Galt Global Review

A self-described global nomad, Stephenson is usually always on the move. From London to Majorca, Spain, to Los Angeles and New York, she travels around the world from contract to contract, and contact to contact, much like she did while in her twenties amongst the still very much alive Mayan people.

“I get jet-lag if I stop moving!” she laughs. “I’ve spent 20 years out in the field as an anthropologist and just as many in corporate. In the grinding pace of academia, professors don’t have five years’ experience, they just have one year’s experience five times. For me, I wanted to live a new life every year.”

Stephenson’s clientele has included IBM, Time/AOL/Warner, Hewlett-Packard, the Pentagon and CIA, the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the LAPD. Hired by the US government to analyze and detect weaknesses in Al-Qaeda’s network and by the LAPD to restructure their police force after the Rodney King riots, Stephenson is the renegade scientist who is called upon to redesign the human networks existing within the given hierarchy of an organization – especially when something goes wrong.

The insights she offers clients are about the actual insides of their network: who trusts whom, who is the gatekeeper monitoring the flow of information, who is the hub connected to everybody, who are the pulse-takers keeping a watchful eye on everything, who turns to who for advice, who the “unsung workhorses” are, where communication is being blocked, who backstabbed who and which ones know “where the bodies are stashed.”
” I kind of like being the wild stallion” she says wryly, “I work best as a free agent. You ever see the movie The Constant Gardner? I do that work – at the strategic, network level. When you study networks, you realize that any network can unravel a hierarchy but any hierarchy when it sees a network can crush it.”

Stephenson speaks with the charisma of someone who has found their calling and who is inherently optimistic about their work and its potential to change the world. “The idea of human networks is a compelling one,” she says. “I’ve never been bored by it and have been following it for 30 years. There’s never any issue, or angst, about this or that - I always take the logical next step, and can foresee myself doing this for the rest of my life.”

Stephenson studies the properties of human networks, specifically the energy level – the trust – that holds the human networks in place. Human networks are the same everywhere, she points out, whether it’s an academic network, a business network, a tribal network, or a community. Trust relationships are the “gold standard” of innovative and successful organizations, yet networks alone cannot tell a person where the trust is. Stephenson needs to go below the radar to get her information, and she does this by using mathematical algorithms and software which she owns proprietary rights to through her company, Netform.

The process involves confidential surveying and extensive analysis which is then interpreted by the software and converted into graphic images. Like a map, the resulting data reveals a dense blueprint of names, job titles and criss-crossing lines that reveal the informal connections and pathways of communication between people.

“Business people are excited by this capability because it confirms what they instinctively know,” says Stephenson, “but it also reveals surprises. The approach is fundamentally counterintuitive. For example, the fastest path to someone may be a longer more circuitous path because the people in the long chain of connections really trust each other. So even though there are more links in the chain, it takes less time to travel across them.”

While organizational charts typically show the corporate hierarchy - a ranking of who is in charge - what it doesn’t show is how things get done within a company and who is actually doing the work.

Karen Stephenson is both a pioneer and innovator in her field. “I’m training the second wave,” is how she puts it. If Stanford Design School had been around when she was beginning her career, she’d have been an alumni by now, yet in her time there was no discipline or degree that integrated both art and science.

For Stephenson, the path to becoming a corporate anthropologist was an innovative one. She majored in art and chemistry at Austin College, Texas, where she discovered her talent for recognizing patterns (in art history classes, she could recognize the artist of a work, as well as the date, by interpreting the brush strokes). After a brief time living as a painter in New York City, Stephenson then enrolled at the University of Utah as a student in the quantum chemistry program. It was here that she became more interested in the study of people. While managing a 200-person chemistry lab, she began to notice how the reactions occurring in macromolecular chemistry were strangely similar to what was going on in the lab between people – from quantum chemistry to social chemistry. This led her to a deep interest in the study of human networks and she earned a Master’s degree in Anthropology at the University of Utah – modeling humans, not molecules

“By design, I gave myself five years to master a discipline – once I’d exhausted the discipline or had earned the degree, I took my idea to the next level. I had initially earned two undergraduate degrees simultaneously, but thereafter, earned degrees in five year increments, first a Masters, then a Ph.D.

It was while taking a community class in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that Karen wrote a paper (on ancient trade networks in what is now known as modern day Iraq) that caught the attention of Carl Lanberg-Karlovsky, the Professor of her class and also the Director of the Peabody Museum. He introduced her to Harvard’s anthropology department, where she was accepted as a PhD candidate.

“ Harvard wanted me to do the Margaret Mead thing,” says Stephenson. “No disrespect, but I’d been there – I had already done that. What about modern day corporations? I asked, and they said: Are you crazy!”

But Stephenson persisted – “What good is theory if you cannot test it?” she responded – and in the end became the first person to complete a PhD in Anthropology focusing on human networks in corporations. It was a difficult period at Harvard (“I couldn’t wait to get out of there!”), as Stephenson’s ideas often weren’t very well received within the academic world initially. After ten years as a management professor at UCLA business school, Harvard offered her a teaching position where she now teaches at the Graduate School of Design.

“ When you innovate it takes a while before you get recognized for it,” she says. “It’s typically considered a threat to people who want to hold down tradition. People will hijack the situation and render the innovation irrelevant or stigmatized. Your job as an innovator is to keep going – don’t get even, just get ahead - don’t let them stop you from doing your work.”

Stephenson’s current work is concerned with helping people build a process by which people can collaborate effectively – an important proviso for governments and NGOs alike.

“ This work is both innovative and risky,” says Stephenson. “You’re going in there and not exposing too much about the methodology while you are trying to change things. For example, take my work with the LAPD. There was an institution set up for the greater good, yet the structure of the organization was so dysfunctional – it was accomplishing just the opposite in terms of its treatment of the citizenry and its inability to prosecute crime effectively. When this happens, it’s called a perverse outcome.”