In my post from 2024, AI and the Untouchables, I argued that as AI proliferates…

…understanding and interpreting the consequences of human-to-human interactions and characteristics like intent, morality, motivation, emotion, inspiration, frustration, implication, etc. will become increasingly valuable. While advances in tech may shift this…they may also contribute even further to increasing the value of non-digitally-mediated human-to-human interactions. Surprise! — these are exactly the realms in which ethnographers thrive.

This post is deeper reflection on what I see as both growing demand and critical shift for ethnography in the age of AI. Most importantly, it’s a reflection on how the practice has an opportunity to expand beyond the standard research service model in ways that both leverage the unique value of interpersonal human connection and diffuse ethnographic thinking throughout teams.

Relinquishing (Full) Ownership

Let’s start here. It can be a hard pill to swallow, but let me be blunt: your greatest value isn’t always in being the purveyor of knowledge. In fact, in the age of AI, knowledge-as-a-service is a precarious offering. However, if you’re reading this, chances are you’ve also developed another set of interpersonal skills that are becoming increasingly valuable. Those include:

• framing a challenge
• posing strategic questions
• facilitating conversations
• layered interpretation (‘reading’ the room, ‘reading’ between the lines)
• adapting on the fly
• emotional intelligence
• learning through embodiment
• grace, honor, and respect
• appreciation for delight, serendipity, and anomalies

All of these (and more) rely heavily on acumen and prudence mixed with a keen sensibility for human interactions (something many are now reducing to the words ‘taste’ or ‘judgment’). They can be incredibly useful in many different settings, but signs of their value are particularly visible in shared group experiences, such as field immersions. So let’s drill down there, and explore how the value of our role in this work might increase with a shift from knowledge purveyors to insight facilitators.

Consider the Field Immersion

Field immersions are forms of experiential learning designed to open up thinking and prioritize action to help teams make impact by developing informed and inspired insights. Many borrow from ethnographic methods such as participatory observation, contextual interviews, or exploratory excursions (sometimes referred to as “safaris” or “missions”). This is often paired with other experiences designed to intentionally foster social connection or facilitate business relationships. Regardless of methods, the focus is on embodied learning through real-world experiences that are memorable and meaningful. Beyond their tremendous learning value, field immersions often stimulate:

• Collaboration: There are many moving parts in a field immersion, and getting them aligned requires teamwork. On-the-fly adaptation, bravely facing unknowns, overcoming challenges, navigating difficult terrain and interactions, and acclimating to the unfamiliar…these all require collaboration and team dedication.
• Acceleration: The real-time nature of field immersions serves as an incubator for teams to quickly identify patterns, see connections, and rapidly iterate on possible solutions and outcomes. This helps teams process their thinking and entertain new ideas much faster than ordinary everyday work cadences.
• Ecosystem view: The concentrated nature of immersions (where participants are exposed to a range of perspectives over a short duration) helps teams spot interdependencies between different players of an ecosystem, and understand the dynamics of challenges they face or opportunities they can uncover.

In a nutshell, there’s no substitute for being there, and AI can’t replicate the bond-building, connection-spotting, or serendipity that field immersions produce. But what more should we consider in a shift from knowledge purveyors to insight facilitators through the lens of field immersions?

Immersion is Sticky

Our cross-disciplinary team consisted of an engineer, a product manager, a marketing specialist, designers, managers, a director, and yes, researchers — but researchers were by far the minority. We were on the bus on the way back from one of the last visits of our fieldwork in São Paulo. Over the past few days, we’d spent time with lots of different participants in a wide range of settings. We toured a TV studio (which included a surprising number of drag queens – more on that another time), met with content creators, dug into details of employee workflows at large companies, got to know the inner workings of agencies, etc. So, the bus conversation was happening in between the teams’ deep immersion into these experiences.

As we were riding along, casually discussing our experiences, I began to notice the team using shortcuts in their language, a sign that their thinking was starting to ‘gel.’ For example, they were using participants’ names as tokens of broader phenomena (“Rafael” meant Rafael from the media agency who highlighted the limitations of…). They also began identifying connections across experiences, drawing comparisons, and selectively tying their interpretations back to critical parts of the challenges our team was facing; all in the very condensed language we were developing based on our shared experiences. Clearly, the gears were turning, and the team was collaborating across disciplines — without effort, without meetings, and without meetings to prepare for meetings. We were spotting patterns, comparing participant POV’s, sorting through outliers, and generating new ideas — all in the moment, as we rode along in the ‘between space’ of the bus.

