Corporate Anthropology: How Organizations Operate as Modern Tribes

[00:00:00]Translator: Catherine Dean Reviewer: Maria Pericleous So to get us underway, would you please give a warm welcome to corporate anthropologist, Michael Henderson.

[00:00:31](Applause) (Cheers) Thank you.

[00:00:35](Applause) Thank you.

[00:00:41]So I just thought, to start off, to make it very clear, when I was sitting, the smoke that appeared behind me wasn't due to me.

[00:00:47](Laughter) I'd hate to go down on my CV, as the guy that did that on TED.

[00:00:51]I thought for a moment they were running out of time and decided to cut speaker number one, "Gas him now!"

[00:00:57]Still glad to be here.

[00:00:59]I thought I'd start off with a story my grandfather told me.

[00:01:02]This was many years ago, about a worker in a Russian factory not long after the revolution, in the new Soviet Union.

[00:01:08]At the end of every work day, the workers would leave the factory, go down to the gates of the factory, and be stopped by security guards they would be searched to ensure they weren't taking any tools or any equipment, or even any of the motherland resources out of the factory.

[00:01:22]This one particular worker, used to wheel a wheelbarrow with him, he'd carry his winter coat in there and perhaps a basket to carry his lunch in.

[00:01:30]The security guards everyday would stop him, search under the coat, make sure it didn't have any tools in it, and this went on, day after day, week after week, for years and years.

[00:01:39]And after four or five years, it was found that this particular worker had skipped the Soviet Union.

[00:01:44]Apparently with a very large sum of money.

[00:01:47]Turned out, he'd been stealing wheelbarrows.

[00:01:49](Laughter) I suspect this happens a lot with company culture.

[00:01:54]Company culture wheels in and out of the building on a daily basis, but no one actually pays attention to it.

[00:01:59]And traditionally, that didn't really need to be an issue in the last century.

[00:02:03]But I think, this century, it's something, we need to be paying attention to in organisations, because people, even what we're doing today, playing with ideas, have actually started to contribute far more to organisations in that way, than perhaps they have ever before.

[00:02:18]And as an anthropologist, I find that fascinating.

[00:02:21]So, the field of corporate anthropology, is literally the discovery and the search for what is the nature of people in organisations.

[00:02:30]I got into corporate anthropology almost by mistake.

[00:02:33]I graduated from Auckland University in anthropology, I highly recommend their anthropological programs.

[00:02:38]And on graduation, the professor gave me some very good advice, he said, "Two things I need to let you know, Michael.

[00:02:43]Number one, congratulations, you will never be bored for the rest of your life.

[00:02:47]You're an anthropologist, we don't suffer boredom."

[00:02:50]"Second thing", he says, "you're unemployable.

[00:02:52]Good luck with that."

[00:02:54](Laughter) Turned out, he was right on both counts.

[00:02:57]Difficult to get a job when you say, "Hi, I'm an anthropologist, where do I start?"

[00:03:01]So I took off to London, as we Kiwis do and went on an OE, and decided that I'd better go and get a "real job," I think that's what my mother called it, joined an advertising group in London, and was selling advertising, in that particular market in the 80s.

[00:03:16]I'd been with the company for about a month, and suddenly there was called a "crisis meeting."

[00:03:21]I didn't know what it meant, maybe the building was burning down.

[00:03:24]Turned out it was about financial figures we weren't doing as well as we could be.

[00:03:28]This gentlemen came on stage, a distinguished looking chap, and there was hundreds of us brought together to sit at his feet.

[00:03:34]And he was introduced as the CEO.

[00:03:37]I didn't know much about business, "CEO, what's that?"

[00:03:39]So I leant across to the person next to me and said, "What's a CEO?"

[00:03:43]They said, "Well duh, it's the Chief Executive Officer."

[00:03:46]And I just went, "Woah!" because that first word, as an anthropologist, captured me of course.

[00:03:51](Laughter) So, I went, "Coo.l" I pulled out my little black notebook and got my pen ready.

[00:03:56]Two things you should know, anybody carrying a black notebook, is one of two things, an anthropologist or a policeman.

[00:04:02](Laughter) They both ask the same question, "So, what is it you're doing here?"

[00:04:07]Anthropologists do it with a matter of inquiry.

[00:04:09]The police are a little more threatening.

[00:04:12]I listen to this guy talk about how badly the organisation was performing, how results hadn't been how they should have been, that we needed to lift our endeavors and our efforts, that times were tough.

[00:04:22]That we needed to pull together more and make this thing happen.

