Natalie Black on Curiosity & Culture

Natalie Black is the Founder and CEO of Culture x Curate, a strategic foresight and brand advisory based in Atlanta. She also serves as Chief Marketing Officer at Mia (Mission Impact Academy), empowering women globally through tech skills training. For over 20 years, Natalie has worked with Fortune 100 companies including Coca-Cola, UPS, AT&T, Estee Lauder, and The Home Depot.

So I start all these conversations with the same question, which is one I borrowed from a friend of mine—who’s actually a neighbor—and she helps people tell their story. It’s such a beautiful question, I borrow it. But because it’s so big, I kind of over-explain it, the way I’m doing right now. Before I ask it, I want you to know that you are in absolute control. You can answer—or not answer—in any way that you want to, and it’s impossible to make a mistake. So the question is: Where do you come from? And again, you’re in total control, and you can answer—or not answer—however you’d like.

Gosh, what a gut punch, the way you set that up. And I love that you said, "You're in total control." That is amazing, because it is such a—God—such a deep question.

So I think of it in terms of physically—where am I from—and philosophically. I grew up on Long Island, Nassau County. And as a child growing up on Long Island, all you’re trying to do is get off Long Island.

You have dreams of, you know, "I’m part of the bridge and tunnel crew." You get into Manhattan every moment you can, and you have dreams—or at least I did—like, "When I grow up, I’m going to move to SoHo. It’s going to be great. I’m going to be in fashion and beauty." It was the precursor to Sex and the City, before Sex and the City was a thing.

And then I left and never looked back. Now I’m a tourist in New York, because I live in Atlanta. And I look at it with such deep fondness—having had such a suburban life.

I’m a suburbanite. Having trees and neighbors and neighborhoods, right? That was like the OG framework for a neighborhood.

And being part of a diverse community in a diverse space—I love that part about my upbringing in New York. That part is a gift.

So yeah—Long Islander, suburbanite. But philosophically, I think that was the beginning of me coming from a place of wonder and awe and curiosity. I often describe myself as intellectually promiscuous.

And I think where I came from started that—because there was always something to taste, to smell, to try, to poke at, to feel. That’s something so special about being in New York—everywhere: upstate, downstate, all of it. That kind of spark gets embedded in you. And it becomes lifelong.

Do you have recollections of, as a girl, what you wanted to be when you grew up?

Yeah. I—seriously, this is so cliché—but I grew up in the late ’80s, early ’90s. That whole culture shaped me. I read Sybil, the novel, at age 10 because I was always interested in what makes people tick. You know, why do we do the things we do? What are the decisions we make? All of that.

So I thought I wanted to be a psychiatrist. But I also fell in love with glossies. I had every single magazine. And, you know, you don't think about it then—because I was a child—that pop culture shapes you. I had YM, Seventeen, all of the magazines—Spin, Rolling Stone, everything. If it was a magazine, I was in love with it.

I was in love with the imagery. I was in love with the words. I was in love with the stories they were telling me about the world—and ultimately about myself and my place in it.

So I said, well, if New York is the manufacturer of cool and pop culture, I want to be there. And I want to be in fashion and beauty. So that’s what I did.

You’ll see this as a running theme: I started showing up to offices and places and meetings I had no business being in. I would just say, “I’m here, I’m an intern,” or “I’m here for the shoot.” I’ve crashed sets—things like that. Just because I wanted to be there. I wanted to learn. Because no one was willing to tell you, “Start here,” at least in my circle. So I was like, fine, I’ll just show up.

I didn’t realize at the time that I was taking in strategy and research and observation—all of that. I just knew I wanted to do this. I wanted to learn how. And I wanted to learn everything about how—not just the end product, not just how it gets to the shelves or how the photoshoots happen or how the clothes are made. I wanted to learn everything.

It wasn’t until I got older—went to college—and struggled in college because I wanted to be a psychiatrist, but I didn’t want to be pre-med. That felt too straight and narrow. I’m good at school, but it was boring.

So I decided to create my own degree based on what I was interested in. I did bioethics and social biology. That allowed me to take psych, biophysics, sociology, political science—all the things. I just did a smorgasbord of classes and got my degree in that.

At the same time, I was working in comms—at the time, it was street marketing and youth culture. Again, just showing up, like, “Yeah, I can manage accounts.” Just doing that. And I started to really formulate what my career could look like in my twenties.

