Drawing from over 30 years of experience in web design and data visualization, Shander explains that stakeholders often don’t know what they actually need and are often driven by subconscious biases. He advocates for “stakeholder whispering” methods to guide stakeholders to discover their real needs through empathetic questioning, rather than simply gathering requirements.
Shander emphasizes that this two-way learning process helps stakeholders gain insights about their own needs while ensuring that data dashboards and reports truly serve their intended purpose. He highlights key skills for insights and innovation professionals including empathy, curiosity, and what he calls “useful paranoia”—questioning every request as a starting point rather than accepting it at face value.
Understanding Stakeholder Needs
All Things Innovation: Thanks so much, Bill, for coming on with us today to talk about your book, Stakeholder Whispering. Let’s set the stage: You have a lot of experience as an author, a speaker, an instructor, focusing on data storytelling, information design, and data visualization, which is really to the heart of the insights professional. And you’ve written a book that came out last year from Wiley, Stakeholder Whispering: Uncover What People Need Before Doing What They Ask. It’s a great title.
What inspired you to write Stakeholder Whispering? How did your personal and professional experience kind of shape the ideas in the book?
Bill Shander: The basic idea, and the reason I was inspired to do it, is all the work that I’ve done for my entire 30-plus year career in preparing content for people. I used to do web design and development, then I was doing data storytelling and visualization. Whether you’re creating a data dashboard or a report, insights packaged up for somebody in whatever way, shape, or form, those insights are there for a reason. Someone’s consuming that report in order to learn and to make a decision. This data, and these insights, they don’t exist in a vacuum.
They serve a purpose. If you don’t understand the purpose that they’re meant to serve, then it’s a giant waste of time. My entire career, whether I was designing a website and a client might ask me, hey, can you make the buttons on the website blue? I would say, well, maybe, let’s talk about why you want the website buttons to be blue. They would say something like, well, we want them to be noticeable. We really want them to stand out, to pop. OK, so what you really need is noticeable buttons. You want people to click on the buttons. That’s the actual need. Now blue may be the answer. We’ll figure it out together, but we have got to identify the real need, whether it’s a website or an insights report, whatever the case is, you have to understand your stakeholders.
When Wiley approached me to do this book, they originally approached me to do a data visualization and data storytelling book, and there’s a million of those. I just never wanted to write that book for a variety of reasons. But I had this idea because this is probably the most important skill I’ve developed. Any success I’ve had is because I was really good at understanding my actual clients’ needs, not because I was so great at design or storytelling and any of the rest of it, to be honest.
The Art of Conversation
All Things Innovation: You bring up a lot of great points. The market research field is awash in dashboards and reports, always focused on engaging the stakeholder, making sure that their work has impact and influence, influencing stakeholders, and trying to make strategic decisions.In terms of the book, you emphasized the importance of understanding and managing stakeholders effectively. What mistakes do we commonly make when we are trying to engage stakeholders?
Bill Shander: I think the very first one, especially if it’s literally your job to produce that dashboard or report, is to assume that the stakeholders know what they need from you. Because guess what? They don’t. They are not data experts, which is one part of it.
But more importantly, human beings are all driven by their subconscious. We’re not very good at reasoning. This is proven by decades of research. If you really allow yourself to look at that square in the face, you’ll recognize that when someone asks you, hey, make this dashboard with this data, the first thing you need to do is just question whether that’s really what’s needed.
It’s the first thing. Recognize that they’re being driven by their subconscious, their own biases, the fact that they’ve always done it that way, the fact that somebody else did it that way last month. That’s why they’re asking you to do it, not necessarily because it’s what is actually needed. Start there, recognize that that may not be the need. And then from there, you can do what needs to be done.
I talk in the book about the technique, the art, of having these conversations, but you have to start from that point. And if you’re the stakeholder, if you’re the one asking for a dashboard, recognizing yourself, you’re asking for a dashboard because everybody’s making dashboards left and right all the time these days.
Of course, the first thing you think of is, well, I guess we need a dashboard. Slow it down and ask yourself, wait, maybe do we need a dashboard or is there something else that will solve my actual problem? Really think about the underlying need that you have in addition to what your stakeholders have. The first mistake that people and organizations make to your question is to not do that, to sort of take everything at face value.
Guiding Through ‘Whispering’
All Things Innovation: It’s a provocative point. Maybe they don’t need that dashboard after all. Let’s shift gears for a second here. You talk about whispering in the title of your book, which suggests a very nuanced and empathetic approach to stakeholder management. Can you elaborate on what you mean by whispering and how it differs from traditional stakeholder engagement?
Bill Shander: By the way, it is a provocative point. I think it’s a fair thing to say that. And I’m not saying that every dashboard request is wrong. Like 95% of them may be absolutely spot on. But there’s always going to be something missing or something that needs to be slightly tweaked in that request and that’s what you need to do the whispering for.
