Take a moment to sit quietly and listen to a conversation between designers. What do you hear? Debates over design changes; thoughts and discussions on recent user testing; possible interaction solutions for the best possible experience. While specific discussions and experiences may vary there is a common issue facing designers across all sectors and cultures; an issue that this profession has been struggling with since the beginning – getting stakeholder buy-in. Whether it’s the use of a specific tool to help define a given end state or trying to shift a rigid process to a more flexible and creative solution, designers seemingly have to battle more often than not to get support for their approaches and solutions to both small and large scale design issues.

We believe that empathy, patience, and communication are the key to getting stakeholder buy-in. Luckily, designers are already well equipped for this task! This talk will help designers sharpen their communication skills by providing 1) essential business frameworks from strategy leaders Stephen Covey and Charles Krone; and 2) conflict resolution and assertion techniques such as fogging, broken record, and negative assertion found in behavioral psychology.

 

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Transcript

Dan Willis: OK, we're going to get started. That's my polite way of saying [loudly] , "Sit down, sit down. What are you standing for?"

Woman: [laughs]

The people that are doing it are Alla Zollers... Aza, aza.

[applause]

[applause]

So, Alla does not the neurology background, is it? [laughs] Alla is a recovering academic. She spent a decade in academia, and she ran screaming from the whole operation. Now she builds things, and she'll tell you a little bit about that as context probably.

Jeff Parks, who everyone on the planet already knows, but I'll act like you don't, worked in brain rehab for a number of years, rehabilitative, people who had brain injuries.

Jeff Parks: Yeah, I was a rehab therapist.

I know they're going to have a great presentation, and that's it.

Jeff: OK. Great. Thanks very much, Dan. So, the Journey to Yes. I want to thank Alla for inviting me to share this presentation with her and some of the ideas and experiences I've learned over the years. Just one more thing.

Three years ago I was at my first Summit in Miami, and I never dreamed that I'd actually be here presenting and sharing some ideas. For those of you in the audience, this might be your first Summit. I would encourage you to continue to share ideas and look to the future and share some experiences that you think might help this community reform because ultimately the junior designers in this room, if there are any of you, regardless of your age or experience you guys are the future leaders of this discipline. Without you, we're nowhere. Away we go.

The Journey to Yes, typically when we look at problems and running into conflicts with people, we typically say my boss is the problem, or the designer's the problem, or the marketing professional's the problem. That really doesn't get us anywhere. It just sort of hits into this resistance that Alla is going to be talking about later.

To start with, what I'd like to do is get some people's thoughts, some ideas. I want to create a kind of mini controlled vocabulary. I'd like you guys to shout out different characteristics of people you used to work with or that you do work with right now that are problematic. What makes them so?

An example would be they don't listen. So, just shout out different ideas. They're assholes, yes. [audience response could not be heard] Perfect. What else? Egotistical? Unpredictable? Sorry? Clueless? Self-serving. Controlling. Disres-, may-... so, we all know the jerks we have to work with on a daily basis, right?

[laughter]

Jeff: When you keep this in mind, I want you to think of my boss as that. I want you to keep those ideas in your head as we go through that because what we want to do is share some ideas with you that'll move you towards more of a utopian state.

Let me ask you again. If you were to create a controlled vocabulary of a utopian state of the people you could work with, the corporate culture that you could create, what are some of the words that would describe that utopian state? Trust. Open. Humble. Smart. Collaborative. Aware. Respect. Humor? Human. God bless you, son, absolutely.

Because we are, as Jesse James Garrett stated a couple of years ago, database architects designed for other machines, information architects designed for other people. If we don't understand what motivates and drives and influences people, it's pretty hard to make those decisions.

So, influence. Ironically, I was on the same flight with Peter Morville on the way down, and he was kind enough to give me a ride to this event. I started sharing some of these ideas with him, and he brought up a good point and I'm not quoting Peter here, for the record. But he sort of talked about this idea of how people have a hard time differentiating influence and manipulation.

Manipulation is not what we're talking about today. Manipulation is doing something where one person wins, and the other person loses. It's about putting someone else down as an effort to promote yourself up. In that scenario, somebody wins and somebody loses, and that's where you create a greater disconnect within your organization.

