One of the more surprising things about adulthood is the difficulty in differentiating “appearances” from “reality.” Kids actually can’t differentiate it, teenagers and young adults think they can, but as you get more experienced, the more challenging it becomes.
In the context of working with a client, there are various interesting ways to apply this insight.
One is when you interact with your client: always be clear on what you do for appearance’s sake vs. what you do because it helps your client achieve his goals.
Anything you do for appearance’s sake is things that you don’t think add value, but your client insists on it. It may not be ideal but it happens in the real world.
Maybe he asks you to run an ad campaign that you know will fail. Maybe he insists on a change to a design you know will make it worse. Maybe he asks you to fill out a form, or talk to someone, even though you know nothing will come from it.
This seems like just typical annoying client behavior. But there is an interesting and useful way to turn this into a positive: if you frame yourself as the truth-teller, the outsider-but-insider, you can be the trusted source to help your client see what is useful and what isn’t.
It’s too easy to forget that your client may be insisting on it because he doesn’t realize that it doesn’t add value. Lots of inexperienced people may think that Generic Survey ABCD is really valuable when, well, anything generic likely isn’t.
In other words: if you’re frank and direct about what is done for appearance’s sake and what is done for reality’s sake, then that helps your client not just think more clearly himself, but see your value. They will also see that you’re thinking about the core company objectives and not just following orders. Remember, you’re being paid not just to follow orders, but to follow orders and think about them.
Here’s one embodiment of that. You can use verbiage along the lines of, “Today, I’m focusing on X, as my top priority, Y as my second, and Z as my third because I think these have the combination of urgency plus importance for me to work on. After these, I will then find time for ABCD, even though it seems less likely to achieve Objective Q, because of reason R.”
An even stronger method for this is to propose a measurement or success metric for anything that is done for appearance’s sake. And maybe even the same for what is done for reality’s sake, as well!
