• Advocating is not inquiring – that’s asking questions.
• Advocating is not listening – that’s staying open to the words and actions of others and hearing what they really have to say.
• Advocating is not empathizing – that would be relating to others through their feelings and the perspective.

Advocating is what I am doing right now; that is, talking (via my writing) to make a point. The challenge most of us face is that we don’t know when we’re advocating.

As designers, we are trained to listen, to ask good questions and to empathize. However, we are not effectively trained to advocate; to communicate what we want and need for ourselves, and to communicate what we, as advocates or proxies for the customer experience, need. It turns out that given the work each of us engage in, it is essential that you advocate for yourself, your projects, your team and your discipline!

Advocating is not simply getting credit where credit is due; it’s about putting yourself out there. Advocating is about knowing what to say, when to say it and how to say it so that the right people will listen and act on your behalf to get things done. It’s about leaning forward and allowing natural forces to pull you into the conversation.

When I was a kid, I learned that walking was, essentially, the act of leaning forward and falling into the next step…by putting one leg in front of the other and allowing gravity to pull me ahead. Advocating is similar. Let the gravity of your job pull you forward. Lean into it. And, as with walking, it’s essential to put one foot in front of the other so to speak.

Advocate for the customer, or as some designers say (and as much as I detest the term) “the user.” Advocate for your stakeholders and for better experience design overall. If people don’t know who you are, what you’re capable of, what value you create and how you make things better simply by showing up, then we are all missing out. It is essential that designers advocate for better experiences across channels, up and down the interaction chain.

Part of our job is to help people see that what shows up in an interface is only a small piece of the puzzle. Another key part of our job is to thread the needle through the interface—from the business model, through service design interactions, experience moments and ultimately the UI.  And, from a omni-channel point of view, it doesn’t matter if the experience moment manifests for the end user, pre-sales engagement, post sales support, software developers or any other persona.

In an omni-channel world, it is about personas and what I call atomic-segments—the smallest meaningful unit of people who have the same expectations. Consider an expectation to be the sum of non-negotiable demands and wants or desires.

As I see it, limiting our understanding to “users” doesn’t make sense because the term is overloaded at best and pejorative at worst.

As agents of change, and to create the kind of world we want to live in, we have to take into account and accept responsibility for crafting the interaction chains that lead to high utility and usable designs that deliver extraordinary value-for-value exchanges. You have to connect this stuff all the way back because great interfaces aren’t enough anymore. We have to link design deep into our organizations.

These are the things that I’m asking all designers to take responsibility for:

• Illuminating – Shedding light
• Educating – Learning and helping others learn
• Negotiating – Collaborating and compromising
• Activating – Getting it done and being the change you want to see in the world
• Advocating – Talking about the things that matter

These are the things I’m asking you to think about and do. There is a huge opportunity in front of us.

I draw this term from Now Discover Your Strengths by Marcus Buckingham and Donald Clifton. Strengths are like talents. They are a way of thinking or behaving that comes easily to you. According to the book, there are 34 key strengths; Activator is one of them. Here is part of the definition of an Activator:

“’When can we start?’ You are impatient for action. Only action is real. Only action can make things happen. Only action leads to performance. Once a decision is made, you cannot not act.”

While negotiating is about saying “No” to get to the bigger “Yes,” activating is about saying “Yes” and getting stuff done. It’s about getting beyond the conversations and commitments and moving into action. It’s about doing the work, but it is also about being the change you want to see in the world.

To win the hearts and minds of those who depend on you, as a designer,  to be agents of change, we not only need to do the work, but we also must model the process, share the tools, provide templates for artifacts and set higher standards. In effect, we get to design where we want to go, know what to leave behind as we advance and lead others as we discover the path forward ourselves.

This means that designers should not only activate ourselves, our teams and our organizations, but also activate our discipline. We start by creating a new vision of possibility, and we give others the power to participate in creating the kind of world we all want to live in. And our work reveals how things can change.

Customer Experience Design. Information Architecture. Design Thinking. Visualization, Usability Engineering. This is what we do. Our art is making ideas real, concrete and valuable. Activation is the ignition switch.

Designers should strive to activate proactively. When you don’t do this, you lose control of the timeline and the choices you have in the now. When you lose control of the timeline, you are forced to react to the default reality, a reality that others created, and not necessarily by design.

Create the reality you want to live in. Don’t wait for others to tell you what to do, how to think, what to build or how to work.  Activate.

Harry Max is Vice President of Experience Design for Rackspace. Harry’s role includes responsibility for everything experience: from product design to customer service tools to the employee experience. Be sure to visit the blog next week for Harry’s final tool of change for designers, Advocating. Also check out Harry’s previous posts on Illuminating, Educating and Negotiating.

If it were only up to you and me, this would be a snap. However, when other people are involved, it almost always means finding a compromise. Different perspectives mean different needs, interests and goals. Negotiating is about harmonizing your needs, interests and goals with those of others.

As a designer, you must bring together divergent perspectives in a way that allows you to move from conversation to commitment to ultimately action. Remember, your colleagues want to get stuff done too.

