From the course: Cultivating Presence and Impact in a Live and Virtual World

Become a cultural anthropologist at work

From the course: Cultivating Presence and Impact in a Live and Virtual World

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Become a cultural anthropologist at work

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- This is where I encourage you to become a cultural anthropologist, so be somebody who studies the culture of your organization. You can start with two specific things. One is studying how decisions are made, and two, studying how people behave when making decisions. So on one hand, you can think about, okay, where are or how are decisions made in my department? What's the supply chain process? What typically happens? What times of year are there big decisions made, like budgets, like big projects, or the allocation of team members, promotions? Think about all those decisions and really sit with it. Take time, write it down, map it out. Think about all those big decision pipelines. The second side of it is how people make decisions. Think about small decisions, like the last time you were in a meeting and there was a decision to move forward or not move forward to reject an idea or to propose a new idea and just sit and think a little bit about those dynamics. Was tenure at play? Was it tone of voice? Was it the relationships in the room? Are there things that happen outside of the room that actually dictate and influence those decisions? And so, just studying these two things, how decisions are made and how people make decisions will unveil all sorts of important information to you. It helps you just really be more tactical and understanding. Okay, you may discover things that you didn't realize before when you take the time to sit and think about how that decision was actually made. There may be an individual that was in the room that wasn't the loudest, wasn't the one that took up the most airtime, but actually influenced that decision on its outset. Do you have a good relationship with that person? How can you sit down with them? Get to know them, allow them to get to know you. So really mapping out and starting to study how decisions are made he type of people will give you so much more information, and again, you don't have to change who you are, but it allows you to think intentionally about the people that you want to get to know and the parts of the process that you aren't aware of, and that's where even you can talk to the people that you trust that have been with the organization longer or maybe are in a completely different department that have a different bird's eye view of how the process goes and how those decisions actually work themselves out. So the opportunity here is to really study the politics.

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