Social context to technology Anthropology Diversity Culture Collaboration
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Silvija Seres: Hello and welcome to Lorn.tech My name is Silvija Seres and our topic today is the social side of technology. My guest is one of my favorite people in Norway, Anna Kirah. Who works for Kirah. Welcome, Anna.
Anna Kirah: Thank you very much Silvija.
Silvija: We’ve kind of worked not together but side by side in several organizations that are Microsoft and Making Waves.
Anna: that's correct
Silvija: And people used to describe you probably still do, as small nuclear power plants over women. Small package with, not just a lot of ideas but also a passion, forgetting these ideas to actually get through people's minds and hearts and change the way we work and I love that. So we'll talk about diversity and we'll talk about what anthropologists do in the world of digital media companies and what we think needs to be done going forward to keep on the right track. So I think we will start with who Anna Kirah is and I have to start from the beginning with an American lady in Norway but also a surname that is very exotic. Who are you?
Anna: Well it's all connected so, in the world of technology is one of the reasons I believe that social sciences and humanities should be working in technology is that when you connect the dots you get something much larger than the docks themselves. They become a much bigger picture, very difficult. but my name is Japanese, it was a nickname for myself when I was a little girl and I was lying in a hospital bed in Paris quite ill, watching the Eiffel Tower's twinkle. you know how they twinkle?
Silvija: Yeah
Anna: And I love this. This was what got me through this hospital experience and my name actually means twinkle but you can call yourself Anna Twinkle, so is Anna Kirah. So is my hidden middle special name to remind me of my childhood but also other very transformative experiences in France.
Silvija: I listen to this weird thing as you know this technology monster in Norway, that actually something magical and social for you.
Anna: It is,Technology is both for me, it's a blessing and a curse and I think that is just about anything that we have to understand both the negative and positive consequences of the technologies we create and I have, I suffer from believing that we spent too much time just building without thinking about them these consequences before we actually create them or we think when we think digital transformation, we think we're building something by just looking at it from a technical point of view and we missed the big picture and often ends up with great technical solutions that nobody can use.
Silvija: Right and you have been very prominent in saying that if we actually want to have a technology that really changes our lives the better we have to understand the people not the technology.
Anna: correct
Silvija: Your background is, if I'm not mistaken, an anthropologist and a psychologist. So how do you apply what you know from there to the world of technology?
Anna: Okay, I can start with my first job at Microsoft. What my job was, was to help Microsoft understand other perspectives and their own and what that means is that you can be a technician and work very hard and be the best technician in the world and the best coders and I'm not a coder that is magic to me. it still is Magic 30 years, it's like, oh my God, is it possible to come up with these things so that magic aspect is there but to make sure that it's meaningful and relevant to the people who are actually going to be using this technology, then you have to have the social context in which technology is used in place or the historical context of the reasons why people need a certain technology so this historical there is the contextual side and what apology is an? apology for always being about understanding others from their perspective instead of our own. So I have transferred the main premise of anthropology and applied it into the development of products and services.
Silvija: So you work for Microsoft and that brought you to Norway?
Anna: No
Silvija: Or it was personal?
Anna: It was personal. So my story of why did I return back to Norway has to do with my childhood, because I grew up in Asia and in Asia, children are taught, I went to local schools in Asia and children are taught that you have to give back to your community and because I grew up in so many different countries and I don't have one country that just feels really home I thought about where I had gotten the most and Norway gave me my education and my children. So then I thought well then it would be natural at the age of 50 to return to Norway and give back.
Silvija: And we are very happy again.
Anna: well some get happy and some get frustrated because I challenge the establishment.
Silvija: I love that. So you always challenged people in business and people in hoodies?
Anna: Yes
Silvija: And I think you are part of the triangle that we are really missing. So tell us a little bit about the work you did for other companies and we'll go back to that challenge.
Anna: I guess the general thing I do is problem solve. And I problem solve by first listening to how companies, what their challenges are, what they believe their challenges are and I dive into the unknowns. So most companies are focused on what I call the known knowns. Things that they have lots of data on and they believe that they understand what the problem is, but they never understand why or how that problem can be resolved and the whys and hows are not in a quantitative sense. They come from many other ways of looking at the same data. And many other ways of looking at, again the people using it. With their employees. So when I am problem-solving, I first have to understand what the people think the challenge is, then I expand that to look in an interview others so that we have a much better holistic story of what actually is the problem in this very rarely the problem people think that it is.
Silvija: And can you give us a couple of concrete examples?
Anna: Yes. So companies often want to get design thinking brought into the company, that’s the new trend. Oh lets design thinkers but if you are thinking linearly and most companies do. There is from the Industrial Revolution to go from A to Z in a linear fashion. They miss out on all the parts of…
Silvija: ...new value creation?
Anna: Yes and then both internally and the organization but also externally. And so design thinking for me is not so much about, they expect the manual and expected to be very linear in its approach.
Silvija: Just give them enough Posted notes and they will be design thinkers.