These language shortcuts are signs that field immersions are helping teams internalize their insights. The ‘aha’ moments that field experiences produce, and the rate at which they occur, stand in stark contrast to what teams experience listening to a researcher presenting insights. (Sorry, folks, but sitting through your deck is often perceived as the ‘blah, blah’ in our colleagues’ workdays.) Real-world encounters open up opportunities for teams to physically ‘absorb’ different perspectives in the moment, and to think through their own insights while they’re in the context of their participants’ world. This is far different from passively watching video clips, reading quotes from interviews, or scanning an AI summary. These modes of learning are all locked in the past (or within AI-speak) and are constrained within protocols that inherently exclude the team from primary embodied interactions. Opportunities for them to participate, ask follow up questions, pick up on an interesting tangent, and especially to internalize realizations, are all absent. Even Q&A sessions with an AI model, while sometimes stimulating, often serve up variations of the median.

Cognitive scientists and educational specialists have identified strong associations between experiential learning and long-term memory retention, skill transfer, critical thinking, and motivation. “Research from the University of Chicago reveals that experiential learning can lead to retention rates as high as 90%, compared to just 5% from traditional lectures. When students actively participate in their learning, they not only retain information better but also apply what they’ve learned more effectively.” Similarly, a clinical study published in PMC validated that medical graduates trained via experiential “wet labs” showed significantly higher knowledge retention than those who only attended traditional lectures. And, perhaps most relevant to workplace teams, a study tracking student progress showed that field-based experiential courses consistently yield dramatic spikes in student confidence, peer-to-peer social integration, and a renewed sense of excitement regarding academic goals. Passive learning, by contrast, correlates heavily with burnout and disengagement.

Rapid Iterative Repositioning

Field immersions also provide teams with much more time, and a greater range of circumstances, to entertain different configurations in their own thinking. In-the-moment analysis, informal de-briefs, and time for random musings all open up the space and permission to collectively make connections, identify patterns, and entertain “what ifs” when the stakes are low and the team is in their most receptive state of mind. We might label it “if this, then what?” thinking, and it often proliferates in the field.

Clear indicators of rapid iterative repositioning tend to surface in a few distinct ways. First, we start to see those language shortcuts mentioned above get paired with provocations. Questions that begin with “Why wouldn’t we…? Why don’t we just…? Who really benefits from…? What if we stopped…” start to arise. And then the team starts to respond to the questions they ask themselves by playing out various repercussions together. It has the vibes of a spontaneous generative workshop, but without the painful icebreakers, stiff exercises, assignments, breakout groups, or ‘contests’ of design sprints that (in my experience) can suppress open thinking with the pressure of the constraints they impose.

In fact, in every field immersion I’ve hosted, I’ve witnessed team members who were so inspired by the discoveries and connections they made that they were compelled (often suddenly and on their own) to passionately scrawl their realizations. This happened more than a few times on the most recent field immersion I hosted, and it’s incredibly inspiring to see the sparks fly. Some members of this team even returned with a laundry list of action items, areas of investigation, and people to meet, etc.

The sheer passion behind these outcomes often accelerates change within an organization. It can also sidestep bureaucracy, uncover leapfrog ideas, and identify ‘non-problems’ that teams may have assumed were more important than they are. That’s because teams had a chance to ‘try on’ different solutions and map them to challenges in real time, collectively ruminate on potential outcomes, and even adapt research protocols in real time as their thinking evolved. This is perhaps the most direct and impactful way I’ve seen teams activate insight over my more than 20 years as a researcher. It’s simply the fastest way to generate the sparks that ignite inspired change; and the most direct way to reach lasting internalized insight.

Eating, Thinking…and maybe a little Drinking

I want to focus a bit more on the value of down time, because it’s one of the most critical moments for discovery in field immersions. There are, of course, lots of ways to make sense of data while in the field, including de-briefs, summaries, or other semi-structured downloads. However, in my experience, these are most useful for organizing observations, or synthesizing data; and they’re often more blah-blah than aha. If we make space for teams to relax, unwind, and let their thoughts wander, we often see them play with their interpretations in ways that go far beyond ‘reporting’ their experiences. Their thinking turns toward an expansive and generative mode, rather than reductive and critical one.

