How long did it take to feel comfortable in the non-academic world?

Sherman says it was gradual. Her first role at Intel was in Genevieve Bell's research lab, which was close enough to an academic environment that the transition was cushioned. When the company reorganized and she moved into a more business-oriented group, roughly two years in, she describes it as a 'rude awakening' where she realized she was working at a corporation and needed to adapt. She estimates it took several years to fully internalize what had changed, and often you only recognize what you have learned when you talk to someone who has not yet learned it.

Thinking of highly matrixed organizations in relation to Scott's work, particularly those with direct and indirect service components: when does order get in the way of success?

Sherman thinks this is a valuable research question, but cautions that it is not one you can pose directly to most business partners. Some colleagues will engage with it philosophically, and those are worth keeping close. For others, the question surfaces better through concrete project discussions: if we do it this way, what do we miss? What do we leave out? The abstract question becomes tractable when grounded in something specific they are already working on.

What is the biggest impact the concept of legibility has had on your day-to-day work at Netflix?

It has reframed part of her job as ongoing internal research. At Netflix, the scope and definition of her team's work is not fully settled, with multiple cross-functional projects and differing views on what the group is trying to accomplish. She has started treating her own stakeholders as research participants: mapping the landscape of what she sees the group doing and presenting it back to them as a provocation, inviting them to tell her what she has wrong. Netflix calls this 'farming for dissent.' It functions as both a dialogue tool and a way of surfacing shared understanding.

Can you give examples of the 'complex messy spaces' where you have built frameworks?

The clearest example she gave was leading a working group at Intel on defining disinformation and media manipulation. The group was using the term without a shared definition. She convened a diverse group, produced a rough first-draft framework, and iterated collectively. The outcome was a definition focused specifically on manipulation of audio and video content, which allowed the team to explicitly exclude adjacent problems (such as contextual mislabeling or legitimate special effects) and focus their technical work accordingly.

Legibility: What, How, and Why It Matters

Jamie Sherman, Senior Product Researcher at Netflix Studio Insights, uses the concept of "legibility" to pull together practical lessons on job searching, communicating research inside organizations, and translating qualitative insights for business audiences. Drawing on her background in cultural anthropology, theater directing, and nearly a decade at Intel, she argues that roughly 80% of a researcher's real work is internal: understanding stakeholders, learning their language, and presenting findings in forms they can actually use. She closes by complicating her own framework, borrowing from James Scott's critique of legibility to caution against over-ordering insights at the cost of losing what matters most.

Key Takeaways

Learn the language of your audience before writing your resume or presenting findings. Listen in informational interviews for the specific words, titles, and framings your target employers use, then mirror that language back.
Treat your internal environment as a research project. Identifying who your stakeholders are, what problems they are trying to solve, and what data formats they trust is as important as the research itself.
Shift the job-interview frame from 'prove I am smart' to 'show I can solve your problem.' Employers want to know you can help them succeed and fit their team, not simply that you are capable.
Org charts are relational maps. They show who is close to whom, who has seniority, and how the company itself organizes its thinking. Read them the way an anthropologist reads a kinship diagram.
Lowering the bar intentionally through a rough first draft invites collaborators to take ownership and improve the work. Starting with something concrete, even something wrong, moves a group forward faster than waiting for the right answer.
Push back against over-legibility in your own outputs. Organizing findings into clean categories can erase the messiest, most important signals. Name what does not fit and hold it deliberately rather than cutting it.

Questions & Answers

How difficult was it to adjust your writing or presentation style moving from academic life to corporate life, especially with the idea of leaving out the 'violence' of over-ordering?: Anthropology is already a storytelling genre, so scenario-based communication translated reasonably well. The bigger adjustment was adapting to each company's communication genre. At Intel, everything was bullet-point PowerPoint with a TL;DR at the front, because presentations could be interrupted after five minutes. At Netflix, the norm is written memos in Google Docs with discussion happening through comments. Each requires a different approach, and Sherman describes it as still being in progress at Netflix.
How long did it take to feel comfortable in the non-academic world?: Sherman says it was gradual. Her first role at Intel was in Genevieve Bell's research lab, which was close enough to an academic environment that the transition was cushioned. When the company reorganized and she moved into a more business-oriented group, roughly two years in, she describes it as a 'rude awakening' where she realized she was working at a corporation and needed to adapt. She estimates it took several years to fully internalize what had changed, and often you only recognize what you have learned when you talk to someone who has not yet learned it.
Thinking of highly matrixed organizations in relation to Scott's work, particularly those with direct and indirect service components: when does order get in the way of success?: Sherman thinks this is a valuable research question, but cautions that it is not one you can pose directly to most business partners. Some colleagues will engage with it philosophically, and those are worth keeping close. For others, the question surfaces better through concrete project discussions: if we do it this way, what do we miss? What do we leave out? The abstract question becomes tractable when grounded in something specific they are already working on.
What is the biggest impact the concept of legibility has had on your day-to-day work at Netflix?: It has reframed part of her job as ongoing internal research. At Netflix, the scope and definition of her team's work is not fully settled, with multiple cross-functional projects and differing views on what the group is trying to accomplish. She has started treating her own stakeholders as research participants: mapping the landscape of what she sees the group doing and presenting it back to them as a provocation, inviting them to tell her what she has wrong. Netflix calls this 'farming for dissent.' It functions as both a dialogue tool and a way of surfacing shared understanding.
Can you give examples of the 'complex messy spaces' where you have built frameworks?: The clearest example she gave was leading a working group at Intel on defining disinformation and media manipulation. The group was using the term without a shared definition. She convened a diverse group, produced a rough first-draft framework, and iterated collectively. The outcome was a definition focused specifically on manipulation of audio and video content, which allowed the team to explicitly exclude adjacent problems (such as contextual mislabeling or legitimate special effects) and focus their technical work accordingly.
What approaches for making arguments have you found most successful at helping business leaders understand the value that anthropology can bring to a corporate setting?: The most effective argument is doing something people find valuable and letting the results speak. Explaining methodology in the abstract rarely lands. Describing a past project in terms of what happened and what it led to allows the listener to imagine how it might apply to their own problems. Sherman acknowledges this is easy advice and hard to execute, comparing it to telling parents to be consistent.

