In November 2008, I participated in a panel at the American Anthropological Association conference. The panel compared the worldviews of different professions, including anthropology, industrial design, architecture, engineering, etc.
I focused on the worldview of business managers. A lot of people want to give input and advice and expertise to business managers. But often, many of these would-be advisers feel like they’re ignored by business leaders.
In many cases, the advice-givers get ignored because they failed to understand the mindset of business leaders. Not a surprise: if you want somebody to listen to you, you better know how to speak their language.
So here’s my presentation: an overview of “how business managers think” for non-business people who want to communicate more effectively with business decision-makers.
BTW this worldviews framework is the QAME model (invented by anthropologist Alan Bernard). QAME is a very helpful tool: it’s a short and easy-to-understand model for summarizing the worldview of a particular discipline or cultural group. Because it’s a simple model, you can quickly describe it and have a group discuss its applicability to themselves or to a different group. A lot of this worldview stuff is unconscious, so simply by talking about it, people can develop a greater awareness and modify their communications accordingly.
For example, if you have two different groups that have difficulties communicating (for example, Marketing and Engineering) — you can use QAME as a teambuilding / discussion exercise with the two groups.
Q = the ultimate Question that the discipline is trying to address. For business managers, I said their ultimate question was “how best to organize people, processes and resources to generate value, wealth and organizational sustainability.”
A= Assumptions held by people who are work in that discipline. Business managers have a number of assumptions, including a belief in scarcity, a bias towards action, and a belief in the necessity of metrics.
M= methods that people in that discipline use to do their work. A key method used by business managers is the business process.
E= evidence accepted by people in that discipline as “proof” of good work. The core evidence accepted by business managers is customer behavior (as measured by sales, customer feedback, etc.).
A quick plug for the organizer of this panel: Dori Tunstall, a thought leader in the field of interdisciplinary communications. She’s an anthropologist who worked for a management consulting firm, and now she’s a professor at a design school. She’s written a number of excellent blog posts and articles about design anthropology (a great overview article is here — thanks to adobe.com for the link).
