You may not want to hear this, but if you’re doing your job right all your conversations are “tough”. That is, they deal with complex, nuanced topics like application design or organizational dynamics or performance. They involve people who care deeply about those topics. They require arriving confidently at decisions that matter to your job and everyone’s job.

But, just because they’re necessary doesn’t make them easy. And sometimes it feels like our training prepared us for everything but the difficult conversation. Sometimes it feels like you all will never see eye-to-eye, or that none of you ever understand each other. Sometimes it feels like you all just keep talking in circles. Sometimes it feels like that one coworker doesn’t even *want* to come to an agreement. No one has these conversations because they want to: they have them because they have to.

In this workshop, we’ll talk about what makes conversations tough and how to navigate them. We’ll identify and practice techniques that you can bring to your conversations to make them productive. These techniques fall into four categories:

• Empathizing: Building understanding between people
• Involving: Drawing people into the process
• Redirecting: Shifting focus to productive topics or goals
• Reframing: Adopting a different vocabulary

These techniques directly address the most typical obstacles in conversations, like lack of empathy or understanding. We’ll look at some of these obstacles more deeply and discuss how fear and confusion are the primary distractors from productive conversation. We’ll develop a framework for facilitating conversations to arrive at meaningful conclusions based on the types of conversations you have. These different kinds of conversations include:

• Facilitating: Managing a conversation toward a productive outcome
• Presenting: Conveying ideas to get input or buy in
• Critiquing: Providing feedback on work to move the project forward

**AS OF AUGUST 19, THIS WORKSHOP HAS SOLD OUT**

UX researchers and designers have powerful tools for understanding people, but their training often lacks key skills needed to navigate and influence the business environments in which they work. This workshop will give you the business acumen you need to amplify your impact within your own organization or your clients’ organizations. Covering the fundamentals of finance, organizational structure, and strategy, you’ll learn the tools and frameworks that drive business thinking and decision making, and learn to be a better interlocutor between traditional business functions and your own function or department.
You’ll leave the workshop with:

• Foundational knowledge of business principles
• An understanding of how UX can be best positioned in relation to—not siloed from—the larger organization and its cross-functional teams
• A clear perspective on how UX can help define and meet enterprise business goals

Agenda

• Cultivating a business mindset in UX (30 min)
• Deepening empathy for the enterprise (30 min)
• The meaning and significance of key financial indicators (1 hr)
• The anatomy of an organization’s structure (1 hr)
• The building blocks for identifying and formulating corporate strategy (1 hr)
• Reframing our UX practices with a business mindset (1 hr)
• Optimizing cross-functional collaboration to meet enterprise goals (30 min)
• Wrap-up and group discussion (30 min)

Outcomes

• Techniques for thinking on your feet as you deal with difficult conversations in the moment
• Techniques for preparing for tough conversations to set yourself up for success
• Techniques for specific types of conversations typical to UX projects and processes
• Framework for assessing the obstacles preventing you from reaching productive conclusions

Many UX designers, product owners, and the people responsible for the digital world are facing incredible complexity. As they try to design simple front-end solutions for their users, the back-end reality of multiple databases, multi-level permissions, APIs, and content governance often seems impossible to tame. In this workshop, participants learn Object-Oriented UX, a methodology that helps wrangle that complexity into a tidy array of color-coded sticky notes. Participants will return to their organizations with a repeatable, scaleable, and collaborative tool for detangling—and visualizing—even the most convoluted IAs.

Benefits

• Understand why consistent, recognizable digital objects are important, from a psychological perspective.
• Extract the important business objects from stakeholder requirements and research, which will become the pillars of your strong information architecture.
• Create object-relationship models with crows-feet diagrams, which will inform intuitive and natural navigation.
• Get a handle on the full scope of your functionality requirements with a capabilities inventory.
• Build an object map, a magical artifact that gives a team X-ray vision into the system they are trying to design.
• Map your Objects, Relationships, and Attributes across systems and processes, giving your organization new information management Capabilities.
• Determine whether centralized or distributed management is best for your Objects.
• Learn how measurement and governance can make your information ecosystem improve over time, keeping it durable and sustainable.
• Understand your organization’s information topology so you can design a model that allows people and platforms to effectively share information.

**AS OF AUGUST 19, THIS WORKSHOP HAS SOLD OUT**

UX researchers and designers have powerful tools for understanding people, but their training often lacks key skills needed to navigate and influence the business environments in which they work. This workshop will give you the business acumen you need to amplify your impact within your own organization or your clients’ organizations. Covering the fundamentals of finance, organizational structure, and strategy, you’ll learn the tools and frameworks that drive business thinking and decision making, and learn to be a better interlocutor between traditional business functions and your own function or department.
You’ll leave the workshop with:

• Foundational knowledge of business principles
• An understanding of how UX can be best positioned in relation to—not siloed from—the larger organization and its cross-functional teams
• A clear perspective on how UX can help define and meet enterprise business goals

Agenda

• Cultivating a business mindset in UX (30 min)
• Deepening empathy for the enterprise (30 min)
• The meaning and significance of key financial indicators (1 hr)
• The anatomy of an organization’s structure (1 hr)
• The building blocks for identifying and formulating corporate strategy (1 hr)
• Reframing our UX practices with a business mindset (1 hr)
• Optimizing cross-functional collaboration to meet enterprise goals (30 min)
• Wrap-up and group discussion (30 min)

Outcomes

• Techniques for thinking on your feet as you deal with difficult conversations in the moment
• Techniques for preparing for tough conversations to set yourself up for success
• Techniques for specific types of conversations typical to UX projects and processes
• Framework for assessing the obstacles preventing you from reaching productive conclusions

Many UX designers, product owners, and the people responsible for the digital world are facing incredible complexity. As they try to design simple front-end solutions for their users, the back-end reality of multiple databases, multi-level permissions, APIs, and content governance often seems impossible to tame. In this workshop, participants learn Object-Oriented UX, a methodology that helps wrangle that complexity into a tidy array of color-coded sticky notes. Participants will return to their organizations with a repeatable, scaleable, and collaborative tool for detangling—and visualizing—even the most convoluted IAs.

Benefits

• Understand why consistent, recognizable digital objects are important, from a psychological perspective.
• Extract the important business objects from stakeholder requirements and research, which will become the pillars of your strong information architecture.
• Create object-relationship models with crows-feet diagrams, which will inform intuitive and natural navigation.
• Get a handle on the full scope of your functionality requirements with a capabilities inventory.
• Build an object map, a magical artifact that gives a team X-ray vision into the system they are trying to design.
• Map your Objects, Relationships, and Attributes across systems and processes, giving your organization new information management Capabilities.
• Determine whether centralized or distributed management is best for your Objects.
• Learn how measurement and governance can make your information ecosystem improve over time, keeping it durable and sustainable.
• Understand your organization’s information topology so you can design a model that allows people and platforms to effectively share information.