Organizational change through the eyes of Art, UX and Technology

Have you ever considered yourself an Artist or a Designer? If you come from the field of Computer Science or Systems Engineering odds are you haven't, but you might have more in common with those fields than you think.A few days ago, a friend (a very experienced but quiet software architect with impressive skills) from the office was sharing his frustrations about how to persuade people in his team to do things his way. And he made me reminisce about my early days in the company where I work for, trying to convince people that we should take care of the User Experience, and tried an analogy based on the things that I went through, and which I describe below.Vincent Van Gogh is one of my heroes, and I always found Pablo Picasso a little bit cryptic and difficult to understand, but in my head, they both share something more valuable than art: they were change agents. I told my friend that in order to make an impact in the company with all his good ideas, he had to convince people that that was (1) the right thing to do, and that happened to be (2) easier to do. I told him that it wasn't about him knowing the best software development design patterns, that, his art, such as Van Gogh’s or Picasso's (or any other's) relied on people's appreciation of it in order to be successful, and that no matter how good he was at what he does, his impact was going to be small, if he didn't manage to communicate it to others. He nodded.One would assume that making software better (easier to use, improving performance, better looking) would carry more weight while pursuing organizational change, but it might be the other way around. Changing people's conception of what is right is more difficult. Chris Nodder, in his book "Evil by Design" writes: "Changing [people's] opinion on something involves [them] admitting that [they] were wrong." it also says that "People don't like to change opinions and will [often] ignore counterfactual information".So, how do you make people appreciate your "art" in the software-industry form, you may ask. These six points have worked for me to achieve some degree of successful organizational change:

• Get people's take on the issue. Before you change anything, be absolutely sure that you are on the right track with your thoughts, and that you are not just being stubborn. Before I started lobbying for User Experience initiatives in the company, I made sure that people acknowledged a general need for change (so fussy that it was difficult to name it).
• Do not go Big Bang. When I started in the User Experience role in the company that I work for, somebody, that believed in what I did, told me: "Look dude, this (an incredible looking high-fidelity wireframe) looks great but you need to start with little things, this is going to scare people off".
• Do not compare "yours vs. theirs". Being a change agent, involves shredding a current belief for a new one. However, this is likely to create a cognitive dissonance between you and them. Focus on how similar your approach is to theirs, even if it isn't. When I started I wanted to be THE designer that would get the application to success. In order to succeed I had to learn and practice to enable other people to be better designers.
• Manage to get people talking about your "art". Chris Nodder in his book, suggest that the best form of influence comes from other sources other than yourself, so get people talking about it, at the end you want people to familiarize with your ideas, get people to talk and champion them for you.
• Get people in high-places to sponsor your "art". Use their credibility and reputable knowledge so that the sponsorship carries more organizational weight. I’ve never been able to succeed in the UX field without the help of my managers, which I had to convince at the beginning that pursuing a better User Experience was important. None of my manager have been design thinkers at the beginning, but as time went by, they became obsessed with it.
• Do not nag people with your “art”. Or as Mark Twain would put it: “Tom [Sawyer] had discovered a great law of human action, namely, that in order to make a man covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain.”, and you are not going to do this by annoying people all the time.

Both Van Gogh and Picasso developed a new and unique painting style, something that people thought too abstract at the time they both started. But (and I’m going to throw a big assumption here) their social context defined how long it took for them to get recognition and be successful teaching people how to see through their eyes.One thing that makes things easy, is leaving a company, is likely that people will talk about your work and ideas in a more positive way than when you were there monitoring progress and pushing for change, perhaps it is the same kind of behavior that coined the phrase:

Le roi est mort, vive le roi! (The king is dead, long live the king!)

But perhaps this is not your goal.Van Gogh became absurdly famous posthumously as compared to Picasso who enjoyed his fair share of popularity during his lifetime. So the question remains: do you want to be popular during current job, or after you leave?I wrote this post for my friend, and I wanted to reinforce some concepts that I’ve learned about how people behave and interact that I’ve read in these two books:

Ariely, Dan. Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions. New York, NY: HarperCollins, 2008. Print.

Nodder, Chris. Evil by Design: Interaction Design to Lead Us into Temptation. Indianapolis, IN: Wiley, 2013. Print.