Design patterns for communication and influence (part 1)

The common patterns

Design pattern was based on the idea that common solutions in programming can be reused in many scenarios. In my past 17 years coding experience, I never feel design patterns helped me in practice. While it doesn’t make much sense in programming, I find this idea makes thinking about human problems much easier. There are common patterns or styles of tactics that are applied repeatedly in various tough situations.

This series of posts will be a collection of the ‘design patterns’ I used most frequently at work and life. I hope they will bring you the same success as they helped me. I thought about listing the common problems(asking help from authorities, seeking feedback, etc) instead of design patterns. But I find the problem set is much harder to generalize and dry to write about.

3rd party power

This is one of my favorite techniques. Several years ago I was leading an infra project. The design was approved after months of iterations. One day, I was told that another product will need to be supported by our infra. The lead from that team was not happy about their integration work required by our design. He started an email thread and began involving many senior leaders to argue our design is ill-informed. When I was added to the discussion by my manager, the thread was already very chaotic. Everyone is saying something, some I don’t even understand.

Instead of contributing my opinion as requested, I went to have a 1:1 with the senior director who approved our design but was not in the thread. That director was the authority in this area across the company. After learning that he was still supportive of the design even with the concerns raised by the other team, I encouraged him to share his thoughts in the discussion. The effect is beyond my imagination. All those insightful, knowledgeable and determined oppositions immediately became very supportive after the director’s explanation. Even though my manager long ago made very similar points many times in the thread. What he doesn’t understand is that people can be persuaded by many things, but facts, reasons are not among them. You can never win an argument with your peers.

The normal approach of influence is building trust first. When facing a tight timeline or in other scenarios where building trust is not practical, leveraging a 3rd party power that has both the ability and willingness to influence the other side is a great strategy. The 3rd party could be an authority or an affinity to both sides. This pattern is also powerful when you need to influence someone much higher in the authority hierarchy.

As another fun example, it once took me two layers of indirection to influence a rank and file engineer from another team. All names below are aliases. I need to influence Andy’s priority who refused due to direct command from his manager Noha. I talked to Noha who didn’t buy my reasoning(sounds familiar?). I tried to influence Noha by two managers from my team. They were Noha’s peers and were stakeholders of my project. Sadly, they were either not interested or did not want to be in conflict with Noha. Then I came to Emma who was highly incentivized for my project and has a good relationship with Noah. Emma created a narrative where Noha was persuaded by my priority and in turn Andy was on board.

Sorry-thank you

‘Sorry’ or ‘Thank you’ is the most, sometimes the only appropriate response to most comments and feedback. Using them will never be wrong. If you are like me, we failed to apply them because of a big ego. We want to be smart and insightful by adding more value to the discussion. Below are some anti-patterns.

I already know that!

Josh is from a partner team with us. In one meeting, he enthusiastically described how their system works for ten minutes. I’m familiar with all his information. So I replied: “Thank you Josh. I’ve read it from the doc”. The trailing “I’ve read it from the doc” is terrible. It made Josh feel his effort is not valuable or even necessary, it’s not appreciated, and the ‘thank you’ is just being polite.

A much better answer should be “Thank you Josh. I will do some homework and get back to you”, or just “Thank you Josh!”.

Comment on feedback

Another very bad anti-pattern is to comment on other’s feedback. I’m highly experienced at distributed system design interviews and never failed one as a job candidate. One time a recruiter delivered negative feedback from a recent interview. She gave me a very detailed narrative from the interviewer with good intention. I think that the interviewer was inexperienced and evaluated by the book without knowing why. So I can’t help myself to interrupt her and explain why the feedback was wrong and I was right. What a stupid behavior! The recruiter has zero context to make a judgement, she will only feel not being trusted and not welcome. I realized my mistake very fast and apologized, she laughed out loud which confirmed that it would be as bad as I realized.

As a principle: the only safe and most appropriate response to any feedback is thank you or sorry. Nothing more.

There are many interactions where adding more input from us won’t do any good to other parties, except that it will promote our egos. In such cases, politely close the conversation with genuine sorry or thank you.

Request-promise, refuse to interprete

Request promise pattern consists of two perspectives.

1) Our world is driven by the act of speech. All consequential actions are the results of some speech. On top of that, all speeches are either a request or a promise. For example, Joe Biden requested to be elected as POTUS. After elected, he promised to unite the country. All following consequences rooted from there.

2) It’s meaningless to subjectively interpret or explain other people’s actions without data. Such interpretation will be a death spiral of self doubts, jeopardizing otherwise sound strategy and healthy mindset. Questions like, “She refused to date me but still accepted my gifts, what does that mean” is meaningless.

Drive agenda by speech

1) can be illustrated with the invention of the iPhone, one of the most consequential tech revolutions. The iPhone revolution was driven from two groups of speeches.

• In 2004, a small number of Apple employees requested Steve Jobs to consider integrating the phone function into their iPod. Steve Jobs strongly rejected it but after six months of iterations, the last version of their request managed to sway Steve Jobs to support this idea. That version is a promise of natural expansion of Steve’s iPod vision and never turning Apple into a carrier company.
• In 2007, during the release of the iPhone, Apple promised to the world that they had re-invented the phone and the new age of the Internet was about to begin.

While there are mind-boggling complex research, engineering, and production to make the iPhone a reality, all of those were results of the above two actions of speech.

Another example is the funding of the United States of America which began with the Declaration of Independence. The Declaration of Independence is essentially a promise of a free country and a request of separation from an existing political band.

It’s a fun exercise to name any great invention, movement or religion and study how it was built on top of acts of speeches in the form of requests or promises.

Refuse to interpretation

2) is necessary to enable us to make requests and promises fearlessly. Interpreting others’ behaviors is a very weak mindset I used to fall victim to. A few anti-patterns:

• I waved to say hello to a senior manager in the aisle, he didn’t respond but walked past me. He probably doesn’t like my proposal and will kill it.
• My manager is always late to our 1:1, it seems he doesn’t want to talk to me.
• I haven’t said much in recent meetings, so I must speak more otherwise my team will believe I know nothing about our projects.
• The interviewer avoided eye contact before I left the office, the interview feedback must be bad.

At the truth level, we need to realize the above may or may not be true. They are what they are. We made countless efforts in our lives, some will turn out as planned, some unexpected excellence, others unexpected failures. Our interpretation is insignificant to the objective world.

At the habit level, the action of interpretation itself is harmful. ‘Interpretation > action > interpretation’ is a weak strategy to interact with the external world. In many cases there’s really nothing to interpret, for example, there’s no consensus among a team about your skill level, their opinions are both shadow and ever changing. In other cases, it’s simply not possible to reach a conclusion with meaningful accuracy. Chasing such rabbit holes will exhaust our attention energy and reduce our lives to a pathetic passive state.

But what if things were indeed bad, like what if my manager doesn’t like me? Change it starting with requests and promises. First, envision a version of future you like, for example, my manager will be committed to support me because I can move number XXX which will help her deliver our annual goal; or my manager will be committed to support me because I can help her scale the team; or my manager will help me because we share the same mentality of personal growth and leadership. With such an envisioned future, take an act of speech(request or promise) to demand it from the world. If rejected, try another version of your vision.

As a summary, it’s a very strong pattern to use requests and promises to push agendas and refuse to interpret the feedback subjectively.