Katarina Graffman on People & Meaning

Katarina Graffman is a cultural anthropologist and founder of Inculture, a cultural analysis consultancy. She holds a PhD in cultural anthropology and is a researcher at Uppsala University. Her clients include IKEA, Volvo, Bloomberg, Björn Borg, Skanska, Swedish Radio, and the BBC. She co-authored *We Are What We Buy* (2018) and *In Search of the Time to Come* (2020).

Her TED Talk “The focus on the rational mind will lead to climate collapse.”

All right, so I start all the conversations I do with the same question, which I borrowed from a friend of mine. She helps people tell their stories. I don’t know, it’s just a beautiful question, so I stole it from her.

But it’s really big, so I over explain it the way that I’m doing right now. So before I ask it, I want you to know that you’re in total control and you can answer or not answer any way that you want to. And the question is, where do you come from? And again, you are in absolute control.

That’s an interesting question. I come from my mother’s womb. I was actually listening to a podcast this morning when I was out walking — a professor in nanotechnology here in Sweden, Maria Strömme. She’s from Norway, but she’s at Uppsala University. She has been in hard science her whole life, but now she’s started to dig deep into philosophy and the humanities, because she thinks she can build a mathematical formula to understand where people go after death. Where they go.

And I’ve never been someone who is afraid of death, even though I’m not religious. I think that in some way, we are around. So it was really interesting to hear this hard science woman arrive at the same conclusion through mathematics and physics. She will probably be a name in the future, I think.

So to answer your question — I come from my mother’s womb, but I think I come from all over the place, from many, many people from the past. That was a little bit maybe strange.

How does that feel? What’s that?

It feels good.

Nice. You used this phrase, I think, we are around. What did you mean when you said that?

I said that the spirit of us — or the something, whatever it is — something in us as humans is always around. The only way to explain it.

Do you have a recollection of growing up, as a girl, what did you want to be when you grew up?

I wanted to be someone working with elephants, but I ended up working with humans.

I don’t know what it says about me. What was the attraction to the elephants? I think I have always been fascinated by elephants because they are very wise. They have a really interesting way of living in groups, how they socialize with each other.

So I think maybe that’s also why I studied humans, because what’s interesting about anthropology is how people live in their groups, how we become herd members. We always talk about how humans are so individualistic and unique, especially in Western cultures. But the thing is that we are more dependent on the group than ever before in those individualistic cultures.

So that’s my area I’m studying today. Yeah. Did you have an experience with elephants as a child that inspired you, or where did that come from, do you think? I don’t know.

Not more than going to the zoo. And then later on, I went to Tanzania, but that was when I was 20-something, when I was starting my PhD. I went for half a year to Tanzania.

Of course, I saw elephants in the wild, but by then I had already started my anthropological career. Yeah. Tell us, where are you now and what do you do for work? Yeah, I’m an anthropologist and I took my PhD in Sweden, Uppsala University, in 2002.

And then I rather quickly decided to leave the university and academic life because I wanted to work outside. I think that as an anthropologist you can do a lot in society, in organizations, in different aspects of how to understand humans. I wrote my thesis about TV producers.

So that was a little bit different from many other anthropologists. My thesis was about how people in content creation produce content for people they don’t know. Especially in Sweden, we have public service and you are supposed to reach certain groups of people in our nation.

How can you do that if you don’t know them? So I wrote about that — how producers create fantasy viewers based on maybe one person they know in the countryside. And there was also an American anthropologist studying public service TV who talked about the same idea — that you create a viewer and then you start to make content with that fantasy in your head.

And I think that’s very interesting if you look at the marketing industries, because they often have very shallow knowledge of the people they are supposed to create products or advertisements for. So that’s where my interest started.

Yeah. I want to hear more about the field work on your thesis. That’s so fascinating. As somebody who’s worked within organizations and big corporations in the US, there’s all this talk about personas and empathy — all these shortcuts to help people develop products for people they don’t know. It’s a whole infrastructure, really. So what did you do and what did you really learn?

I started my field work with the idea that I was going to study how you make formats more locally adapted. For example, Who Wants to Become a Millionaire or Survivor or something — the format has a Bible, from the person who came up with the idea, and they say this is the way you should produce this format. But then you have to locally do something to make it popular in Sweden or popular in the UK or popular in Poland or wherever you are.

