While trying to understand a coworker today, I realized that the way that she made sense of her world was very foreign to me. In part, this realization struck me with more force than usual because I have lately been struggling to understand just these kinds of differences in perspective when interacting with my wife.
Misunderstandings, and perpetual arguments, with a significant other are particularly infuriating, because it can seem like our partner is purposefully misinterpreting what we say, twisting our words in some kind of weird logic simply to watch our tormented reaction. Knowing deeply and rationally that my wife has no such intention, I still perceive viscerally and in immediate emotional confrontedness that she can have no other intention, I come to the realization that her experience of me must be similar! I must seem like the jerk.
Usually, in my intimate relationship, my rational curious self can't find a space to wriggle into the fixed closedness of my emotional conundrum, but with a less threatening situation, I can actually find a bit of humor.
So it was with thinking about the dance between customers and developers when wrangling over requirements. And I realize that what seems like nonsense to me, makes perfect sense to the other person, and vice-versa.
Picture a black and white image of a squat cylinder, a cube, a cone and a sphere. The woman is describing the way she wants them to be arranged with one another, and the man is trying to understand. She says, "the green one should look up to the liquid, instead of down at it." The man, can sort of get the relational sense of up and down, but the 'green' and 'liquid' references through him. For a moment, he imagines the sphere as a billiard ball, and can imagine green. He asks, "so the roundness doesn't dominate, but is drawn to the pointed-ness?"
She looks puzzled, "what? no, the one that smells like peanut butter is central."
He rocks back, "which shape is the peanut butter, and where do you want it?"
"Shape?" she asks, "you mean which relationship smells like peanut butter? The smooth with the round of course."
And it continues. I'm imagining it more absurd, and a bit abstract for effect. The difference in perception is clear. They are not looking at the same world. What he sees has nothing to do with peanut butter, green, or liquid, and yet he is trying to map those descriptions onto what he does perceive. I can almost hear him thinking, well, the cylinder is kind of like a jar of peanut butter, so that must be the one she means.
The layers of context provide the orientation for sense-making, and when those layers of context don't sufficiently overlap, mutual sense-making is impossible.
I think of someone who is gifted with profound synesthesia, and describes green as pointy with a flat bottom. I often think in terms of the movements of diffuse shapes, analogically imprecise, but capturing the sense of a situation, and I'm not very good with the details. I sometimes must listen for quite a while before I have enough information to piece together a working legend for the map that others don't even perceive as a map.
It seems to me that good designers are excel in this kind of translation between maps, and can pick out fundamental elements that speak more universally to a variety of constituents. When conversations go bad, it feels as if both parties assume that their internal legend is self-evident... no, more than that, they feel as of their orientation is the one, true, obvious orientation, and all else is nonsense.
I'm reminded of Buckminster Fuller, who insisted that "up" was no way to orient to the sky, but "out" was more accurate. Clearly, there is a dimensionality that gives a different orientation to the common perspective. It is as radical as realizing that the world is round, and revolves around the sun, rather than being the center of all existence.
Funny how all of this seems so intimately tied to the BBC program about Cantor, Boltzmann, Godel and Turing (http://is.gd/e6s - 1.5 hours long, but extremely worth it if your nerd streak works that way).
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