Episode 38: We Know What Happens When You “Assume”

A conversation with Tamara Adlin, UX consultant, creator of the Alignment Personas Method, and co-author of the “The Persona Lifecycle”

This article was originally published on voltagecontrol.com

“The only assumptions that can hurt our products are the ones we don’t know about. I lean into the assumptions, I say, ‘Let’s get them all out on the table.’ Let’s align around them because until we get all of you guys aligned, we’re not going to be able to change your minds anyway.” -Tamara Adlin

Tamara Adlin is a UX expert and consultant who helps startups, and companies who want to behave more like startups, create products their customers love. She is also the co-author of the Persona Lifecycle book series and has created a method she calls Alignment Personas.

In this episode of Control the Room, I talk with Tamara about shared narratives, alignment, and personas. Listen in to hear how exploring assumptions and allowing data to inform decision-making creates a unified team and a clear perspective.

Show Highlights

[01:03] Tamara’s Start

[04:35] Discoverability vs. Intuitiveness

[13:14] How to Expose Assumptions & Misalignment

[21:30] Shared Narrative Through Alignment Personas

[34:51] Tamara’s Closing Thoughts

Links | Resources

Tamara’s LinkedIn

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About the Guest

Tamara Adlin is a UX consultant who focuses on helping existing businesses run with the perspective and vitality of startups. Her background in technical communication allows her to focus on detangling the implicit and personal meanings that individuals assign to words within a communication process, while simultaneously exposing and evaluating the validity of assumptions held by key stakeholders.

About Voltage Control

Voltage Control is a change agency that helps enterprises sustain innovation and teams work better together with custom-designed meetings and workshops, both in-person and virtual. Our master facilitators offer trusted guidance and custom coaching to companies who want to transform ineffective meetings, reignite stalled projects, and cut through assumptions. Based in Austin, Voltage Control designs and leads public and private workshops that range from small meetings to large conference-style gatherings.

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Full Transcript

Douglas Ferguson:

Welcome to the Control the Room Podcast, a series devoted to the exploration of meeting culture and uncovering cures for the common meeting. Some meetings have tight control and others are loose. To control the room means achieving outcomes while striking a balance between imposing and removing structure, asserting and distributing power, leaning in and leaning out. The service of having a truly magical meeting. Today, I’m with Tamara Adlin of Adlin Incorporated. She is a UX expert and consultant who helps startups and companies who want to behave more like startups, create products their customers love. She is also the co-author of The Persona Lifecycles book series, and has created a new method she calls the Alignment Personas. Welcome to the show, Tamara.

Tamara Adlin:

Thank you, so great to be here.

Douglas Ferguson:

So, to kick things off, tell us a little bit about how you got your start.

Tamara Adlin:

Well, I got my start in the field of user experience before there was really a clear field of user experience. My family was interested in psychology and art, my mom and my dad, and I ended up doing an independent major to combine both, having no idea where that would go, and then discovered the field of human computer interaction and ended up going to the University of Washington’s department of Technical Communication for my master’s degree, and I didn’t even know what Technical Communication was. And today that department is called human centered design and engineering. And so I sort of made a straight line without having any idea where I was going and fell in love with the field and have been happily doing this work ever since I got my master’s degree in 1996, and have been working in large companies and startups ever since then.

Douglas Ferguson:

That’s amazing. I had a very different experience that’s very parallel. So around ’96, ’97, I was at my first startup and writing software and we had built a lot of awesome technology and had some provisional patents, and were definitely leading the way on web analytics. Prior to us no one was doing the 1×1 pixel, which everyone does now. And it was ad click and all these folks that were doing server file analysis. And we thought we were hot stuff. We had Walmart, we had Victoria’s Secret, we had an Eddie Bauer, we had every e-commerce brand you can imagine. Well, brick and mortar brand that were just going online and needed these analytics. And along came a company called Omniture.

Tamara Adlin:

Yeah.

Douglas Ferguson:

And they started picking away clients left and right, because they had a better user experience, and we didn’t even have that terminology then, but we knew exactly what they were doing, we saw what was happening, but we were in no position to react. And that’s what sent me on my journey to where I’m at now and understanding the importance of this kind of work. So it’s kind of interesting that just our experiences and what got thrown at us from the world just kind of prepared us for this work.

