‘We ‘other’ people all the time. It helps prop up our own worldview’

What makes for a good conversation? Our editor sat down with author and designer Daniel Stillman to find out.

What got you interested in studying how conversations work?

My background is in industrial design, and then interaction and digital product design. Industries where designing for people is rampant and designing with people is rare. It’s a really important shift.

The idea that the people we are designing for should be involved in the design is not revolutionary or new. But it’s legitimately hard.

Anytime that voice has been missing in my own design process, there’s always been something amiss. I’ve had this feeling of the secret stakeholder who I didn’t include in the conversation. And who will somehow blow up the project late in the game!

Back in design school, I never thought I was designing conversations. I was designing things: interfaces, products and services.

But most things are service-oriented now. They’re a series of interactions. Which are all basically a set of conversations and communications, just with some technology as the intermediary.

So that’s something I came to realise. There’s a secret stakeholder: I’d better include them.

That’s easy enough to say but hard to do. I see corporations struggle with it a lot. They’ll do a whole set of workshops. Staff are asked to be creative. They brainstorm, sketch and dream.

And then they go off and either a) do nothing with it or b) do something totally different. And never tell people why they’re doing what they’re doing. I’ve been passionately frustrated by this for years.

It feels unsafe to give away and distribute power. So I feel it’s still rare to say, ‘You know what, let’s bring people in.’ It’s risky, it’s more complicated and it takes longer.

Whereas it feels fast and efficient to just make the call; to make the heroic decision.

What’s the best way to handle difficult conversations?

It’s easy to think somebody is being oppositional or forcefully against you. They’re actually just trying to survive. They’re not trying to make your life difficult. They’re trying to make their life easy.

When someone says something, the natural response is to react.

But here’s something I’ve learned from studying the patterns in our conversations: If you wait more than 200 milliseconds to give a response, people think you’re overthinking.

Which is hilarious. Because it actually takes us 600 milliseconds to cook up a reasonable thought.

Yet, we feel this pressure to react. Somebody sends you a heated message. The text comes in and it’s hot! You want to respond right away.

Or you could reflect on what’s being offered. And think ‘They’re not playing against me. We’re playing together here. We’re on the same team’.

Reflecting or reframing is always the safest bet. Just to clarify what’s being said first and unpack the layers of meaning.

If you wait more than 200 milliseconds to answer a question, people think you’re overthinking. Which is hilarious.

Is it too simplistic to say any major conflict –  war, even – can be resolved through conversation?

Well, war is a conversation – just a violent one. We’re always sending information, receiving information and sending information back.

There’s always the moment when we are on the brink of war. Someone moves troops or moves their missiles. We can interpret that signal as a red line, a hard line.

Now, we could have a disproportional response: Let’s burn everything to the ground.

Or we could step back from the edge and say ‘We noticed that you moved these troops. Tell us more about that.’ Opening up a line of dialogue to reflect rather than react.

But things escalate very quickly, in all fields of life.

Anybody who has a brother, a spouse or a best friend knows this. We’ve all been in conversations that get into a chain reaction where we go to the brink. Sometimes we go over the brink.

And it’s hard to walk back from that. Better to avoid the brink in the first place! But that’s tough to do.

So immediately reacting is hardwired in us?

Yes, we’re working against millions of years of evolution. And thousands of years of social acculturation driving us.

This is about psychological safety. Trying to stay alive. So we respond to threats as efficiently as possible.

Take speech. We’ve adapted to try and guess where someone’s going in their sentence structure, based on their tone and their pace. Easily halfway through their sentence, we’re starting to think about what we’ll say to respond.

It’s a survival mechanism: we anticipate what somebody’s thinking and meaning. To figure out where they’re going with this. To head things off at the pass.

That makes us really good at communicating with people. But it also means pure listening is rare.

People can easily become polarised. It feels particularly bad right now. Is this the reason why – our survival mechanism?

We ‘other’ people all the time. Because it helps prop up our own worldview. Everyone’s in their own information bubble. Life is complex, everything is fuzzy. So it feels nice to have crisp, clean lines on things.

But most people haven’t really thought very clearly about their own opinions. That requires the time to say, “You know what? I’m willing to investigate my own beliefs.” It’s uncomfortable to do.

Things escalate very quickly, in all fields of life. Anybody who has a brother, a spouse or a best friend knows this.

‘Othering’ happens because it’s much easier not to have to think about anything. Thinking takes Brain Juice. As my mentor, Dave Grey, says “It’s very hard to get someone to disbelieve something their whole life depends on believing.”

To encourage empathy between groups, he asks people: “Tell me about the first time you started to feel or think this way about them.”

He turns it into a narrative, into part of their life story. It moves from abstracts to specifics, where empathy is more likely to happen. You start to see someone’s humanity.

That is uncomfortable to do, though. Because now you’re in a world of complexity. As you start to humanise their perspective, you start to humanise them.

You start to realise that they are loving something, though you think they hate. Republicans hate women’s rights, you may think. Well, they’re loving something else! Saying ‘I see that you love that’ is really hard to do. Because you’re not ‘othering’ the person anymore.

Sometimes there’s this fear that if I empathise with someone who thinks differently to me, I will become infected with their sickness. I think we’ve all had that feeling. So ‘othering’ makes it seem abhorrent to even empathise.

You quote Jonathan Ives, the former Chief Design Officer at Apple, in your book: “The best ideas start as conversation.” What’s your take on that?

Even if you think you’re an introvert, you’re still having conversations.

I think it was Scott Berkun who said one of the myths of innovation is the ‘Eureka’ moment. Where great ideas come out of thin air, like Newton’s apple.

But we forget that Newton had been thinking, reflecting and journaling. He’d read hundreds and hundreds of books on Physics. He’d been puzzling on this question for decades. All of those voices, all of those authors were taking up residence in his head.

One of the keys to having better ideas is to have more inputs. And to let them have conversations in your head. Sketching and writing things down is having a conversation with yourself.

Because as we write, we externalise our thoughts. We see our brain’s output as new input. ‘Embodied cognition’ is what some folks call it.

This is part of a very ancient practice, part of Aboriginal culture: drawing on the ground. We’ve been doing this forever.

Making an abstract representation of our ideas, looking at them and saying, ‘Do I agree with that? Shall I scribble it out? What if I change it? No, I’ll make another one.”

It’s a conversation with yourself. And I think the best ideas always start with conversations.

Good Talk: How To Design Conversations That Matter by Daniel Stillman is published by Boom uitgevers Amsterdam.