A conversation with Teresa Torres, Product Discovery Coach & Internationally Acclaimed Author

What’s funny is I actually think that pushing decision-making to the edges, and building a really robust organization around this idea of complexity is what leads to scale. It’s just so different from how we think today.” -Teresa Torres

In this episode of Control the Room, Teresa Torres and I examine her diverse career journey centered in human-centered design, where she helps organizations embrace and optimize the complex dynamics of team decision-making. Teresa shares the benefits that organizations can gain when they embrace the “messiness” of collaborating in complex systems and the opportunity they then have to “empower the edges.” We discuss Teresa’s approach to the “decision-making trio” that occurs during group decision-making and the value of listening to individual team member’s unique perspectives Teresa also highlights how an organization can interview its customers using an empathetic approach, and the corresponding revelations that can arise when teams “do the work in their own research.” Listen in to hear Teresa’s take on how to work together as a team when complex problems arise in your organization and gain the skills necessary to make effective decisions for your team and your customers.  

Show Highlights

[1:40] Teresa’s Start in Design & the Complexity of the Workforce
[6:17] Empowering the Edges in Organizations 
[20:05] Decision Making Trio in Group Decision Making 
[29:21] Teresa’s Perspective on “Interviewing the Customer Together” 
[33:13] Tools in Problem-Solving & Teresa’s Final Thoughts

Teresa’s LinkedIn
Continuous Discovery Habits
Product Talk Academy
Product Talk YouTube

About the Guest

Teresa Torres is an internationally acclaimed author, speaker, and coach. She teaches a structured and sustainable approach to continuous discovery that helps product teams infuse their daily product decisions with customer input. She’s coached hundreds of teams at companies of all sizes, from early-stage start-ups to global enterprises, in a variety of industries. Teresa has taught over 7,000 product people discovery skills through the Product Talk Academy. Before beginning her career as a coach, Teresa spent her early beginnings in leading product and design teams at early-stage internet companies. Most recently, Teresa was Vice President of Products at AfterCollege, an Internet startup that helps college students discover their first job opportunity. Formally, she was CEO of Affinity Circles, an online community provider for university alumni associations and a social recruiting service utilized by Fortune 500 companies. Teresa received her Bachelor of Science in Symbolic Systems from Stanford University and a Master’s in Learning and Organizational Change from Northwestern University.

About Voltage Control

Voltage Control is a change agency that helps enterprises sustain innovation and teams work better together with custom-designed meetings and workshops, both in-person and virtual. Our master facilitators offer trusted guidance and custom coaching to companies who want to transform ineffective meetings, reignite stalled projects, and cut through assumptions. Based in Austin, Voltage Control designs and leads public and private workshops that range from small meetings to large conference-style gatherings.

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Full Transcript

Douglas:

Welcome to the Control The Room podcast, series devoted to the exploration of meeting culture and uncovering cures for the common meeting. Some meetings have tight control and others are loose. To control the room means achieving outcomes while striking a balance between imposing and removing structure, asserting and distributing power, leaning in and leaning out, all the in service of having a truly magical meeting. 

Thanks for listening. If you’d like to join us live for a session sometime, you can join our weekly Control The Room facilitation lab. It’s a free event to meet fellow facilitators and explore new techniques, so you can apply the things you learn in the podcast in real time with other facilitators. Sign up today at voltagecontrol.com/facilitation-lab. If you’d like to learn more about my new book Magical Meetings, you can download the Magical Meetings Quick Start Guide, a free PDF reference with some of the most important pieces of advice from the book. Download a copy today at voltagecontrol.com/magical-meetings-quick-guide.

Today, I’m with Teresa Torres, an internationally acclaimed author, speaker and coach. She teaches a structured and sustainable approach to continuous discovery that helps product teams infuse their daily product decisions with customer input. She’s also the author of the book, Continuous Discovery Habits, and blogs regularly at producttalk.org. Welcome to the show, Teresa.

Teresa Torres:

Thanks, Douglas. I’m excited to be here. 

Douglas:

Yeah, it’s great to have you. So, let’s kick things off with how you got your start in this work. 

Teresa Torres:

Yeah, I’m really fortunate, it goes all the way back to my college days where I was introduced to human-centered design and human-computer interaction. It’s a funny story, I naively thought that’s how business worked. So I was 22 year old when I got my very first job, I really did expect, I worked at a really early software company in the late ’90s, we were bringing medical journals online. So we were like the technology provider for science and New England Journal of Medicine. It was kind of the Wild West, right, all that stuff was brand new, the internet was still fairly new, and I really thought that we would be focused on the customer and using these human-centered practices. 