Session Notes

About Jamie Sherman

PhD in cultural anthropology, Princeton; earlier background in performance studies, religion, and theater directing.
Senior Product Researcher, Netflix Studio Insights.
Previously spent approximately nine years as a social research scientist at Intel.
Co-chair of the Ethnographic Practice in Industry Conference (EPIC); epicpeople.org.
Primary research focus: media, content creators, and emerging technology. Core methods: qualitative and ethnographic, with strong interest in quantitative collaboration.

What Legibility Means Here

Sherman built this talk around two meanings of the word legible: (1) capable of being read or deciphered, and (2) capable of being understood or recognized. Both matter for researchers trying to communicate their value.

She adds a second layer from reader-response theory: the meaning of a text is a mutual creation between the writer and the reader. Applied to research, this means an insight does not sit fully formed inside the researcher. Its meaning is co-created with whoever receives it. That reframes how researchers should think about resumes, presentations, and stakeholder conversations.

Legibility in the Job Search

Know Your Reader Before You Write

When Sherman transitioned from academia, she could not decode job postings because she did not know the terminology, levels, or industries. She launched what she called a research project: contacting every social scientist she could find who was working outside academia and asking them what they did and how they got there.

Informational interviews are a low-cost way to access industry knowledge. People will share information when you ask for it rather than for a job.
Listen for language, not just content. Notice whether a company says 'users' or 'customers,' 'cross-disciplinary' or 'cross-functional.' Use their words in your materials.
Research your contacts before you meet them. Reading their published work or LinkedIn history gives context and surfaces how their interests have shifted over time.
Be honest that you are looking for a role, but do not ask for a job directly. The implicit contract of an informational interview is that the other person is sharing information, not necessarily offering a position.

Put Yourself in the Employer's Shoes

Sherman argues that most candidates waste energy trying to prove they are smart and capable. Employers who invite someone to interview have already assumed basic competence. What they actually want to know:

Can you help solve the specific problem I have right now?
Will you make me and my team more successful?
Will you be a good colleague and a cultural fit?
Will you stay, given how much effort hiring costs?

I wanted to get out of the frame of trying to convince people that I'm worthy and smart, which is just a terrible experience and makes me feel insecure and miserable and I don't actually perform well.

Her opening in recent interviews was deliberately structured, like a five-paragraph essay, to tell interviewers what they would learn about her, explain it, and then reinforce it. The goal was to control the narrative and invite a genuine two-way fit conversation rather than a one-sided performance.

Legibility on the Job

The Real Research Project Is Internal

Sherman estimates that about 80% of her research energy is directed inward: understanding her stakeholders, their problems, and the formats in which findings will land. The actual data collection and analysis, while important, is closer to table stakes for someone with a research background.

At Intel, she learned that engineers trusted spreadsheets, graphs, and pie charts. She adopted those formats to make her qualitative findings more actionable for that audience.
On one prioritization project, a engineering partner suggested scoring use cases in a spreadsheet by how many participant stories referenced each one. As an anthropologist, this was not her natural analysis method, but she adopted it for three reasons: it was not a bad method, it brought the partner into the research as a co-owner, and it made the findings immediately legible to that team.
Each company has its own communication genre. At Intel, bullet-point decks with a TL;DR were standard. At Netflix, written memos shared in Google Docs with comment-thread discussion are the norm. Adapting to each is part of the job.

Read Org Charts Like Kinship Diagrams

It took Sherman about three years to recognize that org charts are more than administrative documents. She now reads them as relational maps: who is close to whom, who holds seniority, who will be affected by a reorg. When companies reorganize, relationships shift even when direct reporting lines do not.

She also sees org charts as reflections of how a company organizes its thinking, not just its people. The structure itself encodes assumptions about what matters and how work should be divided.

The Critique: What Legibility Leaves Out

Sherman closes by returning to the theoretical origins of the legibility concept, specifically James Scott's work on the relationship between governments and populations. Scott observed that governments impose top-down order onto complex, self-sustaining systems, and that the resulting plans often fail because they strip out the messy, unordered elements that actually keep the system alive. A planned monoculture forest, for instance, lacks the understory plants and animals that sustain a natural forest.

Applied to research practice, the question becomes: what do you lose when you make your findings legible? What gets cut because it does not fit a category? Sherman's example comes from content creator research at Intel, where she kept encountering a distinction between 'creativity as service to an idea' versus 'creativity as personal vision.' She could not explain why it mattered for silicon architecture, but she believed it did.

I will oftentimes try to be legible but also include some of the illegibility that I find. The things that I don't know why they fit. And I say: I'm not sure how this fits, I'm just going to put it out there and tell you that I think it matters, and we're going to hold it and think about that.

The practical implication: build legibility deliberately, but name what does not fit rather than discarding it. Resist the pressure to make everything resolve cleanly.

