even if it's not for-profit, and they need to have very clear terms of service that make very evident and easily-comprehendible to the average person who doesn't want to read 50 pages before agreeing, that they won't share data or information. Kate: Now, I do like to close my show with optimism. So first, let's go to Rahaf once again with one potential solution to the current tech issues plaguing our minds. Rahaf: To me one of the most important things that we need to tackle—and I don't know why we can't just do this immediately—we need to have the capacity on any platform that we use to turn off the algorithm. Having an algorithm choose what we see is one of the biggest threats, because think about all the information that you consume in a day, and think about how much of that was selected for you by an algorithm. We need to have an ability to go outside of the power that this little piece of code has to go out and select our own information, or hold companies accountable to produce information that is much more balanced. Kate: And that sounds like a great solution. But how do we do that? We don't control our technology, the parent companies do. It's easy to feel hopeless… unless you're my friend David Ryan Polgar, a tech ethicist and founder of All Tech Is Human, who's here to remind us that we aren't bystanders in this. I asked him what the most important question we should be asking ourselves is at this moment, and he had this to say. David: What do we want from our technology? This is not happening to us, this is us. We are part of the process. We are not just magically watching something take place, and I think we often times forget that. The best and brightest of our generation should not be focused on getting us to click on an ad, it should be focused on improving humanity. We have major societal issues, but we also have the talent and expertise to solve some of these problems. And another area that I think should be focused on a little more, we are really missing out on human touch. Frankly, I feel impacted by it. We need to hug each other. We need to shake hands as Americans. I know some people would disagree with that, but we need warmth. We need presence of somebody. If there was a way that if we ended this conversation and like, we had some type of haptic feedback, where you could like, pat me on the shoulder or something like that… everybody right now is an avatar. So I need to have something to say like, “Kate! You and I are friends, we know each other! So I want a greater connection with you than with any other video that I could watch online. You are more important than that other video.” But right now it's still very two dimensional, and I'm not feeling anything from you. And I think there's going to have to be a lot more focus on, how can I feel this conversation a little more. Because I mean listen, people are sick and tired right now, ‘not another Zoom call!' But if there was some kind of feeling behind it, then you could say, “I feel nourished!” whereas now, you can sometimes feel exhausted. We're not trying to replace humanity, what we're always trying to do is, no matter where you stand on an issue, at the end of the day, we're actually pretty basic. We want more friends, we want more love… there are actual base emotions and I think COVID has really set that in motion, to say, hey, we can disagree on a lot in life, but what we're trying to do is get more value. Be happier as humans, and be more fulfilled. Be more educated and stimulated. And technology has a major role in that, and now, it's about saying how can it be more focused on that, rather than something that is more extractive in nature? Kate: Whether we like it or not, the Internet and digital technology play a major role in our collective mental health, and most of the controls are outside of our hands. That can feel heavy, or make you want to throw in the towel. Those feelings are valid, but they aren't the end of the story. I asked David for something actionable, and this is what he had to say. David: Get more involved in the process. Part of the problem is we don't feel like we can, but we're going to have to demand that we are, and I think frankly some of this is going to come down to political involvement, to say ‘we want these conversations to be happening. We don't want something adopted and deployed before we've had a chance to ask what we actually desire.' So that's the biggest part is that everyone needs to add their voice, because these are political issues, and right now people think, ‘well, I'm not a techie!' Guess what? if you're carrying around a smartphone… Kate: All the more reason we need you! David: Right! We need everybody. Technology is much larger. Technology is society. These are actually social issues, and I think once we start applying that, then we start saying, ‘yeah, I can get involved.' And that's one of the things we need to do as a society is get plugged in and be part of the process. KO: There are a lot of factors that contribute to our overall sense of happiness as humans. And although it may sound like a cliche, some of those factors are the technologies that we use to make our lives easier and the algorithms that govern the apps we thought we were using to stay connected. But that doesn't mean things are hopeless. If we keep talking about what matters to us, and make an effort to bring back meaningful human interaction, we can influence the people building our technology so that it works for our mental health, instead of against it.
On this week's episode, we're rethinking education to bring about a brighter future for humanity. I speak with guests about the ways technology has changed the way we think about what's possible for education, as well as how we can challenge our assumptions to make the system work better for all humans. Which technologies can we use to improve learning? Who benefits from the lessons we learned throughout the ongoing COVID pandemic? And in what ways can we rethink our current system to help all learners reach their potential? Guests include Dr. Rumman Chowdhury, Dr. Chris Gilliard, Rahaf Harfoush, John C. Havens, & Dr. Oluwakemi Olurinola. The Tech Humanist Show is a multi-media-format program exploring how data and technology shape the human experience. Hosted by Kate O'Neill. To watch full interviews with past and future guests, or for updates on what Kate O'Neill is doing next, subscribe to The Tech Humanist Show hosted by Kate O'Neill channel on YouTube. Transcript Today on the show, we're talking about how we can achieve A Brighter Future for Education. Schools are not created equal, as any parent will tell you. For proof, look no further than the recent college admissions bribery scandal, or the fact that we still grade our schools and use those metrics to determine school budgets. Beyond that, budgetary restrictions and teacher experience can make for vastly different education outcomes. And with our rapidly changing technology, some of these differences will become magnified. In my book A Future So Bright, I write about the opportunity for a brighter future for education–which is critical to ensuring we meet United Nations Sustainable Development Goal #4: “ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all.”When we think about what it might take to make the future brighter for education, most teachers and administrators I have spoken with in the US will start their answer with “budgets” and move on to “curricula.” This isn't a strictly American occurrence, either. I spoke with Dr. Oluwakemi Olurinola, who is both an educator and an educational technology consultant, speaker, and a Microsoft Global Training partner based in Nigeria, about attempts to improve the education system in Nigeria and where the most significant gaps are. [Dr. Oluwakemi Olurinola] “Sometimes when we think about the teaching and learning, and we think about the instructional materials, most times we are looking at how to get these things bought, you know? We are talking about budgets. You know sometimes we engage with some schools and they tell you ‘oh, I'm ICT compliant' because they have quite a number of laptops, but then you go into how these devices are actually used and you see that basically all they are doing is converting their hard notes to soft copies and that isn't really what technology integration is really about. And you know sometimes you also see where budgets and large amounts of money spent buying devices, because there used to be this imagination that once you have technology in the hands of students, definitely there is improved learning, and we know that that is not true. One of the lessons taken away was actually the skill gap of the teachers. We've seen governments or budgets spend on technology, but then you still have that skill gap.” Budget and curriculum are very real limitations, but before we even get there, there are more fundamental challenges facing education, many of which are globally relevant. But as we look at the challenges and what I call “Change Factors” faced by schools and teachers, we see a lot more to overcome. A brighter future starts with full acknowledgment of harms & risks, as well as the opportunities for improvement. If we want the future of education to be as bright as possible, we have to do that here. Largely, when we talk about the future, we think of two extremes: Dystopia vs. Utopia. While it feels like we should be aiming for utopia in our planning and strategizing, deep down we know that's not possible, and that makes that useless. It's a problem of framing. Several of the experts I've spoken with share this view, including Rahaf Harfoush, a Strategist, Digital Anthropologist, and Best-Selling Author who focuses on the intersections between emerging technology, innovation, and digital culture and John C Havens, Executive Director of the IEEE Global Initiative on Ethics of Autonomous and Intelligent Systems, who each elaborate on why it doesn't make sense to think of things this way. [Rahaf Harfoush] “Everything has the capacity to help us, it's just that it's going to also simultaneously hurt us in some new and different ways. I don't necessarily think about what's going to help humanity, I think about what new challenges are going to emerge from this technology, and how can we navigate that? The bigger question for me becomes, how can we prepare people to hold this duality? What worries me is that the tech crowd comes in and they try to push you this utopian version, and other people push the dystopian version. Both of those are not true, but both are true in different ways. For every single case of facial recognition used to catch a criminal there's a case where it's used to breach privacy. I always say, ‘it's going to be equally awesome and equally terrible at the same time,' and that's why it's going to be so hard to predict the future. We just have to continuously ask ourselves which side of the equation we're falling on.” [John C Havens] “Six years ago I was writing a series for Mashable. What I was finding was that even 6 years ago, there were only the extremes… here's the dystopian aspect of AI, here's the utopian… I just kept calling people and asking ‘is there a code of ethics for AI? Because that will help balance things out.' And more and more, no one knew of one.” There will never be a complete utopia or complete dystopia—they exist simultaneously. Within our tech and within ourselves. The “either/or” model distances us from the very real consequences of our decisions, and how they play out in future realities. When it comes to technology in education, there are externalities to our decisions that must be considered. The good news is, we make decisions that affect the future every day, which means we can still bend that future towards the most uplifting and empowering outcomes for all of humanity. First, though, let's look at the potential Harms and Risks within our current system. One major issue that has cropped up and been magnified since the onset of the Pandemic is lack of equitable broadband access. Dr. Chris Gilliard, a writer, professor and speaker whose scholarship concentrates on digital privacy and the intersections of race, class, and technology, explains the consequences he's seen firsthand because of this inequity in Detroit. [Dr. Chris Gilliard] “Lack of access to internet can be tied to health outcomes, long-term educational outcomes, or employment opportunities. And If you looked at a redlining map of the city of Detroit, many of the ways these maps were drawn, a lot of the disproportionate affects of discrimination are still being felt by the populations. What I call that is digital redlining. If you drive along 8 Mile, or some other roads in Detroit, it's very clear 50-60-70 years later, the after-effects of these housing policies. I teach at a community college. I started to see through my work with students how these effects became digital, whether it was lack of access to broadband, or scholarly publications.” These were issues before COVID, but our changing education landscape has made them much more noticeable and urgent. Shortly after the onset of the COVID-19 Pandemic, UNESCO reported that 192 countries had closed all schools and universities, which left nearly 1.6 billion children and young people (representing more than 90 percent of the world's learners) scrambling to adapt—not to mention their teachers, parents, and guardians. UN data reveals a ‘nearly insurmountable' scale of lost schooling due to Covid. The research suggests that “…up to 70% of 10-year-olds in low- and middle-income countries cannot read or understand simple text, up from 53% pre-Covid.” “In South Africa, schoolchildren are between 75% and a whole school year behind where they should be, with up to 500,000 having dropped out of school altogether between March 2020 and October 2021. This has long-term implications as well. In the 2005 Pakistan earthquake, students missed 3 months of school, but four years later were still 1.5 years behind where they would have been. Then there are intersectional issues of gender, class, and race. Around the world, girls' education is most at risk, with over 11M girls at risk of not returning to school after COVID-19 for a variety of reasons, including caregiving demands, early and forced marriages, adolescent pregnancy, beliefs that girls aren't supposed to be educated, and more. On top of that, there is a tremendous inequity of resources available to students in low-income communities, leaving far too many students–including a disproportionate number of non-White students–at a significant disadvantage. And then there are issues of safety. With the increasing number of school shootings, many districts are increasing their security–often at the expense of jobs designed to help students progress. NYC public schools, for example, have over 5,000 full-time police officers but only 3,000 guidance counselors. The presence of these officers drives up rates of punitive measures for students of color–including instances of punishment for things like burping–which feeds into the school-to-prison pipeline. On top of all of this, the cost of education is increasing–especially higher education like colleges and universities. Daniel Bignault of WBIR-TV in Knoxville calculated the increases in in-state tuition at the University of Tennessee compared with wages over a nearly forty-year span and found that “from 1982 to 2018, college costs at UT grew by 1,430%, while median income grew by 213% and minimum wage grew by only 116%.” The total amount of student debt carried by people well out of school is far too high. College didn't used to be a risky investment, but for many students–especially those from low-income backgrounds–it very much is. And we still haven't talked about curriculum. In addition to the quality of information varying wildly from school to school, many schools don't offer contemporary technical skills, aren't as inclusive as they could be, and don't take into account the differing learning styles of the students. Because of this variety of challenges, we have a long way to go if we want to reach the goal of education equity. Now, let's take a look at The Bright Side! What, for example, are the unique advantages of remote learning?Because I investigated the intersection of online and offline experiences for my 2016 book Pixels and Place, I have been particularly intrigued with the pros and cons of the mass pivots to online experiences since early 2020.First, online learning fosters a different type of imagination. For a long time, students have existed in a binary where they are either “at school,” where learning is done, or “not at school,” where learning is not expected to happen. With the onset of online learning, students' homes have become a sort of “thirdspace,” which is described by Edward Soja in the field of human geography as “an in-between space between binaries that enables the possibility to think and act otherwise.” This thirdspace ideology has allowed teachers to begin rejecting the long-held assumption that school buildings are the locus of learning, and toward imagining ways in which meaningful learning can occur outside our rigid perceptions of what constitutes “legitimate” education. For instance, a 2021 study published in *Education Sciences* explores the ways that teachers in Scotland were pushed to not only learn how to use new digital tools for online learning during COVID-19, but to, even more importantly, imagine how to teach adaptively, a practice that requires “deep and sophisticated knowledge about learning, learners, and content.” This pushed teachers to embrace the idea that learning can occur in various forms and mediums, including during activities usually seen as “just for fun.” Dr. Olurinola encountered this in Nigeria as well, and spoke to me about the joys of watching teachers embrace novelty and creativity in their teaching processes. [Dr. Oluwakemi Olurinola] “We had all forms of interventions as a country, because we were aware there was a disparity in access to technology, especially for not-too-developed cities and remote areas. One of the lessons was the skill gap of the teachers… so one of the major things we saw the government do, and I think they are learning from the experience, was teacher development. We had a lot of government initiatives in upskilling teachers, especially with digital skills. Radio broadcasts, TV stations with teachers teaching via television… but for schools that could afford it, there was technology integration at different levels. The beauty about that period was the creativity of the teachers. We saw teachers use tools not originally developed for academic purposes. We saw them adapt to meet the needs of their students during this period. One lesson learned was the importance of technology to everyday life, we couldn't adopt the ostrich approach, we had to stand up and embrace this change. In fairness to the teachers & students within that period, we saw a lot of them taking up these challenges head-on. Because destruction was sudden, teachers weren't really prepared, but we saw them take up crash-courses, improve upon professional development, learning how to use various technology tools, just to ensure learning continued even though the pandemic was on.” In using thirdspaces to challenge the “at school or not” binary, some students have been better able to participate and learn than they ever were in the classroom. Classrooms were not designed for all learning styles, and with thirdspace learning, “some of the underlying logics, assumptions and norms that make people feel excluded and alone within [institutionalized spaces] are unmasked and made visible”—a practice that can lead to greater inclusion, self-expression, and change. Neurodivergent students, for example, seem to be better able to thrive in at-home learning, where they are able to be in a familiar environment so the novelty of learning is not overwhelming. A 