Chris Darrouzet, Water Cooler Logic Co-founder
Ph.D. in anthropology

My current interest is in improving the ways in which participatory ethnography and design can help staffs in large organizations deal with the immense complexity of their work in these organizations. The challenge is to convince leaders that they and their staff, at every level, can achieve a more useful, productive and meaningful grasp of their work and that of their colleagues if given the opportunity to investigate their work in the spirit of Water Cooler Logic.

I came to this work via a period in the late 1980s to early 1990s of working in industry, on staff and as a consultant to leading companies in Silicon Valley — among them, Sun Microsystems, Hewlett Packard, Apple Computer Systems. In 1994, I joined the former Institute for Research on Learning (IRL) as a research scientist. IRL was a spin-off from XEROX’s famed Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) dedicated to achieving a new, in-depth understanding of work and learning. At IRL, I quickly aligned with those who wanted to conduct team-based, action-research and learning consulting projects, projects on which we could engage staff in organizations directly, see work and learning up close, in its real settings, test out our ideas, and have significant impacts (for the better we hope, and believe) on the quality of work-life in our large organizations. In 1998, I was elected head of the work practice analysis group at IRL. It was in this context that our group moved toward the style of participatory ethnography that was to become the basis of Water Cooler Logic.

My work with WCL Inc and IRL returned me to my professional roots in anthropology. In the 1970s, I trained in cultural anthropology, at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. My thesis research entailed a 14-month stay in Papua New Guinea, conducting ethnographic research on the topic of social and political change at the local level among a cluster of small villages. No surprise, really, that much of what I learned about small group processes, local politics, and business has carried over into my work in large scale-organizations.