On being open-minded

Willie Wheeler
Jul 21, 2017 · 3 min read
https://www.flickr.com/photos/christophe_pelletier/5976002766/

Some years ago, my company did a leadership training event where they brought in an improvisation expert to help people practice the art of improvisation. If this sounds odd to you, well, it sounded odd to me too, but our leadership explained that improvisation involves a specific skill that many find challenging — namely, being able to take whatever comes your way and work with it. And this is a skill that turns out to be useful outside of improvisation, like hearing somebody’s idea and working with it instead of rejecting it.

For whatever reason, that’s always been a challenge for me. I consider myself an open-minded person, but so far it’s in the somewhat limited sense that I can be convinced. I don’t want to sell myself short, because that’s a pretty good thing. But there’s an even better way of being open-minded, which is to react to new or challenging ideas with a bias toward thinking they’re great, or at least worth pursuing, and I’m not there yet. And today something happened that makes me want to invest a little more energy here.

I’m working on a piece of software, and I met with the UI engineer for the project to throw some ideas around on how we might incorporate my contribution into the larger UI. He articulated some UI design principles that I agreed with in theory. To make it concrete, one of the principles he presented was the idea that if we put an alert in front of the user, we ought to give the user some idea what they can do to address the issue. Yup, yup, that’s straight out of Jakob Nielsen, and no argument here. “But the problem,” I began, “is that there’s not really anything specific I can offer the user on how to solve it. So I think all I can do is display the alert.” My colleague wasn’t at all excited about this response, but as this was his first exposure to this particular topic, he didn’t himself know what sorts of specific things we might do, and so we agreed that maybe we’d pursue the generic strategy of pointing the user to documentation. Yuck.

At this time another colleague was walking by and wanted to listen in on the conversation. He hadn’t heard any of the previous back-and-forth, but he just happened to say, “Hey, wouldn’t it be awesome if when we display the alert, we offer [insert several specific proposals here] to the user?” Upon hearing the specific examples both the UI engineer and I immediately embraced them, and recognized that these solved our earlier problem. My UI engineer colleague gently remarked to me that this was the sort of thing he had in mind. He was too polite to say, “Willie, you were a dumbass, no?” But that would have been appropriate.

Next time this happens, I hope I can be a bit better. Especially in a case where I actually agree with the idea, and I just don’t know how to do it. Much better to say, “Yes, I agree, though I don’t yet know exactly what we will do here. But let’s at least agree to the goal and let’s see what we come up with.” Mistaking my lack of imagination for impossibility is a sure way to miss out on great ideas.

wwblog

Willie Wheeler's personal blog

)

Willie Wheeler

Written by

Interested in applying machine learning and data science to problems in operations.

wwblog

wwblog

Willie Wheeler's personal blog

Welcome to a place where words matter. On Medium, smart voices and original ideas take center stage - with no ads in sight. Watch
Follow all the topics you care about, and we’ll deliver the best stories for you to your homepage and inbox. Explore
Get unlimited access to the best stories on Medium — and support writers while you’re at it. Just $5/month. Upgrade