these are the Oakland strokes it's a
woman's eight rowing team and on this
day in 2011 on the Charles River in
Boston Massachusetts they won their race
in this boat it's called a rowing scull
and for many of us we've seen rowing
we've seen it in the Olympics we've seen
it in college we may have even seen it
on the Charles River itself and the
beauty of the synchronicity belies the
difficulty of the work that they're
actually doing in that boat I know
because we had a series of team meetings
once and we were gathered together in
the general manager arranged for us to
learn how to row at a boat house and the
boat captain gave us an introduction we
sat down on rowing machines like you
might imagine and we rode we practiced
rowing just the way we imagined the way
you're imagining now then we went
outside to the dock and we got into our
boat it was two sculls gang together
with a crossbar and it was handy because
those boats are really narrow and you
can tip over pretty easily but also we
could get sixteen people to learn and so
the boat captain started giving us
instructions as we drifted away from the
dock to row together we have to start
together to start together we have to
sit together knees bent arms out
straight or blade flatten on the water
pretty simple instructions when he said
sit three people got it right only three
people it took six eight ten more times
for the boat captain to work with us to
where we could sit with our knees
straight arms out oars blade flat and on
the water then it was time to row you
know where this is going
he gave us instructions when you roll I
only want you to drop the or blade in
the water and pull with your arms no
legs ready row everybody pushed
everybody pulled in a variety of
directions the orders were clanging it
was kind of a mess in some ways it was
the most disappointing team-building
event that I've ever been a part of in
some ways that was the most instructive
team-building event I've ever been a
part of it was disappointing because we
were gathered together to design some
complicated computing system
and we couldn't even figure out how to
row a boat together something people
have been doing for thousands of years
what was the problem well I think it had
something to do with listening or in
this case not listening I've been at
Intel as an ethnographer for about 20
years I've heard a lot of stories a lot
of people's stories businesses talking
about their IT problems I've heard
people tell me what it's like to be
families in the Midwest of the u.s. I've
heard people from thirty different
countries all walks of life tell me all
kinds of stories I know a little
something about listening and so there
was some professional interest when I
was trying to wonder why this rowing was
so difficult and as I thought about it I
was thinking about the kinds of biases
and preconceptions that we bring when we
enter into a conversation even if it's a
conversation like rowing and the one
that I want to talk about today is this
notion of cognitive dissonance
dissonance is this feeling that we get
of anxiety or discomfort when we're
holding discrepant ideas in our heads at
the same time we try to mitigate that
and make it better right so a good
example of that would be you're a
teenager you're invited to go to a
concert you go ask your parents if you
can go and your parents say no you can't
go and so you kind of really want it to
go but what are you going to tell your
friends well you know my parents said I
can't go right they're not going to say
that you're going to say well yeah my
parents really aren't too keen on it but
I didn't really want to go that much
anyway right it reduces that dissonance
or take a more corporate example think
about a product that maybe we want to
bring out right and we have an idea for
what we want to build and so what do we
do we go talk to users we go talk to
people we try to get that customer
feedback and when they tell us something
what we hear is through the lens of the
product that we actually want to build
and so we here make some modifications
make some adjustments build the product
what they were really saying is I don't
really want your product I don't know
what I want but it's not that right or
think about something really weird and
far out there right think about flying
cars it's one of my favorite things in
1924 popular science put flying car on
the cover for the first time and since
then two things have happened one we've
built flying cars cars apply they
haven't taken off but at the same time
we've also developed an imagination for
what a flying car means to
we know what a flying car is even if we
can't give you that specification so
let's call that gap between the
imagination that we've developed and the
thing that we're going to build an
imagination gap but I think the root of
that imagination gap is something that
I'll call a listening gap and that's the
difference between the imagination
voiced or unvoiced and what we hear and
so the question is how do we close that
gap well one way is to just resolve
dissonance whenever we have it by
whatever expedient manner we want to do
right so we hear something about our
product we choose not to actually listen
to it we release the product anyway it
doesn't sell and we're a little
surprised because we actually got good
customer feedback not a really good plan
a better way is to try and figure out
how to listen better one way to do that
is to recognize we have to release our
biases we have to release our
preconceptions we have to start every
conversation fresh and I'm not the first
one to say this but we have to be
vulnerable we have to listen to ideas
that we may not like and entertain them
and struggle with them and keep them in
our heads for a period of time until we
develop a mutual understanding so let's
go back to the rowing example in this
