The Achievement Habit (14 page)

Go beyond just good listening. Get to a point where you know the intention, not just the words. If you have any doubt, rephrase and repeat back what the person has just said: “So, what I’m hearing is . . . ,” or “It sounds like you feel . . .” Try to get to the core of what a person is asking for or feeling, and then check to make sure you have it right. This is also known as “active listening,” a phrase coined by
Thomas Gordon.
³
It may feel phony the first few times you do this (frequently rephrasing and repeating what another person says is not what most of us do normally), yet it can be very powerful. When another person feels understood, you’ve given him a great gift.

Part of working well in any group is the ability to have hard conversations. It is easy to avoid having conversations that deeply go into your feelings and tough issues. Ironically, avoiding hard conversations usually makes things worse, not better. Properly conducted, hard conversations vastly improve matters and can totally change the atmosphere in a positive way.

I have found this to be the case both at work and at home. If one person takes the initiative, others usually follow. It is easy. All you have to do is say how you feel and what your concerns are, and make sure you aren’t attacking the person.

I still recall the feelings of excitement and positive group cohesion thirty years ago when, at a faculty meeting, the Design Division got up the nerve to tell our youngest faculty member that we wanted him to leave. It was clear he would never complete his PhD thesis if he continued working at Stanford as a lecturer.

Everyone, including the person we were dismissing, spoke openly and from the heart. I have found over and over again that if one person speaks from his heart, others follow, and the group’s feelings of community and commitment increase tremendously. On the other hand, if the discussions remain on a superficial and impersonal level, the feelings of frustration and alienation abound.

Sociologists speak of
realistic
and
nonrealistic
conflicts. A realistic conflict is a disagreement that is goal oriented. That is to say, it is about something specific that the conflicting parties need to resolve. When such conflicts arise in well-functioning relationships, their resolution can lead to progress toward the goal.

A nonrealistic conflict is, at heart, about something other than what is being talked about. Its primary purpose, for at least one of the participants, is to discharge tension. It is not really about the goal of solving a problem. Such conflicts arise when there isn’t real mutuality in the group. Instead there is a
pseudomutuality
wherein people pretend their relationship to the others is something that it isn’t.

They may be hiding a poor self-image or a sense of exclusion or jealousy. Whatever its root causes, they are suffering discomfort that builds up tensions. In provoking a nonrealistic conflict, they are seeking a temporary discharge of their built-up tensions. Unless something is done about the root causes of the tension, such conflicts can only put a temporary Band-Aid on a bad situation.

G
OOD COMMUNICATION SKILLS AFFECT
every area of your life. They can mean the difference between getting a job and not getting it, making an important connection with someone or not, and surviving public crises without too much damage to your reputation or becoming persona non grata. We elect presidents based more on their communication style than anything else. We value people who communicate openly and honestly, and we avoid people who don’t
pick up on social cues that we don’t
want
to be cornered or kept on the phone for a half hour. The best communicator isn’t necessarily the person who knows the fanciest words; it’s the person who pays attention and makes others know that they’ve been heard.

CHAPTER 7

Conversation while being driven in New York City
by my friend Harold:
Me: Harold, why don’t you use your turn signals?
Harold: I don’t like strangers to know my business!

Belonging to groups gives us an important way to express our humanity. Most of us are affiliated with many groups: In addition to family, we have groups of friends; professional, political, health, and school groups; and so on. The way you interact within those groups can change the way you feel about each situation and can enrich (or screw up) your life.

In this chapter we’ll talk about making productive changes in your teamwork, physical space, body language, and communication to make groups work better for you.

In my teaching and administrative roles as the academic director of the d.school, most of my day is filled with different group experiences. In the d.school, all classes must be team-taught. The way we do team-teaching is different from many
other team-taught courses at Stanford: we expect that the entire teaching team be present at every class, and always be ready to participate. Although there have been some remarkable exceptions, most other entities at Stanford treat team-teaching as a relay race: each person does his run, then hands off the baton to the next person, leaving the race.

We feel that if every member of the teaching team is participating, the students get a richer experience. My colleague Jim Adams loves this kind of teaching. He tells me, “I like to team-teach so we teachers can trash-talk each other, thereby giving the students a better insight into professors as people and the nature of their world.” Unfortunately, most of my colleagues are not at Jim’s level of enlightenment regarding the virtues of trash talk. Still, it does benefit everyone to have different viewpoints in the same room.

