Runciter Associates

When looking for help with a task at work, people turn to those best able to do the job. Right? Wrong. New research shows that work partners tend to be chosen not for ability but for likeability. Drawing from their study encompassing 10,000 work relationships in five organizations, the authors have classified work partners into four archetypes: the competent jerk, who knows a lot but is unpleasant; the lovable fool, who doesn’t know much but is a delight; the lovable star, who’s both smart and likeable; and the incompetent jerk, who…well, that’s self-explanatory. Of course, everybody wants to work with the lovable star, and nobody wants to work with the incompetent jerk. More interesting is that people prefer the lovable fool over the competent jerk. That has big implications for every organization, as both of these types often represent missed opportunities. Lovable fools can bridge gaps between diverse groups that might not otherwise interact. But their networking skills are often developed at the expense of job performance, which can make these employees underappreciated and vulnerable to downsizing. To get the most out of them, managers need to protect them and put them in positions that don’t waste their bridge-building talents. As for the competent jerks, many can be socialized through coaching or by being made accountable for bad behavior.

From HBS

In-house at an engineering driven organization, how do you insert yourself as a designer into a process which historically skips design

Show how your work will result in making more money, impact the bottom line

Understanding budgeting process, how projects get funded, where does the money come from, how to have influence earlier in the process

Lovable fool or competent jerk. If you are an abrasive jerk, you have two options. Push or get people to like you. If you are liked but your ideas are not respected. Pick your battles, or socialize more ideas. Start within your comfort zone. The easiest way to do this is to show what you know really well.

Who is the audience and what is being experienced? User experience of you.

1. Audit of you, self-audit, how am I presenting myself and what’s out there for people to interface with me. What information is available about you — facebook? internal meetings, presentations? what are you like in person?
2. who is the user, what do they need? what are their goals?
3. competitive audit, who are the other colleagues involved in decision-making, what are their strengths and weaknesses? competitors are everyone who is competing for time and money and mindshare.

How do you design a better, more effective, user experience of you? More iterative than waterfall. Constant user testing. Pay attention to how people respond. If something doesn’t work, it’s not the user’s fault, you need to keep at it, try a new approach.

Understand which communication methods work best. Some people need terse and articulate, other people need hand-holding and love. Just because a method works for one user doesnt mean it will work for everyone.

Trust. Which comes from proving yourself and making good decisions.

The only time something will change radically is if you’re changing jobs. If you are slowly moving up in the ranks, you are constantly proving yourself. That can happen quickly if you’re doing things well, but if it’s happening more slowly it’s because you just haven’t earned it yet baby.

My 2 clients — amazing brand but pain in the ass client, other brand I don’t like but is an amazing client. Knowing what we’re good at and accepting what we’re not, and trusting our partners to fill in the gaps. Express your expertise as complementary to theirs, lube them up.

Peter Principle, people get kicked upstairs.

Managing up, your boss wants you to make his or her job easier, you need to find ways to persuade your boss that you are an asset to the organization. If you don’t respect your boss, you are probably in the wrong place.

User centered design typically requires the following:

• Empathy for the people we’re designing for, an ability to put ourselves in the user’s shoes and imagine the world from their point of view
• Usability, meaning that the product we create has to fit into their existing mental model or they have to be able to grasp it
• Persuasion, in the sense that we are often expecting users to do something different or adopt a new means of working, and so we have to convince them to change

Finding influence in the organization is all about having ideas and then persuading people to adopt them. You can make an analogy to how UX designers create new products or new ways of working and try to get people to use them.

Persistence, how long it takes to effect change, don’t expect users to adopt new working styles overnight, why expect your organization to change

Who’s to blame? If the user can’t or won’t adopt a new product, you assume the product is to blame. If your organization won’t adopt a new means of working, you assume the organization is to blame, that your boss is stupid.

You can’t be a jerk. People have to like you if you’re going to effect change. This is like using an interface that is rude and critical.