What I am talking about is the opportunity to influence people in a positive direction so that everybody can win at the end of the day. One of my favorite TED Talks of all time is by Benjamin Zander. Benjamin Zander is a classical music conductor, and he gave a great TED Talk. He played Chopin several times, and he actually talked about going around to different schools and playing this classical musical piece for kids to inspire them and whatnot.

How many people have heard this talk? OK. One of the things in my background working with kids in gangs and group homes over the years, I'm 38 years, good Lord, old, and I've been to over 50 funerals in my lifetime and most of them kids under the age of 25. Having that kind of experience really starts to pull what's really important in life into perspective in a hell of a hurry.

He gave this one talk and in one part of the conversation he had he was talking about this young boy, this school that he went to. He came up to him afterwards playing a piece by Chopin, and the boy came up to him and he said, "You know..." Sorry, I always relate back to my own experiences, this gets me a little choked up. He said, "You know, my brother died last year, and I never cried for my brother. When you played that Chopping piece, I cried for my brother. It felt really good to cry for my brother."

You know what's interesting? Whenever I tell these sort of stories or share these kinds of experiences, you can hear a pin drop. People stop tweeting. They look up. They pay attention because at the end of the day we're all social creatures. We're all very much connected to one another.

As he noted in his talk, he said the conductor doesn't make a sound. He depends for his power on his ability to make other people powerful. 90 to 95% of communication as human beings is non-verbal. It's not what we say. It's the tone. It's our body language. It's how we come across.

This is why Twitter is the most useless contextual tool on the planet. This is why email is absolutely atrocious providing meaning and understanding. The Journey to Yes, you want to get by and you work in an organization with someone you're talking to work with and they're sitting four cubicles down, and you're sending 30 emails and then going, "Why the hell didn't he get what I meant?" That's kind of tough to swallow when you have that opportunity to connect with other people.

He went on to say that he realized that his job was to awaken possibility in other people. He went on to say, "Who am I being that my player's eyes are not shining." Now, what did he mean by that? When you connect with someone on an emotional level, when you really connect with them, you get a little choked up. Your eyes start to tear up a little bit. And so, the light reflecting off of those eyes cause them to shine.

I want you to remember this as we go through this talk, who am I being as an information architect, as a designer that my client's eyes, that the people I'm trying to get buying from and work with aren't shining, aren't connecting with me at an emotional level.

This talk is going to be very different than most talks at the IAS Summit. We're not going to go all out on data analytics and which tools are better than which, but this fundamentally, these ideas are how we connect with other people and how we get by.

My father was the Director of Engineering at DuPont, Canada, and he had the opportunity to work with Steven Covey of "Seven Habits of Highly Effective Business People". I think everyone's nodding their head going, "Yep, I've heard of that one." I was going to include that in my talk, but because I see all the head nods, well, I think I'll stick with another gentleman, Charles Crohn, which I'll get into later.

One of the most important lessons my father ever taught me in life was that everyone wants to feel like what they're doing is of value and that they're valued within that process. If you don't take anything away today from my part of the conversation, I would encourage you to remember that. Because as you interact with other inter-disciplinary teams that we run into with conflict and whatnot, everybody wants to feel like what they're doing is of value, and that they're valued in the process. Keep that in mind as we go forward.

Cognitive Dissonance. This quote was actually taken from a social psychology text way back in the day when I was in university by the existential philosopher, Albert Camus. I'm Canadian, and my French sucks, I'm sorry. But he said, "Humans are creatures who spend their lives trying to convince themselves their existence is not absurd", and he was referring to cognitive dissonance.

What that basically means, it means when you have two ideas that are psychological opposed, you rationalize why you make a specific decision. The cognition that, "I'm a good, kind, sweet person" is dissonant to the fact that well, I just told my manager that he's a moron and they don't understand anything and we can't get along.

So, we rationalize why we made that decision. We say, "Well, I was as patient as I could be. I gave them as many deliverables as I could. They just didn't get it. They're not getting it." Like the controlled vocabulary at the beginning, they're not listening, they're clueless. That's another one. I love that one. That's great.

Again, that doesn't get us anywhere in terms of moving forward because at the end of the day fundamentally we are emotional creatures. We are not rational ones. In fact, we are social creatures by and large, more than anything else.

An MRI machine, for those who don't know, you hook them up to your brain, and you ask them questions, well, not the monkey. But if it was a person, you ask some questions or get them engaged in behavior and you see which areas of the brain light up so you know what's responsible for what specific function.