2017 report from the All Party Parliamentary Group on Autism (APPGA) in England presented survey results showing that “fewer than half of children and young people on the autism spectrum say they are happy at school; seven in ten say that their peers do not understand them, and five in ten say that their teachers do not know how to support them.” Sean Arnold, a special educator and STEM coach in NYC, noticed a significant change when his students were working from home, saying ‘I had students who were selectively mute, and had never spoken to their peers in school in person. But because they had a familiar space… they literally spoke to their classmates for the first time in remote learning. I think that's meaningful.' He also noted a trend: nearly all of the remote students with whom he works showed more growth than in-person classmates.” An article by Eva Tesfaye for NPR suggests that some students with autism and other neurological differences tend to focus better without other classmates around. Bobby, a sixth grader in western Massachusetts, told NPR that he likes online learning because “it's a lot easier to focus. I can be in my room and be a lot more comfortable doing stuff.” It's worth noting that virtual learning isn't always the best solution for neurodivergent students, particularly in situations when remote learning requires significant support from parents, when certain learners need to focus on developing social skills with classmates, or when remote learning conflicts with meeting other objectives in a student's Individualized Education Plan. That said, there is a growing and vocal contingent of parents, teachers, and students who want to permanently incorporate virtual or at-home learning as a resource. Which leads us to the part where we look forward. How can we achieve A Brighter Future in regards to education? What opportunities can we take action on today? Our goal is to make education equitable, inclusive, accessible, available to all ages, & resilient – in spite of existing infrastructure gaps and climate challenges. That means there's still a need to ensure public access to at least the basics of education. It's hard to quantify the spillover benefits of public education, but society can only gain in both economic prosperity and overall quality of life by continuing to invest in it. I've put together a number of specific areas that, if we focus our attention, we can have the largest impact on future prosperity. First, invest in educating girls worldwide. UNESCO lists several compelling statistics on their website that demonstrate the value of education at the individual level (“just one more year of school can increase a girl's earnings, when she is an adult, by up to 20%”) and at the more macroeconomic level (“some countries lose more than US $1 billion a year by failing to educate girls to the same level as boys”). Dr. Olurinola works to expand what girls see as possible for themselves in STEM fields. Although girls in Nigeria knew they could be Doctors, that was the only job they could see themselves in. [Dr. Oluwakemi Olurinola] “Over time, especially in this climate of gender stereotypes of the place of a woman and types of career that she can or cannot do. To change this narrative, we started “Girls in Science & Technology” program, (in short, GISTs) so it's basically an initiative in that educating girls by providing girls the opportunity to learn about STEM. I remember in that particular time I ran a program and invited 70 girls. I asked which of them wanted to be medical doctors, and everyone's hands went up. I had only one person in that room who was considering a career in engineering. I realized they loved science, but they didn't know what other career options were available to them. So you have the problem of awareness. One of the things that I love to do is show them videos of women who are trailblazing in different career paths in science & tech fields so they know this is a possibility, they have people they can look up to and mentors they can say ‘okay, if she can do it, why can't I also do it if I have an interest in this field?'.” Our next actionable and necessary step is to actively work to remove racist ideas and other systemic discrimination from the curriculum and the classroom. We can instead increase messages of inclusion and respect. Another thing to think about is reimagining our education delivery methods. One model, called Teaching at the Right Level (TaRL), attempts to sort students based on their current knowledge & learning level rather than their age. The method was pioneered in India and rolled out to ten African countries by mid-2020. Whether that method works here or anywhere is yet to be determined, but we have to be willing to be bold if we want to make big, lasting change. Where possible, we should also be working to improve learning opportunities with technology. This includes making accommodations for students with (autism spectrum disorder, or) ASD or who learn better in familiar environments. Students from The National Autistic Society's Young Ambassadors Group in England submitted a 7-point plan for how they believe schools should do things differently for students with ASD, including things like 1) tackle bullying more effectively, 2) provide safe spaces, including a quiet room that is always available to students with ASD, and 3) understand that students on the Autism Spectrum may have sensory differences, and may be particularly sensitive to things like light and noise. In addition, schools can work to use technology to enhance learning that's already happening in the current system. Dr. Olurinola explored matching specific technologies to different lessons to solidify concepts. [Dr. Oluwakemi Olurinola] “We see that different kinds of content require different kinds of engagement. One of the most common tools is Powerpoint. The Powerpoint presentation doesn't address every form of engagement. For instance, I want to teach math. There are other math tools that allow you to collaborate. For instance, if I'm using one and sharing that note with all my students, they all can collaborate in that space to solve that math problem. That has a better output than presenting rigid content using Powerpoint. Because it's there and easy to use, sometimes it's abused. For instance, I'm teaching a literature class, let's say you wrote a book about Tech Humanism. One of the ways to bring to light that content, is to actually Skype with you or have you on Zoom and have my students connect with you via live session and ask you questions about the content that you have written in your book. This is something we can do because technology enables it. It would be difficult for you to come into my classroom, but we can do this in real time because we have technology enabling, and the learning on that topic is actually enhanced.” In our increasingly digital world, we also need to teach both critical media and digital literacies. The rise of misinformation and disinformation suggests that more people would benefit from skills in reading comprehension, critical thinking, and questioning motives driving media and institutions. A study published in PNAS in 2020 used Facebook's “Tips to Spot Fake News” article to create a short course and quiz which was given to five-thousand participants. The result? People's ability to spot fake news increased by 26.5%. This also means teaching kindness and empathy. If our goal is global equity, that means thinking of ourselves as a global community and using technology to showcase our authentic selves. Dr. Olurinola spoke to me about how she teaches her students to think of themselves as members of a global community. [Dr. Oluwakemi Olurinola] “I know that the fusion of technologies is beginning to blur, therefore I believe that the effort should be focused towards global competencies for our students, because the world has become more interconnected. Coming from a developing country, we know that it becomes more imperative that we train our students to be globally competent, to develop the skills to know how to live, learn, and work even in the global village. As we make these global connections because people are working remotely, and you have more global communities rising, our students need to know how to successfully navigate and interact within the digital space. Things like kindness and empathy. There isn't really a dichotomy between your online self and offline persona. Your online and offline persona should be the same. So if I'm kind as a person, even when I'm online and using tech, I should be kind in my use of tech and kind when I'm online engaging in the digital space. We need to learn how to be good citizens, how to develop global competences, and also to appreciate differences when they exist. For me, that's the future I see.” Along those lines, we also need to teach young people the human skills they need for the future workplace. I spoke with Dr. Rumman Chowdry, who is currently the Director of the Machine Learning Ethics, Transparency, and Accountability team at Twitter, about the dichotomy between our education system and the workplace, and the skills taught vs the skills needed. [Dr. Rumman Chowdhury] “If I were to pick one thing that got me the most interested in this technology, it's actually the potential for EdTech. What it should be is a complete reimagining of education. Because for one, educational systems do not help people get jobs or do well at their jobs. People joke that the number one skill you need to learn in college is Excel, and that's the one thing they don't teach you. So there's this disconnect between the real world and the jobs we get and then educational systems and how they're structured. We know there's inequality. There's just so much that can be resolved with this tech, whether it's remote learning or customized learning. When I started my job at Accenture, even before then, people were talking about lifelong learning, and how AI really means we have to embrace learning and think about how we're going to spend the rest of our lives educating us. What amazing aspirations! I sincerely hope that what we don't do is try to stick technology into the broken infrastructure that is our education system. That would be a disservice to us as humanity, but also to technology and its potential. KO: Is it true or not that once you use technology to accelerate a system, where it breaks might be instructive about where those institutions are already failing us? RC: Specifically using the education example, there are so many people that have already looked at the inefficiencies of these systems, what does/doesn't work, and if we really think about this in regards to human self-determination… what is the purpose of this system? Can we take a step back and emotionlessly ask, ‘is it serving the purpose it is intended to serve?' There are plenty of people pointing out the systemic flaws. Now we have technologies that could be designed to solve these problems, rather than reinforce the power imbalance and structural inequalities, and we're going to ignore what these people say because it's easier to perpetuate, amplify, and cement these inequalities rather than do the extra work to fix things.” Some of the skills that will be most in-demand are difficult-to-automate manual skills, like plumbing and other fine motor work, and the skills commonly called “soft”—usually mature versions of unique-to-human abilities such as making decisions in context, judgment calls, nuanced management, leading with emotional intelligence, and so on. As the future workplace remains uncertain, we also need to teach humans to be adept at making meaning. If our identities are tied too closely with our jobs, many people are in for a massive loss of self as the upheaval in the job marketplace forces millions of people to change career paths as we build our way to the ideal future. One way to fight this is to have a better sense of how we make meaning in our lives, and how we can begin something new without losing track of ourselves. This is by no means an exhaustive list, but consider it a blueprint to build and amend as we go. Taken as a whole, this may sound like a lot of work, but if we all focus on one thing we can influence, our combined efforts can build a future that works for everyone.
Hustle. Rise and grind. Fake it till you make it. Today's work culture believes the only way to get ahead is to put your nose to the grindstone and maximize the hours in the day. The harder you work, the more successful you become, right? On the flip side, burnout rates are on the rise — people's bodies are physically revolting in a desperate attempt to tell them to rest. No one knows this better than our guest, author, and digital anthropologist, Rahaf Harfoush. Her concept of “productivity propaganda” highlights how our obsession with working harder is actually making it harder to work. After hustling with her pedal to the metal for years, her body gave out on her and forced her to step back and do something she wasn't familiar with: slow down and listen. At Waste No Potential, we have a story of an unlikely teacher. Whenever it got busy at our old office and it felt like things were about to go off the rails, an uncanny thing recurred: a ladybug showed up. Crawling on a meeting room wall or across someone's keyboard, the slow-moving critter made everyone pause and reflect. Being forced to take a second to breathe didn't affect our work negatively — it improved it. It was then, in a moment of zen, we learned the way of the ladybug. We don't quote Ferris Bueller very often, but when we do, we say, “Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Find out more on our website: https://bit.ly/3HDcxmr A global debate is in full swing about when and where we should work and it's playing out in organisations of all sizes across the world. Who has the power to decide? Who wins and who loses out in different time / space configurations? Why do we work like this anyway? In the rapid move to remote working companies have largely done a "lift and shift" of work practices according to what we have historically considered to be necessarily same time/same place work. The result is overburdened diaries, endless meetings, cognitive overload and no time in which to actually complete our work. Based on extensive, hands-on research into the implications of new trends in collaborative working practices, this webinar explores how we can radically rethink the most precious resource any of us have - our time - in order to make space for the most value-adding work to get done. Speaker: Victoria Ward works as a coach, strategic adviser, convenor for, and companion to those who seek to create lasting change, in themselves, in their teams and networks, in the organisation as a whole, or in the system in which the organisation plays a part. She left NatWest in 1997 to set up a radical new multi-disciplinary practice, specialising in knowledge, narrative, knowledge networks and cultural transformation. Before acting as Chief Knowledge Officer at NatWest Markets, Victoria acted as Chief Operating Officer, Capital Markets, and Managing Director, Global Futures. She joined NatWest from the London International Futures Exchange working as head of R&D, education and statistics, as well as working with Exchange members, and with regulators internationally to change the tax and regulatory regime for index futures and options, and, among other things, to provide a robust response to regulatory enquiry into the role of index futures and options in the market crash of 1987. A 20+ year portfolio includes work in the public, private, not for profit and cultural sectors, with development banks and agencies, financial institutions, government agencies and departments, regulators, international manufacturing and pharmaceutical companies, academic institutions and museums. Victoria is internationally recognised as being at the forward edge of thinking and practice in knowledge management, communities of practice, narrative research, technology-enabled collaborative and storytelling approaches to complex organisational challenges and transformation. Dr Caitlin McDonald is the DXC's resident Digital Anthropologist. She helps business leaders and teams learn to step outside their version of ‘normal,' suspend judgement, and consider things from many different perspectives. This gives businesses the leading edge through boosting customer empathy, finding new solutions to old problems, and enriching the insight power of big data through multidisciplinary approaches. Recognised for her domain knowledge in qualitative methods like ethnography and participant-observation, Caitlin spent six years at the quantitative coal face developing analytical models and designing dashboards for the world's largest collaboration and talent network for education professionals. Before that Caitlin earned her PhD following dancers around the world and across the internet, understanding how information flows for cultural bodies of knowledge like dance are impacted by technoscapes (the digital world around us.) Her combined expertise gives her a uniquely balanced perspective for gleaning wisdom from the intersection between human imagination and digital systems.
https://www.alainguillot.com/frank-rose/ Frank Rose is the author most recently of The Sea We Swim In: How Stories Work in a Data-Driven World. Get the book here: https://amzn.to/3a33FHI
Episode 10. Meet Catherine. Leadership Coach. Digital Anthropologist. Facilitator. Building & Growth Maker. Writer & Mom. Join Kendra & Catherine as they discuss true confidence, how to be bigger & braver, and measuring success through happiness. Hosted by Kendra Rogers - Music by Reid Zakos paper-napkin.com - @papernapkinco
Technology has its place in Anthropology, and Hussein Kesvani knows all about it. Hussein is a digital anthropologist at UCL, is a part of two successful podcasts; Trashfuture and ten thousand posts, he’s also a journalist, writer, editor, media producer and consultant. Today JJ and Hussein talk about Islamophobia, human relation to technology, coffee, tea and much more. Hope you enjoy!
This episode was recorded on April 23, 2021 from a live panel discussion and Q&A on Clubhouse called: To "Hustle" or To "Work-Life Balance"? The event was moderated by How Do You Do? Podcast host Ben Hannani and the panelists included: * *RAHAF HARFOUSH* - Strategist, Digital Anthropologist, and The New York Times bestselling author of Hustle & Float ( https://www.amazon.com/Hustle-Float-Reclaim-Creativity-Obsessed/dp/1635765781 ) : Reclaim Your Creativity and Thrive in a World Obsessed with Work. * *MADY MAIO* - Co-host of Okay Sis Podcast ( https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/okay-sis/id1434353917 ) , co-founder of the upcoming travel recommendations app Camber ( camberapp.com ) , and she leads Business Development at StoryFile ( http://storyfile.com/ ). * *SCOUT SOBEL* - Co-host of Okay Sis Podcast, host of Scout podcast ( https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/scout/id1505252696 ) , and founder of the boutique PR firm, Scout's Agency ( https://app.redcircle.com/shows/808bdae1-4d16-41bb-98a2-9307a1efc396/ep/SCOUTSAgency.com ). How Do You Do? Pod LIVE convenes on Clubhouse. Follow the club to be notified of future events: https://www.joinclubhouse.com/club/how-do-you-do-pod-live
Technical Storyteller and Digital Anthropologist, Grace Andrews, joins us on the podcast to impart wisdom from her education, cultural and family upbringing, and passion for storytelling. In the episode, Grace shares how she brings the power of storytelling to her work as a product marketer, content creator, and speaking coach. We discuss picking your own title, the evolution of a storyteller, and authenticity in storytelling. Find Grace on instagram @grace_ewuraesi, her website asprinklingofgrace.com, or email her at grace@asprinklingofgrace.com.