[00:04:25]Now, the interesting thing about his talk was, he didn't actually use the words, but he made it very clear, it was our fault.

[00:04:32](Laughter) I thought, "This is interesting."

[00:04:35]I'd been there for a month, and it suddenly clicked, this guy didn't realise, that he was head of a cult.

[00:04:41]Not a culture.

[00:04:43]Most businesses don't know the distinction between those two, how that happens and what it delivers.

[00:04:49]I wrote that down and thought "Wow, this is really interesting.

[00:04:52]He's got no idea."

[00:04:53]The difference being that in a cult, a leader sees greatness in themselves.

[00:05:00]In a culture, the leader sees greatness in... the people, of course.

[00:05:06]It was interesting even from his comments I realised he doesn't realise he's set up a cult.

[00:05:11]So, a lot of the performance issues he was blaming everyone else for, in fact, I believe, possibly, was a reflection of his leadership style.

[00:05:19]So as a result of that, I took his money, I did some selling, didn't do too well, I was too busy with my black notebook and kept getting warnings, "The sales not right."

[00:05:27]I headed to South America and Africa for a couple of years and went to study the cultures and tribes, that I was interested in and had a passion for, to learn what they were doing around culture and leadership.

[00:05:37]And one of the central revelations of anthropology is, it's a little bizarre.

[00:05:43]You become an anthropologist because you want to study other tribes and cultures, and a big number of you putting your hands up saying you'd been there, done that.

[00:05:50]So, nice to be talking to an audience full of fellow anthropologists.

[00:05:54]You go there to study other people and perhaps even reveal who they truly are.

[00:05:58]In reality what happens is, as you're studying them and spending time with them, you reveal not who they are, but of course, who you are.

[00:06:06]You come face to face with your own prejudices.

[00:06:09]It can be sexist, it can be political, it can be racist.

[00:06:12]That's not necessarily a pleasant thing to experience.

[00:06:15]The more I looked at this, I suddenly realised that in fact, the lessons that are to be learnt from traditional tribes and cultures, did not need to be shared with these, they were already okay.

[00:06:27]It occured to me that the people that needed these lessons on how to build cultures and effective leadership, were in fact the tribe I'd just left in London.

[00:06:35]That toxic cult environment.

[00:06:37]It occurred to me in fact that organisations, are the modern tribes.

[00:06:43]I experienced that many of us spend far more hours in our work place, or our education places, here we are at the school, than potentially we do even in our national culture or in our ethnic culture.

[00:06:53]And that perhaps, that's something we should be paying attention to.

[00:06:56]Perhaps that's giving us some indication as to what's going on in society and the way it has been going on.

[00:07:01]I looked at the history of organisations.

[00:07:03]Organisations have been running the world for 400 years now.

[00:07:06]My question is, "How's it going?"

[00:07:09]Rhetorical question.

[00:07:12]So, I gathered all this, came back, got back to London, thought, "Hmm," got another job and started to sit within organisations and view them as a tribe.

[00:07:19]So as I said, started to see the CEO, as the chief, executive officer.

[00:07:24]Let me explain what that means C, E, and O.

[00:07:27]The chief is head of culture, the executive is head of structure, who's at what position, with how much power, how much authority.

[00:07:33]And the officer, clearly military, the delivery of strategy, if you like.

[00:07:37]I saw that the chief actually had three mandates of power, this is not a title or a position within the business, it's the three things that the individuals should be paying attention to.

[00:07:46]But my experience showed me that they tended to favour two of those and delegate the other one to a group called HR.

[00:07:53]Have you heard of this group, HR?

[00:07:55](Audience) Yes.

[00:07:56]Human Resources.

[00:07:57]When you use the phrase "human resources" with a traditional tribe, you can see them pull back a little bit.

[00:08:03]They don't like that phrase.

[00:08:05]It brings up bad memories for them, they have another word associated with that; it's called slavery.

[00:08:11]What's intriguing is one of the lessons I believe organisations can learn from traditional cultures is tribes don't do HR they do RH.

[00:08:18]In other words they resource humans for an occupation, they don't have human resources.

[00:08:23]Think about that, it sounds like a clever play on words, doesn't it?

[00:08:26]Just nod.

[00:08:28]It's actually more than that.

[00:08:30]It's a whole mentality.

[00:08:32]Yes. So resourcing humans, where would you rather work?

[00:08:34]Somewhere that resources humans or somewhere that treats people as human resources?

[00:08:39]I just wonder if there's some opportunities for us to learn here.

[00:08:42]I'm often questioned, people go "Yes, yes clever stuff, but is this the latest business trend?

