A researcher and anthropologist with experience across academia, freelancing, and in-house work at Lowe's argues that traditional ROI calculations are too narrow to capture the value of ethnographic and generative qualitative research. She introduces a framework built around immediate, medium-term, and sustainable impact markers, illustrated through case studies involving Pepsi, Lowe's, and Habitat for Humanity. The talk is aimed at helping ethnographers and qualitative researchers communicate their impact to decision makers without forcing their work into a purely mathematical ROI model.
Key Takeaways
- Traditional ROI calculations overindex on immediate financial returns and short time horizons, making them a poor fit for ethnographic and generative qualitative research.
- Ethnographic insights often hold validity for years, not quarters, and can inform multiple streams of work long after the original project ends, making a longitudinal impact framework more appropriate.
- The three medium-term markers of ethnographic return are longer-term impact, strategic engagement (staying involved in the solutioning phase), and organizational impact (shifting culture and language within an organization).
- Sustained outcomes, the highest tier of the framework, are about building resiliency and flexibility into an organization so it can adapt over time, not just solve one problem once.
- Research amnesia is a real cost: cataloging and connecting earlier ethnographic work to later projects can deliver rich insights with significantly less additional research effort.
- Immediate impact is still necessary for ethnographic work to have staying power; it can be measured with traditional ROI tools, but it is only one small input into a larger, longer arc of value.
Session Notes
What This Talk Is and Is Not
This is not a standard ROI calculation talk. A prior ARVIK presentation by Trevor Calabro is recommended for the clearest, simplest framing of traditional ROI math. Instead, this talk focuses specifically on ethnography and multi-method qualitative research, the kind of work that investigates messy, complex problem spaces and often happens years before a finished product reaches the world.
The central question is: how do we define impact for decision makers in a way that moves us forward unapologetically, without forcing qualitative work into a mathematical model built for more tactical research?
Speaker Background and Context
The speaker holds a PhD in sociocultural anthropology and has worked across academia, a decade of freelancing, and in-house research at Lowe's. Her academic fieldwork was in Siberia, examining how household economies, natural resources, religion, and traditional medicine intersect in the post-Soviet era. That work taught her how ethnography surfaces connections that are invisible to outsiders but obvious to people living within a community.
- Academia: Fieldwork in Siberia, service learning, methodology research.
- Freelancing: Policy program innovation, taxation messaging research, ethnographic intercepts in retail, and home studies for brands including Pepsi.
- In-house at Lowe's: Longitudinal influence on decision makers, platform experience research, and store associate workflow studies.
Three Myths of ROI for Ethnographic Research
Myth 1: Impact Can Be Measured in Dollars and Cents
Every research decision, including the choice not to research something, carries financial, temporal, and trust costs. Yet return is almost always discussed only in financial terms. Impact can also be measured through ratios, growth numbers, organizational resilience, and the ability to adapt to uncertainty.
Myth 2: Impact Can Be Seen in Quarters
Even tactical research at Lowe's often happens two to four quarters before a product releases, and by launch day researchers are frequently left off the announcement slide. Ethnographic work compounds this problem because it tends to hold its validity for years, not quarters. Workflows, attitudes, and mental models documented ethnographically remain accurate and useful long after a tactical concept test would have expired.
Myth 3: Business Outcomes Are Directly Correlated to Our Contributions
Many people are involved in the journey from research insight to finished product. The time lag makes a one-to-one correlation between a researcher's report and a business outcome difficult to establish. This is a primary reason ethnographers are reluctant to measure impact at all, but it is also the opening for a different, broader narrative of value.
Case Study 1: Pepsi and the 'Born in the Carolinas' Campaign
In the early 2010s, the speaker worked as a contractor on a home ethnography project for Pepsi. Pepsi and Coca-Cola were competing over roughly 2% revenue margins, largely by running alternating buy-two-get-three-free promotions that eroded profitability. The client problem was how to drive product innovation or increase full-price purchasing.
Five ethnographers conducted home interviews in five cities, mapping every occasion in which beverages, not just soda, fit into daily life and seasonal rituals. During daily debrief calls, a pattern emerged: strong emotional attachment to regional and local sodas. In North Carolina, people built recipes around Cheerwine specifically for the Christmas holidays. Similar patterns appeared in Colorado and other states.
The speaker included a photo of a local Charlotte distributor's billboard reading 'Born in North Carolina' in her report, alongside a recommendation that Pepsi adopt 'Born in the Carolinas' as a regional identity play, connecting to its actual founding in New Bern, North Carolina in 1898 and its sponsorship of major sports teams across both Carolinas.
Pepsi launched the Born in the Carolinas campaign. More than 15 years later, the campaign and its associated logo remain active and have expanded beyond the Carolinas. The insight was that Pepsi could compete on nostalgia and regional identity, something Coca-Cola was assumed to own.
