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Episode 4: Impact without Authority
128 Plays12 days ago
In this episode, Sam and Steve talk about the times they influenced senior stakeholders without having a senior title. How do you know you've done it? What kind of mindset do you need to make it happen?
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Transcript
Introduction to 'Off The Path' and Hosts
00:00:14
Speaker
Welcome to Off The Path, a show where we talk about research careers, especially our own. I'm Sam Ladner. And I'm Steve Portigal. Sam and I have been having a bunch of conversations about research careers, and with Off The Path, we're going to share those conversations with you.
00:00:31
Speaker
I'm going to start by asking you something.
Unexpected Influence in Research Projects
00:00:33
Speaker
When you think about a time in your life that you had the most unexpected influence, you were taken aback by how much influence you were having in that situation.
00:00:46
Speaker
I got one. It was a series of presentations to a client. So I'd been working with this client and we had gone through some rounds of research and there was like designers that were turning everything that the research was was revealing into design principles. Like they were really taking and making new stuff out of it. Mm-hmm.
00:01:06
Speaker
Like there's this point and end of a project, you have a roadmap, we're going to do this, we're going to do this, we're going to this. And then find a work with the clients who start coming up with new stuff to do that's hyper localized to their group of people. It's not a deliverable or a workshop or an activation thing that I would have ever put in a proposal. So yeah, like these designers, they put together their own deck way better than our deck because it's an operating thing that they can start to work with. And then I think we shared the research and implications and they started to even shift the some of the ways they were doing their design and product and communications and the head of the business.
CEO's Role in Amplifying Research Impact
00:01:43
Speaker
This was like a startup that had got acquired by a larger company and they were not quite folded in. So they operated somewhat on their own. So they had a ceo who might have been sort of put there by the new parent company. it was like yeah a little more corporate and professional.
00:02:01
Speaker
ahhuh And so this CEO, she arranges a completely different meeting than anything that we had done before. And I think this was to bring marketing people in And i think we gave like the scantest sort of research deck. And what she had asked us to do was re-edit or re-present just the videos from the research. If I remember, that's what it was. Yeah. Yeah. Different audience, different deliverable, all from the initiative of the CEO. it was unexpected? It was not part of original scope. It was like, oh, can you do this? And I think we were paid for it and scoped for it, but it was all, we see how to get more mileage out of this work and kind of have more impact. Right.
00:02:44
Speaker
Different audience. And we want you to direct that. This sounds like a great outcome. This sounds like a fantastic situation. That's just the context for kind of what you're asking. What I saw in that meeting was, so this was probably several weeks after we had done the original presentation. And again, we think we did a short
Research's Influence on Company Language and Culture
00:03:03
Speaker
presentation. So hearing the CEO, who's not a design person or research person, just like a smart person who's curious and saw the chance for them to do way better in communicating what their product was to their users,
00:03:16
Speaker
They're ideal prospective, non-technical, nerd, forum-dwelling online people, but people that would be into this category. She started directing or inspiring or, you know, giving a charge to these marketing people using our language.
00:03:33
Speaker
o The exact phrases that we had crafted and I love that. I can't remember exactly what it was like. It might have been very specific to what we were talking about. I know that in that research we ended up talking about mental models as like ah their mental model, the documentation's mental model and what mental model gets created when you receive this thing and try to make sense of it. So it could have been something conceptual as that.
00:03:58
Speaker
Yeah. Or it might have been just one of those phrases you put into a deck to try to like capture the insight or capture the opportunity. And they were speaking that language back to you. Not even back to me, but to someone else. Even better. and The CEO was using that language to direct and instruct this new cohort that we were trying to share the research with.
00:04:19
Speaker
um It's cool when it doesn't come from me. Right. And it made me feel like, oh, those ideas landed because they're able to use the label that we gave for those ideas.
00:04:32
Speaker
Yeah. And they landed enough that she got it and she wanted other people to get And. Yeah, that was extremely satisfying to hear the words get used by somebody else. Yeah, by the CEO, who was just a great champion. I think that's as good as it gets, isn't it? Like the CEO starts using words and phrases that you offered in your research, and they start using it with someone else. Like, I think that's the top, right? That's as good as it gets. I guess the point in the realm for us often what gets shipped. Sure. What design decisions get made.
00:05:06
Speaker
I would rather, I think the influencing people part is crucial and also very satisfying, perhaps more so than seeing it in the product.
Finding Satisfaction in Influencing Mindsets
00:05:17
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, I agree, actually, because ah it's like an alive situation where there's a real breathing person who clearly heard what you had to say, internalized it, put it in their own context, connected it to other things that are going on. Yeah, I've had occasionally very specific things shipped in the product. For example, when I was in Amazon, I had arrived too late, which is always what researchers do, unfortunately. i arrived too late to make the early stage influence that I wanted to make. And the product had already been kind of prototyped.
00:05:52
Speaker
And i had to test the prototype instead of helping design the original prototype. One of the marquee features that the product team was super stoked about, it just made zero sense to the users.