case we entered that example with a
preconception of what it is to row a
boat we knew what we wanted to do the
boat captain had a slightly different
idea to row together we had to sit in a
particular way and do those particular
things it took a long time to get
through our preconception of what it
means to row a boat and if he had been a
little bit better he would have realized
we had that preconception we could have
talked about it and maybe made a little
bit of progress more quickly but it was
still a hard thing to do that's a pretty
easy listening gap boat captain yelling
at us telling us what to do until we did
it right but in the future we're not
going to have a boat captain telling us
what to do in the future we're going to
have to listen for things that aren't
said we're gonna have to listen for
things that we don't know to listen for
ahead of time so as a second exercise
think about Tim and Beth and their two
kids and a family I was visiting back
around 1997 and we were doing the thing
we do visiting families and talking
about different things and eventually we
sort of rolled around to the topic of
cell phones
pretty popular item in 1997 just coming
on board and Beth was telling a story
about how it would have been handy to
have one of these cell phones or at
least for Tim to have one while he was
climbing Mount McKinley in Alaska that
was taking him a month with no way to
contact her and she had heard on the
news that there were some problems up in
Mount McKinley and she didn't know if it
involved Tim or not and at this point
Tim kind of chimed in he goes yeah you
know you should do all this dangerous
stuff mountain climbing and hiking and
all that never got hurt then I started
riding bicycles that put me in the
hospital
and Beth continues the story she says
yeah he fell off his bike and he had a
brain injury and it put him in the
hospital for a month I didn't know if he
was going to recover when he was going
to recover how much he was going to
recover I had to just deal with it and
as she told that story a little
something happened in the room as I was
listening that story wasn't about
cellphones and it wasn't about Tim
hiking that story was about her
relationship with Tim how much she
worries about him when he's doing these
things but how much she loved him and
didn't want him to know that she was
worrying about those things because it
would diminish his enjoyment of them and
so that end didn't we talked about some
other things and about a week later
we're in a meeting and it turns out I
knew Tim Tim had me out to the house
because he wanted to know what it was
like when we did this work for real
outside and he started telling stories
about what we were talking about and
made me uncomfortable because I didn't
think that he understood that I knew a
lot about his relationship so I pulled
him aside and I said Tim and I told him
what I just told all of you about Beth
and he was flabbergasted he said wow I
never thought about it that way you're
right that makes a lot of sense and then
I was flabbergasted I thought he just
didn't know that I knew I had no idea
that he didn't know it's his wife that's
a pretty complicated listening gap those
are the stories that we need to listen
to and listen for as we're going forward
and I know this and I know I need to
listen more carefully because the other
day I was on a plane and we had to shut
off all our electron
devices and I was kind of irritated
because I was trying to get something
done and so I just started thinking
about all the times I've been on a plane
started thinking about all the places
that I'd been to and when the
frustration reached my brain I realized
I know a whole lot more about a whole
lot of other places that I hadn't
thought of yet here when we were in
Vietnam for example and we were studying
education and thinking about that we
knew education was about getting a job
even though they didn't tell us that but
what it was really about was belonging
about people belonging to a global
society where education as a marker of
that belonging or when we were in India
and we're studying work years ago we
knew it was about income having extra
income but if I thought about it some
more it was also about contribution back
to the family back to the community for
the sacrifice they had made so that you
could have that job and when we were in
the mountains in Ecuador in Kenya and we
were working with an indigenous
population of canari people and we were
studying remittances the money that
people sent back from the jobs they take
far away we knew it was about economic
survival that was a pretty easy one but
I thought about it it was also about the
care and the concern that they had for a
culture that they've kept alive for
hundreds of years under duress belonging
contributing caring these were my words
these weren't their words they didn't
talk about these words in that way but
that's the way we need to listen to
these kinds of stories and we're not
listening to them in the way we need to
as an industry we're hearing still I
believe what it is we want to hear we're
certainly not listening for what's not
being said and so as individuals as
colleagues as an industry who are we
going to listen to how are we going to
listen to them will we have the
collective humility to be vulnerable
enough to open ourselves up to listen
carefully enough so that we can struggle
with those differences in those
challenges to understand enough to build
the things that we need to build to
design our future together and the irony
of all of this is that as we become
increasingly digital as everything we do
is increasingly mediated by did
technologies to design our future we're
going to need to do something that's
intensely human that we can only do for
each other
person-to-person listen thank you