While the monkey was trying to open up the nut, a researcher walked into the room and saw that the researcher figured out how to open the nut. They couldn't believe it. They thought there must be something wrong with the machine because suddenly the monkey could open the nut by watching the scientist open it. They were sure that there was something wrong.

They were sure that this can't possibly be right, but as they did more and more research what they started to discover were what are called mirror neurons. This is the way we empathize with other people. We have mirror neurons in our brain that actually allow us to connect with other people and understand.

This is why you don't walk into a funeral and start acting like its New Year's Eve. It's why you can walk up to someone without them saying a word and know whether or not to approach them or not. I was in line this morning getting a cup of coffee, and there was a lady holding this beautiful little girl. She was sick, and she was crying, and I looked at her, and I thought, "I'm going to try something here." I just kept smiling at her, right? I kept smiling at her and blinking at her and whatnot. Within a couple of minutes, she started to mirror back the exact expressions that I was mirroring to her, over and over again.

The important thing to recognize is that we are homo empaticus, and the fundamental elements of what they found in that research was that we are soft wired for sociability, attachment, affection and companionship.

A few years ago in 2006 I was doing some research for an e-learning program, looking at the new research about what motivates people and what drives them to do certain actions. And Dr. Elizabeth Gould in an article in Seed Magazine in February, 2006 came across this understanding.

She said, "The structure of our brain from the details of our dendrites to the density of our hippocampus is incredibly influenced by our surroundings. Put a primate under stressful conditions, and its brain begins to starve. It stops creating new cells. The cells it already had retreats inwards. The mind is disfigured, but here's the key. The social implications of this research are staggering. If boring environments, stressful noises in a primate's particular slot in a dominance hierarchy."

And when you think about the dominance hierarchy, I'm also referring to the corporate hierarchy as an example. If those things all shape the architecture of the brain, and Gould's team has shown that they do, the playing field isn't level. Poverty and stress aren't just an idea, they're an anatomy. Some minds never stand a chance. Poverty and stress just aren't an idea, they're an anatomy.

That means this is how important your corporate culture and your environment and your workplace is set up. If you work in the cubicle nightmare from hell with gray cubicles and fluorescent lighting, that actually impacts your capacity to create because your brain shuts down. It also prevents interactions between other human beings because it literally shouts, "Go away." We actually prevent the creative process from moving forward in a positive direction. This is really important to keep in mind as we go forward, model the behavior you want to see and others will naturally mirror it.

Now, I'm not saying, "We're a bunch of lemmings" and say, "Well, if I do this, you're all going to do this" and react that way. But if you are experiencing someone that's being defensive, anxious, uptight, close minded, you need to look back and think about how you're behaving and how you are modeling that behavior.

We were playing Michael Jackson's "Man in the Mirror" at the beginning as sort of a metaphor for the rest of the day today. He says, "You've got to look at yourself and see who you're being if you want to reflect changes in your own organization."

One of my favorite comedians is a guy named Lewis Black, and he's an American comic. The reason I'm saying he's an American comic will be clear in a second. I actually saw this at a time in my life when things were really tough, and I laughed so hard I cried for weeks on end. It's awesome. There's two specific skits here that I think will make you guys laugh, too and there are two points that are related to it. We'll watch that.

[video plays]

Lewis Black: The most important part of travel is when you come home because that's when you see your country with new eyes. I was amazed to realize that we are the only country that tells the rest of the world on a nearly constant basis that we are the greatest country on earth, and that is a little fucking obnoxious.

[laughter]

Lewis: And I know it's obnoxious because if you were in an office and there was someone there who came in every day and said, "I'm the greatest fucker here, and you sniveling shits would die without me. Ha, ha." I can guarantee by the end of the week you'd have killed him and eaten him just to try to possess his power.

[laughter]

Lewis: The amazing thing is there are people who have never left this country who talk about the fact that we're the greatest country on earth. How fucking dumb is that? Because you don't know. You haven't left here, you don't know. There are countries that may be giving shit away every day. Canada is one of those countries. You know what they give away? Health insurance.

[applause and laughter]

Jeff: OK, I thought you guys would enjoy that. To his first point, this is the importance of understanding how others perceive you because if you're walking into work every day... this is why the rock star crap in this industry has to end, immediately, please.