Brian Solis is a Digital Analyst and Digital Anthropologist who left college before graduating so that he could pursue his passion. He had always been interested in technological advancements and their influence over both businesses and individuals, so he decided to combine them into one job description. Brian studies the trajectory of disruptive technologies and evaluates how they will affect humans and their businesses. The post Why Tech & Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) Need Anthropologists With Brian Solis, Altimeter Group [re-release] appeared first on Time4Coffee.
How do you determine what feedback to listen to when you are starting out with an idea? How is Covid-19 changing the digital landscape? When you have a big new innovative idea how do you manage the self-doubt and internal questioning? These are just some of the topics I discussed on the latest episode of Unleashing Brilliant with Kelly Slessor. Kelly is a digital strategist, and Founder of Shop You (an artificially intelligent personal stylist). Kelly’s focus is on creating emotional connections and developing technology to solve real customer problems. She describes herself as a Digital Anthropologist, passionate about connecting technology with people, to ultimately make people’s lives easier and to save time. Listen in
Julie and Casey sit down with Rahaf Harfoush, author of Hustle and Float to discuss her unusual journey to her speaking and writing career, reimagining work culture for creatives, burnout, and the impossible pursuit of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. TOP TAKEAWAYS Following the breadcrumbs of opportunity and listening to your intuition can lead you on some amazing adventures Burnout comes from trying to satisfy our obsession with productivity and our systems which were not designed for creatives. Burnout is real, and comes with a delightful range of scary physical and emotional symptoms. Just because you CAN do all the things doesn't mean you should. You are not your job. Your worth is not dependent on productivity or any other external signifier. Is Cordelia from Buffy the Vampire Slayer the ultimate example of authenticity? Rahaf Harfoush is a Strategist, Digital Anthropologist, and Best-Selling Author who focuses on the intersections between emerging technology, innovation, and digital culture. She is the Executive Director of the Red Thread Institute of Digital Culture and teaches “Innovation & Emerging Business Models” at Sciences Politique’s school of Management and Innovation in Paris. She is currently working on her fourth book. Her third book, entitled “Hustle & Float: Reclaim Your Creativity and Thrive in a World Obsessed with Work,” was released in 2019. She has been featured by Bloomberg, The CBC, CTV, and Forbes for her work on workplace culture. Formerly, Rahaf was the Associate Director of the Technology Pioneer Program at the World Economic Forum in Geneva where she helped identify disruptive-startups that were improving the state of the world. Rahaf is the co-author of “The Decoded Company: Know Your Talent Better Than You Know your Customers” It was published in early 2014 and was listed on both the New York Times and USA Today best seller lists. It won a 2015 Gold Axiom Award for Best Business Technology Book. The Decoded Company explores how big data is providing an unprecedented opportunity for organizations to dramatically improve their decision making, increase their performance and, most importantly, intentionally create happy and vibrant work cultures.
About this episode's guest: Rahaf Harfoush is a Strategist, Digital Anthropologist, and Best-Selling Author who focuses on the intersections between emerging technology, innovation, and digital culture. She is the Executive Director of the Red Thread Institute of Digital Culture and teaches “Innovation & Emerging Business Models” at Sciences Politique's school of Management and Innovation in Paris. […]
The Tech Humanist Show explores how data and technology shape the human experience. It's recorded live each week in a live-streamed video program before it's made available in audio format. Hosted by Kate O’Neill. About this episode's guest: Rahaf Harfoush is a Strategist, Digital Anthropologist, and Best-Selling Author who focuses on the intersections between emerging technology, innovation, and digital culture. She is the Executive Director of the Red Thread Institute of Digital Culture and teaches “Innovation & Emerging Business Models” at Sciences Politique’s school of Management and Innovation in Paris. She is currently working on her fourth book. Her third book, entitled “Hustle & Float: Reclaim Your Creativity and Thrive in a World Obsessed with Work,” was released in 2019. She has been featured by Bloomberg, The CBC, CTV, and Forbes for her work on workplace culture. Formerly, Rahaf was the Associate Director of the Technology Pioneer Program at the World Economic Forum in Geneva where she helped identify disruptive-startups that were improving the state of the world. Rahaf is the co-author of “The Decoded Company: Know Your Talent Better Than You Know your Customers” Her first book, “Yes We Did: An Insider’s Look at How Social Media Built the Obama Brand,”chronicled her experiences as a member of Barack Obama’s digital media team during the 2008 Presidential elections and explored how social networking revolutionized political campaign strategy. Rahaf has been named "one of the most innovative women in France,” "one of the top future thinkers to shape the world,” "a Young Global Changer,” and a “Canadian Arab to Watch.” Rahaf’s writing has been featured in HBR, Wired, The Globe and Mail, Fast Company, and many more. She is a frequent commentator on France24 and the CBC. In her spare time, Rahaf enjoys instagramming too many pictures of her dog Pixel, learning how to play the ukulele and working on her first novel. She tweets as @RahafHarfoush. This episode streamed live on Thursday, September 10, 2020.
Ready for some insights on the state and future of technology and business trends? Then you should join our conversation with Brian Solis, Global Innovation Evangelist at Salesforce, 8x Best-Selling Author, and Digital Anthropologist. We will explore the nature of modern business and customer relationships, and the art of sales and service in the social web. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/restream-creatorspotlight/message
When do we hustle, when do we float, and what on earth do K-Pop Stans and Witches have to do with global social movements?Join Laura Gassner Otting as she hosts the very first episode of Big Talk and interviewing Rahaf Harfoush - strategist, navigator, and digital anthropologist. 2:49 Big Talk and Why We Write8:00 What to Do When There Are No Words32:22 What's the Weirdest Thing You've Found on the Internet39:22 K-Pop and Trump51:23 Amy Cooper and What Does Canceling Mean? About the Guest: Rahaf Harfoush is a Strategist, Digital Anthropologist, and Best-Selling Author who focuses on the intersections between emerging technology, innovation, and digital culture. She is the Executive Director of the Red Thread Institute of Digital Culture and teaches “Innovation & Emerging Business Models” at Sciences Politique’s school of Management and Innovation in Paris. She is currently working on her fourth book. Her third book, entitled “Hustle & Float: Reclaim Your Creativity and Thrive in a World Obsessed with Work,” was released in 2019. She has been featured by Bloomberg, The CBC, CTV, and Forbes for her work on workplace culture. . Rahaf is the co-author of “The Decoded Company: Know Your Talent Better Than You Know your Customers” It was published in early 2014 and was listed on both the New York Times and USA Today best seller lists. It won a 2015 Gold Axiom Award for Best Business Technology Book. The Decoded Company explores how big data is providing an unprecedented opportunity for organizations to dramatically improve their decision making, increase their performance and, most importantly, intentionally create happy and vibrant work cultures. In 2019, the prestigious “Les Napoleons” named Rahaf as one of the most innovative women in France. She was listed as one of the top future thinkers to shape the world by the Hay Literary Festival in 2017. Rahaf was named as a Young Global Changer by the G20 Global Think Tank Summit. Rahaf has also been recognized by the World Economic Forum as a Young Global Shaper, and by the Women’s Forum for the Economy and Society as a Rising Talent for her thought leadership in the fields of digital culture and technology. In 2014, Rahaf was also named as a “Canadian Arab to Watch,” by the Canadian Arab Institute. She is a member of the German Marshall Network of Transatlantic Leaders.About the Host: Washington Post Best Selling Author and Motivational Keynote speaker, Laura Gassner Otting, inspires people to push past the doubt and indecision that keep great ideas in limbo because her presentations make listeners think bigger and accept greater challenges that reach beyond their limited scope of belief.She delivers strategic thinking, well-honed wisdom, and perspective generated by decades of navigating change across the start-up, nonprofit, political, as well as philanthropic landscapes. Laura dares listeners to find their voice, and generate the confidence needed to tackle larger-than-life challenges. She leads them to seek new ways of leading, managing and mentoring others.Laura’s entrepreneurial edge has been well-honed over a 25-year career that started as a Presidential Appointee in Bill Clinton’s White House, where she helped shape AmeriCorps.She is the author of Mission-Driven: Moving from Profit to Purpose (2015) and the Washington Post Best Seller Limitless: How to Ignore Everybody, Carve Your Own Path, and Live Your Best Life (2019). She lives with her husband, two teenage sons, and troublesome puppy outside of Boston, MA.
As leaders, how do we build the right environments—physically, digitally, and mentally—for our teams to achieve both collaborative and focus-time potential? As teams, how do we express and negotiate our shared working practices? How do we explicitly build in time for the social interaction and micro-moments of connection that happen very differently in a virtual setting? As an individual, how do I claim the best conditions for my own working style and support others in theirs? While we are currently responding to an unprecedented global situation, the ubiquity and reliability of innovations in digital infrastructure opens up opportunities for operating in a distributed way that haven't been available in prior systemic shocks. But shifting to virtual working requires more than changing the tool kit: organizations also need to prepare their teams for the right attitudes & behaviours to support effective distributed collaboration, especially in this time of crisis. It feels as though we are at an inflection point where something that was already shifting the workplace has accelerated in ways we are only beginning to understand and to integrate. Join Caitlin and Victoria to learn about developing strategies to seize the moment and prepare yourselves for being remotely human. Speakers: Dr Caitlin McDonald is the LEF's resident Digital Anthropologist. She helps business leaders and teams learn to step outside their version of ‘normal,' suspend judgement, and consider things from many different perspectives. This gives businesses the leading edge through boosting customer empathy, finding new solutions to old problems, and enriching the insight power of big data through multidisciplinary approaches. Recognised for her domain knowledge in qualitative methods like ethnography and participant-observation, Caitlin spent six years at the quantitative coal face developing analytical models and designing dashboards for the world's largest collaboration and talent network for education professionals. Victoria Ward works as a coach, strategic adviser, convenor for, and companion to those who seek to create lasting change, in themselves, in their teams and networks, in the organisation as a whole, or in the system in which the organisation plays a part. She left NatWest in 1997 to set up a radical new multi-disciplinary practice, specialising in knowledge, narrative, knowledge networks and cultural transformation. Before acting as Chief Knowledge Officer at NatWest Markets, Victoria acted as Chief Operating Officer, Capital Markets, and Managing Director, Global Futures. She joined NatWest from the London International Futures Exchange working as head of R&D, education and statistics, as well as working with Exchange members, and with regulators internationally to change the tax and regulatory regime for index futures and options, and, among other things, to provide a robust response to regulatory enquiry into the role of index futures and options in the market crash of 1987. Interested in watching our webinars live, or taking part in the production of our research? Join our community at: https://bit.ly/3sXPpb5
On this special edition of the Futurum Tech Podcast - Interview Series, host Daniel Newman welcomed Richard Davies, Vice President at DXC Technology and Managing Director of Leading Edge Forum and Caitlin McDonald, Digital Anthropologist at Leading Edge Forum. Richard and Caitlin discussed findings from a recent report from LEF and the accelerated digital transformation that's happening due to COVID-19. Reconfiguring the Collaborative Workspace Even before the pandemic we were seeing a massive shift in the way that people are working. Caitlin and Richard shared insights from The Leading Edge Forum's latest research “Reconfiguring the Collaborative Workspace,” a study that was done over the last few years with insights from a variety of companies in a variety of industries. It's clear that there is an increasing ubiquity and reliability of collaborative technologies like Slack, Zoom, and shared cloud etc. All of these things were coming together to enable businesses of any size and in any field to think about how they could change the way that people work whether that's flexible hours or a distributed team across the globe. The office has become less of a hub. Now, 30 percent of the earth's population is under some sort of shelter-in-place order so this shift in how we work is massively accelerated. We are looking at a new collaborative workspace. The Technology Matters Beyond the way that people were working, where they worked, the kinds of work they were doing one key finding from the report is all about how important the right equipment is. If there's a barrier to communication because of the technology, you as a person perceive it as a barrier to your interpersonal communication which can be difficult to overcome in this new work environment. Caitlin shared that employees don't complain about wanting the new hot technology. They complain about coworkers not being able to hear them or not being able to understand them. You can't expect effective collaboration if the tools that are in place hinder it. Companies need to invest in technology solutions that facilitate collaboration. Rethinking How We Interact Working from home also requires us to rethink our interactions with coworkers and clients. We are missing spontaneous interactions and team building moments. Richard shared that leaders especially have to think a little more about how to keep people engaged and connected. How do you build the community? How do you deliver what you're trying to say? You have to consider what you're trying to create and the desired outcome. If it's team building, perhaps a quick informal check in call would work. If it's something more important, then an interactive presentation might do the trick, But there's more to think about than just the information that's being delivered. The Changing Physical Environment We talk a lot about the virtual environment, but realistically when you're working in a virtual environment you also are still sitting somewhere physically. In the current situation, it's not just that people are working from home, you have to consider that their kids are there or roommates are there. Multiple people in one household trying to work and collaborate with their own companies and schools. Companies need to consider this when thinking about the virtual environment too. As individuals, we need to get in the right mental headspace. We need to create the right working zone in our minds to get things done. There is no “one size fits all” response that will work. We each have to figure out what works. Biggest Surprises and Takeaways There were many surprises and big takeaways from the study but a few stood out. Caitlin shared that she was surprised how adaptable people are to different situations, but that there are still barriers to success if you don't handle collaborative workspace in the right way. Right now many companies are thinking about how to get the workforce on board to deal with new ways of work and to adjust to this environment, but yet have a balance in their lives? Richard proposed that companies and leaders need to create a shared sense of purpose. Get employees invested by helping them understand the value proposition and the role they play. At the same time, communication is hugely important. Slow everything down and make slear points so people have the opportunity to absorb, understand, and then respond. Caitlin's final takeaway is mostly aimed at leaders. As you're thinking about your teams and a virtual only way of interacting, it is important to create those micro-moments of trust that normally you depend on happening by accident physically in the office. This cannot be overlooked or forgotten if you want your team to be successful. If you'd like to learn more about the study or other pieces of research that the Leading Edge Forum is working on, visit their website. Also be sure to listen to the full episode below and hit subscribe while you're at it so you never miss an insightful episode of The Futurum Tech Podcast.