And that really wasn’t how it worked at all. In fact, we just were a client shop, and we did what our clients asked us to do. I tried really hard to bring some of these principles to that work. Then I just always felt like I was swimming upstream. Then I went to another company where, again, it was in early stage startup in Silicon Valley, and I thought, “Oh, don’t be this way.” And they weren’t. Then after a few tries at that, I realized maybe we all know we should do this, but doing it is actually really hard. So that’s when I decided rather than building products, I really wanted to help product teams to spend way more time with their customers. 

Douglas:

That echos another story you told me in the pre show chat around getting the masters and studying things like leaderless teams, and then just not seeing collaboration play out that way in the workforce. So it seems like that’s also found its way into your coaching work as well.

Teresa Torres:

Yeah, I’m a bit of an idealist. I think I’m stubborn and really want the world to work the way that we model it out. Even though I know that it’s much messier than that, and maybe the messiness is what keeps it interesting. So I have two interdisciplinary degrees, and I think both have contributed to how I think about the world. So as an undergraduate, I was a symbolic systems major at Stanford, which nobody knows what that means. It’s essentially a cognitive science program infused with machines.

Cognitive science is how does the human brain process information, symbolic systems is how does any symbolic system process information. So that’s humans and machines. That’s where I got introduced to human-computer interaction, and then I did a master’s in learning and organizational change. That’s also an interdisciplinary program. It’s really about the workplace, but it takes place in a school of education and social policy. So it infuses the social impact and the more messy human side, which I just … The world is complex, and I really like discovering new ways of exploring that complexity.

Douglas:

It’s interesting, you mentioned the idealism is really fascinating from an academic standpoint, and in this messy hard work of understanding how to put it into practice, I think it’s really important, because there’s so many people that are out there struggling, trying, they’re just going through the motions, no one ever gave them a manual on how to collaborate. Right? Or how to properly use email. They got trained on skill, you can follow that history back to maybe the guilds and the systems of mentorship and stuff, but it’s really fascinating that these fundamental ways of working are not taught. Right? How do we take what’s happening in research and management science and actually help people apply those things?

Teresa Torres:

Yeah. I think what’s interesting is that we’re seeing the complexity around us increase. So I think if we go back to guild days, the complexity in the world was pretty small. Right? You learned your trade, you bartered some things, you went about your life, and life was pretty simple. As we build more complex things, the way that we interact with other humans grows in complexity. I think that’s where we recognize that … we saw a huge evolution from taylorism in the industrial age to just sort of the strategy age of business, and that’s because we started to see that efficiency doesn’t always win. Right?

So, assembly line is all about efficiency, and we match that out, and then suddenly, it was no longer a competitive differentiator, and we had to start looking at what’s the next line? I think with the internet, we’re actually seeing, there’s a line after strategy, and that’s how well do we collaborate to manage complex things, and how do we do it in a way that scales really well. The thing we know about complex systems is you can’t just poke one part and expect it to change the way that you expect it to. Instead of all these individual tradespeople impacting specific moments and thinking we can predict output, we instead have to figure out how do we work together, and have a more complex interaction with the complex system.

Douglas:

Yeah. It reminds me of the book, Team of Teams, and this notion of empowering the edges. I think, to me, those are some of the best stories around actually implementing that at scale. Right? It’s like, “Let’s empower these folks that are literally on the edges of where the information’s evolving, and where the fight’s happening, which is like, you typically think of the army as one of the most poster versions of command and control. They had to adapt.

Teresa Torres:

Yeah, I remember as a master’s student, I read the book Surfing the Edge of Chaos, and it was my first accessible introduction to complexity theory. It blew my mind, because to me, it described exactly what it’s like to work on complex software, and to work in an organization that’s really trying to wrangle the way they influence the world. I love the book Team of Teams, I think General McChrystal did an amazing job of describing, here’s how the world rapidly changed around us, and we were behind, and the only way that we could look at it is to adapt, and to really beyond those edges, and take advantage of all of the people, and not just let the leaders at the very top make all the decisions. 

That’s what I nerd out on. I really love this idea of how do organizations create environments where they can push decision making down to the edges, so that they become a complex organism that’s way better at engaging with the world and creating value in the world.

Douglas:

I mean, do you think that these concepts are at odds with the notion of scaling and operating at scale, given that some things may be in the complex domain, lots of things are in the complex domain, but there may be things in the complicated domain, how do we manage those transitions and support the different zones? Or is that even important? Should we just treat everything as complex?