Framework Development: The Shitty First Draft Method

When Sherman was asked to lead a working group at Intel on defining disinformation and media manipulation, she used what she calls the shitty first draft method. The approach:

Produce a deliberately imperfect first version of the framework. Be explicit that it is wrong and incomplete.
Share it with the group as a provocation rather than a proposal.
Invite collaborators to tear it apart, reorder it, and rebuild it. This gives them ownership over the outcome.
Expect the final result to be a collective product better than anything one person could have produced alone.

In the disinformation project, the working group ultimately defined their scope around manipulation of audio and video content, explicitly excluding cases where media itself is unaltered but context or labels are changed, and excluding legitimate manipulation such as special effects. Having a concrete starting point made it possible to define both what the group was and was not working on, which became a useful tool for the team.

Making the Case for Anthropology and Qualitative Research

When asked how to help business leaders understand the value of anthropological research, Sherman's answer is direct: the best argument is demonstrating value through a concrete project, not making an abstract case. Show results and impact rather than explaining methodology. If a past project led to something tangible, describe what happened and let the listener imagine how it might apply to their problem.

Transcript

Read the full transcript

okay the screen that you are seeing is it your title screen it is excellent excellent it's again i've got like multiple monitors going on i apologize my name is billy spivak um from accelerant research so i'd like to welcome everybody um who is joining for the first time today and those of you who have been with us throughout the day um and have been anxiously awaiting jamie sherman to speak to us today about a topic that i'm very curious about because uh usually i know by the title uh what the uh what you're gonna be speaking on in this one i'm totally stumped uh so i'm very excited um legibility what how and why it matters so it's a very provocative uh title there and uh jamie uh comes to us from netflix she's a senior product researcher and i'm gonna let her go ahead and take it away awesome thank you and i'm gonna stop sharing and you should be able to now i'm gonna start um so i'm gonna try sharing this as a as a window and then you can all tell me what you see now you see not what i was hoping you would see let's see of course not okay i'm going to stop sharing that and i'm going to do a different way we can we can see your wonderful dog though excellent he is my visual entertainment um for when if you get bored with with what i'm talking about you can always um uh look at the dog excellent okay can you all see the the title slide now i believe everyone can and uh if anyone has any questions along the way uh that you would like jamie to address please put it in the chat button for us um and jamie i'll go ahead and monitor that for you too okay that sounds great and um i tell people sometimes that i come from a very interrupted culture um both in my my home and my work life so if there's if there are questions that come up that seem relevant um then you will have it's just fine if you interrupt um and if not we'll have q a at the end so um so i'm gonna talk a little bit just sort of like this about myself first but i'll just for a second i'll just address the the fact that you said oh it's a mysterious title and that's really interesting because part of what i'm going to be talking about is not being mysterious necessarily and how to how to think about that um but really when i when i was asked to do this talk um you know bill said oh you can talk about something that maybe a presentation you've given before and i said you know i don't have a fixed presentation but i do have a bunch of soap boxes um and things that i will rant about at will uh and so legibility is really the framework that i came up with as a way to pull together some of the themes in the soapboxes um that i talk about pretty regularly when people ask me questions and i find myself going on and on about um so um so so anyway so we'll just walk through it i'll tell you a little bit about who i am first um so so first of all some of the what i call the dry facts about me um i got my phd in cultural anthropology at princeton um uh before that i was studying uh uh performance studies and religion and before that theater directing uh so have kind of an eclectic background today i'm a senior product researcher at netflix studio insights that's a relatively recent transition before that i spent about nine years as a social research scientist at intel and today uh i can't help but pitch um i am co-chair of the ethnographic practice and industry conference um which for those of you on this line if you're not aware of it you should be and you should check it out because it's a fantastic community and resource uh and it's coming up soon they also have uh tutorials and talks and panels it's a whole big thing so epic people.org and if you ask me at the end i'll repeat that um again just some dry facts my primary focus for the last few years has been on media and content creators and emerging technology um my background my wheelhouse is qualitative and ethnographics um skills i'm also for a quant qual person i think of myself as extraordinarily um sort of quant fascinated i've said in the past that i want my very own data scientists to be attached to the hip so i have a record of international and remote research 12 patents filed a cadence of published papers and various kinds of recognitions for innovation and business impact a few kind of what i call the wet facts or or not the dry facts i grew up in berkeley california i have three older brothers which it might explain that interrupted culture i used to be a theater artist i think i mentioned that i think one of the things that might tell you is that i really am deeply passionate about collaboration i truly believe that when we come together we are more than the sum of our parts um and and even more than that i was actually a theater director uh before i became an anthropologist and i think that matters because the perspective as an actor for example has to be very much within the role but when you're a director you're really thinking about the big picture as well as all of the details and you're thinking about how it all fits together and i think um as a theater director i defined myself as somebody who used theater as a way of asking questions what could this mean what could this be um as an as an anthropologist i think of myself as asking similar questions about what is this um what is it trying to be what does it actually mean so there's actually quite a bit of continuity in thinking about how the details add up to the picture that we see some of the things that i do really well i drive high impact user research initiatives into strategy engineering and product i create frameworks for thinking about complex messy spaces um i what i mean by that is oftentimes you'll hear people about a particular topic say it's just you know there is no pattern here um it's all just like so variable you can't really say anything and my response to that is one that's just not possible uh there are always patterns um and one of the things that i do is i take those i take those variabilities um and those different sort of individual stories and really think about um what are the what are some of the ways that we could make sense of this what does that help us do what are the limitations of the way that we're making sense of it the buckets that we're using that is something that is kind of one of my strengths i'm a storyteller i think of myself as an experimental pragmatist that means that i don't really care about the method that much as long as it gets me where i want to go and i will freely adapt borrow and steal from anything and i rarely remember the names of the methods i use because they're all just another way of getting at the question