This is something I’ve recently come to articulate. When presenting ideas to our colleagues, friends, or even potential customers, it’s easy to get frustrated when someone “just doesn’t get it.”
I mean, what’s wrong with them? The value of our idea is obvious, right? If they don’t get it that’s on them. We’re just a misunderstood genius. We’ll just take our idea and go home.
But hold on. If they’re confused, will someone else be confused? In fact, how many people will be confused?
Proving value sucks
Years ago I was a partner at a web agency and we were working on landing a decent sized contract. The client was a medium-sized company that manufactured and sold hundreds of tools. The idea was to build them a WooCommerce site to better sell their tools. For the decades history of the company they’d sold through physical catalogs and traveling salespeople. Old school, but hey it clearly worked! We were going to expand their sales channels to the web.
We were a week or so before signing and beginning the project. We had details nailed down, their project manager was excited, and we were too.
Then, the CEO got involved. He showed up and canceled it. That was it.
I’ll never forget the reason he gave. It was concise and to the point:
“The Internet is a fad.”
This was something like 2017. I was fairly sure by then we’d proven as the human race the Internet was a fairly reasonably long-term bet. But that was it.
I learned something valuable, almost immediately once he said it: You can only prove so much value to a customer or client. To prove to this CEO that it was worth contracting with us, I’d have to prove the value of WooCommerce and, oh yeah, the Internet. It was too much of a gap and we walked away.
Clear value optics
When someone “doesn’t get it”, what they really don’t get is the value of your idea, and especially for the folks that are your target market, that really matters. The value of your offering should be as clear as day; it should be like finding something precious they’d lost.
Every time a customer gets confused, even in the smallest way, that’s a moment where the value of that product, feature, or whatever becomes a bit opaque to them. The clarity is lost and they have to find a way around it.
Imagine an old, window that’s opaque and distorted. If you looked a beautiful painting on the other side it would look awful. Not because the paining is bad or not valuable, but because the means by which its seen is flawed.
This is confusion. When a person says they’re confused, they’re not criticizing your idea, they’re letting you know that the window is fogged up and dirty. Don’t explain the object on the other side:
Clean the window
Look favorably upon confusion, especially from colleagues, friends, and customers providing feedback. Even if you are able to quickly explain things to your coworker such that they get it, take note that you had to do that. The person using your product does not have you standing there to explain it.
So the next time you’re in a meeting and you feel that frustration building because the other person just isn’t getting it, remember that their confusion matters. How can you adjust things such that the confusion is reduced in the first place? How can you make the window
