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Erika Hall

@mulegirl

14 Nov

If you have people in your lives—close friends and family—who have been influenced by disinformation, do not argue with them. It will not work.

If you do want to make that person a deprogramming project, step 1 is to establish rapport and trust.

Step 0, of course is to accept that it's a long game to try to counter months or years of messages and social reinforcement that have a lot of money and power behind them.

The best way to establish rapport and trust is to demonstrate genuine interest in their lives.

Centering the needs of someone who has aligned themselves with the baddies may make you feel like a traitor to the cause.

But again, arguing with facts is likely to backfire badly.

Read 12 tweets

Erika Hall

@mulegirl

4 Nov

Everyone hyped on surveys or polling should actually read Rensis Likert's PhD dissertation in which he describes the method we've reduced to "the Likert scale".

Here, I googled it for you:
legacy.voteview.com/pdf/Likert_193…

Oh, I should add content warning: racism.

Not his so much as the attitudes he is studying—although he does use the 1932 vernacular.

I shudder to think of giving the same survey in today's America.

Read 6 tweets

Erika Hall

@mulegirl

4 Nov

Fun anecdote.

One time I was running a remote presentation of discovery findings to a client.

Without warning the CEO had added two colleagues (buddies) to the call at the last minute.

They didn't hang out and listen.

Oh no. They were just complete jerks, challenging everything from out of left field.

I googled them afterwards. Turns out they were GOP pollsters. I think one of them had been indicted for something.

I had been (lightly) hit by a car while biking on the way to work that morning.

This meeting was more annoying than that.

Read 4 tweets

Erika Hall

@mulegirl

21 Oct

If I could change ONE thing about how everyone doing "creative problem solving" worked, it would be to stop brainstorming ideas and start brainstorming questions.

Brainstorming and ranking ideas is the worst and it puts team members in competition with each other to look smart.

But if you get everyone in a room (virtual or otherwise) and say "OK, what are all the things we're assuming or simply lack information about?" and then "Which of these areas of ignorance are highest priority?" that is both immensely useful and enhances collaboration.

But the idea that "ideation" is a good and productive use of people's time is so baked into how people think about design and business.

Because it's easy and fun and everyone secretly wants to "win" at group ideation.

Read 5 tweets

Erika Hall

@mulegirl

23 May

Marine biology fun fact of the day:

Moray eels have pharyngeal jaws, much like the Alien xenomorph.

"Moray eels are the only known animals that use pharyngeal jaws to actively capture and restrain prey in this way"

Additional moray eel fun facts:

Groupers swim up to moray eels and shake their heads to say "Hey pal, let's go hunting!"

nationalgeographic.com/science/phenom…

Here is an x-ray of a moray eel that will in no way give you nightmares. You can make out the pharyngeal jaws.

Read 4 tweets

Erika Hall

@mulegirl

14 May

The missing role at most organizations is a communication/collaboration facilitator—a person to help create intentionally humane and effective communication protocols.

So much of work is communication in many modes and channels. And it's really really hard to get right.

IT picks software tools. Facilities runs meeting rooms (in the before).

No one thinks about how to orchestrate the most functional communication among various roles/tasks/etc. People just treat it like something that everyone knows how to do well.

Creating the conditions for healthy communication among people *is* interaction design.

Just having physical meeting rooms, or slack channels or zoom is like giving the end user a command prompt.

That's a bad metaphor because the command line is less taxing than zoom.

Read 10 tweets

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