Welcome to the Beyond Your Research Degree podcast from the University of Exeter Doctoral College! The podcast about non-academic careers and all the opportunities available to you... beyond your research degree! In this episode PhD student Debbie Kinsey talks to Dr Caitlin McDonald, a University of Exeter alumni who now works at the Leading Edge Forum. Today Caitlin is recognised for her domain knowledge in qualitative methods like ethnography and participant-observation. Music from https://filmmusic.io 'Cheery Monday' by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com) License: CC BY (https://creativecommons.org/licenses Podcast transcript 1 00:00:10,000 --> 00:00:21,000 Hello and welcome to the Beyond Your Research Degree podcast by the University of Exeter, Doctoral College 2 00:00:21,000 --> 00:00:22,000 My name's Dr Caitlin McDonald. 3 00:00:22,000 --> 00:00:31,000 I graduated in 2011 with a degree in Arab and Islamic studies from here at the University of Exeter at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies. 4 00:00:31,000 --> 00:00:36,000 And hard as it is to believe that it's now nine years later. 5 00:00:36,000 --> 00:00:39,000 It's it's really interesting to look back on what's happened since that time and 6 00:00:39,000 --> 00:00:45,000 consider the skills that I took away from the university and how I'm applying them now. 7 00:00:45,000 --> 00:00:53,000 So maybe to give you a bit of an update on where I am. I currently work as a digital anthropologist at an organisation called The Leading Edge Forum, 8 00:00:53,000 --> 00:00:59,000 which does technology and strategy research for large businesses and just in the 9 00:00:59,000 --> 00:01:04,000 Last month I was at the UN delivering a talk at the International Labour Organisation. 10 00:01:04,000 --> 00:01:11,000 I then hosted a dinner at the House of Lords about ethics. And I've done a range of interesting and exciting things since then. 11 00:01:11,000 --> 00:01:15,000 But it's really interesting to think about this particular month in particular 12 00:01:15,000 --> 00:01:20,000 and how that the kind of culmination of where I started and how I got here. 13 00:01:20,000 --> 00:01:28,000 So I started working at the Leading Edge forum about two years ago, and before that I was based at what was the Times educational supplement. 14 00:01:28,000 --> 00:01:30,000 But it's no longer known as that it's just the tes 15 00:01:30,000 --> 00:01:43,000 It's no longer owned by the Times, where I was working as a digital analyst, data analyst and working with data systems quite a bit. 16 00:01:43,000 --> 00:01:49,000 So all of that sounds really different than where I started, which was very much middle easy studies based, but really the kind of the through line. 17 00:01:49,000 --> 00:01:55,000 The thread for me was that a lot of the research that I was doing when I was doing my PhD was very digital ethnography based. 18 00:01:55,000 --> 00:02:06,000 So I was looking at patterns of knowledge and how they shift around the world, in particular for dancers who often for Middle Eastern dance, 19 00:02:06,000 --> 00:02:15,000 want to base their practise or to base the centre at the hub of their knowledge in Cairo or sometimes in Turkey or in other kinds of regions. 20 00:02:15,000 --> 00:02:19,000 But in my particular case, I was looking at dancers who had a dance tradition that is based out of Cairo. 21 00:02:19,000 --> 00:02:26,000 And what ended up happening was I did a lot of ethnography around in particular how people were using Facebook groups, 22 00:02:26,000 --> 00:02:32,000 but also other social media channels to spread the knowledge and in the creation of knowledge 23 00:02:32,000 --> 00:02:39,000 about how the dance kind of mythology and epistemology of what the dance meant to people. 24 00:02:39,000 --> 00:02:47,000 And while this doesn't sound really revolutionary now, way back in 2006, 2007, 2008, when I was first doing that, that was fairly new. 25 00:02:47,000 --> 00:02:52,000 You know, there weren't a huge amount of digital humanities tools at the time. 26 00:02:52,000 --> 00:02:59,000 And certainly we weren't using anything like this wonderful lab that we have now. I think this was the old print print shop at the time. 27 00:02:59,000 --> 00:03:04,000 So it was really interesting. But then what ended up happening is I went to do a very quantitative role, 28 00:03:04,000 --> 00:03:08,000 which when you become an anthropologist, you don't necessarily think of yourself as a quantitative person. 29 00:03:08,000 --> 00:03:14,000 Some might. I did not. But it was having that kind of digital skills component that really was able to help me make 30 00:03:14,000 --> 00:03:20,000 the transition from a very academic role into a much more kind of commercially minded role. 31 00:03:20,000 --> 00:03:27,000 And I didn't really intend to leave academia, but around the time that I was leaving, there were huge budget cuts. 32 00:03:27,000 --> 00:03:35,000 So there simply weren't the kind of resources available for people to have postdocs and subsequent academic careers in particular. 33 00:03:35,000 --> 00:03:40,000 As an immigrant to this country, I was I needed to have a role if I wanted to stay working here. 34 00:03:40,000 --> 00:03:46,000 That was not short term. So it had to be a Full-Time full contract. 35 00:03:46,000 --> 00:03:49,000 And luckily, I was able to find something that worked out, which was with the Tes 36 00:03:49,000 --> 00:03:53,000 and they really wanted someone who could help them to an extent of their research skills. 37 00:03:53,000 --> 00:03:58,000 But a lot of the role was really about the kind of Day-To-Day operational knowledge to help the business run. 38 00:03:58,000 --> 00:04:01,000 So that was very, very different from what I previously been doing. 39 00:04:01,000 --> 00:04:07,000 But having this kind of interrogative skills, those kind of basics of a humanities research skills, 40 00:04:07,000 --> 00:04:11,000 those basic social sciences research skills was really helpful or for doing things 41 00:04:11,000 --> 00:04:17,000 like helping question why a particular thing was being done in a particular way. 42 00:04:17,000 --> 00:04:22,000 In particular, I was doing a lot of kind of daily reporting of what was happening on the website and what kinds of numbers 43 00:04:22,000 --> 00:04:29,000 were coming back in terms of circulation and all those kinds of things that digital businesses do. 44 00:04:29,000 --> 00:04:35,000 And really, the thing that was extremely useful was being able to turn around and say, hey, is anyone actually reading this report? 45 00:04:35,000 --> 00:04:40,000 You know, something as simple as this ritual that we go through on a daily basis of producing these numbers. 46 00:04:40,000 --> 00:04:42,000 How are they feeding into our decision making? 47 00:04:42,000 --> 00:04:49,000 And in some senses, that questioning was perhaps not always very welcome, but it also was that helpful to create the conditions for change. 48 00:04:49,000 --> 00:04:54,000 And I think that the social sciences are not always really great about talking about 49 00:04:54,000 --> 00:04:59,000 the transferable skills outside of academia that absolutely do exist. 50 00:04:59,000 --> 00:05:05,000 And I think now we're starting to see in particular with another research area that I do, which is all around ethics. 51 00:05:05,000 --> 00:05:09,000 You're starting to see some of those kinds of questions emerging around. 52 00:05:09,000 --> 00:05:19,000 Who is in charge of this knowledge or what are the kinds of different weights that we put on how we assess particular aspects of 53 00:05:19,000 --> 00:05:27,000 artificial intelligence and its relevance and its usefulness and how is it relevant to and who's benefiting and who's not benefiting? 54 00:05:27,000 --> 00:05:34,000 And I think that having a general social sciences research background, regardless of whether your specialism is in ethics or in, 55 00:05:34,000 --> 00:05:42,000 you know, particular aspects of digital technologies, you know, having that kind of questioning mind is is a really useful thing. 56 00:05:42,000 --> 00:05:49,000 And I think that people who work in digital context are starting to appreciate those qualitative skills, 57 00:05:49,000 --> 00:05:58,000 again, in a way that perhaps has been a little bit subsumed recently. So those kinds of questions around how is this going to benefit not only direct 58 00:05:58,000 --> 00:06:01,000 users of our services or our products or whatever it is that we're building, 59 00:06:01,000 --> 00:06:08,000 but also that kind of contextual knowledge about how is this affecting other people who are going to be impacted by the decisions that we're making? 60 00:06:08,000 --> 00:06:14,000 There is renewed curiosity and interest in those kinds of decisions. And so increasingly, organisations, 61 00:06:14,000 --> 00:06:19,000 businesses and non-commercial organisations are looking to the humanities as well as 62 00:06:19,000 --> 00:06:25,000 engineering to to make up the body of knowledge of creating those products effectively. 63 00:06:25,000 --> 00:06:30,000 So I would say now is a really good time, actually, to be in the digital humanities. 64 00:06:30,000 --> 00:06:35,000 And to some extent, no matter what you're doing, your work is always going to have a digital component. 65 00:06:35,000 --> 00:06:38,000 So recognising that, you know, when you think about the degree that I did, 66 00:06:38,000 --> 00:06:44,000 which was very much based in transmission of knowledge and very much about dance, 67 00:06:44,000 --> 00:06:48,000 you wouldn't necessarily think that that would lead to where it did lead. But in other ways, it makes total sense. 68 00:06:48,000 --> 00:06:54,000 It was a logical chain of transmission. I was looking at the social components of how that knowledge was happening. 69 00:06:54,000 --> 00:07:00,000 And now we are even more immersed in digital technologies. Our careers are even more immersed in this, no matter who you are. 70 00:07:00,000 --> 00:07:06,000 So having that background of having done that, kind of that kind of study was really useful to get me where I am now. 71 00:07:06,000 --> 00:07:11,000 Yeah, it sounds really interesting. So it sounds like so 72 00:07:11,000 --> 00:07:17,000 all PhDs are very specific so yours was around dance and transmission of knowledge between dances and creation of knowledge in that way. 73 00:07:17,000 --> 00:07:24,000 But then it sounds you talk about thinking about things, those things more broadly in terms of the general skills we develop. 74 00:07:24,000 --> 00:07:32,000 And how did you find translating those things from kind of academic speak to then going into a non-academic, non-academic role? 75 00:07:32,000 --> 00:07:40,000 Yeah. I would say that initially it was a real challenge for me, partly because when I first was looking for a job, 76 00:07:40,000 --> 00:07:44,000 I still was applying for a very academic roles, as well as starting to look beyond that. 77 00:07:44,000 --> 00:07:48,000 So I was looking at a lot of roles in market research. I was looking at the National Centre for Social Research. 78 00:07:48,000 --> 00:07:56,000 I was looking at ESRA U.K. you know, you go places like that and they have a more kind of traditional, I would say, research bent. 79 00:07:56,000 --> 00:08:03,000 Whereas if you if you move into, you know, user research and a company, for example, 80 00:08:03,000 --> 00:08:10,000 and most organisations do have a user research arm if they have a digital component, even if that's not their kind of core business, 81 00:08:10,000 --> 00:08:14,000 but that the language of that is very different from what perhaps you might be talking about 82 00:08:14,000 --> 00:08:18,000 if you're coming out of the social sciences or have a real kind of pure research background. 83 00:08:18,000 --> 00:08:22,000 So but the advantage of being an anthropologist or a sociologist or someone who 84 00:08:22,000 --> 00:08:26,000 studies the way that people think about knowledge is that you can then apply 85 00:08:26,000 --> 00:08:31,000 all the research skills that you have to your own situation so you can notice 86 00:08:31,000 --> 00:08:34,000 the kinds of patterns of knowledge that are happening in your organisation. 87 00:08:34,000 --> 00:08:41,000 You can notice the particular language that people are using around things and say, OK, you know, this group is talking about doing AB testing. 88 00:08:41,000 --> 00:08:46,000 You know, I might describe that differently in my own historical research background or whatever it was. 89 00:08:46,000 --> 00:08:50,000 But actually, the actual things that you need to do, the mechanics of the research are the same. 90 00:08:50,000 --> 00:08:55,000 So simply learning the kind of patterns of the patterns of life and work in 91 00:08:55,000 --> 00:08:58,000 the organisation that you find yourself in is a really useful skill to apply. 92 00:08:58,000 --> 00:09:03,000 So I spent probably two or three years mostly working in a digital engineering team. 93 00:09:03,000 --> 00:09:11,000 People that were doing actual software creation. And my role there was to assist with data migration that was happening. 94 00:09:11,000 --> 00:09:16,000 So we essentially had a place that we'd been storing all of this hard quantitative data 95 00:09:16,000 --> 00:09:20,000 that we were collecting over the years about how that Web site that we had was being used. 96 00:09:20,000 --> 00:09:26,000 And then we were changing everything about the underlying infrastructure and technology that we had into a completely different data storage system. 97 00:09:26,000 --> 00:09:31,000 And my role is to make sure that as we were doing that, nothing got lost. 98 00:09:31,000 --> 00:09:35,000 The data was collected in the same way. Nothing was missing. 99 00:09:35,000 --> 00:09:44,000 Nothing suddenly looked out of place. And so part of that was doing things like mapping the infrastructure from how the old data system work, 100 00:09:44,000 --> 00:09:49,000 doing what's called an entity relationship diagram, and looking at what the new entity relationships would be. 101 00:09:49,000 --> 00:09:52,000 So the places where the data was collected from the stored. 102 00:09:52,000 --> 00:09:59,000 And as I was doing those, I was like, this is a lot like doing essentially is family tree diagrams. 103 00:09:59,000 --> 00:10:04,000 You know, it's very much the same thing where you're looking at where are things transmitting from A to Z. 104 00:10:04,000 --> 00:10:09,000 So you can use all those kinds of same skills. And also just the kind of. 105 00:10:09,000 --> 00:10:12,000 That sense that I would get when I would go in and if I didn't know what people were 106 00:10:12,000 --> 00:10:17,000 talking about or if I felt like there was something unspoken or something happening, 107 00:10:17,000 --> 00:10:23,000 I didn't quite understand, I would behave exactly as though I were doing ethnography with a community, 108 00:10:23,000 --> 00:10:30,000 which is to try and treat the knowledge that I was a part of as being something that was that I was studying, you know. 109 00:10:30,000 --> 00:10:33,000 And so kind of having that observational hat on. 110 00:10:33,000 --> 00:10:37,000 First of all, it really helped defuse some situations that could have otherwise been quite personally demanding. 111 00:10:37,000 --> 00:10:41,000 Because if you just view it as I'm learning about what's going on within this group, 112 00:10:41,000 --> 00:10:47,000 then you're kind of personal sense of responsibility about that while still high because you were working there. 113 00:10:47,000 --> 00:10:52,000 It doesn't feel quite so rooted in your own sense of identity, I suppose, 114 00:10:52,000 --> 00:10:57,000 because you can also treat it as I'm viewing this as objectively separate from myself. 115 00:10:57,000 --> 00:10:59,000 And also then, you know, 116 00:10:59,000 --> 00:11:05,000 eventually you will pick up the lingo and you will learn the skills and you will realise the patterns that are happening within your organisation. 117 00:11:05,000 --> 00:11:12,000 And that's really helpful for putting the right pieces in place at the right time to achieve the things that you want to achieve in your career. 118 00:11:12,000 --> 00:11:18,000 Yeah, yeah. It's kind of like learning the language when you're there using those skills. 119 00:11:18,000 --> 00:11:22,000 You already have to kind of pick up on that. Precisely. 120 00:11:22,000 --> 00:11:27,000 Yeah. And how did you find it kind of before that stage, kind of making applications, 121 00:11:27,000 --> 00:11:32,000 trying to write and tailor things in such a way that you're using a language you're not quite sure of yet? 122 00:11:32,000 --> 00:11:36,000 And kind of that probably is the hardest piece. 