Teresa Torres:

What’s funny is I actually think that pushing decision making to the edges, and building a really robust organization around this idea of complexity is what leads to scale. It’s just so different from how we think today. So I think most organizations think that we’re going to scale by having everybody do things the same way, and we’re going to scale by trying to predict the future and have a five year plan, and we’ll get all our ducks in a row and everybody moving in the same direction, and that’s going to give us scale.

Maybe that used to work, like when we’re literally manufacturing cars with humans, and what differentiates us from the competitors as we built a car a little bit faster than somebody else, then sure, the more efficient your assembly line, the more you have everybody working together, that’s a differentiator. But when we look at things like … I mean, even the way we make cars today, like it’s … I mean, first of call, cars are made by robots, and really the work in creating a car is the design work and understanding the market.

It’s all the more messy human bits that are a lot more complex than just the efficiency of how do we manufacture this. I think for those types of challenges, the only way to scale is to tap into the creativity and the power of every single person in your building, and how do you empower them to get really close to your customer, and make the best decisions they can. It sounds messy, though, right?

Douglas:

Yeah, it is messy. It’s really interesting, your point around those are made by robots. I’ve been thinking about automation for a while now, and how the rate of change and the amount of automation that’s happening, a lot of people get really worried and talk about the loss of jobs, et cetera, and my hypothesis has been, it just means we need to lean into our humanity, which is what you were just saying. Right? We need to do that messy stuff that humans can do.

Teresa Torres:

Yeah, it’s funny that you’re bringing this up, because I was just listening to a Freakonomics episode about the Robot Apocalypse. Well, I just learned Freakonomics is back which is amazing. They were talking about the automation of jobs, and everybody talks about the automation of jobs like it’s a bad thing. I get it, because jobs are at stake, and people’s livelihoods are at stake, and we certainly need to do a better job of managing that this time around than we did in the Industrial Revolution, and even in the ’60s, because clearly, there was a lot of pain and suffering. 

But I also can see the potential of, “Look, if humans no longer have to do menial labor, what kind of creativity does that unlock? And what kind of quality of life does that unlock if we’re not slaving away for 12 hours a day?” Which, frankly, we still have a lot of people in this world that are doing jobs that probably no human should be doing. So I’m excited about, again, idealist. Right? So I’m excited about the upside of can we tap into that human creativity? Like you said, that humanity.

Douglas:

I love where this is going. I do want to get back to decision making in a moment. But I’ll just close off this complexity conversation with a curiosity around Kinevin. Do you ever use the Kinevin model in your work?

Teresa Torres:

I’ve looked at it, it hurts my brain, I get the underlying concepts, but the language around it is so hard. I really want somebody to rewrite it in a way more accessible way. And probably somebody has, but I haven’t seen it.

Douglas:

We were just talking about that in the pre show chat. There’s so much out there that comes from academia, that almost has to be repackaged so that it can be adopted and put into practice.

Teresa Torres:

It’s funny, like I’m willing to do the work. I read John Dewey, who is like the most archaic philosopher ever, but his work is so good that, to me, it’s worth the effort. I keep trying with that framework, and people rave about it. I feel like I just need to put in the work so I can get the payout. But from my limited understanding, it feels like other people have expressed similar ideas in a much more accessible way. So I’ve just pushed it to the side and moved on.

Douglas:

Yeah. I think Wardley maps is another one that people will struggle with in the same way. There’s some really awesome concepts, and I think the key is like getting those four or five concepts, taking those bullet points away and using them, leave all the rhetoric aside because it’ll just get you tangled up. 

Teresa Torres:

We see that a lot, right, because consultants want to have a thing to sell, like the thing that … The one that’s coming to mind to me right now is jobs to be done. I think the content behind jobs to be done is phenomenal. It’s all about need finding, it’s all about really understanding your customer, building empathy, empathy, and really understanding what is it they’re trying to do, which is amazing. I actually think Tony Oleworks original work is some of the best we have in the industry, and the language is atrocious.

I know so many people who just can’t wrap their head around like, “What do you mean?” “I’m hiring you for a job.” If you’re hiring me as a consultant, sure, you’re hiring me for a job, but I hire my Apple Watch for a job. People get so stuck in the language, and that’s where I think words matter and how we communicate, and simplifying language matters a lot.

Douglas:

100%. I think that is critical, even in the moment as facilitators. When we’re in the room, if we’re not communicating in ways that is approachable for everyone, then we wouldn’t even ask why we’re there.

Teresa Torres:

Yeah, and I’m guilty of it too. I have a visual structure and opportunity solution tree and I kick myself. It’s like the worst name. I introduced the language for a reason, like opportunities represent more than, it’s not just problems, so we don’t just solve problems in the product world. There was a very good reason for it. But I literally have to explain what the opportunity is in every talk and every conversation that I have, and it’s done, I could have just collectively said needs pain points and desires and left it at that, and maybe call it an outcome map or something way more simpler.

