The reasons why your team is not listening to you
“Nobody listens to me!” say researchers, designers, marketers, engineers … almost everybody. This might be why.
Years ago, I coined the term “echoloquation” to describe the phenomenon of expensive consultants presenting, to applause, the exact same things I’d been telling management all along.
It’s a witty tale I’m fond of telling.
(I leave out the part where they ignored the consultants, too.)
Many such consultants came and went over the years, and we all knew the problems and some good ways to solve them, but there was a gap between the identified cause, the obvious solution, and changing the situation.
Maybe management were listening all along, but they had some other reason for not taking action.
Reason 1: They’re stupid
From The Office to Dilbert, the trope of the incompetent manager has had widespread appeal. The Peter Principle says that some are promoted to their level of incompetence, but in most cases, at most companies, the people in any given role will have had to demonstrate their capabilities as part of the hiring process.
To reach the upper echelons of management, most will have to take some form of an MBA at some point and at some point their homework will look like this:
You can be perfectly clever and bad at maths — there’s even a whole diagnosis for that — but, in general, to solve the equation, your brain will have had to complete a sequence of processes. It’s not quite “if maths then competent”, but you’d have to be able to think in a certain way to go from the problem to a sensible answer — to think logically.
If you can think logically, but you are not behaving logically, then something else is wrong.
Reason 2: They heard different words than you said
There are four parts to every conversation:
- The words you say
- The idea you want to communicate
- The words the other person hears
- The other person’s interpretation of those words.
In the cartoon above, there is clearly a gulf between the coach’s intended message to the player, and the player’s understanding of that message, due to the framing of the message (as a general comment on the team). This type of communication breakdown happens all the time.
The Mom Test demonstrates it in the context of product development, with an example of an untrained researcher framing innocent-sounding questions as a request for confirmation, and his indulgent mother framing her answers as a hypothetical compliment outside of any real commitment in order to placate him. He believes his idea is validated; it is not.
If you are communicating clearly, but the message does not inspire your intended reaction, then something else is wrong.
Reason 3: They understand perfectly, but something else matters more
Understanding consumer needs and behaviours is central to most business functions — in many, it’s the very first thing you learn!
“A company can outperform rivals only if it can establish a difference it can preserve. It must deliver greater value to customers or create comparable value at a lower cost, or do both.” —On Strategy, Michael Porter (business strategy)
“Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through the early and continuous delivery of valuable software.” — The Agile Manifesto (software development)
“Don’t find customers for your products, find products for your customers.” — Seth Godin (sales)
“An operations management professional understands local and global trends, customer demand, and available resources for production. Operations management approaches the acquisition of materials and the use of labor in a timely, cost-effective manner to deliver customer expectations.” — Investopedia
“Companies that excel at customer experience outperform the market and are more likely to be recommended by customers and more likely to see customers return and buy again.” — This Is Service Design Doing, Stickdorn et al (design)
“Understanding the cost to acquire new customers (CAC) is crucial to analyzing return on investment. By using CAC, a company is able to determine the most cost-effective way to acquire customers.” — Corporate Finance Institute
“The marketing process is about understanding the competitive marketplace and ensuring you can tap into key trends, reaching consumers with the right product at the right price, place and time.” — Chartered Institute of Marketing
If your manager understands that understanding customers is important, but is ignoring recommendations from professional researchers, then something else is wrong.
Reason 4: Perverse incentives
There’s a canal basin near Camden called Dead Dog Tunnel where, the story goes, dead dog carcasses used to be found in Victorian times. To clean up the water, a bounty was offered for each dead dog delivered.
Of course, they didn’t specify that the dog had to be already dead.
Comic Agilé depicts similar perverse incentives: companies set out to measure what matters, but soon find that what is measured is what matters.
We like things to be predictable, so we estimate how long it will take to build something and that metric becomes an end in itself. The comic describes stalling for billable hours, but a more destructive antipattern is a focus on launching things instead of learning things.
When we are assessed and rewarded based on the number of units of code shipped, we become a feature factory. We strive for “early and continuous delivery of software” but forget the “valuable” part — the part you only get to when you build the product around deep understanding of user needs.
Business guru Roger Martin says “strategic planning” is really two things: there’s planning, which is our list of activities; and there’s strategy, our set of choices on “where to play and how to win”.
The crucial difference is that we control planning. If we decide that we are going to build features A, B and C and launch them in June, then — barring rains of fire from above — we can probably do that.
We cannot control strategy. Strategy is a series of bets based on educated guesses: we think (based on our understanding of customers, external factors and our own capabilities) that if we do X and Y, then Z will happen. It’s scary and risky and makes people feel uncomfortable, so they much prefer to plan instead. The build-launch-feedback model of prototyping is a set of planning activities; hypothesis-driven development is a set of strategic bets.
If there are no perverse incentives at work, then something else is wrong.
Reason 5: Everything was just fine until you came along
“In learning organizations, information is produced via the synthesis of research data, and preserved within organizational knowledge. But in non-learning organizations, that process flows the other way: incoming data is used solely to create evidence that validates existing knowledge.” — Pavel Samsonov
I had long understood reasons 1–4, but reason 5 was a penny-drop moment for me, courtesy of AWS UX lead, Pavel Samsonov.
In a LinkedIn post, he described our assumption that if we show the costs saved by not wasting time/money/effort building things customers don’t want to buy, then stakeholders will embrace this and build differently. This is, he says, at odds with the mindset of an outputs-driven organization, that all work is valuable if it produces any outputs. The success criteria for every project is ultimately “if we ship”.
Through that lens, anything delaying those outputs (such as user research) is seen as wasteful — but “when research reveals that the work they wanted to do would have been wasteful, they associate the research with the waste instead. By doing research, you have transformed their really cool idea into a wasteful idea. Research created waste.”
Without our work, they never would have known that the work was wasteful. Post-release, the NPS might drop, but nobody would ever join the dots.
We see that pattern replicated in every sphere:
Design creates waste.
Agile creates waste.
Anything which reveals a weakness in the status quo (current product, process, structure, strategy, roadmap) draws (management’s) attention to something they didn’t see until (we) revealed it, so if we hadn’t revealed it, they might not have seen it for years. Sure, they might be losing money, but they wouldn’t have known why or felt like they had to fix it.
Therefore it must be resisted at all costs.
Stop trying to tell people your ideas
“The trick is to make them think it was their idea all along” is the advice I was given years ago, and while you don’t get any reward for doing it, it is an effective way to get things done.
A more straightforward approach is to bring them into the process: I always figured the purpose for getting the stakeholders to read through the affinity maps with me was to help them remember the insights; turns out it’s more about getting them to internalize not only the conclusions of the research but the entire thread of logic that lead up to them.
Don’t just explain your idea, have them take the whole journey with you.
In summary
- If your senior management team is ignoring you, it is probably not because they are stupid
- If the message does not inspire your intended reaction, you may not have been clear in your communication
- If your manager is ignoring recommendations from professional researchers, it is probably not because they don’t think understanding customers is important
- If you’re doing planning activites when you should be doing strategic activities, the business might not be encouraging the behaviours it intends to encourage
- If your ideas meet resistance, it might be because you’re not in an environment where true learning is valued.
A most effective solution, for all of these, is to stop trying to get people to listen to you and instead have them take the whole journey with you.