Now to your next question, you might be familiar with the horse whisperer from the famous book and then movie. The basic idea is that rather than beating the horse in order to get it to do what you want it to do, to train the horse to be able to be rideable, some people can whisper in the horse’s ear and understand what the horse really is trying to do in order to get the horse to do what you need. That’s where the word comes from.
In stakeholder whispering, it’s really important to recognize that, let me phrase it this way. The difference between stakeholder whispering and what we usually do is this. What we usually do is needs assessment, or requirements gathering. In other words, you asked me to make a dashboard, I’m going say, what data do you have? Tell me what do you need in the dashboard? What other requirements? I get the list of things like the rules I should follow and then I do it.
But if I go back to what I said before, and I wonder if that’s really what’s needed, the whispering takes a different form. It actually seems very similar as I am asking questions, but there’s a really important difference. What I recommend you do is you actually use the Socratic method. The Socratic dialogue is this. I ask questions not to learn from the answers, although that will happen. It is like needs assessment. I ask questions, I will learn what you need and what the requirements are. But more importantly, I’m actually asking questions to help my stakeholder learn.
It’s a two-way learning process. I’m asking the questions and they’ll be in answering the questions, learning about their own needs. It’s like therapy. So literally, it will be guiding them essentially towards an insight. In the example, someone says, make me a dashboard. And I started asking my questions, who’s going to use it? What decisions do they need to make? What is the data you have? In that process, at some point, if we’re lucky and it doesn’t always happen, but at some point they may say wait a second. Yes. Hold on. I never thought about it that way. You’re right. That data doesn’t do this, it actually does that. The decision needs to be this, not that.
In other words, I’ve helped them see for themselves what they really need from me. They’re clarifying the request. Again, it’s more important that I’m guiding them to the insight, helping them figure out what they need from me than just gathering requirements. It’s a subtle difference, but it’s really important.
Developing Empathy
All Things Innovation: It’s just a little bit of a different way of engaging stakeholders to reach those needs. For someone in the insights or innovation world, a market researcher, what are some key skills or qualities that they can develop in order to become more effective stakeholder whisperers?
Bill Shander: You mentioned one earlier, which is empathy. You have to be empathetic in order to do this well. I must really understand my stakeholder and try to anticipate what they might be thinking, feeling, needing in the context of the situation in order to do a good job guiding them towards their insights. Therapists are very empathetic so that they can do a good job guiding someone towards that insight that they’re trying to get in that case in their personal life.
Empathy is a really important one and it’s important for people to realize, we think that empathy is like a natural state, but it’s not. Empathy is learnable. You can develop empathy. You can work on your empathy. Another related concept which is also interestingly learnable is curiosity. Because if you don’t care, you’re not going to really be a very good stakeholder whisperer. But if you’re excited and interested in your organization, the data that you’re looking at, you’re curious about it, then you will genuinely want to find the answer. Therefore, you’re going to be more effective guiding these conversations to try to get to the heart of the matter because you care.
Those are two really good skills to develop. A third tactical skill is coming up with good questions. Being in that mode helps illuminate your concept. And I can talk a little bit about one of the techniques that I recommend using if we have time. But you know, asking questions is hard because you also have to be a really good listener. You have to be listening and not always thinking of the follow-up question and yet also be good at follow-up questions. There’s a lot of tension in that because you must truly listen to hear the underlying need and to guide them.
All Things Innovation: Innovation teams should have a lot of empathy for their consumer. Yet there’s also this empathy for the stakeholder and knowing what their needs and goals are and working with them.
Bill Shander: Yes. Empathy for the consumer, or whoever the most important stakeholders are, which includes the consumer, it includes the end user of the product, and so on. Their needs may completely outweigh your stakeholders. So your stakeholder may say do X, but your job is also to help them remember that the ultimate stakeholder is the consumer. Recognizing you have all kinds of stakeholders, your boss may be here, someone else may be here, you prioritize that list and help them keep their eye on the real need of the stakeholder, which might be the customer.
Driven by the Subconscious
All Things Innovation: One final thought. For readers new to stakeholder management or new to your book, what’s a key takeaway or piece of advice that you hope they will gain from the book?
Bill Shander: I honestly think the most important one is to remember and act on the fact that we’re all driven by our subconscious. Everything that happens, including stakeholder requests, is the starting point, not the end point. Your boss says jump, you don’t say how high. And it’s not because you’re going to push back and not do it. It’s the starting point. To investigate that request to jump and ask yourself and ask them, is jumping what’s really needed? Is it about the height or could it be about the distance or could it be about something else completely? Have those conversations. Engage what I call your useful paranoia. Assume that every request, everything is a yes, maybe, but maybe not. There might be an issue with a problem, something missing, some nuance that needs to be teased out. Start from that standpoint, and then everything you do in the end will be much better.
All Things Innovation: Bill, thanks so much for coming on and talking about your book, Stakeholder Whispering: Uncover What People Need Before Doing What They Ask.
Editor’s Note: For more information about Stakeholder Whispering by Bill Shander, visit the Amazon book store.
Video: Interview with Bill Shander courtesy of All Things Insights.