I went to karaoke night the other night. Trust me, there ain't any rock stars in this industry.

[laughter]

Jeff: God bless every one of you, I'm just saying. But the reality is that people who we're trying to influence and get buy-ins from are watching and listening to everything that we're saying. If we don't start supporting one another more effectively, it's going to be impossible for us to get buy-ins.

The other part of the skit where he talked about my home and native land, Canada, when he talked about that idea of if you've never left here you don't know. It reminded me of a conversation I had at the first VizThink Conference that Dave Gray put on back in 2008, I believe. I got to interview one of the lead designers from Bell Canada at the time, Daniel Rose. He made a great analogy. He said, "You know it's not really possible to think outside the box", the metaphorical box, of course, being a perspective on anything.

The only way to really expand that box is to surround yourself with people with different experiences than you and listen very carefully to what they have to say and learn from them, thereby expanding your own experience. My experience working with people with brain injuries, kids in gangs, pre-kindergarten kids that gave me a perspective on life that quite frankly I haven't run into very many people have.

You can imagine having those experiences and then going into a board room talking to people who are like stressed out about what color the button should be. It's like, really? Really? I told a group of executives one time, I'm like, "We're not curing cancer. So, everybody, just take a deep breath. Everybody, slow down. There's absolutely nothing we cannot do today."

There's a futurist, his last name is Seymour, he recently said, "There is nothing we cannot do today. We need to shift the conversation to what we could be doing to what we should be doing. If we can know about anything today, that literally changes everything." People don't buy what you do, people buy why you do it.

A great talk on TED by Simon Sinek, basically how great leaders inspire action and effect. Here is a framework that he drew, and at the core of the framework was the word, why. Outside the circle was how, the further outside the circle was what.

Here's my impression of the industry over the last few years. What? To find the damn thing. My definition's better than your definition. No, my definition is better than your definition. IA doesn't exist. Interaction design more important designs than this, this, this, this.

How? Wire frames are good. Wire frames are bad. Content inventories are useless. No, they're not. They're worthwhile. We should definitely do this.

Why? Because I said so. Really? How are we being perceived by the outside world? How about we switch the argument around and start with the purpose. Why? Everyone wants to feel like what they're doing is a value and that the value is in that process. Everyone wants a purpose in life.

Martin Luther King, Jr., the slide up here. Easily without question, one of the greatest inspirational leaders in human history in my opinion. Why? Because he had a purpose, and everybody knew what the purpose was. There was no question.

In the IA community if we switch things around, maybe the conversation starts sounding like this. We start with the what. As information architects, we help everybody find anything they need whenever they need it. You drive context information so people can understand what it is we're trying to convey.

How do we do that? We use a variety of different tools, but mostly we listen to the people that we're designing for and use the terms and words that they use so we can provide meaning to them.

Want to work with me? Big change from, "We're defining this thing as this. This is the tool that's good or bad because I said so." We have the opportunity to change these conversations, but it's on us as leaders in these communities and as the future leaders of these communities in particular to not only start doing that sort of approach to how and why we are of value, regardless of your title because that can apply to interaction design. It can apply to human factors.

We start focusing on the value of the brain, and suddenly we start raising the level of debate in conversation, and we get away from the trivial nonsense that's been going on in the community for a few years now.

Slow down, listen, and question for clarity.

[applause]

Jeff: [laughs] Slow down, listen, question for clarity.

I'm not saying if you're in the middle of a two week sprint that you have to extend that to three and four weeks. What I am saying is that within that two week sprint there is nothing preventing you from questioning for clarity, going to other people within the team and saying, "I want to make sure. This is what we agreed to do, right? Did we take these other things into account? Are we looking at the bigger picture? Are we getting too semantic?" Any number of those things will allow you to actually question for clarity and slow down.

Listening. There's a big difference between listening and hearing. If you're listening, imagine yourself walking downtown in a major metropolis. We have people here from all over the world, so I'm not going to name a particular city. Imagine walking downtown in a major metropolis around noon, you're walking with a friend, it's noisy as hell around you. You're listening to your friend, but you're hearing all the other background noise going around you.

If we don't learn to slow down and listen more effectively, this is why we run into problems because what we end up doing is we only hear bits and parts of what's going on around us, and then we blame other people for not communicating more effectively. Or they didn't understand the whole piece.

