Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive
Tell me more
Dialogue. We hear the word often, but how much consideration do we give achieving it? Dialogue is defined as a conversation between two or more people, and it also relates to discussion with the aim to resolve a conflict. When I looked up definitions, I was surprised that it didn’t quite address how I view the word. I think that a definition I would add would be “conversation with a goal of fully understanding som eone’s views and finding a common resolution.” For the sake of this blog post, please humor me and consider that as the definition.
So, conversation #4 of 100 Conversations seemed to have dialogue at its core… specifically with placing an emphasis on understanding someone else in order to find appropriate solutions.
I Don’t Have Time to Help Myself!
The beginning of the conversation started with looking inwardly, and how we get caught up in our lives. Specifically we often do not place intentional focus on where we put our energy. We wind up focusing our energy on those things which ‘seem’ pressing. These often deal with our interactions with others. Simply put, it’s easy to fall into putting a lot of energy into thinking about and addressing the negative things in our lives. A parallel I’ll draw is the statement that within the professional world, 5% of our clients take 95% of our effort (or something like that). The squeaky wheel gets the grease.
It’s difficult to stop and intentionally reprioritize our efforts to focus on the positive. There will certainly be times where we need to focus on the negative, but it should be within a recognition that it leads someplace. If it doesn’t lie within some continuity toward an end, then it might not be worth it. [Note: have you seen the movie Inside Out? It’s worth it in how well it makes the case that we sometimes need to embrace the things we see as negative. I don’t know how well it relates to my professional life, but it does illustrate a meaningful concept.]
We Can Control Negativity
The reason I bring the above up is that in my experience, negativity in my professional life can be traced back to poor communication. This blog has presented setting expectations and other aspects of trying to achieve positive communication, but it hasn’t dealt with some of mechanics of dialogue. Setting expectations sets the groundwork for this post in that it reinforced the need to truly understand someone by verifying what they say. This is the first step in dialogue. I think that we all crave validation. The first step in validation is feeling that someone has heard you.
Tell me more
How often do we stop and ask someone to “tell me more”? These simple words illustrate that someone is listening, and that no conditions are being imposed on how the information might be delivered. The listener has shifted importance to the speaker with an open question/request. They illustrate that we have found something of such interest, that we just want to hear you speak about it. (see post: The Power of Being Heard)
I joke about facilitation being a martial art like jujitsu. Facilitators seek to engage with and direct communication energies to where they have their highest benefit. Asking someone to “tell me more” places focus on them and puts them in a space of inherent validation. They can be in a place where they tell their story. Our culture of online comments, trolls and reduced accountability (we wouldn’t say the things we write if we were face-to-face) has exacerbated our already “all too human” tendency to expect the worst and act accordingly. My reference point is a heated public meeting. My reference point is a skilled facilitator who creates a space of dialogue where before there was unidirectional anger. Most of the time, it’s about using the right tools to listen.
Tools That Say, “We want to hear you.”
Dialogue is about understanding the tools that allow us to identify with one another and ideally find common ground. In the absence of common ground, at least feeling heard and understood. These tools allow us to understand and put order to complexity. Communication can be very messy, but if we can tease apart information and its relationships, we can help to bring order to things.
Good facilitation is beyond a single post, or even a university degree. To be an effective listener, you need a suite of tools to give someone the atmosphere within which they can communicate. It’s also important to realize that facilitation can be exhausting and take it’s mental toll. Our tendency is to absorb things, even as we redirect them. It takes a special kind of person to internalize that they are merely a conduit to help people be heard. THIS is why having someone on a project who is purely a facilitator has great benefit when things are complex. If you are on the design team, it will be very difficult to separate yourselves from the fact that you may be the target for people’s concerns.
Compartmentalizing our Roles
I’d like to wrap up this post with the ‘sanity’ side of how much we invest ourselves in what we do. As designers, it’s hard to not love your work… and imbue it with pieces of yourself. There is a fine line to walk within this to ensure that your client is getting a product that is theirs (and not yours), and to ensure that you don’t suffer when your ‘vision’ is subject to whatever winds that blow. Your project is NOT you. If your project IS you, then hopefully you tend more toward the art side of things and have patrons that support you.
In our lives, all people can’t be all things to us. There will be some people that give, some that take, and some with which we find balance. We accept trade-offs. We intentionally shift a relationship to meeting the needs of others without meeting our needs. Just as others might do the same for us. Within our professional roles, we can recognize that in the end, our projects are not about us. We place our focus on our clients and stakeholders, with us merely there to help facilitate their visions. We may need to work with their anger, confusion and other feelings… without letting them reflect on our view of ourselves. I’ll reiterate that there will be times where you will NEED someone else to be facilitator… for your well-being.
This brings this post full circle. Professionally we are at our best when we subvert or eliminate our personal needs, our ego. We are there to listen to our clients and to help them achieve THEIR needs. This may not be easy, but these interactions are not about us in any way, shape or form.
If you are involved with complex communication situations, do NOT look to your work as where you get your personal validation. We need to ensure that the other parts of our lives provide us with the validation that we need. That these parts provide us with the balance we need in order to subvert ourselves in order to get done what we need to get done at work.
You can’t be all things to all people. People can’t be all things to you. We need to juggle all of our relationships so that as a whole, they allow us to stay sane and ideally happy.
So… let’s end with a simple flowchart (eye candy). This expands on the validation component of the flowchart in Managed Expectations = Success to put an emphasis on listening, validating and really hearing someone: Tell Me More.
Tell Me More: Confirming We Heard You Right