So I was interested in how you make this cultural adaptation of a format. But as an anthropologist, you can never know if what you’re interested in is going to happen during the time you’re there. So they didn’t do any formats. And when I was there — I was at a production company in Sweden, maybe they did 12 to 15 different productions — I started to become very interested in, OK, how do you know how to make this program? Because you don’t know your viewers, whether they’ll connect with it or not.

And then I talked to a guy who was in charge of the insights at this production company and he said, well, nobody in this industry comes and asks me anything about how to get to know people. It has happened twice. And I have put a sheet together with some statistics — that’s the only thing they want.

But I was so interested because I thought, wow, this is really something. So then I tried to understand how you as a creator actually make things when you don’t know for whom. That was my focus — to understand this process. And different producers use different strategies.

One guy, he said that when he’s out of creativity, he goes to a small town in Sweden and has some drinks at the bar. Then he goes home and writes new stuff. He’s met the ordinary Swedes.

So it was a lot of easy ways to get to know people without real knowledge. And maybe that’s why I talk a lot about insight washing in my work today. Because I think that what most companies do is insight washing. They have very, very shallow insights. You mentioned personas, generation descriptions, et cetera.

And that’s quite shallow because it’s mainly based on quantitative studies or broad categories. They don’t have this deep, qualitative knowledge of how people live their lives, what is meaningful for them, how people act in different groups — because you can never get that if you only ask people things. So insight washing is, I would say, the summary of everything I do.

Trying to make organizations understand what it is.

Yeah. What’s the definition of insight washing?

Well, I think it’s when you try to make very shallow insights look like real knowledge.

And I think that when you talk about it in that sense, people get two reactions. One is, wow, that’s true. But they also get a little bit offended — oh, so you don’t like quantitative studies? Well, it’s not about that, because you need both. You need different tools if you really want to understand. So what I say is that you should have qualitative studies as part of it.

It can be ethnography, it can be different conversations with people, it can be observation. You need to have the other view, not only what people say. Yeah.

You need to be able to see, okay, is this true? Are people really doing what they’re saying? No, they’re not. So that’s what I always say — you can’t trust what people say. You have to understand how they live.

So tell us about the work you do now. When do clients come to you, what kinds of problems do they bring, and how would you describe your approach?

I can take one project. One of my latest projects was for a big official organization that oversees building — different building projects. They set all the rules for construction. How do you explain that in English? A developer? Yeah, but they also decide all the rules for building. It’s more like a regulatory body.

So they have been working a lot with waste in the building industry. And in Sweden, they’ve estimated that around 25 percent is waste — materials, time, everything. It’s the most wasteful industry of all of them.

And they said, everybody in the business knows this, but why is nothing happening? Why isn’t the waste getting less year by year? So me and another anthropologist, we had the question: how can we work with this without sending another information folder? Everybody already knows. And that’s very typical when I work with companies — they want to change something. I work a lot with sustainability today.

People know, but they don’t change behavior. And the easiest response is to treat the human as a rational person. So let’s send some more information.

This time they will probably change — but of course, they will not. So I worked with them, me and Lotta Björklund Larsson, the other anthropologist. We thought, what can we do? Because building is very, very complex.

It’s a very complex process from when they start to buy land to the end, and also everything that happens after the building project is over. So we said, let’s look at the knowledge culture in this business. Why is it that everyone knows, but nothing is happening? Is there something wrong with how knowledge is transferred between different parts of the project, between different companies? So we focused on understanding the knowledge culture in the building industry.

And what we found was that many, many people have an enormous amount of knowledge, but they don’t have any system to transfer it the way they should. And they don’t systematically look at good and bad projects and use that knowledge going forward.

So that’s one way to work — finding ways to make change without using information as the lever. Especially when it comes to consumer culture. People know the world is on fire, but — I still want my fast fashion little dress. So I’ve been working a lot on that. How do you make people change without telling them to change? That’s maybe my main area today.

Yeah. Because it’s also a world that really needs change in many, many ways. So when did you first realize you could make a living doing this stuff? I think that I have had my own company now for 20 years, actually.

And I know I wrote something about that on LinkedIn, because when I told my former professor at Uppsala University that I wanted to start my own business and have my own company, she said to me, oh, that will be tough for you. Don’t say that you’re an anthropologist. So then I decided — yes, of course I will say that I’m an anthropologist.

