[Book] The Age of Surge
The Age of Surge: A Human Centered Framework for Scaling Company Wide Agility and Navigating the Tsunami of Digital By Brad Murphy and Carol Mase Reinvent Press January 2018, 272 pages > Q&A on the book The global forces of…
Insights curated by Experientia, the international UX consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the international UX consultancy
Category Business
[Book] The Human Workplace: People-Centred Organizational Development
The Human Workplace: People-Centred Organizational Development By Andy Swann Kogan Page Publishing October 2017, 232 pages Companies spend time and effort developing their employees – their most important asset – but they often forget to consider the company structure, culture,…
Six hacks for service designers working in an agile environment
Ideally service designers deliver our best value when we stay outside the “Scrum†(literally and figuratively), fulfilling our strategic role and avoiding the hectic pace and too-narrow focus of two-week sprints. Our work, writes Jesse Grimes in the most recent…
“Thick data” sees the market future when big data can’t
“Customers are really the most unpredictable, the most unknown, and the most difficult-to-quantify thing for any business,” said Tricia Wang, ethnographer and co-founder of Sudden Compass, in an interview during the IBM Data Science for All event in NYC. She…
Service design at BBVA bank
BBVA (an international financial institution with a presence in 35 countries, providing services to 70 million customers) was one of the sponsors of the Service Design Global Conference in Madrid last week. Derek White, BBVA’s Global Head of Customer and…
Design Thinking needs to think bigger
We live in a massively complex, intricately interconnected global system. And it’s increasingly impossible to be designers (or human beings) without taking into account how we affect and are, in turn, affected by all the moving pieces of this organic…
Should we delight the customer?
Growing the service design industry requires more than simply educating the next generation of service designers. Business students can also benefit from learning how service design can be used to innovate and address complex market and organisational challenges. That’s why…
“Where the social sciences and business come together” – Alexandra Mack on ethnography
In this episode of the Change Management Review Podcast, Theresa Moulton interviews Alexandra Mack. Alexandra is a senior fellow at Pitney Bowes, the e-commerce services provider, and a Board Member of Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Community (EPIC). Theresa and Alexandra…
Putting human thought behind chatbots
Business anthropologist Martha Bird’s specialty is designing technologies that work for people, creating conversational user interfaces and chatbots that can serve different professional audiences across different geographies and different cultures. An interview excerpt: Why are people’s relationships with technology so…
Global study: Leading companies bet on customer experience
A new report from Harvard Business Review Analytic Services reveals that customer experience is vital for business success, and establishes social media as the foundation for customer experience. The survey, which includes 600+ leaders from the world’s biggest brands, also…
An anthropologist in the boardroom
“It is often tempting to think that the 21st-century world is so closely integrated and digitised that the issue of culture is becoming irrelevant,” writes Gillian Tett in the Financial Times. “But behind the scenes, a growing number of companies…
Interview with Prof. Bill Beeman on the ways ethnography can improve business
A fertile relationship is growing between anthropology and business. Marketers are finding that anthropologists gather very useful knowledge by studying consumers in their natural habitat using the ethnographic techniques of observation and interviewing. A leader in this field is Bill…
Business as Unusual: Latest issue of Touchpoint, the service design journal
“Business as Unusual†was the theme of the ninth annual Service Design Global Conference held in Amsterdam and in its play on words, it recognises that service design is more and more becoming an established way of ‘doing business’, whether…
Organizational culture as lazy sensemaking
Laura A. McNamara describes what ethnographers can do about the cultural equivalent of the fundamental attribution error, also known as correspondence bias. “It’s a common category error (at least among the Western psych undergrads who volunteer for experimental lab credits)…
Innovative PhD dissertations at Harvard use ethnographic methods to understand organizational culture
Three innovative PhD dissertations have been published at the Harvard Business School’s Doctoral Program on Organizational Behavior that use ethnography and qualitative research to understand and map organizational culture: Curtis K. Chan Chan’s research (The Double-Edged Sword of Organizational Culture:…
Why UX research is business research
Libby Maurer, UX leader at Widen Enterprise (a content technology company specializing in digital asset management software and content production services), makes a strong case for the value of UX research in a hardcore business environment. She writes that “the…
Experience design and Big Data at BBVA bank
Over the last 6 months, Fabien Girardin has been working in a rather unique position at BBVA Data & Analytics, a center of excellence in financial data analysis. My job is to make the design of user experiences reach a…
[Book] Collaborative Ethnography in Business Environments
Collaborative Ethnography in Business Environments Edited by Maryann McCabe Routledge 2017, 138 pages In a global and rapidly changing commercial environment, businesses increasingly use collaborative ethnographic research to understand what motivates their employees and what their customers value. In this…
[Book] Sensemaking
Sensemaking: The Power of the Humanities in the Age of the Algorithm by Christian Madsbjerg Hachette Books March 2017, 256 pages Inspired by his work with companies like Ford and Coca-Cola, Madsbjerg’s Sensemaking is a provocative stand against the “tyranny”…
Billions spent on cyber security tech while human error ignored
Billions spent on cyber security tech while human error ignored, writes Misha Glenny in the Financial Times. Armies of zombie computers threaten us all. Despite the headlines, the cyber security industry has prioritised the development of expensive tech over teaching…