Published: 21 November 2016
The value of thinking and working in the in-between
Gerry Gaffney:
This is Gerry Gaffney with the User Experience podcast. Today’s guest was on UXpod way back in 2007 when he spoke about visual communication, culture maps and infographics.
In the meantime, he wrote “The Connected Company,” co-wrote “Gamestorming” and recently published Liminal Thinking; Create the Change You Want by Changing the Way You think.
[You can get 20% off with the code UXPOD.]Dave Gray, welcome to the User Experience podcast.
Dave Gray:
Thanks Gerry, it’s great to be here and talk to you again after so many years and we did actually meet in person which was nice.
Gerry:
We did indeed.
For some reason I always associate the word “liminal” with the work of Philip K. Dick, maybe because his characters seem to sort of slip between different versions of reality.
Can you tell us what does liminal mean and what is liminal thinking?
Dave:
Sure, yeah. Liminal is simply a word that means boundary or threshold and it specifically describes the experience that people feel when they’re on a boundary or a threshold, between one thing and another. I think for those people in your audience who know Philip K. Dick, I think it’s a really great, I hadn’t made that connection but I think it’s a wonderful one because what Philip K. Dick often does in his stories is take a familiar world and throw us into a completely unknown context. So there’s always something that feels very familiar and always something that feels completely unknown and bizarre and that’s often what it feels like when you’re going from one thing to another.
Liminal is a word that came out of the field of anthropology, when people were studying different societies and noticing this common thread between, that we have in all societies where we have these rites of transition from girlhood to womanhood, from boyhood to manhood; the initiation into the tribe. These are all considered liminal times when you are no longer in one… like a wedding would be a liminal rite because during the wedding you’re no longer single but you’re not yet married so it’s that period of transition that people go through.
And liminal thinking, I’ve described it, it’s a term that I use to describe the skill or the ability that one can cultivate for getting better at these moments of transition and actually creating transitions when you might feel stuck finding your way through, out of these stuck points and into a new way of thinking about the world that can lead to much more interesting outcomes for you.
Gerry:
Can you remember when you first came across the term or the word, rather, ‘liminal’?
Dave:
Mm I’m not sure that I can. It’s been a long, long time though.
Gerry:
That’s a tricky one.
Dave:
Yeah, I believe that, well I mean everyone’s heard the word “subliminal,” right? That’s probably, at some point someone said the word subliminal and I investigated, well what does that actually, the “liminal” part of that mean? And subliminal simply refers to this, these sensations that are below the threshold of consciousness.
In other words, they are things that are happening but we are not conscious of them. So they’re below that threshold of sensation or noticing.
Gerry:
And I guess in a way there’s a sense in the stuff that you write and talk about, about becoming conscious of the things that are below the water line, if you like, and then exposing them to reality.
Dave:
Yeah, I think the way that I think about it is there are always… you know, everyone has blind spots but how would you know? You know if you have blind spots, how would you know? By definition you can’t see that, right? They’re blind spots. So how do you actually discover blind spots that you’re not even aware that you have? That’s a really interesting problem and I think it is… there are ways that you can do it. But it takes effort and it takes effort and energy to do it and even wondering why you should do that might mean the nature, the very nature of blind spots is that you’re not aware of them, right?
I can remember, and I’m sure you can too, learning how to drive and learning that you can look at the rear view mirror but there are things that can be very, very close to you that would not show up in the rear view mirror and you have to actually look over your shoulder to see those things and that’s a great example of a blind spot, right? If you’re just looking in the mirror you wouldn’t even know there was a truck in your blind spot when you’re about to change lanes but of course if you look over your shoulder you can see that and you have to know that that blind spot is there in order to look over your shoulder. And we have blind spots like that, you know that’s a very common one that a lot of people are familiar with but we all have blind spots like that.
