She Watched Chimps. I watched a Software War.

Last year, the world lost one of its greatest observers. This Women's History Month, we honor her.

Dr. Jane Goodall passed away on October 1, 2025. She was 91.

She spent decades sitting still in the forest. Watching. Not intervening. Just noticing what was true.

She broke scientific convention by giving chimpanzees names instead of numbers. Senior scientists were upset. It is now standard practice.

What she understood — before anyone had words for it — was this:

You cannot understand a system without watching the humans inside it.

That idea changed everything for me.

From the jungle to the war room.

Margaret Mead didn't just study other cultures. She entered them.

She believed you could not understand people from a distance. You had to sit with them. Eat with them. Watch how they moved through ordinary moments.

That method — ethnography — gave the world a new way to see.

Not through surveys. Not through data alone. Through presence.

The lesson she left behind is one I still use today:

The most important thing is rarely what people tell you.It's what they do when they think no one is watching.

That idea became the foundation of my graduate research. I took ethnography out of the rainforest and into the corporate trenches.

Her method — ethnography — was deceptively simple: go where the humans are, watch what they actually do, not what they say they do. That spirit of observing humans in context became the foundation of every human-centered research method that followed.

I was captivated.

I almost signed up to observe exotic parrots in the Galápagos.

I needed to make a living.

So instead I studied the most fascinating species I could find close to home —

The corporate engineer under deadline pressure.

It was 1997. The year Steve Jobs returned to Apple as CEO — walking back into a company on the verge of bankruptcy, about to change everything.

I walked into 1 Infinite Loop, Cupertino that summer with a scholarship, a notepad, and a research question.

A mentor who worked at Apple gave me access. The department I was embedded with — those early researchers — had just been laid off.

Jobs was cutting everything that wasn't essential.

So I sat alone on that floor. An R&D building being emptied around me. Just me, my data, and the ghost of the team that had been there.

It is, in retrospect, the most perfect metaphor for ethnographic research I can imagine.

The observer, left alone with the artifacts.

I was there not to fix the code. To watch the humans around the code.

And in a very Forrest Gump kind of moment —

I once stood next to a man in the cafeteria complaining about the lack of vegan options.

He was listening.

I didn't know it was Steve Jobs until someone told me afterward.

The framework I adapted as a lens was called Activity Theory.

A way of mapping how people, tools, language, and context shape each other inside complex systems.

What I was tracking wasn't bugs.

It was artifacts.

The whiteboards. The tracking systems. The logbooks. The language engineers used in the room when something broke.

And what I found wasn't what anyone expected.

The bugs were social events.

There were rituals around who got to name a problem. There were unspoken rules about who escalated — and who absorbed the shame.

And the language — oh, the language.

Hot potatoes. Hit squads. Bug meisters.

These weren't just colorful nicknames. They were the nervous system of the team made visible.

The artifact — the logbook, the whiteboard, the tracking tool — wasn't just a tool. It was how the team held its collective memory. How it decided what mattered. How it survived.

I published. I presented in Denmark. I took the research to HP next.

My published paper — Activity Theory and System Design: A View from the Trenches — documents exactly what we found.

→ Read the research here​

Then, like Goodall's early critics who dismissed her method as too soft, too human, too feeling —

Some doors closed. The academic path narrowed and disappeared.

And I stayed inside the software war anyway. For nearly two more decades. In corporate. In UX. Watching the same patterns repeat.

Until I walked out and built something on the other side.

What I know now.

The patterns I observed in those war rooms never went away.

The unspoken tension. The language rituals. The artifacts carrying meaning no one names out loud.

They are in every team. In every founder's mind. In every room where AI has entered and no one has said what they're actually afraid of.

The jungle never changed. I just finally found my way out of the war.

Speaking of women who observe deeply and build differently —

My friend Alessandra Thornton was once a journalist, an archaeologist by degree, and an ecologist by heart.

Then she went into the Amazon rainforest, watched the floods strip the Tagua nuts from the palm trees, and found her life's work in that moment.

Her story is worth five minutes of your time this Women's History Month.

→ Listen to Alessandra's story here​

→ Follow her on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/alessandrathornton/

The Pause with Purpose™ Quiz isn't a personality test.

Grounded in polyvagal theory, somatic awareness and psychometric design, it maps your natural relationship to stillness across 8 universal pause energy archetypes — this month, each one is illustrated through the lens of a woman.

Not a label. A mirror.

Reflecting your wiring so you can work with it, not against it.

This month, discover which woman archetype lives in your nervous system.

A small personal note before we wrap up week 2 of Women's History Month.

Once upon a time, my graduate research was built around exactly this.

Not the moth. The humans in the room with the bugs.

My work examined how software teams collaborated around bug management — through an ethnographic lens grounded in a framework called Activity Theory.

I studied Apple. I studied HP. I published.

Then life took me somewhere else.

But the questions never left: How do humans and systems shape each other? When things break — what do we actually do?

That thread runs straight through to everything I do now.

More on that next week. 🦋

✨ 🦋 Women's History Month Fun Fact: Margaret Mead published Coming of Age in Samoa in 1928 — at age 27, after fieldwork she conducted alone in the South Pacific. Male critics spent decades trying to discredit her. The anthropological community ultimately defended her work. She is now considered a founding figure of cultural anthropology and, quietly, the godmother of every human-centered research method we use today.

→ Take the Pause with Purpose™ Quiz: quiz.omnimindfulness.com​

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With love & light,​
​Shilpa 💛​
Founder of Omni Mindfulness

Your 🌐 AI Strategist Meets a 🧘 Spiritual Sage

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Owner/Founder of Omni Mindfulness​ Shilpa

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