Better Research, Better Design: How to Align Teams and Build a Human-Centric Company Culture🇺🇸 🇬🇧

equations, but human incentives, motivations, unspoken assumptions, and identities, too. Credit, after all, comes from the word credere in Latin, meaning “to believe”; when trust is lost, finance does not work - as we saw in 2008. And while econ- omists and financiers often downplayed this human element in the past, there is now a rising interest in behavioural finance and cultural analysis. Indeed, in 2011 Alan Greenspan, the former Federal Reserve chairman, even stopped me at a conference and asked for recommendations for books on anthropology; that was a remarkable sign of a bigger zeitgeist shift, given that he once epitomized a profession that worshipped ecocnomic models. The rise of Silicon Valley in the 21st century has also increased interest in anthropology. Even the most blinkered technologist can see that digital technology is changing human interactions and behavior in im- portant ways. Most also know that the human context in which digital technology is created and applied is important too. Meanwhile, a string of scandals around social media and concerns about the development of artificial intelligence has also sparked interest in the societal context of computer science; or, if you like, how AI can benefit from another type of “ AI” - anthro- pology intelligence. Another accelerant, though, is the COVID-19 pandemic. For one thing, this has provided a wake up call around the need to incorporate behavioral science into policymaking. Tackling COVID-19 has demanded amazing feats of medical science. Computer science has been useful too. But what has become clear is that we cannot stop the disease just with medicine, but we need to know why and how people assess medical risk, comply with lockdowns (or not) and their attitudes to vaccines. Culture matters, whi...