Tamara Adlin:

Well, yeah. And I’ll add to that, I love that this is your first question. I did a series of interviews in 2006 and 2007, and I’ve published some of them but not all of them on a site called uxpioneers.com. And they are always some of the generation before me, the ones who actually created our field, and all of them came from completely random places and their experience sort of led them to create this whole field of user experience. And it’s a bunch of fascinating weirdos, right? And I started every interview with, “What’s the first thing you can remember fascinating you?” And we were off and running from there.

So, I too love thinking about how this entire world sort of evolved from people’s curiosity and starting to notice the source of the problem and that source being what we call now user-friendliness or things making sense to regular human beings. We all get so enamored with technology, but the linchpin is the people who are trying to use that stuff.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah. It’s interesting, the notion of how intuitive something is. It’s one of the most difficult things to grapple because of the curse of knowledge. Once we know how something works, it’s hard to remember what it was like to not know that and put ourselves in those folks’ shoes. And I just don’t know how you get around just not talking to humans.

Tamara Adlin:

Yeah. Everybody used to talk about intuitiveness, and there’s almost nothing that’s super intuitive, but there’s a lot of stuff that’s discoverable, which basically means that if you see it once you won’t forget it, right? And so I think we actually build user interfaces a lot on discoverability as opposed to intuitiveness. And I think that that’s totally fine.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah. I was kind of blurring those two concepts more, just the notion that I know that we’re working on a product to use inside of virtual meetings, and just the terminology, I’ll name something some way and it makes total sense to me and people will see it and it’s like they have no idea what it means. And I explain it and then they say, “Oh, that.” And so if I hear “that” enough times, then that’s what goes in the product, right? Because I feel like they understand it immediately, or it relates to more people than whatever word that I dreamed up that no one understands.

Tamara Adlin:

Yeah. And before this interview, we were talking a little bit, you said one of the things you asked people is what their superpower is. And I think one of my personal superpowers is that I am good at looking at products and designs and seeing them through the eyes of a first timer. There’s just some mode that I feel like I can put myself in, now that’s not flawless by a long shot and doesn’t replace actual user testing, but it’s an interesting place to try to put yourself in.

And I also think what you said about the wording. So often in my workshops I end up very quickly creating a document called glossary. And honestly, that glossary is one of the most important products, deliverables, of most of the work that I do, even though it’s never once mentioned in the description of the workshop or in the contract, or even in conversations that we have before a client hires me.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah. I think that definitely relates to something we were also talking about in the pre-show chat, which was this notion of perceived value of this work. A lot of executives would look at a statement of work then insert a glossary. I’m sure they were glossed right over that. What’s the benefit of this, right? Whereas you and I know that the alignment is so critical and I don’t think I’ve ever made a glossary for a client, although we’ve done it. I did it for… A few of them are startups internally, just because I got tired of hearing people being confused about words and said, “Let’s just write these down.”

But so much of the work is about helping people just understand each other. If you’re in a session and you’re a good facilitator, you’re going to start linking and noticing that people are using different words to describe different things. This is a massive opportunity for improving efficiency across teams. So tell me a little bit more about the glossary, and why aren’t people valuing these things as much?

Tamara Adlin:

Okay. Well, I’m going to answer that question in a way that’s not going to seem totally obvious, but here’s the thing about this executive alignment work about the workshops and all of this. I started out as a user experience person interested in user experience design, and then I started getting interested in, well, if we have great designers working on this stuff, why aren’t the products better that we deliver? And then I started looking at what gets in the way of delivering great design, and that could be anything and everything from not having enough budget to do research before you do the design to executives coming in and doing the swoop and poop seagull management six weeks after the design starts and telling you to make the logo bigger or whatever it is. And that’s how I started getting really interested.