There’s the saying you’ve probably heard; “If you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” And I think that’s the case in any profession or any profession where you become very expert in something, you have a tendency to think that your profession solves, is the one best way to solve a problem because you know how to solve a problem that way. And for you it may be that it is the best way to solve a problem and I think companies develop blind spots in the same way that individuals do and I was just in another conversation where we were talking about hotels. If you’re a hotel, you develop a certain way of thinking about the world that and solving the problem of giving people a room when they travel, those are blind spots that make it almost impossible to see companies like Couchsurfing or Airbnb when they came around because you’ve developed a certain set of parameters and ideas about the way to solve the problem, and you may not be able to see outside of those boundaries whereas someone who’s simply looking at the customer problem with completely fresh eyes may see opportunities that are invisible to you. And this is a common problem.
Gerry:
Yeah, it’s funny. I mean to sort of go completely off topic already, you know you talk about technology enabling us, well you don’t actually, but you know technology when we’re driving enables us to see something that’s in our blind spot but in some ways the technologies we use are actually preventing us from seeing or they’re even creating blind spots, if you look at something like our use of Twitter, or social media in general, we tend to get into these echo chambers whereby we’re not, you know, we become less and less conscious of those blind spots.
Dave:
Well, yeah I mean even in a simple car analogy, right? The mirror, if you have no mirror, you would know you’d have to look over your shoulder because you would know there are all these blind spots that are behind you but the fact that you have a mirror overhead and a mirror on both sides gives you the illusion that you can see behind you without turning around, right? And unless you know that there’s a blind spot there, and usually we learnt it from a driving instructor, right, or a parent, or someone who was teaching us how to drive, taught us that there was this space back there, if you didn’t know that they were there then you would be operating under the illusion that you had no blind spot and then by the time of course you discovered that blind spot it might be very late, you might actually get yourself into a very messy situation. And I do think that all technologies, any technology, by its nature are going to create blind spots. It’s going, by the nature of any technology or tool, it will allow you to increase your focus on certain aspects of a problem and by the very nature of allowing you increased focus on that thing it will automatically create blind spots to whatever is not that thing.
Gerry:
Hmm.
Dave:
I don’t think I said that very well but...
Gerry:
No I think I get the idea.
In the first part of the book, to get back to the book, you talk about beliefs and you ascribe six attributes to them, you call them principles. You say: they are models, they are created, they create a shared world, they are limiting, they defend themselves and they are tied to identity. But you also say belief is a material. What do you mean by that and why does it matter?
Dave:
Well, the context of that is that I come from a… My blind spot, I suppose, is that I come from kind of a design mentality, a design approach which is this idea that you can solve problems in a lot of times by being creative about how you define the problem and how you look at the problem and looking at it from different angles. And so when you’re a designer, it’s very important for you to understand the nature of the material that you’re working with. I went to art school and we had a class called Nature of Materials and all we did was make things out of metal, make things out of wood, make things out of plastic in order to learn what is the nature of those materials, what they can and can’t do, what are good ways to work with them and what are ways that are counterproductive to work with them to, you know every material has certain properties. And if you want to, if your goal is to help people change their minds or to change your own mind or to work with the idea of mindsets and shifting mindsets then belief is the material you need to get familiar with and learn about.
Gerry:
I guess we don’t think of belief as a material though, do we? Or as a tool.
Dave:
We don’t but I think it’s a, for me it’s a… Once I started thinking of belief in that way I started asking the questions you would ask about any material, right? What are the properties of paper? You can fold it, you can write on it, you can wrap a box with it. There are certain things you can do with it and if you start asking about questions about belief in this way you start to uncover some interesting things; what are beliefs?
What are beliefs? What are they made of? How do they come into being? How do you, if you want to change a belief, what are the aspects of a belief that are changeable and what the aspects that are unchangeable? Which kinds, are there kinds of beliefs that are easier to change than others?
All these things, I mean at the very basic level you know beliefs are something that we feel in our bodies and our hearts and our minds, right, that we actually have a sense that they are reality, that they synonymous with reality. We don’t actually examine them that much and we certainly don’t ask ourselves very often what a belief is made of. And even the idea of like thinking of a belief as something that could be moulded and shaped is probably only something that advertising and other kind of evil manipulative people do, right? [Laughs.]
