I Hate You: Psychological Projection in Business Relationships

Has something like this happened to you? You have been assigned to a project working with a person you just can't stand. Something about them really bugs you! They don't like you much either. Maybe you think the person is manipulative, overbearing, power hungry, sneaky, whatever.... Logic and the needs of the business don't seem to be enough in dealing with this person. You start documenting everything for the day when things fall apart and people are looking for someone to blame.

If you've been there, chances are you have experienced the power of psychological projection (we'll call it PP for short.) PP occurs when a person is operating in a social setting and unconsciously overlays some internal phenomenon on an external situation or person. The person then reacts to the internal overlay instead of to the external reality. To an outsider or to one on whom the PP has been overlayed, the person's actions and responses seem inappropriate to the real situation.

Let's look at a specific, real situation in which a two-way PP occurred. A few years ago I owned a company and had a huge client project with two project managers who ran differents parts of the project but had to collaborate on others.

They hated each other. Each night after work, I would predictably receive a call from each person complaining about the other. As I listened to each version of the story, it sounded like the angels were on that person's side. At first I was pulled this way and that as I listened, until I realized that neither person was presenting the complete picture.

Person A was a quiet, subtle, but assertive person from a family where there had been an abusive, loud father. Person B was an assertive, loud person from an assertive, loud family. Person A thought person B was abusive and crazy. Person B thought person A was sneaky and manipulative. Neither trusted the other.

Because of the importance of the project and my conviction of the basic competence of each person, I took some drastic measures--mainly, I made them have lunch with me and talk to each other. Good digestion was not the goal! Understanding was. The most effective tactic was to have each tell their side of a recent conflict. For example, Person A explained:

" I came up to B and told her that the current approach was just NOT working, and she clammed up and started working behind my back with her staff. "

"What do you mean working behind your back?" I asked.

"Well, she had meetings that I wasn't invited to where she told the team that I was out of control and that something had to be done about the situation in question or I'd go ballistic. I know she wants to get me, but I didn't think she'd go this far!"

I asked Person B if she had met behind person A's back. " Yes, but we just wanted to solve the situation, which did need work. Person A is such a drama queen, I didn't want to upset her, so I just got what she wanted done done. I don't know what she's complaining about!"

I thought about what I'd heard and realized that actually they had worked together effectively--there was a situation which Person B could affect but didn't recognize; Person A had recognized it, pointed it out and asked for action. She got it. The problem was their styles and PP.

I asked Person B, the quiet one, how she interpreted A's assertion that the current situation was NOT working? "Well, she was saying that it was my fault!"

Person A looked astonished! "No, that's not what I meant. I was concerned that the process we had set up together wasn't working that Person C (their client manager) wouldn't be happy. I was upset, but not at you. After all, it was my idea too!"

"What ARE you upset about then?" I asked. "Well, Person B tried to tell the team I was out of control and sneaked behind my back to form a solution without me and undermine me with the team."

It was Person B's turn to be astonished. "No, I was so taken aback by your anger over this that I was trying to get a solution fast to calm you down. Besides, you were right about the situation."

After a few interchanges like this one, both people realized that they didn't understand each other's motivations very well and were doing some PP. Person B was confusing Person A's loud behavior, purely an ethnic habit, with abusive behavior. (In Person A's family, if you weren't loud and assertive, you got nothing, and nobody trusted you. Quiet was sneaky.)

In Person B's family, loud was abusive and had to be managed to keep further upsets from happening. Members of her family worked behind the scenes to solve problems that caused upsets. There was a lot of blaming in her family.

After a few moderated interchanges, these two intelligent women realized they had gotten each other wrong. They began to call time-outs to hash out what they really intended when conflicts arose. They become fast friends and allies in the project--a very hopeful thing for us all!
David Orr

STC Announcement

The Society for Technical Communication is the primary professional organization for technical writers, and for those interested in clear technical communication. STC holds an annual competition at local chapters and at the national level. Just got this announcement:


The July/August issue of Intercom [STC news magazine], which recognizes the winners of STC’s international technical communication competitions, has been posted to www.stc.org/intercom
Members interested in Simplified Technical English (STE) won’t want to miss Larry Lester’s article on ways that STC can work toward developing its own version of STE. Other features include an interview with Susan Burton, STC’s new executive director, and photos from the Las Vegas conference.
To access Intercom articles online, you'll need your STC member number and password.