[00:08:47]Is this what companies are doing at the moment, looking at culture?"

[00:08:50]My response to that is clearly no.

[00:08:52]In fact I'd say, business is just the latest cultural trend.

[00:08:56]Culture's been around, as long as humans have been processing cognitive thought, and communing together on this planet.

[00:09:02]Business, in the forum that we, currently, most of us, operate in, is barely 400 years old.

[00:09:07]So do you think, maybe there's some lessons in traditional cultural experience, that we could draw on and engage from, within our organisations?

[00:09:16]I started to play with that, share that with organisations, there's a couple of things, some of those lessons we can take from traditional tribes and apply within organisations, very simple, they're obvious when you look at them.

[00:09:27]I guess that's one of the benefits of being an anthropologist.

[00:09:30]Most people suffer from a thing called "déjà vu," have you heard that expression?

[00:09:33]You feel like you've been here before, had this conversation, often accompanied with goosebumps, hairs standing up, going, "Oh it's a bit freaky," been here before, had this conversation.

[00:09:42]Anthropologists don't suffer from that, we suffer from "vuja' de'" that's actually the reverse, we've been there 100 times, but this is like seeing it for the first time.

[00:09:52]Every time I go into an organisation I've been there before, but I always treat it like a new experience, a new beginning, a fresh mind.

[00:09:58]Just as we've been asked to clear our minds for this session.

[00:10:01]What are the lessons that organisations could learn from tribes if they clear their minds and see themselves for the first time?

[00:10:08]The big one, is a thing called engagement.

[00:10:11]Tribes are famous for doing two things fundamentally: enabling their people, preparing the next generation to be able to hunt, fish, make babies, build huts etc. And also engagement, which is making them proud to be who they are.

[00:10:24]Finding their place to stand, the Tūrangawaewae of the people, actually defining who you are through historical text and stories and symbolism.

[00:10:32]Here's the intriguing thing: Global surveys around the world, show that in engagement surveys on average, in most modern organisations, 20% of the people are engaged, 80% are either sitting on the fence or are clearly disengaged.

[00:10:46]What we mean by engaged, is three things: they're willing to stay with your organisation; to speak positively about the organisation which given the social network forums that we have available to us nowadays, crucial comment, you bad mouth your company to millions of people on the Internet, it effects things like your reputation and your brand etc; the other thing was to strive for your organisation.

[00:11:06]Imagine if an organisation has low levels of engagement, people aren't willing to stay, to speak positively about it, or strive on behalf of it, what do you think that does to productivity, customer service and job fulfilment?

[00:11:19]And yet all round the world, we have 80% of the workers, and I'm talking about millions of people, are not fully engaged in the work they do.

[00:11:28]Those numbers may sound familiar if you're in business, have you heard of 20-80, the Pareto theory?

[00:11:33]The theory being that 20% of your people deliver 80% of your results on average.

[00:11:37]I'm not saying there's a correlation between those figures but isn't that interesting?

[00:11:41]20% are engaged and they happen to be generating 80% of the results.

[00:11:44]Here's the interesting thing: I've travelled extensively, I think I won that prize for countries visited, over 70 looking at cultures and tribes, so if a chocolate fish is up for grabs put my name down for it.

[00:11:54]I found that no tribe that I've ever come across that runs engagement surveys.

[00:11:59]Why would they?

[00:12:02]They're in contact with the people, know what's going on, they don't need a survey for feedback.

[00:12:06]It's in dialogue, in everyday expression, brought to the table at every meeting.

[00:12:11]They're paying attention to, truly listening to each other, as tribe members.

[00:12:15]We don't do that in organisations.

[00:12:17]I often suggest that leadership in modern organisations has become an email sort.

[00:12:22]In tribes, it's a contact sport.

[00:12:24]Again it sounds like a clever play on words but some real differences show up when you do that, and lessons potentially to be learnt from that.

[00:12:32]The other thing about engagement in traditional tribes is it's not 20% of the people delivering 80% of the results, it's 80% of the people delivering 100% of the results.

[00:12:41]The 20% that aren't involved in delivering those results are either too young and still learning, being brought up as tribe members, learning the traditions, the skill sets required to make them contributing tribe members, or they're too old, so their responsibility then is more a mentor role, passing on the traditions and the stories of the old times to the next generation.

[00:13:02]Which in our western societies seems to have drifted away, doesn't it?

[00:13:05]We tend to, when we they get too old, we stick them in a retirment home and go and visit them every second month if we've got the time, or is that just what happens in my family?

[00:13:14](Laughter) It's interesting, yes? They embrace them.