00:06:06
Speaker
Like nothing. It didn't make any sense. Not only did it not make sense, but it was so bad that it undermined the intelligibility of the entire product. It was confusing. And it actually started shifting people's beliefs into something that the product was not meant to do at all.
00:06:23
Speaker
And so I did get to see from that research that I did, I did get to see they pulled that out of the product. with great regret and nobody wanted to, but they trusted the insight that I had so much because I had real people, facial expressions, actual words. What even is this basically is what I got. I captured it really, really well.
00:06:46
Speaker
And it was so compelling. Like the way I got people saying things and expressing their reactions was so evocative that there was really no way that they could say this is a useful feature. So I would say that was satisfying. I didn't order anybody to take this out of the product. I didn't have the authority to do that anyway. But what you're talking about is different. It's like where people start thinking and therefore speaking with your concepts, your ideas, your knowledge that you generated.
Empowerment Through Research Insights
00:07:15
Speaker
i find that very like interactively, interpersonally, very satisfying.
00:07:20
Speaker
Sure, it's great if somebody does something in the product that you think they should do, but it's way more interesting if you get them to think the way you want them to think. That's a lot harder to put on a website or put in your portfolio or share your LinkedIn profile.
00:07:35
Speaker
Totally. And the way you were talking about it actually made me think, and I don't even know why I thought that, maybe because I was teaching this week, but the way you put that, it made me think about what we know about teaching and learning.
00:07:46
Speaker
The most effective way students learn is by getting this new idea, like there's a thing, it's called mental models and this is how it works or whatever, and then putting it within their own context to talking about it or thinking about it or writing about it relating to things that they already know.
00:08:03
Speaker
So you mentioned that the designers, they started like coding stuff up and like doing design principles based on what you did. That's a perfect example of good education. That's a good learning experience for those designers.
00:08:14
Speaker
Hopefully this isn't too far of a derail. One of the things that frustrates me about sort of state of research, whether it's in-house or consulting, is there's just far less of an appetite for, let's just call them like, how might we brainstorming workshops.
00:08:27
Speaker
These days, yes. Yeah, yeah. I mean, that used to be standard practice. True. And now it's give us the report, give us the top three recommendations, whatever. It's very optimized. And what I saw in the years of doing those workshops is that people do come up with stuff, but they also, to your point about teaching, right, they make the insights their own. Yeah. And once you have started to try to problem solve, like, oh, well we're making of this with a that, how do we take this kind of principle? Oh, well, while turns out people are very smart they come up with 70 things to do in 30 minutes. That activity of doing that translation or that creation, thinking as a consultant where that's the end of my engagement, usually, i feel happy about leaving them having done that exercise because... to your point about teaching, right, they start applying what is still abstract in a deck. They have so much more context for what a good idea is, what a new idea is, what an implementation might look like. And if I can free them up to, a be armed with something new about the world and B, the freedom to just come up with stuff, good and bad, then I feel hopeful for them that the work will live
Research as a Teaching and Learning Process
00:09:37
Speaker
on. You put it as you feel hopeful for them that the work will live on as opposed to hopeful for you.
00:09:43
Speaker
Well, I'm done, right? Yeah. My project's over. So ideally, like, that's the funny thing about consulting. I like to get done and get out, but I also want to stick around and have a relationship and find out and kind of stay connected. but Get the epilogue.
00:09:56
Speaker
Yeah. Yes. But the reality is you you don't and sometimes you never find out. Well, back to your point about what do you put in your portfolio or in your website or whatever, putting down people started using my language sounds really inadequate in the portfolio.
00:10:11
Speaker
But when you think about it in terms of influence, I think it's huge. I think it's massive, way more than just they did this feature change. I wonder how we can like kind of shift our mindsets a little bit as researchers away from this company defined impact.
00:10:29
Speaker
of like put it in the features or whatever, whatever, and like dispense with all that. That's a corporate game. i don't care about the corporate game. Yes, I'm in it. Yes, I have to play it, but I don't care about it. And that's not what I'm in for. What I'm in for is for people to change their thinking based on what research I've given them.
00:10:47
Speaker
That's what I want. And if you just kind of free yourself from this, I got to play the whatever they think impact is game, I think you're freeing yourself. That's really big. And it doesn't have to be an either or, right? If you're an employee, you have goals, you have performance reviews, you have 360 degree reviews, you have all this stuff that yeah is probably going to look at those things, that the corporate game things. But could a research team within itself make a space for talking about, i don't want to call them adjacent, I don't want to call them soft. They are hard outcomes as opposed to soft outcomes. They're a different category. And I feel like, you know, maybe this is me being older or out of step.
00:11:24
Speaker
I feel like at a certain point not that long ago, we would all, if you kind of got all of us in a room, we would all acknowledge the reality of what some of the assessments are based on, but also acknowledge the reality of like, here's what we care about. Here's why we got into this. Here's what we're good at. Here's what satisfies us. And I guess I just don't know if is that a generational marker If we were to have this conversation in a room with 25 people that are like five years or less in the field.
Defining Research Influence
00:11:53
Speaker
Would they have a different way of looking at it? You're kind of nodding along going, yes, teaching, influencing people to think differently. Yeah.
