This passage from James Gleik’s Chaos is a reminder of one of the major challenges user experience professionals face when we speaking to the uninitiated — to those coming from a deployment-centric perspective:
To some the difficulty of communicating the new ideas and the ferocious resistance from traditional quarters showed how revolutionary the new science was. Shallow ideas can be assimilated; ideas that require people to reorganize their picture of the world provoke hostility. A physicist at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Joseph Ford, started quoting Tolstoy: “I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives.”
The expectation of those we are speaking to is that we will add to their existing process, without deeply modifying what they do. In fact, we are introducing significantly deep and disruptive methodological changes.
Further, we ask for something truly difficult, not only cognitively but also affectively: We ask them to shift their perspective and see what they do from a different angle. The more we can recognize the anxieties that accompany this kind of shift the more compassionately and effectively we can address it.
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