[00:13:16]So even this whole Gen Y thing in the workplace, Gen Ys have to have their managers taught how to manage a Gen Y generation.

[00:13:23]What is intriguing is, how come no one's teaching the Gen Ys how to respect the older generations?

[00:13:29]Respect the wisdom that has come before.

[00:13:32]As you would do in a tribe.

[00:13:33]Bizarre, don't you think?

[00:13:35]What else can we learn?

[00:13:36]I guess one of the things I'm big on, is something around dignity in the workplace.

[00:13:43]You see, the thing I find in traditional tribes, it doesn't matter who you are, what your role is, or how old you are, it doesn't even, often, not always, matter what gender you are, you are provided with instant dignity, instant respect is afforded to you.

[00:13:59]And in southern Africa, they have a word called "Ubuntu."

[00:14:02]"Ubuntu" meaning a person is a person because of the people.

[00:14:08]So a manager is only a manager because they have people to manage.

[00:14:12]Sales teams are only sales teams because they have people to sell to, they have accountants that process the numbers, a manufacturing department that manufactures products, researches and develops those products, imports those products in the first place.

[00:14:24]It makes sense, doesn't it?

[00:14:26]That who we are and what we do is absolutely because the world we live in dependant on our ability to function well with others, to serve with others.

[00:14:34]So this ubuntu is acceptable in tribes.

[00:14:38]And yet in businesses it's often missing.

[00:14:40]I know it would never apply to the schools or businesses that you people belong to, but have you heard of organisations, where they have silo mentality, one department at war with the other?

[00:14:49]Have you heard about that?

[00:14:51]It's just bizarre, because that never occurs in a tribe.

[00:14:55]And it's interesting, the way leadership responds to this, one of the key areas, that there's an opportunity as well as the leadership role in organisations and tribes are two fundamentaly different things.

[00:15:05]Do this... A little exercise for you, for just a moment.

[00:15:08]Take a moment, in your mind, picture the structure of a typical organisation.

[00:15:13]It could be the school we're at today, a modern business, a government department, if you were going to draw a symbol to represent the structure of that organisation, what would it look like?

[00:15:22]You got that?

[00:15:24]Now, picture within that where would you typically position leadership?

[00:15:29]Hold that for a moment, you've got a structure and a position.

[00:15:32]Now, even if you've never been to a traditional tribe, think about the structure of a traditional tribe, what shape would you choose for that?

[00:15:39]Picture that in your mind.

[00:15:41]Then think about where would you position leadership within a traditional culture.

[00:15:46]Here's a question for you: How many, for the first one went for something like a triangle, hierarchical, with leadership at the top?

[00:15:52]Show of hands.

[00:15:53]Yes, so we've all been indoctrinated through that, yes?

[00:15:56]And traditional tribes, how many of you did a more flat maybe even circular shape as the symbol that came up, and where was leadership?

[00:16:02]In the middle, yes, centered.

[00:16:05]And so this is a huge insight into why tribes are able to sustain culture, our neighbours in Australia, we know from the artefacts alone, traditional culture there is a minimum of 30,000 years old.

[00:16:17]So, here we are, modern society, talking about sustainability, we have experts across the channel we could be learning from.

[00:16:24]Likewise in this country.

[00:16:25]Some of the wisdom contained on the Marae here, is what we should be paying attention to.

[00:16:30]The ability to be in amongst the people as an equal, listen and pay attention to one another, is incredibly powerful and offers an opportunity to do, not only learning and sharing, which of course is crucial, it's why we're all here today at TED.

[00:16:43]More importantly, it offers us the opportunity to share that dignity, to pass that respect back to different people.

[00:16:51]Even the language, I often refer to language within organisations, and with any culture, language is the bloodline of culture.

[00:16:58]If you want to gauge how well a company or a traditional culture is going, you listen to the language.

[00:17:03]It gives you clues as to what's going on.

[00:17:05]I was doing some work where an organisation asked me to do exactly that.

[00:17:08]I spent a few weeks floating around jobs doing whatever it took to listen to the language.

[00:17:13]Interestingly, the most commonly spoken word in that organisation began with the letter "F."

[00:17:19]It wasn't football.

[00:17:20](Laughter) Yet interestingly enough, when you went into the reception area they had the values on the wall there, of integrity, teamwork, sharing and trust.

[00:17:30]Which do you think is believable and real?

[00:17:32]The language people are speaking, or the proclaimed values?

[00:17:36]The difference between tribe and organisation is a tribe lives the values lived on a daily basis, organisations typically have executives that go off on a thing called a retreat.