Then I started getting the shape of what ended up being a brand comms, brand PR, brand marketing kind of career.

You mentioned—did you say social biology? What is that? Can you tell me more about it?

Well, I was an impulsive 20-year-old, you know? So I was like, “Social biology—sure.” But actually, no—it was more than that.

At the time, I was at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. And again, I was playing around with my love of human behavior. My mom was in healthcare—she was a nurse. I didn’t necessarily want med school, but I did want to tap into the human side of healthcare.

Ethics was becoming a big thing—this global conversation—because of CRISPR and all these other innovations that were coming out. I loved the dialogue happening both at the academic level and at the practitioner level. I realized, wow, you can actually merge the physical sciences and the social sciences to really derive meaning.

There was all this unprecedented innovation. Globalization was happening at a rapid pace. And no one knew what to do. No one knew what arenas or spaces were best suited to have constructive conversations that could move humanity forward in a beneficial way—for all humanity.

And I thought, that’s where I need to be. Somewhere in the center of that. Not because I wanted it to be all about my thoughts or perspective, but because that’s where the global, future-shaping conversations were happening. And I just—if I could observe, learn, absorb—fantastic.

But I didn’t want to be just on the tactical side, where things get discussed, and then you’re told, “Here, eat it, now do it,” with no context behind it.

Yeah, I really identify with that. I feel like I had a suburban experience, too, where the whole world came to me through magazines and newspapers. And I just couldn’t get there fast enough.

So, catch us up. Where are you now? What are your days like, and what are you working on?

Yeah. So now, as a woman of a certain age, I’ve settled. I got my urban dreams out—New York, Boston, proper. I did all the things. And you realize, okay, this is great, this is cool—but it doesn’t exactly play out the way you think it will. Still, it gives you a certain grit.

And at some point, you say, all right, I’m ready for the next level. Now I’m settled in a suburb of Atlanta. I still like to be close enough to the action, but not in the thick of it. I’m an interloper.

So I like to go in and out, but I’ve traversed my entire career—which looks like a splatter map—and that was on purpose. I went from agency to small brand startup to big brand to big agency, and all of that bouncing around... at the time, it might’ve looked like I was scatterbrained and didn’t have any direction.

But I did. I may not have been able to articulate it well enough, but I knew that I wanted to be part of building a brand that closely understood who they were interacting with. Again, that was strategy, right?

So I was doing that and realized—after years of being a strategist and a communicator—that I got, I think, a combination of tired and bored. Tired of the pace at which large brands were moving, the lack of interest in doing any deeper studies around humans and communities, and just... how different teams were not speaking to each other.

So I was like, screw it—I’m gonna start my own consultancy. Again, being very impulsive—that’s also a theme in my life and career. I started a consultancy called Culture by Curate, and my remit was to inject foresight and futures into traditional brand strategy, to impart a deep understanding of cultural intelligence—building brands for meaning.

And that doesn’t have to be airy-fairy or ethereal. A lot of brand strategists say, “We’re a business. We’re in the business of making money.” Sure—you can make money and still be part of a collective that pushes meaning, derives meaning, and still makes money.

Yeah. It sounds amazing. Can you tell me a little bit about what you mean when you talk about foresight—what that looks like and what it is?

Yeah. You know what? The word now is so overused. I’m actually a little happy about that. And I’ll say—my background, as I mentioned, I don’t have a traditional pedigree in foresight or futures. I didn’t go to school for it. I’m kind of like a school child, right? I read things, I have conversations, I take courses—things like that. And then I just kind of go, “Okay, I’m going to do it in real time.”

So what I found was—brand strategy tends to think in terms of campaigns, buyer journeys, KPIs, things like that. If you’re doing architecture, it’s narrative and messaging and personas. But it's very limited in how it thinks long-term—maybe two or three years out. And even that’s pushing it. You’re really thinking in spurts—quarters.

It doesn’t account for, you know, when the proverbial s**t hits the fan. What if your audience grows up or decides something differently? People move. We evolve—based on where we are in life, where we grow up, where we move, what we do. You’re not the same person, fundamentally, as you move through life. And brand strategy traditionally doesn’t account for that.