I mean, all UX is about swimming upstream, right? And I swam all the way upstream into the executive suite where I realized that it is politically impossible for them to realize that they’re talking past each other and for anybody to make a decision or draw a line in the sand that they write down and stick to. And I got fascinated with trying to solve that problem all in the name of, how can we launch products that are designed better? Right? And so when you track it all the way up to the C-suite, what you start to realize is the problems are as much social and organizationally political and based in fear or just based in… My dear friend and super smarty pants, Katie Geminder calls it the game of telephones that exists in all executive suites. It’s something that they have built themselves, they can’t see it and you cannot fix it from the inside. And it is sometimes as basic as writing down and reflecting to them that the two of you, CMO and CFO or whatever are using this word to mean two different things. Right?

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah. I was also thinking as you were talking about just vulnerability and trust, because especially that there’s been a lot of writings about the first team, this notion that as you get into leadership you’re no longer responsible for your organization you’re responsible for the executive team. You’re a member of the executive team. Your peers are now leaders of other organizations, not the people in your organization. And I just see so many executive teams struggle with that one issue. And I think it just manifests itself in other ways. And it’s almost like these people are so skilled at life and at doing things, they create coping mechanisms that they don’t even realize they’re creating. And so everything’s kind of somewhat functional, but if you really look at it, it’s pretty dysfunctional. They’re getting things done.

Tamara Adlin:

Yeah. What they’re really good at is getting higher and higher in an organization. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but then once you reached the top, now what do you do? And so I like to think a lot about… What I do too is user centered design, where each executive is both a product that is used by their peers, right? And is a user of their peers as products. So are you usable and are your colleagues usable to you? Right? Which is a totally different way of looking at it. But the nice thing about that is that it then tells user experience people, “You can use the same skills that you used to create better products to make yourself more usable and to become a more informed consumer of others in your organization, and to clearly ask for what you need.” And that also is true then at the executive level, but it just gets trickier up at the top.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, it’s really fascinating this notion of inner departmental services. I know Zappos a few years back were experimenting with something they were calling market-driven dynamics. And essentially every team got a budget and they were supposed to release a services list. And so teams would request services of each other and they were kind of creating market-driven dynamics within the company, which is really fascinating. But I think conceptually that’s interesting. What I heard from folks was the overhead of managing a P&L for every team is a little much, right?

Tamara Adlin:

Yeah. Yeah. But I think even doing that as an exercise, maybe not operationalizing it and actually turning it into a P&L, but doing that as an exercise for yourself, for your team, even for the teams that you work with most closely, and getting aligned on what is it that you offer and what is it that you need and are those things matching up, is really, really interesting. And it’s really, really fruitful.

Douglas Ferguson:

So tell me a little bit about… I’m really curious how the executive alignment workshop works. Your goal is to get executive alignment, but it’s the alignment personas workshop, I believe.

Tamara Adlin:

Yeah. So I wrote these books on data-driven personas, right? And I co-authored them with John Pruitt, who’s awesome. And they are about, how do you really prepare an organization to use personas? And then how do you use data to create them? And then how do you actually physically use them on a day to day basis? Well, I wrote these books and then I went into consulting in 2005 and I never ended up creating data-driven personas. Partially because no one had the budget for it, also partially because the stories I heard from organizations that did have the budget is that they would launch them and then their personas would fail. So I started thinking about that as a problem. And what I ended up doing, long story short, was deciding that or realizing that if an executive… I’m just going to call them executives, it could be stakeholder, whatever. If they have an idea about the way something should be built, you can’t convince them that’s not the way it should be built, until you show them that their way doesn’t work.

So I knew that assumptions at the stakeholder and higher levels were actually the thing driving product decisions. And there’s a good reason for that. If you think about even just a startup, by the time a startup tries to build a product, what they’ve done is they have created pitch decks, they’ve created demos, maybe they’ve created an MVP, they’ve gotten money. And what that means is that people have looked at their assumptions about the way to build something and told them it’s valuable. Until they build that thing the way they think it should be built, you can’t convince them to do otherwise.

So I have an example for you, imagine that you wanted to buy a new house, and imagine that you have it in your head that you want a yard because you have a dog or you have a kid, right? I know there’s an order about saying these things, but whatever. So I could show you all the data in the world that says that owning a house with a backyard actually costs more than it is valuable. That it actually makes a huge amount more sense to buy a house near a park, near an unleashed dog area, near a playground. It’s not going to change your mind about wanting a house with a yard. It doesn’t matter how much data I give you. If you want a yard and that’s in your head, you’re going to buy a house with a yard.

