This is where we drill down into the changes taking place in the self, organizations, celebrity culture, music, brands, families, homes, storytelling, and outsider culture.

This is where we show how these very cultural things are becoming more open, diverse, floating (sorry, we can’t think of a better term), transformational, capacious, exploration, dynamic, inclusive and performative.

I know, you can be forgiven thinking “OMG, like, get a grip and everything.” But mastering these structural properties helps build our cultural competence and create value for the client and the organization.

You are already the keeper of culture in your organization. We want you to be the resident expert, the person people go to when things are vexingly unclear. Your knowledge of culture allows you to reveal things invisible to others.

For instance, we can see the gap between the financial industry and its consumers; the real reason things went so wrong for Harry and Meghan; why big Pharma struggles to speak to consumers; how Millennials see the world; how we define the new office place; and how we can master and practice the new rules of branding.

This means working with cultural meanings, rules, and trends.

We can make culture by moving, colliding, stealing, borrowing meanings. We can make culture by mixing and matching rules. We can leverage, create and counter trends.

This last hour will be filled with little case studies that talk about Boomers and Gens X, Y and Z. We will talk about the meaning manufacture by Progressive, Tide, Method, Wendy’s, American Express, Cole Haan, The Container Store, Ancestry.com, Michelob, McDonald’s, Bud Light, Mustang, Hyundai, Google, KFC, Verizon, and assorted memes and other acts of mischief.

But for many organizations, it remains a mystery, a kind of “dark matter.” People know it’s “out there.” But they don’t know how to understand or work with it. We want to fix that.

We will break culture down into meanings, rules and trends. This is our way to clarify and simplify.

We are the unsung heroes of the corporation. We’re the ones who know how to make dark matter matter, to make dark matter bright. Culture Camp is a way to enlarge our practice and to improve our profile.

Our approach uses anthropology, ethnography, big data, and a device we call The Griff.

We are both scrupulous and practical. (Too often, people seem to think that as long as you are standing in a kitchen or a living room, you are doing ethnography. Um, no.)

The point is to show how we can use these methods to capture someone’s head and heart from three points of view: the inside, the outside, and the future (where she will be 2, 5 and 10 years hence). This is where The Griff comes in, serving as a kind of “time machine.” Buckle up for safety!

For the moment our culture looks like a goat rodeo. It’s a mess. But gradually we are learning to live with disruption. Yay, us!

We are beginning to master the cultural drivers, perspectives, complexities and possibilities that make change possible and necessary. (Double yay.)

Culture Camp will examine the rules of chaos, including, for instance, the new contracts binding culture creators and consumers, the death of genre in storytelling, the rise of multiplicity and identity, and the transformation of the home and family before and after COVID-19.