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0:00
Hello. Good morning.
My name is Margaret Kennedy.
I'm a sociologist by training.
I am the founder
and managing director
of Kennedy Insights.
We are a culture and
leadership consultancy.
We're based in Ireland,
but we work globally.
0:24
I work with leaders
and organisations
to help them see their
culture in a different way.
My background combines
research and practice.
I lecture at university level,
and I also spend much of
my time in boardrooms
working with leaders who
want to understand what
really drives behaviour
in their organisations.
What I've learned is
this: most businesses
are drowning in data, but
starving for meaning.
We've never had more numbers,
more dashboards, more
engagement scores.
Yet still, time and again,
culture is still
tripping companies up.
That's where the
topic I'm going to
speak to you today: ethnography.
That's where I
believe ethnography
gives us a hidden advantage.
In this talk, I want to
show you why it matters,
how it works and the
impact that I believe
it can have when you
bring it into business.
1:25
We've never had more data,
but more data doesn't
necessarily mean
deeper understanding.
Credibly relevant today,
AI is all we seem to
be talking about.
Brilliant in patterns
what happens, when, how often.
But it can't tell you why
people act the way they do,
and leaders know this.
They look at huge
survey reports,
and they're still
left wondering.
Why don't people engage
the way we expect?
Why don't our values stick?
Why are our talented
people leaving?
The answers don't sit
in more dashboards;
they sit in meaning.
Ethnography is about
going after the why.
It looks beneath the obvious,
gets to how people make
sense of their work.
