Ep. 136 - Archaeology as a Leadership Tool - Celia Orsini

Speaker A: Welcome to Dear Human Resources, the podcast where we explore the human side of work, leadership, learning, culture, and all the messy, meaningful things in between. I'm Mary Lynn Germain, your host. And today's episode might surprise you because we're talking about archaeology. Yes, archaeology, not as history, but, but as a leadership and well being tool. And my guest is Celia Orsini, an archaeologist and the founder of Archaeology for well Being. Celicia works with STEM and research teams to address communication breakdowns, isolation and burnout using evidence led, non clinical frameworks inspired by archaeology. Her work helps leaders rebuild empathy, trust and belonging by creating shared reference points drawn from human stories of the past. Celia, welcome to the show. Hi.

Speaker B: Thank you for having me.

Speaker A: So let's start by clearing things up here. Many people still think archaeology is about digging up old things and putting them behind glass. When you walk into a room with a leadership team or a research group, what actually happens?

Speaker B: I would like to just address one thing. We often see archaeology as this messy, muddy field with people digging up the ground. But what archaeologists, uh, are doing is trying to identify groups of people and how they express their identity. Archaeology really studies how people organized belonging, organized identity and support, which is actually exactly what leaders are, ah, asked to do. Nowadays the discipline studies human connection and relationships. And what I do is that I approach organization the way an archaeologist would approach a site. I'm trying to observe patterns, relationship and context rather than address an immediate problem. So instead of really asking what went wrong, I'm looking for a pattern, um, what patterns produce the situation.

Speaker A: That's really fascinating to me. So archaeologists are trained to read what's not immediately visible, right? Which is pretty much what you explained, the layers, absences, context, what's missing as much as what's present. Is that right?

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, exactly. Leaders usually miss actually those invisible layers. So in archaeology we are actually trained to look for what's missing. And it teaches us that what's absent or avoided can be just as informative as what's openly expressed. So what I like to do is discuss with the team leader before any workshop to understand the unspoken expectation or the past conflicts or the informal hierarchies that shape how people behave within, uh, a team. And this is really the first step before any of my interventions.

Speaker A: So if organizations were archaeological sites, what you're talking about leaders missing things, right? What do leaders usually miss?

Speaker B: I think they explain issues, the way they gathered data, pointing out that there is, uh, a miscommunication problem in a team and uh, not actually looking at what created that problem. What really brought these tension between people. And I do believe that often what created issues is individualistic thinking, it's siloed thinking. And what I try to address within the session is how building a culture that is inclusive will help shed light on biases and will help share this space where people actually have the space to communicate properly.

Speaker A: What are the buried layers showing up as? Uh, conflict, silence, or burnout, for example?

Speaker B: To me, it's really misaligned values. And when we discuss with different team members, we see that they are working under expectation, that they never really agreed upon, and they feel like they are unable to challenge the statute score. And this usually really is an expression of deeper, uh, organizational structures. Right. What we see is the surface expression of systemic problems. So I want people to train their skills of empathy. I want people to think about identity as something fluid and help them step in other people's shoes, basically to just try to soften conflict. Because you don't have to be best friends with your team members. That's not the point. I'm not here to make you all love each other. I'm here to give you the tools to be able to communicate and work as a community instead, as an individual, part of a group.

Speaker A: I'd like to talk about empathy. Can you share an archaeological moment, maybe in the field or in research that really shaped how you understand empathy today in organizations?

Speaker B: I think it's a really interesting question. Empathy requires you to imagine lives from a different perspective without projecting any assumption onto them. And this is where archaeology is quite interesting, because what we are trained to do is to imagine the people from the past, imagine their lives without projecting modern assumption. And when I was thinking about our interview, I was thinking about giving you example of when I was on site. And things really triggered my capacity to empathize. And the first thing that came to mind is before I created archaeology for well being, I found myself on maternity leave in a new city and very isolated from friends, from colleagues. I knew no one. And I was far away from my family. And I used archaeology, uh, to stay connected with my identity, the identity at my core. And that passed through, um, archaeology, heritage sites, and later on. A friend of mine was also pregnant, preparing to give birth, far away from her homeland, no parents nearby, no circles of friends. And she find herself in a very similar situation that I had. And the way she talked, I recognized that feeling, that feeling of being disconnected, isolated, misunderstood. And basically I suddenly stepped in and telling her, you know, what I did, this is what I did. This is what I did. When I was in your shoes, and. And this is how Archaeology for well Being was born. Because I think the act of empathizing is very nourishing. And when you try to understand another person, you regulate your nervous system. So this, for me, was archaeology in action. So I thought, first I thought about this story, about, um, the fact that I had empathized with her, but there was something missing. At was already a mother, and I had been in her exact same position. So it was easy for me to empathize. So I would like to mention another example. When I was 19 years old, I happened to be digging, uh, in the northern part of England, and I was digging a child's burial. And this was an incredibly exciting moment for me because this was the realization of my dreams. I was there, an archaeologist or in training, but still an archaeologist, digging a burial site, which was quite fascinating. But what I didn't know was when I started digging was that it would be a child's burial, and the child was buried underneath a slab. And there was this moment when I was, uh, with my supervisor, and we were about to lift the stone that was covering this chest child. And that is a moment where I felt like standing next to myself, looking at myself, digging this child, and thinking, what you're doing, and you're so tremendously excited about is emotionally charged, because you are standing where parents would have stood when they would have covered this child's body with a stone slab. And this was a really incredibly interesting moment, realizing that, yes, I wasn't a mother yet, so I couldn't quite understand how a parent would react in front of a child's burial place. But there was this clash of emotion, this responsibility that I felt. Yes, you are so incredibly happy to be here, incredibly privileged to be doing this act of excavating this child. But think about it in the opposite scale of all the negative emotion, all the tremendous suffering that some people may have felt when they were standing in front of this grave. So that was a really interesting moment where I could see things through multiple perspectives.

