"Survival Tactics in the Boardroom: Lessons from Netflix's 'Outlast' for Business Anthropology"

Last night, I began watching the first season of the show Outlast with my family airing on Netflix. ?(We are a little late to the party. The first season aired in 2023).?

The show is Alone meet Survivor where teams of four compete against each other for $1M. Like in Alone, experienced survivalists are dropped off in a secluded location where they must build shelter and procure food, themselves. Like in Survivor, contestants must form alliances and work together with others, to win. There is a new twist: the big prize goes to the last team, rather than last person, standing.

After discussing the show with my family, it struck me how much some of the key social challenges contestants face mirror the role of anthropologists in the workplace and provide valuable lessons for both our business colleagues and for ourselves.

Social Dynamics in the Extreme

Despite the dramatic setting of Outlast in "wild extreme Alaska"—a location staged as the edge of the world—contestants brought their existing social frameworks with them. Here, both the natural setting and the US social context shaped team dynamics.

This was clear from the start, when contestants had to quickly divide into teams of four, going on little more than appearances and small talk. On one team – Camp Charlie – Nick Radner, a burly wrestling coach with a strong aversion to “quitting” and “complaining”— moved into a leadership spot early. In this wild, inhospitable, and cold landscape which embodied the romanticized American frontier, “the coach” — a masculine figure seen as a decisive and knowledgeable leader focused on the long game – easily claimed authority. ?

By Episode 3, social norms began to clash with the forms of expertise the landscape required. In this episode, producers placed crab pots on a small island in the adjacent bay, challenging the teams to build a raft and decide who would retrieve them. On Camp Charlie, Angie Kenai argued to her all-male team that she was the lightest and smallest, which would be an advantage on the raft. Reluctant until the last-minute, Radner relented in the end and agreed to let Kenai be the one to go. This turned out to be the right call. Kenai reached the island first and successfully retrieved three out of the five crab pots that the producers had placed for the competing teams. And, as it turned out, it was her experience fishing and knowledge of the tides that got her there, not just her size.

After filling up on delicious crab, Radner apologized to Kenai. But the earlier scene was revealing. Despite entering the show without pre-defined roles, the prevailing social hierarchy of American culture swiftly sorted contestants into specific positions. That is why it was Kenai who had to fight the hardest to prove she was up to the task.

Outlast-ing Corporate Biases

In the business world, we are not battling the natural elements, but we are working with existing social norms that regulate the weight different knowledge forms carry in the office.

Lessons for the business anthropologist:

• In the office, business anthropologists often occupy the feminized position of Anjie Kenai. And we share her challenges. We must often fight against the tide of social expectations harder than our business, technology, or quant-focused colleagues, to reach our goals.
• We can also learn from her experience on Camp Charlie. Had Kenai led with her fishing experience rather than her size alone, would she be able to make a better case for herself? Similarly, many of us can become better at communicating our expertise in the “native” terms of the corporate world. The good news is that this work taps into the skills we already have.?
• Business anthropologists should ask: As experienced cultural translators, how can we continue to better translate our value into the language of business to make a better case for our own expertise?

Lessons for the office: ?

• Our business, technology, or quant-focused colleagues often occupy the masculinized position of Nick Radner. And they tend to enjoy similar advantages. The business world defaults to privileging numbers-driven thinking.
• Organizations can learn from Radner’s experience too. Overreliance on decontextualized quantitative metrics can be a blind spot in recognizing the value of diverse perspectives and qualitative insights.
• Business leaders should ask: What can we do to identify and interrogate the social biases that may be inhibiting us from recognizing and better deploying the value of context-aware qualitative anthropological expertise?

?