00:12:00
Speaker
Does that span all researchers? If you sliced up the very large population of user researchers, how would you get a different take on that? What would those little segments turn into?
00:12:11
Speaker
Yeah. If you were to slice up all of the user researchers and ask them, like, what is real influence, you are going to have a sizable minority, let's say, that take kind of the corporate career progression, end of year review. They're going to take that wholesale and they're going to say that that's what impact is. I think there's a sizable minority. I don't think...
00:12:32
Speaker
think that's necessarily a generationally driven sizable minority. I think that's about people who maybe haven't really thought about it too much and haven't given themselves permission to make their own definitions about what matters. I think you're going to get another sizable minority that are going to say things like repeat business, for lack of a better term, right?
00:12:53
Speaker
When people come back to us and ask for more, I don't care if it's like in feature changes or whatever. That emerges out of repeat business. You know, you have stakeholders that come back to you on a regular basis. Don't worry about the future outcome part. That'll come. It's a necessary. So I think that's probably the largest segment, I think, in the large research population. But then there's a few people that are, and you know people like this, and I know people like this, that they are like, yes, I understand this is a corporate game and I'm inside of a capitalist organization, of course. But really, what real influence is, is people hearing
00:13:30
Speaker
your words and using them themselves. And you could make another argument, a deeper argument there is like, yes, the repeat business will come out of that. And then in turn, the features and the changes and the product comes out of that. Right. So if you start telling yourself, I'm in charge of what influence means to me, it's a small segment, though. I don't think there's that many people who think those ways. I want to say that if you're a researcher and you think the number of features you shipped is an exciting outcome from doing research, I'm not casting aspersions on i' that person. I'm saying, for me, it is exciting to see people change the way that they think. And it's interesting that there are different kinds of definitions of influence or there are different ways that we in our work find meaning and satisfaction from observable measures of influence. But I don't pull against anyone that
00:14:22
Speaker
likes to ship stuff. oh Well, sure. If you want to see your work become material. Yeah, i I get that. Absolutely. You've been able to like get a crappy feature improved. Like that feels good, especially if your users are like enterprise users and they have no choice but to use this thing. And you managed to like make one step go away. Now they have 17 instead of 18 steps.
00:14:47
Speaker
That's literally the satisfaction level that I have had in some enterprise contexts. And so you can understand why that seems small compared to people using my words.
00:14:57
Speaker
For you and I, maybe. And you know maybe for someone else, they just drive different satisfaction out of it. I think I had that burned out of me in my years working for an industrial design consultancy. Mm-hmm. If you go back to this period of the 90s, it was really about, portfolio was walking into the lobby of a very cool 90s looking building and seeing shelves with all the stuff. And people would come in to meet you for lunch or come in as prospective clients. They'd walk up and down and go like,
00:15:27
Speaker
Oh, did you guys design this? Did you guys design this? And you guys design that? And industrial design is like physically producing stuff. So even if that's not the mouse that Logitech ended up using, there's still like three mice in the lobby that got designed.
From Industrial Design to Research Influence
00:15:43
Speaker
So it looks like it was shipped, like you made a finished thing. And I kind of came up in that culture. and you know, if you looked at like IDEO's press in that era, that was not where I worked, but they sort of set the standard. Sure. it was just brand and product that was shipped, shipped, shipped, shipped.
00:15:59
Speaker
Yeah, we made this, we made that. Oh, yeah, we made that, too. Yeah. Right. And my company had sort of a tiny lobby with not as many examples, but it was a big deal when, like, something got engineered or 3D modeled, like they put one out in the lobby.
00:16:13
Speaker
And so that's what success looked like, you know, a positive outcome, influence. Your work has been well received. Yeah. um But that's not the work that I was doing. like I was doing research. We were doing front end work. And so much better. greater timelines between what we would do and something actually shipping.
00:16:31
Speaker
And especially as we were doing sort of new to the world product development, often nothing would come out. And if anything did come out, it was very, very rare to see anything that you could trace back. And I mostly gave up on that just over time, although we did work that led to GoGurt.
00:16:48
Speaker
And I remember seeing the package in the store because, again, we had moved on and no one called us and said like, hey, you guys told us X and the packaging has this description on it. It's just like what was in the research. and I was in the store and I saw this thing and it was from the manufacturer we'd worked with, the brand we'd worked with. And I picked it up and looked at it. and I'm like, oh my goodness, this is our story. And I like brought it into the office and I showed everybody. And it became kind of lore for our agency that fact people say like, oh, we developed or designed GoGurt. I mean, we didn't, but I know what was in our report and I know what's in the GoGurt use case that they launched with. And it's right there. But it was serendipitous that I even saw that and that I drew the conclusion and that we could kind of even have that claim. But that's rare. That was a lot, a lot of innovation work and very little of it. Yeah. Sort of directly traceable. And you certainly were never given attribution as a vendor. If you were IDEO, yes, you'd say IDEO made our thing. But if you were us, we didn't really get that. Well, even internally, I don't think a lot of researchers get anything. Let's imagine that this was an internal project for whatever reason, and you could literally pull up your research report and show the packaging and see. Even then, i don't think people would have proactively reached out to you and told you and credited you. Because the thing about research is that it is kind of like the silent guide that gives the designers, engineers, gives them the guardrails. I had a friend that I worked with, Microsoft, and he was an engineer, a developer. And he said to me before he worked with me, he was making hundreds of decisions every single day that he knew had a direct impact on the user experience. So he's sitting there literally at his keyboard coding and he's making decisions and he knows he's making decisions about what will eventually affect the user experience. And he doesn't know what he's doing. And he called it developer whim.