So I encountered foresight as—what corporate would call—strategic planning. Like, “What does our customer look like three years from now?” But even that felt too prosaic. Then I realized there’s a whole school of thought around systems. How does a system evolve? What does that look like for us as human beings?

And I said, this is the kind of thinking brand strategy needs. It’s imagining. It’s experimentation. It’s play. It’s rigorous scientific inquiry. It’s all the things—all the skills that make human beings good at what they do—applied to brand strategy.

So foresight, for me, is not about predicting the future or saying what’s going to happen. It’s more about coming up with “what ifs,” playing around with them, and being able to build on top of that.

What kinds of questions do people come to you with? When do they pick up the phone and call?

Well, right now, it's all about AI. It's all about AI. And it’s nice—I think we’ve turned a corner a little bit when it comes to utility. Everyone was rushing to talk about productivity and efficiencies. And now, it’s nice that we’re no longer centering the conversation on AI as just a tool for efficiency and productivity.

Now, at least in the conversations I’m having with clients, it’s more like: “So we have these tools—how do we use them as co-creators, as co-pilots, so that we can be better at connecting?” And that’s such an open-ended, endless question. There’s no final answer, because we evolve, and we grow—but it’s the right question to play around with.

It gives us the opportunity to say, for instance, “Now I can study, communicate, and convene with many different communities at scale—because of AI.” It doesn’t remove the need for me to interact or, I would say, to embed and embody. It doesn’t replace that. It just allows me to think about things I previously couldn’t—because of the size of the world, the nuance, and the complexity of human beings and culture. So those are the kinds of conversations I’m having right now.

Yeah, what do you love about the work? Like, where’s the joy in it for you?

It’s meaning, honestly. What an appropriate conversation. There’s so much we, as human beings, are blind to—and part of that has just been given, right? It’s not necessarily because we’re all completely self-unaware. I think it’s that we’re moving through the world, through systems—of work, society, everything we endure as living, breathing individuals—and we’re often on autopilot.

We usually only start looking for deeper meaning when there’s a tower moment, when something jolts our very identity. Then we question, then we rediscover, then we reconfigure. That’s a beautiful process. It’s a messy process—but beautiful.

And the work I do is like: Let’s lean into that. Let’s not avoid the messiness of being human. Sure, you want to build a customer journey and create personas? Great. But that’s one-dimensional. That may check certain boxes, but it doesn’t account for the totality of who someone is and what they’re experiencing.

Let’s lean into that complexity so we can better understand where you, the brand, fit into someone’s life—and vice versa. And the result might be something entirely new. Whether it’s a product, a service, or even just a new way of engaging, it’s something new, rather than just transactional.

They’re not just consumers. They’re beings. We are beings. So let’s remove this notion that we are one activity—that we’re only valuable if we consume, and you’re only valuable if you make. That is just an outdated way of looking at things.

Yeah. Can you tell me a story about that?

Yeah. I’ll talk about a client in health science. And the reason this is interesting is, number one, I’m industry agnostic. Meaning, discovery, curiosity—those things are industry agnostic. You can apply the same approach whether it’s CPG, automotive, or life sciences.

This particular client had conducted both qualitative and quantitative research, which is fantastic—being able to do that and analyze the results. But what was missing was the nuance: the differences between rural, urban, and suburban communities.

And I think, especially in sectors like pharma or life sciences, everyone wants to replicate what I call “the Obama strategy”—right? Grassroots: knock on doors, hand out pamphlets, do micro-this, micro-that—because it worked.

But the time, energy, and effort to do that is substantial. And you have to be willing, ready, and open to learn some things that might be uncomfortable. So the idea of saying, “We’re targeting these three groups, these three sets of communities, and ultimately we want them to come in for genetic testing... we’re going to talk about how amazing genetic testing is, what you’ll learn, and it’ll go from there—it’ll be fantastic”—well, that doesn’t always work.

Number one, there's the question of awareness. You can say “genetic testing” or “DNA testing”—those are two different ways to describe it. What's the level of awareness and comfort, not just with the procedure, but with the information? Where does it fit in their life?

Ideally, a busy family of four is going to look at genetic testing very differently than a millennial—or an alpha kid—living in the city. So again, level-set: what’s their awareness of what it is and what the benefits are?

