ETL 47: Bill Shander on How to Know What Stakeholders Really Want

Transcript: Bill Shander and Bob Buday

Bob Buday: Bill, it’s great to see you again. I’ve known you for years as one of the premier people and a pioneer of data visualization, especially the interactive data viz that’s really attracted attention. How did you wander into this territory of stakeholder whispering?

Bill Shander: About 30 years ago, before I started doing data visualization as my primary focus, I used to do web design and development. People would ask me to make a logo bigger, or make the button blue, or other arbitrary requests. Then they’d look at it and decided they’d want maybe purple or green, or a square button. They didn’t actually need that blue button — something else was behind their requests. And the same thing happens in data visualization all the time. It all comes back to the same question: What do they really need? You have to look beyond that initial “ask,” the thing that they think they need. Doing that can lead you to a better design, a better data delivery mechanism, or whatever it is that you’re working on.  

Bob: And as your book suggests, you can’t simply ask them what they need. It’s more complex than that.  

Bill: It definitely is, because if you say, “Well, what do you need,” they’ll say, “A blue button. Didn’t you hear me? I just told you what I needed. Just get to it.” It’s a much bigger issue than that. First of all you have to realize — and I talk about this a lot in the book – that literally nothing on earth is as it seems. All humans are being driven by their subconscious at all times, and we don’t reason very well. Even if you were to ask them what they think, they often don’t know. 

Like a great therapist, you have to ask them in a way that helps them dig out what they actually need for themselves. With clients, it feels like therapy when I’m trying to get them to tell me what they really need. We joke about it, but it really is. It’s about helping them understand their true underlying needs, because once you understand the true need, then then you can address it. A good friend phrased it really well. He said, “They own the problem. You own the solution.” So if they really think, they might discover that their real problem is that people are not clicking on a button. So they don’t need a blue button; they need a button that will entice people to click. And maybe it’s a color thing, maybe it’s a shape thing, maybe it bounces around. Maybe there’s a bird that flies and lands on the button. I don’t know what it is, but let’s really solve that problem, and I’m going to solve it because I’m a designer. You tell me what the problem is, and we’ll collaborate and fix it. That’s sort of the basic idea.  

Don’t Be Afraid to Ask Questions

Bob: So why don’t people ask these questions to really kind of get out the real need? There’s got to be a good reason why they just take the first answer and then they go out and execute it, only to be told it’s totally wrong. Is it that people want to just please others, especially those who are paying them to do something? 

Bill: Yeah, there are a whole host of reasons why. People pleasing is part of that. You also might be a junior in your career. You are young, and you’re told what to do, and you think your job is to just do that. And so it’s a fairly normal thing to think “I’m the employee. They’re the boss. Just do what they say.” 

You also might work in a company where the culture isn’t super welcoming to managing up, where questioning the boss historically hasn’t worked so well. Maybe it’s not even just a cultural thing, but maybe your boss, your stakeholder, has been a jerk in the past when you tried to question them. A lot of times our bosses are incredibly busy, talented, and maybe intimidating. When they’re the genius experts in their field, it’s fairly natural to assume they know what they need. So there’s all kinds of reasons we don’t do it. But we must realize it’s our job to question them. If you’re in knowledge work, you’re hired not just to be fingers on a keyboard, but to actually think strategically. And so your job is to not so much to push back, but to probe and question, especially when there’s a little bit of nuance to the situation. In other words: I know that you don’t need a blue button. I know that you need something else, which is why you are asking for blue, so it’s my job to figure that out. I could spend 47 iterations and three days on it, or maybe I could save us all a lot of heartache, time, and money and get it right the first time, if we just have a short conversation about it.  

Bob: And it’s obviously really a good thing to get it right the first time, because the frustration builds up on both sides when you’re doing the 17th iteration of a white paper and it’s still not very good.  