[00:17:45]As an anthropologist it's fascinating that businesses go on a retreat and not an advance, but that's what they choose to do and call it.

[00:17:52]They create a set of values, come back and they have the audacity to stand up in front of their tribe and announce the tribe's values to their own people.

[00:18:01]"We, your esteemed leaders, have come up with a set of values.

[00:18:04]They are integrity and team work and respect.

[00:18:08]And we will honour these values and we will fight for them.

[00:18:11]In the workplaces and in the cafeteria and in the carpark.

[00:18:14]We will never surrender our commitment to these values."

[00:18:18]It used to work well in the last century, but nowadays that's a bit like a Tui (beer) ad.

[00:18:22](Laughter) The audience sits there, they don't hear values, what they hear is violations.

[00:18:29]They hear you go, "Integrity": "Really? Weren't you having an affair with the secretary?"

[00:18:33](Laughter) So, culture's started to position itself in such a way within businesses, that I even inform a lot of my clients now, that it's possibly their strongest form of competition.

[00:18:44]They're threatened by their own competition more than the physical competition in the market place.

[00:18:49]I started to pay attention to this once Enron Arthur Andersen and Co started to fall apart at the seams.

[00:18:55]Here's the interesting thing: Enron's competition didn't put them out of business.

[00:18:59]Enron's culture did.

[00:19:01]And Enron's leadership of that culture more specifically.

[00:19:05]I've seen this time and time again.

[00:19:07]We are failing at culture in organisations.

[00:19:10]And yet we have the innate ability for that just not to happen.

[00:19:14]It's a natural way of being human.

[00:19:16]Birds flock, fish school, humans tribe.

[00:19:20]We know how to do this, it's very simple.

[00:19:23]I guess to wrap this up, one of the key things I'm interested in paying attention to is two dynamic forces I see play out in many organisations.

[00:19:30]This can be government departments, churches, schools, or organisations.

[00:19:35]And that is the dynamic forces of relationship versus result.

[00:19:42]If you don't pay attention to those two in your organisation, there's some bizarre stuff that starts to happen.

[00:19:47]We talk a lot with our organisations to pay attention to those two.

[00:19:51]To get a result, what happens to the relationships?

[00:19:53]Is there a relationship between relationship and results?

[00:19:56]Do people need to get on to deliver the results?

[00:19:58]If there is, you better pay attention, you better take culture seriously.

[00:20:02]You better start to get tribal.

[00:20:04]I guess the best story I can share with you on this that really massaged the point home for me was actually our own children, my wife and I, this was about a year or so ago, we heard our daughter and son fighting over the TV remote in the room next door which normally means trouble, we were debating who was going to go and play United Nations and rescue them.

[00:20:23]It was getting pretty intense.

[00:20:25]And then suddenly, it went silent.

[00:20:28]And that terrified us, because when it goes silent, we realised someone was dead.

[00:20:32](Laughter) So we both stood up in panic, and ran into the room and came accross a bizarre situation.

[00:20:38]Daughter and son, standing there just looking at each other.

[00:20:42]My daughter looked a bit upset.

[00:20:43]Oh, here we go, what's happened now?

[00:20:45]And I say "Guys, what happened?"

[00:20:47]My son turned round and says, "Dad, I waved the white flag".

[00:20:50]I said "You what?"

[00:20:52]"I waved the white flag."

[00:20:53]He'd overheard us talking about some work that we'd done about results versus relationships.

[00:20:57]Waving the white flag, what that means is - and this is how he put it - "I was just thinking Dad, I'm bigger and older than her, I could easily get that remote and demand it off her.

[00:21:07]But I realised this is my sister, I have to grow up with this girl for the rest of my life, the relationship is more important than the result right now."

[00:21:16]Wave the white flag.

[00:21:18]Interestingly he also said, "Besides, I need to borrow pocket money off her on Saturday."

[00:21:22](Laughter) So in reality, there's a result in there as well.

[00:21:26]So, parting words for you, what I'd like to leave you with, is the opportunity to explore in your own lives and tribe be that your own family, the organisations you work for and belong to.

[00:21:35]Have a look and measure yourself in terms of how you relate to others and the results you strive for.

[00:21:40]Are you jeopardizing relationships that maybe deserve more dignity than that?

[00:21:45]And can you find the courage to consider maybe waving your white flag, surrendering your position, your opportunity to win, for that relationship?

[00:21:53]I believe that's a great idea, worth doing.

[00:21:56]Thank you very much.

[00:21:57](Applause) Fantastic.