Anna: And then they will be design thinkers and its really I challenge them and my favourite quote from a software company I've been working and recently was the head of strategy kept saying but we do customer journeys we do customer journey and I took this person out into the world to meet the customers and watch their journey and she came back with this exclamation Oh my God we're creating for the ideal journey but not for the messiness of everyday life so she understood she wasn't helping them further and then you can then at that point begin to understand how can you change the software to meet those the messiness of everyday life.
Silvija: You're touching upon something that I think is super central that Silicon Valley and I just finished the book called surveillance capitalism. And it's a very dark book, I think it's about a social economist. Writes about this new capitalism that's based on data but not to make our lives more efficient, at least they interpret for themselves what they believe that efficiency should be and they optimize us not only for our good but also for their revenue and we don't understand that side of the data gathering at all. We don’t understand the accumulation side of it and the exclusion side of it, for those who don't know how to persuade but the point is that what states actually talks about *** and how behavior?
Anna: My area
Silvija: Your area. Kind of tried to override. They believe they understand better than we do what's good for us and that's the industrial thinking. Make things work efficiently upscale, applied to humans but don't work that way.
Anna: It doesn't work and it's a book called The Shape of content by Ben Ishan written in the 1950s by a professor of Art at Harvard and he talks about this because first of all if you work in that technical sense, you forget the Organic nature of human beings and humanity. Most of my work is about balancing technology and humanity because technology has its own life. Today it has its own life and with it, with what you were talking about, we are creating a monster out there of people who are not in touch with themselves anymore or in touch with other human beings. They forget how to be human and this is so incredibly important if I gonna save this planet.
Silvija: I think the thing that scared me with this book was that I think she's too, very pessimistic in a way. out of love, I'm sure but this is something we still can deal with and I think the only way to deal with technology changes society.
Anna: Yes
Silvija: That's the first thing we need to all except.
Anna: Technology changes culture and culture changes technology.
Silvija: There is a feedback loop and we have an active role.
Anna: And we have a responsibility. I believe humans both in the workplace and outside in communities have a responsibility to react with the technology advances. React both positively and negatively towards it.
Silvija: But then you have to think a little bit of head and understand how this will change my everyday life, how will this change my financial life, how will it change the way I think and if we don't then suddenly you get Cambridge Analytica and twitter politics.
Anna: Exactly and end this issue of how do I understand what I do not understand. I do not understand. I need to understand, that's what you're talking about and that's the search of the unknown unknowns.
Silvija: But you have to be able to deal with risk and be comfortable with the unknown?
Anna: Yes
Silvija: How do you do that?
Anna: I think for me it's part of you know we have an expression in Norway it comes in the mother's Milk because of the way I grew up in many different countries, it's a natural thing for me to live in chaos. I'm not scared of chaos. I'm not uncomfortable with the Unknowns. My life has been one half to the next and it's helping companies become comfortable with what they don't know and what it looks like is that, when companies tell me what they know, the first thing I do is check if what they know is in fact real. And then there already you're starting to peel the onion and looking for the core and the core is on the Unknown Unknowns and if you think of it in terms of the large companies; Kodak had a known situation that they didn't unveil.
Silvija: Yeah
Anna: And therefore in that was the digital world and so they lost out on that even though it was right in front of their noses so my job is unveiling what's right in front of people and showing them what they know from a different angle.
Silvija: The other thing here that I find fascinating is, while you do that you're breaking people you're taking away from people that basic truths sometimes and that's a very very uphill battle. You're a woman, a foreigner, a psychologist trying to tell very established mainstream majority people with a very successful background that they need to look at this problem from a different angle and that's not an easy sell.
Anna: The best time I've ever had and getting men in suits to change was taking top leaders to Soweto in South Africa and I gave him a project where I gave them how to fix the three basic roles and what we found out was they couldn't do it and they failed. and the reason they failed was the first rule was they had to collaborate with the people from Soweto to get the solution. They had to understand their perspective and not their own. That part they were really good at, really good at listening and show and collecting insight but it was at the solution face and westerners maybe men in their business suit. They are so proud of their success that they're under the whiteboard and sort it without asking for the help and collaboration of the people from Soweto, so it ended up that only one group succeeded and that was where they were collaborating with in a very diverse setting with people from different backgrounds and listening to each other and then they squeeze the essence out and got the best solution. The other teams failed because they came up with a solution that would work in their own country but not in the context of Soweto in the ghetto.
Silvija: And that's the same problem we face with the new future.
Anna: Yes
Silvija: your reality even where we are living. Because they are being changed every day. One thing is jumping to conclusions based on your past experience. The other one is trying to analyze the problem until it goes away, I won't go away. There isn't enough data to tell you what these unpredictable volatile assets in future will do.
Anna: Is unpredictable we can't know. We can’t know and so we can only test it out and see and sometimes we fail and other times will be successful but as long as we don't go out and there to seek the unknown, we come out with new ideas.
Silvija: Anna we are almost running out of time but I really want you to tell us your story of your train.
Anna: My train?
Silvija: Yes. I love the conference and you were doing the talk before me and you were going to talk to people who do commercial building and shopping centers and you talked about a train.