Douglas:

Yeah. It’s a trade off, because sometimes we need to go through a little bit of that pain moment to help the participants understand where things are headed, right, because I tend to agree with that reframing around opportunities, because if everyone’s so pessimistically, just thinking about what problem are onslaught of problems versus like, “Let’s be a little bit optimistic here about what we can create in the world.”

Teresa Torres:

Yeah. Yeah. It’s not too bad, people generally get it. I think the problem with that word in particular is people think business opportunities.

Douglas:

Deals. Yeah.

Teresa Torres:

Yeah. I have to find it like a market opportunity. Right? So I have to define it as like, “Look, it’s an opportunity to intervene positively in your customer’s life.” That’s where it comes from, we’re not just solving a problem, we might be delighting them, we might be addressing a pain point, removing some friction. So there is opportunity there, which is like, I don’t even know where the word originally came from, I’m pretty sure that I did not invent it. I probably borrowed it from somebody else.

I think in the product world, it’s starting to become part of the vernacular and is less jargon, but I’ve been doing a ton of public speaking to promote my book, and it’s one of the most common questions I get, is what in the world is an opportunity? I just find it like seven times over the course of my talk, and I’m like, “Okay …”

Douglas:

Yeah, that’s hilarious.

Teresa Torres:

“This is jargon.”

Douglas:

No doubt. Yeah, I hear it. I’ve heard it in the design thinking world for sure, reframing problems as opportunities. I mean, salespeople use it as like, that’s what happens before a deal happens. You’re right. Jargon can take on so many different definitions. As a facilitator, so often our work is helping people move past the jargon, get past that company slogan. I remember one time we were doing a workshop for a really large apparel company here in the U.S. And they were so stuck on this, almost like mission-y project statement, though, that had their brand all entangled in it. We kept asking them, “What is this? Why are you doing this?” They kept repeating the jargon over and over.

But after a while, we had this breakthrough moment where like, it just became really clear that no one knew what they were … Everyone had different definitions. So we just settled in on this moment of understanding that no one understood each other. They had big epiphany for them.

Teresa Torres:

Yeah, I mean, this is why Dilbert was so successful. Right? I get emails from potential prospects, where I can’t understand a word they’re saying, which is kind of mind blowing. We’re so steeped in our conversational context, we forget how to talk to outsiders. I actually do this with product teams. So I coach product teams on how to really understand the opportunity space. So how do you uncover your customers needs pain points and desires?

I encourage them to frame opportunities from the customer’s point of view, and to use really simple language. It’s really hard, people write these really complex, long, convoluted opportunities statements, and I put them in and I go, “Oh, your customer just needs to edit this thing.” And they’re like, “Yeah. It’s just that simple.” “Okay, cool. Let’s use those four words.”

Douglas:

I feel like there’s always this desire to impress the boss, or to sound sophisticated. The thing I realized, once I started doing more writing, my blogging is like, “Man, if I can simplify, then I get a lot more readership, more people reading, appreciate if it’s like 101, easy to digest. Just make it obvious.

Teresa Torres:

Yes. Who’s the author, really … It might be Hemingway. It’s probably not Hemingway, I think it’s a quote about “I would have written a shorter letter had I had more time.”

Douglas:

Mark Twain is who always is attributed to.

Teresa Torres:

Mark Twain, very possible, Mark Twain. Yeah, I mean, it’s so true. I remember one of my first readers of my book, in a review wrote, “I was disappointed.” It was only 244 pages. But then they continued in the review and said, “But it was comprehensive and thorough.” And I don’t know what was left out. I was like, “You should be thanking me, it’s only 244 pages, because I worked very hard to get it thorough like it started. In fact, I’m about to release a blog post talking about the process.” The first chapter I wrote would have put the book on pace to be 750 pages. Nobody needs a 750 page book. Right? I think that that’s the missing piece, is that more is not more. Definitely when it comes to writing and language, less is more.

Douglas:

There’s so many books that I have that I wish it would have just been 50 page, give it to me. I just need what I need to go do.

Teresa Torres:

There’s a quote, I think it’s from Hamlet, and I’m not going to get it exactly right. But I read this as like a senior in high school and just thought, “This should be the motto for life.” And then the Queen says to somebody in the book, “More matter, less art.” That is the best quote of all time.

Douglas:

That’s great. It also reminds me, there’s an example on my desk right now, because I was just flipping through Christina Wodtke book, Radical Focus, and thinking about how … It’s 150 pages, versus Measure What Matters, which is like 350 or something, and I think her book’s better. I think her book’s much better.