Ethnographers said, 'You know what? There's an opportunity for you to sell the nostalgia factor that you thought Coca-Cola had the market cornered on.'
Case Study 2: Lowe's Platform Research and Research Amnesia
The speaker and a colleague conducted contextual research at Lowe's stores to understand how associates clock in. The study examined not just what associates were doing but where in the store they were doing it, what context surrounded the action, and what drove them to that physical location. It was thorough, well-received, and then deprioritized as priorities shifted.
Six months later, Lowe's began rolling out a new single sign-on experience. Security had one unresolved question before expanding beyond pilot stores. The speaker was already visiting those pilot stores for a separate project. She collected some additional unstructured interviews and observations, but the substantive answer was already in the earlier study. The final report drew directly on that foundational work, delivering rich ethnographic insights from roughly a day and a half of additional fieldwork.
This example illustrates the concept of research amnesia, a term coined by a colleague, referring to situations where teams commission new research on a question that has already been answered. Cataloging and connecting earlier work prevents wasted effort and multiplies the return on the original investment.
Why Ethnography Is Different: Webs of Significance and Liminality
- Webs of significance: Ethnography captures not just what people do but how that behavior is embedded in a physical, social, and cultural context. Things people cannot articulate themselves become nameable and actionable through a combination of observation, interviewing, and follow-up.
- Liminality: When an organization or community is in transition, ethnography helps amplify what is possible beyond the immediate problem statement. It is more alchemy than arithmetic.
- Longitudinal staying power: Foundational ethnographic work can be pulled forward to support later, smaller studies, compounding its value over time.
It's more alchemy than arithmetic. This is why an arithmetic equation for measuring ROI doesn't quite work.
Case Study 3: Habitat for Humanity and the Origin of the Framework
In 2006, the speaker led a 12-week applied anthropology service-learning project with students for Charlotte's Habitat for Humanity chapter. The original ask was narrow: would Habitat homeowners accept multifamily housing instead of single-family homes, because infill lots were becoming scarce? Other chapters had already moved toward multifamily out of financial necessity.
The research used a workshop format. It asked participants about their ideal interior and exterior home, then expanded to ask what their ideal community beyond their property would look like. That last question opened the most significant discussion.
I feel like they are choosing people to put in those communities so that we can become a community and help others. I mean, they don't just let anyone in Habitat.
Participants recognized that Habitat's vetting process had selected people with shared values and financial training. Some resented the implied expectation to serve as community role models. Others saw it as an opportunity. The insight across all focus groups was the same: if Habitat wanted to build community, why not formalize it and give homeowners their own neighborhood?
The real root problem was also reframed by the research. Habitat's definition of success was year-over-year growth in homes built. The obstacle was not a preference for single-family homes; it was that rising land costs made the growth model unsustainable at current scales.
Outcomes from the Habitat Project
One 12-week research project, estimated at roughly four weeks if done by a consultancy, generated four separate initiatives:
- A critical repairs program to keep existing homeowners in their homes before they lose them.
- A rehab program for existing housing stock.
- The first multifamily structures, built before the housing bubble.
- The first Habitat neighborhood, built in 2012.
All four programs coalesce around the themes of safety, community, and location that emerged from the research. The speaker remained an adviser to the Charlotte chapter from 2006 to 2008, through the ribbon cutting on the first multifamily home. The chapter's approach has since influenced Habitat chapters nationally.
The long-term result: Charlotte's Habitat chapter has nearly tripled the number of families served annually, even as local housing costs have skyrocketed, because the research created a flexible, resilient model rather than a single fixed solution.
The Framework: Return on Ethnographic Investment
The framework moves through three tiers of impact over time, with immediate impact as the necessary foundation.
Immediate Impact
This is the earliest and smallest input, but it is essential. Without it, the work will not have staying power. It can and should be measured using traditional ROI tools. It might look like triage, an early directional finding, or a concept validated or invalidated.
Medium-Term Markers (Three Principles)
- Longer-term impact: A shift in a program, a product direction, or a strategy, not just a single deliverable.
- Strategic engagement: The ethnographer stays involved in the solutioning phase, continuing to shape how the research is interpreted and applied alongside designers, product managers, and marketers.
- Organizational impact: The research changes the culture or language of the organization. When people inside the company start using vocabulary from your report as if they always spoke that way, that is organizational impact.
Sustainable Outcomes
The highest tier. These are campaigns, programs, or models that become embedded in the organization's identity and continue to generate value over years. They provide resilience: the ability to adapt as conditions change rather than cycling through repeated problem-solution-failure loops.