00:18:43
Speaker
He lived in developer whim every day. After he worked with me and went through the research that I had done and I had taken him in the field once and then kept him in the loop, obviously, of all the other research that I had done, he said he had developer intuition, which was different, right?
Empowering Developers with Research
00:19:00
Speaker
So he could extrapolate.
00:19:03
Speaker
Some of the findings I had, maybe it wasn't a concrete, like, direct trace line, like, oh, Sam found somebody who said X, so I'm going to do X. Like, that was rare. Almost never happens. But he would remember that I had found users liked to control what they reveal to their coworkers, for example, and... And so he's at his keyboard and he has to make a decision. And he's like, you know, she said that they don't like to reveal stuff without checking first. So I'm going to put a little speed bump in here or something like he would make something there. That to me is a more typical kind of trace that you're going to see. And there's good reasons why researchers think that they don't matter because that doesn't feel real. But for my friend John, that was real.
00:19:46
Speaker
And I think there's a cynical take on that story, which is that person's intuition is not they're misinterpreting, they're misremembering, they're being too literal. There's probably a lot of ways that if every one of those hundred decisions got workshopped in a context where you brought back the findings or asked the researcher to to re-research that, you know, you might have done something different. But i bring up that, I guess I want to acknowledge cynical interpretation. I i think that's really exciting and it's a very positive story. and It's an interesting mix of you change somebody's mind, but you empower them to make their own future decisions. Exactly, exactly. And I think that that's something that we don't pause enough to think about and to celebrate.
00:20:25
Speaker
I'm not here to tell people what to do. Even if I work, i don't have the power to do that. Like, I don't have the authority to order people to rip things out of the product or put new things in. There's very few people in any organization that have that kind of authority. And I don't know if any one of those people are going to be researchers, right? Instead, i have to empower.
00:20:46
Speaker
That's what I have to do. I can't overrule. I have to empower. And I want them to go the right direction. So, like, that's kind of how I thought about influence in general. It's about giving people that intuition. Are they going to be 100% right all the time? Probably not. Did John misinterpret some of the things that I, maybe, but he felt stronger.
00:21:03
Speaker
He felt more equipped to champion the user. He felt like he had better language, better tools, better thinking, more concepts. And he knows what levers to pull.
00:21:14
Speaker
That's right. oh There's insight about people feeling a certain way about exposing information. He knows to put a speed bump in. That might not be in your vocabulary as how might we, any one of these many, many, many points in a user's experience with something, how might we enact that principle in the experience? That's his job.
00:21:33
Speaker
That's his job. He knows all the ways that things can work and all the ways that things can be put in front of people. And you don't know that because you're not sitting there writing code. You're yeah you're empowering. Yeah. It's the same thing, I think, for designers, although I think because John's an engineer and he's a little further removed. So I think it's easier for researchers to kind of say, oh, OK, I can see how we have to like give engineers ideas or language or concepts or whatever. But I don't think a lot of researchers think that about designers or even product managers. I think they think, oh, well, they are just as well equipped vocabulary wise as I am. So I'm just going to try to like get them to pay more attention to the same things.
00:22:12
Speaker
And I think that that's not true.
Academic vs. Applied Research Environments
00:22:14
Speaker
i think researchers have language, vocabulary, concepts, ideas, principles that they can give to PMs and to designers to make them make better decisions, have better intuition. They're not experts in human behavior. We are, right? Do you think that researchers that come from academia understand that better?
00:22:37
Speaker
Oh, good question. Yes and no. On the yes side, I think they know the distance between who they were before they had all that training, like knowledge-wise, and who they are now. So they have a better understanding of the depth of new insights that a researcher can bring because they went through that transformation intellectually themselves.
00:22:58
Speaker
However, on the no side... I don't think they have a really good handle on, like, let's say you're a purely academic person. You came out, you maybe you got a PhD and maybe you had a couple years experience. Now you have your first real big tech job, let's say, researching something.
00:23:14
Speaker
I don't think you have a really good handle on how product comes together. Hmm. I don't think you understand how people draw on concepts to like enact a yogurt. Like, I don't think they know how that comes to be, really. Yeah, because it makes me think about the ways that I interact with people and in different disciplines and probably defer to assuming more commonality than difference to maybe as a researcher, as a human, I want to close distance and not be a gatekeeper or an expert, you know, around what we've learned and and what it means. So that I'm, yeah, if you're teaching, you are encouraging and empowering, enabling all these sort of respectful verbs.
00:23:56
Speaker
And I think probably to my detriment, I assume more competence or fluency in those around me. For sure, when I am teaching, I see this like, oh, i we have to actually back up because you don't have the foundational.