But I think one of the things that is very interesting to me is well you know if there’s people out there like let’s say advertisers and big brands that are trying to mould and shape your beliefs, you better learn how to do it for your own self if you want to be… and if you don’t you’re probably defenceless.
Gerry:
I saw you present at UX Australia in 2015 and you drew the pyramid of belief which is also in the book. Can you, I mean I know it’s a bit hard with voice only but perhaps you can give us a word picture of what the pyramid of belief is.
Dave:
Sure, I can try. I mean beliefs, the thing about beliefs; the first thing to recognise about beliefs is that they don’t just come into being all on their own; that we actively create them. We don’t do it consciously usually but we participate in the construction, creation of our beliefs; that we create them in the same way that we create anything in the world that we make beliefs, we shape them, they’re a tool that we use to understand the world and to get better at acting in it. And a belief, you know one way of thinking about a belief is you can think about it as a recipe or a rule for action; you know when I see this kind of, some certain kind of circumstance or situation, then if I do these things, these certain things then it’s very likely that this is the result I’m going to get.
I just had a conversation with somebody who asked me why do I keep my cash you know kind of wadded up in a binder clip separate from my credit cards in my pocket? And I said “Well you know it’s just in case somebody comes up and wants my money, I can throw them a binder clip you know full of bills and maybe I’ll get to keep my credit cards, you know, run the other way.” So I have a recipe in my head, right? A belief. Okay, one part of that belief is someone might actually come up and try and rob me, another part of that belief is they’re probably going to want cash, money, that’s probably what they’re going to be there for. Another part of that belief as well, okay if I throw the money in one direction and I run in the other direction they’re probably going to follow the money.
So those are all beliefs based on prior experiences that I’ve had and they are, they may be valid, they may not be valid. The only way to find out is to test them and please don’t come and try rob me to test this belief but I think that we create them and the way that we create them is we all have a set of experiences that you know every one of us has unique experiences growing up, the family that we grew up in, the life that we had, the experiences that we’ve had, the stories that we’ve heard other people tell or the way that we create those beliefs. We think, we have experiences, we learn from them, we notice certain aspects of those experiences and because of our background some people are going to notice things that other people won’t notice, right, and pay attention to those things and based on the things that we pay attention to in those experiences we formulate theories and we make judgements and from those judgements come our beliefs.
And the reason that that is important is because when we’re just sitting on top of the, at the very top of those beliefs and we forget how we came to have them, we start to forget that we created those beliefs out of our own experiences, and when we hear a belief that’s very radically different than our own, we just had an election here in the US where half of the country voted for one candidate and half the country voted for another candidate and I think on both sides of that gulf are people who are just amazed that their beliefs are so radically different from this other group of people and just devastated and just completely in shock that their beliefs could be so far apart. And you know the fact is that no belief is a reality. All beliefs are created based on experiences that we’ve had and you know people who have had radically experiences from each other are going to have radically different beliefs and when we run into these situations where we bump into someone who has a radically different belief we tend to try and solve it by you know reasoning and facts and logical arguments, but that doesn’t work and the reason it doesn’t work is I can’t logically explain to you why your experiences in your life are invalid because they are valid, they are valid for you. All these beliefs have come into being because they work for you and you can’t explain away a belief that is so embedded in your life that it’s just kind of like your operating manual.
The only way to do this is start deconstructing down that pyramid of belief and saying, “Okay, well how were this person’s experiences different than mine?” and trying to explore that with them and understand you know what is the path by which people come to certain beliefs. And I think if you can understand that, that gets back to this idea of understanding belief as a material. If you can understand how they are constructed then you have a better chance of understanding how they might be deconstructed, your own and other people’s, how you might be able to deconstruct them and actually come to a better understanding of your beliefs, other people’s beliefs and maybe how close they may or may not be to the reality that you’re both experiencing.