123 00:11:36,000 --> 00:11:41,000 I would say, because you're not yet immersed enough in the transition that you want to make. 124 00:11:41,000 --> 00:11:50,000 To really know what you need to say so that your legitimacy of knowledge in that spaces is understood. 125 00:11:50,000 --> 00:11:54,000 And you also simply don't have the connections, perhaps, that you would do once you've moved into the space. 126 00:11:54,000 --> 00:12:03,000 So I'd say if I were going to do anything differently, probably what I would do is, you know, 127 00:12:03,000 --> 00:12:08,000 and especially for students who are listening to this now that are maybe in their first or second year, 128 00:12:08,000 --> 00:12:13,000 I would have spent a little bit more time thinking about how am I going to make the 129 00:12:13,000 --> 00:12:17,000 kinds of connections I want to make to understand the spaces that are available to me, 130 00:12:17,000 --> 00:12:19,000 like what are the options that are out there? And, B, 131 00:12:19,000 --> 00:12:29,000 make the Connections to really form the right network so that at the right time I have the right information about what roles are available and 132 00:12:29,000 --> 00:12:38,000 potentially who can introduce me to the right kind of person to to know about a job that's that's out there and the right kinds of skills. 133 00:12:38,000 --> 00:12:44,000 So because skills do change in terms of need, employer need, and what they're looking for will change over time. 134 00:12:44,000 --> 00:12:51,000 So having an idea of how that space is shifting will allow you to see not only what's on the on the market right now or what's needed in the market, 135 00:12:51,000 --> 00:12:56,000 but you can get an understanding of what's going to be needed by the time I leave, 136 00:12:56,000 --> 00:12:59,000 because you can kind of observe the trends that are happening and say, OK. 137 00:12:59,000 --> 00:13:07,000 So if I put some resources into, for example, learning how to do network mapping or doing a bit more on the kind of digital skill side, 138 00:13:07,000 --> 00:13:14,000 then I'll be more valuable than if I'm spending time doing something else. Which isn't to say, of course, that you shouldn't focus on your degree. 139 00:13:14,000 --> 00:13:19,000 I mean, you know, it's such a kind of you have to get over that hurdle more than anything else. 140 00:13:19,000 --> 00:13:26,000 Right? That is the thing to get through. But I'd say a really crucial skill is networking. 141 00:13:26,000 --> 00:13:32,000 And I know that everyone always says that. And people find it can find it very overwhelming. 142 00:13:32,000 --> 00:13:39,000 But I think the thing to remember is networking is a skill that allows you to understand 143 00:13:39,000 --> 00:13:44,000 some knowledge that's out there in the world that you don't yet have in an informal way. 144 00:13:44,000 --> 00:13:48,000 So if you view it in that sense, then it can be less overwhelming. 145 00:13:48,000 --> 00:13:53,000 And I found as well, once I started learning to have an objective when I went to a networking event. 146 00:13:53,000 --> 00:14:03,000 So I go to a lot of digital skills, meet ups in London, or I try and attend a lot of webinars or whatever it is I'm trying to learn about. 147 00:14:03,000 --> 00:14:08,000 I look for places where I can find that information and in particular I potentially can 148 00:14:08,000 --> 00:14:14,000 share some information as well because people are always willing to engage with you. 149 00:14:14,000 --> 00:14:18,000 First of all, if you're interested in them and ask them questions, everyone loves talking about themselves. 150 00:14:18,000 --> 00:14:23,000 This is like the crucial skill of good networking is if you can get someone, if you can express interest in them. 151 00:14:23,000 --> 00:14:27,000 People are usually very willing to tell you more about what they're doing, 152 00:14:27,000 --> 00:14:33,000 but also people are usually have some kind of a need that if you can fulfil that need in some way, 153 00:14:33,000 --> 00:14:39,000 like having a slightly adjacent skill or a different skill that they're looking for, then they'll want to talk to you as well. 154 00:14:39,000 --> 00:14:47,000 So so building that skill of saying, OK, there is a big data meetup on Wednesday, I'm going to go and 155 00:14:47,000 --> 00:14:52,000 My goal is to find out either a little bit more about this particular topic or to meet someone that works in this 156 00:14:52,000 --> 00:15:00,000 business or to find someone that has this job title and just speak to them a little bit about whatever my objective is. 157 00:15:00,000 --> 00:15:08,000 Having that focus can really, really make it much easier because you feel less overwhelmed by the idea of networking in general. 158 00:15:08,000 --> 00:15:16,000 That can. Huge kind of topic and kind of focussing it on something smaller to achieve can make can make life just a little bit less overwhelming. 159 00:15:16,000 --> 00:15:20,000 Yeah, yeah, definitely. I think a lot people do get it. Oh, you've got to network. 160 00:15:20,000 --> 00:15:24,000 But then what does that really mean? What does it look like in practise. They kind of. 161 00:15:24,000 --> 00:15:31,000 Yeah. So to get tip of going to something with an objective and kind of having a little bit of reciprocity in that, 162 00:15:31,000 --> 00:15:36,000 like maybe there's two things you can offer as well as getting people to talk about themselves. 163 00:15:36,000 --> 00:15:42,000 Yeah. And honestly, the other thing that I would say, which is a really good tip, is even if you're fairly early in your career, 164 00:15:42,000 --> 00:15:47,000 especially if you're looking at a non-academic role, getting up there and being a speaker. 165 00:15:47,000 --> 00:15:54,000 So, you know, it gives it gives you a chance to showcase what you're doing or the kinds of knowledge and skills that you have. 166 00:15:54,000 --> 00:15:57,000 But it also gives people an excuse to talk to you at a networking event. 167 00:15:57,000 --> 00:16:01,000 And even if you're an introvert, actually, as scary as it could be to go on stage, 168 00:16:01,000 --> 00:16:08,000 giving a talk is a really excellent way of putting the burden on others to come and talk to you so you don't have 169 00:16:08,000 --> 00:16:12,000 to feel like you're trying to muscle your way into someone else or to identify a friendly face in the crowd, 170 00:16:12,000 --> 00:16:17,000 because everyone knows that you're so and so talked about the thing and then they might want to come ask you questions. 171 00:16:17,000 --> 00:16:23,000 So it's a really great way of, you know, it's essentially you saying I'm here, I can talk about this. 172 00:16:23,000 --> 00:16:29,000 And I'd say the real value is that in the personal connections, the one on one connections that you make after you've given the talk. 173 00:16:29,000 --> 00:16:34,000 So even a short you know, in particular, when I think about the technology team, 174 00:16:34,000 --> 00:16:40,000 which is mostly what I work in, there are tons of events, in particular London, where I live. 175 00:16:40,000 --> 00:16:44,000 You could probably go to multiple. You'd have your choice of events to go to every evening. 176 00:16:44,000 --> 00:16:49,000 And typically they're very short form talks, two to three minutes about a subject of interest. 177 00:16:49,000 --> 00:16:55,000 So there's usually lots of opportunities to get in and kind of on the ground floor of the ladder of speaking, as it were. 178 00:16:55,000 --> 00:17:02,000 If you're in a place that has less accessible resources in that way, there are definitely a lot of online resources. 179 00:17:02,000 --> 00:17:08,000 And in particular, I think now that there is so much fear about physically being lots of people together, 180 00:17:08,000 --> 00:17:14,000 lots of the kinds of events that I would typically have gone to are going to be thinking about moving online more and more. 181 00:17:14,000 --> 00:17:16,000 And the way that we develop essentially digital etiquette. 182 00:17:16,000 --> 00:17:24,000 So, you know, how people develop those kinds of informal connections is going to become increasingly important. 183 00:17:24,000 --> 00:17:30,000 You know, it's relatively easy to put together a podcast or a webinar that is one way broadcast content, 184 00:17:30,000 --> 00:17:35,000 but creating those connections that those networking events are really valuable for. 185 00:17:35,000 --> 00:17:40,000 There are very few ways that people are good at that right now. But I think increasingly that's a thing that people will get good at. 186 00:17:40,000 --> 00:17:46,000 So I'd say look for opportunities in that space where you can not only watch a piece of content, 187 00:17:46,000 --> 00:17:52,000 but also in some way contribute to an ongoing dialogue and meet people through that kind of a mechanism. 188 00:17:52,000 --> 00:18:02,000 I'm trying to think of other examples of good kind of asynchronous or at a distance ways that people can learn and connect with one another. 189 00:18:02,000 --> 00:18:06,000 I subscribe to a lot of newsletters about such just some interest to me professionally as well. 190 00:18:06,000 --> 00:18:12,000 Usually reaching out to someone and saying, I read this thing or I have a question about whatever it is, 191 00:18:12,000 --> 00:18:16,000 you won't always have a hundred percent success so that people will get a lot of demands on their time, 192 00:18:16,000 --> 00:18:19,000 particularly as they get more skilled or experienced in their space. 193 00:18:19,000 --> 00:18:24,000 But often people are again willing to talk about something or willing to connect with you, 194 00:18:24,000 --> 00:18:29,000 you know, to answer a question or to be involved or engaged in something. 195 00:18:29,000 --> 00:18:34,000 People are typically very generous with their time, you know, especially if you're only asking for 10 minutes or, you know, 196 00:18:34,000 --> 00:18:41,000 whatever it is, a small or small chunk of time is usually a good way to go in, particularly if you can be specific about your ask. 197 00:18:41,000 --> 00:18:49,000 That really helps people to engage with you quickly is instead of being like, hey, I read your thing, will you be my mentor? 198 00:18:49,000 --> 00:18:53,000 That's that's often too open ended. But if you say I read your thing, it was interesting. 199 00:18:53,000 --> 00:18:57,000 Specifically, I have a question about blah. You can often then open a dialogue in that way. 200 00:18:57,000 --> 00:19:05,000 Yeah. So it kind of being specific and kind of very much time limited when you're asking of people. 201 00:19:05,000 --> 00:19:11,000 And yeah. And it's really interesting to think about kind of non sort of Face-To-Face in person ways you can do networking. 202 00:19:11,000 --> 00:19:15,000 I think a lot of people think of networking as you got to go to this event and a lot 203 00:19:15,000 --> 00:19:18,000 of PGRs are part time or they have caring responsibilities and they just think, 204 00:19:18,000 --> 00:19:23,000 oh, I just can't do that. Actually, there are all these other ways that you can get involved. 205 00:19:23,000 --> 00:19:28,000 Yeah. And like I say, I think that those kind of online and asynchronous abilities are where the necessity for those 206 00:19:28,000 --> 00:19:34,000 is going to become increasing over the next few months and probably years after that as well. 207 00:19:34,000 --> 00:19:39,000 You know, because businesses have long been looking for ways to encourage less business travel, for example. 208 00:19:39,000 --> 00:19:43,000 And it's always, oh, it's too hard. There's no way to do this. It's impossible. 209 00:19:43,000 --> 00:19:49,000 And one of my current research areas is how digital technologies are actually changing the physical spaces that people work. 210 00:19:49,000 --> 00:19:57,000 And so right now is a real kind of fascinating live experiment for me to watch the way the businesses are responding to the current pandemic crisis. 211 00:19:57,000 --> 00:20:00,000 And I think that that really will change a lot of the things that we're thinking about. 212 00:20:00,000 --> 00:20:05,000 In particular, you look at things like slack channels for technology. 213 00:20:05,000 --> 00:20:09,000 Conferences have always been very popular, but. 214 00:20:09,000 --> 00:20:14,000 It's going from that being a kind of adjacent thing to the event, to being that is the event. 215 00:20:14,000 --> 00:20:17,000 You know, video conferencing again. It's not like that's a new technology, 216 00:20:17,000 --> 00:20:24,000 but the way that people get comfortable with using those things in particular in large groups is going to be really interesting. 217 00:20:24,000 --> 00:20:31,000 I think how people understand the visual and audio cues that they're getting on multiple person calls is going 218 00:20:31,000 --> 00:20:37,000 to be interesting because you often have these kind of slightly weird signals where if you were in person. 219 00:20:37,000 --> 00:20:42,000 So, of course, you know, we're probably sitting about four or five feet apart as we're recording this podcast. 220 00:20:42,000 --> 00:20:47,000 And that has a particular kind of etiquette about the way that we do distancing 221 00:20:47,000 --> 00:20:52,000 But if you're in a video conferencing situation, people often have the camera at a slightly weird distance. 222 00:20:52,000 --> 00:20:55,000 So you either feel like you're too close or you're too far away. 223 00:20:55,000 --> 00:21:01,000 And that gives different cues to how you perceive that interaction, where they have the microphone to close it. 224 00:21:01,000 --> 00:21:05,000 It's like they're breathing on you. I don't know if you've had that experience. I'm sure everyone has. 225 00:21:05,000 --> 00:21:09,000 And it's that really sets up a very different kind of interaction. 226 00:21:09,000 --> 00:21:13,000 And I think that as these technologies become ever more ubiquitous, 227 00:21:13,000 --> 00:21:17,000 people are going to have to be getting better at understanding what those implications 228 00:21:17,000 --> 00:21:21,000 are of sound and eyesight and what that means for people's comfort level of distancing. 229 00:21:21,000 --> 00:21:25,000 So that for me, is very fascinating subject right now. Yeah, yeah. There's so much to explore. 230 00:21:25,000 --> 00:21:29,000 And it's going to be interesting how it develops like over the next couple of months especially. 231 00:21:29,000 --> 00:21:35,000 Definitely. And you mentioned that he thought networking would be particularly with people in the early 232 00:21:35,000 --> 00:21:41,000 stage of their PhD just in terms of finding out about what different entities are doing, 233 00:21:41,000 --> 00:21:42,000 how things are moving and trends, 234 00:21:42,000 --> 00:21:48,000 and then they can use that to think about what skills do I need to pick up and develop and see if someone was interested 235 00:21:48,000 --> 00:21:55,000 in doing the kind of work that you do like as a digital anthropologist and all the various things that that's include 236 00:21:55,000 --> 00:22:01,000 What kinds of experiences would be useful for people to try and pick up alongside or as part of the PhD 237 00:22:01,000 --> 00:22:05,000 I think one of the it's important to focus on one of the reasons that I think it's important 238 00:22:05,000 --> 00:22:09,000 to do this early in your academic career is because when you are working in academia, 239 00:22:09,000 --> 00:22:14,000 unless you are doing something part time or you have prior experience outside of academia, 240 00:22:14,000 --> 00:22:19,000 the people who are teaching you so often don't have the experience of working outside of academia. 241 00:22:19,000 --> 00:22:25,000 So they are simply not in a very good position to advise you about if you want to explore non-academic options. 242 00:22:25,000 --> 00:22:28,000 What that transition looks like, what kinds of skills are being looked for. 243 00:22:28,000 --> 00:22:33,000 They can't really advise you on the kind of non-academic lingo unless they themselves are also doing some of this stuff. 244 00:22:33,000 --> 00:22:35,000 This is all, of course, very context dependent. 245 00:22:35,000 --> 00:22:39,000 You have some departments who are very different or you have university support services which can help you. 246 00:22:39,000 --> 00:22:46,000 But in general, my experience when I was a PhD student was that of many others that I spoke to was that they simply weren't 247 00:22:46,000 --> 00:22:55,000 able to bridge that gap into the commercial realm because they didn't have the right advice at the time. 248 00:22:55,000 --> 00:22:59,000 And being an anthropologist and someone who does a lot of ethnography 249 00:22:59,000 --> 00:23:05,000 I always think that the best way of learning about something is going to immerse yourself in that thing and then experiencing it for yourself. 