00:24:09
Speaker
Right. you know, glimmer that's going to help this way of of working makes sense. It makes me think of that commercial that was on many years ago. It was like FedEx or something. I think it was FedEx. And there was a guy that was just started and he's sitting down in front of the keyboard. And this older woman is like showing him how to do stuff.
00:24:28
Speaker
And she goes, OK, so when we ship packages, we go to FedEx and we do these
Communicating Insights Across Roles
00:24:33
Speaker
things. Right. And he's like, oh, ah you don't understand. I have an MBA. And, you know, you pause because you're like, OK, what's she going to do here? And she was like, oh, I'm sorry. i better do it for you then.
00:24:45
Speaker
I better show you exactly how to do it. Like the idea was, hey, this guy is trying to explain to her, you're giving me the wrong stuff to do. Like that's beneath me. And she's saying back, yeah, obviously you have no idea how to do anything, right?
00:24:59
Speaker
Wow. I have that transparency bias myself because i I just assume everybody that I'm working with has had the same experiences that I have, but they haven't, obviously. Yeah, that sort of shoots down my my caricature. I'm sort of othering academics as a non-academic myself that there's an elevated amount of knowledge and expertise that, you know, someone with a Ph.D. has worked years to kind of acquire. And I feel like that path sort of takes you down the I know this and you don't.
00:25:30
Speaker
Yes. In unkind way, but that's sort of the posture of that. This is very different than, wait, you don't know this? Sort of the dumbfounded response that I have versus maybe starting from the awareness. And you kind of, you wrap it up with some empathy, right? Like they've gone from not knowing to knowing. So they know what that is like.
00:25:47
Speaker
That transformation that I think a lot of researchers go through either in their academic training or then like in the first few years of their applied roles, like their first like big roles. I think what happens is that, I mean, I experienced this when I would sit down with product managers and I'd be like, OK, I'm going to have to talk and like business speak to these guys. Right. And I'd spend all this time reading business literature. Right. And so I'm like, I'm going to talk and like strategy 101, MBA 101 speak so they can, it'll resonate for them. And then I realized they don't know any of this stuff. They never studied the same. They didn't do this. Oh, okay. Wait, wait, wait. You don't know any of this.
00:26:27
Speaker
ok I have to start from the very beginning. So in in order to do that in a way that is, it's not threatening and it's not condescending. It's very difficult to do, especially when you had the assumption they have this superior position because they have this knowledge that you worked really hard to catch up to their level and you realize they're not even at that level. It's really confusing and kind of upsetting.
00:26:52
Speaker
Well, you're trying to find common ground and common language. Right. And you you are doing what I think a good researcher does is to sort of take that on themselves. You're going to reach out to them or you're going to put yourself in their space as much as you can. And then that's the target doesn't exist. That space doesn't exist. It's something else. And you thought it did, but it doesn't, so.
00:27:14
Speaker
Well, and in some of those relationships, you have time to go through that. Working with someone like John, you had probably multiple interactions to sort of figure out. Right.
00:27:25
Speaker
Where is he coming from? What is his language? How do you talk to him? And. it will The way that I'm kind of thinking about this approach to influence as being like the teacher, can I get these people to connect what I'm giving them to what they already know and therefore they're going to learn? There's an added wrinkle to it because the student, quote unquote student, does not know they're a student.
Adopting a Teacher's Mindset in Research
00:27:48
Speaker
And in fact, may reject being called a student and don't want to be considered a student. Can you imagine, like, if that were the case in education in general, people go into a classroom and the teachers up there is like, OK, everybody, let's settle down. Like, who are you?
00:28:04
Speaker
You know, like, I already read this book last year, you know. I think that's what's from friends who are teachers. I think our world of the power dynamic and the expectations of teaching has really changed. And there may be more of that element actually in like teaching kids now than there was when we were there.
00:28:23
Speaker
you know, when you said teacher, my hackles went up a little bit because that word affords a power dynamic. That's not what you mean. Right. it It's the intention that the teacher brings, but it's not the role that they inhabit, which, well, there is influence, but there is authority for the most part in a teacher, right? Right. You control, you set the time and so on. Yeah. but We've all had teachers, though, that did not rely on the authority to influence you, right? I mean, these are the teachers that stand out in our minds as the ones that were really worth listening to because they dignified you and they gave you a place to take your own journey.
00:28:59
Speaker
And then, of course, there were always the the teachers that had... no real influence over you. All they had was authority and you hated them. Of course you did because they were terrible and they were mean.
00:29:10
Speaker
If you can think about that same dynamic in terms of a researcher's ability to influence, you're never going to have that authority. I mean, maybe you might, you know, you might outrank some of the people that are in a particular meeting at one time, maybe. But even then, you can't order them to do things. Right. You know?
00:29:29
Speaker
Right. So we're sort of separating the mindset and intent of these kinds of teachers that meet you where you are, that listen to you and that influence you and the context in which those teachers work, which in some cases they have sort of a structural or sort of share a set up authority to work.