The road to becoming good at negotiating starts with developing the skill of asking precise questions and giving precise answers. PQ&A (Precision Questioning and Answering) accelerates conversations. And it involves learning to say “No” in ways that empower us to keep the conversation moving forward to get to the bigger “Yes.” Learning to negotiate is key. One of the best resources I have found on this is The Power of Positive No by William Ury.

Perceptual Positions

One way to help with negotiations is to practice changing perceptual positions. Try it: Imagine looking at somebody through your own eyes. That’s first position. Then, imagine what you look like from their point of view. That’s second position. Finally, imagine what you both look like from above. That’s third position. If you can see this with your mind’s eye, you’ve just experience the art of changing perceptual positions. Changing perceptual positions gives you information you otherwise wouldn’t have. Minimally, it slows you down just a bit…and forces you to walk, at least for a few moments, in somebody else’s shoes. Beyond that, it can help you manage your emotions better. See, if you are using your imagination to watch yourself, it’s hard to be truly angry or upset or disappointed.

Can you imagine how valuable it must be to see yourself through another’s eyes when you are negotiating? Designers are familiar with doing this because in our work we often represent the customers’ or users’ perspective. The trick is becoming more intentional in changing perceptual positions and figuring out how to use it to reach compromises that matter, to create a better reality.

Negotiating Includes Problem Solving

Problem solving is central to creating solutions. There’s an aphorism that says 50 percent of solving a problem is defining it. And the first step toward defining a “problem” is characterizing it accurately. For example, is it a:

·      Problem – Real problems can be solved.
·      Predicament – A problem that cannot be solved.
·      Quagmire – Where every attempt to solve it leaves you worse off.
·      Challenge – A chance to win by overcoming obstacles.
·      Opportunity – A valuable, potential benefit.

Negotiating is a nonviolent approach. There is no need for hostility – you’re not trying to bully people into agreement. Nor is negotiating about simply compromising – you don’t have to give in to get something. But you do have to ask for something specific, and you have to know what to ask for.

You have to help others see and tease out the criteria for what’s sufficient and for what’s hopelessly idealistic. See through their eyes, and help them discover what questions to ask. Negotiating implies a relationship, a partnership. As each party discovers what questions to ask, they discover how to get their needs met. This transforms the conversation from a battleground to a treasure hunt. The goal is to achieve something, both collectively and collaboratively, in order to reach the treasure, to find the prize.

When I am negotiating at work, I hear myself telling people, “What you’re working on is important. What I’m working on is important. We have a to work together to get to the great place we want to be.” Not a place where I want to be, where we want to be. The real trick is being mindful about how we get there.

Authentic Self Confidence Is The Key

The tools I’ve discussed so far prepare us for observing and getting oriented, to bringing others along and to get our needs met. This brings us to the brink of deciding. At this point, we as designers tend to get in our own way.

Somewhere deep inside of each of us is a joyful “Yes” and a feisty “No.” Only you can decide which is which: joy is “Yes,” regret is “No.” At the point you have to decide, you must choose. What do you trust to move forward?

To begin with, you have to trust yourself. You can’t trust yourself if you are willfully deceiving yourself; you have to trust your gut feeling, as data…your data! Sometimes you have to get to the bigger “Yes” by saying “No”.

Remember, as you negotiate, there’s an element of being right here, right now and knowing how to say “Yes” as well as “No” with grace. Give people, including yourself, the chance to be part of the story as the story unfolds.

Harry Max is Vice President of Experience Design for Rackspace. Harry’s role includes responsibility for everything experience: from product design to customer service tools to the employee experience. Be sure to visit the blog next week for Harry’s fourth tool of change for designers, Activating. Also check out Harry’s previous posts on Illuminating and Educating.

I believe that designers can’t teach others until we have an understanding of how to do things ourselves. Once we’ve internalized these skills, we can help model new behaviors. This is “training people by accident,” modeling the behavior your want to see in your preferred version of reality.

There are three categories of skills and capabilities that Richard Bolles, one of my mentors, wrote in What Color is Your Parachute:

• Domain-specific skills (like card-sorting)
• Basic transferable skills (like typing)
• Personal-adaptive skills (like active listening)

Personal-adaptive skills are the finer skills you apply to all areas of life, and which you adapt to different situations. Most people don’t pay enough attention to these skills, such as Precision Question and Answering, Active Listening, Decision-making or Effective Negotiation. These are the tools of the agents of change.

The opportunity is for you to first educate yourself and learn what’s necessary to do the work. From there, you can educate others, then teams of people to further understand the design problems you face, and how you will work together to develop potential solutions that stick.

For me, educating others means modeling simple frameworks, which they can in turn use and model for others. Some of my favorite frameworks include:

• Outcome-Based Thinking – specifying what’s wanted, and how you’ll know when the goal is achieved. This tool gets people on the same page and aligns insights for action.
• Current-State Analysis – observing and orienting in the present, by looking at reality for what it is, not what you want it to be because the facts are friendly.
• Visual Road-Mapping – capturing the dependencies, progressive phases, and critical success factors over time in a framework inspired by Dave Sibbet

I find it amazing what happens when people start asking better questions and giving more relevant and succinct answers. Frameworks like these transform your ability to accomplish things and to interact more effectively across your organization.

