Depositphotos, Author: Andrew Lozovyi

Premise

Since I am a UXer, and this article could be read by those who do not know this profession or think they know it (eg “oh yes, you do wireframes, flows and pretty things), like many other UXers I feel the need to reiterate that our discipline was not born to exclusively serve the digital world, indeed initially in the 90s at most, it had the title of UX Architect (User Experience Architect’s Office in Apple, cit. D. Norman) then after the 2000s people progressively started to misuse the term to say “UX Design”, “I/you design apps” etc and relegating it to the digital world, often confusing it with Web Design and Graphic Design.

I also want to reiterate that UX applies to the end user, whether it is the user of a digital product, physical product, the candidate of a recruitment process or the same employee within a company or a citizen who uses a service, like the public transport or the medical service in a hospital.
UX is not limited to wireframes and certainly does not simply deal with graphic aesthetics, for that, there is the Graphic Designer.

In its past, we speak of the 50s, there are roots in cognitive psychology and in the scientific research method, from these, the discipline has evolved over time into what Don Norman then called User Experience when he worked for Apple in the mid 1990s (although the term, per se, had already been used decades earlier).

The following article specifically refers to “stakeholders” where the terms can be changed with “people/humans beings” and it assumes that UXers and PMs are doing a data driven work or anyway backed up by decades of knowledge in their sector.

Table of contents

• Intro
• Stakeholders and fear of change
• Stakeholders and resistance to change
• Stakeholders and cognitive dissonance
• Stakeholders and confirmation bias
• Consequences for UXers
• Resources

Intro

Several bootcamps and articles on the web focus on how important it is that UXers and Product Managers are able to convince stakeholders, to the point that if they can’t, UXers and Product Managers should bet blamed.

This same conviction then seems to bounce from one recruitment process to another, in which recruiters or other people involved in the hiring process ask questions in order to find out how the candidate managed to convince the stakeholders and, if he/she did not succeed, then it’s a bad candidate.

However a good amount of the people involved in the recruiting process are victims of biases that reduce their ability to be impartial, moreover, it is easier to blame others than to recognize our own limitations or mistakes.

A sentence like this:

“To garner their support, make sure your stakeholders clearly understand the issue, the solution, and the ways in which it will benefit them.”

It is extremely simplistic and ignores human nature, indeed the example above, can only succeed when certain circumstances within the stakeholder cognitive and behavioral processes are met, otherwise it’s not going to happen, no matter how good a Product Manager or a UXer is in selling their work.

Stakeholders, whoever they are, CEO, CTO, Head of Departments etc (and sometimes also Product Managers), are human beings and as such, subject to cognitive bias and the inability to accept change and, especially UXers, they can be carriers of very radical changes.

“Before you heal someone, ask him if he’s willing to give up the things that make him sick” — Hippocrates

Stakeholders and fear of change

True motivation to change depends, first and foremost, on the ability of stakeholders to notice the negative aspects of the condition in which the product, company or employees working for the company find themselves.

Stakeholders are human beings, and as such their minds keep track of the words that gratified them and the criticisms that hurt them, the situations they experienced, the times when, despite obstacles, they acted and those when the fear of failure paralyzed them.

It keeps track of the decisions they made, their successes and defeats. Their self draws on these memories.

The self, their sense of identity, is a kind of “container” of self-descriptions:

• Physical
• Psychological
• Biographical
• Relational
• Social

and is based, for the most part, on beliefs and ways of feeling. Ultimately, it is not what they really are, but rather is the result of how they are accustomed to thinking about themselves.

Possessing a stable self is calming; it makes us feel like individuals with continuity over time. But it comes at a price:

It requires consistency, that is, that we act, in the present, similarly to how we have done in the past.

For this reason, people, and thus also stakeholders seek out experiences familiar to them and are averse to new ways of thinking.

Thus, however, they end up locked into a limited view of themselves and the world.

In a past experience, I extracted data from Microsoft Power BI, merged 3 years of research performed by two different UXers and in which, users were always complaining about the same problem that went unheard for years, as result they were registering their account to never log again after just 24 hours.