00:29:47
Speaker
We're trying to describe the teacher's mindset, not the context in which they work. So the avatar of a teacher that comes into my head is somebody like at the front of a classroom with a chalkboard. Right. But when you start talking about, I start thinking about, oh, how like Mr. Gauthier like talked to me and listened to me, despite the fact that I was a shit disturber in his class. I love it. You remember his name. Oh my God, I remember the jokes we made about him and I remember, yes, I remember everything about how he treated me and all the problems that I caused, but
00:30:18
Speaker
Yeah, those teachers that treated you like an adult because you're in a vulnerable time of your life where, let's just say age 11 through age 18, you're trying to figure out who you are. Yeah. and Those people that took you seriously. Well, that's exactly the mindset I'm talking about. When you go into this room, there's a bunch of PMs, there's maybe some engineers, there's a few designers, whatever it is. And I think a lot of researchers are going to go in with this belief that everyone here is more powerful than me and I have to beg them to listen.
00:30:47
Speaker
Instead, what was his name? Mr. Gauthier? You could go in as Mr. Gauthier and you can say, I'm going to meet you guys where you are and I'm going to enable you on your journey. I'm going to give you some tools, some language, some ideas, some thoughts. And you may reject me because you're a little shit disturber, Steve, right?
00:31:08
Speaker
Or whoever. But that's OK because I'm the bigger person here because I'm older and wiser. And my job isn't about me. It's about them. Yeah, that's a really, really good reframe that if you go in clenching your fists and gritting your teeth about the thing that you don't have, you're missing an opportunity to just shift away from that and what you do have and what kind of intention and being, I guess, you want to bring into
Finding Meaning and Joy in Research
00:31:32
Speaker
that room. I went out for drinks last night with some old friends that I used to work with. Haven't seen them in a long while. Like, I don't remember the last time four of us got together. I have no idea. It's been a long, long time.
00:31:44
Speaker
So it was super fun. We had a wonderful time. Everyone's doing very different things, different locations, different companies. Had several lifetimes since we saw each other last. And one of the researchers there has been...
00:31:56
Speaker
Non-working for a couple years now and not too upset about it because there's life and, you know, kids and things like that. But then they were saying we were talking about the last place that they had worked, which was kind of an alpha bro male culture. Very troubling, difficult to do, hard. As the research leader in this context, it was very difficult for this person. And so they were really burnt out. And we were talking about how do you recover from that kind of thing. And I was talking about the last role that I had where I had a lot of moments where I was not enjoying myself. But then I forgot there was all sorts of joy and meaning and little tiny moments where I was getting people to like, you know, I was meeting them where they were and they were using my language and all this kind of stuff. And this ah this other researcher, she says, oh, I need to do that. I need to look at how I can make sense of that time I had. It was very challenging, but she had forgotten to look for the joys.
00:32:55
Speaker
I think that happens to us all. The next time you go into a room and you're like, I'm going to try to influence these people instead of like, I'd like to enjoy this moment. Well, think about how you started off this conversation before we got um on Zoom. You told me what you thought a good topic for today was.
00:33:10
Speaker
But you asked the question about what's a successful example. And then we've been talking about, you know, what's that making us think? And you and I have hundreds of stories about frustrating things where we weren't listened to. And I mean, we could just complain nonstop. But for days, probably we've managed to go like for quite a ah chunk of time in this conversation without sharing stories about when things went wrong around having influence, because your question started off by filtering for a positive outcome. And we're not we're not trying to say everything is always like X or everything is always like Y, but it invited a different. I've had the other discussion a thousand times in my career, but you started us off today in a way that's maybe this feels like a fresh conversation to your
00:33:53
Speaker
your point about your friend saying, like, I got to go back and look at what are the good things that happened. Yeah, we don't we don't do that as easily. um Right. And it's I'm sure it's that fight or flight stuff, right, where negative stories far outweigh how they're rooted. Then, of course, stories. Well, it takes work to get the positive to pop. Right. You and I could probably have an eight hour continuous conversation about where things went wrong.
00:34:17
Speaker
And how shitty it was and how hard it felt and how, you know, upsetting it was. And it could go on and on. And with then we could talk about other people's stories that they've told us where they had that same problem and we could like commiserate. But in order to have a conversation about the goodness and the meaning or the joy that we've experienced, it's not ready to hand. Like it's not top of mind. It's not top of heart. Yeah. And we're not being naive about it or we're not pretending everything is perfect. I think we're just looking at a different facet and seeing what comes out from that.
00:34:51
Speaker
Yeah. One of the reasons I think researchers may have this ah in spades for, you know, looking at like, oh, we lack influence is because we are trained to be very analytical.
00:35:01
Speaker
And I don't know about you, but I just reject corporate Pollyannaism out of hand. As soon as somebody starts telling me, oh, I love this. Oh, our messaging is so great. And that strategy session was amazing. And I love that town hall. I mean, I don't listen to people like that.
00:35:19
Speaker
i won't I'm like allergic to that kind of stuff. That's not the only other option, right? Non-naive, realistic, but also like looking for the good. yeah If you're going to be spending your time the majority of your life working, well, is it the majority? A good chunk of your time working. You kind of need a strategy to figure out how to grapple with how work functions.