250 00:23:05,000 --> 00:23:12,000 So finding an internship or some kind of work experience, I know it's less common for older people to be doing those. 251 00:23:12,000 --> 00:23:20,000 But you can usually find something. And there are often places that will offer short work placements even to postgraduate students, 252 00:23:20,000 --> 00:23:26,000 although it is you know, sometimes they're not quite very well set up for that. But, you know, there are definitely places that are doing it, 253 00:23:26,000 --> 00:23:29,000 especially if they're interested either in your area of research or the kinds of creative skills that 254 00:23:29,000 --> 00:23:35,000 you can bring to the situation that you're looking at and doing those fairly early on in your career. 255 00:23:35,000 --> 00:23:42,000 Gives you an opportunity to understand more about yourself, what you like and what you don't like instead of waiting until the end and thinking, hey, 256 00:23:42,000 --> 00:23:48,000 I'm just going to sit out in the wide world and having this wonderful badge of my degree is going to 257 00:23:48,000 --> 00:23:55,000 tell people something about who I am and the kind of skills I have often in a commercial setting. 258 00:23:55,000 --> 00:24:03,000 You know, you might recognise the value of a PhD, but you won't understand how that applies to your business. 259 00:24:03,000 --> 00:24:09,000 So particular for early people who are just out of the PhD 260 00:24:09,000 --> 00:24:16,000 It's a hard sell because in essence, from an employer perspective, they're seeing it was just a regular graduate who is a little bit more expensive. 261 00:24:16,000 --> 00:24:18,000 And that can be challenging to overcome that. 262 00:24:18,000 --> 00:24:27,000 You know, I'd say after your first job or first couple of jobs, when you move it to either a more managerial role or more strategic looking role, 263 00:24:27,000 --> 00:24:33,000 then people begin to value your active experience more than they did when you were first out of the gate. 264 00:24:33,000 --> 00:24:37,000 So that's really tough because that's kind of the biggest hurdle is is getting into your first job. 265 00:24:37,000 --> 00:24:46,000 It's a very much kind of a catch 22 situation. But coming in from your your postgraduate experience, having had some commercial experience as well, 266 00:24:46,000 --> 00:24:52,000 puts you in a much stronger position than to be looking at a commercial role because people can 267 00:24:52,000 --> 00:24:57,000 people make assumptions about your commercial experience when they're reviewing your CV or your, 268 00:24:57,000 --> 00:25:03,000 you know, as you're being in your hiring process than they will about someone who's just coming with no experience. 269 00:25:03,000 --> 00:25:08,000 That's obvious to them. Yeah. So it sounds like it's really important. 270 00:25:08,000 --> 00:25:16,000 First, few roles to really think to really keep in mind that someone else won't know, understand what a PhD is. 271 00:25:16,000 --> 00:25:21,000 Also all the skills involved. So you really have to work at both getting other experiences, 272 00:25:21,000 --> 00:25:27,000 maybe then also how you kind of market those things, I guess what those skills mean from your PhD. 273 00:25:27,000 --> 00:25:31,000 It's not just I did this degree and there's nothing about it that makes sense. 274 00:25:31,000 --> 00:25:39,000 Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And also, it's worth remembering that in a commercial setting, the word research can mean very different things. 275 00:25:39,000 --> 00:25:47,000 So I'm doing some doing a little bit of research on what is the commercial we're looking for and what do those kinds of roles do. 276 00:25:47,000 --> 00:25:55,000 And if I'm if I'm right. Gosh, the PGR resource that I'm forgetting the name of. 277 00:25:55,000 --> 00:25:59,000 But it's like academia to ac-doc or something like that. Yeah. 278 00:25:59,000 --> 00:26:02,000 I can find it to be linked. That would be awesome. Thank you. So. 279 00:26:02,000 --> 00:26:06,000 So there's some good kind of role descriptions of, you know, what does a U x designer do. 280 00:26:06,000 --> 00:26:10,000 And what does a commercial analyst do. 281 00:26:10,000 --> 00:26:14,000 And things of that nature that are just kind of general descriptions of jobs that are out there in 282 00:26:14,000 --> 00:26:20,000 the market and getting an understanding of what the language is that's used around those roles is 283 00:26:20,000 --> 00:26:25,000 really helpful because you can then tailor your CV to reflect those skills specifically and in 284 00:26:25,000 --> 00:26:31,000 particular to take some projects that you've done and demonstrate how those skills relate to that role. 285 00:26:31,000 --> 00:26:35,000 So essentially, it means you as the person coming into the job, 286 00:26:35,000 --> 00:26:41,000 you have to be a bit more forward stepping and thinking to to to the commercial 287 00:26:41,000 --> 00:26:46,000 person to give them an understanding of what you want them to see about that. 288 00:26:46,000 --> 00:26:49,000 That relates to their job that they have on the market. 289 00:26:49,000 --> 00:26:55,000 And that can be challenging because, again, sometimes the language is, you know, very jargonistic in particular. 290 00:26:55,000 --> 00:27:00,000 And, you know, if you've worked in a commercial setting, you might understand the particularities of what they're looking for. 291 00:27:00,000 --> 00:27:04,000 Whereas if you haven't, you don't really know what they're looking for. 292 00:27:04,000 --> 00:27:08,000 But trying to get informal interviews with people just to understand what they're specifically 293 00:27:08,000 --> 00:27:12,000 asking or getting in examples of prior work that other people who are in that field have done. 294 00:27:12,000 --> 00:27:19,000 So that's why networking isn't just about learning from people who are already hiring managers. 295 00:27:19,000 --> 00:27:24,000 It's not just about trying to find people who are looking for, you know, who have jobs on offer, 296 00:27:24,000 --> 00:27:29,000 but also about meeting people in those roles and finding out what their backgrounds are and how they got into that role. 297 00:27:29,000 --> 00:27:35,000 So it's really important, even just pure networking, can be super important to to understand how they bridge that gap and how they got into that space. 298 00:27:35,000 --> 00:27:41,000 Yes, I say there's a lot to do in terms of not having assumptions yourself. 299 00:27:41,000 --> 00:27:45,000 Someone else will understand what you're talking about then not assuming that 300 00:27:45,000 --> 00:27:48,000 you also know what they're talking about when they say research and you say, I've done this research, 301 00:27:48,000 --> 00:27:52,000 you might be talking about two completely different things and you might not either 302 00:27:52,000 --> 00:27:57,000 have a good match or they might not realise that you might be a good match. And talking to other people, 303 00:27:57,000 --> 00:28:03,000 who are in the field and their experiences can really help to sort of reach those gaps and find that language like you say, 304 00:28:03,000 --> 00:28:08,000 before you're fully immersed in whatever field. Is that kind of thing. 305 00:28:08,000 --> 00:28:17,000 Yeah. Yeah. Precisely. Yeah. So you say if someone was applying to work with you with that particular things that you are looking for in 306 00:28:17,000 --> 00:28:23,000 terms of how people put those things across or things you'll particularly like not looking for things like, 307 00:28:23,000 --> 00:28:27,000 nope, don't do that. Yeah. Let me answer that question in two ways. 308 00:28:27,000 --> 00:28:31,000 So where I work now, we are essentially a small consortium of researchers who have very different skills. 309 00:28:31,000 --> 00:28:37,000 So you can think about in an academic setting as being like an area skills department where you might have an economist and an anthropologist 310 00:28:37,000 --> 00:28:44,000 and a musicologist and whoever else that are all working on either a particular geographic region or some kind of conceptual region. 311 00:28:44,000 --> 00:28:47,000 But they all have very, very different skills that they're bringing to the table. 312 00:28:47,000 --> 00:28:53,000 And they might not even work very closely together, although they might on some projects. So that's really where I work now, is like that. 313 00:28:53,000 --> 00:28:57,000 We all have very specialised skills. I'm the only digital anthropologist on the team. 314 00:28:57,000 --> 00:29:04,000 The other people who have more skills that are focussed on looking at things like digitisation and cloud 315 00:29:04,000 --> 00:29:14,000 technologies and organisational strategy and some in some cases software engineering concepts and things like that. 316 00:29:14,000 --> 00:29:17,000 So we all have very, very different goals. 317 00:29:17,000 --> 00:29:23,000 So when we look for someone, we're typically looking for someone who has different skills and what we already have. 318 00:29:23,000 --> 00:29:34,000 I would say in the roles that we're doing, if I was hiring someone to be an assistant to me, then I probably would be looking for. 319 00:29:34,000 --> 00:29:37,000 Usually I've done that in a kind of short term project way. 320 00:29:37,000 --> 00:29:44,000 So in that case, it will very much depend on other project is when we hire into the the LEF. 321 00:29:44,000 --> 00:29:49,000 More broadly, we probably will be looking for somebody with a fair amount of commercially experience already. 322 00:29:49,000 --> 00:29:53,000 So I probably wouldn't see that as a good was a good starting role for somebody who has a PhD. 323 00:29:53,000 --> 00:30:03,000 But, you know, I've managed to make it there eventually. So I think if you want to work in an organisation that's like the one that ours is, 324 00:30:03,000 --> 00:30:08,000 then it's a matter of figuring out what kinds of steppingstones you need to put him. 325 00:30:08,000 --> 00:30:10,000 Along the way to get there. 326 00:30:10,000 --> 00:30:20,000 So to answer the question more from the perspective of my old job, when I was doing a more kind of data science y data analysis, background. 327 00:30:20,000 --> 00:30:30,000 When we were first hiring people who were typically coming straight out of their degrees for junior analyst roles. 328 00:30:30,000 --> 00:30:32,000 That was a very quantitatively oriented department. 329 00:30:32,000 --> 00:30:42,000 So we were typically looking for some examples of statistical knowledge, some potentially familiarity with statistical package software. 330 00:30:42,000 --> 00:30:47,000 And interestingly, there's not a lot of crossover between academic usage of those things. 331 00:30:47,000 --> 00:30:53,000 So you typically might be doing SPSS or quite a lot of stuff with, ah, potentially some stuff with Python. 332 00:30:53,000 --> 00:30:57,000 And what commercial organisations use in those spaces. 333 00:30:57,000 --> 00:31:01,000 Obviously all the maths is the same, but they simply are using different kinds of software packages. 334 00:31:01,000 --> 00:31:06,000 So we wouldn't always be looking for some experience in those commercial packages, 335 00:31:06,000 --> 00:31:14,000 which are things like Tableau and Click View and software package called Looker. 336 00:31:14,000 --> 00:31:18,000 But if they had some, that was usually perceived as an advantage. 337 00:31:18,000 --> 00:31:26,000 But if they had Python, our other stuff, we knew that they'd worked with statistical package software before and that was OK. 338 00:31:26,000 --> 00:31:35,000 We also were looking for people who at the time, again, very quantitive were all but we wanted people who could look at a set of data 339 00:31:35,000 --> 00:31:39,000 and see where there were irregularities or unusual things happening so that 340 00:31:39,000 --> 00:31:48,000 they could then raise a challenge in terms of either how the data was being collected or an anomaly of some kind in what was happening with the data. 341 00:31:48,000 --> 00:32:01,000 So you needed to have a bit of an investigative hat. And I would say my role there as an anthropologist was much more about assisting 342 00:32:01,000 --> 00:32:06,000 people with the kind of more ephemeral qualities of questioning those things. 343 00:32:06,000 --> 00:32:15,000 So while I did have a very quantitative role when I was there, I wasn't necessarily doing a lot of the kind of data sciences side of things. 344 00:32:15,000 --> 00:32:20,000 A lot of it was more of the summary statistics. And then, OK, we've noticed that there's an unusual pattern. 345 00:32:20,000 --> 00:32:23,000 What are some creative ideas we can think about, about in terms of why that might be? 346 00:32:23,000 --> 00:32:29,000 So you needed that mixture of people who could do the the crunchier side of the maths, 347 00:32:29,000 --> 00:32:39,000 but also say things like all the schools are on holiday this week or there's been a strike in Chicago teaching in the Chicago teaching union 348 00:32:39,000 --> 00:32:46,000 And so therefore, we're having less people who are logging on to share their stories with us this week or whatever it might be. 349 00:32:46,000 --> 00:32:53,000 So there is kind of that social side in terms of understanding what you know, if you see something unusual, what might it be? 350 00:32:53,000 --> 00:32:59,000 So a lot of my role in the end was really about training the newer trainees so they would come in with a more kind of hard sciences background. 351 00:32:59,000 --> 00:33:05,000 And then my role would be to help them. Question. When you see something unusual, why might that be so they can answer a lot of questions about this. 352 00:33:05,000 --> 00:33:09,000 Looks weird, but they didn't necessarily know what to do with that information. And my role is to help them understand that. 353 00:33:09,000 --> 00:33:12,000 Know how could you then question this more broadly? Yeah. 354 00:33:12,000 --> 00:33:18,000 So it's kind of, um, combining those that kind of hard science, the social sciences types together. 355 00:33:18,000 --> 00:33:25,000 Precisely. And I would say if you depending on the size of the organisation you're with, you often find that you get blended teams. 356 00:33:25,000 --> 00:33:31,000 So and that can be a real strength when you're able to when you're able to have people who have strengths in different areas, 357 00:33:31,000 --> 00:33:37,000 it allows you to see information in a different way than if you are just one person is looking at it in one way. 358 00:33:37,000 --> 00:33:42,000 And of course, there's always the wonderful idea of having everyone have all of the skills. 359 00:33:42,000 --> 00:33:44,000 But people are simply going to have different strengths. 360 00:33:44,000 --> 00:33:48,000 And recognising where they can contribute the most is really important for any organisation to do. 361 00:33:48,000 --> 00:33:56,000 Yeah. Yeah, sure. I know I say sounds like you're saying your current role and maybe that's a person that's listenings dream. 362 00:33:56,000 --> 00:34:03,000 Well, they want to work in a team, but it's a case that you won't necessarily do that straight away to think about the kind of work. 363 00:34:03,000 --> 00:34:08,000 What are the steps and experiences I need to get to that point. If that's the kind of thing I want to be aiming for. 364 00:34:08,000 --> 00:34:12,000 Yeah. Precisely. So a good example would be like, there is no way that I would have the job I have now, 365 00:34:12,000 --> 00:34:15,000 even though my role is much more qualitative than it was previously. 366 00:34:15,000 --> 00:34:21,000 If I hadn't had my experience where I was doing essentially the kind of hard number crunching for the past six years before that, 367 00:34:21,000 --> 00:34:26,000 because it gave me experiences like managing a team, give me a lot of organisational operational experience. 368 00:34:26,000 --> 00:34:32,000 So I understood the different parts of what most businesses have in terms of the kinds of ways that they're set up. 369 00:34:32,000 --> 00:34:39,000 Give me a lot of experience around kind of standard ways of doing commercial modelling for different kinds of things. 