MJ Petroni, Cyborg Anthropologist; Founder, Causeit, Inc
MJ specializes in helping others understand the mental models necessary to navigate digital opportunities.
Podcast
Overview
00:15- About MJ Petroni
MJ specializes in helping others understand the mental models necessary to navigate digital opportunities. A cyborg anthropologist, MJ allows us to see how we shape technologies and how they are reshaping us. They help organizations increase their Digital Fluency in preparation for future technologies, attending not just to tools but also the thinking, skills, data, and business models which comprise new value creation.
The author of the Causeit digital fluency guide, MJ focuses on raising the lowest common denominator of Digital Fluency for individuals, teams, and entire organizations. Since founding Causeit, Inc. in 2006, MJ has shifted thinking for hundreds of global enterprises, including NTT, Accenture, Volkswagen, the Gates Foundation, SWIFT, and several major financial and media companies, raising Digital Fluency among hundreds of thousands of professionals. MJ is an Accenture Tech Vision Advisory board member and Lewis & Clark College alum.
01:19- The two inflection points in your life that resulted in who you are today?
When I was growing up, I was always really fascinated by the idea of technology and how it worked. And I was a voracious reader. I would just read tons and tons of novels and a lot of sci-fi. my parents had said to me, what are you going to do that will help people? I ended up finding this field of Cyborg Anthropology. And I just knew that this was the thing that I wanted to check out and study and get into.
03:19- Explain Cyborg and anthropologist and the intersection
What cyborg anthropology does is look at not just how we make technologies, but how they remake or reshape us. The term cyborg refers to a cybernetic organism, it’s the merging of organic or human and inorganic or technological. But the idea is that we don’t get to just pick up a tool when it’s convenient to us in modern society, there is no unplugging completely in the current context of the world. And so resisting that causes us a lot of suffering, choosing it and getting curious about it gives us a lot of opportunity to make wiser decisions about what technology we bring into our own personal lives, what we bring into our workplaces, and what we bring into the culture at large.
11:39- Being a technology vision board member with Accenture
When we first started with the Tech Vision Advisory Board, which is an external advisory board to Accenture’s technology leadership that they then plow into thought leadership content that they share with their clients and their partners. There’s sometimes a fiduciary responsibility to produce short-term gains. And there’s  definitely, a lot of pressure to do that when companies live and breed by their stock price.
RESOURCES:
You can connect with MJ Petroni- LinkedIn
Visit http://www.causeit.org
Profile
MJ specializes in helping others understand the mental models necessary to navigate digital opportunities. A cyborg anthropologist, MJ allows us to see how we shape technologies and how they are reshaping us. They help organizations increase their Digital Fluency in preparation for future technologies, attending not just to tools but also the thinking, skills, data, and business models which comprise new value creation.
