Shut up and listen!
Ernesto Sirolli’s passionate TED Talk is an inspiring, eye-opening talk that deeply changed my mindset in professional and personal situations.
Ernesto explains that when we try to help others (especially in a charity work context) we tend to fall into two ways we deal with people: we either patronise them or we are paternalistic. Both words come from the Latin root pater, which means father.
- We patronise when we treat a person or a community (often from a lower socio-economic situation) as inferior. We are their saviour.
- We’re paternalistic when we treat them as our children. We care about them and we decide what’s best for them.
Both approaches are old-fashioned and damaging.
Ernesto’s powerful, but simple advice is to shut up and listen.
Every day, designers help clients solve problems. As experts in our field we tend to jump straight to a shiny solution (often based on expertise, but also assumptions), without taking time to deeply understand the problem.
In other words, we need to talk less and learn more. Empathise, connect and listen.
Dive deeper
Allocate time at the start of a project. Pick up the phone and have a conversation with the stakeholders and users. Set up a workshop to extract insights. Use surveys. Ask questions. Run user tests. Have one-on-one conversations, ideally in their environment.
Sometimes clients don’t fully understand their problem either! Some may also resist spending time to understand it, being held hostages of tight deadlines or budget constraints.
Only after listening and learning, discovering what they think about, what they see and what they feel, we will be able to empathise and provide the tailor-made solution that truly addresses the challenge.