An iconic example of the benefits of team-teaching occurred when I received a phone call from Bill on the evening of our first class session. He and I were part of the teaching team for the class “Transformative Design.” I was thrilled to be working with Bill because he was one of my closest friends, a world-class designer who had designed the first laptop computer, and one of the three people who had founded the design consultancy IDEO. The phone conversation went as follows:

       
BILL
: I was wondering what you thought about our class this afternoon.

       
ME
: I thought it was great. What did you think?

       
BILL
: Yes, I liked it.

       
ME
: Great!

       
BILL
: Do me a favor. Next time, give me your PowerPoint slides the evening before the class.

       
ME
: You already know what I am going to say. Why do you need them?

       
BILL
: It’s not the content. I want to fix your fonts.

       
ME
: Are you kidding?

       
BILL
: No.

Two evenings later Bill and his wife, Karin, were at my house for dinner. I showed my PowerPoint slides to our wives—they are both designers and have great aesthetic sensibilities. They humored me by agreeing that my fonts were not bad. However, I knew Bill was right: I had sinned in multiple ways. He proceeded to point out the defects: too many font styles, too many different font sizes, no consistency of style, and—worst of all—I had not used the official d.school font. As soon as he finished, Karin dubbed Bill the Font Nazi. We all had a good laugh.

The next week I, of course, told the story to the class. That incident provided me with a mantra for the rest of the term: “Fix up your fonts, or Bill will get on your case.” It was all in good fun.

A powerful lesson lies behind this incident, however. I was trained as an engineer; I am used to worrying primarily about the content. Bill was trained as a designer; bad aesthetics made him viscerally upset. If I were teaching the class alone, the students would never have been exposed to the sensibility that Bill brought with him so naturally. The sharing of sensibilities and different points of view enrich the educational experience for students and for teachers, and this occurs when we bring teachers from different backgrounds into the same classroom.

Needless to say, Bill prepared all the future PowerPoint slides, handouts, and Web postings for the class. Everything was elegantly done in the same style, using the official d.school
font. I never fully recovered. Every time I look at fonts, I fondly remember Bill. I also curse him for all the extra time and effort I now put in struggling to get my presentations close to his minimal level of acceptance.

We also require teamwork from the students. Most of our courses are based on project work from interdisciplinary student teams. We generally do not impose any structure on the ways student teams organize themselves.

Again, this is different from the mainstream. Many other academic units dictate team structure and assign different responsibilities to the students within the team. Much of the faculty mentality that team members should be assigned specific roles seems to me to be analogous to what happened to me in the third grade when the teacher assigned a structure, thinking it would train us for the real world. In fact, it had the effect of deadening initiative, discouraging us from learning the skills we needed to be responsible and flexible enough to find the appropriate structure for each specific situation.

Sharing a project requires a set of skills that are different from those used when working alone. Everything discussed in the “Conversations” section of chapter 6 is applicable to teamwork.

In addition, there is the added dynamic of multiple players. Generally the students are organized into groups of about four, so it is possible for there to be various splits in the way students handle conflict. We sometimes get three against one (or one against three!). We sometimes get two pairs, and sometimes one pair and two singles or, in the worst case, four singles. Remarkably, most teams work out well, and conflicts usually get
resolved in productive ways. We actually have a professional psychologist on staff (we call him the d.shrink), and he promotes the idea that open communication leads to much better team performance.

There are various theories on how to compose teams to match different personality and skill types.
¹
I find that the most important thing to be learned from studying about different personality types is the visceral acceptance of the fact that basic differences exist between people. People are different because they have different academic majors and because they also have different styles for learning and doing things. Each person needs to know that his way is not necessarily the only right way. This will serve him both on the job and in the family.

You know by now how much I like jokes, right? Well . . .

During a court case, after listening to the plaintiff, the judge says, “You’re right.”

The defendant gets excited and says to the judge, “But, Your Honor, what really happened was . . .”

The judge then says to the defendant, “You’re right.”

Hearing this, a spectator in the courtroom says, “Wait a minute, Your Honor; they can’t both be right.”

The judge responds, saying, “You’re right.”