Stating Your Impact: A Template
Using the Habitat example, the speaker demonstrates how to write a long-term ROI statement:
By shifting the mental framework of how they build, Habitat created a flexible housing model that includes infill housing, renovated homes, and entire communities, allowing them to nearly triple the number of families served annually even as Charlotte area housing costs skyrocket.
The structure is: how you changed how they think (strategic engagement and organizational change) plus what they do now as a result (sustainable outcomes) plus the measurable difference, whether financial or, in this case, number of families served.
Closing Thought
Research is formalized curiosity. It's poking and prying with a purpose. -- Zora Neale Hurston
Non-financial outcomes, such as number of clients served, satisfaction scores, and organizational resilience, are legitimate measures of long-term ethnographic return. The goal is not to abandon financial metrics but to build a richer narrative that encompasses the full arc of impact that ethnographic work can generate.
Transcript
Read the full transcript
So uh this is not a typical ROI talk. So not a typical return on investment kind of talk. Um I think if you want an example of that, Arvik had a talk by Trevor Calabro last year I believe it was. Um and that has been the clearest simplest framing that I've seen of um talking about ROI and talking about the math behind the ROI. Um, so I think that's a place to go. That's a really excellent place to go to to get that kind of background. What I'm talking about is a little bit more specifically focused on ethnography. And that's not something that everybody does. Don't worry if you don't do ethnography. Don't worry if you're not an anthropologist. This talk can still be for you. Um I think the framework that I've developed while it's specific to ethnography what that really means is that it's specific to a multimemethod largely qualitative study. It's specific to uh research that is investigating that messy complex problem space and it's specific to research that's often identifying and defining problems. Right? we're not figuring out what to do about those problems necessarily, but we are really digging into that problem space. So, um this is often happening years before the world sees the finished product. So again, it's not going to be relevant to everything that we do in UX or customer insights, but I think that that um ethnography is really an excellent way to start off an initiative. You bake in some excellent insights that help drive potentially multiple streams of work. And so that's something that a simple ROI really doesn't help us get to. Um it it narrows the focus and or it sort of reduces the ways that we can talk about what success looks like. Um so I'm going to speak a little bit to I don't know why it's not advancing there. Um I'm going to speak a little bit to um thinking about impact over returns. So uh return on investment is really an impact measure. Um and I'm going to kind of as I sort of start with that, I'll talk a little bit about my own trajectory as a researcher because I've worked in a lot of different sectors. Um and I've worked inhouse. I've worked as a freelancer. So, um, there's a there's a lot of weaving and winding in my my past. And that kind of will help contextualize a little bit about where my thinking is coming from and and kind of how I got to the point of thinking about talking about return in a structured way. Um, but without the dollars and cents sort of calculation. Um, again, that ROI calculation is great because it really does sort of fit into your day-to-day, how you operate day-to-day as a researcher. Um, I'm thinking about how you want to talk about something that's maybe a larger time frame, uh, sort of retrospective looking. Um, so there's no shade here at all on calculation of ROI. that's actually part of this, but it's sort of like a a little piece of the bigger puzzle that we're trying to un unpack. Um, and again, like I said, what troubles me about that ROI narrative is that it feels constraining. Um, it overindexes on those immediate returns and it's pretty singular. Uh so what I want to help us kind of understand is and and I have a paper that I wrote on this as well and so we I'll provide a link for you guys to to dig into the paper that I wrote. Um, but if you're investing human capital into understanding and solving human problems through a multimemethod approach, incorporating observation and a mix of structured and semistructured methodologies, what I'm talking about still applies to the kinds of things that you're looking at. And so, um, when I talk about some myths of ROI, I'll also be kind of addressing a couple of examples from those a different different periods of my career. And then I'll talk about what it what does it actually mean to invest in ethnography. What is it that makes ethnography different special? And so I'll share another sort of framing or uh example in that section around habitat for humanity. And that example is really what drove uh building this framework out on how to look at what does a long-term return on ethmographic investment look like. So um again the the key premise of this is how might we define our impact to decision makers? How can we talk to people who are making decisions not necessarily about whether to fund a specific project? Uh maybe not even whether to hire us but how to think about research within the organization. So for me, I'm thinking about organizations that uh have the potential to really grow more holistically across multiple streams of work by embracing um something like ethnography at the early stages of the work that they do. Um and for us as ethnographers, anybody else in the room who is an ethnographer, how how can we embrace a narrative that moves us forward unapologetically? What I feel and hear a lot when I talk to other ethnographers is trying to force what we do into that mathematical um model for ROI that's really based on more tactical types of research. So that's the premise for today. Oops. Now, how do I go back? Hang on. So this is the resume. Um my PhD is in socioultural anthropology and for a while I worked at academia. So a lot of what I did was in Siberia. Um I worked at the intersection of household economies, natural resources religion traditional medicine. And those things might on put it down on the slide because those things on the face of it don't necessarily