Authenticity means that someone stands for something. They come from a perspective. That perspective is truly how that person sees things, and that perspective is held steadily. In other words, the person is sincere and can be counted on to stick to his view and behave consistently in accord with it.
Tact means that someone is sensitive to those around him. He knows others have different perspectives from his own, and that these perspectival differences add considerable challenge to communication. Tact is the art of navigating differing perspectives.
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Authenticity and tact are mutually dependent.
Without tact, authenticity degrades into ideological insularity: rigid, narrow, simplistic enslavement to unexamined concepts.
Without authenticity, tact degrades into a soulless exedientism that says whatever it believes will ingratiate it to its audience.
We should not attempt to avoid being “flip-floppers” by becoming rigid and insensitive to other people. We should not attempt to avoid being rigid, inflexible and insensitive by conforming ourselves to the expectations of others. (If a slope tilted in one direction is slippery, does tilting it in the opposite direction make it any less slippery?)
Nor should we try to find some compromise by averaging the two. This produces embarrassingly bland equivocating, convoluted, and barely-principled half-way solutions. It only serves to reinforce extremism.
The solution is dialogue, and it requires the marriage of authenticity and tact. Dialogue is mutual teaching and mutual being taught — knowing how you see, learning how the other sees, sharing how you see, deepening your vision: mutual growth is the soul of dialogue.
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Organization-centrism is generally bad news. It shares the characteristics of authenticity without tact.
User-centrism is generally a great improvement over organization-centrism. It at least understands a user’s functional problems and addresses them with superior utility, which the “user” finds more useful and more usable (notice all the “use” language). Unfortunately, user-centrism shares the characteristics of tact without authenticity. Like many utilitarian things, it tends to lacks charisma, excitement, genuine felt inspiration. Its self-effacement can give it a generic or hollow quality which is only accentuated by attempts to increase its appeal by infusing it with “desirable” qualities.
User experience is at its best helping commodity businesses become incrementally improved commodity businesses.
This improvement, though, can actually do harm. What makes a commodity a commodity is that it aims for the same ideal as its competitors. Everyone is chasing the same thing. But to chase an ideal is to endorse an ideal. Is your company in a better position than its competitors is to deliver on that ideal in the long term? If so, you should pray that your competitors employ user-centered approaches, because whatever gains they make will be easily imitated and they will reinforce a vision of your offering that serves your organization. Your competitors will be an inexpensive R&D department for you.
If this is not the case, however — and it rarely is — You might want to ask yourself some questions: Where did customers learn to see the products they buy? On complex purchases, customers learn to think about what they are about to purchase, and this way of thinking projects an ideal. Is this framework fixed and inevitable? Is it changeable? Would changing conceptions of the ideal product make the purchase simpler or more exciting?
Don’t worry if you cannot answer the question. Recognizing that the question can be asked and then really asking it is the hardest part.
The methods of synetic branding help you discover-invent the answer.
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