EP 219 – Ethnography: The Secret to How Things Work

Today, we’re diving into a bold idea: the best way to uncover the truth is to set aside the spreadsheets, go undercover, and embrace a rigorous approach that exposes the hidden, unscripted life within our organizations.

#advancedqualityprograms #thequalityguy #ethnography #JuanNavarro

What if most of what we think we know about how companies work is based on a lie? What if the multimillion‑dollar strategies and the software you’re forced to use are built on ideas that are fundamentally—and catastrophically—flawed?

Modern business relies heavily on clean, simple data from surveys and spreadsheets, creating an illusion of certainty. That illusion is dangerous because it ignores the complex, human nature of real work life, presenting only a sanitized fiction.

The Problem – A World Built on Flawed Data

So, what’s the core of the problem? It’s our obsession with looking good—sophisticated, eloquent, academic, appearing to be at the top of the game—while not actually acting scientifically.

Think about the last time your company rolled out a major change. You were probably given a survey, a tidy multiple‑choice questionnaire asking you to rate your agreement on a scale of one to five.

How engaged are you?

From “I’d take a bullet for this company” to “I’m updating my résumé on company time.”

The results get crunched into a PowerPoint slide. A manager points to a chart and declares, “See? 85% of our employees are aligned with the new strategy!” Everyone nods. It looks like a fact. It has the vibe of a fact. But is it?

When you filled out that survey, were you completely honest? Or did you give the answers you thought management wanted to hear?

This is the central failure of most management research: it collects data that is easy to gather, not data that is true.

Tony Watson highlights in his 2011 paper Ethnography, Reality, and Truth that we often rely on people’s statements about their work rather than observing their actions. This creates a gap between intentions and real behavior.

The Agitation – The Cost of Fitting Reality to a Spreadsheet

This is not just a theoretical discussion. Being out of touch with reality leads to significant real‑world impacts. Using unreliable data causes companies to waste resources on unsuccessful initiatives and release products that don’t meet people’s needs.

It also creates deep, corrosive cynicism. Employees see leadership celebrating “successful” projects that everyone on the ground knows were dumpster fires. They’re told a new policy is boosting efficiency while they spend hours inventing workarounds just to get their basic jobs done.

Some refer to this as jet‑plane ethnography—consultants who briefly visit, collect minimal data, and depart with limited understanding. From afar, everything seems organized, but real life on the ground goes unnoticed.

The Solution

If surveys and spreadsheets mislead, Tony Watson suggests ethnography as a solution. Unlike analysts, who approach data like tourists, ethnographers immerse themselves in communities to gain genuine insights. Ethnography relies on thorough observation, guided by Pragmatist Realism—the belief that truth is defined by accounts that enable effective action rather than perfectly replicating reality.

John Van Maanen, an authority in the field, characterizes ethnography as a blend of:

  • Fieldwork: immersing yourself in the setting
  • Headwork: interpreting your observations
  • Textwork: crafting a narrative that reflects the culture

Van Maanen refers to this process as one of “unbearable slowness”—essentially, it’s everything a TikTok trend is not.

One classic example comes from ethnographers studying screwdriver use. In interviews, no one ever mentioned a problem. But by watching carpenters, they noticed a tiny, repeated moment of friction: a worker would pick up a screwdriver, glance at the tip, realize it was the wrong kind, and put it back. This happened constantly. That insight led to a simple innovation: marking the top of the handle to show the tip type.

That’s the power of watching instead of asking.

The Playbook for Finding the Truth

Watson offers a practical playbook for making ethnography a mainstream business tool:

  1. Raise Awareness: Stop treating ethnography like a niche method and start teaching it as a core skill in business schools.
  2. Cut the Career Risks: Universities must stop demanding that researchers show up with a hypothesis already in hand. The whole point of ethnography is discovery.
  3. Create New Pathways: offer a chance to do the job.
  4. Tackle the Elites: To study CEOs, Watson suggests recruiting corporate veterans and retired executives, then training them as ethnographers. They already have access and speak the language.

Spreadsheets promise order and control, but real work is complicated and unpredictable. Ethnography encourages deeper honesty and rigor by focusing on messy, human realities instead of just data.

That’s it for this episode. The next time you see a chart claiming to summarize the thoughts of thousands of people, ask yourself a simple question: Who actually went and watched?

Thanks for checking out my books The Quality Mindset, Principles of Quality, and Life Quality Projects.

Till next time, stay excellent, keep improving, and hit that bell.