When I calculated that in the last 3 years the business was burning €1M per year due to the user cost of acquisition/churn rate, precisely because the user problem was ignored, the CEO surprised by the amount of money loss, replied with a “lol”, literally.

Recently in a company that did not know what product discovery was, nor the difference between Product Manager and Project Manager, nor the creation of a product as a solution to a user problem, in order to help myself and the business itself, I quoted Don Norman, Jakob Nielsen, Joe Notoli, Debbie Levitt, referenced specific researches to corroborate what I was saying and supporting my own researches.

I have quoted Teresa Torres, Don Norman again, William Hudson and reported examples of companies that have failed to innovate, closed for bankruptcy or burned huge amounts of money because “we know what our customers want” the answer they gave me was that they had to speed up and that they didn’t want anymore to conduct interviews and surveys, they could be done later on, to adjust the product so far built without research.

There is nothing UXers can do in these situations, if the change does not arise first in the company itself. Nobody can help those who doesn’t want to be helped and UXers are not like other professions, they are equipped like doctors and if the doctor is telling you that you are going to get a liver cirrhosis if you don’t stop drinking and you keep drinking, the doctor can’t help it, but the barman (the Web Designer) can help you, ’cause he/she doesn’t care as he/she doesn’t need, so he/she will be happy to make the pretty graphic/serves you another beer.

“UX without research, it’s not UX and UI without UX it’s not UI, it’s Web Design.”

Stakeholders and resistance to change

Resistance to change, in this specific case, typically a resistance to change product strategy, adopting a new type of management, a new organizational chart etc it causes in people experiencing an emotional anxiety caused by the prospect of a transformation or change that is taking place.

If we use the emotional cycle proposed by the psychiatrist Kubler-Ross, and we adapt the context to the one we have in a business, more or less this is what happening in stakeholders:

1. Shock phase. It is the state of paralysis or initial block when stakeholders are exposed to the perspective of change, for example adopting “Product Discovery”, removing “Dark Design Patterns” etc.

In this state stakeholders usually do not react, there’s is silence, low reaction or apparent compliance, so that UXers or Product Managers may think that stakeholders have willingly accepted the transformation, but in reality what is happening is that stakeholder emotional system has “frozen.” Their rational mind has not yet processed the change and what it means.

2. Negative phase. At this stage stakeholders deny the change, this implies closing their eyes in front of reality and any evidence that transformation is necessary or is occurring.

Normally stakeholders continue with their processes, actions, works etc as if nothing had happened, with the naive claim that the need to change disappears. This is because, by grasping to their everyday routines, they recover the feeling of control.

3. Phase of wrath. When stakeholder can no longer deny change, the most common thing is to react with anger, frustration, and rage. In this phase, all the feelings repressed during the previous phases emerge.

At this stage stakeholders often try to back up each others, they try to make team, rise up a shield and point a finger against the Product Manager or the UXer. This is a defensive reaction, at his core there’s an attempt to maintain the status quo, because it’s comfortable, secure, produce a feeling of control, stability, certainty.

Product Managers or UXers are seen as distruptive and unpleasant elements. It is not the wrong past strategies and methodologies that have led to this moment, but the PMs and/or the UXers that do not conform to the status quo, actually wrong (remember we are talking about denying the evidence, not hypothesis), of the stakeholders.

4. Phase of negotiation. It is a phase in which stakeholders will try to find a way out, although it is usually useless because stakeholders are still struggling to change. At this stage they have not yet accepted the change, but they try to find the “way” to avoid it.

Here is usually when different type of cognitive biases show up. If stakeholders are unable to accept the change and recognize past mistakes, this is also where usually everything end.

Product Managers and/or UXers get frustrated, their profession it’s not recognized, evidence it’s ignored and they have two options, start to look for a new job or continue to work by producing low quality deliverables, giving up on their professionality and/or years of studies who taught them the correct way to perform their profession.

5. Phase of depression. At this point, usually after the umpteenth meeting in which there’s again a clash of world view, more or less intense, stakeholders finally accept that change is inevitable, but they do not accept it, they can react getting depressed or irritated because things are not going as they wanted.

