If you’re a designer, you’re a problem solver. You have to be, that’s what designers do all day — solve problems. Designers generally have a good ability to take the list of requirements in a design brief and generate multiple approaches to meet them. If you do project work at a design firm or in-house, you’re probably used to working to briefs generated by others, and if that’s the case, your problem-solving skills will serve you well. But if you’re a freelancer, or senior/principal designer (or aspire to be), you’re going to need to cultivate great listening skills to go along with your problem-solving abilities. Why? Well, how else are you going to know what problem you’re trying to solve?
Here’s a little secret about people who are great problem solvers: they tend to be lousy listeners. Problem solvers, whether designers or anybody else, tend to be quick to assess a narrative and come up with a problem schema and solution to match it. They listen for a bit, until they think they’ve got it, then they’ll jump in with the answer. That would be really efficient, except that people don’t always say what they mean, or really even know what they mean. It often takes time and conversational space to peel away the layers of meaning and obfuscation to get to the real nub of the problem. In my experience, many clients will try to express what they want to achieve in terms of what they expect the solution will be like instead of what the issues are that need to be addressed. If left unexplored, this can stifle creative thinking. It’s what’s sometimes known as the “faster horse” syndrome — instead of defining the problem as getting from A to B quicker, the problem is defined in terms of a solution, a faster horse, when the more innovative response might be a car, an airplane or teleportation.
So what’s the answer if we’ve got both client and designer inclined to thinking in terms of solutions instead of problems? Listening. Not just any old listening, but a very intentional and deep form used by therapists and caregivers called Active Listening. You may be familiar with it in the context of interpersonal relationships, but if not, have no fear, I’m going to give you a crash course from the designer’s perspective. It takes a little mental discipline, but it can be done by anybody with a bit of practice. There are three main steps to follow to get to a deeper understanding of what anyone is saying to you.
Attention
The person speaking needs to feel like you’re listening, so you need to demonstrate to them that you’re attentive to what they’re saying. Eye contact, leaning forward, open posture and the occasional “uh huh” or “I see” go a long way to outwardly demonstrating your attention. But this isn’t acting class, your attention needs not only to be shown but actually given. This is something a lot of us, me included, aren’t great at. You need to set aside the many other thoughts that might be going through your mind, including judgements about the speaker and their words, and just concentrate on hearing what they’re trying to convey. The worst thing you can do is be sitting there pretending to listen while composing your next conversational gambit. Listening isn’t about how clever you are, it’s about really trying to hear what the other person is trying, sometimes even struggling, to say.
Clarification
Almost inevitably, the speaker will say things to you that do not fully add up in the context or that are somewhat cryptic, or even worse, seem formulaic. This is where you need to seek clarification by asking them to re-phrase with statements like “I’m not sure what you meant by…” Or, if you think you might have an inkling, questions like “when you said X, Did you mean…?” can really help. These are invitations to the speaker to try to reframe what they’ve just said, and doing that can help them better clarify their thoughts. This process can be iterative, but if it’s done in the spirit of honest enquiry, it can result in a better understanding of the issues for both parties.
Confirmation
After the speaker has finished talking, and seems to have nothing further to add, some confirmation is in order. Your task as the listener is to summarize what you understand they have said, without injection of any attitude. Condescension or dismissiveness are completely counterproductive, as they destroy the trust you just created. Whether you agree with what the speaker has just said is irrelevant, you need to agree on a common version of what they’ve expressed. Until you both agree on a single version of the narrative that will guide the project, it’s very hard to move forward productively. Once you have that, you can move on to respectfully challenge assumptions you disagree with, assess constraints and opportunities, and do all that problem solving stuff that designers love.
Listening is an often overlooked skill in the designer’s toolkit, but it’s an essential one. An inability to hear what is being said to you by clients, other stakeholders or even other designers on a project can be a real career-killer. You don’t have to agree with everything you’re told, and shouldn’t, but you can’t acknowledge, can’t even assess, accept or dismiss what you never heard to begin with.
Like this? More from the Design Process category.
Follow me on Twitter (@intudes) for interesting links and occasional observations.
Subscribe to the RSS feed, and don’t miss another post.