And I think startups are similar. I think the people who run startups want a house with a yard. And that you need to lean into that and get all of those assumptions out on the table. Why they want a yard, how big of a yard? Do they all define a yard the same way? And help them by saying, “The only assumptions that can hurt our products are the ones we don’t know about.” If you think of a yard as a tiny strip of land, and you think of a yard as an acre and a half of wilderness, then we’re in trouble. Right? So I lean in to the assumptions, and I say, “Let’s get them all out on the table. Let’s align around them, regardless of whether or not having a yard is fundamentally the best idea. Because until we get all of you guys aligned, we’re not going to be able to change your minds anyway. Right?”

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah. And it reminds me of… Especially your question around, well, how big is this backyard?

Tamara Adlin:

Right.

Douglas Ferguson:

Reminds me of the clean language questions, because so many people talk in metaphor and jargon and the clean language questions are so great at kind of helping tease out those differences and get to deeper understanding. The jargon’s great. As long as we’re referencing the same glossary, it can be really great to make our communication really efficient, but I think humans tend to go to that efficient communication too early before we’ve established the norms and gotten really well aligned, and then it really causes a lot of problem, because we’re moving quickly and we’re assuming that we were… You made a comment that the only assumptions that will hurt us are the ones that we haven’t discovered.

Tamara Adlin:

Yeah.

Douglas Ferguson:

And the assumptions we’re making that we understand each other, those are maybe the most dangerous.

Tamara Adlin:

I think you’re right. I think the clean words, the glossary, you and I know that that is the root of the problem. The other root of the problem is the lack of numbers. So another thing that happens with my workshops is I always start with articulating measurable… I call them business goals, but their product goals or their project goals. And I do them with this Mad Libs format, right? So that everyone has to be articulate with… The first word is increase or decrease. The second part of the Mad Libs is some important measurable number. The third part of the Mad Libs is an actual number like 20% or 80%. And the last part of the Mad Libs is in some time period, like three months after launch. And there’s reasons for all those pieces.

But instead of diving into that, what I want to say is, every single time when I do this, the client says, “Well, we already have our goals nailed down.” And I say, “Send them on over.” And either they send old ones from when they were at the beginning of the year, or more often I get, “Hey, Sandra, did you have the latest board deck? Because we had some thoughts in there and then we had the original vision and metrics. And Bob, did you have the KPIs for the flim-flam challis wham or whatever?” I mean, they’re all over the place. And that’s because every time more than one executive is in a room together, something shifts slightly and nobody writes it down. So they all tell me, “We’ll take out the goals part of this. We don’t need this as part of the project.” But the amazing thing, my other little cute… As consultants, we have lots of cute things we say, well, the magic of business goals is that it’s never inappropriate to ask for them and they never exist.

So that’s what I mean by actual numbers. And what I tell people is, “I don’t care whether you decide that you want to increase new signups by 20% or 80%, what I care about is that all of you agree that it’s in the realm of 20% versus in the realm of 80%.” Right? So first the metric is the clean language, right? Increased number of people who create an account. That’s hard to actually get to sometimes. And then 20% versus 80%. So I think we’re down to words and numbers you and I. I think we’ve solved the world with words and numbers.

Douglas Ferguson:

Well, I’m going to bring up something that came up in the pre-show chat. This seems like a nice segue to your statement that data doesn’t solve any of the problems.

Tamara Adlin:

That’s right. Yeah. Everybody relies on data for everything. Companies are like, “Well, if we have a problem, let’s go out and get data to solve it.” But data doesn’t solve most business problems. And that’s because, unless you know what the assumptions are that that data is up against, and unless those assumptions have been articulated and fully appreciated, data isn’t going to change your mind. Data isn’t going to change your mind about wanting a damn yard. It’s just not.