feel like they're interconnected. But as I started exploring how are people in the postsviet era managing their household economies in areas that are rich in natural resources, religion came up as a frame for how to manage resources. And as I started looking around deeper, you know, multiple studies later, started diving into some of the resources and some of the opportunities that existed within that space. not just within the household economy but within village economies and and larger spaces. Uh traditional medicine and herbal medicine came up as a primary uh opportunity. I'm going to call it sort of a painoint but also um a strong economic opportunity that wasn't necessarily being leveraged. Um so all of those things intersect and if you live there that makes sense. But for people who maybe are on the cusp of a particular geographic space or external to those uh communities, those religious or traditional um medicine communities, those opportunities might might not be as transparent. And this is kind of the exciting thing about what ethnography can really help us do. So, as an academic, it took me years to figure out all of these intersections and how it connects and how to talk about it and how to frame it. I wanted people with an undergraduate degree in anthropology to be able to have examples in their back pocket to be able to talk about this stuff. So that as an academic led me to towards focusing on service learning and becoming a quite the methodology geek. So um some of that comes back into how I'm thinking about uh the work that I'm presenting today. After academia I spent about a decade freelancing and again you'll see a lot of variation. So within the policy sphere I did a lot of program innovation work um you know testing proof of concepts uh getting feedback on them uh sort of and then another stream of that work was policy messaging. So um did a lot of research around taxation messaging. So if you want resources for that to make people in your life feel a little bit better about paying taxes since we're you know coming off of that season uh let me know. Um and then market research, a lot of ethnographic intercepts. So not just doing survey work in store, but watching how people move through the store and interact with products. Uh so a lot of that contextual research, a lot of uh deeper interviews, including home studies. So going into people's homes and looking at, you know, for example, well, I've already told you uh one of the things that I'll be talking about is a a marketing messaging piece around Born in the Carolinas. So, if you are in North Carolina, you know what I'm talking about. I'm talking about Pepsi. So, we looked at where are people storing their soda in their home? Uh what kind of memorabilia do they have? Uh how does it fit into their everyday life? So, those kinds of things within my freelancing space. And then I came into um in-house at Lowe's because I wanted to be inhouse. I wanted to have more of an influence on some of the decision makers, more day-to-day uh sort of experiences and particularly more longitudinal experience like being able to really drive decision-m across a longer time frame. So, I'm super excited about our third speaker today too. Uh so, I hope you guys will see some parallels in our talks. Um so, uh let me see was there anything else I wanted to say on that slide? Uh so um the other thing that I wanted to mention around this is that even within the Lowe's environment doing ethnography still matters. Like it's not about accumulating a bunch of small studies but having a foundational piece of work that you can tie later work back to. And that's also part of what I'm trying to sort of create a framework for. How do we talk about that longitudinal work that we're doing? So even if a lot of your work is smaller, more tactical studies, maybe thinking about reframing some of that accumulation of knowledge in a way that allows you to actually ask for and deliver these these deeper sort of richer messy problems space kind of ethnographic studies or discovery studies. So those are some things to think about too as I'm I'm kind of walking through some of my examples. So, I want to dive into um what I'm calling ROI myths. Uh ROI is a narrative just like the narrative I'm providing for you today. It's a way of talking about the work that we do. It's storytelling just like when we deliver insight. So, I think everybody should feel comfortable talking about return on investment whether it's with the mathematical equations for that immediate work, whether it's in the framework of what I'm presenting today. Storytelling is a good thing. Um, and I've already kind of touched on some of these myths a little bit, but uh, the first one, impact can be measured in dollars and cents, right? All research, including the choice to not do research. When organizations are choosing not to research something, that always brings in financial, temporal, and trust costs. So the costs are multitude but the return on investment is generally only talked about in terms of a financial benefit. Um so I think the myth in this is that we can talk about other kinds of benefits and we can quantify them maybe not in a you know monetary way but we can quantify those through a ratio through a you know growth number of some sort. But we can also talk about things like resilience um ability to adapt to uncertainty because of decisions that we made. So impact is not just dollars and cents. Um the second myth is that impact can be seen in quarters. We're generally asked to measure this stuff on a very tight time horizon like quarters. But even some of the tactical work that our teams do at Lowe's, the research happens 2, three, four quarters before a product releases and when they do the little rahrrah product release slide. Sometimes the researcher often the researchers are left off the slide. It's like by the time the thing got across the finish line, they forgot that there was an impact that was driven by people who were going out and asking questions, talking to people, testing designs. So, so I think there's this um even within the tactical work that we do, it's hard for people to remember that we were part of the impact that got delivered. So it's even more so when we talk about ethnography. But on the flip side, ethn ethnographic research tends to hold its validity um its accuracy in terms of representing a moment in time, representing a user group for years, not just quarters. So