00:35:41
Speaker
Because work a lot of times does suck. It really does. And it's not because you're a bad person or, you know, you are essentially sentenced to this. It's because you have to work harder to find meaning. You have to like go back and revisit. Hey, you know what? I actually did get some good stuff out of that experience. That takes effort and nobody tells you you should do it.
00:36:06
Speaker
That's great that your friend had that sort of realization. It sounds like they're on a journey from an experience that maybe overall wasn't good and a not that's going to change that, but it sounds like they were saying it would be healthy for them to revisit and find a positive. Well, anybody listening to this can probably figure out exactly what it was like. I say tech bro culture and like puffy vests and a lot of fist bumping. And you can guarantee people have all had this experience. They know exactly what I'm talking about. And there's very little that comes top of mind or top of heart to be positive from something like that. But I bet you anything there's little gems in there.
00:36:47
Speaker
gems of experience that you just didn't maybe appreciate. It just slid past you at the time. Yeah, those moments, they could be small moments or medium-sized moments that maybe doesn't change the overall narrative of what an experience is, but gives it more texture or color or... Yeah. don't know if it balances the word here, but... Now, I can also hear in my mind's ear somebody saying, well, that's all well and good for you, but I still need to have a portfolio that demonstrates impact.
00:37:14
Speaker
And I'm not saying that that's not true. Of course, everybody needs to be able to quote unquote prove their value in the corporate environment. And you have to work at developing the traceability, the specific feature, the, you know, whatever it is, of course. But if you're substituting that for your own meaning, you're in trouble.
00:37:36
Speaker
Girl, you're in trouble, girl. You bought into the hustle, right? And it's right it's not really winnable or it doesn't pay off, I don't think. I mean, I say this not from personal experience, right? I've never had a corporate job as a researcher. I've been outside. have my own challenges about having portfolio and having success and finding out what happened and using that to demonstrate my value. But it's not the same.
00:37:58
Speaker
It's similar, though. If you've worked as a consultant or a freelancer or an agency employee, you also need a portfolio that demonstrates the quote unquote expected impact. Like, we're not going to hire you as a company or as an individual until you show us that you put that thing in the feature. And, you know, OK, that's probably true. But as soon as you let that be the totality of the influence that you've made, like you say, you're not going to win. There's no winning that. but I remember going to, wasn't quite a pitch
Tackling Unrealistic Expectations in Research
00:38:30
Speaker
meeting. it was like get to know you meeting with a startup in Silicon Valley. And don't know, there was some designers there. Like it was friendlies or friends of friends. Like it was to kind of talk about what we did and how we worked in some examples. And the CEO who wasn't expected to come in came in.
00:38:46
Speaker
and started giving us the like the intense quizzing like maybe he would get at like funding review kind of meetings and I was sort of taken aback and he eventually almost held us down he said what's an example of a client you've worked for where you had a unique insight and it led to them developing a product that succeeded like either said iPhone or iPod I don't remember how long ago this was but I sort of quietly tilt my head like, well, there have only been like whatever, eight of those in history. For anyone in any universe.
00:39:19
Speaker
I started thinking like, oh, I've given clients insights that could have led to them creating something that successful. But for many, many, many reasons, they didn't choose to do it. I can't really, I'm not going to take accountability for that level of impact.
00:39:33
Speaker
It was an astonishing question and that I wasn't really prepared to answer properly. And it showed just what different lanes that we were kind of operating in. Yeah, totally. And I brought a colleague there with me.
00:39:45
Speaker
And when we got to the parking lot, they called him douchebag, which was sort of validating to me because I was trying to answer his question, even though question is ridiculous now that we're talking about it. But I know it's nice to have somebody talk shit about somebody else on your behalf and be like,
00:40:01
Speaker
So needless to say, we didn't end up working with them. Oh, you didn't make the iPad? Well, they also have not, in the years since then, have not come out with an innovation equivalent to anything that Apple has done. So, know, I didn't work with them. Well, it's your fault because the insights that you offered in that one meeting were not sufficient to drive them. Not sufficient to, yeah, to compliment about us. You know, I feel sorry for that guy, CEO. How's that?
00:40:28
Speaker
He thought that that was a really awesome question. And what kind of person are you if that's an awesome? Like, what is your life like?
00:40:40
Speaker
You know, what does he think innovation or success looks like, you know, in in tech? Well, and as you say, in the years since you've had this conversation, they didn't come out with any of this stuff. So what kind of crushing sense of inadequacy, shame and failure does this guy have?
00:40:58
Speaker
Yeah, I'm sure in his Woodside Mansion as he sips his has imported French vino, he's just, he hates himself though. Well, but that's the thing. i mean, he probably i mean, maybe he does have this beautiful wine cellar. Great. Fine. Who cares? But like, is that wealth of spirit and heart? Like, no, this guy is empty and inside if he thinks that that's a really like he thought I need to make the iPhone and this dude isn't going to get anywhere near helping us getting there.
