How I Bring Humility and Compassion to Learning Design
The answer is hidden in the things I do every day
I asked a similar question on Twitter sometime back and got a few interesting answers.
But it didn’t stop there. I couldn’t get it out of my head.
The reason I asked this question on Twitter because I have been struggling with it for a couple of months.
And it took me some time and courage to write this post. I wasn’t even sure if I should share these thoughts publicly because I don’t know if I know the answer. But I am willing to put my half-baked thoughts out there in the hope that others might benefit from it and help me bring more clarity and change to my work.
Both my work and personal life are going good but I can’t seem to marry the two aspects. I have been forcing myself to live two separate lifestyles. It’s exhausting and entirely my fault. However, instead of seeing it as a problem, I started seeing as an opportunity to perhaps improve what I do.
You see, sometime back I started getting involved with meditation and spirituality, which has been liberating and a key part of my growth. As part of my practice, I have been studying some Vedic texts and trying to explore answers to some of the most complex, fundamental, and important questions:
- Why do we have desires and greed?
- Why do we get angry?
- What are we really hankering for, and so on?
The other part of my spiritual practice revolves around continuously introspecting on the areas to improve. It has brought focus on a few qualities I needed to develop and be mindful of them during my dealings with others. Some of the key qualities that I have been working on are, humility, compassion, and tolerance.
These behaviours and habits are fairly new, compared to my other life — my work — which I have been involved with for about 10 years. I grew up to be a bit of a confrontational and challenging person. I didn’t have a drop of humility in my blood. I thought being humble and tolerant in a work environment wouldn’t serve “me” because others might take advantage of it and crush my dreams.
However, this behaviour didn’t match with what I was now learning through mindfulness and spirituality. So I naturally considered my work and professional life as my two separate identities . . . until now.
I have never been more wrong about something. I know now that it’s not only about “me.” I didn’t realize the huge responsibility I bear on my shoulders as a learning designer. I didn’t realize it soon enough that I could better serve others by being more humble, compassionate, tolerant, and more human.
Now I don’t see these as separate from anything I do.
So I have been taking intentional and conscious actions. Read on to learn how . . .
1. Humility
> For analysis and learning design:
- Practice “intellectual humility,” which is the ability to be open to and evaluate a broad range of evidence before aligning on a solution.
- Attach myself to opposing ideas and have the ability to defend those ideas during brainstorming and design phases.
- Pre-commit to the possibility of being wrong. Design solutions with the mindset that they could be wrong despite initial evidence and years of learning design experience. I know I’m wrong about things a lot of the time so it makes sense to be prepared for it. Arun Pradhan uses the phrase “Orphan Your Ideas.” He says “We need to separate ourselves from our ideas. Some ideas will get shot down in an instant, others will evolve and end up being stars, but they are not us, and the quicker we orphan them, and allow them to go their own way, the faster we can create better ones.”
- Treat end-users as our mirror to show us what we should be doing instead of us telling them. Design for them, not for us.
> For dealing with other people and situations:
- Attend meetings with a humble mind. Again, practising “intellectual humility.” Give complete attention to others’ ideas and listen without waiting to jump in about how their perspective is wrong. Just listen and have a conversation.
- Speak only when I truly believe that my words present a different idea or build on others’ ideas versus just grabbing attention or being spoken to impress others.
- Avoid pointing out others’ wrongs, or what I perceive as wrong because I have learned that I value people over opinions. If you can have actual conversations about issues without personalizing them, you may actually change your point of view.
The following principle from Ray Dalio explains it better than I ever could.
2. Compassion (Empathy + Action)
> For analysis and learning design:
- Don’t design based on assumptions or second-hand information. Always question the assumptions by asking questions like “Why do I think this?,” “How do I know this is true,” “What data do I have to back this up,” “What are the consequences of me being wrong,”?
- If possible, observe the real users and put myself in their world. If not possible, use empathy interviews and put the observations from these interviews on empathy maps/personas, such as their motivations, feelings, pain points, and friction points. Don’t have time or budget to interview? Jump on a quick Slack/Teams chat with some of the users and ask 1–2 questions.
- Draw a journey map with all the touch-points and frictions. Then use take action and solve for them through design. Compassion without action is just empathy. It doesn’t make an impact.
- If possible, invite a few users to co-design workshops and learn a bit about what they do, how they do it, how much time do they have for learning, how do they prefer to learn, etc.
- Adopt Show vs. Tell approach. Show what the solution could look like even if it means a simple sketch on a physical or virtual whiteboard or something quickly put together with the help of screenshots. Others may not be able to visualize the solution as clearly as I could as a solution builder.
> For dealing with humans and situations:
- People don’t remember what we say, they remember how they feel in our presence. We must make them feel good. Emotions are what stays with people for the long term.
- Consciously let others know how much value are they providing by just being on a project
- Give genuine compliments when a teammate asks a question that advances the discussion when someone shares an example that unlocks further ideas, and so on.
- Empathy is necessary for negotiation as well. When talking to team members, understanding the other person’s motives will give you the best chance of arriving at a mutually beneficial decision.
- Always be ready to offer help. Do not say No without offering alternatives.
Thanks for taking the time to read the post. I hope you enjoyed reading it and derived some value that you can immediately apply to your work. Please let me know your thoughts/questions in the comments.
I’d also love the opportunity to connect with you on both LinkedIn and Twitter.