tactical work can be quickly let's turn around, let's get some information on this, and let's deliver. And then by the time you deliver the solution, the problem that you were identifying, if you did the right thing, the problem's been solved. So that research doesn't have the same sort of staying power that some ethnographic work around workflows and and um attitudes, mental models might have. So um think about the work that you do that might carry some some relevancy past the immediate uh project that you were working on. Um that's another place where you can look to see how this framework might support you. Um and then finally, business outcomes. The myth is that business outcomes are directly correlated to our contributions. Right? It's not always easy. Right? If I worked on a project and I did a concept test for example or if I did a survey project around a design around a problem space around a a you know even a even a um persona. The idea is that that is you know onetoone correlated to a project. the um the outcomes come directly from the output. So I did a report, I developed these personas and then there were outcomes that came from the design that resulted from that. So there was increased profit, improved customer satisfaction. But one reason and and so this is a big reason why rel our ethnographers are really reluctant to measure impact because a lot more people are involved in the journey from our insights to the finished product um or service or campaign after we've given our contributions. So that that time lag really makes it hard for us to make that direct connection. But I think one of the things again that we can look to with some of this longer term research is how does this foundational work support us in um talking about impacts that go beyond fiscal improvements over a quarter or customer impro you know improved customer satisfaction scores over a quarter or a half year or a year. Um there are things that and I'm going to come into this first example. Um you know there are things that go beyond dollars and cents often also go beyond that sort of direct correlation. Um and so I want to talk a little bit about some research that I did in the early 2010s for Pepsi. Um, I was working as a contractor for a larger company and the short-term impact of this project was really some trial and error on the part of Pepsi with um product lines and even some advertising. Uh, but the thing that had the staying power, the long-term impact really came from the opportunity that they did not know that they had. And this I will tell you some people on the call I think who know me uh probably heard the story before cuz I love this is the story I tell in all my interviews. Um the client problem was really uh they wanted direction on product innovation and the reality that we all know exists is that Pepsi and and uh Coca-Cola are in this death match but we don't know it's not it's not really for sort of uh staying power as a brand. They're both really well-known brands. They're fighting over like 2% margins in terms of their revenue generation. So, how do we generate more sales? Um, is it a new product line? Is it how do we get people, if it's not a new product line, how do we get people to pay full price for a product? So, back in the early 2010s, I don't know if they still do this, but both companies in alternate weeks would be running these buy two get three free product sales at the major grocery stores. So, they were not making a whole lot of money on the product, their their flagship products. um so how could they get people to potentially buy more frequently? So these were um home interviews that we did. They captured a wide array of all of the ways that beverages broadly, not just soda, beverages can fit into occasions. So that could include daily rituals like what do I grab on my way to work? What's the thing that I have at the end of the day when I'm coming home from work? Um what's the special treat that I give my kids when they've been behaving well? Uh, and so those were the kinds of day-to-day occasions, but it also included things like holidays, birthdays, um, what other kinds of occasions were coming up. Maybe you had an annual barbecue party uh, to to celebrate, you know, the end of the school year. Um, so imagine five ethnographers in five different cities across the country and none of us were soda drinkers. So we were having every time we would do interviews we would have these daily debrief calls and one day one of the ethnographers said I don't know if this is something and that's kind of a if you ever work on a collaborative project with uh ethnographers you will hear things like that I don't know if this is something this is like I think there's a pattern here but I think this is meaningful but I don't know if there's a pattern here right I think this is meaningful but I'm not sure if there's a pattern here um and she was talking about local or a regional soda in Colorado. And then somebody else was like, "Oh my god, I'm seeing this, too." And I said, "Oh my gosh, in North Carolina, cheer wine. I have so many recipes for how people make their cheer wine punch for the Christmas holidays." And these are people who may not drink cheer wine any other time of year. I grew up in a state that had a local little uh if you grew up in southeastern Wisconsin 50/50, you know what I'm talking about. It's a grapefruit and lime soda. That is just my favorite childhood soda. Can't get it anywhere outside of southeastern Wisconsin. There is a a pull that people feel towards localized uh products. It's a nostalgia factor. It's a geography factor. It's a lot of things. Um, and at the time in North Carolina, there was a a a distributor in Charlotte who had a like single solitary, very ugly billboard in Charlotte that said born in North Carolina and the name of his bottling company. And so that photo, a photo of that billboard went into my report uh for this project along with a recommendation that if they're going to play with this born in that in North Carolina that they actually do Born in Carolas because Pepsi is a sponsor of all of our major sports teams in North Carolina and all of those major sports teams are trying to build a larger uh fan base by in incorporating South Carolina. So even though Pepsicola was uh established in 1898 in Newburn, North Carolina, their slogan is born in the Carolinas. Why? Because ethnographers said, "You know what? There's an opportunity for you to sell