People don’t think in terms of just features and benefits. We know this. Some of those frameworks are broken. But when you tap into what it will mean to them—how it helps bolster their identity and their purpose, based on what they assign meaning to, not what we assign—then you begin to have a different conversation.

We found that for older folks in the South, in rural areas and even suburbs, the conversation around legacy and family health history really resonated. In the North and the West, it was more about longevity and biohacking. Using those kinds of terms—that was the key. Different conversation, same result.

So again, when you tap into what things mean for people—how they assign meaning in their life, how they see themselves, and those aspirational (not even goals, but dimensions) of their personality—then you can have a conversation that’s actually grounded in reality and still get a so-called “desired behavior.”

Yeah, that's awesome. Because you pointed it out—and it's irresistible—this series is called That Business of Meaning. So, what do we mean when we say “meaning”? What are we talking about?

Gosh.

It's the million-dollar question.

It’s a million-dollar question. And you know, I was a philosophy minor, so I love this question. This is great. And it’s what makes your conversations so compelling—because you can get a million and one different answers.

Meaning is sense, right? It’s how I see myself, what I think about who I am, what I do, where I am, and what kind of impact I have. It’s identity, it’s values, it’s beliefs. It’s that internal system I’ve built—some of it given to me, some of it absorbed—and then I chew it up and spit it back out And that becomes my small place in this human journey.

And wow, right? That’s nebulous—but that is meaning. Because we’re all going to end up in the same place, right? All of us. No matter where we come from or what we do—we’re all ending up in the same place.

So for a brief moment in time, our thoughts and actions are creating an imprint that signals: this is what it is to be human. And so it’s not an unknowable answer—it’s just not a concrete one. Which is nice... but also beautiful.

Mm-hmm. I love your use of the word sense. And earlier you said embed and embody. Are those words you use often?

I do. Because in my journey of discovery—both career and personal—we talked about it earlier, right? You do the academic thing: semiotics, culture, anthropology, sociology. The very underpinnings of academic inquiry into meaning.

And it’s fantastic. It gives you a basis. It gives meaning to things you might not be able to articulate in the moment—it gives you a framework. But then you also discover different pockets and dimensions of how human beings are doing the work.

Part of that includes the metaphysical. And there’s a whole language in the metaphysical and esoteric space. People there use words like co-create, embody, and embed. And those are beautiful terms—they sometimes get a bad rap.

But the profound sense of what they’re trying to encapsulate absolutely has a place in business. Because when you say desired behavior, that’s one shot. It keeps things very temporal. And it also moves the goalposts every time a person evolves in their so-called customer journey.

But when you say embody and embed—that’s deeper. Now, I’m no longer just purchasing Clorox. Now the idea of cleanliness, organization, and togetherness becomes embedded in deep meaning in my life.

Me buying Clorox, for instance—true story, client story—that’s the output of that deeper meaning. It becomes a ritual. Not just the cleaning itself, but my relationship with that thing is helping me build that ritual and that sense.

Yeah, what is the Clorox story? Can you share? I'm a sucker for a CPG story.

CPGs are amazing, right? We are so surrounded by product and stuff. And when you go beyond packaging, media spend, and channel optimization—beyond those tactics—you start to realize that some of the meaning is given to us. I’m told that Clorox is amazing. It'll make my house super clean. And I’ll be the toast of the town because I have the cleanest house on the block.

But the Clorox story happened at the height of the pandemic, when we were all forced to reckon with and reassign meaning and value in our lives. The social distancing, the disruption of daily activity—all of it. I mean, for the first time in our collective human experience—at least while being fully aware and alive—we all went through it together.

So now, we were forming new relationships with these products and services. Some of it was a grieving—for our old lives and the old ways of doing things. And that needed to happen.

Something I used to clean a toilet, or put a drop of in to wash dishes, now meant something more. Some of the work I was tapped to do was to figure out what that was. Because it wasn’t just about keeping coronavirus out of the house so my family wouldn’t get sick.

It became an embodied ideal—of legacy, protection, care, stewardship. Because that was one time when we were all looking out for one another. That was the only way. There was this “we’re all in this together” kind of rally cry. So it became a notion of stewardship.

And then prices were getting jacked up—because scarcity was a thing, fear was a thing. But there was almost no amount of money people wouldn’t pay. And the ultimate output of that deliverable was: how do we carry that meaning forward? Once this moment in time evolves into something else—how do we continue that meaning?