Well, why were you not listening from the beginning? You have to learn to slow down and to listen because the reality is we may not want to work the marketers and the communication directors and everybody else on the planet but we do. Everybody has to work with inter-disciplinary teams, and by taking this sort of approach we have the opportunity to break down those silos.

This, by the way, is the hardest work you will ever do in your career. I don't care what you call yourself, who you are, what industry you're in. This is the hardest work you'll ever do. The reason why this is not done and the reason why companies don't work more and sort of collaboratively together is because this is hard. This takes a lot of time and patience to move through.

So, I was mentioning in the beginning that Stephen Covey wasn't going to cover Charles Crohn, and my father had the opportunity to work with these people. Since the time I'd been 15 years old, I had been learning these ridiculously intense frameworks from some of the greatest systemic thinkers, well at least the last couple of generations.

Charles Crohn, some of you may not know who he is. You can Google him or look him up. He's not really on Google a lot. I think Mr. Crohn is about 70 years old or so now, but to give you a little background on him. When he was 15, he was teaching calculus at Northwestern University. When he was 20, he worked for a little company called Boeing. They couldn't figure out how to get the 747 to fly, so he worked with them to help them understand how different metal alloys can help create lifts and drag within an airplane.

But probably the most remarkable thing that has impacted every single person in this room was that Charles Crohn actually created the concept of Crest toothpaste. He changed the dentist industry forever based on the ways he thought about things, the ways he structured ideas, to empower other people, to think about things in a very different way. In this framework, in particular, the ability to create an empathic corporate culture and the sense of value.

The star itself, actually I didn't have time to change the design. The star itself should have the lines all intersecting with one another. They are not desperate entities. They're all connected. So, if we look at the ideas here, you create a corporate culture, an empathic corporate culture by saying that everyone experiences a sense of individuality and self-expression.

There is a way of reacting to the spontaneity, integrity, and integration existing. There is an ability to reason and exchange ideas with others, and there's a drive towards actions, self-expression, and creative experiences.

Now, like I said, my dad's been sharing these things with me since I was 15, and the one word of wisdom, well he gave me many words of wisdom, but with respect to these. He said, "You don't share this with other people. You don't take this write it down, give it to your boss, and say, 'Hell, I want to create this.' This is a framework to keep in the back of your mind. You memorize this, and then you think about who you are being."

Like at the beginning when Benjamin Zander was talking, "Who am I being that my player's eyes are not shining?" Who am I being that's preventing us to creating great designs, to looking at things in a different way because ultimately we're accountable for that. Blaming other people for everything gets us absolutely nowhere.

Now, the real question becomes how do we break down those barriers? For that I'm going to hand the mike over to Alla.

[applause]

[off mic conversation]

Alla Zollers: All right. So, we have got to do all these wonderful things that Jeff just suggested. You're going to try to model the behavior. You're going to try to create an empathic culture and be self-aware. What's the first thing that's going to happen when you try to elicit change? [indecipherable 25:12] now. You are going to get resistance. You are going to get resistance. That is the first thing that is going to happen.

As Jeff mentioned, I'm going to keep coming back to this, is that everything that you're dealing with is on an emotional level and so is resistance. Actually, resistance is a very natural reaction for somebody facing a change or having to face up to a difficult organizational problem. They didn't want to face up to it. Maybe they were ignoring it. Now you're asking them to.

And you might be having this conversation with a stakeholder or with your boss, and you're getting this resistance. It has nothing to do with what you're actually saying. It doesn't have to do with the ROI charts that you're showing and big data and all the money they're going to make. They're going to still resist because resistance is an emotional process that's happening under the surface.

The first thing that you need to do is not take it personally because again, they might not even be conscious that they're doing this. But what it does mean is that you've hit on something really valuable and important. If you didn't, you wouldn't even be facing the resistance.

What's also important to understand is that not everything is resistance. Resistance is discomfort expressed indirectly, and this discomfort again is coming back from having to make a difficult choice or take an unpopular action or face a feeling that you just didn't want to face before.

So your stakeholder might have to fire somebody, or they might have to talk to their own boss about problems that they didn't want to address. So all of these things are indirect. They're not expressing it, and they're fighting with their own feelings about what they have to do.