Bill: The people asking the questions, the ones helping to produce the thought leadership piece, are afraid of that frustration in this initial conversation. They worry that the thought leader is going to be annoyed or impatient. But I think that the frustration is far worse when there are too many iterations and it’s still not what they need. The way you gain their trust is by having these conversations at the beginning, actually discovering some other underlying need that leads to better quality work, and faster. And the next time you need to have a conversation like that with the thought leader, things will be so much easier. They will be consulting with you before they throw the task at you. You’re there as a strategic partner in that process, not just an editor or writer responding to a vague request. 

How to Peel Back the Onion

Bob: I think the stakeholder whispering is so important for thought leadership professionals. I think that many of them are intimidated by gurus or leading experts, especially if the person has several books or articles in HBR or Sloan Management Review. They’re like the Wizard of Oz, and you never question what the wizard tells you, especially if you’re at the beginning of your career.  So a lot of thought leadership professionals, I think, put themselves in this role of order takers.  

Bill: Again, we need to realize that we are there for a reason. Why aren’t they doing this all themselves? You might be working with a genius, a supply chain bottleneck expert who’s done all the research and has all the ideas, along with 30 years of experience to build on — but you’re there to help them produce this HBR article, white paper, or whatever it is. And you are the marketing professional who understands the audiences and what they really need. I have a chapter in my book about peeling the onion of your stakeholders, because that’s exactly what you are doing.  Mr. Supply Chain Bottleneck Guru may be one of them, but guess what? The HBR editors and readers are stakeholders too. Depending on the experts, other stakeholders might include top executives in auto manufacturing, or CFOs, or company leaders in Southeast Asia but not in North America. You need to figure out which stakeholders are the most important and prioritize the list. When you go back to Mr. Intimidating Expert, your job is to figure out what they are trying to do, and help translate what they’re doing into this thing that’s going to work with the other key stakeholders. And so you have a seat at the table for a reason: You belong there. They may be the experts, and you can defer to them about their area of expertise, but that doesn’t mean you have to defer to them about how to market or how to craft a thought leadership piece. It’s a collaborative effort.  

An Early Lesson

Bob: There’s a great story in your book for thought leadership professionals who are working for very famous people and trying to get them even more famous than they are. Tell us about that. 

Bill: I was doing a project for one of the most famous professors in the world, if not THE most famous, who remain unnamed. This project was about one of this person’s significant pieces of research, and we were creating an interactive website based on this research, which was going to eventually be hosted by the US Department of Commerce, and it was a huge failure. We ended up getting fired and kicked off the project. 

This happened because I didn’t do a good enough job thinking through all of the users and prioritizing all the stakeholders.  I had a lot of conversations with the end users who were supposed to be using this website down the road, essentially regional economic development professionals. They loved the ideas that I was pitching. But I wasn’t dealing directly Mr. Famous Professor; I was dealing with two of his right-hand men. They told me they thought Mr. Famous Professor would like what we had produced.  

Then the day came to present this to the US Department of Commerce, and Mr. Famous Professor was in the room and seeing the presentation for the first time. A few things were just ass backwards from the way he would have expected it to be, and didn’t match how he usually presented this information in his thought leadership. My biggest mistake was that I was stakeholder whispering by proxy, by talking with his advisors instead of him. I was under the assumption that the primary stakeholders were the people who were going to use this thing — including President Obama, by the way.  We also focused on the media, because we wanted them to cover this when it came out. But who is the right primary stakeholder? Is it Mr. Famous Professor, who owns this thought leadership, or is it the people who are going to use the website? It doesn’t matter whether users liked or didn’t like it if it didn’t match the nature of the thought leadership that Mr. Famous Professor had done. If had peeled the onion and understood what he really wanted, instead of letting his advisors speak for him, we could have found a situation that would have blended all stakeholders’ needs, including his. 

That was a rookie mistake. I was young, and it is probably one of the most important lessons I ever learned. It was very much a stakeholder whispering failure — not a design failure, not a technical failure, nothing else.

The Questions That Help You Get What You Want

Bob: What should be the first things that idea developers, data visualization experts, speech coaches, or other thought leadership professionals do to really understand what their stakeholders need?  

