• 1) To design and conduct ethnography for strategic consulting across markets and institutional contexts
• 2) Understand how to leverage organizational cultures
• 3) Translate the findings yielded by ethnographic methods into innovation, product development and services rendered in strategic consulting
• 4) Applying field research to bring essential people-centred insights to strategic consulting

Making Better Bets on Human Behavior: A Field Guide to Strategic Consulting

What really informs and drives your buying? What notions, values and past experiences define what new technologies you trust? What personal and organizational priorities fuel and fashion the ways in which you work? From plotting consumer needs and mapping user experience (UX) design to more holistic understandings of complex organizations, fieldwork based ethnography has been applied by leading consulting companies to the operation and strategic development of enterprises. Going beyond conventional sit-down interviews, surveys, questionnaires, focus groups and quantitative methods, the methods of ethnography often more accurately capture the values and valuations of agents, which cannot be assumed to be utility maximizing. Rather, human behavior often turns out to be unexpected, paradoxical and illogical. Currently, leading consulting companies apply such ethnographic methods to get inside the real desires and decisions of consumers, to unravel the trust barometers of end-users subject to new technologies, to uncover the blind spots of complex organizations and to forecast market trends.

The purpose of this course is to learn how to plan and conduct fieldwork based ethnography for organizational strategy formulation and execution. In collaboration with a leading consultancy company based in Copenhagen, you will learn how to plan and conduct fieldwork in different markets and organizational contexts and translate your findings and insights into strategy formulation and actionable recommendations. You will develop a practical understanding of what it takes to work closely with different clients - from C-suite executives in global corporations to grassroots organizations – to execute your advice and tailor your strategic recommendations to their specific needs. Ultimately, you will gain familiarity and real world experience with fieldwork based ethnography, where the focus is on solving real business problems from the backstage of inventory management to the frontstage of e-commerce.

Ordinary 6 weeks course

Preliminary assignment: The course coordinator uploads Preliminary Assignment on Canvas at the end of May. It is expected that students participate as it will be included in the final exam, but the assignment is without independent assessment and grading.

Course and exam timetable is/will be available on  https://www.cbs.dk/uddannelse/international-summer-university-programme-isup/courses-and-exams

We reserve the right to cancel the course if we do not get enough applications. This will be communicated on  https://www.cbs.dk/uddannelse/international-summer-university-programme-isup/courses-and-exams in start March.

Tentative literature:

1) Gillian Tett: Anthro-Vision: How Anthropology can Explain Business and Life

2) Mike Youngblood & Benjamin Chesluk: Rethinking Users: The Design Guide to

    User Ecosystem Thinking.

3) Sam Ladner:  Mixed Methods: A Short Guide to Applied Mixed Methods Research

4) Sheila Pontis:  Making Sense of Field Research

5)  Hannah Knox & Dawn Nafus Ethnography for a Data-Saturated World

6) Jay Hasbrouck: Ethnographic Thinking: From Method to Mindset

7) J. A. English-Lueck  Cultures@SiliconValley, Second Edition

8) Jan Chipchase The Field Study Handbook

9) Christian Madsbjerg Sensemaking: The Power of the Humanities in the Age of the Algorithm