However, if your stakeholder says, "You know, this is a really great idea. What you're suggesting might put me in a vulnerable position politically, so maybe this isn't the right time to do it," they're not being resistant. They're actually telling you quite directly what's going on. At that time just work with them to figure out what the best time is to then start your initiative or take that change.

So people also talk a lot about overcoming resistance. I actually don't like the term "overcoming." I feel like it insinuates some kind of force, like you're going to force somebody to do what you want them to do. So guess what, folks? You can't make anybody do anything. You just can't do it. The earlier you realize this, the easier life will become. You can't make anybody do anything.

So let's do a little exercise together. Put your hands together palms facing each other, OK? Your right hand is you. Your left hand is your stakeholder that you're trying to influence. Now push both palms against each other. You're getting really far, aren't you? Yeah. This is what happens with resistance. They're resisting. You're trying to overcome them, right? Nothing's happening.

Now let your stakeholder push, and you don't do anything. Just let them push. Your left hand eventually stops. Your stakeholder eventually stops pushing. Now push back. Now you have some movement. The way that you do that, the way that you manage this resistance, the way you actually move forward, is by three things.

You identify that resistance is going on because as I mentioned sometimes it's not resistance. You name the resistance in a neutral way so that the person doesn't get defensive, and you allow them to actually express their resistance directly.

As I mentioned, resistance is discomfort, that they're manifesting indirectly? The best way to manage it is to help them express it directly. So how do you identify it? How do you know what's going on? You actually can use yourself as a temperature gauge. You're the gauge. There's a lot of things that are happening that your unconscious mind is aware of but you might not be aware of as you're having a conversation.

So what you need to try to do, again, as we keep coming back to, is you need to be self aware. You're having an important conversation with somebody and you're feeling irritated and you're feeling frustrated. Or you're feeling bored. These are not the type of feelings that you should be having.

This means something else is going on that your mind is picking up on that you're not hearing verbally. So if you're feeling this and you're having an important conversation, that's the first clue, the best clue, that something else is going on that maybe resistance is happening. The next thing you need to do is name the resistance. Resistance has many faces depending on a person's personality, the person that you're working with.

I'll name a few, and then I'll ask you to think of some. So think of some as I'm trying to name some. The most recent one that I've encountered is requests for more detail. Continually requests for more detail. Did not want to start a sketch without the functional specifications being at a granular detailed level. That is a form of resistance.

Sometimes people will flood you with detail. "Here is all of our historical information of everything that we've ever done, go with it." This is stalling, right? They're not trying to make something happen. Decisions aren't moving forward. You have to deal with this tome, right? All of these are things we're trying not to deal with the problem. Can anybody think of other ones? Yeah?

Audience: [off mic conversation]

Alla: So actually that's a very hard one to spot because some people will agree to everything. You're like, "Wow! This is the best stakeholder on the face of the earth! They just do everything I suggest." Actually, that's a really big sign that they're resisting because they're not giving you any feedback. They're not giving you any direction, and later it's going to be your fault. "Well, the designers did this. I didn't do this."

Also silence. Sometimes people just don't say anything, and that's also resisting. They're just not even dealing with it at that point. Does anybody have any other ones? Yup?

Audience: [off mic conversation] .

Alla: Right. So actually that's called "intellectualizing." So a lot of people, what they'll do is, "Well, let's talk about hypotheses and theories some more. Let's not actually solve the problem." And every time you get close to actually a decision that might happen, they go back to some kind of theory or some kind of process.

Oh, this is a good one for us. Questioning methodology, all the time. If you've explained your methodology three times and your methodology is still being questioned, you are facing resistance. There are many more. Feigning confusion. Again, you've explained something three times, and they're still confused about it. Why are you still [laughs] confused about it?

I hear this a lot. Product managers, that if you do some research and give them some results, "Oh. Well, I'm not surprised." "Like I was trying to surprise you? This isn't like a game that I'm trying to win," but they're never surprised. They just make sure that they're never surprised.

So the trick here is once you've identified what the type of resistance is, is to actually say it out loud. If somebody's being silent you can say, "You're being silent. I don't understand what is happening." If somebody's questioning your methodology, "You seem to be questioning my methodology. Are you worried about the results or is there another problem going on?"

But trying to say it in a way that doesn't make them defensive like there's something wrong with them. And that's the hardest part about this, just finding the right language so you don't put the other person on the defensive.