Teresa Torres:

It’s much better.

Douglas:

Yeah, it gets straight to the point of what you need to know and how to deal with the bad stuff.

Teresa Torres:

Here’s how to explain the difference between those books, because arguably, John Dewey has a bigger name than Christina, although, I think that’s baloney. It’s very much Silicon Valley white guyism. But Christina is an operator. Right? She is on the ground, hands on experience with OKRs. She clearly worked very hard to communicate the depth of our experience in a very compelling story. John Dewey is a venture capitalist who saw OKRs used in a lot of environments, and there’s value to that. But it’s clear from reading his book, he does not have on the ground experience with him.

I was shocked by that book. I was shocked that he clearly doesn’t understand what a key result is. Don’t get me wrong, there’s some good nuggets in that book, it’s not all garbage. But I was like, “Why are you writing a book about a concept that you fundamentally don’t understand the basics?” To me, that’s inexcusable.  

Douglas:

So let’s move on to decision making. And specifically, you talk a lot about the decision making trio in product teams. I find that really fascinating because group decision making is a powerful thing, and something that a lot of people struggle with, to be honest.

Teresa Torres:

Yeah, in some ways, when you just phrase it as group decision making, I get a little bit of churn in my stomach of like, “Wow, this must be an awful process.” Right? I think it’s because we associate group decision making with consensus, and we think of hippies sitting in a room for eight hours trying to make a decision about what to eat for dinner, and never really quite making a decision. That’s not really the model of group decision making. So, I work with product managers, designers and software engineers, usually at the product trio, and there’s a lot of more complex names for that if you want to get into language, triads, and three legged stools, and three amigos.

But the idea is just these three roles, working together to make good decisions about what to build. What happens in the product world is everybody has an opinion, it does not take very much work whatsoever for your brain to come up with a fast answer to what should we build? The problem is, if you have three people, and they all come to their own fast answers, we end up in this opinion battle. Right? Where I want my view to win over your idea, and then we end up in this awful consensus making structure.

Whereas if we just understand a little bit about how our brains work, and how decision making happens, we can say, “Okay, we each individually came to a conclusion, what were the inferences that we made along the way?” And oftentimes, they’re super fast inferences. So we have to actually take time to reflect and understand our own individual perspective. So that we can explain, “Here’s why I think this creates value for the business, here’s why I think it creates value for the customer. Here’s how I got to this conclusion.” Then if we take the time to explore each other’s perspectives, what do we uncover? We’re all relying on different knowledge and expertise, which is why we’re making different conclusions. The reality is, this is where Chris Argyris’s  ladder of inference, you’re familiar with his work?

Yeah, where he just talks about like, all of us, we take in data from the world. We draw from our own knowledge and experience to interpret that data. Right? Then we make assumptions, and we draw our conclusions on it. So I think the key with group decision making is how do you individually slow down, externalize that really rapid process, so that you can start to examine it. And oftentimes, even when we just do that individually, we change our minds, we realize we made some inference mistakes. I mean, that’s the definition of cognitive biases. Right? It’s ways that our brains make fast inferences and get it wrong.

Then, what’s really powerful is, as a team, we can all share that individual perspectives, which means we now have a much more robust understanding of our problem space, because we’ve considered different perspectives, we can share our knowledge and experience with each other. So we collectively have a much better knowledge base than any of us individually. What happens when we do that, is most of the time, we come out a dream, and we make a better decision. We don’t always agree, and there’s ways to work through those differences. But the vast majority of time, disagreements are just because we’re all drawing from different knowledge and experience, and we’re not sharing that with each other.

Douglas:

Yeah. One of the things I like to coach facilitators on is like, if there’s a disagreement in the room, is usually because of asymmetric information.

Teresa Torres:

Yep.

Douglas:

And sometimes that could be based on prior lived experience. I’ve seen that thing break on the factory floor that you’re proposing. Right? And this other person hasn’t seen a break. Also, it could just be that someone’s been told some things that someone else hasn’t been told. So, all that perspective needs to be shared and unpacked. I love the fact that you said slow down, I think that’s like a big … Often we need to slow down and move faster. Because if you make a hasty decision, or get into repeated conversations that never actually make decisions, it takes way longer.

Teresa Torres:

Yeah. One of the things that I really work with teams on is, how to externalize your thinking. This comes from … A lot of the design world is about externalizing your thinking, but I’m a really nerd out on John Dewey’s work. John Dewey was educational philosopher from the turn of the 20th century. He’s an American philosopher looking at how do we maintain a thriving democracy. What he believed was, in order to have a thriving democracy, you need to have good critical thinkers. So he nerded out on how do we develop good, critical thinkers, which is why I love his work.

