Explaining through listening

I ❤ Complex

So this is a pattern with me… I like to get myself involved in complex things… Maybe it’s just because they are complex, maybe it’s my self-diagnosed Asperger’s tendencies, or simply the fact that I am strong N (as in INTJ). I find complex problems just so much more interesting to solve. There’s so much there to work with, and a great opportunity to tell such an interesting story! So it’s not unfrequent that I find myself having to explain what I do.

To give you some examples, when I was in undergraduate school I had to explain to my parents that I wanted to be a landscape architect. I can still hear the surprised tone in my father’s voice when I tried to translate this into French, and the best explanation lead my father to respond with “so… you are going to school to be a gardener?” My father’s surprise was less a criticism of the choice of profession and more a reaction to my choice of how to pursue that profession. Surely if I wanted to be a gardener, academia was not the most obvious answer. In graduate school, as my focus evolved from landscape architecture to urban planning, I began exploring the rather nascent area of specialization called Planning Support Systems. Explaining this choice went from an issue of language translation to explaining something rather abstract (“What do you mean people need software and processes to make decisions? Can’t they just decide?”). Fast forward a few years, when I joined a global consultancy with the aspiration to help shape their geospatial analytics offering, I was met with the same inquisitive looks about what geospatial analytics is. It was a pretty regular thing for me to get reaction like “So, you make maps?”, or “So, you’re the data guy?”. In a superficial way, yes it is about all those things, but ultimately it was about so much more. It was about transforming how businesses make decisions about where and how to grow and operate based on multiple data inputs, analytical approaches, and communication strategies.

Let there be light!

I had resigned myself to a life of having a hard time explaining what I do, when it finally dawned on me… I was approaching the problem the wrong way. I was trying to explain what I did by the pieces of my work or the processes in my work. So every time, people would get hung up on the one piece that they understood (“Oh he said maps, I like maps, so he must make maps”), and with it, it carried the entirety of their views and positive and negative biases about that thing. I realized that I was missing a key ingredient: their frame of reference. This was great news! I am natural introvert, and, at social events, often find myself talking to a handful of people (or none at all). Sometimes, even those conversations can hit a wall quick (Weather, check; How do you know…, check; politics, skip; sports, in limited dose; work, do I have to?). But now I was armed with a new strategy, something that could extend those conversations sufficiently to make them interesting, and provide a more realistic (or appreciable) understanding of what I do.

So now a conversation could go like this:

Them: So what do you do?

Me: Well, first let me ask you what you do, it may be easier to contextualize it that way.

Them: ok. Well, I’m a banker. I work for [insert random name]. I’m a regional manager for the retail bank.

Me: Great. Have you always been a regional manager for this bank, or have you switched around roles?

Them: Well, I started as a teller, then became a branch manager, and now am a regional manager.

Me: Cool. So you’ve seen what it takes to make a bank work, and how to work with customers. Have you ever wondered how the bank makes decisions about where to add branches?

Them: Mmmmhhh no. I guess I always thought it was the CEO of the bank that decided.

Me: Sure, that’s possible, especially if they’re very hands on. Do you know how they make that decision?

Them: I suppose instinct? talking to people? Maybe from the conversation that we have with our state president?

Me: Right, that’s probably part of it, and a lot of that goes into making decisions. The problem becomes that they often end up with a lot of information, sometimes information that doesn’t make sense because it contradicts itself. On top of that, as you add more branches it becomes harder and harder to figure out where the next branch goes. So that’s what I do. I work with data and people. I help companies make decisions about where and how to grow. I help them make fact based decisions based on data, whether that data comes from the census, a vendor, their systems, or their own instincts. So for example, in the case of your bank, I could help your CEO look at all the information that they have, and build a structure for them to think about all the information and data in a consistent way, and then help them make decisions about where to open. Of course it’s not a black or white answer. There is a lot of subjectivity and bias, and I can help your CEO or whoever is in charge of making those decisions with the various options.

Them: Ha… That makes sense! (ed: Generally not always).

I’ve used this approach over and over, and have found that it works extremely well because of three things.

1. It allows me to get to know the person better, and understand their frame of reference.
2. It levels and focuses the conversation on what the person knows, without assuming too much knowledge or talking down to them.
3. It allows me to spend more time talking about one piece of my work so that I can learn about how people perceive it, and it helps me better understand how to articulate what I do. (i.e. educational for me).

Sure, you may be thinking that it doesn’t give a complete view of what the topic is, but I see it as building from the bottom up, and some wins are better than no wins. So rather than me starting from the top and losing people along the way, I am able to build on something that they know, a common ground of sorts, and describe the potential and opportunity of the work that I do, and also talk about the direct applicability of this work to what they do.

So why does this matter?

Well, as my life pattern would have it, I have moved on from geospatial analytics as my core profession. I now lead my boutique growth strategy consultancy Nomadic Foundry (#ShamelessPlug) where I help small and medium companies with questions of growth. As those of you who know me, or follow me, know, I have been active in the coworking industry. Interestingly enough, I have seen the same challenges in the coworking industry as I did in explaining landscape architecture, planning support systems, or geospatial analytics. How do you explain what coworking is, and what the benefits are? How do you explain that it’s not just about real estate? How do you explain what a vibrant community may look like? Sure, there have been shared spaces for people to use for decades, but coworking tries to bring a new dimension to this.

The industry talks about collaboration, community, productivity, and lowered costs as the benefits of being in a coworking space, and while all those can be true, they are not all necessarily true for everyone (eg: my home office is free, and has the benefit of a very warm and cuddly Mastiff at my feet). I have seen people trying to explain coworking from a top-down perspective, and end up losing people along the way (“So why would I pay to go to a different place to work?”, “I hate open desks?”). It is a product of people’s historical framing; after all, most people understand that a company has offices, and people work in offices. Anything deviating from this standard frame of reference, and you are far more likely to lose people on the way. So, more often than not, I see industry people try to explain coworking through the same means that I used to describe what I did, notably the elements of the experience and the product. Rarely do I see someone pausing and getting to know the person that they are talking with and creating a linkage between that person’s needs and what coworking can provide. This is a critical flaw, especially in evangelizing coworking, as our aim should be about embracing, not broadcasting. We seem so caught up in broadcasting the message of coworking, that we end up, it seems, forgetting that the decision to join a space is a personal one that lends itself to a more 1-to-1 communication.

In doing so, we may very well overlook some aspects of why coworking is great and transformative, but I would argue that making the individual connection is significantly more valuable than approximating an answer for a broader group. The side benefit of this is that once someone is sold on the concept of coworking in the way that is relevant to them, the rest of the coworking experience can be the cherry on top (i.e. the gift that keeps on giving), and they are much more likely to accept the areas that they are less comfortable with. As the independent professionals group continues to grow, and more people move out of corporate environments where the experience is generally driven top-down, we will see more people looking to tailor their experience. So rather than broadcast, we should be talking directly with people, and letting the individual experience continue to define what the distinctive value of coworking is.