Navigating The Human Element - 2/2
Part - 1 is here.
Proposing new ideas without designing their integration into the world is innovation half done.
(The Human Element)
The reason Ali Reda outsells an average car seller by more than 12 times is not that he has a sales pitch that is 12 times as smooth. Ali performs at this level because once people work with him, they do not want to work with anyone else. And they tell their friends (like I'm telling you about this book), and as a result, every day, people walk into the dealership after a friend recommended them to speak with Ali.
We have often blamed our unaccepted idea on the people. Instead, discovering and eliminating the points of Friction around a new idea will make it easier for people to accept it, and the idea will go far.
One Friction against a good idea is what this book describes as Ambiguity. It has been a major personal hurdle almost daily, and I am not alone. The confusion surrounding a task is often a more significant hurdle than the actual work.
To resolve Ambiguity in Software Engineering, we do Proof Of Concepts. To resolve Ambiguity around your product, you can:
The business case for empathy.
It is easy to get engrossed in your idea and fail to see things from others’ eyes. Seeing the idea through the users’ eyes is important because it is their experience that we must understand. The Friction exists between the idea and the user. So that is where one needs to look.
After you have created your product, for example, you wrote a book, investigate what factors make it difficult for the users to use your product. Some questions you can explore:
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Effectively, you must identify and resolve all the micro-frictions the user experiences.
One example in the book is of a company called IDEO and a person named Barbara Beskind. Barbara once saw an interview with IDEO Founder David Kelley on television. IDEO built products for elderly users, and Barbara thought her experience could help. She was 90 years old then. IDEO was approached by a company that operated several senior living communities around the US. The company felt that instead of having the seniors go through the hassle of paying for different activities on an a la carte basis, they would charge them an upfront fee of $3000.
To the majority of us, this would sound like a sane idea.
Barbara, however, quickly saw the Friction. I’m quoting Barbara just the way the book did:
It was very off-putting — quite insulting, in fact. What this company did not seem to understand is that for a senior forced to consider a move to an assisted living facility, everything in their life that has brought them to this moment has been a series of "losses." They have lost their house. They may have lost their spouse. They have lost their car, their mobility, their diet, they have undoubtedly lost some hearing and perhaps vision. This company did not realize that asking someone on a fixed income, who has just undergone a steady and emotional stream of losses, to make a large upfront payment of $3,000 for participating in community activities, shows a total lack of sensitivity to the journey that elder has been on. They would be better to just increase the monthly facility fee by $30 and bury the cost there. Asking someone to incur another big "loss" right up front (in the form of financial cost) at this moment in their life is just awful.
Conclusion
When we are sure our idea is good, but we find that our idea is not accepted, we do not need to increase the gunpowder.
There has to be a shift in the approach, and we need to eliminate the Friction.
The Human Element explains this need for a shift with plenty of examples. It even applies them to itself, presenting the readers with an index that beautifully outlines the authors’ approach to solving the identified problems.