The art of understanding: The danger of assumptions
In my recent projects, I had a lot of lessons to learn about communication. It’s impressive how many jobs and tasks rely on communication but it’s even more impressive how many misunderstandings and problems are caused by it. I had a chance to compare how communication works in user research and agile coaching, in corporations and startups, in hierarchical and flat environments.
Because I feel like ‘communication’ is a term so overused and distorted, I would prefer to call it ‘the art of understanding’ — in the end, that’s what it is all about, right? Being so much focused on our goals, needs and assumptions about others, we very often neglect understanding. That’s why I suppose it became an art of understanding — an enormous field that one should learn and explore.
Although the lessons I am writing about in this article are mostly relevant to UX research, I want to stress that they are applicable in other fields, meaning other jobs and especially our personal lives.
What’s wrong with assumptions
You could have already heard about what Malcolm Gladwell in ‘Blink’ calls the adaptive unconscious or Daniel Kahneman in ‘Thinking, Fast and Slow’ — System 1 thinking. Basically, it’s the part of the brain that is responsible for quick judgements. In many cases, it indeed proves to be very effective in helping us make rapid decisions and can even save our lives.
However, very often we entrust this ability with too many tasks — tasks that it just cannot manage. We use the so-called quick thinking to create opinions about people and to make sense of what they say and how they behave. As a result, all our interactions with others are guided by assumptions.
Think of the last time you argued with someone. How long did it take until you rushed into an emotional reaction? Did you have time to listen to the other’s opinion? Arguments? Are you sure you really understood what the other person was trying to say and, most importantly, why they did it?
What assumptions have to do with coconuts
Very often we make assumptions about what other people think and why they do what they do. As a result, we treat people around us as if we knew what they were up to, even if we don’t. In their book ‘Agile Teams lösungsfokussiert coachen’, Veronika Kortba and Ralph Miarka teach the art of understanding and demonstrate how it can be applied to facilitate communication in teams. The book is currently available only in German but its English version will soon be on the market.
My key takeaway from the book was the coconut model (see illustration below). The idea behind is that there is a little girl living on a coconut island and a young man living on an island with a regular tree. One day, the girl decides that it’s frustrating that the man has never seen a coconut, so she decides to throw him one. However, the poor man is totally confused — why is that coconut suddenly flying towards him? Did someone attack him?
Unfortunately, this is what often happens in our interactions with others. We ‘throw them coconuts’ — offer solutions that we think are good to the problems we think they have. We make assumptions about others, which, in most cases, results in a series of misjudgments and misunderstandings.
How to fight assumptions in user research
To master the art of communication starts with asking the right questions. Questions may act as a bridge between the two islands and let us know more about the other people, their needs and motivations. Answers that we get would then act as a basis for further communication and help us develop an understanding of this other person.
As user researchers, we know how important it is to ask the right questions. But we also know that one can hardly make sense of answers without digging deeper into a person’s lifestyle, feelings and greater context. Primarily, that’s the reason why in user research we prefer to combine methods. For example, we might use surveys but they don’t really help to develop any understanding — a researcher ends up with a set of responses, which very often turn out to be socially desirable answers to biased questions.
We often conduct interviews, which allow us to make more sense of what people say — we can ask follow-up questions and specifically ask more about the things that we are curious of (something that is not possible in surveys). From my experience, most insights get uncovered when the researcher asks follow-up questions about the interviewee’s feelings and emotions. Why? In this way, we as researchers can help understand something about the person that they may not even realize themselves. We can help interviewees get conscious of, for example, why they feel in a specific way or why they took some specific decisions.
Interviews are just a drop in the ocean of all the methods available to the researcher. There exist diary studies, A/B testing, observation, ethnographic encounters and many more — and the more touchpoints one has with a person, the better understanding one can develop about that person. It’s the researcher’s task to carefully evaluate what the research goals are and which methods are suitable to achieve goals.
I would argue that the big mission user researchers are carrying out is sparking human interest in people around us and demonstrating how fruitful communication can be if you interact with people based on what you learned from them rather than guided by your assumptions about them. That level of understanding each other is something that should be reflected in our everyday communication, no matter who we are or what kind of job we’re doing.