my happy place is working on hard difficult problems with smart people who like what they do that's i like to have fun and work hard those things to me go together they're not separate so actually i think the better title for this might have been legibility what why and how to do it um but this really is again sort of a way of pulling together some of the ways that i've come to think about the work that i do and also some of the ways that i think of i've been helpful to me in thinking about how to represent myself how to talk about what i do um as and and in terms of both looking for a job in terms of being on the job and then finally because i am a social scientist and because this is what we do i want to take my own framework and then sort of think about the risks and limits of of thinking about it this way what might me lose by thinking about legibility so legibility um this definition at the top comes from merriam-webster online it's not deep in any particular or theoretically thick in any particular way but i really kind of like it um because it all partly because it just has two the the two meanings are really quite fun and because it has this um inexplicably amusing um and dark quote from thomas wolfe so the first one capable of being read or deciphered um just you know can you read it um and the second the idea of murder sweltering in his heart being legible on his face but importantly sort of this idea of being understood how can i be discoverable how can how can my insights be discoverable or understood what does it mean to be discovered and understood and the second piece i want to bring to this is something that i took from i guess my first graduate program where i was in an interdisciplinary program at nyu gallatin school and in one of our first year seminars we did a lot of reading across different disciplines within the humanities and social sciences this comes from reader response theory and it is the idea that a text in itself is not necessary is not a fixed and and solid thing it doesn't mean only the words it's actually what the reader brings to it so the so so the the the meaning of a text is is actually a mutual creation of the reader plus the text and that matters a lot to me when i think about how people understand me how i understand them that this is actually if we think of text not just as words on paper but text as many different things this presentation can be seen as a text an interview can be seen as a text how is the meaning of that um created i think it's a it's actually a mutual creation as opposed to a single thing that resides within me or within you um so this is kind of my basic message in terms of thinking about job searching um and and being on the job and the first thing that i want to say is that being looking for work sucks and we should all just acknowledge that it's hard it's miserable and you don't get paid for it so that that out of that aside um i want to share a quick story some of you if any of you have known me from um from any previous life or have heard me talk before you may have heard the story before um but when people ask me about how i made the transition from academia in into industry i tell them that my graduate program um was extraordinarily bad at professionalization in ways that i both love it was intellectually incredibly nurturing because it wasn't about how do you get a job it was about what what are you seeing what are your insights how do you think about this um but the downside was is that they didn't say anything about how to get a job or anything outside of academia and so when i realized that for various reasons that i won't necessarily go into but that i needed i wanted i needed to look outside of the academic market in terms of my future um i didn't know i was like i don't know what it's called i don't know what i don't i can't i can't even read the classified ads because i don't know what the nobody says wanted anthropologists who studied bodybuilders nobody so i i don't even i don't know what the positions are i don't know what the levels are i don't know what industries i'm looking at i have no idea where to go and so i started what i called a new research project which was called what do anthropologists do when they're not teaching and for that project i reached far and wide doing what we might call a rolling recruit of my entire network for anyone that looked like an anthropologist or a social scientist of any kind that was working outside of academia and i contacted them and i said tell me what you do and how you got there so i think though that i think many i don't know the backgrounds of the folks here on the line but um but if you're a researcher um or a user researcher or a market researcher of any kind i think it's familiar territory to think of the need to understand the market or the industry or the users but here i'm really talking about understanding the industry um and you know how do i how do i actually um you know how do i understand the employers um i'll say and and i've said this certainly before um inter inter informational interviews are a gift from the universe to you in this project um because uh people will do them when you come to people when and you're asking for information and not for a job many of us have been on the other side uh many of us um you know feel like it is a way of giving back um and uh and it's just a it's just a great gift it's a real gift of access um but when you do an informational interview i think it's worth thinking about like what are you actually looking for how do you get to know your reader um how do you actually take your assumptions about a um about an industry or a market or or you know what it means to be for example a market researcher because i have a lot of biases and assumptions by the way about market research that i come to this with having grown up as i remind you in berkeley uh which is a sort of a rich history of anti-capitalism um and being against the man and so market research has um a little bit of a connotation that i will freely admit i had you know i kind of walked into it but so so what do we do when we turn we flip that on its head so thinking about you know you know turning my assumptions on their head asking myself what how do researchers see themselves how do people in those fields see themselves do i do i resonate with that you know so in one of my informational interviews i talked to somebody who absolutely hated what he did uh and hated the company that that we were talking about um and as he was talking i'm like that sounds awesome that sounds great i would love that and all of the things that he disliked were things that i actually felt like were really really wonderful so you have to kind of think about you know sort of listening through the interview um and doing your homework i think um you know google internet and linkedin are my friends um i internet stalk people all the time i read what they wrote i read when i was in graduate school i read their their papers and their dissertations before i talked to them uh sometimes with awkward results when i asked people about things that they had written 20 years before but nonetheless it kind of gave me a sense of context for them and what they'd been interested in and and where they started versus where they ended up which is always super fascinating because people study things like i study bodybuilders and now i study um people who make movies and do data science um and then finally just sort of one kind of caveat is to say um you know being on it you can be honest about the fact that you're looking for a job and trans or if you're transitioning but i would say just don't ask for a job because uh when you agree to an informational interview on the other side as a person giving the interview um that was part of the the sort of essential contract is that i don't have it i don't i don't necessarily have a job to give and if i do then it's up to me to offer um you know if i do have a job opening so it's worth being honest because in fact that is how i got my first job in industry is by doing an informational interview um but don't ask for it uh that's not advancing there