So first you have to know they want a yard, right? And you have to respect that because they did get money, either from their investors or from their organization to pursue project X, which is project X is to solve some problem for some set of people in some unique way that we think will make money or whatever. All right. Well, they got all the way to the point where this thing is funded, however, it’s funded, they’ve been validated by the most important people in their lives, their bosses, their investors, based on the ideas they’ve shared, their assumptions about the right way to do this thing. Data is not the thing that’s going to tell them they were wrong. Unless you fully understand that their assumption is that users want peanut butter, right? Now that you know that they think some users want peanut butter and some users want jelly, now you can go out and get data and show them, “We actually looked at these people and they actually want almond butter. Here, we’ll show you.” That’s got nowhere to land unless you know what it is that they’re thinking and… Yeah.

Douglas Ferguson:

That definitely aligns with my experience and observations. Also, I think there’s a layer there, which is, if you couple that with how curious the person is, that has an impact. Because, people that are highly curious are typically easier to have that conversation about the backyard. And when I say curious, I’m talking about a child’s mind curiosity. And I think that’s why these workshops that we do are so powerful at helping people address this type of work, because we’re putting them in that mindset. Of course, we’ve got systems to walk them through, but also getting to a point where they become curious and they start examining things, to me, is one of those first steps. And if you’re already starting with highly curious people, then it’s sometimes easier.

Tamara Adlin:

Well, I like what you say about that, about curiosity and getting into that mode. I think I have thought about it differently. I’ve thought about it as changing the conversation and changing the words. So you asked me about… Executive alignment is my thing, that’s the what, and the alignment personas is the how. And the reason I create these alignment personas, which is personas based on how stakeholders are thinking about their users, right? And again, cute way of describing our projects when we’re consultants, like, this is executive alignment and five conversations, which is really about creating alignment personas.

And the first step is business goals, and the second step is listing all the words they use to describe users today, users, customers, known users, account holders, mom, and that takes about five minutes. And then doing, here’s the stickies, right? Then doing what I call the yellow sticky exercise, which is just if your product or your project was a building and you were looking at all these people showing up at the front door, like you were standing on a mountain over here looking down on them, describe each of them. Like, a mom who wants to do yoga at home, or an athlete who has an injury that they don’t know how to address, right? And that changes the conversation. That’s like, describe all these people that you can imagine showing up at your product.

And then the third conversation is clustering those understatements that start with the word I want, or I need. And I’m racing through this, but just to give you a sense, and then clustering those want and need statements into sort of motivation based personas, right? As if there was a concierge inside your building, and after a week of people streaming through, if you ask them, “Well, who’s coming to this product?” They would say, “Well, there’s a bunch of people over there who are brand new to it, there’s a bunch of people over there who have issues or problems, there’s a bunch about people who are looking for a specific solution.” And you sort of create these persona candidates out of that.

And then the last step is prioritizing them based on the numeric goals you created in the first place. And the reason I’m listing through that is because when I want to point out is it’s simply changing the conversation. It’s changing the discussion from whatever discussion they were having before that was tangling them up to this very sort of equalizing sticky note based. And at first they roll their eyes, exercise where they’re just describing the people who are going to produce the money that will pay their salaries, right? And then trying to think like them instead of thinking about them, right? And then ending up with these personas that now you can go get data and decide whether or not they’re realistic. But you were there in the room with your colleagues, with the other stakeholders, together you created them and together you prioritized them according to these agreed on business goals. And suddenly now the language has changed because now you’re able to say, “We prioritized Penelope over Roberta.” Right? “Because Penelope will help us get to our goal of having more people actually sign up than Roberta will.” For whatever reason.

So if somebody comes in in six weeks and has a cool idea, anybody could say to them, “That’s a cool idea for Roberta, but you prioritized Penelope. So do you want us to work on this Roberta idea or Penelope?” And so, because those names and those shared understanding of who those people are and their priorities and how they reflect our business needs, that changes the glossary completely. That changes the language.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, it’s like a shift in perspective, right?

Tamara Adlin:

Yeah.

Douglas Ferguson:

That’s ultimately a paradigm change for folks.

Tamara Adlin:

Yeah. And the way I describe that is that it sort of transitions from thinking about their users to thinking like their users. And a huge amount of agreement can be drawn from that. Now, the reason traditional personas tend to fail is because they are designed to communicate data, right? So they are designed to summarize data. What alignment personas are built to do is to drive to and communicate agreement and alignment, no matter where it came from, because lack of alignment is a much bigger problem than lack of data.