Anna: Yes
Silvija: And it was about the cultural journey of that train. can do that in 2 minutes?
Anna: I will try my best so basically the train was not succeeding. it was one part of which is called the Uvic bomb and their train service was not working they were losing lots of money and also.
Silvija: It’s a local train that people who live in the area or the forest around Oslo are really dependent on.
Anna: They are very dependent on it and it had very low customer satisfaction. The trains were breaking down, there was bleeding, the company was bleeding, they weren't making money. So they got a new leader and the first thing he asked for was to get new train tracks because they're built-in 1905 and then the answer was no. Then he asked if they could have a new train because they broke down and the answer was no so he realized he could only do one thing and work with these people and he decided what he did was he powered his people, his employees to solve challenges the customers had at the moment they had. So if the train broke down they solved the problem immediately instead of saying that's not our problem. If somebody needed a cup of coffee, they gave him a cup of coffee. If they saw a passenger helping another passenger, they thanked them and gave them a reward and what happened was that they created a sense of belongingness on this train and by doing so it had nothing to do, there was no money involved. They ended up in just two years' time turning the company around and it made 35% more than they ever had made and every year since then. They have broken their record and so they are still considered in Europe the most efficient train line in Europe.
Silvija: The way that he built not only his employees but also customers into this new community, look forward to your Friday train trip with the hot dogs and beer.
Anna: And also wine. It’s a joyous thing but what the key is, it has to do it belongingness, it has to do with motivating both passengers to behave well and employees to behave well and this happens when you collaborate across boundaries and if I put it back into the context were talking about, technologist alone will not save the world. Technologist, social scientist, humanist, designers working together truly working together and challenging each other, is challenging. We have to dare challenge ourselves. Then we come up with new ideas, new ways of doing business, new ways of developing products and services that will meet the needs of the people we serve.
Silvija: So to finish it off, I want to ask you a personal question and it's personal to me and it's personal to you. So we are both immigrants to this country with a big heart for this country and among immigrants that have succeeded most and I think people don't realize how much it has cost in the sense that people talk about diversity of a great thing and you just use it and everything will be fine but it goes two ways. either they integrate you until you're just like them and you behave and then you don't bring in anything new or they find somebody very stubborn like you and me who insist on using our differences to change this place with the values that we bring, but the cost of that is really quite hard because you have to nobody likes people that think differently. Nobody likes frustration of not being able to talk about the same skip trip every lunch but our job is to get them to like what we are saying how did you do that?
Anna: I don't always do it first of all and sometimes I fail and what I experience is the time when you see this excessive, it is exponentially more wonderful than the times you fail. So that would keep me going otherwise I would just stop. yesterday I felt the pressure when I walked in to do a talk where I was met with skepticism and a standing ovation at the end. So it's a transformation that happens and when that happens I feel it gives me such motivation to continue and fight it but there are other days where you just feel so worn out and I think it's that's what you're talking about if it comes at such a heavy cost and I think that people don't understand why we do it. I'm driven because I believe in giving back and then there's times when I wonder why am I getting back to play for maybe doesn't want it but I believe that ultimately they do want it but it's hard, it's hard to accept it just as it's hard for me to accept that sometimes I do something wrong or that I need to change, it's hard for established patterns to accept that maybe they could try something new and it would be better.
Silvija: And before they understand it.
Anna: Yes
Silvija: Especially. It's a fight and is a good fight and we do it with love.
Anna: We do it with love, that’s why we are here.
Silvija: Exactly. So, I asked you, you are one of these people that’s really dangerous to ask what reading you recommend but what reading do you recommend for people listening to this podcast?
Anna: Right now, I will recommend Education.
Silvija: It is a book?
Anna: It is a book and it is about a woman in the United States who grew up in and uneducated family and it's a very strong book.
Silvija: How has changed her life when she gets education or?
Anna: And the transformation understanding realities because I think this connects very much to what you just talked about, in terms of being an immigrant and so forth. It helps people understand that there are multiple realities and how we struggle with those realities in ourselves. So that book and then, of course, I can't go without saying that homo sapiens and homo deus.
Silvija: One is about how we got here and the other one is going forward?
Anna: Yes. And both are really relevant to the discussions that you have in your podcast and education. I think it is a personal journey so I teach my students and service design even if it's digital service design that they have to do a service design on themselves before we can help others. Sort of like the airplane you have to put a mask on yourself before you help others, that's I think very very important if you're going to become a strong-person fighting establishment, you have to make sure that you take care of yourself first.
Silvija: Do you have a quote? If I knew where to write the quote over your bed today, what would it be?
Anna: The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.
Silvija: That was nice.
Anna: And that's Eleanor Roosevelt.
Silvija: If people are to remember one thing from this very broad conversation we had, what would you like it to be?
Anna: I would like it to be dire to include people who are different from yourselves and different educational backgrounds, different ethnicity, different culture, different age to go and dialogue with them to find the answers to your challenges.
Silvija: Anna Kirah, my favorite agent provocateur. Thank you so much for coming here to Lorn and helping to think differently. Thank you to those who are listening.
Anna: Thank you.
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