6. Phase of the test. It is a phase where resistance to change is finally disappearing because stakeholders realize that they have to react. This is happening when:

• They start to give importance in the values and objectives that PMs and UXers says. Taking responsibility is central: values and objectives can be encouraged, but not induced from outside by PMs and UXers. On the contrary, they must be “built” in a conscious and deliberate way inside the stakeholders.
• Stakeholders gain the ability to predict the long-term consequences of one’s actions, not to repeat old habits. In a word, a change requires self-control to accomplish. Impulsiveness is the tendency to act on the spot without considering that the expected results, in this way, may not occur; it is difficult for a person without a minimum of self-control to keep at bay that part of himself that pushes him towards the usual behaviors.
• Cognitive flexibility is achieved. The ability to accept even those conditions that are different from how one would like them, to modify one’s thoughts according to reality and to assume the perspective of those who have different ideas.

At this point stakeholders start looking for realistic solutions and new coping models that fit the reality. They begin small experiments that bring them closer to change and allow them to observe it in a new perspective.

7. Phase of acceptance. It is the last stage in which stakeholders return to find the balance that was lost with the change. They find and implement new models of adaptive behavior that help them to rebuild their identity in new circumstances.

“The motivation for change depends on the ability to fully realize the negative aspects of the condition in which one is”

Stakeholders and Cognitive Dissonance

Why do many stakeholders firmly defend their views and beliefs even in the face of overwhelming evidence that their ideas and views are totally wrong?

One explanation is what in psychology is called cognitive dissonance.

A mental distress experienced by a person who simultaneously holds two or more contradictory beliefs, ideas or values. Discomfort is triggered by a situation where a person’s beliefs collide with new evidence presented to that person.

Stakeholders suffering from cognitive dissonance will vigorously defend, justify and maintain their glorious beliefs even when faced with irrefutable evidence that they are wrong.

A classic example:

- UXer / Product Manager: “A product / service is created to solve the problem of one or more people, not because someone one day decides to do it to maybe copy the competition. Here is a pile of decades of studies that proof the effectiveness and all the benefits of this process and the downsides when it is not applied. At the bottom you will find the signatures of Thor, Batman and all the Olympian Gods.”

- Stakeholder: “I disagree and you are a rookie in this company and just a bad person who wants to dictate how to live my business life, now I cry, go away.”

To reduce psychological distress, stakeholders will have to change their mind or behavior in order to resolve the inconsistency or contradiction, thus restoring mental balance and emotional harmony, or otherwise known as cognitive consonance (yes the opposite of dissonance).

There are several ways human beings and so stakeholders reduce their mental tension when their behavior and available information collide.

A stakeholder experiencing cognitive dissonance will try to reduce mental tension in several ways, for example:

A. At best they will change their behavior or beliefs to be congruent with the new information:

“Okay, let’s proceed with the research. It will allow us to understand the behavior of our users, to study their process, to understand what problems they experience, to innovate, get a leverage on our competitors and this will also reduce the risk for us of creating a failing product, of burning money for nothing and of reduce or avoid retrofit costs etc”

B. They will justify their behavior or beliefs by modifying conflicting cognition:

“We know our customers, we know what they want even if we have never done research, for this time we can avoid doing it and proceed with product development, for once we can do it”

C. They will justify their behavior or beliefs by adding new cognition:

“We have millions in profits, we know what we are doing” or “We will do more research later on to adjust the product” or “We will invest more in new customer acquisition to compensate the loss due to a lack of research”

D. They will ignore or deny information that conflicts with their existing beliefs:

“Product discovery it’s not really necessary, a business can decide to start simply for business decisions, not because there’s a problem to solve” or “This is not a startup business, we have our own processes” or “There’s no need to do maintenance on this machine, it’s perfectly working and we never had problems”

Many stakeholders are unwilling to change their vision of things to account for new information that contradicts their beliefs, instead, they reduce cognitive dissonance by justifying their way of viewing things rather than by changing their minds or behaviors.

If science worked in the same way, there would be no progress nor a whole series of inventions.

Stakeholders and Confirmation Bias

Confirmation bias, it’s the tendency to process information by looking for, or interpreting, information that is consistent with one’s existing beliefs.

Human decision making and information processing are often biased because stakeholders simply interpret information from their own point of view.