we go um so then thinking about how to translate that back into my text right the opening that you saw is actually the opening that i used in one of my in my recent round of interviews when i was on the job market and one of the things that the reasons that i put that in is because i remembered um actually um something uh somebody had told me about writing a five paragraph essay which seems kind of silly but that in the introduction you tell people what they're going to read and then you explain it to them and then you tell them what they read and so that was my attempt to sort of really control the narrative and when i wanted to talk about my work i wanted to tell them what they what they were going to see i wanted them to tell them what they would see so that then they could see it but i think importantly i i really think that when i was doing the informational interviews one of the things that i really listened for is how do people not just not just what they say but how do they talk what is the kind of language that they use so that when i wrote my resume i could use that kind of language i could use that kind of framing thinking about you know uh do you talk about you know i early in my career i i was i came to intel and i was like oh they call them users that's what they call the people that they talk to and if i call them users people will know who i mean and so thinking and that seems like it's a silly example but really thinking about you know do they call them um you know they don't call them cross-disciplinary they call them cross-functional and actually that's kind of the same thing because what we mean is people coming to a project from different kinds of backgrounds and different kinds of thinking and and so i can take my experiences and my skill sets and put them into a language that my my readers my imp you know my potential employers can actually understand what i'm saying um is not that um i work with people who are economic um you know majored in economics and history but rather that i worked with a cross-functional group of researchers on a particular project right second putting yourself in their shoes kind of understanding what it is that they want to know as opposed to what i want them to know and and some examples of that are for you know what they would i think that when i first came into interviewing oftentimes i felt really compelled to convince people that i was smart and capable and that wasn't a mistake because actually people don't care or they've already assumed that you are or they wouldn't be interviewing you in the first place what they really want to know as employers are you know since i have a job opening that means i have a problem or a set of problems that i need to solve what i want to know is can you help me solve my problem will you help me will you make me successful will you fit in with my team and be a good colleague for the people that i work with will you fit in with the the the the sort of environment that i have to offer because i have no um i put a lot of energy into um looking for people to fill my my team and uh and and to have to do it all over again feels exhausting on the employer side as well so how can you help me understand you know that you can solve my problem how can you how can you show me ways that you can help me be successful perhaps by showing me ways that you've helped other people be successful or other teams be successful in the past how can you show me that you'll be a good fit for my team and that last one i think is really interesting because actually when i go into a job interview as a as either i also as an interviewee i have the same question you know will i fit with this team i don't want to take a job and be unhappy and so some of what i was telling you for example up front was to say here's who i am you know this is the way i work this is this is um you know you know tell me is this a good fit right can i give you a sense of who i am so that you can give me a sense of who you are and we can decide if we're a good match it's like dating right and so all of these constructs i will say help me um a lot in getting out of the frame set of trying to convince people that i'm worthy and smart which is just a terrible terrible experience and makes me feel um insecure and miserable and i don't actually perform well um but i want to talk now again about legibility in terms of in in terms of the job itself um and and this is something i will say that i think other people may pick up more quickly than i did i felt like it took me a while to figure out that my real research project when i was on the job was actually not the research that i performed as part of my job but the research that i did on my job itself figuring out what my job is figuring out who my stakeholders are figuring out what do they care about what is the what are the problems that they're trying to solve what is the kind of information that actually matters um how can i present it in ways that actually make sense to you i discovered at intel um and and i say this actually with great affection um that engineers at intel love spreadsheets spreadsheets make them happy um you know that and so i said oh i can do spreadsheets i can show you i can show you graphs graphs make you happy pie charts make you happy i can do that and and and so being willing to kind of also flex how i talk about my data how i talk about um you know so so both in terms of of uh you know i think i think the the the kinds of data that i collect realizing for example that for the engineers again that i worked with um it it not only mattered that you were working on a film versus audio but it mattered because i work on media and it actually mattered how many screens you have um and and how big they were and if they're plugged into the wall that's data i can collect but i can't i won't collect it unless i know it's important um and so realizing that that it for them to make the kinds of decisions that they had to make on the basis of my research this was the kind of data that actually made a difference in making those decisions um and then and then again sort of like and how do i present it and even sometimes how i analyze it um in one of my last projects with intel um we were trying to prioritize use cases um and i the one of my closest partners um said hey if we put it in a in a spreadsheet um and we and we actually score it by um by you know how many people of in our stories um you know we have a stories on one side and the different use cases we've identified and we can score down the bottom how many of them actually would use this use case and then we add it up at the bottom we'll actually know which ones are most important because the the number of people that use that will tell us something about the scale of that use case now i'll tell you as an anthropologist this is not how i normally do my my analysis i i just don't think that way i have i have a whole other set of processes more like you know sticky notes and affinity maps and and coding and something i tend to call soft focus as i kind of look across and think about the patterns that i'm seeing um but i but i listened to um to my friend david and i said okay why because i think there were a few different reasons one it wasn't a terrible method two it brought him into my research and and and really leveraged the fact that he was engaging in a really important way it made him part of the project and gave him ownership over what we were doing and three again in the context of legibility he could understand he could follow exactly what we were doing it so it gave him a real a way of thinking about the findings that made them more impactful for for for that team um so this is kind of my my um just sort of my my so this soapbox is is again to just sort of say that i think that about 80 of my research tends to be internally focused um i tend to think of the external research as if you have a background in research already if you went to school and studied something that that sort of taught you how to do research and analysis that the actual research that we do as researchers is is i don't want to say trivial but it's it