Taking the Worm’s Eye View

Gillian Tett is a social anthropologist whose book Anthro-Vision is fascinating exploration of the behaviour of organisations and individuals. Tett uses stories, observation and ethnography to reveal the rituals and behaviours that are the ‘glue’ to a culture. She famously used these methods to predict the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. There is no Big Data or measurement of culture here, it involves the study of detail, observing and talking to people to take the worm’s eye, not the bird’s eye view. If I had read this book 25 years ago, imagine the time saved spent trying to measure safety culture or ‘mature’ it.

Anthro-Vision argues that applying anthropological ideas to our everyday lives will help us better understand each other and the world around us. It's a interesting mix bringing together psychology with sociology.

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Three Principles of Anthropology

The book is based on, and organised around, three principles of anthropology that help us understand ourselves, our tribes, companies and communities, and help to reduce our wilful blindness. I’m sure these three principles could equally apply to other forms of cultural analysis such as organisational / safety culture also.

1?? Make the “strange” familiar

This entails countering the inherent rejection of the things that seem unfamiliar to us. It requires us cultivate a mindset of empathy for strangers and value diversity. There is some interesting discussion on risk perceptions, such as why we overemphase risks that arrive from outside the group, and underestimate those that are inside it.

2?? Make the familiar strange

Listening to someone else’s view, however strange, does not just gain empathy, it makes it easier to see ourselves. It emphasises the importance of ‘empathetic observation,’ seeking to understand the perspective of another before measuring it against your own. We cannot fully understand the world around us if we only see it through our eyes. It invovles identifying our biases and making the conscious effort to look at the world without them. Studying the world through childish curiosity reveals novel observations of how we live, work and play.

3?? Listen to social silence

This enables us to see the blind spots in others and ourselves that our biases, assumptions and worldviews blind us to. These are the things that aren’t talked, challenged or debated about in a society or organisation. The things that are there but are regarded as taboo, or too embarrassing or irrelevant to talk about. These are the subjects that are not up for discussion, shut down, dismissed and are assumed as a given. This is a nice link back to Margaret Heffernan’s notion of Wilful Blindness. As the famous Paul Broca quote states: “The least questioned assumptions are often the most questionable.”

Here’s a really nice article on listening to social silence: https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/fandd/issues/2021/12/Listening-social-silence-Gillian-Tett

Some Interesting Concepts

Anthro-Vision introduces a number of interesting concepts, several of which were new to new. Here's some notes on those concepts.

Liminality

The concept of Liminality was new to new. These ‘liminal moments’ are the rituals and symbols that cultures employ to mark transition periods within calendars, the phases of life or social events. Liminal moments are windows into cultures. Think we apply liminality to reveal the hidden elements of meaning within organisation / safety cultures.

Habitus

Another concept that was new to me. Habitus argues that the way humans organise space reflects the mental and cultural “maps” we inherit from our surroundings. But as we occupy the space, the habits become so natural and inevitable that we stop noticing them. And hence we are creatures of our social and physical patterns, and the two elements reinforce each other. Put simply, ‘habit’ and ‘habitat’ become interchangeable.

WEIRD Cultures

Whilst I had heard Joseph Henrich’s W.E.I.R.D. concept before, it was not until reading Gillian Tett’s book that I fully understood what the theory could mean for different the perspectives within global teams and organisations. WEIRD stands for ??estern, ??ducated, ??ndustrialized, ??ich and ??emocratic,

W.E.I.R.D. is used to explain the difference between western and other cultures to explain different mindsets. For example, analytical thinking based on logic and reductionism versus more contextual and holistic modes of thinking that are prevalent in other cultures. W.E.I.R.D. cultures are also more individualistic versus non-western cultures that defined themselves according to their family and community relationships. A third distinction was morality which W.E.I.R.D. cultures view as fixed and others as more contextual. These differences often lead us to make judgements on other cultures.

Learn more about Joseph Henrich’s W.E.I.R.D model here: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/09/joseph-henrich-explores-weird-societies/

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Anthro-Vision is an interesting and thought-provoking book that is relevant to anyone seeking to study or dare I suggest 'mature' a culture (I think we should leave notions of 'maturing' to cheese and adolescence myself...).

Links and further reading:

?? Book overview: https://www.ft.com/content/65d66cf7-f793-4531-9b82-1b54b70bbd21

?? More on social silence: https://www.ft.com/content/69bbdb4e-f4be-11e2-a62e-00144feabdc0