I’ve begun formalizing the techniques I use to help ease the frustration of good design getting stuck. Some of these techniques, I shared at Leading Design 2016. It was a top notch event, and a great opportunity to try things out and get feedback.  This first tool, is called the Decision-Maker Mindset Map. Its purpose is to build empathy for the power holders that you need to reach effectively. Feel free to use it and share your feedback about how it works for you.

How to use it

This exercise is similar to Dave Gray’s Empathy Map, however it looks at information specific to the creation of a presentation strategy. You can do this exercise alone, but it’s most effective throwing at least two brains at it.

The page is divided into quadrants with the person’s name and role at the center. It’s important that this exercise makes the decision maker not just better understood, but also connects you to them on a human level. Take each quadrant separately, brainstorming and listing the details for the key decision maker who you will be presenting to.

The Quadrants

Point of View

Describe the perspective that this person brings to the job and the meeting. This could include their primary area of expertise, their work history or some other formative details that shape how they approach the work world.

Priorities

What takes most of their time and attention in their role? Do they put particular aspects of the organization or work ahead of everything else?

Definition of Success

How is this person’s performance measured? Are there particular incentives that will have influence over their decisions? Are they rewarded for certain accomplishments by the organization?

External Forces

Executives often deal with events happening in the market, as well as your organization. Things such as restructuring, budget changes or strategies have a big impact on the decisions that someone makes about your work.

Where do you find out this information? Take the time to learn about them and get to know them. Casual hallway conversations, or an afternoon coffee break are opportunities to get to know someone. You can also talk to people who have worked with them before or have insight into that area of the organization. Feel it out, like you would do in a user interview. It’s not spying or politics when you are genuinely interested in an influential person’s view on the world.

Download the template

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As organizers, we volunteered our time to gather colleagues to build friendships and learn from each other. None of us are security experts. Balanced Team is a self-organized bunch without a legal team or much of a budget. We are like most meetups and professional communities. Hosting an event takes a lot of work. We focused on curating a good program and covering the necessities for a fun gathering of people. Making sure everyone felt safe was a part of that.

I have training in managing sexual harassment incidents as well as victim assistance. Something I’ve learned is that a healthy community requires a safe way for people who don’t feel safe to reach out to people who can help. If there is no readily available way to share concerns or get help, victims rarely report incidents. The likelihood of a victim to make a report is also impacted by the victim’s assessment of what may happen if they do make the report.

An attendee takes a risk trusting people with professional clout when reporting an issue with an attendee, speaker, or staff . If a person has already been put in a position of vulnerability, they need some commitment from those organizers that they will treat the reporter with respect and put safety first. Otherwise, that risk may be too great to report a threat before until it escalates into an assault or something requiring legal action.

As organizers, we set the standards for our communities. We signal the culture we intend to collectively cultivate, the behavior we value, and that which we discourage. A code of conduct is a tool for the group to consider these things in a way that hasn’t been commonplace in the tech industry’s past. Even when a CoC gets copied and pasted, someone has thought about these things more than was historically common. We are encouraging good behavior.

A code of conduct is a signal to everyone that the standard of behavior at an event is mutual respect and inclusivity. We know there is a problem with active discouragement, dismissal, and harassment in our workplaces. How could we possibly believe those same people do not bring those behaviors with them to events?

At our event, we didn’t have a rigid process set for handling reports but we did have a point person, security and police information and established communication streams within the team. We had an agreement among the organizers that if something was reported, we would address it. We communicated that we wanted attendees to tell us about anything that made them uncomfortable and err on the side of safety. We communicated to everyone that the culture we were cultivating was inclusive and supportive. Other behavior was not welcome.

We did have an incident, of a type we weren’t expecting. Someone actively discouraged one of our speakers shortly before their time slot. It wasn’t illegal behavior, it wasn’t sexual harassment. It was unmistakably malicious and violated the code of conduct. Our CoC gave us a thing to point to that told people, in advance, what would not be tolerated and what response they could expect from us. We could confidently confront the individual and administer a warning. We had a mechanism for actively discouraging someone being shitty to another person at our event.

Our code of conduct helped us as organizers. We used this increasingly common practice to prepare and then act to keep our event a positive, productive gathering. Without it, we would have felt terrible for that presenter’s experience but likely would have done nothing. We would have missed an opportunity to call someone out on the type of crap that makes good people leave our community. Our speaker would not have been supported. Instead, we proactively stopped intimidation and we had our speaker’s back.

That’s why I’m not going to attend a conference or speak at one that doesn’t have a code of conduct.

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1-Narrating your deliverables and then asking for feedback as if your stakeholder is grading your homework sets up a disorganized critique wherein your stakeholders look for errors. This approach invites spin and reduces confidence.

2-Using the presentation as an opportunity to gather richer input from your stakeholders and work closer to the goal together through collaboration. This sets you on a path of productive progress.

I made the following poster for IA Summit 2015 as a guide to IAs and Designers to conduct productive presentations for our complex, abstract work.

Download the poster: Presenting for Impact

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