Stakeholders need to process information quickly to protect themselves from harm. It is adaptive to rely on instinctive and automatic reflexes that keep them out of danger, in this case the change is seen as a danger, a danger that travels carried by the aforementioned cognitive dissonance.

Another reason stakeholders display confirmation bias is to protect their self-esteem. People like to feel good about themselves and discovering that the belief that they are of great value is incorrect causes stakeholders to feel bad about themselves.

Therefore, stakeholders will look for information that supports their existing beliefs. Another reason is accuracy. Stakeholders want to feel smart, and information that suggests they have an inaccurate belief or make a bad decision suggests them lack intelligence.

When we seek only what confirms our beliefs (confirmation bias), we only side with what is most comfortable (cognitive dissonance) and we do not examine contrary ideas (motivated reasoning), we impede social, economic and academic progress. — Sam McInerne

If PMs or UXers are highlighting with, for example data research, the bad consequences or the poor results of a decision operated by a stakeholder (sales, marketing, growth etc), this information that conflicts with stakeholders decision, may cause discomfort and is therefore ignored or given little consideration.

In the context of decision making, once an individual makes a decision, he or she will look for information that supports it.

Confirmation bias also surfaces in people’s tendency to look for positive instances. When seeking information to support their hypotheses or expectations, people tend to look for positive evidence that confirms that a hypothesis is true rather than information that would prove the view is false if it is false.

Confirmation bias also operates in impression formation. If people are told what to expect from a person they are about to meet, such as that the person is warm, friendly, and outgoing, people will look for information that supports their expectations.

Banal example, if a stakeholder explain to his colleagues that UXers are engaged in the digital product by doing wireframes and UI, they will expect this, not a profession with roots in cognitive psychology, not a profession that does research and work in an iterative process along all the lifespan of a product, not a profession that applies to any type of end-user, and so employees as well as users of a physical product.

If a Senior Recruiter will explain to a Junior that a UXer needs to know HTML and JS to be as such (false) the Junior Recruiter will seek for this, falling victim of a confirmation bias and with the risk of leave behind good or even excellent candidates that don’t know HTML or JS.

Confirmation bias is important because it can lead stakeholders to stick firmly to false beliefs or give more weight to information that supports their beliefs than is warranted by the evidence.

Stakeholders may be too confident in their beliefs because they have accumulated supporting evidence, when in fact a lot of evidence that refutes their beliefs has been overlooked or ignored, evidence that, when considered, would lead to less confidence in their beliefs.

People experience genuine pleasure — a rush of dopamine — when processing information that supports their beliefs. “It feels good to ‘stick to our guns’ even if we are wrong,”

These factors can lead to risky decisions and cause stakeholders to overlook warning signs and other important information.

Consequences for UXers

When stakeholders refuse to acknowledge the evidence, often one of the typical situations that UXers (but why not, PMs as well) encounter is that of finding themselves in situations in which a dichotomy is created:

• A. Leaving the business to be able to continue working professionally somewhere else, to be able to enrich oneself in an environment that embraces change and that foster personal growth and allows them to do quality work.
• B. Continue to work for the same business, producing mediocre work, skipping steps in established processes, ignoring the end user and sometime producing only graphics (UI without UX).

Since changing job it’s not an easy option, except perhaps for those with enough savings to quit and go back to looking for a new job, option B is the most common.

It therefore happens that by treating someone according to expectations (I expect that you do not do research, that you ignore the research results, that you only do the UI and maybe you go directly in deployment with good peace of QA and devs), that UXer may unintentionally change his or her behavior to conform to the expectations, thereby providing further support for the perceiver’s confirmation bias.

This situation then has a major consequence of reducing the professional quality of the UXer and of “polluting” the ecosystem by producing and dispersing in other businesses “modified” UXers to support the confirmation bias of stakeholders.

Resources

Positive Psychology
Psychology Today
Psychology Spot
Britannica Science
“Denying to the Grave: Why We Ignore the Facts That Will Save Us”, by Sara Gorman, Ph.D., MPH, and Jack M. Gorman, MD
Dr. Gabriele Calderone and Giovanni Bortologgi Psychologists and Psychotherapists
A 100-Year View of User Experience, by Jakob Nielsen
The Term UX, by Don Norman