He talks a lot about these fast inferences, that in order to be a good critical thinker, you have to be really aware of the precedents that led to your beliefs, and the consequences of those beliefs, which we so rarely do that, right, is that we just have a belief and we believe it strongly and we don’t think about like, “What led to that belief and does that logically follow?” And then to go even further to say, “And if I believe this is true, then I also have to deal with the consequences of that.” We see this in society right now. I feel like we’re living through this giant like critical inferences experiment with COVID vaccines. Right? We had a whole bunch of people that didn’t want to wear masks, and then now we don’t have to wear masks, because we got vaccinated.

But then because of the Delta variant, and a whole bunch of people chose not to get vaccinated, we’re on our way, at least here in Oregon, to wearing masks again. It’s because of the original people who didn’t want to wear masks, don’t want to get vaccinated. Right? And so it’s like, you have this belief that your freedom should not be impinged by mask wearing, the consequence of that belief is a whole bunch of people get sick. We then have a vaccine, you don’t want the vaccine because again, your own freedom, okay, that’s consistent kind of. The consequence of that is we’re going back to wearing masks, and your freedom is going to be impinged again.

And there’s no recognition of like, “This is a loop.” Nobody is sitting down to think through about the consistency of thought, and the precedents and the consequences. We see this everywhere. We see this everywhere. So Dewey was right about democracy for sure. But I think in group decision making, not only are we not examining our own thinking, we’re all thinking separately, and so we’re all making different inferences. We all have different consequences, and we’re not taking the time to untangle the mess. We’re just dealing with the tangled consequences.

Douglas:

Yeah. One of the things I love to say is what gets visualized gets velocity.

Teresa Torres:

Yeah.

Douglas:

And visualizing things allows us to create logic models, or just share interpretation of what’s in our brains. If it’s not on the wall, it’s between our ears, and if it’s between our ears, then others can’t understand or start to understand our point of view, and we can start creating linkages, and these linkages are where the magic starts to develop.

Teresa Torres:

Definitely. I think the thing to realize is, there’s two parts to this. One is that human working memory is limited. Right? So there’s only so much we can hold in our head at the same time. And not only that, if we’re spending our cognitive energy on working memory, we then don’t have a lot of cognitive energy to process and to play with and to manipulate within our working memory. Whereas if we externalize our thinking and put it on paper, we just relieved our working memory, and now we can use all of our cognitive energy, playing with it, manipulating it, seeing it.

There’s a cognitive psychologist, Barbara Tversky, who does amazing work around spatial thinking and spatial reasoning. I think this is a natural human ability that most of us learn early on to stop using. Whereas I think a lot of group work and group decision making requires tapping back into that. So that as a group, we’re looking at the same visuals and manipulating and working on it together. 

Douglas:

That’s really interesting. It reminds me that Stanford study where they pitted CEOs against kindergarten students and the kindergarteners like totally.

Teresa Torres:

The marshmallow?

Douglas:

Crushed it. Yeah.

Teresa Torres:

The marshmallow. Yeah.

Douglas:

It’s pretty awesome. I mean, I think that was a little bit more about, the thesis there was that they were trying to understand power dynamics, like the CEOs were jockeying for power or whatever, and the kindergarteners lean in, but there’s also this notion of they’re using their minds in a different way too.

Teresa Torres:

What I love about the marshmallow experiment is this idea of people think marshmallow experiment, and they think that like willpower one, but this is, you get some spaghetti, and a marshmallow and you got to build the tallest structure experiment. What I love about it is that, I think the big takeaway for me is that, what kids do the adults forget to do is they just try things. It’s the best experiment for exposing the value of a bias for action. I think this also is grounded in Dewey’s work. Dewey says we learn by doing, and we see this in things like the OODA loop. Right? We see this more recently with the lean startup, we learn by doing.

So how do we start doing as quickly as possible? But in a really structured way, in a way that allows us to learn from the doing. So not just, “I’m going to try things at random, but I’m going to try something, I’m going to evaluate the results. I’m going to adjust.”

Douglas:

I want to come back to the decision making trio for a second. And one of the things that really jumped out to me in that article you wrote, I love, love, love is, this notion of interviewing the customer together. This is something I struggled with for years and years. As a CTO, I often lead the product team at startups here in Austin, and just always scratch my head around how the CEO drive these ego-driven decisions, even though we’d bring research to them and stuff. When we did design sprints with the Google Ventures design team, and they’re like, “No, no, everyone’s there on Friday and watches the interviews.”