Douglas Ferguson:

I’m seeing a few different angles of alignment or dimensions maybe. There’s the perspective of the executive to executive alignment, because now they’re really clear because they went through this process together and they got to understand it. There’s also alignment of the strategy to the goals, because now the strategy is going to be informed by these decisions that we made. And I think that goes all the way up and down the ladder, right? The tactics should then be really clear because we’re using the personas as a litmus to make sure that we are making the right decision. So it can kind of help inform decisions all the way up and down. So there’s alignment there. Is there another dimension that you’ve noticed or are those the main two?

Tamara Adlin:

Well, first of all, that’s very astute and unsurprising that you would realize that given who you are, but that’s exactly right. It’s connecting the, what we’re trying to do, the how we’re trying to do it. I think the other… You’ve sort of covered it in you’re saying like it’s an up and down alignment, but it’s also alignment between the executives and everybody else working for them in some really interesting ways. So these alignment personas can and are used to communicate throughout down in the organization. We are focusing on Penelope first and foremost, and then we’re not going to make Roberta unhappy, but when push comes to shove, and push always comes to shove, we’re going to make sure that we nail it for Penelope. Because if we don’t, we’re not going to hit our goals.

What then also happens is what goes down can come up. So if the lowest person on the design totem pole gets a visit from a very important head honcho who tells them to make the logo bigger, right? Which happens, then that lowly designer can say, “I can understand why we’d want to do that for Roberta and I can do that for you because you’re my boss. But the cost is that I’m not going to be able to do this feature change for Penelope.” It’s your choice, right? Because you’re the hot honcho. But just be able to explain to you that this doesn’t line up with what you said your priorities were in a way that’s not going to get the lowly designer fired. All they’re doing is saying, “I heard you and I respect your decision. If something has changed, let me know. I’ll do whatever you want.”

And what ends up happening is then that honcho can back down without embarrassment. And he’d say, “You know, you’re completely right. We do really want this for a Penelope.” Great reminder, go for it. Or they can tell this lowly designer, “Our executive priorities have changed, and now Roberta’s opinion of us is much more important than we thought.” Now the lowly designer can raise the flag to everyone on their team and say, “Guess what? I just heard from this head honcho their priorities have changed.” And that’s great. They’re allowed to change priorities. Knowing about it enables us to do something about it because it happens anyway and we don’t know about it.

So that kind of magical thing where these personas give us a third sort of entity in the organization that we can blame things on, that we can invoke that are apolitical, is sort of a magical thing. It’s like you have two kids who are mad at each other and then they both get mad at the parent. Right? It’s a sort of common… Not this case, an enemy, but commonplace to put sort of blame for pushback.

Douglas Ferguson:

I love this notion of the shared narrative that allows it to… I don’t know. It definitely helps the communication because I would say that’s the hardest thing I see executive teams struggle with as… I mean, first they need to be aligned, but then even the ones that are aligned, it’s great and all if you get aligned inside the workshop, but if you don’t disseminate that throughout the organization, then it’s not going to take hold.

And I think one of the qualities of one of my favorite leaders, the chairman of my last startup, was I would just see him tell the same story over and over and over and over again. Whether it was in our board meeting, or in an executive meeting, or an all-hands meeting, or at the water cooler with the admin. It didn’t matter who it was, what we were talking about, they didn’t dilute the message. That’s a superior skill because I recognize myself abbreviating, shortening, because I feel like I’ve said it a million times, that it’s super important for people to get the real thing and to get it undiluted and make sure that we’re empowering the organization to know what to do.

Tamara Adlin:

Yeah. I want to put a whole other angle on that. I think a lot of people who listened to this podcast are people who are in the business of controlling the room. Right? And I think one thing that I’ve noticed in myself is I keep thinking that I have to come up with new concepts or new workshops or new whatever, but the truth is that the same work that I’ve been doing for years is still highly relevant. Executive alignment is never not going to be a problem. And even though I find myself repeating myself on different podcast interviews or whatever, right? I have to respect that what I offer is valuable and worth repeating without constantly having to come up with something new to have value as a service provider. I know it’s kind of an odd way to reply to what you’re saying, but I think a lot of us must struggle with this. I feel like I should be creating articles on new topics all the time, but the truth is, honestly, what I should be doing is creating articles on the same topics all the time.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah. Repetition is often key. And I think the beauty is, how do we make sure people hear what we were trying to say? And we’re there for people when they need to hear it.