You can get info about STC at www.stc.org.
David Orr

The Elements of Style for Designers

Source: Usability In The News; 7/26/2006; 9:59:27 PM.
The Elements of Style for Designers. Writing effectively for websites ..."The creative act of writing is always bounded a bit by the audience: journalism is not writing a novel. The same can be said of design: it is not art. Yet the materials are the same words and pictures and it is no big surprise that what is good for fiction is good for nonfiction. The surprise comes when one discovers that, with some exceptions, what is good for words is good for pictures too. And thus we discover The Elements of Style is just as relevant for young designers as for young writers. E.B. White finishes The Elements of Style with a List of Reminders. It could have easily been Ten Rules for Clear Writing or A Writer's Manifesto or even Hanging Commas, but he opted for the gentler term: reminder. He did so because rules were meant to broken, learned first, but broken. And so he reminds us as we innovate and play what those rules were in the first place, and reminds us that breaking a rule can sometimes be hard to pull off. In that spirit, I will try to translate his writing reminders into design reminders. After reading them, you can go off and exuberantly ignore them." (Continued via Boxes and Arrows) [Usability Resources]

Orr's Aphorisms™ 07/24/2006 (updated weekly)

• There are often unacknowledged disconnects between how people are supposed to use a system and how they actually use it. Cross-departmental, cross-functional process analysis teams are best at uncovering disconnects.
• Quick and dirty process mapping and conceptual design can be done with sticky notes, index cards, magic markers, and butcher paper tacked or attached with Spray Mount® on a wall.
• Include concrete examples of abstract or complicated processes
  
  
  David Orr is an award-winning instructional designer with 23 years experience designing and developing technical training for Fortune 1000 companies.

Freely Revealing Innovations

Asheville, North Carolina, is a beautiful town tucked in among the Blue Ridge Mountains, and is also a center of "Open Source" software development. Small "boutique" software development firms thrive in a community where innovations are freely communicated, not hoarded and patented. The basic proposition is this:

I invent a useful product like software. I share the invention freely and all information about it so that anyone can change it, and improve it. I, then, can use their improvements at no cost to me. The more people involved in the process, the more valuable the core, continually improving product is.

How do I, the original inventor, make any money? It happens through the application of the technology to specific needs, and sometimes because I become the expert on the product and get paid for my expertise.

Seems kind of idealistic and "hippiesque," doesn't it? But wait, how many corporations are using Linux for their web servers? A lot! It was news to me that this sort of freely sharing approach is nothing new in industry. It happens all the time, going all the way back to the beginnings of the industrial revolution.

Professor Eric Von Hippel, the Head of Innovation and Entrepreneurship at MIT's Sloan School of Management, has written a persausive (and free) online book called Democritizing Innovation http://web.mit.edu/evhippel/www/democ.htm, in which he discusses in detail the history and advantages of freely sharing innovations. I particularly found Chapter 6 -
"Why Users Often Freely Reveal Their Innovations" compelling. Here's a quote:

"---free revealing is often the best practical option available to user innovators. Harhoff, Henkel, and von Hippel (2003) found that it is in practice very difficult for most innovators to protect their innovations from direct or approximate imitation. This means that the practical choice is typically not the one posited by the private investment model: should innovators voluntarily freely reveal their innovations, or should they protect them? Instead, the real choice facing user innovators often is whether to voluntarily freely reveal or to arrive at the same end state, perhaps with a bit of a lag, via involuntary spillovers. The practical case for voluntary free revealing is further strengthened because it can be accomplished at low cost, and often yields private benefits to the innovators. When benefits from free revealing exceed the benefits that are practically obtainable from holding an innovation secret or licensing it, free revealing should be the preferred course of action for a profit-seeking firm or individual."

In future articles, I plan to interview some "Open Source" practitioners to see how they live and thrive in a freely sharing environment. In the meantime, you might want to check out a technology portal produced by Asheville volunteers in about a month by using open source software www.meetthegeeks.net .