the nostalgia factor that you thought that Coca-Cola had the, you know, cornered the market on. So how do I tie this to revenue? How are they even tying this this campaign to revenue? Um, and then how do I tie it to revenue given my uh my my uh status as a as a contractor? Uh, I'm going to need to pause for one second and grab a um grab my uh plug, but I'm going to go to the next slide while I do that because there's a little bit of text on there. So, y'all are at the mercy of the tech, but you're also at the mercy of my traveling schedule this week, and I apologize for that. Um, okay. So, we had an iconic brand campaign that increased presumably it's increasing revenue because they've continued to have this campaign for another 15 years. Uh, and it's become sort of this this logo is the one that they settled on that is sort of the iconic logo. So, and I've seen it outside of North Carolina, North and South Carolina. So, when it first came out, I would take pictures in gas stations, um, of this logo showing up everywhere because it was a big deal. It was probably one of the largest, uh, most well-known impacts of any work that I had done up to that point, which was a little bit odd to me. But, um, let me talk about another um, that another impact, another myth. um that impact can be seen quickly. So, I think one of the things that's going to sound really familiar to everybody on this call, regardless of whether or not you're an ethnographer, is that um things change, priorities change. So, imagine ethnographic research. It takes a little bit longer. It doesn't always have to. I mean, I've done ethnographic projects in six weeks. It's scope it so that you can get it done. Um but ethnographic research essentially is about uncovering unmasking untangling that messy problem. So um for anybody who takes that kind of early generative knowledge and uses it for ideiation pro you know this might be the designers in the group uh this might be some of the product folks in the group you know that not every ideation session not every design jam is going to lead to a product feature um and everybody even outside of UX knows that work gets dep prioritized all the time does that mean that the research that informed those efforts those ideation sessions and whatnot doesn't have an ROI because nothing got built or that nothing got built immediately. Absolutely not. Um we need to speak in rather sort of broad brush strokes about sort of how this can can help. So I think the the first thing that I want to point out and I can actually provide a link to this article that I'm referencing here as well but um a colleague of mine uh and I'm blanking on what company she worked for but um you she coined a term research amnesia right all of us have been in a room where we're sitting there realizing that we've already done the research we already know this right there's um particularly with enterprise ethnography. This is work that's inherently longitudinal. So things are going to come up. So I want to give one really quick example and I'll try to walk through this pretty fast. Um but there's a there's a case that came up in 2025 uh for us. We um had been working on so one of the things that I mentioned that I worked on at Lowe's is some of the platform work. So we do a lot of our own technology you know building it in house. So design needed to have uh some inputs around rebuilding our platform experience. So think about your navigation like your landing page navigation. You log into your terminal at work. What does that look like? That's what we were trying to understand. Um that's a pretty big mandate. So one of the questions that came up for us in that work and I'm not going to go into a ton of detail, but one of the questions that came up for us around that was clocking in. So for that um and other sort of big unknown like we've never thought about this before questions, the team decided to reach out to the research team and I worked with um another researcher on how to incorporate some observation data, some contextual research into this project. So we were looking not just at what people are doing, so we weren't just documenting workflows, but where are they doing it physically? Where are they in the store? Where are they clocking in? And what's the context around that flow? Is somebody else present? Is it the computer that they always work on? Uh what's driving them to go to that place in the store versus another place in the store? This was pretty meaty stuff. Um and I spent a day in store with this other researcher getting him set up to sort of think about this framework for how to go after the data. Uh essentially I gave him a one-day ethnographic boot camp and he was fabulous. The research was fabulous. It was super wellreceived and then prior priorities changed. nothing got worked on. Fast forward um to last summer, we were rolling out a new single sign on experience in the stores. It solved a ton of associate problems. We were all super excited about it, but security had one niggling little question. Um they were concerned about rolling beyond pilot stores until we understood this one simple question. I was smack in the middle of another project, but I said, "You know what? The stores that are in the pilot are the same stores that I'm going to for this other project. So let me collect some data from you know for both projects and it was supposed to be just enough research to figure out uh if we need to do more research but the reality was we already had the research the research had been done six months prior. So I did some unstructured interviews and observations in stores. Um and then the the project I ended up the the report that I ended up writing really drew on that first project. So I was able to pull that thread forward from that other study. Um we were able to present really rich insights based on two full days in storm. Not even two full a day and a half in a store. um which is not a lot of not a lot of research for something ethnographic but again the deeper ethnographic work had already been done that had already been shared now it was about talking about why these insights mattered in this particular context um so that's something that I was really excited about um so in terms of investing in ethnography like why does this matter uh again that timeline is about more than the length of the engagement, but it's also about webs of significance. Right? So, we had taken the time in this previous research to