I saw this massive shift and appreciation for the outputs of the interviews, and I was like, “Oh, this is totally obvious.” It was very clear to me, no one had to explain to me why that phenomenon was the case, this was like, “Oh, they lived it.” They weren’t reading, because if you read someone else’s report, you can explain it away. But they interpreted, they pulled out the things that they just had a bone to pick about, or whatever. But if you watch the pain, and you see it firsthand, then it’s a whole different game.

Teresa Torres:

Yeah, I mean, I think this is part of our biology. Right? I think this really comes down to natural human empathy, and maybe even getting the level of mirror neurons, like when we see somebody going through something, we feel it the same way they do. I don’t think we know how to communicate that in writing, I don’t even know if it’s possible to communicate it through notes. I think you’re absolutely right. If you are involved in the research, the research is far more believable, and if it’s far more believable, it’s far more actionable.

I’m a huge advocate. I mean, I wrote an entire book about how the teams that are building the products need to be the ones doing their own research, and it’s exactly for that reason. It’d be nice if we could silo it and say, “Okay, research team deliver research to the product teams.” But we’ve tried that, and what happens is the research gets ignored.

Douglas:

100%. I’ve seen it happen over and over again, whether it’s like you hiring an external research firm or doing it in house, the folks that have to take action on it aren’t seeing it. They’re not likely to take action on it.

Teresa Torres:

I think also, you mentioned startups, and almost all, actually all of my full time employee experience was at early stage startups. I think startups are particularly hard because we have this, especially in the States. Although the startup ecosystem, I think, it’s worldwide, we have this really strong belief in a myth of the hero, the super creative-

Douglas:

Visionary.

Teresa Torres:

Visionary, single person. So what happens in startups is that we have a founder who’s trying to dictate solutions and dictate. I probably hear every week from somebody who says, “How do I convince my founder that the product team should be going and doing discovery?” To be honest, I don’t know the answer to that question. I think startups learn that product teams need to be doing discovery, when the founders ego gets bruised, and they realize that their vision is wrong.

Short of that, I mean, I used to work with a lot of startups, and I don’t anymore, because I don’t want to have to tell a founder that, but that’s the reality in a lot of cases, is that, startup founders are amazing people, because they have such as referred to as Steve Jobs a reality distortion field, that allows them to take an enormous risk, and to try to impact the world, and that’s the upside of it.

And the downside of it is, that usually comes with tremendous ego, and blinders that leads to most startups failing. It’s the ones that happened to get it right, that have this outsized success, and then we celebrate it as this individual, creative hero myth. Whereas in reality, I think if we had a good way of comparing, for the companies that were learning on the edges and push decision making down, I have a very strong suspicion they’d have a much higher success rate.

Douglas:

I couldn’t agree more. Another thing we talked about that’s related to this is, or especially the trio decision making is, just problem solving in general. I know you’ve done a lot of research and you study this and deeply care about it, what some advice that you might have for our listeners on how to approach problem solving with a group, techniques that they might consider for facilitating moments where they need to do some real, challenging problem solving?

Teresa Torres:

Yeah. I think we’ve touched on a few elements already, I think it really starts with, if you want to leverage the knowledge and expertise in the group, start with individual work. So there’s a pattern that I use all the time, which I think is really helpful when working on complex problems, which is, have every individual in the group start by doing the work individually. If you have a group of five, you just got five different perspectives right off the bat with little effort whatsoever. 

Whereas if you have them start together as a group, and then say, “Okay, that’s your first perspective, come up with a second one.” That lateral thinking is really hard to do as a group. Whereas we can get it for free by just having everybody individually do it. Now you have five versions, take time to share those versions with each other, and then co-create a group version. That group version is going to be significantly better than any other individual five ones. So I use that pattern quite a bit, just to leverage all the expertise in the room.

Then the other thing that I would think about is, in group decision making in particular, we tend to get stuck choosing between options. Whereas oftentimes we need to be looking for how do we create an even better option? So I get questions all the time from product teams. The product manager wants to build A, my designer wants to build B, who’s right? They’re both wrong. You need to find solution C, that the product manager and the designer are both really excited about, and the reality is, we have an infinite solution space. So we just are searching in the wrong place if we’re still having these awful opinion battles.

Douglas:

Yeah, one of my go to strategies is, if people are talking too much about options, and they don’t seem thrilled about any of them, and even if they’re thrilled about them, if it’s just so focused on options, I asked them take a moment to think about criteria. How would you define a good solution? How would you define a good decision? They generally have very thoughtful things to share about this. Right? And you can just write them up and go, “Okay, let’s use this as a rubric. Okay, these don’t score very well. So why not? What can you change to make them improve their scores?” I feel like these kinds of prompts can help with that lateral thinking. You mentioned that being difficult. Have you found any tools in those moments where you need to shift the lateral thinking?