Yeah. And the meaning was stewardship? That was the idea?

Stewardship.

And can you tell me more about what that means?

Yeah, absolutely. You know, it’s about exploring old ideas, old words, and emotions.

Oh my gosh, yes.

Things like kith and kin. What does that look like? What does that mean? No one speaks like that anymore, right? And now we have nothing but time and the ability to explore ourselves in relation to one another.

The through-line sentiment is stewardship: I take care of myself, and by doing that, I’m better able to take care of you—and vice versa. And when we take care of one another, something beautiful emerges from that: fauna and flora, community—things that happen organically because there’s a reciprocal relationship of care.

Care against the coronavirus. Care about income. Care through sharing meals and outdoor spaces as we reconfigure this life in the wake of emergency.

So stewardship was the theme. And you can still see it now in some of the messaging—it’s not as strongly stated anymore, because there’s been a hard pivot. So you had to say things like community, care, frontline—those became emergency signal words. But that message of stewardship still runs throughout their campaigns.

Beautiful. I love that stuff. It sounds wonderful. I’m curious—when was the first time you realized you could make a living doing this kind of thing?

Oh boy. That was twofold.

First, you started this conversation with the idea that you’re in control. And I think I realized that early on—when I was crashing through windows, showing up in meetings, doing things I had no business doing—just because I wanted to be in control.

That was probably early twenties. No matter what was thrown in my way—I became a mom early, I went to school, I did all the things. It’s not a sob story; it’s just what you do to live and thrive.

And I realized, Wow. If I can be resilient enough to say, “Okay, today I’m a makeup artist, I guess I’m going to this video shoot,” or “I’m doing a book signing and now I’m a publicist,” or “I’m launching a digital magazine,” or “I’m helping an artist,” or “I’m working on the Google acquisition of Motorola”—then I can make a living at this.

I was doing all these things because I said I could. It doesn’t take long to learn. Everyone’s figuring it out along the way—even the most seasoned experts.

So I realized you can make a living at this. You just need a word to describe it—something people can latch onto so they don’t question it. The brain loves containers. It’s a hard intellectual exercise to break out of them, but we need those containers to start the conversation.

That’s when I was like, I’m a strategist. I can’t say, “Hey, I’m a professional thinker and figure-outer”—people would say, “What the hell does that mean? I’m not paying you to do that.”

But I am a strategist. I’m a planner. I’m a futurist. Words like that help people understand the containers of what I do, the value I bring, and what we’re going to explore. There are no real lines or boundaries, but I use a container to introduce the conversation.And that realization—that aha moment—came in my early twenties.

Really? And what was the word? Was it strategist?

Yeah, first it was strategist. That came from being a digital strategist and a digital PR strategist—back when social media was still in its infancy. It was the MySpace era, and brands like Coty came knocking, saying, “There are these folks online who seem to have an audience—we want to tap into that.”

So I started doing that. I worked on JLo’s Glow and Glow Miami campaigns—it was digital PR, and we were doing events. It wasn’t exactly happenstance, but it kind of was.

Then I started helping brands think about how people behave in these new online spaces, how that compares to how they interact in real life, how language evolves, how style and activity evolve. That’s thinking. That’s exploration. That’s strategy. And that became the basis of how I started calling myself a strategist.

And then, when I finally got to agencies, I was told, “Oh, you're not a strategist. You didn’t get your MBA at Wharton. You didn’t do these things.” And I was like, “Oh... okay.”

So I figured, all right, I need some business strategy principles. And that’s when I started calling myself an emerging venture strategist—things like that. Because it just made it so much easier for people to understand what I was actually doing, which was sense-making, place-making, meaning-making.

Oh, I love it. I want to know about the name—I love the name of your advisory: Culture by Curate. Can you tell me the origin story of that name?

Yeah. I think just now—over the past, I’d say, three to five years—brands are really beginning to understand how ubiquitous and important culture is to us as human beings. Culture drives commerce—not the other way around.

And there are, I mean, gosh—when I say nuance, and we talk about subcultures and things like that—those are really oversimplified containers. They’re tools for brands and brand practitioners to try to understand the invisible and visible ways we interact: the signals, how we dress, what we do, what we say, what we think, where we go, how we play, what we do together as a group versus in different groups—or as individuals.