You want the overall organization to see what you see, to understand what you understand and to use design thinking to solve the tough problems. Your role as a designer is to educate your organization on this manner of solving tough problems in this new way of thinking.

Harry Max is Vice President of Experience Design for Rackspace. Harry’s role includes responsibility for everything experience: from product design to customer service tools to the employee experience. Be sure to visit the blog next week for Harry’s third tool of change for designers, Negotiating. Also check out Harry’s previous post on Illuminating.

According to Jonah Lehrer in How We Decide, our emotional subsystem is what allows us to make decisions, not our rational mind. Designers should be mindful of this and you should make sure that they don’t brush aside the inner “Yes” or “No” as they design. While feelings are emotional “facts,” the designer should take this as a data point, as one piece of fact to the larger puzzle.

Designers must also pay attention to external facts. Facts are friendly to a designer because they reflect truth, the underlying reality of a situation. Raw data. Nothing more. Facts in and of themselves have no emotional charge, they just are. So, as you consider your design decisions, examine both your feelings and external facts.

Too often as humans, we intentionally fool ourselves. Call it self-deception. This is where we willfully ignore our feelings by rationalizing what “should” or must be true.  Or we dismiss what the facts are telling us.

Designers need to fight the urge to override their inner “Yes” or “No.” And they need to avoid the pull of going the opposite direction of what the facts are showing them.

Deceiving yourself into hearing what you want to hear is particularly un-useful. I like to define stupidity as the following:

A series of decisions and actions where the result is the opposite of the intended outcome, and where willful ignorance or self-deception is at play.

Willful ignorance or self-deception generally leads to poor decisions and even worse design. However, if a designer responds to the facts as they are, rather than they “should” be, they dramatically increase the chances of things turning out as they hope.

Beyond turning up the light in yourself, I believe that you can also illuminate things on the outside, both your peers and your organization. Designers can do this through visualization, categorization, information design, interaction dynamics and symbolic structure development. One key idea of illumination is capturing the transient, giving permanence to the ephemeral.

As peers come to you with ideas, apply your craft by helping them visualize their concepts, sketches and white board content by turning it into frameworks or other meaningful, relevant visualizations. Taking the time to reveal the meaning for your colleagues with help challenge the default reality and shape it into something new. This will help facilitate meaningful and relevant conversations, which will result in better decisions and alignment.

Harry Max is Vice President of Experience Design for Rackspace. Harry’s role includes responsibility for everything experience: from product design to customer service tools to the employee experience. Be sure to visit the blog next week for Harry’s second tool of change for designers, Educating. Also check out Harry’s introductory post.

Each moment, we get to choose:

• Our attitudes,
• How thoughtfully we listen, and
• What to do with the information we have.

The opportunity is to get better at choosing, because our choices contribute directly to reality as it unfolds right smack in front of us. The default reality is one possible version of reality, but it’s not a given. We have a choice.

Some people argue that designers are change agents and others say that they’re not. Either way, you are an agent of change in your own life. You have a choice.

I hear that design, experience design, user-centered design, service design, information design, design thinking and all monikers of the form “design” will change the world. I think that part of this is right, but I also feel that we over promise and under deliver because, in part, designers have fixated on the wrong problem: the default reality.

Design is the craft of change. The potential is certainly there, but I worry that design professionals don’t realize how much choice, or capacity to be a change agent, they have. Consequently, many designers react to the default reality instead of creating a better one.

Part of a designer’s job is to lead the change. Gandhi said it best, “You must be the change you want to see in the world.” And, as a designer, whether you like it or not, each of you is an agent of change. Change will follow in your wake, and the wake you leave is the version of reality you choose to live in.

There are five tools of change: Illuminating, Educating, Negotiating, Advocating and Activating. Each week I will write an article on one of these tools based on a talk that I delivered at the Information Architecture Summit in New Orleans.

Harry Max is Vice President of Experience Design for Rackspace. Harry’s role includes responsibility for everything experience: from product design to customer service tools to aspects of the employee experience. Be sure to visit the blog next week for Harry’s first tool of change for designers, Illuminating.

The experience that a developer, DevOps engineer, support technician, operations manager or any other Rackspace employee has is just as important as the customer’s experience, because ultimately, it helps make the customer’s experience even better. Our systems need to be user-friendly for everyone.

We’re fanatical about the design of our products and services, and we work diligently to make sure they work as a coherent whole. We have embarked on a journey to instill our core values into every aspect of the Rackspace experience, inside and out. To achieve this, Rackspace uses a discipline called experience design.

Experience design is much more than user experience, and in this whitepaper I write about what experience design is; how it relates to our core values; why we deployed it; some of our mottos and guiding principles on design; the importance of utilizing customer feedback; some of the tools we use; and how we have organized within our business.

Check back with the blog in the near future for more of Harry’s thoughts on experience design.