370 00:34:39,000 --> 00:34:45,000 So then when I go into businesses now where where I'm advising them, I usually understand the organisational setup pretty well. 371 00:34:45,000 --> 00:34:53,000 Because, you know, though, of course, there are differences, there are definitely commonalities in terms of how large organisations are always set up. 372 00:34:53,000 --> 00:34:55,000 So if I hadn't had that experience, 373 00:34:55,000 --> 00:35:01,000 I wouldn't simply I've simply wouldn't be able to kind of stretch to putting myself in the shoes of the organisations I work with. 374 00:35:01,000 --> 00:35:08,000 So so, yeah, it's definitely that kind of sense of, OK, if I want to someday work in a think tank or work in a research. 375 00:35:08,000 --> 00:35:15,000 organisation or something of that nature or go into a kind of political policy organisation. 376 00:35:15,000 --> 00:35:17,000 What do I need to do so that when I get there, 377 00:35:17,000 --> 00:35:25,000 I have the right mixture of skills and background and essentially area knowledge so that I can really provide the most value in that kind of role. 378 00:35:25,000 --> 00:35:33,000 Yeah, yeah. And when you were moving to your first role at tes, like, how did you find because obviously that was quite different in terms of quantitative, 379 00:35:33,000 --> 00:35:39,000 in terms of applying for that role, how you sort of sold your skills in that setting mixture thing. 380 00:35:39,000 --> 00:35:43,000 So I had applied for several different things around that time. 381 00:35:43,000 --> 00:35:49,000 I specifically remembers applying for internship and publishing as well. And I was applying at that time as well as it has. 382 00:35:49,000 --> 00:35:55,000 And the tes connection was actually through a personal friend. 383 00:35:55,000 --> 00:36:02,000 So, again, networking, it comes down to, you know, it absolutely is about what you know, because, you know, 384 00:36:02,000 --> 00:36:07,000 when you show up in the room to be the one who is in the interview, you have to you have to pass the bar. 385 00:36:07,000 --> 00:36:13,000 But in terms of the knowledge about what roles are available and out there, 386 00:36:13,000 --> 00:36:19,000 it really is helpful to not just be depending on job boards and kind of publicly available information. 387 00:36:19,000 --> 00:36:27,000 Having some knowledge about, you know, roles that either are not being advertised explicitly or in particular this role. 388 00:36:27,000 --> 00:36:31,000 When I first was applying, it has had a very hard time filling the role. 389 00:36:31,000 --> 00:36:35,000 And that's partly because it was a slightly unusual setup for the role. 390 00:36:35,000 --> 00:36:42,000 So a lot of the people that they were interviewing either had one side of the job that they were looking for covered already, 391 00:36:42,000 --> 00:36:44,000 or they had the other side that they wanted. 392 00:36:44,000 --> 00:36:53,000 So in this case, they wanted somebody who could do a lot of the kind of analysis and Day-To-Day reporting. 393 00:36:53,000 --> 00:37:00,000 But they also wanted someone who they could eventually train to do some of the the actual programming of the reporting tools. 394 00:37:00,000 --> 00:37:04,000 And what they were finding at the time was that they could they could find someone who was one of the other very strongly, 395 00:37:04,000 --> 00:37:10,000 who had a commercial background. But they were really struggling to find somebody who either had both or wanted to do both because it was unusual, 396 00:37:10,000 --> 00:37:17,000 you know, expectation, especially for that level of role. And of course, I come in as a newly graduated PhD and like, I can do anything. 397 00:37:17,000 --> 00:37:23,000 I'm willing to do whatever it takes to succeed in this job. And sometimes that extra flexibility of simply saying, hey, 398 00:37:23,000 --> 00:37:31,000 I'm willing to learn it can it can sometimes put you in a better position simply because other people whose careers were 399 00:37:31,000 --> 00:37:40,000 fixed or have a very focussed career path in mind might not be interested in having that kind of broad range of skills. 400 00:37:40,000 --> 00:37:48,000 And so, you know, for you to come in then and say, I can learn things very quickly and I'm very experienced in part of this or I am 401 00:37:48,000 --> 00:37:51,000 very thorough in the way that I go about learning things can be a real advantage. 402 00:37:51,000 --> 00:37:56,000 And so that was eventually what happened was because they'd had such a hard time filling the role, 403 00:37:56,000 --> 00:38:01,000 they were then willing to look slightly differently at what kinds of mix of skills they needed. So essentially, 404 00:38:01,000 --> 00:38:10,000 I showed up at the right time when they were looking for someone who is a little bit different than what they had initially had in mind. 405 00:38:10,000 --> 00:38:14,000 And then when I was doing the interviewing, clearly they were impressed by the research skills that I had, 406 00:38:14,000 --> 00:38:21,000 but also some of the ways that I was thinking about or questioning some of the stuff that they were putting forward that made them feel like, 407 00:38:21,000 --> 00:38:26,000 OK, this could be someone who can approach this role differently, which is really helpful for them. 408 00:38:26,000 --> 00:38:31,000 And interestingly enough, when I went to then move to the leading edge forum where I work now, 409 00:38:31,000 --> 00:38:35,000 I knew that I was ready to move on from a role that was very quantitative. 410 00:38:35,000 --> 00:38:38,000 And I wanted to get back into some of those more kind of core research skills that I developed. 411 00:38:38,000 --> 00:38:45,000 And when I was here at Exeter and I was having a hard time because my role at that point was so quantitive that all anyone could see in me was, 412 00:38:45,000 --> 00:38:51,000 oh, she's an analyst. She's an analyst. And so it was very hard for them to see that the qualitative skills that I'd amassed 413 00:38:51,000 --> 00:38:55,000 in the previous simply weren't things that in their mind were showing up for them. 414 00:38:55,000 --> 00:38:57,000 When I was trying to put myself forward. 415 00:38:57,000 --> 00:39:05,000 So but the leading edge forum was specifically looking for someone who wanted to do a digital anthropology programme for them, programme of research. 416 00:39:05,000 --> 00:39:09,000 So again, it was just the right thing at the right time. It just matched up. That was what I wanted to do and that was what they needed. 417 00:39:09,000 --> 00:39:14,000 And again, they'd been having a hard time filling the role because they had a lot of people who either had a 418 00:39:14,000 --> 00:39:19,000 lot of commercial experience but didn't really have the kind of core research skills that I had. 419 00:39:19,000 --> 00:39:25,000 Or they had a lot of people who had been doing very academic research for a long time, 420 00:39:25,000 --> 00:39:31,000 but didn't have the commercial experience and the context to operate in that world. 421 00:39:31,000 --> 00:39:36,000 So, you know, it's just about finding the right the right match at the right moment, I think. 422 00:39:36,000 --> 00:39:41,000 Yeah. Yeah. And this only about. Throughout kind of the importance of networking, 423 00:39:41,000 --> 00:39:47,000 finding out about jobs that are available in any kind of different people's experience and backgrounds in these industries. 424 00:39:47,000 --> 00:39:52,000 And it sounds like that makes it experience between the academic and the kind 425 00:39:52,000 --> 00:39:57,000 of commercial industry industry type stuff and get having both those things. 426 00:39:57,000 --> 00:40:02,000 And I said maybe trying to get some of these experiences durinf your PhD really helpful. 427 00:40:02,000 --> 00:40:06,000 Yeah, yeah, absolutely. It can be really powerful if you want to move into a commercial role. 428 00:40:06,000 --> 00:40:17,000 And I I'd say also what I've observed. Is there an increasing number of public private partnerships or academic quasi 429 00:40:17,000 --> 00:40:24,000 academic research skills or or things of that nature where there's some kind of, 430 00:40:24,000 --> 00:40:32,000 oh, hey, we, the university have a lot of research skills or a lot of scope for doing like innovation lab style stuff. 431 00:40:32,000 --> 00:40:34,000 But what we don't have is a lot of the commercial side of things. 432 00:40:34,000 --> 00:40:42,000 So they develop these like digital hubs or innovation hubs in different parts of the world, in different country. 433 00:40:42,000 --> 00:40:51,000 And so there are often roles that are available that are kind of quasi academic, but also really depend on the commercial experience as well. 434 00:40:51,000 --> 00:40:54,000 So, you know, I haven't really had an experience of fighting for those, 435 00:40:54,000 --> 00:40:58,000 but it's something I've observed as I've been thinking about my my future career path. 436 00:40:58,000 --> 00:41:02,000 It's something that I've observed is out there in the market. So there might be something like that. You know, 437 00:41:02,000 --> 00:41:05,000 if you're thinking about perhaps wanting to stick a bit closer on the academic 438 00:41:05,000 --> 00:41:10,000 side and maintaining those academic credentials and publishing and all that. 439 00:41:10,000 --> 00:41:16,000 But also having a bit of commercial experience that would let you be that kind of linchpin between those two those two things. 440 00:41:16,000 --> 00:41:23,000 So I'd say that's an interesting potential career path as well. It's adjacent to but not exactly the same as the way that I've gone. 441 00:41:23,000 --> 00:41:27,000 And would there be any other kind of final tips you'd give someone kind of in the middle of 442 00:41:27,000 --> 00:41:33,000 your PhD or something you wish you'd done a bit differently when you were doing your PhD? 443 00:41:33,000 --> 00:41:36,000 I think the only other tip. 444 00:41:36,000 --> 00:41:45,000 And again, it's probably something that is spoken about perhaps a bit more than when I was a student, is prioritising your own self care. 445 00:41:45,000 --> 00:41:51,000 And I mean that not in a fluffy bubble bath kind of way, although if that is something that works for you, then great. 446 00:41:51,000 --> 00:41:57,000 But really look after your own mental health and your own physical health. 447 00:41:57,000 --> 00:42:05,000 Because if you don't have a working as a working instrument, then it's going to be very difficult for you to play the sonata, basically. 448 00:42:05,000 --> 00:42:15,000 And I'm hoping that there are a lot of resources out there available now to enable students to to really 449 00:42:15,000 --> 00:42:22,000 care about those things and to look after themselves and also to develop those habits early in life, 450 00:42:22,000 --> 00:42:24,000 especially when you're in the kind of pressured environment that a Masters or 451 00:42:24,000 --> 00:42:30,000 PhD is that will put you in extremely good stead for later in life when you 452 00:42:30,000 --> 00:42:34,000 have pressured roles or are dealing with different kinds of pressures like 453 00:42:34,000 --> 00:42:38,000 balancing work and family or what or financial concerns or whatever it might be. 454 00:42:38,000 --> 00:42:46,000 So developing those habits early on, when you're at what might be the most pressured moment of your career, ultimately will then help you. 455 00:42:46,000 --> 00:42:52,000 Everything else beyond that will seem like a piece of cake then. And that's it for this episode. 456 00:42:52,000 --> 00:43:07,349 Join us next time when we'll be talking to another researcher about their career beyond their research degree.
We're talking to Rahaf Harfoush about how to identify the signs of burnout (because it can sneak up on you) and we dig into some powerful and unorthodox ways to beat it. Rahaf is a Digital Anthropologist, Best Selling Author, and Executive Director of the Red Thread Institute for Digital Culture. Rahaf Harfoush 's latest book is called “Hustle and Float.” In it, she shows us that a lot of what we've been told about “work-life” balance is wrong… but more importantly… she shows us a better way to maximize our day… our creativity… and most importantly… our lives. She came by this truth the hard way but getting blindsided by extreme burnout a few years ago. So we talk about how it almost killed her career and how she fought back and how she learned to “float” too. It's a beautiful, raw, and powerful conversation with some great insights, good stories, and practical strategies you can start using today! Listen To The Podcast: Rahaf Harfoush RESOURCES: Book: Hustle & Float - reclaim your creativity and thrive in a world obsessed with work. Twitter: www.Twitter.com/rahafharfoush Website: www.Rahafharfoush.com Instagram: www.instagram.com/foushy MORE INFO ABOUT THE EPISODE: Wow… I don't know if there's been a better time to talk about ways to avoid burnout. Seriously… right now… as we're getting bombarded with all sorts of headlines and updates on a global scale. Many are working from home… for the first time. Because of all of this… some of those normal boundaries of a “normal” workday are out the window… and many are asked to do more with less. So yes… the potential for burnout is a very real thing. Maybe now more than ever. That's why I wanted to bring on an expert… both because she's studied the subject in depth… and because she's lived through a brutal first-hand experience which almost ended a career she loved… and it felt like it stripped away the very thing she'd always felt called to do. As the Executive Director of the Red Thread Institute of Digital Culture, Rahaf Harfoush leads a team of researchers in exploring the implications of the world's digital culture on our lives – from the way we date and parent, to the way we travel, work, and stay informed. She helps organizations like the Starwood Capital Group, Deutche Bank, Estée Lauder, L'Oreal, and ING Direct… to name a few. And her writing has been featured in Wired, The Globe and Mail, Fast Company, and many more. Rahaf and her husband Jesse along with their puppy named Pixel live in France… but we got to meet for coffee in LA… when we were both there recently for speaking gigs. I found her absolutely fascinating… and she's a true DREAM THINK DOer. so I wanted to bring her on the show! And since she's all about helping us navigate the bombardment of information… AND avoid burnout in these wild times… I thought it was THE perfect time to have her on. SHOW NOTES AND TIMES: 0:02 What to expect today! 1:35 Meet Rahaf 8:02 How Rahaf is passionate about the topic of burnout 12:07 How burnout affected Rahaf 16:45 How Rahaf overcame burn out 21:20 Tips for avoiding burnout 25:30 What does success look like to you? 27:20 Creating time to be still 32:04 You are more than what you do 36:18 How to connect with Rahaf 37:04 Wisdom of the week 38:20 Mitch's biggest takeaways WE WANT TO HEAR FROM YOU! Let me know what stood out to you from this episode? What's something you're going to try based on Rahaf's story and strategies? I'd love to hear from YOU! Leave a comment below and let's keep this important conversation going. Listen to Mitch Mattews Top Podcast here
On the internet, anyone has the potential to become a celebrity. Some actively seek internet fame by carefully cultivating their online identity; while others may become unwitting internet celebrities when a stray, unflattering image of themselves is used as the subject of a meme.In this episode, David is joined by digital anthropologist Dr Crystal Abidin, to discuss the rise and fall of both ‘deliberate' and ‘accidental' online celebrities.Why influencers are more than just product-pushing advertisers (2.17)How the law affects social media influencers differently to traditional advertisers (9.23)How a social media platform changing, or closing down entirely, affects both influencers and their fans (14.05)The rise of people being memed and accidentally becoming celebrities (17.24)Why we're shifting away from picture-perfect, professional social media influencers and valuing those who are more authentic (23.44)On the rise of virtual influencers and other trends (28.28)Learn moreABC News: Students are fighting climate change, one TikTok video at a timeBBC: How turning ‘likes' invisible is changing InstagramBBC: Life beyond the meme: what happens after you go viralDrinktank: Seven wonders of the social media influencerGot any questions, or suggestions for future topics?Email thefutureof@curtin.edu.au.Curtin University supports academic freedom of speech. The views expressed in The Future Of podcast may not reflect those of the university.Music: OKAY by 13ounce Creative Commons — Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported — CC BY-SA 3.0 Music promoted by Audio LibraryYou can read the full transcript for the episode here.
