Feature

posted 13 May 2005 in Volume 1 Issue 10

Understanding real user needs

The first in a two-part series, this article focuses on face-to-face interviewing techniques, highlighting the importance of social styles and human behaviour when analysing the needs of intranet users. Part 1. By Richard Miller

One of the common experiences of companies all over the world is the knowledge-management project that failed. You find the corpses everywhere you go. Smart people putting energy, enthusiasm and skill into clever projects designed to make a difference. Launched with a fanfare – and landing with a dull thud. Despite all the effort and enthusiasm, nobody cares.

A common reason for failure is indeed that nobody cares. The benefits delivered by the project, whether a new intranet, online communities or new database services, simply don’t matter to the organisation and its people.

Getting alignment

I believe that for any knowledge project to be a success it must be aligned with the needs of the organisation. It must be aligned with the strategic needs of the organisation – doing things that matter.

It must also be aligned with the interests and needs of individuals – helping real people to do real jobs each and every day.

To get the kind of alignment that makes selling and implementing a project easy, you have to gather information about what the organisation and the users really need. There are two key groups who can supply that information; senior managers, who are responsible for delivering the key strategic objectives of the organisation, and control the budget, and the users, who are concerned with delivering their day-to-day work.

When working with clients on a project, we always interview both groups and we never ask them what they want out of the project. The problem is that if you ask them what they want they will tell you. They will tell you about tools that they have heard about, they will tell you what they have seen in other companies and they will tell you what they think they can have.

You need to keep people away from designing an answer. Keep them focused on goals and problems, not solutions. Outside their own areas of expertise most people have a limited vision of what good practice looks like or what is possible.

Some years ago I worked with a group of scientists who wanted to use electronic-information systems to dramatically improve their productivity. I made the mistake of asking them what sort of tools they wanted. I asked them to dream about their ultimate IT support system for innovation. I got plenty of responses. I got lots of precisely targeted tools that solved a particular problem for a particular scientist but that had no connection whatsoever with the tools being demanded by the scientist on the next bench. I also got lots of ‘dreams’ and ‘visions’ that were standard tools, available off the shelf and widely used in other companies or industry sectors. In fact, you could accurately discover when a scientist left university by their ideas of the ultimate research support tool. Unfortunately, once they had stated their needs, it was very hard to drag the discussion round to alternative approaches to improving their productivity. It took a couple of months to backtrack and restart the conversation.

What I should have done was to talk to them about their jobs, responsibilities, goals and needs.

Figures 1 and 2 show the kind of questions we use with senior managers and users to get at the key issues in the organisation. Open discussions around these sorts of issues will reveal the really hot topics. You might find out that from a strategic point of view sales performance, improving customer service or creating a shared global identity are key issues. Or that for the users accessing key information, working in virtual teams or slow administrative processes are the problems they struggle with daily.

Once the things that matter have been identified, then you can develop knowledge-management programmes to address them. And you can be sure that when it comes to implementing projects senior managers will understand why it will help the organisation to deliver its key strategic goals, and users will understand why it is in their interest to embrace this new way of working.

What sort of methods can we use to make sure that we are getting the best possible responses to these key questions? This article will focus on face-to-face interviewing of individuals. Next month we will look at working with groups.

Whether you are interviewing senior executives, or front-line staff, your approach should be the same. This needs to be a conversation with all the rhythms of a conversation. You shouldn’t be pushing your own ideas and options all the time. Equally you should not be taking a purely passive listening role. Trying to be a pure observer doesn’t help in revealing real insights. You need to be actively involved and interested.

Sort out some of the practical things. Make sure that the interviewee will be comfortable, and that you are as well. It may sound obvious that the person doing the interview should not sit with their back to a brightly lit window, but I have seen it done many times. It keeps the sun out of your eyes and illuminates the face of the person you are talking to. Which is exactly the problem.

Decide how you are going to handle any preparatory notes or scripts you have prepared for the interview and how you are going to take notes. Interviews are rarely successful if there is never any eye contact between the participants because the interviewer is constantly checking their script and making detailed notes.

We use mind-maps a lot to structure interviews and to record information.

It allows you to let the discussion flow naturally, but also allows you to track which of the key topic areas you have covered. Mind-mapping encourages the taking of brief key concept notes and allows you to give your full attention to the person you are talking to.

If participants are willing, recording the interview can be very useful for checking key points and capturing useful quotes.

Building rapport

A key step is building rapport with the person you are talking to. They need to feel that there is a real connection with the interviewer. Figure 3 shows some research on communications from the 1960s. In normal conversation, over half the meaning is carried through non-verbal clues such as gesture, facial expression and body posture. Most of the rest is carried by the way in which we speak: the sound of our voice. Only about seven per cent of the meaning is carried by the words themselves.

Normal conversation between people uses a lot of bandwidth, so it is important to use all channels to send the right message to the person you are talking to.

I have been interviewed many times, and it quickly becomes apparent when someone is not really interested in what I have to say, or disagrees with me. If the interviewer is thinking about the next question while I am still answering the last question, their eyes de-focus and they look away, or over my head. Their tone of voice can tell me that this is the twenty-fourth time they have run through this script today and they have long ago lost interest in the answers. It goes without saying that people will quickly lose interest if interviewed in this manner.

An extremely powerful technique for making a connection is mirroring.

We have all seen this in parties, bars and coffee shops. Two people who are enjoying each others company start to mirror behaviours. They tend to use the same language; picking up words and phrases from each other. The tone, pitch, volume and pace of what they say starts to synchronise. The body posture, gestures, expression and even breathing echo and copy each other.