Speaker A: Why do you think empathy is so often misunderstood as being nice or being emotional? You know, especially in STEM or elite performance cultures?

Speaker B: I think in many technical environments, empathy is framed as emotional softness rather than an analytical awareness of human dynamics. And I think that's what's missing. Because being empathetic does not mean you're weak, does not mean you cannot take action. It just means that you have a, uh, different observation, interpretation of what is happening in front of you. It's a skill. It's A tool to be used in those very pressured moments where emotion run high. And saying that stem cultures and research group kind of reject emotion is maybe a very strong word. They are trained to be extremely analytical. I am here to explain them that empathy is actually part of that analysis. It is the human connection missing in so many places, in so many technical environments.

Speaker A: So one of the most intriguing parts of your work, I think, is how you use objects and landscapes and even the body, as you explained with this child, not necessarily therapy, not coaching, but something else entirely. So for someone listening right now and thinking, okay, but what does this look like in practice? What actually happens in the room?

Speaker B: Yes, I think people sometimes are terrified when they, uh, hear archaeology for well being. First of all, I think it's really important to understand that there is no prerequisite needed. You come into the room as you are and you don't need to have any knowledge prior any session. So you come as you are. My job is to try to show you that structured observation, that paying attention to pattern and interaction is going to be useful and is going to help you train that empathy skill. So what it does look like is three sessions. Usually we start talking about universal themes. So we're going to talk about health and healing through time. We're going to talk about food and food traits and how our identity reflects in our plates. We're going to talk about relationship and collective identity. And finally we're going to talk about landmarks and landscape. So the first workshop is dedicated to the individual. We talk about healing and how we deal with our own tension first. Then we expand to focusing on relationship and how we produce those relationship, how we maintain those relationship with others and how we build collective identities. And finally, the third workshop really talks about how our environment shapes our identity and our lives. And this is all these explorations create a space where people can examine communication, stress and collaboration from a different perspective.

Speaker A: Are there any outcomes that surprise even the leaders themselves?

Speaker B: The way I explain how the workshop are working right now may be still a bit abstract actually, because during the session there always is a part where we're going to handle artifacts or replicas and we're going to work a lot with maps and photos. And that breaks some of the resistance that people may have when they enter the room. What people tend to realize is that once this tension, this first resistance towards archaeology for well being, is gone, the language softens and we start listening actively. And that I think is extremely important when we want to practice empathy. Active listening is going to be an incredibly important and skill. And what leaders expect is quicker productivity, productivity improvement. But instead they will notice greater uh, clarity on how the team communicates and how those workshops help people step outside their defensive position.

Speaker A: So let's zoom out for a minute. What would it mean for organizations and for archaeology as a discipline if care if empathy and relational awareness were treated not as soft extras but as a core professional uh, competency? What do you think would happen and what does it mean? What would it mean?

Speaker B: I think it would be, it would be a dream, wouldn't it? Um, I think if we would recognize that organization are human systems, not just technical or economical structures, skills like observation, interpretation or relationship awareness would become part of professional training rather than informal expectation. Understanding people across time requires really discipline and attention to context and care and interpretation. So I think this is, would be an excellent training skills to add to any professions recognizing that human are at the center of those organization. It would be quite a tremendous shift.

Speaker A: And if you could leave our listeners, many of them are in hr, they are HR leaders, they are managers, they are researchers with one invitation, one small shift in how they see their teams through a longer human lens. What would that advice be?

Speaker B: I think I would say start treating workplace problems as systems with history, not isolated incidents. I think this is quite interesting. I'm going to take an example. There's a uh, team I've been working with for two years and we see reaction from some team leaders and some team members persisting through time and creating, recreating this similar situation, similar problem arising because the way they expect things to work is not put in place. And I think that when you employ a consultant and you bring in him or uh, her uh, into a team, you give them the tasks to solve that problem without giving him the background, the long term history. Because I don't believe that stress in corporations or burnouts come out of nowhere. It's not an isolated incident. It's layers and layers of past decision. So that's what I would invite people to do. To just realize that every case has a uh, history. And understanding those layers, those small accidental layers could help them respond better to the present conflict.

Speaker A: Celia, thank you for reminding us that leadership isn't just about the future. It's also about how deeply we understand the human stories beneath our feet.

Speaker B: Thank you very much for having me. I would like to say that archaeology is ultimately the study of how people lived and struggled and organized themselves and cared for one another over time. And if we have applied this perspective to modern organization, it will help us see human behavior with greater patience and

Speaker A: with greater depth to, uh, our listeners. If this episode made you rethink empathy, performance and what it means to really listen at work, then Archaeology may have just done its job. So thank you again, Sidi.

Speaker B: Thank you again.

Speaker A: Support for this show comes from Western Carolina University, a campus of the University of North Carolina system. With the technical assistance of Kelly Menace.