Bill: One of the important techniques in my book is about the Socratic method. Therapists use it intentionally. It’s about asking questions in a very specific way or with a very specific goal. 

I don’t ask questions of my stakeholders to learn the answers myself, although that does happen. My goal is to help them learn; to teach them by asking them questions. Thought leadership professionals might not feel that’s their job to teach Mr. Expert, but it really is, only it’s more like therapy. You’re helping them discover for themselves what it is that they’re trying to do because they really don’t know. They think they need a blue button, but no, they need a button that is more enticing to click. They think they need an HBR piece that does X, Y and Z, but no, they need something else.  

So how do you ask them questions? In my book I talk about the dance of the six W’s: who, what, when, where, why, and how, which is an honorary W word. You dance around all those words and try to get to “why,” the most important one. But you can’t just ask “why,” because that’s essentially a hostile question. We ask different questions to get to why, and it shouldn’t feel like you’re asking why. Some are divergent questions that open up the mind; others are convergent questions that narrow in the thinking and lead to decision making.  

Bob: Early in my career I did a lot of convergent thinking. Somebody would hand me a PowerPoint or a crappy article they wrote, and they’d ask me to make it right. When I look back on it, I think my convergent thinking would sink in when I would decide to “lead the witness” and force the expert down this path by asking questions that are in line with what I think he’s saying. Then when I present him with a draft of something, it comes back marked up, because it’s too narrow or not in line with what the expert really wanted to say.  That’s a great example of the mistake of leading with convergent thinking; I think it would have been better to ask open ended questions first, to get experts to articulate their thinking.  

Bill: Sometimes you do a little bouncing around. You might ask your expert a very convergent question, sort of, “when you say this, did you mean this?”  And then they can very quickly say, “Yeah, that’s totally it,” or “Absolutely not. That is not at all it.” Then you can say “tell me more” – a great divergent question.  Now they can go expansive, and then you have some back and forth. Eventually, through some tension, you get to this moment where they literally may say, “Actually, I never thought about it that way before. You’re right, that’s what this is about.”  Again, some people are more comfortable with either divergent or convergent thinking. Some people really want to get to decisions quickly and don’t want the expansive stuff. But your job is to make sure you have this back and forth.  

This can be challenging because these are very busy people. You won’t be able to do 12 hours of discovery with them.  So you have pick your battles and be laser focused on asking the right combination of questions.  

How to Rescue a Flailing Conversation 

Bob: Sometimes you’re holding a conversation with an expert, and you’re not even sure what anybody’s talking about anymore. The conversation has become so divergent that you don’t even remember what the topic was. Have you ever seen that happen in any of your work? 

Bill: I’ve definitely seen it happen. The good news is that every meeting has a time limit, and so no matter how off the rails you go, eventually the meeting is going to end. And afterwards, if you’ve taken good notes, you may have a nugget of convergence, and can shoot the expert an email that says, “I know that was a really long conversation, but at one moment, I thought that you might be saying [this.]” That one quick email can be that moment that triggers the opportunity for a second, shorter meeting focused on that little nugget that that seems to be the winner. 

Bob: So do stakeholder whisperers in thought leadership have to educate the expert that one meeting may not be enough to nail their point of view? That the goal is to get a bunch of the expert’s ideas on the table to figure out where to go next?  

Bill: Absolutely. It’s like media training: I know you’re an amazing expert in what you do, but if there’s a crisis and people are shoving microphones in the your face, here’s how to deal with that. Thought leadership is no different. Writing a piece for HBR is different than writing a piece for The New York Times or Fortune. Thought leadership professionals need to approach their stakeholders with the attitude that they themselves deserve a seat at the table.  

The Optimum Time to Set the Course 

Bob: What do you feel are some of the biggest moments when a thought leadership professional needs to kind of check in with the key stakeholders about what they really want to achieve? Is it at the very beginning? Is it when the conversation starts to get murky or vague or conceptual, and nobody understands where they are?  