Rahaf Harfoush is a Digital Anthropologist, Strategist, and Best-Selling Author who focuses on the intersections between emerging technology, innovation, and the impact they have on our culture. She is also the Executive Director of Red Thread Institute of Digital Culture, which teaches innovation and emerging business models at Sciences Politique’s Master’s of Economics and Finance program in Paris. Rahaf offers insight as to why the hustle culture isn’t going away, the need for leaders to adapt to new learning methodologies, and how we can be productive with less time. Key Takeaways [3:00] What is a digital anthropologist? Rahaf studies how emerging technologies influence our culture. [5:25] Leaders have the daunting task of managing a wide variety of new information coming to them. They are struggling to keep up and understand what’s relevant and what’s not. [7:45] We are taught to consume information in a very linear fashion. You go to a class, you exit that class, you do it enough times and you get a degree. The information in this class is focused and specific. However, our ecosystem is now infinite and we haven’t adapted our learning styles to keep up with this. [9:25] Leaders need to have a bit of vulnerability in them to admit that they don’t know everything. It’s difficult because they’re seen as the go-to person for answers, but the rapid growth of our technology makes it impossible for anyone to truly know everything. Leaders need to freely admit that they don’t have the answers. [14:25] Rahaf’s book, Hustle & Float, came from the result of burnout. Rahaf understood the importance of rest, so why wasn’t she doing it? [17:35] Your brain needs unstructured time to be creative, but our work culture doesn’t allow room for this. [21:55] Leaders are overworking themselves because they are suffering from ‘work devotion.’ We sacrifice not seeing our families for our work because it showcases to the world how much of a hardworking individual we are. [24:15] It’s the American Dream dilemma: If you haven’t achieved your perceived level of success, it must be because you’re not working hard enough. [32:55] The answer to achieving better productivity is to create systems that are custom-tailored to the individual so that they have time to listen, reflect, and innovate. [39:30] What value does it have to tell the other person that you’ve read a message or not? There is so much added stress and pressure to respond ‘right now.’ [46:10] Joe Biden has expressed that if his staff miss out on important family events in favor of doing work for him, it would disappoint him greatly. Sometimes you need leaders to just spell it out as plainly and bluntly as that. Be a supportive leader. [49:45] How can you change the company culture for the better? Start having uncomfortable conversations with yourself about your own work identity, and then carry this dialogue over to your team’s work identity. Quotable Quotes “Technology is changing the way that we relate to each other; the way we communicate and maintain friendships.” “There’s an expectation of a leader to manage everything and sort of know everything.” “Do I have the courage to raise my hand and say, ‘We need to ask questions’?” “We have created this intensely complex relationship with work. We’ve linked work with our identities and self-worth.” We are asking people to tackle complex problems and yet we’re creating work cultures that make it hard for people to accomplish this. How to Thrive in a World Obsessed with Work Rahafharfoush.com Hustle & Float: Reclaim Your Creativity and Thrive in a World Obsessed with Work, by Rahaf Harfoush Twitter: @rahafharfoush Medium: @rahafharfoush Redthreadinc.co Tosdr.org ~~~~~ ~~~~~ Strategic Partners The Leadership Podcast is proud to announce a new initiative with thoughtLEADERS to provide very short podcasts called Chalk Talks. They’re bitesize hacks on common (but challenging) leadership issues. Interested in learning more? You can only access the Chalk Talks by subscribing to our mailing list at The Leadership Podcast. Beyond the Uniform offers over 300 free episodes to help military Veterans succeed in their civilian career. This includes overviews of potential career paths, deep dives on necessary skills to succeed, and reviews of other free services that support the military Veteran community. You can find more info at BeyondTheUniform.org.
ALGORITHMIC BIAS: AI Traps and Possible Escapes Caroline Sinders (Machine Learning Designer/User Researcher, Artist, Digital Anthropologist, USA/DE) and Sarah Grant (Media Artist and Educator, Radical Networks, USA/DE) in conversation with Ruth Catlow (Co-Founder and Co-Artistic Director, Furtherfield, UK). Algorithms are not neutral and unbiased, but instead often reflect, reinforce and automate the current and historical biases and inequalities of society, such as social, racial and gender prejudices. This panel frames this issue, and aims to discuss some possible escapes. Caroline Sinders discusses what an intersectional Feminist AI could look like, and how we could get it. Sarah Grant organises Radical Networks, a community event and arts festival for critical investigations in telecommunications. She will go into how the repeated biases and behaviours that we find in Internet could find themselves patterned and spread into AI systems. ACTIVATION: Collective Strategies to Expose Injustice The Art of Exposing Injustice - Part 4 The 18th conference of the Disruption Network Lab www.disruptionlab.org/activation Photo credit: Maria Silvano
Payal Arora, digital anthropologist and author of the book, ‘The Next Billion Users: Digital Life Beyond the West’ talks to Jayadevan on the sidelines of the Design Up conference in Bangalore on designing products for the Next Billion Users or NBUs. She is presently Professor & Chair in Tech, Values & Global Media Cultures at Erasmus University and has been researching digital behaviours in different economies for over ten years.Note: If you are listening to this episode on Apple Podcasts (click here), please do consider leaving us a good rating. It takes a few seconds, but helps make the show become more discoverable. You could also find us on other platforms like Spotify and Google Podcasts. If you want to listen to this on your phone’s browser window, just minimise the browser window and it should continue playing.TIMESTAMP:1:05 - The NBU as the new focus area for businesses and investors (especially Western)2:30 - The poor-rich gap and misunderstanding the wants of NBUs3:45 - Internet as the sole “leisure economy” for the NBU5:05 - Designing products for Next Billion Users9:50 - Catching up with socio-politics around NBU design vs allowing users to create for themselves12:30 - Surviving piracy while targeting NBUs13:25 - Implications for privacy of NBUs14:55 - Adding friction into product design to reduce social risks17:50 - Social Credit System in China, the biggest NBU product20:45 - Want for fabulousness by the NBU, digital products as an equaliser between the rich and poorLink to Payal’s website: http://payalarora.com Get full access to Turnaround at turnaround.substack.com/subscribe
I caught up with Brian Solis, the long-time "digital anthropologist" and speaker on influencer marketing, at this week's Open Influence Summit in Los Angeles (where I also moderated a panel featuring Open Influence CEO Eric Dahan, Casting Influence CEO Tanya Bershadsky and Ensemble Digital Studios Founder Larry Shapiro). The summit was focused on influencer marketing, and that dominated Solis' keynote conversation with Dahan. But he also talked with me about his new book, Life Scale: How to Live a More Creative, Productive, and Happy Life. It's the result of Solis' own journey over the past year or so, dealing with a loss of focus, productivity and ease, thanks to his frenetic relationship with digital technology that he's been studying since the mid-1990s. The conference was good, my panel better and my conversation with Solis most interesting of all. Give it a listen. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/davidlbloom/support
Rahaf Harfoush is a Strategist, Digital Anthropologist and Author who has a powerful message to share in this episode of the Podcast. In a world where we are taught that attention is a measure of success and that our success determines our worth, the true value of self has become distorted. Take a listen to our discussion, it might just be exactly what you're needing to hear.To find out more about Rahaf's latest book, Hustle and Float, head on over to HustleandFloat.comYou can connect with Rahaf on any social media platform as @RahafHarfoush See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Become a member at https://plus.acast.com/s/the-unmistakable-creative-podcast.
Rahaf Harfoush masterfully unpacks history, psychology, philosophy, and more to discover how we got obsessed with hustling / productivity...and how that obsession often hurts our creative output. You'll Learn: How productivity and creativity are incompatible The reverberating negative impact of the 2008 economic recession on how we work Best practices for optimizing your limited reserve of energy About Rahaf: Rahaf is a Digital Anthropologist, Best-Selling Author, and Speaker researching the impacts of emerging technologies on our society. She focuses on understanding the deep (and often hidden) behavioral shifts that are taking place within organizations and individuals as global digital infrastructures enable the unprecedented exchange of ideas, information, and opinions. She teaches Innovation and Disruptive Business Models at SciencePo’s Masters of Finance and Economics Program in Paris. She’s worked with organizations like Starwood Capital Group, Deutsche Bank, Estée Lauder, UNESCO, The OECD, A1, ING Direct, and more. View transcript, show notes, and links at http://AwesomeAtYourJob.com/ep418
Rahaf Harfoush is a Strategist, Digital Anthropologist and Author who has a powerful message to share in this episode of the Podcast. In a world where we are taught that attention is a measure of success and that our success determines our worth, the true value of self has become distorted. Take a listen to our discussion, it might just be exactly what you're needing to hear.To find out more about Rahaf's latest book, Hustle and Float, head on over to HustleandFloat.comYou can connect with Rahaf on any social media platform as @RahafHarfoush See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Welcome to episode #659 of Six Pixels of Separation. Here it is: Six Pixels of Separation - Episode #659 - Host: Mitch Joel. We have been debating and discussing the power of technology, culture and humans for a long time. Rahaf Harfoush is a Strategist, Digital Anthropologist, and Best-Selling Author who focuses on the intersections between emerging technology, innovation, and digital culture. She teaches Innovation & Emerging Business Models at Sciences Politique’s Masters of Economics and Finance program in Paris. Before that, Rahaf was the Associate Director of the Technology Pioneer Program at the World Economic Forum in Geneva. Her first book, Yes We Did - An Insider’s Look at How Social Media Built the Obama Brand chronicled her experiences as a member of Barack Obama’s digital media team during the 2008 Presidential elections and explored how social networking revolutionized political campaign strategy. Her second book was the best selling, The Decoded Company (that she co-authored). Her latest book is Hustle & Float - reclaim your creativity and thrive in a world obsessed with work. For too long, creativity and productivity have been considered essential but unconnected. Thousands of books have been written about each of these concepts separately. In fact, nearly every business book out there tackles achievement and performance through one of these two lenses. Hustle and Float is an exploration of the increasing tensions between productivity and creativity within our personal and professional lives. Enjoy the conversation... Running time: 53:25. Hello from beautiful Montreal. Subscribe over at iTunes. Please visit and leave comments on the blog - Six Pixels of Separation. Feel free to connect to me directly on Facebook here: Mitch Joel on Facebook. or you can connect on LinkedIn. ...or on Twitter. Here is my conversation with Rahaf Harfoush. Hustle & Float - reclaim your creativity and thrive in a world obsessed with work. The Decoded Company. Yes We Did - An Insider’s Look at How Social Media Built the Obama Brand. Follow Rahaf on Twitter. This week's music: David Usher 'St. Lawrence River'.
We're joined on this episode by Rahaf Harfoush, a Digital Anthropologist and Best-Selling Author who researches the impacts of emerging technologies on our society. Tune in to hear our discussion around our belief systems of work, the historical tension between creativity and productivity, and how Rahaf became a Beyoncé-ologist while researching the principles highlighted in her latest book, Hustle & Float.
Brian Solis is a Digital Analyst and Digital Anthropologist at the Altimeter Group and left college before graduating so that he could pursue his passion. He had always been interested in technological advancements and their influence over both businesses and individuals, so he decided to combine them into one job description. He studies the trajectory of disruptive technologies and evaluates how they will affect humans and their businesses. He has written numerous books on the subject-- most recently X: The Experience When Business Meets Design-- as he hopes to spread the word to the public about the future of tech. This short interview (the longer interview w/ Brian about his job and career is episode #29) with Brian will give you all the quick tips you need to get a jump start on a career in the disruptive tech field. Brian has many job titles as well as specialties in the tech industry, which we dive into in the main interview with him, so stick around if you’re interested. Right now, though, he just wants to help you get on a path to success in the ever evolving and intricate world of technology. Want to know how you can have the chance to work with AI and robots later in your career? Well, press Play now so you can get a start in the tech industry that may involve a lot of amazing changes very soon. The post 106: How to Break Into Disruptive Technology w/ Brian Solis, Altimeter Group [Espresso Shots] appeared first on Time4Coffee.
Every tenth episode of CultureLab, we look back at the previous 9 episodes and pick the ‘best bits’: the tips and stories that help us demystify organisational and team culture to make it more accessible and less overwhelming in its complexity. The Best Bits episode is also an opportunity to zoom out and see the big picture, extracting common themes from the interviews with our diverse group of guests. This time, yet again, we had a truly eclectic mix of guests: Rahaf Harfoush, Kate Cairns, Sue Black, Garry Ridge, Wendy Smith, Patty McCord, Kip Lambert, Dave Ulrich, and Ayse Birsel. Here’s what you will find in this compilation: How Dave Ulrich defines culture and why he believes that we should be building a culture from the outside-in The "secret sauce" of Netflix’s success What's more important than technology in the future of work according to Digital Anthropologist, Rahaf Harfoush What building a culture from the inside-out looks like Why Garry Ridge and Kip Lambert credit the culture of their companies for their financial success Professor Wendy Smith talking about why we tend to get trapped in false dichotomies and how to break free of them by adopting a paradox mindset What Patty McCord, the author of "Powerful", has to say about the so-called "culture of fear" in Netflix Ayse Birsel speaking on how you can use design thinking and process to design a culture that your customers and employees love Professor Sue Black sharing what she does when she sees a problem that she cares about Kate Cairns on why we have more power to drive change than we think
Brian Solis left college before graduating so that he could pursue his passion. He had always been interested in technological advancements and their influence over both businesses and individuals, so he decided to combine them into one job description. Brian is a Digital Analyst and Digital Anthropologist. He studies the trajectory of disruptive technologies and evaluates how they will affect humans and their businesses. He has written numerous books on the subject-- most recently X: The Experience When Business Meets Design-- as he hopes to spread the word to the public about the future of tech. The post 29: Why Tech & Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) Need Anthropologists w/ Brian Solis, Altimeter Group appeared first on Time4Coffee.
Sameer Vasta is a Digital Anthropologist with the Government of Ontario. Jay Menard is a Content Strategist with Digital Echidna. Both are friends. And both currently call London, Ontario home. I recently met up with both of them in London to talk about London and so much more!
We as a society have collectively decided that there's an appropriate way to show our commitment to our jobs. And that's through struggle and sacrifice. So you say “I'm so busy” or “I pulled an all-nighter.” You stay really late, you're the last one to leave, you're the first one to arrive. There's this kind of element of you're proving through sacrifice your devotion to your job which we as a culture have decided on. What technology has done is that it's made it very hard to disconnect. It's blurring the lines between being at work and being at home. So now we have this mechanism through which we can constantly showing work devotion through all hours of the day.Rahaf Harfoush is a Strategist, Digital Anthropologist, and Best-Selling Author who focuses on the intersections between emerging technology, innovation, and digital culture. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
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