Tamara Adlin:

The adjustments come in adjusting the same message for a different set of ears.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah.

Tamara Adlin:

The way I’m talking to you now, I would never summarize this workshop that fast or business goals that fast for any other audience. But since I know I’m talking to a bunch of workshop facilitators, I know they’re like, “Oh, yep, yep, yep, yep. Yep.” So it’s an adjusted message but the core value is still the same. And I think we all want that from our leaders, to your point about the CEO or something. There’s huge relief in knowing what you’re doing as a lower person in the organization. That it aligns with the entire business, that there’s a reason that you’re doing it. And then you have clarity in the direction that you’re going.

We all want Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer up in front saying, “No, it’s this way. It’s this way. It’s this way.” And I think part of my job is helping to establish that red nose. But my analogies are going all over the place, which means I’m happy in the conversation.

Douglas Ferguson:

But you got to have the signal, right? There’s got to be a signal somewhere.

Tamara Adlin:

And it’s got to be clear and not change too much. And if it does change, you have to be able to say, “It changed everybody, so let’s adjust, but let’s adjust together.” Because my whole thing about alignment is like, if you picture a bunch of thoroughbred race horses all attached to a carriage, they could be the fastest race horses on the face of the planet, but if they are heading in slightly different directions, just a couple degrees off, that chariot is not going to go very fast.

Douglas Ferguson:

It may even get damaged in the process too.

Tamara Adlin:

Exactly. Right? And so you’ve hired these thoroughbred race horses who all obviously can go fast, so why aren’t you going faster? It’s because you’ve attached them all to a chariot but they’re all heading in slightly, slightly different directions. And the reason why I’m a consultant and will never take a full-time job is because you can’t fix that from the inside. Not possible.

Douglas Ferguson:

Well, we are at time and-

Tamara Adlin:

Oh, sorry. I’m having so much fun.

Douglas Ferguson:

No, no, this is great. That’s why I had to drop in that message thinking, “Okay, we’re done.” Because often, my guests are so much fun to talk to, we could just probably talk for hours and we had to end at some point. So I want to give you just a moment to leave our listeners with something that you’d like them just to keep top of mind.

Tamara Adlin:

What I want to leave people with is that I’m really into this notion of executive alignment as a place for us to focus our attention and work. And I’m really interested in… I mean, of course, because I have my alignment personas and persona stuff, I’m really interested in finding ways to align them by changing the conversation to be around their most important people in the company, which are their users. But I think whatever it is that you do, whatever workshop you provide, thinking a lot about what is it that’s part of already part of your workshop or the work that you’re doing that is about alignment? And really articulating that, creating a deliverable around that, creating a message around that, so we get the word out to the industry that this is something that people should shop for. This is a problem they should recognize without it being threatening. And it is a solvable problem. It’s so fascinating to me and it’s so powerful.

Douglas Ferguson:

How can listeners find you?

Tamara Adlin:

Oh yes. Well, I have a website, adlininc.com. A-D-L-I-N-I-N-C.com. And that has links to medium articles and stuff. And you can also find me ish on uxpioneers.com, where I have a lot of interviews with the people who started the UX entire field. And there are links on my site to recordings of presentations and podcasts and things like that. And I’m always looking for fun speaking opportunities, so if you have any get in touch with me.

Douglas Ferguson:

It’s been a pleasure speaking with you Tamara, thanks for joining me.

Tamara Adlin:

Oh, the pleasure is all mine. Oh, please. Thank you so much.

Douglas Ferguson:

Thanks for joining me for another episode of Control the Room. Don’t forget to subscribe to receive updates when new episodes are released. And if you want more, head over to our blog, where I post weekly articles and resources about working better together, voltagecontrol.com.