Navigating Power Dynamics in Research
00:41:28
Speaker
And let make sure everybody in this meeting knows that. yeah Yeah, that was sort of the power move on his part, right? What a sad situation, you know, and like, I'm going to put him in that same camp of all those other teachers that we were talking, like not Mr. Gauthier, like the non Mr. Gauthier teachers who are not dignifying their students, not treating them with respect, not meeting them where they are. do you think those teachers are happy? way.
00:41:54
Speaker
Absolutely not. And so just back to some of what we're trying to solve for, right? This guy comes into the meeting. i mean, we were shocked by this, but also everyone on his team was shocked.
00:42:05
Speaker
They didn't apologize for him after he left, but the room had changed. Wow. and So right there, middle management or product managers or designers, they're trying to do a good job within the normal bounds of what a good job is. Right. But they're working in a context where what looks like authority or at least power is operating with a different set of rules. I mean, this is your friend, right? Your friend is a normal, caring, compassionate, interested, talented person working for fist bumping puffy vests. Right. Here's the the silverback puffy vest. I'm mixing every possible metaphor in here.
00:42:43
Speaker
Like, you know, that, mean, it sounds worse for her because that's the dominant culture. I think in this case, that guy was the exception. Like he was the one that didn't fit in that room. Yeah, absolutely. We had a lot of common ground until walked in there.
00:42:55
Speaker
And messed it all up. Yeah. So I think her situation sounds even worse, right? It's one thing to not sort of fit the dominant culture, but at least if you have, this is every workplace comedy, right? I mean, that's why we have so much television and and film about workplaces, because you said we spent a lot of time there.
00:43:12
Speaker
We're trying to find meaning. We don't fit in these cultures. It's absurd. Yes. It's a crazy thing for anybody to think that they can get meaning from such a problematic context as work. It's insane that we walk in every day and say, this is going to make me feel important. This is going to give me a sense of purpose. It's insane because there's so little about that context that leads to meaning.
00:43:39
Speaker
And yet we expect the work to give us meaning every single day. And we're disappointed when it doesn't get served up to us on a plate. And there's fist bumping puffy vests everywhere.
00:43:49
Speaker
So i don't know I think a takeaway is that they they can be small
The Importance of Empowerment and Flexibility
00:43:53
Speaker
moments. It's on us to look for them. Absolutely. buy them i mean, that's what you did for me in this conversation. It's what your friend is seeing from you. And that they can exist alongside what the system requires of us.
00:44:04
Speaker
Yes. So if we're being promoted based on what features we ship, it doesn't mean that we can't also look for the meaning we found when we changed how somebody thought about something. Right. Yeah, and some years are good years in terms of meaning, but terrible in terms of feature impact and vice versa. Some years are great for feature impact, but very little for meaning because we hadn't really had that parallel sense making, that reflection.
00:44:31
Speaker
You know, we didn't do it. These tiny moments just passed us by and we didn't even see them. But likewise, you know, I think the other takeaway I have from this is if we think of ourselves as teachers, sometimes that are like invisible, you know, like non-authority based teachers. We can meet people where they are. We can dignify their journey to learning more things. We can be bigger people when they don't do that. i don't need approval from these people. I'm the teacher.
00:44:59
Speaker
I mean, they may not know it, but you know, that's okay. Dignifying people for their own journey is important, I think. That seems like a positive and a big idea to land our conversation on.
00:45:11
Speaker
It's a good thing to think about even outside of work, to be honest. Right. Any of the lessons that we generate for work or research seem to be the ones that I like are the ones that are broader. I got asked today by some students about skills that they thought were important going forward. And I talked about being flexible and things changing. I gave some concrete examples in research or working with clients or in the field where that's important. And then I sort of heard myself talk. I'm like, but this is also life, right? It's Being able to deal with unexpected changes is crucial for reducing the amount of stress and worry in your life.
00:45:47
Speaker
and And not in a Pollyanna corporate who moved my cheese kind of way. You don't have to say, oh, well, I guess the boss has changed the rules of the game again. it's like, no, no, no. You still have power. You still have control. You still have your own life. You still own your own soul. Well, I think we can leave it there.
00:46:07
Speaker
What do you think? i think we can leave it there. Thanks for listening to the Off the Path with Sam and Steve, the show that takes you off the beaten path of research careers and onto your own chosen path.
00:46:19
Speaker
Hire Steve Portigal to lead a research study with your team or to help build user research skills in your organization. or to deliver a talk or workshop for your event. Learn more portugal.com slash services.
00:46:32
Speaker
Steve's classic book, Interviewing Users, is in its second edition with an audiobook. Check out portugal.com slash books for more. And Steve has his own podcast, Dollars to Donuts, where he talks with people who lead user research.
00:46:45
Speaker
That's at portugal.com slash podcast. You can also connect with him on LinkedIn. Hire Sam for research projects or research coaching. Take one of her classes or sign up for exclusive video content at samladner.com.
00:47:00
Speaker
Sam's books, Practical Ethnography and Mixed Methods are both available on Amazon and her new book on strategic foresight is coming out in 2026. Sign up for her newsletter to find out more at samladner.com slash newsletter.