Gerry:
I must admit after hearing you talk on this topic last year, I went and I subscribed to a newspaper whose political beliefs I don’t ascribe [subscribe] to so in a kind of weird way you were contributing to a media outlet that might not concur with your own way of thinking. But Dave you...
Dave:
Well that’s brilliant, that’s brilliant, Gerry. Can I just pause on that for a minute because I think that’s a really great point? One of the only ways that you’re going to ever get outside, and we all have a bubble, right? We’re all walking around with this bubble of belief around our heads it’s just sort of like that we’ve formulated over time. One of the only ways you’re going to get out of that bubble is to actually do exactly what you did, start subscribing to you know channels or categories of things that you know in advance are going to challenge you. I know for me, you know my world, my political world, my foreign affairs world opened up dramatically when I started paying attention to Al Jazeera as a news channel. Al Jazeera is a very legitimate news organisation. It operates by the absolute same fundamental principles of the press in any other part of the world. However, because it has a different set of audiences and it covers things from the perspective that matters to its audience, you see things on there that are just absolutely not covered or discussed in the western media, any western media. You see stuff that is not on BBC, it is not in The Guardian, it’s not in any of the US news channels and even, I mean that’s exactly what you want to do if you’re trying to understand what’s really going on, that’s exactly what you want to do.
Gerry:
Coincidentally I’ve been re-reading “1984” and at one stage it occurred to me this idea of being able to reconcile opposing beliefs was uncomfortably, getting uncomfortably close to the concept of “doublethink” which Orwell describes as ‘the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously and accepting both of them.
Dave:
You know I think that is actually that is… I know that “1984” is a book about a dystopian future but I do think that’s an incredibly important and valuable skill for people to be able to, I mean if you, let’s say you have a belief, let’s just say hypothetically, right, you have a belief that’s wrong, that’s just wrong. And you have a belief that is absolutely contradictory to yours but it happens to be right, OK? If you’re going to ever take a journey from the belief that you hold today that’s wrong toward that more accurate or more correct belief and holding that belief in the future, there will necessarily be a period where you will have to be holding them both in your mind and accepting them both before you can actually make a transition from one to the other. That period will have to happen. Now it may not be a permanent state but it certainly is something that will be necessary. It will be necessary at some point because you’re not going to reject an existing belief until you have something to replace it.
Gerry:
One of the things that occurred to me as I was reading the book there’s quite a powerful idea I think is the battle for the obvious and you know you talk about this as well and you say how difficult it is to be able to even understand the necessity for questioning the obvious and I guess it goes back to Kahneman and the system 1 and system 2 thinking and all of these things you’ve been talking about and how we take things for granted but I mean the obvious is so, when we know something is obvious, like if you talk about a discussion about climate change or whatever you’ve got two apparently completely contradictory viewpoints.
Dave:
Yeah I think I mean when you think something is obvious and someone else has a different obvious that’s a very good indicator that you should start thinking about why that would be. What kind of experiences would this person had to have had to come to that belief?
Gerry:
And I guess you could say well okay I can envisage doing that and trying to put myself in their shoes, but how do I, and this you know a hypothetical situation, how do I get them to wear my shoes?
Dave:
There’s a very simple way to do that and it gets to the core of how beliefs operate in the mind and how they work. And this goes back to you know prior to almost any technology, when we were simply just roaming the planet in the hunter gatherer tribes and we had small groups of say 10, 12 to maybe 30, 40 people roaming around, living off the land and at that time there was only so many ways to learn things, right? You could learn things based on your own personal experience, eat something and get sick or whatever, find out that that’s not the right thing to eat or you can learn through the experiences of other people and the way that you can learn from experiences from other people is that they will tell you a story, something that they, a story is basically a belief wrapped up in a very neat package that’s easily accessible to the mind, a personal story. And the fact is if someone you trust or you know tells you a personal story from their experience, that’s going to have much higher validity than almost anything else, other than your own experience, right? So if you’re having an argument with somebody and you know them and they have some reason to trust you and think that perhaps you are trustworthy, which is important, right, then the way to move someone closer to a belief that you hold is to think about how you came to that belief and tell a story about how you discovered that or how you found that; what was the problem that you were facing? What were you interested in? What did you do? And what happened? And how that belief was validated.