Why make that choice? I think because she said that people in Sweden think anthropology is something weird. As I told you before we started to record, in Sweden, applied anthropology is not common. You can’t study it as a subject.

So an anthropologist in Sweden and Finland has been quite rare, compared to Denmark, for example. In some countries, anthropology has been much more established as a career path.

Your advisor told you to avoid the language, but you chose it for yourself. Why?

Because I thought that anthropology was the best subject in the world. I was supposed to study law first, then economics, and then I decided no.

Economics, because I thought that was quite a broad education and you can do almost anything. But it was really boring — I started with statistics, so I had to take a term off. And then I actually saw anthropology.

I didn’t know what it was when I was looking in the catalogue for the courses. And I started to read anthropology, and by my third course, the first term, I was just amazed. It was like a salvation for me.

It was really like, wow, this is fantastic. It made me see the world in totally new ways. So then I continued to read anthropology in different subjects and took my PhD.

So anthropology for me — it’s not a job. It’s a way of living and seeing the world, I would say. So that’s why when she said, you shouldn’t say that you’re an anthropologist —

I said, of course I have to do that.

I love that so much. How do you talk about what anthropology is, or what culture is, to people? I know you teach, and these ideas can feel slippery. How do you talk about what culture is? And as an anthropologist, what do you do that somebody who’s not an anthropologist can’t?

I would say — I know that it’s difficult. And also in Sweden, we have a particular difficulty with the word culture, because in Swedish, culture is called kultur, and that means both fine arts and culture. One word for both.

And that makes it even harder to explain what you do — it makes the whole thing blurry. So you have to find other ways to explain it.

When I talk to companies, I mostly talk about behavior — understanding people’s behavior, not only trusting what they say, and looking at group effects. If you’re more practical when you explain, it helps. Because in anthropology, there are around 200 definitions of what culture is. So of course, it’s really difficult.

And I think Grant McCracken has a good way, because he talks about it as a language. You learn the grammar when you are a baby and you start to talk, but you don’t know that. You just learn the language and start to speak it.

If you start to learn a language when you’re older, you need to learn the grammar. And that can be quite difficult, instead of just being in a culture and you just start to talk. And he says that culture is like that.

Culture is the blueprint of the society. It’s the grammar of the society. And it’s the system that decides how people interact and how they behave in different contexts.

So for many, it can feel like it’s quite blurry. But ethnography is the method of anthropology. It’s about putting a lot of time in different contexts, studying how people behave, and also talking to them without leading questions.

I can study a family and I can always ask them, why did you do that? Or can you explain that for me? But I never ask leading questions, because then you are pulling them towards different answers. And you’re not interested in that as an anthropologist.

You want to understand, how do these people live in everyday life? And who is affected by whom? Because that’s the essence of understanding culture.

How do you think about the questions you ask? You’ve said you don’t want to ask leading questions — so what kind of question do you find yourself asking?

Oh, it really depends on the project. I have one example. I was working with a fashion brand in Sweden and the marketing manager sent me three sheets with questions. Very tiny text.

And I was really — oh my God, she has really been thinking about this. She was a new marketing manager at this fashion brand and she wanted to do ethnography. She knew what anthropology is all about.

And she said, I have too many questions. So then I said to her, okay, interesting to read your questions, but let’s just leave them. The only thing I would go out and do is actually understand: what does this brand mean for people?

And then we studied how people use the brand. They had different stores. We did field work in the stores to understand the customers. We worked in different subgroups to understand how they used the brand — or how they didn’t use the brand.

And then we started to say, okay, this is what the brand is all about. And it answered almost all her questions, but we had this really broad approach. And the most interesting part was that this company thought they were so much hotter, in the trendier customer groups.

And it actually showed that no, they were very late majority. And that made a total difference for them — how they looked at the brand, what kind of marketing they were supposed to do. Everything changed because they realized they had been thinking totally wrong about who used the brand and why.

So I would say that most projects I do, I look at it very holistically, with a very broad question. And then you start to get knowledge and you get closer and closer to what is really interesting. And I call that the white spaces — and the white spaces are almost always something the company haven’t thought of at all, because you find it when you go in with this broad perspective.

What do you love about the work? Where’s the joy in it for you?