Let’s take meal-sharing as an example, since many field immersions include lots of time in which teams eat together and take a break from their research duties. (Trigger warning, I’m gonna go all evolutionary here.)

It’s widely recognized among many evolutionary biologists and physical anthropologists that meal sharing actively shaped human social structures, brain evolution, and survival strategies. Here are a few ways that feel particularly relevant to how meal sharing may continue to shape team thinking during field immersions.

• Psychological Safety: In foraging and hunting societies, food acquisition—especially high-calorie large game—is often unpredictable. On any given day, a hunter faces a high probability of failure. Food sharing serves as a form of insurance rooted in reciprocal altruism. By bringing food back to the community and consuming it as a group, calorie intake is smoothed out, reducing the risk of starvation. (Kaplan & Hill, 1985; Gurven, Hill, & Kaplan, 2002)
• Folklore / Folk-learning: Because cooking requires time and a stationary fire, the hearth naturally became a communal gathering place. This biologically necessary and structured downtime creates the ideal environment for sharing through storytelling (Wiessner 2014).
• Collaborative Foundations: Consuming food in close physical proximity requires temporary suppression of aggressive, resource-guarding instincts. Participating in a shared meal functions as a reliable signal of non-aggression and social engagement. Agreeing to eat together signals the value of longer-term cooperative partnerships over short-term resource hoarding (Wrangham, 2010; Trivers, 1971; Mauss, 1925).
• Deep(er) Bonds: Social dining, combined with laughter and conversation, stimulates the release of endorphins. This neurochemical reward strengthens interpersonal trust, reinforces social networks, and creates group cohesion that extends beyond immediate biological kin. (Dunbar, 2017).

These points don’t touch much on the drinking part of the equation, but the basics are there, and they have significant impact on team dynamics. They may even be enhanced by other forms of downtime common in field immersions: hanging out in the hotel lobby, getting lost, accidental discoveries, celebrating insignificant wins, etc. I’ll leave it to you to fill in the blanks on the degree to which drinking forms human bonds!

An Antidote for Slop

If AI can be classified at all, we might look to its outputs as a signifier; and much of its text qualifies squarely as ‘blah blah’ — long, formalized, overwrought, and sycophantic. If we factor in scale, we might even say that AI slop is ‘blah blah’ on steroids. It’s also ubiquitous, to the point where we now have classifications for slop and software designed to detect it. If this trend continues, our collective human response will inevitably evolve beyond these technological filters. We will not only re-define the value of knowledge, but perhaps more importantly, the forms in which it is delivered and acquired.

Which brings us back to field immersions. We know that experiential learning has a distinct edge over other modes, and when we add the collective and experimental nature of field immersions to the mix, we arrive at a formula that produces outcomes that prioritize relevancy, resonance, and applicability. There’s simply no need to ‘package,’ or elaborate on, insights in this configuration. Imagine someone contributing to the bus conversation above by offering a 10 minute preamble on context, methods, re-stating the question, etc. (Stop, please!) In addition to the short cuts in language teams develop in field immersions, their interactions also open the door for layered meaning, delightful serendipity, and UN-patterned realizations — all antithetical to AI and its structural underpinnings.

Some Practical Considerations

To close, there are a few considerations to make for effective field immersions that I should mention. From my experience:

1. You need a cross disciplinary team to do this well. Researchers should facilitate the process, not dominate it. This goes back to ‘letting go,’ above. You want to give everyone a chance to be actively involved in as many facets of the field immersion as possible. Your role is to prepare them well, give the experience some structure, help inform interpretations of their experiences, guide when to zoom in or zoom out their perspective, help identify patterns, and accelerate insight activation. You want to encourage ownership and knowledge building at every step of the way.
2. Freeloaders ruin it. The more participation and involvement you have from everyone on the team, the more memorable and valuable the experience will be for them, but dead weight slows everything down. For every experience in a field immersion, each team member should have a role, a motivation for participating, and an investment in the outcomes. Define this early and be crystal clear about the workload. It may be a break from their day to day, but make sure you emphasize that it’s not a vacation.
3. Leadership participation is critical. Want a quick way to get your field immersion labeled a boondoggle? Fail to involve leadership at every step, especially the field immersion itself. Their deep involvement will not only help ensure that insights are actionable, but also that they help inform the organization’s strategic direction. What’s more, leadership involvement helps other team members relate to them in everyday terms, to demystify their role, and build bonds across the organization that ultimately generate cohesion.