understand workflows, understand problems, but not problems like we not need to fix this now, but really how does this problem fit into the ecosystem of how people experience these workflows within a physical environment. So it's not just what they're doing, it's where they're doing it. It's how they're impacted by other things in their environment. And so we can talk about that in terms of webs of significance. So that if you read the paper, there's some academic references in there. Um but this is really about taking the strange, irreexplicit, the things that people can't articulate themselves to you by a combination of observation interviewing follow-ups. um you begin to develop the skill to be able to name and normalize it and that gets us to a lot of um a lot deeper insights. The next thing that happens is that anthropologists are also you know looking at when when the work that we're doing is an organization, a group, a community that's influx. So we talk about that liinal state that people are in. This is about the uncertainty of transition. So ethnography when we come in our is to not just direct say here's a direction you could go in to solve a specific problem but it's really to amplify right it's more than the sum of its part that's why I use the word alchemy. It's more alchemy than arithmetic. This is why an arithmetic equation for measuring ROI doesn't quite work because the kinds of transformations that we can facilitate with this type of research go far beyond um excuse me go far beyond um the types of problems that we're presented with to research. Uh cool. So, I'm going to give a quick rundown of my third example. And I'm like very close to time because we've spent a lot of time on the technology. So, I'm going to pick up the pace on this one because the case study itself is fairly self-explanatory. Uh I in 2006 um it was the first quote unquote real uh design research project I did and it was a service learning project I did with my students in my applied anthropology class. We had a um ask from Habitat for Humanity to go in and do some research and it was a very customerfocused problem statement. Um but it was already kind of in the frame of a solution. So the question that we were investigating was would Habitat home homeowners be willing to choose a multifamily residence over a single family residence. Part of the problem for this was that it was getting harder to find infill lots across the city. Um, but the original remmit was actually smaller than that. Uh, when they came to me initially, the staff wanted to develop a framework for uh, multif family residences based on the experience of other chapters. It sounded like it was already kind of a done deal. Um, and that multif family was what they were doing because other chapters went that way. Um, they had been pushed into it though. most other chapters had sort of run into a financial problem of being able to purchase land. Um, and as we dug into the problem statement around multif family versus single family, the real problem, it turned out, was this nexus of how Habitat for Humanity defines success and property values, land values. So they were looking towards a future where infill property, infill land would not be possible. But it was always going to be possible. It was just going to be more expensive. So that ties to their definition of success. It wasn't going to be possible to keep buying land at a rate that allowed them to be successful. And success meant year-over-year growth. Every year we're increasing the number of homes that we build. more people have a home to live in because of us, right? And so, um, that was really the root problem that they wanted wanted to not just sustain the number of homes but actually grow the number of families who could have a simple decent place to live. So, basically what we did was a workshop format and we focused on what do you want? what would be your sort of ideal state interior to your home, exterior to your home. And then we broke it beyond the home itself. Um because we were thinking about infill. What parts of town would people be will like maybe a multif family doesn't feel as as nice quote unquote nice as a single family. So maybe people would be willing to live in a multif family if it were closer to the city like center of the city, if it were closer to a bus stop. So these were some of the speculations that the staff had. What ended up happening was we added a layer of what would be your ideal community like beyond the borders of your property? What does that need to look like? And that opened up a lot of discussion and that became the focus of um you the the results. So let me jump to um those results, right? So we were only doing research and this was a group of people mind you that I was training to do research. So this is a 12 week 12-week research project. Probably if this were a consulting project it would have been about 4 weeks. So it was very rapid. Um but what we learned was that people were excited about the possibility of options, right? And one of the options that was not on anybody's radar was the idea of the community itself. And so I'm going to read just one quote um from from the paper. So one of the people that was in one of these groups that we worked with said, I feel like they meaning Habitat, I feel like they are choosing people to put in those communities so that we can become a community and help others. I mean, they don't just let anyone in habitat. So, the notion here is that we've gone through a vetting process. We've gone through financial training. We've gone through all of this work and now and and some people were actually resentful. This person was relatively neutral about it, but some people were kind of resentful like, I'm I I'm having a hard enough time keeping my own life together. I can't be there as a role model for everybody else. And so this idea came up across all of our focus groups that what if you had a community like you're trying to build community with us, why not give us our own community? And so they did. Um so and that has been one of the main ways that Habitat has been able to maintain and actually increase the number of household houses built each year. So upshot of this is that this didn't create this four 12week research project that was probably been four week if it was a consultancy that project led to four separate initiatives. One was a critical repairs program keeping people in homes before they lose them. One