But all of this resistance comes down to two primary things. The person is worried about losing control or being vulnerable. So in the organizations, as you go higher up in the food chain, you get more control. That's kind of the coin of the realm. So if something that you're suggesting might make them feel like they're going to lose some control, they're going to start to resist. They're going to feel uncomfortable.

Or if you're going to put them in a politically vulnerable situation, that's also where the resistance might come from. So then you tell them. You say to somebody, "You're being really silent" or "You're agreeing to everything. We would really like some feedback. Can you tell me why you're not giving it to us?" And don't say anything.

This is what you do in usability studies. When you're sitting next to somebody and the button is right in front of them, and you're like, "Just click the button. It's right there. It's right in front of you" and you want to scream it but you don't. You don't say anything at this juncture. You have to let them verbalize what they're feeling directly. That's how you move past this.

A lot of these ideas come from a synthesis from a lot of different books, but this being the main one, which is called "Flawless Consulting" by Peter Block. I don't usually read slides, but I think this is important. Authentic behavior with a client or stakeholder means you put into your words what you're experiencing with work as you do the work.

This is the most powerful thing you can do to have leverage you're looking for to build a client commitment. If you tell people how you're feeling, if you allow them to express their feelings directly in a non-defensive way, you build stronger relationships. You get things done at that point, and the resistance goes away and you make forward movement.

This is also how you reconcile. I hear a lot about compromising in our field. But compromising suggests that somebody wins and somebody loses. Reconciling means there's a solution that both parties are happy with. If you have a strong relationship with someone, then you can reconcile versus compromise.

Let me tell you a quick story about that. There's a tribe in South Africa that hunts with poison arrows. When somebody in the tribe has an issue with somebody else in the tribe or some kind of personal issue, there's a designated person that goes around, grabs all the poison arrows, and hides them. Then they all sit around in a circle, and they don't move and they don't leave until their situation is reconciled. Then the poison arrows can come back in.

So put away your poison arrows as well and reconcile. But as designers we're creative. We are divergent. Come up with awesome creative ideas where both parties can win. That's where your power comes in. Help find alternative solutions. Work together.

Finally, I know a lot of folks personally that are awesome designers, are very nice people, do a lot of these things, but just aren't assertive. A lot of the times to get to reconciliation you also need to be assertive as a person and assert your position. Yes, I am looking at you. [laughs] So there's four ways that you can do that. There's more than four ways, but here are four ways.

One way is called "fogging." That's basically agreeing that there's some truth to any kind of criticism that somebody gives you. So somebody says, "Man, you're so flaky. You don't pay any attention to detail. You're just nuts." You can be like, "Yes, maybe that's the case." You do that calmly and you don't do it defensively. That diffuses the situation a lot of times.

Negative assertion is actually admitting or saying things about yourself that maybe are weaknesses. For example for myself, getting buy-in is actually my weakness. I am terrible at it. This is why I'm doing it. This is why I'm here talking to you. I have been struggling with it since I started working and came out of the academic world. I was like, "Oh, this is what happens in real life." [laughs] People don't just love all my papers. Yeah. [laughs]

I suck at it but I'm trying to own it. So I can say, "Wow! Yeah, sometimes I'm really bad at getting consensus. Let's work together." Admit to people your weaknesses. You're not perfect. Broken record. I've actually used this on a project. This is saying something that you want over and over again so that the person really acknowledges your point of view.

I got hired, and an individual just didn't want to let me do my job. So every time I would present something I would say, "Here's this thing. Let's talk about it, and this is what you hired me to do." I would end almost every sentence with, "And this is what you hired me to do." Eventually, that person sat back, then actually allowed me to do what he hired me to do.

And finally self-disclosure. That's just being open about both your positive and negative aspects of yourself without feeling guilty, without feeling anxious about yourself, without being defensive. I just did some self-disclosure about I pretty much suck at buy-in and that's why I'm here. I'm letting you guys know. OK. [laughs]

So just to end, what we talked about is that we are emotional. We want to belong and be valued. Resistance is natural. Don't take it personally. Be authentic and assertive. And this is a lifelong journey. You're not going to come out of here and immediately everybody will do what you want. This will take a long time, and I'm still on the journey. So I hope you will join me. Thank you.

[applause]