The outliers tactic for stakeholders

Yesterday, I wrote about using an Alternative Universe exercise to get stakeholders focused on behaviors. Today, I’ll share a second tactic: Outliers.

Let’s use a different example and focus on an internal use case: “I want people to be more inclusive in meetings.” And for variety, our stakeholder can be a glasses-wearing CEO named Satya.

The Outliers exercise relies on a natural human bias: our tendency to remember vivid extremes better than averages. This is useful because by using real exemplars of actual outliers, it helps stakeholders connect with behaviors as observed, rather than hypothesized.

I generally start with the positive version. “Alright, Satya, I want you to think about the most inclusive person you know. Do you have them in your mind? Great; tell me a bit about them.”

Satya will usually start with the person’s demographics, which you can ignore unless that is all he mentions, in which case you’ll need to prompt him: “You know he’s inclusive because he’s Black? Are all Black people inclusive?”

Usually, though, he’ll mention some behaviors in passing and those are what you want to call out and emphasize. “Oh, so he calls out when men repeat ideas that a woman has already said. Is that what you mean by inclusive: someone who calls out idea attribution?” 

I generally suggest waiting until he’s finished his initial description, as he may mention several behaviors without prompting. You’re not actually trying to finalize a selection here, just get a list of possibilities, so the more behaviors you can pull out, the greater the chance that you’ll find the sufficient one. You can worry about narrowing down later as you actually write your behavioral statement. 

I also think it is worthwhile to do the negative version. “OK, let’s try something different. I want you to think of the least inclusive person you know and tell me about them.”

This is useful because sometimes our end goal isn’t getting people to do a desirable behavior but rather stopping them from doing an undesirable behavior; there are plenty of inclusive practices that are about the absence of a bias. And because of our innate tendency to focus on promoting pressures, focusing on a negative outlier can help close that blindspot.

I tend to use Outliers over Alternative Universes when the subject is serious, as it doesn’t rely so much on the entertainment factor to hold interest; talking about exemplars is inherently fascinating. And because Satya has no access to the exemplars cognitions and emotions, he’s forced to rely on observable behaviors, which makes it easier to move people away from concepts like “loving a product”.

But the focus on exemplars comes at a cost: because it uses real people, the Outlier exercise often struggles with niche behaviors where the stakeholders’ have no personal experience. If Satya has never actually seen an inclusive leader, how is he supposed to describe them?

Tomorrow’s exercise, The Genie, addresses this by moving back into the realm of fantasy.