How becoming conscious of my ignorance made me a better designer

It is hard to admit that you don't know something, no matter what type of job you do, but its even more culturally inadmissible if you are the consultant in the room. As I got conscious of this way that people have of viewing a consultant, I tried to become more conscious of the way I received and got information and to think about how this role defined what exactly was expected of me, so here is a little piece of what I learnt along the way.

How our roles as consultants define our way of thinking about problems

Our roles as consultants is defined today as the person who is supposed to know more than the other people in the room, and that puts us in a position where we become more of a doctor that comes up with a prescription or solution, rather than a researcher who explores possibilities. It puts us in a headspace where our roles start defining how we think about things and how we conduct ourselves in our projects. Sometimes we are given so much power and our clients lean on us so much, that we become blind sighted about what we really know, and what we think we know. We may unconsciously take for granted what we can learn from our client, dismissing important knowledge about the DNA of their company or processes we wouldn't be able to dive deep in because of lack of time.

Lesson number one: Admit that you don't know, it will make you more open to learning and dive deep when the problem is presented to you by your client.

How being conscious about the way I listen helped me understand the problem from different perspectives (and use this to my advantage)

Usually when a client is telling me about their problem the first time we meet, I automatically go into what I call “solving mode”: This is when I am trying to match my abilities and what I can do to solve the problem that is being presented to me. After many times of doing this I figured out that it is productive to focus on the content and the emotions that the client is expressing while explaining the issues he faces. The truth is we believe that we can focus on all of these things at the same time, but we can't, so we need to be selfaware and switch these modes to suit our purposes. It is hard to interpret what is important for us and what is important for the client at the same time, always focus on the client and his perspective, you will have time to analyze what is important for you on your own later.

Lesson number two: Be aware on how you are listening and try to leave the “solving mode” to review the problem while the client is not in the room anymore. Matching your abilities will be easier after, then you can get back to the client more informed about how you can help.

How being conscious of the way I asked questions helped me break the problem space into more juicy categories

As we can categorize and position ourselves in different listening modes, we can do the same while we ask questions, in this way we can be more self aware of what types of questions we need to use to get the most out of the story our client is trying to tell us.

There are two main categories that are more about when you ask questions than their content: The first one I call “digging” and the second one “guiding questions”.

Usually my default mode is “digging”, where I try to get deeper into the story the client is telling me by asking him questions that will give me details about it. What usually happens is that I may guide the client away from his original story line, and may end up in unexpected places, which is not a bad thing per se, but sometimes the client may lose focus on what he was saying and we may en up losing something he wanted to express on the way.

While I am in the “guiding questions mode” I leave more complex questions for the end, I just let the client speak and take down notes of what caught my attention. I could ask questions like “what happened?”, “what did you do next?” but I just prompt the person to continue if he gets stuck, as well as engaging to let the other person know that I am paying attention. In this way you can get information without influencing the client’s overall stream of the storyline.

Within these two different moments of asking, there are three content categories: Conceptual, emotional and behavioral.

The conceptual refers to how the person views the problem: The idea is to focus on what biases or certitudes the person is using to be able to understand and frame the problem, from what lens he is viewing it. Some questions that may be asked may be: “Why did you think about this problem from this angle?” “what do you think are the most important components/parts of this issue?” “what do you mean by such and such?” “what scope do you think this has?” “do you think the scope can change? “did you decide the scope of this project?” etc.

When you go back to thinking about the problem yourself and work with the information you got from your client, never stop asking yourself this question: ¿Do I need to dive deeper, or do I need to look at the problem in a broader way? What lenses am I using to see the problem? What frame am I using to understand and delimit the problem? Is this the correct one? Why?

The emotional refers to the state of mind of the person at the time and what things you can see that may create friction between your client, your research results, and the rest of the members of the organization. It is important to understand these possible frictions to be able to tell a story that can be used by the organization and will not entirely clash with it and its culture. If a client is sensitive about a particular issue it will help you to set the tone and better use your words so that you avoid hitting a sensitive nerve that could potentially go against your solution.

The behavioral refers more to anecdotes related to the problem space, where you assess what actions did the client take to be able to solve it in the past. This may refer to specific actions done by him or by people in the company. This is helpful because it gives you an idea of what has been done and how, which gives you a glimpse into the culture and if your client has been proactive or not due to internal constraints (processes) or because of his own scope of action (position of power).

Lesson number three: Be aware of what type of questions you are asking and see where you need to get broad or specific, understand what type of problem you are facing and what subjects or problem spaces are sensitive to your client and the company, to be able to create later a solution that is viable.

It all seems quite exhausting at first, but as designers, it is important to be conscious of how we are extracting information to get the most complete picture of the problem, and categorization helped me a lot in this sense: Having a mental map of tools and be conscious enough of their different uses, made me prone to better understand the meaning of what was being said to me, how it better fitted the puzzle/problem, and where possible fissures or contradicting information might appear.