Bill: The whole initial discovery is incredibly important. A key thing is doing an outline for whatever you are doing for them, then running it past them and really digging in deeply. Understand what comes after the outline. It might be a draft, or writing summaries of the outline, or a paragraph or two that captures each key moment. Every one of those is an opportunity to check in with the expert to make sure you are on the right track.  That might feel difficult because you may think you are wasting their time, but it’s much harder to go back after four versions of the project and ask them if it’s right.  

That being said, there’s a moment where you just need to trust your gut…when you’re working on a piece or project that you’ve done many times before, and where you remember that things always fall apart at a specific phase. If you don’t get the client on board before then, everything that comes afterwards will be a waste.  

Stakeholder Whispering For Data Viz

Bob: Let’s about stakeholder whispering for data visualization — for thought leadership purposes, like McKinsey does, or for digital news purposes, like the New York Times online.  They’re combining audio, video, and interactive charts with text and one-dimensional charts to tell a powerful story that can’t be told nearly as well using just one medium. These are among the most complex thought leadership pieces or journalistic pieces that can be done. Is stakeholder whispering more important there than it would be for, say, a 2000-word article? 

Bill: That’s a good question. Complexity is definitely part of it. We need to shoot and edit a video. We’ve got to create these interactive graphics, which is a visual experience, and we might have an auditory component to it, as well as text on the screen. All of this multimedia is being wrapped together in an experience that is going to be cohesive, not jarring and distracting. That’s very hard to do. You’ve got to consider your key stakeholders – the people who are looking at this experience that you’re creating. Can they watch the videos, and can they hear the audio? Will the visuals be culturally relevant to them? Are the colors going to make sense to them, or are they going to be distracting? Will the animation make them so dizzy that they feel sick, or will it show them how interesting the data is? You also need to consider the data literacy of your audience. Will they really understand what you are showing them?  

Bob: Another thing to consider is that there are more contributors to a project. The Times recently did a multimedia piece about the flood in Texas. It involved many photographers, reporters, video people, map makers, app developers and others. It’s not quite a movie production team, but it’s not two journalists either. When you have more people, is that an issue with stakeholder whispering since you’ve got more egos, more opinions to deal with?  

Bill: You definitely have more people with hands in the pie. If the person working on the map doesn’t understand what the stakeholder needs, but the person working on the chart does, the charts might be amazing but the map may not actually help. When more people need to understand the actual stakeholder needs, someone needs to tell everyone, or you will certainly have a problem. 

Another thing to consider is that the New York Times is creating interactive experiences for millions of viewers from different places and of different abilities. But when you are creating a thought leadership piece for a consulting firm, you are likely working with a much narrower audience. It might be, for example, CFOs at automobile manufacturers in Asia. It’s critical that someone talk to them to understand what they really need.  

Your Audience: The Most Important Stakeholder 

Bob: So what you are saying is that in the consulting world, the key stakeholder whisperer is not the expert. It’s the audience. It’s that CFO of an automotive company, right? Whether you are writing a white paper, research report, or book, your primary stakeholder is your target reader, not your expert or co-authors.  

Bill: Always.  

Bob:  And somebody’s got to be acting on behalf of that stakeholder, and it’s often not the experts.  

Bill: Your boss may be your first stakeholder, but not your most important one. Your job is to convince your boss that the audience is their most important stakeholder, and the real boss.  

Bob: Over the years when I’ve worked with experts, I’ve told them that I’m their audience, and that I will tell them when something just goes way over my head or not, or when something is really unique and resonates. I’m your warmup —  before you get on the stage and deliver your article, speech, book, or whatever you are using to appeal to your target audience. It has helped experts realize they can’t be objective about what their audience will understand or find interesting. 

Bill: That’s the curse of knowledge, right? They’re the expert. And if their audience isn’t made up of experts like them, you need to learn, re-learn, and always remember how to speak to them. Your job as a thought leadership professional is to remind your experts how to reach those other people. 

Bob: Well, Bill, it’s been great to have you on the show and talking about your wonderful book. Thank you! 

Bill: Thank you very much, Bob. It’s always great to see you and to talk to you.