I would say two things. I meet a lot of people that I never would meet, because we live in our bubbles.

And sometimes when you go out and do your field work — you have to go out in the evenings, and you feel, oh, I’m so tired, it’s tough going out tonight — but then it’s so fun to meet people you never meet otherwise. It can be in parts of Sweden I never go to. It can be different kinds of people that I normally don’t hang around with.

We always live in our bubbles — at work, doing our exercise, the family, the area we live in. So I love that part, that I meet so many different kinds of people.

And then also — it’s fantastic to do this often long study. It doesn’t have to be that long. When you write your PhD, you’re supposed to be one or two years in the field.

And that’s not possible if you work with company clients. But you put a lot of time in anyway. And then when you have all this data and you start to look at it and work with it and you realize, wow, look here — here is a real finding, here is a white space.

I think that’s the most gratifying part of being an anthropologist.

I’ve got two questions trying to come out at the same time. You’ve been at it a long time. How do you feel like it’s changed, or its role has changed, over that period?

I think that’s changed just in the last few years. When you do anthropology and ethnography in companies, you’re often looking eight to ten years out. What can we see today? What kind of trends, what kind of behavior can we see that will actually have an impact five, eight, ten years from now? Because you’re looking for those small signals when you do ethnography.

And my feeling is that companies are not interested in this long-term perspective anymore. It’s more like two years now. And that’s a little bit scary, especially because the world is changing so fast.

Instead of having this long perspective, they’re just looking at the fires right now. And I’ve been talking to other consultants from other fields and they say the same — the long-term perspective is gone.

And that’s scary, because you need it if you want to have a sustainable society. But what I’ve experienced in the last one or two years is something interesting, because I’ve met several highly educated engineers who say to me, we need the knowledge you have about understanding human beings. Engineers can be very focused on what they are doing right here, right now. And maybe they don’t see how the impact will be felt in other parts of society.

I’ve heard several engineers say that knowledge about how human beings behave will be even more important, because if we are going to scale up these technical solutions, it can be catastrophic if you don’t understand the impact and how people behave. And several really well-educated people, both in tech and other fields, say that understanding how human beings use technology will be so much more important when we have this technology all around us all the time.

So it’s hopeful, I think. Though it will take time before companies understand that, because right now they think they can do everything themselves. And the whole discussion about how everything will become very average, because they do all the creative work with AI — so of course, it will all be the same.

I think it will take time before companies realize that they really need to do something different. That they really need this understanding of how people live and what’s important for them.

Two things you said earlier — the insight washing, and the way anthropology is almost exclusively focused on very durable, enduring learnings. There’s a huge gap between what organizations like to digest and what anthropology actually creates. Do you feel that mismatch? And then — this is a big question — for somebody in a leadership position who wants real knowledge, not insight washing, what guidance do you give them about balancing different ways of learning about who they serve?

That was a very long, dense, tricky question, because I think that most organizations live in a system — they already have ways of doing stuff. And the way they’ve been doing it, it’s difficult to bend the system, because everything is connected to the same way of working, including how you look at insights.

So the main thing I would say is this: when I started — I’ve been working now for over 20 years — I had a lot of meetings in the beginning. And I would say that maybe two to three percent of people in CEO positions understood what I was talking about. And I quickly realized I couldn’t sit with people who didn’t even understand what I was talking about, because it would just drain my energy.

And today, I would say maybe 15 to 20 percent understand, after 20 years. Of course, I also have much more experience now, many more examples. So I can explain better.

Because you can’t sit and talk in anthropological terms — you have to find better ways to explain. But there is a difference. And the first thing I say is, look at what you’re measuring. Because we live in a measurement society — everything should be measured, all the time. How effective people are at work, how successful our product is, how much people love sustainability, blah, blah. You measure everything.

So the first thing I say is, can you look into everything you’re measuring? What are you measuring, and why? And what kind of answers do you think you’re getting? Because if they start there, they soon realize that maybe they don’t understand the right things. And one typical example — if you measure how loyal your customers are, or how satisfied your co-workers are, you have these measurement systems that you do every year. And I’ve worked with companies where I say, okay, you’ve done this with your co-workers for — what, 30 years? Have you changed the questions? We have a totally different world.

Oh no, we can’t change the questions, because then we can’t compare to what they said 10 years ago. And for me, that was really like — okay, society has totally changed. But you still ask the same questions. It’s amazing.