Teresa Torres:

Yeah. A couple of things on lateral thinking. So the first one is, you can practice, and that I think the best way to practice lateral thinking are crossword puzzles. This surprises people. Are you a crossword puzzle person?

Douglas:

I am not, I don’t spend a ton of time doing it.

Teresa Torres:

So most people think crossword puzzles are about trivia, and there’s a little bit of that. Right? There’s going to be clues about some center you’ve never heard of, and it’s going to be hard to fill that one in. But for the most part, crossword puzzles are about lateral thinking, because they’re full of tricks. Right? You need a five letter word that means this thing, and it’s pretty easy to come up with a five letter word that means that thing, so you fill it in, but then you get some feedback as you work on the ones that cross it. But that five letter word is wrong. 

So now the real skill is come up with another five letter word that fits that clue. A lot of crossword puzzle solving is that lateral thinking of, my brain gave me this fast answer, I’m now getting feedback that it’s wrong, come up with another answer. So I actually really think everybody that works in a creative field should be doing crossword puzzles. I think it’s one of the easiest and fun ways to practice lateral thinking. In the moment, though, we have lots of strategies for how to get unstuck. Right? We can look for inspiration.

One of my favorites is to look for … this comes from Decisive, which by the way is the best book on summarizing decision making research. It’s by Chip and Dan Heath. They talk about looking for people who have already solved your problem. So in the product world, I talk about analogous products, and we tend to think about competitors as analogous products, but actually I like to look at, if I can understand the heart of the problem, that same problem probably exists in lots of different industries, and the further afield I go for my own industry, the more likely I’m going to come up with a creative solution.

Total cliche example of this is the invention of Velcro. So the inventor of Velcro was walking outside on a hike and got a cocklebur in their sock, and got curious about how in the world do they attach, and it was like this loop and hook function, and that’s how Velcro works. He was inspired by nature. Right? Nothing even remotely related to the problem he was working on at work. I think that lateral thinking is just looking for analogies in faraway places.

Douglas:

My favorite one is the microwave.

Teresa Torres:

Oh, I don’t know the microwave story.

Douglas:

This engineer was working on a radio tower in the North Pole. After he got done working, he noticed a chocolate bar in his pocket had melted. He’s like, “What melted? How did that happen?”

Teresa Torres:

Its the North Pole. 

Douglas:

And so he started figuring out that it was the microwaves getting emitted off of this tower. He productized it.

Teresa Torres:

Yeah, that’s great. That’s a little bit almost the opposite, right, is that, it’s a little bit like a solution looking for a problem, except for the associative nature, right, that associative nature of what else could this be used for, is exactly that same lateral thinking, which is great.

Douglas:

It reminds me of a guy I interviewed once before Paul Sloane, have you heard of him?

Teresa Torres:

No.

Douglas:

So, he studies lateral thinking, he’s been crowned the king of lateral thinking, and he’s got a book called Lateral Thinking Puzzles, and he’s got a lot of stuff online. If you’re not into crossword puzzles, that might be something to play around with, if you want to exercise those lateral thinking muscles. He actually gave me one for my blog post that I was doing on him. That was like … What was it? Speed limit 50. You see a sign that says speed limit 50, and then 10 miles later, you see a sign that says speed limit 30, and then another one that says blah blah blah. Right? And he’s like, “What’s the speed limit?” The funny thing is that the signs were telling you how many miles there were to the town speed limit.

Teresa Torres:

Yeah, yeah. I am definitely going to buy that book as soon as we are done. 

Douglas:

So, we are reaching our time here. So I want to just give you a moment to leave our listeners with a final thought.

Teresa Torres:

Yeah. What I’ll share is that I do have a new book out called Continuous Discovery Habits. It is designed to help product people, so that’s product managers, designers, software engineers, anybody involved in building a digital product, really learn how to collaborate as a team and make team decisions, and to really do that in a way that helps them make better decisions about what to build, and not just collaborating with the team, but actually collaborating with your customers as well, to make sure that what you’re building really works for them. If you want to learn about it, you can go to producttalk.org and you can learn about the book and a whole bunch of other opportunities we have for learning.

Douglas:

Excellent. I recommend you get over there and check it out. Her work is amazing. Thanks so much for being on the show, Teresa. I really appreciate the conversation.

Teresa Torres:

Yeah, thanks for having me. This was really fun.

Douglas:

Thanks for joining me for another episode of Control The Room. Don’t forget to subscribe to receive updates when new episodes are released. If you want more, head over to our blog, where I post weekly articles and resources about working better together. Voltagecontrol.com.