it fairly goes without saying that you know how to do it it's not actually terribly difficult to do um it's really the understand it's really that translation and really that internal research and continuing that that i find has been the most impactful for me in making my work impactful and enabling me to communicate it enabling me to be legible um and the final insight i'll share and for some of you this may not matter but for others of us who wonder why am i staring at these org charts or how do i know where i sit um org charts are like our relationships um and i learned this it took me about three years to figure this out because before that i'm like i don't know it's a bunch of like mostly guys because i worked in a tech company it's a bunch of guys they all look the same um i don't know who they are or why i care but then i realized at some point i had this epiphany i said oh these are like genealogies these tell me who my cousins are they tell me who i'm related to they tell me who i'm close to and this matters even more in the context of companies that reorganize on a regular basis because when when a company reorganizes it changes your relationships it changes even if it doesn't change who you report to it changes who's close to you it changes who you collaborate with and how you collaborate with them it changes who's senior to you um and and so who are your elders um and even if they're 15 years younger it doesn't really matter if they're if they're if they're up here then they're still that they're still on some level um an elder even in a flat organization it just sort of says something about their role about how they think about what they're doing the other interesting thing about org charts is that they are it turns out that there are ways of thinking um they are literally ways of organizing thought when you think about a company and so i've started to see them um i started to look at them as a reflection of the way the company itself thinks about what it's doing so um so those are just um some of the reasons i look at those and i think they're they're worth reading so this is kind of the last part of of of what i really have to say and then we can kind of open this up to conversation um but i i actually went back when i thought of hey legibility is actually a a really interesting way of thinking about um what these soap boxes and these rants that i have and these stories that i tell and then i went back to look at the theory that comes you know what the origins of the notion of legibility because i really did first hear about this in in anthropology coursework um and i was like oh actually legibility was a critique it the the the origins of legibility and anthropology come from the work of james scott and thinking about the relationship between governments and people and one of the questions that he was looking at is why is it that governments impose these programs that don't work that don't really that actually oftentimes do as much damage as they do good and one of the things that he came up with is that that in order to understand um governments have a tendency to try to make order in what is in fact not exactly orderly or not ordered in a in a sort of you know sort of very uh schematic way um and the picture that he's that this is actually from his book shows kind of a natural forest and then a planned forest that is sort of you know uh sort of top-down planted and what's missing in that picture that the the organic forest lives it has its life cycle it reproduces itself it sustains itself the planned forest actually does not because it's missing all of the the the the ecosystem that sustains it it's missing all of the the the non-forest the non-tree plants and animals that actually make the forest a lot a living thing and so i think it's worth thinking about in your work whether or in you're looking for work what do you miss when you create legibility for yourself and for your employers what are you not saying what does that order leave out and literally what kind of violence is done as we organize our materials into legible readable um kinds of insights so so when we think sometimes when we present our insights it's tempting and i think i've been telling you all you know all about how to make yourself legible but what did i leave out what did i in the way that i organized it in order to be legible what did i miss is there anything important that doesn't easily categorize itself and i'm thinking here about actually in the work that i was doing um you know recently at intel around um creative content makers one of the things that i could never figure out like why it mattered was that people had a different way of you know thinking about what is creative when we think about content creators what is the creative part and i started asking people partly because i was kind of curious and we had a hypothesis that you know the whole point of technology is to help you be creative then what we need to do is enable that creative part and then and then you know and then help you with the other stuff that you don't want to do um but we had ideas about what that creative part was and i started asking people and and it really was quite interesting and very difficult to figure out why it would matter for your computer which is what i was actually helping um the silicon architects think about was what needs to be on silicon architecture in order to support the work of content creators so it's very hard to think about like the idea of for example creativity as service to an idea as opposed to vision of an idea why that matters for the silicon architecture i don't know i really don't um but i will say that i think it does and so occasionally i find that that i will oftentimes try to be legible but also include some of the illegibility that i find the things that i don't know why they fit and i say i'm not sure how this fits i'm just going to put it out there and tell you that i think it matters and we're going to hold it and think about that so just to encourage you to not let go of the the slight chaos of of all of this now that i've spent half an hour telling you to be readable and and that's it that is the end um and i'll just share finally that this is more how i think of myself than than the regimented orderly forest this is um if you can see my room you can also see that's probably reflected in my aesthetic it's a little bit more organic for us than ordered so thank you and i just want to open it up to questions you're on mute billy some questions have just been popping in um one of them be coming from rosie how difficult was it for you to adjust your writing or presentation style moving from academic life to corporate life especially with your idea of leaving out violence so that's actually a great question i have a few different thoughts about it so anthropology is a storytelling genre um most anthropology if not most ethnographies tend to start with some version actually most of them start with some version is i went to this place to study this thing and then something else happened so this is what i studied instead um so but but nonetheless they often start with scenarios and stories and those i still find quite useful um really useful in kind of um helping people understand um what i mean by the kinds of sort of dry insights so if i say you know people really care about um you know the the why does latency matter for example when you're using um a a media product and i can tell them a story that i heard from somebody about how how crazy it makes them so not just the quote but kind of the story and setting the scene um and the the so so in some ways sort of preserving that but in other ways i will say um even it's not even just the the academia to industry but each um each company has its own i i would say communication genre so so at intel for example everything was powerpoint it was all bullet points i i learned over time to communicate not in in in full sentences not in writing nobody would read it bullet points and then tell the story um and every presentation starts with the tldr because actually um there's very that they are very interrupted and um and in some