Different people have different perspectives and their life experiences are not the same as yours. This feels like an obvious statement, more along the lines of “duh” than “revelation”, but every time I’m prompted to think about it, I feel wowed by the diversity of human viewpoints. In a visceral way.
It’s actually kind of unsettling — my intuitive schema for how the world works depends on most people perceiving things similarly to me, and I have to constantly tear down that default model and build a more accurate one. Brains are not good at diverging from their basic assumptions, at least not without significant repetition, so it’s a struggle.
Compassion is difficult to maintain, but it’s useful. I would even say that empathy (or at least a semblance thereof) is one of the more high-impact skills a person can learn. It vastly improves your ability to communicate, which also makes you better at design!
Colorful street art in Lima, Peru. Photo by McKay Savage. Observe the mishmash of styles!
Today I had a conversation with someone to clear up a mild disagreement. The disagreement was only mild because we’re reasonable people — if either of us had handled things differently it could have been a friendship-ending incident. As it was, we reassessed each other’s communication expectations and figured out how to go forward. One way of framing this is that we informally negotiated a code of conduct to apply to the two of us.
This made me reflect on how useful it is to iterate my social techniques in response to feedback (whether explicit or implicit). What I mean is tweaking my attitude and approach depending on what works best in a given situation. People do this automatically to some extent, and it sounds banal when spelled out. But for me the practice of intentionally maintaining social flexibility has been a surprisingly radical change in how I deal with other human beings.
It’s more productive to meet people halfway as opposed to expecting them to accommodate you entirely. I wouldn’t say this is easy — I am a stubborn person and I have to be wary of the urge to dig in my heels — but so far I’ve found communicational pliancy to be worth the effort.
“If we want to understand what’s on the mind of another, the best our mortal senses can do may be to rely on our ears more than our inferences.” — Mindwise by Nicholas Epley
I cross-posted this on Facebook and two friends offered astute comments. Emily Peterson:
“But what about a situation in which you’re asking for something you think is reasonable, and the other party is asking for something you think is unreasonable? In such a case, both parties meeting halfway results in the generic You feeling cheated [sic]. Does this only work when people’s expectations of one another are already in synch?”
Loretta Carr:
“Sometimes my truth and another’s truth don’t coincide; they’re not even close. When I don’t trust that person’s words or actions, I can’t work with him/her. Toxic situation for me. Gotta move on.”
Fair enough. It definitely depends on the situation.
Tech-culture podcast Exponent came back from its summer hiatus on the 6th. In the most recent episode, hosts Ben Thompson and James Allworth discussed Amazon’s work culture in reaction to that now-infamous New York Times article. Their conversation touched on the necessity of soft skills even in creative environments where solid ideas take precedence over everything else.
Successful companies set high standards and enforce them. They must! There is no other way to ensure excellence. Trade-offs are inherent to this arrangement — you can’t care profoundly about your professional results, work devastatingly hard to build something amazing, and still spend plenty of quality time with your wife and kids. The laws of physics forbid it — you can only be in one place at a time. If you’re at the office, then you’re not tossing a frisbee around in the backyard.
More crucially, competitive companies develop and cherish workplace cultures that demand people to identify and demolish subpar ideas. When you prop up bad suggestions to make their progenitors feel good, you guarantee a future of low-quality initiatives. Next stop, loss of market share! It makes sense that brilliant executives want to stamp out the impulse to be nice. Except wait, no, it only makes sense superficially.
Allworth called this attitude “the primacy of ideas”. He pointed out that brutal honesty about the merit of any proposition favors “thinkers” over “feelers”. We INTJs and the like are able to maintain some emotional distance, to take a step back and rationally examine feedback. (Which doesn’t mean we aren’t hurt by criticism — Thompson added that this type of person also views their work as their source of human value. If the output is deemed inferior, we judge ourselves very harshly.)
Allworth explained that a workplace culture hostile to people who prioritize relationships will end up being a monoculture, alienating the voices of potentially useful employees and limiting diversity of thought. Well… yeah. It will.
I’m probably reacting emotionally (ha) and not being fair to either Thompson or Allworth, but it was frustrating to listen while they grudgingly came to the conclusion that there’s value in being nice. I can’t help but think that only men would hash this out at length before tentatively agreeing that maintaining relationships is important. I even felt bitter while listening. It seemed like a classic example of “feminine” strengths being devalued, left invisible by default. Of course, the conversation’s outcome was better than if they had decided soft skills weren’t worth anything at all — but did it really need to be debated?