Customs. Codes. All of those things—that’s what makes up culture. And I think brands often don’t understand that all of that evolves through interaction—with the outside world, and with each other. And that’s curation, right?

It’s putting things together in groups, letting them spin off, evolve, form new meanings. You are curating an experience. You are curating an identity. You are curating meaning.

So, in a fever dream one night, I was playing around with names—like “The Cultural Intelligence Advisory” or “This” or “That.” And all the while, in the back of my mind, I was thinking about the academics who do this—who study this for a living. I wanted to give deference to them.

Because their work gives shape to a lot of what I’m doing. But I’m not an academic. I think for a living, sure—but I’m not a rigorously applied academic thinker. And there’s a place for that kind of work, because it gives us frameworks we can actually use in the real world.

So in a way, I realized—I’m curating that collective intelligence myself. And when I said that to myself, I was like: Ah. There we go. Culture by Curate.

It’s what I do. It’s how I’ve lived. It’s how I approach my work. It’s what brands need in order to create new frameworks for how they operate. And ultimately, it’s how we all exist in this bubble of the world—with each other.

How—what have you observed has changed since you started? You’ve been in this space, working with organizations. I love how you talk about culture. You say there’s a growing recognition that culture drives commerce, not the other way around.How have things changed in terms of how your clients understand—or don’t understand—culture? Who gets it, and who still doesn’t?

I’m finding that the appetite to understand culture has definitely grown—which is great. And not just because it’s great for business, but because it’s great for the evolution of humankind.

Why is that? I’m curious—I want to follow up. Why do you think it’s such a good thing that organizations become fluent in culture?

I think—there are so many different conversations happening right now about systems thinking, systems destruction, and systems recreation. And that can feel really big and heavy, especially to the uninitiated—for those who aren’t in this kind of work, or who aren’t academics. It can feel unsolvable, like, I can’t take part in that.

But when you say, “We’re in culture thinking, in culture exploration,” then you’re doing a piece of that work. And it becomes a beacon—of hope, and of place. Like, I have a place in this larger work of reconstructing systems so that they benefit everybody.

And that includes business. Because when you think about the extractive, exploitative nature of business, it’s easy to say, I can’t solve that. I’ve got to make money to live and eat. That’s the reality—we’re in a system where we need to do that.

But at the same time, you also don’t want to contribute to harmful behavior anymore—to people or planet. And that can feel so big—because you’re just one person doing one thing.

But if you say, “Hey, what if I could help business understand relationships better—beyond just buying?”—then it becomes a slow crack in a system that was built for a world that no longer exists. A system that’s no longer serving us. It’s a slow dismantling. A changing of hearts, minds, and actions.

That’s why I think it’s a great thing for businesses to understand meaning, people, and culture. Because then it becomes—well, it’s like giving medicine to a child. NyQuil tastes terrible, but it helps you sleep. And as a parent, you’re like, This is going to help you sleep, and Mommy needs to sleep too.

So what do you do? You put it in a little bit of juice. It sweetens the taste just enough. And now they’re doing the thing—they’re taking the medicine—and it’s not so bad. And then, after a while, maybe they don’t need the juice. Maybe you can graduate them to a pill. (True story, by the way.) But it’s the same notion.

And how would you—actually, let me go back. What have you noticed has changed?

I’d say the appetite for understanding culture is still there—and growing. But it’s still often framed as, “I want to understand culture so I can figure out what’s cool and package it and sell people more stuff.”

That’s still there. But at least the door is cracked open. Because now I can say, “Great—you’ve got culture with a capital C, and then you’ve got sneaker culture, digital culture, luxury culture”—all these fractures, or splinters, of what culture is.

So again, if I have to work in bite-sized shifts, that’s fine. The appetite is there for discussion and exploration. And then I can say, “Let’s talk about meaning as it relates to commerce.” What you’re really doing is slowly helping them understand that there’s more than what meets the eye—the buying part, the spectacle part.

Another thing that’s changed is that a lot more practitioners are talking about culture, which is fantastic. These aren’t just pundits—they’re people actively participating in the exploration. Some have been exalted as experts, and that’s fine—because at least the conversation is moving forward. I'm okay with the conversation moving forward—as long as it does move forward. And it is. So that’s great.