cases depending on the who you're presenting to you have about five minutes um and that's all you're going to get before people start asking questions and and things so so you're not always guaranteed to get through your material um but where i am now is actually quite different at netflix we communicate a great deal through memos and people write out their ideas in google sheets and they share them and and actually a lot of the conversation happens through the comments that we have back and forth and so it's a completely different way of communicating that i'm still getting used to and still um and there's some things i really like about it um does that answer the question billy yeah i think so did i okay so yes it is kind of challenging but but think of it um i think of it sometimes as genres of writing right um and how long did it take you to make that transition to feel comfortable in the non-academic world so i think um i think it was a gradual transition so for me i was fortunate enough in some ways that when i when i was first hired into at intel i was in i was in the labs i was in the r d space and actually i was hired into a group of um it was a it was genevieve bell who some of you may have heard of as an anthropologist who is senior fellow at intel she at that time had a lab and we had a combination we had three groups of people we had designers we had technologists and we had uh social scientists that we were working together thinking about the future but being hired into that group of social scientists um was a real boon for me because there was a lot more latitude to think and talk about um sort of academically and even the group as a whole was very research oriented and so it was much more familiar in terms of the modes of communication when the company reorganized which by the way was a surprise to me i hadn't occurred to me that that organizations reorganized um and i make a point now of telling everybody that's coming out of academia just be prepared and i also tell people that of all the organ reorganizations that i've been through i'm still mad about that one the other ones i knew were coming that one i didn't know and i'm kind of bitter about it because i had a great job nonetheless um you know i found myself in in more of a sort of business oriented profit and loss and that was sort of probably about two years in and that was a bit of a what i call a rude awakening when i realized i was actually i was actually employed at a corporation i was going to have to get used to it and so so i tell people it definitely took me um a few years to even realize uh what had happened and what i had done so um i've seen many other people who are much more um i don't know what just happened i suddenly went um i can stop sharing i don't i gotta stop sharing it all and so um yeah so it took me a while um i think keep working at it if it's taking you a while um and and sometimes i think you don't realize what you've learned um until you talk to somebody who hasn't yet learned those things or you start to see things a little bit differently um and so um it definitely took me a while i'm a slow on the uptake sometimes well and the next question comes from katherine and she has one that uh very much does tie into what you're just talking about getting used to big organizations she said thinking of those highly matrix organizations in relationship to scott particularly those with both a direct and indirect service component makes her want to start asking this question to business partners and business owners when does order get in the way of success i think that's a fantastic question um i suspect um depending on where you work you may or may not get uh you know it feels almost like the kind of question that um you'll get at through other stories about other things and that will be part of your it's like your research question as opposed to the question you pose to participants um i know and i'm only talking here from um my experience with the people that i work with um there are a few of whom i could ask such a philosophical question and that would respond and be really interested in that and those are the people that i like to keep close and i want to work with again but there are a lot of other people um for whom they wouldn't know how to answer that question but i do think that those questions come up um and they can they through concrete kinds of stories um and and they'll start to and you can start to ask well like you know and or concrete projects like well what do we you know if we do it this way what are you know do we miss something do we you know so just exactly what you said but but in relationships very concrete things that they're already working on and thinking about thank you and our next question comes from bill he wants to know what the biggest impact this concept has had on your day-to-day work at netflix um so the biggest impact for me is is really continuing to research my my my environment and my work and continuing to pay explicit attention it sort of for me it reframes part of what i do in my job and the other thing that's happened in my particular area in my particular position at netflix um is that actually um the domain in which i'm working is not particularly clear there's a lot for a lot of reasons we have you know not just one cross-functional team but lots of people working on lots of different cross-functional projects the scope of what we're doing actually extends well beyond the projects that we're working on and there's a lot of different ideas about what this is that are not necessarily clear and so i've i've found that my um my work lately has been very much on what is this thing um you know that we're working on and i've started to re reflect it back as um you know so almost as if my research right now is the is the group of people i'm working with and i've i've started presenting my findings back to them saying here's the landscape of what i'm seeing and and using that to not just to tell them what they're doing but as a kind of provocation to say here's what i'm seeing tell me if you think i've got it wrong just as i would oftentimes with participants right so i find it a really valuable tool to share my insights with my participants so that they can tell me um if they think i've got them wrong or i think i've cut or i've missed something in the same way i'm doing something very similar with the stakeholders that i work with is sharing what i think the the landscape of our work looks like and um both in order to you know create a little bit of dialogue and also as a as what i what turns out and i really like this term at netflix they call it farming for dissent and and i really i really like it i really like that idea um but i also you know i also think of it as kind of a provocation here's the thing respond to it oh it's fantastic um you said something early on when you were introducing yourself and you said i create frameworks for thinking about complex messy spaces which is such an exciting way to think about what we do right um can you give us some examples um some of those messy spaces um yeah so uh this is again i'm gonna most of my examples will come from intel partly because um uh you know i'm still new at netflix and as you can hear i'm still trying to figure out what my job is so i don't want to say too much about it um but i and i spent a long time at intel so so um as part of my work at intel i got pulled into a conversation about um what they were calling uh it was about media manipulation and disinformation there was a group of people that were interested in working on that um and i said i don't think we know what you what we mean right and i find that is actually often the case we come up with a term um and we all use it and it's great especially big terms like disinformation or um you know or toxicity uh i was worried um and so and we're like well what do we actually mean by that and one of the things that i did with that group and i have to say this is one of the the reasons that i loved working at intel um so somebody called me to talk to me about it um i said you don't know you don't know what you mean and then the