I’m an intellect-first, analytical kind of person. I’m also a woman, socialized to be nice and put up with a lot of nonsense from other people. Maybe the combination of those contradictory tendencies makes it easy to realize that you need to present information in a way that people find acceptable. Intellectual merit isn’t everything — in fact, it isn’t anything without soft skills. Smart people who can’t work with other people aren’t going to get anything done. (To be clear, this is something the Exponent hosts mentioned and agreed on.)
Of course, I went through the same personal-growth phase that Allworth and Thompson also discussed, aggressively wanting to be right and constantly believing that I knew best, before I realized that a good idea you can’t get anyone to buy into has the same results as a bad idea. That’s really my whole point here:
A good idea that you can’t persuade people to believe in is functionally the same as a bad idea.
Even famously brutal tech founders like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Jeff Bezos had to figure out people-friendly ways to present their plans. We know this happened in part because otherwise Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon wouldn’t be iconic companies.
Luckily, collaborators can give each other straightforward feedback without being cruel. Thompson and Allworth do it on the podcast all the time! (More on this in an upcoming review of Ask a Manager blogger Alison Green’s book Managing to Save the World.) I think that’s why I was so frustrated — the necessity of niceness, or at least courtesy, seems utterly obvious, even if only based on their own dynamic. I don’t think the topic shouldn’t have been mentioned — here I am mentioning it at length — but I wonder why the conclusion surprised them.
A big part of my new job is emailing people. Not just emailing them once, but sending an initial message, waiting a couple of days, then following up over and over again until they address my questions. Some people respond to the first email, which is great. Some people respond to the second, which is also great. A few people don’t respond until the sixth or eighteenth email. (At least theoretically — I haven’t gotten to that point yet. It’s only been two weeks.)
Maybe the follow-up email is an obvious technique, but it never occurred to me until I started work at ORO. I felt like I could send an email once and leave it at that. If the recipient wanted to respond, they would respond. If they didn’t — well, so much for that! However, when you’re talking to clients and vendors on behalf of a business, you can’t be so laissez-faire.
What’s really great is that the follow-up email works, probably through the power of sheer annoyance. By popping up in someone’s inbox repeatedly, I make them think, “Ugh, this Sonya chick won’t shut up until I respond. FINE.” Basically, I push myself to the top of their to-do list.
I fully intend to use this realization to further my personal interests as well as ORO’s. Expect more irritating emails from me! Sorry in advance.
Julia Turner wrote of “opinion journalism” that “the challenge is a glorious one: to come up with useful ways to understand the world, and to convey those to readers in a way they’ll find engaging.” Turner’s glorious challenge is the goal of any kind of public communication. One of the best methods is to include people in the process of gathering and interpreting information. This is what Melody Kramer does, and it is a delight!
Kramer has an email newsletter (gif warning) that she uses in part to workshop ideas. Recently, exploring participation and membership, Kramer started a pen-pal project (for lack of a better way to describe it). She used computer magic to auto-pair the 380+ people who volunteered to participate. Then she instructed:
“I would like to ask the two of you to have a conversation with each other about something you’re each passionate about. It can take the form of an email, a video chat, a picture, a gchat, a postcard, or any other form of communication you can think of. When you’re done, please send me the url or the messages or whatever it is you decide to create in this form, and I will send it back out to the group.”
Kramer also noted what I observed above: “One of the best things about this newsletter, I think, is that it’s becoming a way for people to sandbox/share really good ideas.”
I was paired with Kaitlyn Benoit. We friended each other on Facebook and chatted about our interests; the conversation ended up being really affirming and great. You can read the full transcript on Medium, but here are the coolest things we said to each other:
“I think the most rewarding thing about musical performance is just being able to translate random black circles and lines on a staff into something audible that can be interpreted by listeners in a variety of ways.” — Katie
“Sentences don’t mean anything until someone reads them and interprets them with their own personal context and their own emotional background.” — Sonya
“there’s such an intimacy about reading something someone has written—we get to see how they turn words into meaning and how they string thoughts into sentences, AND we also get to use our own social context and worldview to understand those words and thoughts.” — Katie
“there’s such a cool space that’s created when you’re not in competition with someone but rather working together to offer insights and improve whatever it is you’re collectively working on or thinking about.” — Katie
“one of my favorite things about history is crafting the narrative. And that history is not the past, but a story of the past—the past never changes, but the story can.” — Katie
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