is the rehab program and I don't have a date for the starting of that so I didn't put that on the slide and then first multif family structures got built out by the time we ended up in the um the housing bubble and then the first Habitat neighborhood was built in 2012. So this photo is from 2023 when I volunteered with my teammates um on the Carter build uh here in Charlotte. So what h all of these pro programs do is that it coaleses around the issues brought up around safety, community, and location. Um and so that is something that you can't necessarily put a price on. You're going to hear a little bit at the very end once I present the model. Um this is the model in a nutshell. Um and I and I'm going to go through the next couple of slides pretty quickly, but this is it. This is it in a nutshell. This immediate impact, this is the amplification of our impact over time, right? The immediate impact is early, but it's just one tiny input and it is it is a necessity for everything else. So, I I want to be really clear that with any ethnographic project, you have an immediate value or the work won't won't stick around. It won't have staying power. It won't be something that um allows you to uh have that longer term investment. So the im immediate impact is absolutely necessary. It's also something that can be measured using traditional ROI measures like the one from the the previous uh arvik talk. So over time there's a couple other ways and it's great if you can hit all three of these but these um markers are are markers of I'm calling them principles. There's there's three sort of medium-term markers or or principles that you want to try to hit. Uh you want to have a longerterm impact. So immediate impact might be triage and then longer term impact is a shift in a program. Strategic engagement is you as the ethnographer really staying engaged in the solutioning phase when product when design when your program managers when you're you know marketing folks are sort of deciding what to do with the research you're still engaged in part of those conversations you're driving perhaps those conversations as one of your outputs. Um and then organizational impact. Can you change the culture? Like this work done by students absolutely changed the culture of Charlotte's Habitat for Humanity chapter which has changed the culture of Habitat chapters across the entire country. That's not all on us, but the organizational impact would not have happened were it not for the relationship between our research team and our stakeholders. Um, and then ideally over time, like the Pepsi, like the the Habitat, you know, communities, these become sustainable outcomes. So you're not just creating a product and it works for a while and then it fails and then you create a new product and then it works for a while and then it fails. These are campaigns that have staying power. These are campaigns that become iconic. Uh these are programs that become baked into the fiber of the organization. So these are the kinds of impacts that it's really hard to measure with dollars and cents. Um so let me go to the next slide a little bit more on that longer term outcome. Yes, it can be tangible, it can be direct and the measure can be rooted in in um those financial incomes, but it can also be rooted in um meaning outcomes that are non-financial. So clients, number of clients served, seesat scores, um, and long-term impact really comes from answering those questions that your stakeholders didn't ask. You got to get curious. And this is one of my all favorite um, anthropology quotes. Zoran Neil Hursten research is formalized curiosity. It's poking and prying with a purpose. Um, so that is kind of the the anybody on the call who knows me knows that's that's me. there's always a reason behind every question. Um, strategic engagement and organizational change I think kind of go together. So, it's really understanding the logic of the organization, the logic of the human interacting with um it doesn't have to end with a readout. You're helping the organization move from the liinal state that the twixed in between to kind of a north star. It's easier to do that in or inhouse but you can also do it with workshops and other kinds of engagements with the habitat group. I stayed on as an adviser to Habitat for 2 years. So until that f from 2026 to 20 I'm sorry 2006 to 2008 when that first multif family home was actually built and broke you know we had the ribbon cutting that's when my engagement with them ended. Um, and part of why you want to stay engaged is because that work that you've done, that foundation that you've laid with the research is is really about becoming the new taken for granted. Anytime you're an in-house researcher and people around the company start using the language from your report as if that's how they've always talked about the problem space, that is one of the most satisfying things. Can't put a number on that. Um, but you also kind of want to think about how it relates to the overall objectives. And then finally, um, I've already used the word resil and and these sustained incomes are about providing resiliency. So, I'm going to actually read a little bit of, uh, what the statement that I came up with for this habitat example. Um, so if you were to ask me what I thought my impact was using this framework, I'd tell you that uh, by shifting the mental framework of how they build. So that's that strategic engagement and organizational change. By shifting the mental framework of how they build, Habitat created flexible housing model that includes infill housing, renovated homes, homes, and entire communities. That's sustainable outcomes. That's the resiliency. And this is the dollars and cents part. Um allowing them to nearly triple the number of families served annually even as Charlotte area housing costs skyrocket. So they're able to three-fold increase the number of houses they build each year even as costs have gone up because they've built a model that's resilient and flexible. And they've done that because they have a mind shift. So that long-term ROI is really a statement of how you changed how they think which created impacts um based on what they do now. And that's different and it makes uh a financial difference in some cases. In this case, it makes a difference in terms of number of families served because that's how they measure their impact. So that's what I got and I am like run out of time for questions I