You reminded me of Grant McCracken. Are you familiar with Grant?

Yes.

I mean, he’s a hero of mine. I remember him mentioning his book Chief Culture Officer—it’s a beautiful book with a great idea. I recall him—maybe I shouldn’t be telling this story—but he sort of confessed he was exasperated that corporations, generally speaking, would see the word culture and immediately think only of themselves. They wouldn’t recognize the invitation in that word.

Like, “No, no, no—not your internal culture. The culture outside.”

And I think that’s one of the tragic realities—or at least a core difficulty—of doing this kind of work. Does that resonate with you?

Absolutely. And I think everything is connected—including that exact challenge.

I think a lot about parenthood because it’s a big part of my life. When you said that, I immediately thought of adolescence. In adolescence, you’re trying to raise a human being to understand who they are in a healthy context—and how they fit into the world. But it’s also a deeply self-centered time in life.

That self-centeredness is necessary to reach the next stage. And yes, it’s frustrating and infuriating, but also essential. I think of organizations the same way.

A business would love to treat itself as a separate entity—like, “We’re doing this in the name of business,” as if that absolves any responsibility for thinking critically about what you’re actually doing. But organizations are made up of people. Full stop.

So when businesses start to think about culture, and they go, “Well, let’s start with internal culture”—I’ve worked on those projects, internal culture, ERGs, DEI initiatives—all of that. At the very least, it’s a small step in the right direction. It’s a way of acknowledging: “We are made up of people who have thoughts, experiences, feelings, and behaviors.”

That’s dipping your toe in the water of meaning.

But then, quickly, it becomes too big—too overwhelming, too complex. They start all these ERGs (Employee Resource Groups) and BSGs (Business Support Groups) because they suddenly realize: “Oh... people think differently. They’re experiencing things we weren’t aware of. They see their work differently. Some are upset. Some are happy. Some are disengaged.”

And then, the question becomes—why? Why is that happening?

Sometimes, that work goes nowhere. But still—it’s a beginning. A tipping point. And often, it’s the marketing and communications teams who take that momentum and start turning their focus outward—toward the culture beyond the organization. Same practice. Just disjointed. But it’s a step in the right direction.

How do you—just curious—how do you work? This is a selfish part of the conversation: I’m a qualitative researcher, and I’m always advocating for the benefit of qualitative research. What role does it play for you, if any? And how do you help organizations connect with or understand culture?

I’m always pushing for qualitative and quantitative research. Always.

Here’s the thing: I love being around smart people. I absolutely love being around people who are smarter than me. And that’s not just lip service.

Because honestly—I was a terrible employee. Now that I’m on my own, it’s different. But back then, if I was the smartest person in the room—or even just thought I was—I would disengage. I’d already figured out the plot. Part of that’s ADHD. If it’s taken 20 minutes to get to the point and I already got there? I’ve checked out. I’m done. I’m thinking, We’re still talking about this?

So I need the challenge of being around people who know more than me, who think differently than me, who are true experts in something.

That’s when I light up. I think, Oh, I want to learn.

That’s just—I want to say, oh, this is great. Because it really feels like something beautiful is happening—this exchange. That’s what research does for me.

So I partner with researchers. Number one, they’re deep in it. They understand it. I know enough to be dangerous—I say that all the time. I know enough to know the value, to speak the language, to understand the parts and the process.

But I’m always working with people who are fully immersed—who really know the work. Because then we can sit and vibe, and discuss, and debate, and explore ideas together. And from there, we get aligned—and bring the client into that space too.

I collaborate. I no longer work in terms of, “Okay, here’s a campaign” or “Here’s a fixed framework.” Frameworks are important, yes—but my goal is to help brand teams re-familiarize themselves with research. To fall back in love with curiosity and play.

Sure, use your frameworks and funnels—I get that. I can work within them. I have. But I’m also asking, What else? What’s more?

That’s how I work with brands. I acknowledge the tools and systems they’re already using—that’s great. But I also look beyond them.

And part of that is working through the research: commissioning it, understanding it, and then, yes, distilling it into insights. I love insights. And then asking again: What else? What’s more?

Beautiful. This hour went by very quickly. I want to thank you so much for the conversation. It was a real pleasure. I appreciate it.

Likewise. I could talk to you forever. Thank you for the opportunity.

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