So very often I start by saying, what are you measuring? What kind of quantitative studies are you doing? Look into those things.

And maybe let someone with a qualitative eye look at what you’re doing. You might save some money, because some of these things aren’t telling you anything.

So I think that’s the first thing to keep in mind. And also to question this idea of information as a way to change people’s behavior and values.

Most people in companies know it doesn’t work, but they don’t have any other tools. People aren’t changing, they still eat bad things — okay, let’s do another information campaign. They know this isn’t working, but they don’t have alternatives.

So you give them some ideas. How could you do this differently? Maybe it could be nudging, or other approaches. Try to make small changes, and then they understand, wow, this is really good for us. And then they can start to make bigger changes.

I want to go back to that example — the client who wouldn’t change the questions because it would ruin their ability to track change over time. Can you be explicit about what makes that insane? What’s the assumption underneath that’s so problematic?

I would say — you have this saying that how you ask things, that’s the kind of answers you get.

And for example, it can be such easy things as using the wrong words. Maybe you’re using words that people in the 90s understood one way, but people in 2025 experience differently. I can give you an example. I was working with a big TV company in Sweden, and they were doing a lot of quantitative studies on how young people experienced different media and technology.

And they were using the phrase “new media” when they were talking about digital media. Because if you remember, 20 years ago, we talked about new media — that was the word. They didn’t know what to call YouTube, so it was new media.

And they were still using that phrase in their quantitative studies. And the young people we were studying, they said, what? What is new media? I know what old media is — that’s public service, that’s radio, that’s newspapers. I don’t know what new media is.

So they couldn’t even answer the questions because they didn’t know what was being asked. That’s a very simple example. And you also need to understand that media technology has so fundamentally changed the way we live and understand the world.

If you don’t have that included in your quantitative studies — if you want to understand customer loyalty or behavior — it’s really strange.

Have you ever heard of appreciative inquiry? We don’t need to get into it. But David Cooperrider — it’s an approach to transformation that’s not problem-solution. It’s about identifying where things are working, peak experiences, and trying to replicate the good as opposed to solving the bad. He had a quote: we live in the world that our questions create. And I feel like that’s the idea you were expressing.

Yes, yes, that’s very, very true. And I think that’s also connected to what I’ve been saying about white spaces — broadening the area of what you’re interested in. Because otherwise, managers have some ideas about what’s going wrong, or what they want to check.

And if your research doesn’t give them the answer they want, well, then they don’t use it. They’ve already decided what they want to confirm. The problem is that very rarely is that correct, because it’s often something else that’s wrong — something else in people’s everyday life that is affecting your brand or your product.

And managers sit, maybe they sit for quite a long time in the same company. And of course, they develop this framed view of things. That’s the way of being human. If you are in a certain context, you start to see only what’s inside the frame.

So it’s really hard to go outside your own frame of safety and start to understand what’s going on. And sometimes it’s even better to study people who don’t use your brand or don’t use your product. Because then you understand why they’re not using it. You can get more insights from that than from studying the people who are already using it.

So there are a lot of ways to get a much better understanding than the traditional way of doing research.

We’ve just got a little bit of time left. I’m always curious to hear people advocate for qualitative. You’ve talked about measurement, and I think we probably agree that there’s a kind of qualitative illiteracy in organizations — people don’t really understand what qualitative is, or that it’s actually data. How do you talk about what makes qualitative so important, and the role it should play in how people make decisions?

Well, I think I have mentioned it now. I use this quote: people don’t say what they think, they don’t know what they feel, and they for sure don’t do as they say.

And that’s my idea of being human. And that’s what I bring into the field when I start to do my study. We live with this idea of the rational person who understands information and can interpret the knowledge and then make a wise decision.

And we can’t. And humans are not living in a social and cultural vacuum. We are social beings. I would say that most things we do in life is because of other people.

I think, for example, Mark Earls has written Herd. It’s about the idea that you are part of a group — whether it’s the family, or your company, or your friends, or different groupings in social media. You want to do as other people do, because that’s the way of being human — being part of a group.

So in that sense, it’s so important to study how groups live and how they act and what’s important for the group.

Beautiful. Thank you so much. I really appreciate you accepting the invitation. It’s been a blast talking to you.

Thank you.

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