next thing they did was invite me to the meeting and made me lead the lead the working group on defining what we mean i said that's brilliant when somebody tells you you're doing it all wrong you invite them in and put them in charge of figuring it out and so i was like and actually that the only thing that i complained about is he didn't give me any warning whatsoever he invited me to the meeting and he said and jamie's going to lead this work group and i was like i am but i really appreciate it um i really appreciated that um and so what we really did is we actually i you know and so i called in a group of people who i thought were smart and i said i have no idea how to define this um and i i did some you know looking around at different kinds of frameworks and i tried to sort of um take a hack at it i use a method i call um and people who um i call it the shitty first draft method so excuse my language for a minute um but i think um i think that there can be great utility in bringing um uh the bad draft i'm gonna come up with a bad idea and you all will help me make it better because that's what you're here for so i think and because i think having some place to start um is is often good so you start so so this is another so we ended up creating a framework that was both broad enough to you know around sort of the the kinds of problems we thought we were talking about and also enabled us to kind of see what we weren't working on you know what are the pieces of this that that are that fall out in this case we were really interested in the manipulation of audio and video um and that we were able to say hey actually there's there's there's certain there's lots of disinformation that's actually you don't have to manipulate anything all you need to do is put a label on it so you take a picture of sarajevo and call it portland um and you know and so you haven't manipulated the media itself you've manipulated the framing and we were very quickly able to say that's not what we're doing um and that's what that enabled um at the same time you know i was you were talking it's like you know there's lots of media manipulation that is perfectly legitimate um you know you know all of special effects for example right and and that's not what we mean either and so we were able to kind of use that that that sort of um that work in order to be explicit about what it is that we were working on and what it is that we were not working on and that became actually a really powerful tool for that for that group even though um by the way i knew nothing about the technologies that we were proposing to use the solutions themselves were well out of my depth in terms of my technological knowledge um and and i i find that that's actually a useful thing to know um i often don't fully understand the technologies that lie behind the things that we're developing if you ask me about the parts of a silicon chip i could give you people that could help you but i don't always know but what i do know is what people do and so we meet in the middle you know i say you tell me what your component does and how it works and i'll talk to you about people what people do and we'll figure out where we meet oh that is so interesting and such a big uh messy topic of which if you could only just address it on a national level we'd be really happy jamie yeah that would be great [Laughter] and when you're talking about the shitty first draft method is that based on just uh assumptions that you're pulling together like all the things that people think it might be and that becomes part of your draft and then you poke holes in it or yeah kind of i mean actually the shitty first bath comes from um actually my background is a theater director right as a theater director um you know you're pulling together a show and you come in and like all these people are asking you questions and you're like i don't really know the answers i wear my hair like this or should i wear it like that i'm like i don't know um but but i really also felt like i would come i would have a vision of like i don't know you could enter from the left and you could do this and let's try it this way and usually it was a bad idea it wasn't particularly good but what it did do is it gave somebody something gave us something to work with and one of the actors would be like hey how about if i came in from under the table would that be better i'm like i don't know let's try it and so we would do that but having some place to start was a really critical tool in enabling us to move forward because you discover what you're not doing or what it's not and so so it the shitty first draft is really my best effort my i'm not like i don't want to sort of be i am dismissive but i you know it is my best effort at the moment but it lowers the bar in terms of like i'm willing to be wrong i'm pretty sure it is wrong but i'm showing you i'm not just telling you but i'm showing you the direction in which i'm thinking and if you have a better idea by all means please this is what we're here for is to figure out the right way and so um you know in that particular that particular group of people were incredible and came from so many different backgrounds um and uh one of the people i worked with was just you know he took what i did and rearranged it all and came back with it all upside down i'm like i have no idea what you're doing explain it to me and it turned and we ended up sort of coming that the end result was sort of a a combination but having something concrete to start with and having defined it as not as the shitty first draft and not where we were going to end up um i think kind of like the the spreadsheet that i described earlier it invited the people i was working with to have ownership over it and to change it and to make it better and what we came up with collectively i do believe was better than the sum of our parts i don't think any one of us could have figured it out alone or figured it out as well on our own excellent thank you so much a question has come in from calvin what approaches for arguments have you found to be most successful at helping business leaders understand the value that anthropo anthropology can bring to a corporate world um so my manager recently um was reminding me that the best argument is doing something that people find valuable and so oftentimes when i talk to people about what research does they don't really understand it and they don't necessarily see the values the best argument is showing and doing something and i actually mean that that's actually relevant both for um you know being in a company so getting that first project done but also even for what we were talking about a lot earlier in terms of you know resume building you know crafting how you talk about it um even if you're um even if what you're talking about is in a very different domain if i can show how i how my work helped something led to something i'm starting to think in terms of results and impact and that's what the people that are talking to me actually care about they start they can they can begin to imagine how it might work for them um so so the so ultimately the argument that you that works best is examples um i think i mean i don't know um i hope that helps i don't know it's just because you say it doesn't make it easy by the way i just want to say it's like people telling you as a parent in parenting classes to be consistent and if you have children you know like you know i hope you're rolling your eyes because it's not that easy it's easy to say not easy to do so well jimmy thank you so much that's the last question that we have unless somebody wants to sneak one in at the five minutes to go um but thank you we appreciate your time it was a really interesting subject and we wish you the best of luck at netflix and thank you so much i really enjoyed my time here and thank you to all who who sat in okay everyone uh who joined us today thank you so much on behalf of the accelerant we hope you have a wonderful day um and all of this will be made available on the website so uh we hope that you join us for uh the next sessions thank you so much have a great day everyone bye