You can use this in interviews to build rapport. Consciously mirroring the person you are talking to helps them to relax and to open up. It encourages them to keep talking, and helps you to focus on the conversation. If you mirror, your level of attention will increase and you will learn more. It dramatically improves the usefulness of the information you are collecting.

Mirroring works well with active listening. We can process what someone is saying far faster than they naturally speak. So our train of thought wanders to other topics while the other person is talking. Active listening gives our brain something to do that keeps us focused.

In active listening you give your full attention to the speaker. You reflect back the data they are giving you to check your understanding. You also reflect back how they feel about what they are telling you. Is it important, urgent, trivial, frustrating etc? Then you summarise what they have told you and give your interpretation.

Active listening follows the structure of a good conversation. You don’t just listen, but actively participate. And through this engagement you synthesise a shared understanding of the subject. You help the person you are interviewing to express their own thoughts clearly.

Balancing open and closed questions is an important part of interviewing. Open questions are designed to encourage someone to talk. They are good for getting context, revealing needs and allowing the front of mind issues to be captured so that you can probe for underlying issues and root causes.

Open questions use words like who, what, when, where, why and how? They are ‘tell me’ questions. Closed questions are about confirming a point or offering options. You will be inviting the interviewee to answer yes or no, or to choose from a list.

A good way to use open and closed questions is to start with a broad open question, then to ask several questions that probe the response, seeking more detail, and finally to summarise and confirm with a closed question. Your next question should build on what you have just heard; using only the key words and phrases from the previous answers. This repeating approach lets you exhaustively explore a topic in a way that feels like a good discussion and not like a cross-examination.

Matching styles

Individuals have very different social styles, and this affects the way that they prefer to be interviewed. If you can match your interviewing to their styles you will get a lot more out of the conversation. The social styles model was developed by Merrill and Reid1. It is based on a very simple matrix (figure 4) that looks at how people behave along two axes. Do they ask for a lot of input from you, or do they spend more time telling you what they think? Are they very emotionally open, wearing their heart on their sleeve, or are they reserved, hiding their thoughts?

People in the closed-tell quadrant are drivers. The executives who want to make things happen. Action oriented and often impatient they want to move things forward.

The open-tell quadrant holds the expressives. The visionaries and dreamers. Given the slightest encouragement they are off over the horizon into a brave new world.

Closed-ask types are the analyticals. Cautious in venturing opinions, they like to think things through carefully.

Finally, the amiables are open-ask. They are focused on relationships and connections with other people. They are very sensitive to the social impacts of every issue.

As an interviewer you have your own social style, and if you know your own style and that of the person you are interviewing, you can flex your style to get the best out of them. Fortunately, you can get a very quick impression of someone’s style by listening to them talk.

So if you are an expressive and you are interviewing a driver you would try to curb your desire to tell them all the exciting possibilities of knowledge management, and make sure you listen to what they want to tell you. Summarising and reflecting back what they are telling you in a brisk and business-like way will make them feel comfortable and that they are not wasting time.

If you are an analytical then your desire to carefully think things through could be a problem. These drivers want action, not careful and exhaustive consideration of alternatives. To interview effectively you need to pick up the pace and be a bit more definite and assertive than your normal style.

For more information about identifying styles and flexing your behaviour to create a better fit with another person, see Merrill and Reid’s excellent book2.

Finally, a method that works particularly well for getting at the needs of people with managerial responsibilities is SPIN. SPIN selling was originally developed as a sales method for big complicated sales3. SPIN stands for situation, problem, implications and needs. It is a process that asks lots of questions and aims to get at the key underlying issues, so it works just as well for revealing user needs.

The sequence is:

Situation questions – gathering the context, facts and background. Tell me about your business/department/project?
Problem questions – identifying difficulties and dissatisfactions. What is the most difficult issue in staff retention?
Implication questions – exploring the effects of the identified problems. If you can’t retain staff in sales, what will that mean for your growth targets?
Needs-payoff questions – identifying the value of solving the problem. What would it be worth if we could halve staff turnover, and maybe in addition reduce the training time for new staff.

Keeping the SPIN model in mind helps to identify where your project will have the most impact. You will be able to talk about benefits not just features, and that makes the process of selling it into the organisation much easier.

The second part of this article will cover some tried and tested methods for getting the best information out of groups of users, and ways of working with groups to prioritise and select ideas for inclusion in your knowledge-management programme. n

References

Personal Styles and Effective Performance”, David W Merrill & Roger H Reid, CRC Press, 1998.
Personal Styles and Effective Performance”, David W Merrill & Roger H Reid, CRC Press, 1998.
“SPIN Selling”, Neil Rackam, McGraw-Hill, 1988.

Dr. Richard Miller is co-founder and director of intranet and knowledge management consultancy, Vigorat.

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Key questions for senior managers

What are the critical things the organisation needs to do over the next few years?
What are the key things you have to deliver?
What are your most pressing issues?
What keeps you awake at night?
What wastes most energy in the organisation?
Where are you vulnerable?
Where do you have most opportunity?

Make sure that your plans are aligned with the business strategy. Link the benefits to the goals of managers, and tell the story in their language.

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Key questions for users

How could you personally be twice as effective as you are?
If you could make one activity vanish - what would it be?
What wastes your time?
What do you personally have to deliver, and what is stopping you?
What excites you about this job and what frustrates you?

To engage the target users always make sure that you are helping real people to do real jobs. You are asking them to change the way that they work; make sure that there is enough personal benefit to justify the effort you want from them.

Next month’s workshop (part II):

A toolbox for gathering needs and working with groups;
Creating a plan and getting stakeholder buy-in.