How Lego took to anthropology: ‘The Moment of Clarity, Using the human sciences to solve your toughest business problem

February 26, 2014 3:24 pm

How Lego took to anthropology

By Andrew Jack

‘The Moment of Clarity, Using the human sciences to solve your toughest business problems’, by Christian Madsbjerg and Mikkel Rasmussen,Harvard Business Review Press $28; £18.99

A decade ago, Lego’s plastic brick empire was starting to crumble. Half a century after patenting its click-fit system, the Danish toy company reported heavy losses and gave a sign of the depth of its troubles: the grandson of the founder relinquished his place as chief executive to a McKinsey consultant.

In setting out to turn round the business, the new boss inevitably turned to outside advice. Unusually, though, he embedded anthropologist researchers into families in US and German cities for months, taking photos, compiling diaries, talking to parents and spending time shopping and playing with children.

The result was to help reverse Lego’s decline by ceasing its diversification away from its classic nerdy brick-building: a trend driven by the erroneous assumptionthat its customers no longer had time to play, and that the advent of electronic “plug and play” games meant they wanted instant gratification.

To the contrary, the researchers – known as “anthros” by the company – discovered that many children still had plenty of free time, that they enjoyed difficult problems and that they often behaved differently when unsupervised.

The approach, according to Christian Madsbjerg and Mikkel Rasmussen, founding partners of ReD associates, a consultancy that applies the human sciences in business, demonstrated the value of what they call “sensemaking”.

In their book The Moment of Clarity, they argue that companies need to pull back from the narrowly focused and generalised approach of questionnaires and spreadsheets, and apply softer skills to understand customers. “The hard sciences involving mathematics and universal laws tell us the way things are,” they write. “This tendency is so common, we often disregard . . . the way things are experienced in culture.”

In other words, conventional market research to identify perceptions and desires does not always equate to what people ultimately buy and why. For example, a man may focus on the technical performance of a new music system but ultimately purchase a different one because of the “wife acceptance factor” at home.

The authors describe the experiences of one of their own consultants who finally gained insights into a Chinese man’s perceptions of modernisation only on a fourth visit, once the two of them had built up confidence and travelled together from his own old family apartment to the different environment of a new flat he had bought for his son. This tactic is no great revelation to a journalist, though no doubt insufficiently applied in business.

The book is a good place to start for those who want a readable overview of 20th-century social theorists and of the potential applications of their ideas. But its shortcomings are twofold. First, the authors provide insufficiently detailed description of their own to illustrate what counter-intuitive insights were gained from their and others’ sensemaking. For instance, they gushingly profile Intel’s in-house anthropologist Genevieve Bell but do not explain the practical insights she has brought to the chipmaker. Of course, such coyness might whet people’s appetite to hire their own ethnographic services.

Second, while they toss in some high-level (and often banal) general management advice, they fail to demonstrate the link or relative contribution of their own methods to corporate success. When studying business turnrounds, many factors are at work and correlation is not causation.

The Moment of Clarity offers some useful and thought-provoking ideas. But it does not quite prove the case or deliver the clarity that the authors profess.