The point here is that seemingly contradictory things can all be correct. Most real-world activities are not zero-sum games. Ways can be found in which everyone, and especially the team, moves forward. If it is done out of respect and caring, controversy is not a bad thing. It can even be a good thing. It is important that the controversy not get personal and damage the team’s sense of mutual support and understanding.

It is also important that everyone on the team have an intention to make things work. Things go awry when people have different levels of commitment and different goals for the team. When things do not go well, it is easy for some team members to become self-righteous. It is good to know the truth, and it is good to know that the truth in itself does not dictate any specific action. As was pointed out in chapter 1, you give everything its meaning. So lighten up and assist the team to get the job done!

In our workshops we have adopted a system for criticism that I originally learned from the late George M. Prince in a Synectics workshop.
²
The idea is to give criticism in a supportive way that promotes positive evolution of the students’ work, by saying two
I like
statements followed by one
I wish
statement. For example, I might say, “I like the way you took into account concerns about safety, and I like the way it looks.” Then, after a short pause, I would continue, “I wish we could find a way to make it smaller.”

The first thing to notice about this feedback is that there is no
but
between the
I like
and the
I wish
. They are separated by only a short pause, nothing else. The second thing to notice is that
I wish
is said in a way that encourages further refinement in a positive way. It enlists everyone who hears the comment, including the commentator, to work on figuring out a solution. The way
not
to say it would be “It will not work; you made it too big.” This is a blocking kind of statement, whereas the
I wish
version says “Yes,
and
.”

This system for criticism of student work was used for many years in our product design program. Now it has become a fixture in the d.school, where it is used for feedback to and from students. This type of evaluation is, in theory, done after each
class session by the teaching team and by any students who wish to participate. In addition, sessions involving the entire class and teaching team are done during class every few weeks. Based on this, changes are made both to subsequent classes and future course offerings.

The current version of the
I like/I wish
system does not limit the order or number of these statements. Sometimes, a group does all the
I like
s first, followed by all the
I wish
es. A modified version has been introduced by people who do not follow the original idea behind the
I wish
. They use the
I wish
simply to state something they would like to change, without suggesting a direction for improvement. Then they add a third set of items given in the form of
what if?
These serve the function of the problem-solving aspect of the original use of
I wish
. Under this newer version we might get feedback such as, “I liked meeting as a group” or “I wish we spent more time in our group,” and then “What if we met after class?”

Personally I am more comfortable with the original
I like/I wish
version when it comes to criticizing students’ work. The
I wish
version works well when it is used to suggest areas for improvement. It has a positive pull similar to the question “How might we . . . ?” Both “I wish there was a way to accomplish _______” and “How might we accomplish _______?” are good ways to get people to move forward in a proactive problem-solving frame of mind.

Regardless of the version used, this feedback mechanism is effective. It is invaluable in the d.school’s quest for continual improvement in teaching. The students and teaching team like it, and it adds a feeling of community to the class. The same tool can be profitably used for constructive criticism in many situations; it is certainly not limited to student work or to academia.
It can be usefully applied to both your personal and your professional lives.

We once had a senior member of the teaching team who had never before taught at the d.school and was used to the formal European academic tradition. At the end of the first class session, one of the Stanford professors explained to him that it was our custom to gather for an
I like/I wish
feedback session, and he agreed to join. However, when he realized that the session would also include students, he was taken aback. The idea of students telling him what they did not like seemed audacious to him. Still, he was a good sport and toughed it out. After a few such sessions, he became such a big enthusiast that when a class ran a little long and the other teaching team members wanted to forgo the feedback session, he was the one who insisted they follow through with it.

My wife Ruth’s book club agreed to read an early version of the manuscript for this book. One of the members, Marcia, sent me an e-mail thanking me and telling me she liked what she had read. However, the Your Turn exercises scared her. That surprised me.

“What about shy people?” she asked.

That struck a note in me. It also brought back a terrible memory I had suppressed—probably my worst teaching error.

I was teaching a graduate class on designing mechanical devices. That day we were covering a set of parts called a four-bar mechanism. I had assigned students to find mechanical devices in their environments and to take turns in front of the class presenting an analysis relating what they found to what we were studying. The presentations went along well until one student
did her presentation without regard to the vocabulary we had been using in class. I pointed at her projected diagram, showing a four-bar mechanism operating the tail flap on an airplane, and asked her what that was called. She did not answer.