Topics: International Speakers Bureau, Inc. |
Fee Range: Call For Quote (fee note) |
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 Biography: Karen Stephenson, PhD, is a unique visionary and a pioneer in the rapidly emerging field of social network analysis. She has forged an innovative approach that integrates the natural sciences (quantum chemistry and physics) with the social sciences (anthropology and art). This approach has transformed the concept of network analysis - and won Dr. Stephenson international recognition as a foremost corporate anthropologist. But she is an accidental anthropologist, arriving by way of chemistry and physics (detailed in "Trafficking in Trust" Chapter 15 in Enlightened Power, Jossey-Bass, 2005). She is by design a hybrid, bridging the worlds of private corporations and the public institutions of academe and government. Her mantra is this: while people in organizations are intimately familiar with their own context, the anthropologist is not. So when people tell the anthropologist about their context, they are describing what they know, not what they see. And therein lies the problem. They know too much and see too little. To draw what you see, you must forget what you know. You must erase any preconceived notion of what the object is and draw only what is there. If all of us can do this, then we truly see. The sad fact is that what people usually "see" inside and between their organizations is what they know - an explicit structure - in exactly the same way we "see" the physical architecture of a building when we walk into it. What they do not see or understand is the shape of an invisible culture that fills the organization in much the same way that people cannot see or understand the shape of space that fills a building. By connecting the dots revealed through Dr. Stephenson's approach, one can bring into focus an emergent, shadow world beneath the explicit one. She is president and founder of NetForm and a professor of management having taught and served at Harvard's Graduate School of Design, Imperial's School of Management in London, and UCLA's Anderson Graduate School of Management. In addition, she has been appointed as Visiting Anthropologist to IBM's Advanced Business Institute, BBN, the Office of Total Information Awareness and NIH. She received her PhD in Anthropology from Harvard University, an M.A. in Anthropology in mathematical modeling from the University of Utah and a B.A. in Chemistry and Art from Austin College in Texas. |
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