Donald Norman once addressed the challenge designers face in making an impact within their organizations, stating: Designers uniformly complain that they are ignored, that they are called in too late, and that people complain their suggestions will cost too much money or slow down product development. It seems that designers are not applying their own methods to these problems – you need to step back to see what the root causes are. If designers are complaining that they are ignored, well, maybe there’s a reason why.

In this talk, Josh Rubin and Karen McGrane will extend familiar user-centered design approaches to help information architects become leaders within their organizations and achieve greater decision-making authority. Drawing on their experience working inhouse at Motorola and as consultants at Razorfish and at their own firm, Bond Art and Science, Karen and Josh will share techniques and perspectives appropriate for IAs in a variety of organizations.
In this session, they will cover:

* Thinking about clients, bosses, or co-workers as “users” of your services.
* Tailoring your approach and recommendations to achieve change.
* Setting realistic expectations for how long it takes to change organizations.
* Identifying situations that are not likely to be successful—and what to do about it.

“It would have been great if only they had listened to us.”
“Our innovative approach would have been revolutionary if the dotcom bust had never happened.”

Our skills, methods, practices, and know-how would have made successful products if only “they” had listened to us or if the boom had continued indefinitely.

We take issue with both complaints. Declarations of righteousness may resonate with other peers who have experienced adversity despite their best efforts. However, blaming business people for not listening to our great ideas makes it seem that “their” need to listen to us exceeds our need to communicate effectively to others, a core skill most designers and consultants would claim. Do we not share responsibility for others’ failure to listen to us?

From Boxes and Arrows

Who has the most control over how well a thing is made? That’s really what all of us want: well made things. The answer to the question is always either:

A) People who do the making, or
B) People in charge of the makers.

For all their progress, most usability/design folks are still neither A nor B. Instead most are

C) people who try to convince A or B to make things in a certain way.

From Scott Berkun

It’s the whole “I-love-you-because-you-love-me” factor (a.k.a. “reciprocity” factor).

Punch Bob. Watch Bob punch you.

Smile at Bob. He’ll smile at you.

Like Bob. And, he’ll like you.

It’s the concept derived from our favorite psychologist, Robert Cialdini:

You offer somebody something; that person feels obligated to repay you.

From Trizle

In a recent interview, Mr. Shellenberger reprised a central point of the essay and book. “Martin Luther King didn’t give the ‘I have a nightmare’ speech, he gave an ‘I have a dream’ speech,” Mr. Shellenberger said. “We need a politics that is positive and that inspires people around an exciting and inspiring vision.”

From

From NYT via 37 Signals 

Jonathan Pincus, an expert on software reliability who recently left Microsoft Research to become an independent consultant, has observed that “the key issues [in programming] relate to people and the way they communicate and organise themselves.” Grady Booch of IBM Rational once tracked 50 developers for 24 hours, and found that only 30% of their time was spent coding—the rest was spent talking to other members of their team.

From The Economist

PM: One of the things we end up talking about at Adaptive Path in terms of how can organizations get good design and great experiences out into the world, is that there are two tacks to take. There is definitely following solid methods, doing design right, and that tends to be bottom up. But there’s also that need for some type of top-down, executive sponsorship, possibly executive vision, such as what Steve Jobs delivers now, and what might have been lacking with the Newton experience.

What does an organization need to succeed in delivering good design if they don’t have that kind of executive mandate or engagement or is it simply not possible?

DN: I think it’s not possible. I think in the end you need a design dictator, someone who has good focus, who knows what this product is to be about and refuses to allow distractions to change the product. It doesn’t matter if someone supposed, “Oh, that’s really a neat thing to add to the product.” If it doesn’t fit the model, it doesn’t go in, so you need somebody strong and with good taste that understands the vision but then has the managerial authority to make it stick. That person has to have the support of the higher management. So, ideally, that person should be higher management.

http://www.adaptivepath.com/ideas/essays/archives/000862.php