I am often struck by how odd my job is at times. Because let’s be honest, consultants don’t have the best reputation.
We waltz into a company, state the blindingly obvious and management pay attention even though their in-house staff have been saying the same thing for years. It must be incredibly frustrating if you work in-house.
I have put a lot of thought into why people listen to consultants while ignoring their staff. Some of the reasons are outside of your control to influence. For example, people listen to me because my cost to the business is more prominent and so it feels like a more significant waste of money to hire me and then ignore me.
One, however, is a skill that anybody can learn, and that is to speak the language of management. That is because, in fact, the secret to speaking the language of management, is to speak more plainly than we would typically do.
Learning to Speak Plainly
I am not sure whether you are aware of the idea of mental models. Mental models are the structure we use to organise the world around us. What is particularly interesting about mental models, is the more knowledgable we become in a particular area, the more our model and associated language deviates from that of other people.
The reason I bring it up is that the language we employ as digital and UX professionals diverge widely from that employed by most other people, including management.
We talk about journey mapping, design thinking, user research, design sprints, progressive enhancement and many other terms that make perfect sense to us but mean little to others.
The best way we can communicate with management isn’t to learn the secret language of business executives, but to speak more plainly ourselves.
However, that isn’t just about avoiding UX jargon; it is also about explaining why.
The Importance of Explaining Why
We often make presumptions that our audience understands the value of what we are proposing, but that is rarely the case. For example, it is not enough to say we should be doing more usability testing; we also need to explain why that is the case. How does usability testing help, and why is it worth the effort?
I like to imagine that management is made up of petulant toddlers, the kind that endlessly asks why things are the way they are. It is my job to answer all of those whys until they get it.
But, management are petulant toddlers in another way; they are inherently selfish.
Appeal to the Selfish Gene
Of course, in truth, we are all selfish. We tend to expect people to be more altruistic than we are ourselves. We expect management to care about the user, but in truth, they don’t. They care about their job, their goals and their areas of responsibility, just like us. Shouting “will nobody think about the user” will get you nowhere.
So talking the language of management involves talking about things they already care about.
Jared Spool put it beautifully in this post when he wrote:
I’ve been pitching our services for 23 years, and I’ve never once successfully convinced an executive of anything.
He went on to write:
You can find out what your executives are already convinced of. If they are any good at what they do, they likely have something they want to improve. It’s likely to be related to improving revenues, reducing costs, increasing the number of new customers, increasing the sales from existing customers, or increasing shareholder value. Good UX can help with each of those things.
In other words, we need to frame user experience and digital in terms of how they benefit management goals.
As a result, you will rarely hear me talk directly about the customer experience. Instead, I talk about marketing goals, business objectives and cost efficiencies. These are the things management care about.
However, when doing this, it is essential to remember that one size does not fit all.
Adapting Your Message
Management is not a single entity with a single set of goals. Often different managers can have very different or even conflicting goals focused on their areas of responsibility.
That means we need to tailor how we talk to these different audiences. When I talk to the head of marketing, I focus on the marketing advantages of UX, while when talking to finance, I talk more about cost efficiencies.
Of course, perhaps I have an advantage as a consultant.
Perhaps Consultants Are Not Completely Useless
I started by mocking my role as a consultant, and I do think organisations use consultants too much when they have perfectly competent people in-house.
However, one area that consultants do have use in, is winning over stakeholders. The fact that they are external to the organisation helps to give them some independence that is perceived as more objective. They also have the advantage of having worked for many large companies adding to their credibility.
So, if you find yourself struggling to get traction building a customer-centric culture, consider finding a consultant to repeat all the things you have been saying and which have been ignored!
Speak to you soon.
