In praise of the insider-outsider

At the weekly AI transformation stand up, the video wall looked like a Gartner quadrant come to life. A vendor flaunted hypnotic dashboards, the COO fretted about model risk, and the chief architect argued for lower latency. Then an intern asked how frontline staff actually made decisions. The chat fell silent. Ten million dollars into the programme, no one had interviewed a single branch manager.

That awkward pause captures why, even in an age of generative AI euphoria, smart companies still need advisers who behave like anthropologists. This article is inspired by the Financial Times’ Gillian Tett, whose 2022 book Anthro Vision champions two intertwined ideas.  

• First, the discipline of making the strange familiar and the familiar strange: stepping outside our own cultural defaults so we can see others more clearly and turning the lens back on ourselves to expose blind spots and unconscious bias. 
• Second, the insistence that numbers alone are never enough. Big data describes what happened; anthropology probes why through “thick data” (the human stories behind the stats) – exploring meanings, rituals and emotions that rarely appear in datasets, and that matter most where information is sparse or noisy. 

In Gillian Tett’s terms, the best consultants work as “insider-outsiders”: close enough to grasp the jargon, distant enough to notice the unspoken rules that govern real behaviour. Her work reminds leaders that “social silences” can shape outcomes more decisively than any spreadsheet.

Consultants as anthropologists

Just as Gillian Tett once embedded herself in Tajik wedding rituals and later in the credit derivative desks of Wall Street, a great consultant slips inside an organisation to observe its rites and taboos. The consulting craft was never meant to be about slide production; it was about surfacing assumptions that insiders cannot or will not see. The best advisers are participant observers who map the informal power grid, decode the language of risk, and translate murmurs at the water cooler into strategic insight.

During the pandemic boom those skills were blunted across the industry: in 2022, only 10% of clients said that (technology) strategy was the area where they were most likely to use consulting support according to Source Global – evidence that delivery work consumed the majority of consulting budgets while classic strategic advice captured a far smaller slice. 

Demand for “execution muscle” turned many practices into staff augmentation engines. Projects ballooned, decks thickened, wisdom thinned. In the rush to meet quarterly targets, consultants stopped asking naïve questions and started mimicking project managers on the client’s payroll. Businesses got capacity, not clarity.

The cost of that drift is now obvious. Post mortems on stalled digital roll outs reveal the same pattern again and again: the technology functioned perfectly, the culture did not. No algorithm, however elegant, can compensate for a workforce that doesn’t believe in it.

Generative AI promises to automate benchmarking, churn through diligence data, and draft board packs in minutes. Sounds wonderful. But the same technology also risks lulling leaders into thinking that meaning itself can be mechanised. Algorithms excel at pattern recognition; they are blind to context. They do not wander corridors at six pm to discover where decisions are really taken. They cannot laugh nervously when a CFO jokes about “hitting the number no matter what”.

That is why companies should treat AI as a microscope, not an oracle. A microscope magnifies; it does not interpret. Interpretation is a human act that relies on curiosity, empathy, critical thinking and moral judgment – the very attributes that true consultants bring to the table. At firms that infuse their toolkits with proprietary language models, junior teams reach hypotheses faster, freeing senior advisers to probe the messy human questions machines can’t answer.

What the insider-outsider actually does

Instead of a neat consulting ‘methodology’, think of four anthropological moves that translate directly into business value.

First, participant observation. Advisers shadow agile squads, listen to customer service calls and sit in on pricing huddles, watching how the stated process differs from the lived reality.

Second, thick description. They convert that raw detail into narratives executives and frontline teams can both understand, creating a common language for change.

Third, ritual analysis. They expose meetings, metrics and incentive schemes that inadvertently reward yesterday’s behaviour and suffocate tomorrow’s innovation.

Finally, ‘silence mapping’. They surface the topics no one dare raise – algorithmic bias, job security fears, ownership of data – before those unspoken tensions derail the rollout.

Consider a European insurer that installed an AI claims triage engine promising thirty per cent savings. Six months later it was delivering six. A two week ethnographic sprint revealed that adjusters were quietly re entering claims because their variable pay still rewarded manual touches. Fixing incentives, not code, unlocked the economics. The model never saw the problem; the outsider did.

A call to business leaders

This article is not addressed to consultants – it is speaking to the executives who hire them. If you want to de risk a billion-dollar transformation, insist on advisers who combine data fluency with cultural fluency. Ask how they plan to listen, not just how they plan to implement. Demand that they identify the informal power rules in the first thirty days. Require that they tell you what no one else will.

Invite them to the meetings where real trade offs are made, not just the ones scheduled for posterity. Let them shadow sceptics as well as champions. Reward them for raising uncomfortable truths early, not for producing perfect slide decks late.

The payoff is practical: faster adoption, lower political drag and higher ROI. Organizations are five times more likely to achieve significant financial returns than organisations that neglect cultural alignment according to an MIT Sloan Management Review survey of 2,500 executives. Organizations enjoy higher ROI on digital investments when cultural blockers are surfaced early, turning change management clarity into concrete financial returns.

In the age of AI, competitive edge will belong to organisations that integrate machine intelligence with human understanding. The consultant anthropologist stands at that junction, translating code into context and context back into code.

So, the next time a silence descends in your transformation war room, do not blame the intern who asked the obvious question. Blame the absence of an insider-outsider who should have asked it months ago – and hire one before the silence turns into cost overruns and lost market share.

Algorithms can detect anomalies; they cannot tell you why people cling to them. Culture still confounds code, and value still flows to leaders who know where to look.

References

¹ Simon and Schuster | Anthro-Vision, Gillian Tett 
² MIT Sloan Review | Winning with AI