And actually you don’t need to give someone facts, you need to help them through that journey and understand how you came to that belief. Perhaps it’s a story that, and it should be… The thing is if you start to tell a very interesting story that will trump almost any other method of conveying an idea to someone else. Personal story by your personal experience, and if you’ve noticed the great change agents in history, Ghandi, Martin Luther King, they are story tellers. They told, they communicated their ideas and their beliefs with stories, either personal stories or parables or what have you and I think that a lot of times people will try and force fit someone else into their way of thinking by arguing. Well argument, I mean argument is perhaps useful in a courtroom but how often are you actually in a courtroom, you know, with the structured jury and a whole system of laws around you to make your case? You know that system has been designed to eliminate a lot of the things that are really human about how beliefs are shared and how they move around the world. And I think the way to help someone see something through your eyes, the way you see it, is to literally think through how to communicate that through your eyes; you know how did you come to that belief? Why do you think that way? How did you construct, how did you create that belief for yourself? And sometimes you might find, as you start to deconstruct how you got there, you might find that maybe there might have been alternative pasts that might have led you to a different belief.
Gerry:
Hmm. Let me put on my cynic’s hat for a minute, Dave, is liminal thinking just another buzz word that’s going to replace design thinking or disruption or innovation or whatever’s cool right now? We’re going to start seeing liminal labs springing up around the place?
Dave:
I don’t know but I think, I mean, so let me deconstruct that statement for a minute. So does that mean, let’s say to take your phrase “design thinking” that it was let’s say “design thinking” is a buzz word, does that mean it’s not valid? That it’s not a useful idea? I don’t care. I mean if it’s going to be, it will be a buzzword or it won’t but the danger in something becoming a buzzword is that it then becomes easily discountable and can be explained away as well; it didn’t work, it didn’t work here, we tried it, it didn’t work. I think those are usually, those are kind of you know those are weak excuses really for not trying something. For that reason I would prefer it not become a buzzword.
Gerry:
But if it does...
Dave:
But I don’t think that’s something that either you or I have any control over.
Gerry:
That’s true, yeah. I really enjoyed the book, Dave, but a couple of times I found myself thinking, I guess this would be with my cynic’s hat on again, sorry about this, but a couple of times I found myself thinking “hang on, this is, I’m reading another self-help book.” Were you sort of conscious when writing the book of that aspect of it and did you put much thought into it? Did it concern you?
Dave:
What’s wrong with a self-help book?
Gerry:
Well I guess I didn’t expect to come at one of your books or one of the books that I was reading for you know if you like business reasons or for learning purposes and realise you know like it, occasionally… occasionally I just got this moment of discontinuity where I was thinking I was reading what I thought was a design book but it’s actually about, it’s actually you know it seems to be coming across to me as a self-help book.
Dave:
Yeah, I wouldn’t argue with you if you told me it was a self-help book. I mean if it was I would ask you, did it help you with anything?
Gerry:
Yeah it certainly did but I just wondering if you, if you had that mindset at any time during the writing of the book?
Dave:
I certainly did at some point, you know realise that this was crossing over into that territory for sure, yeah, absolutely. I think it’s funny because you, you know, I write books in a way because I am a problem solver and I write books to solve a problem often and when I, so I’m faced with a problem and I’m trying to understand how to solve that problem and I, in the process of writing a book is for me a process of problem solving a lot of times. OK, what’s the solution to this problem? How do you solve this problem? And often when I write a book it solves one problem but that leads to the next problem, right? So “Gamestorming” was a book to solve the problem that people have of getting high energy, high engagement and better outcomes from their meeting, getting more work, better work done, bringing, to use your buzzword, bringing design thinking into the interaction that we have with other people that create and design things. So it solved that problem.
But then I realise as I watch people operate in the gamestorming world, for those that don’t know, gamestorming’s kind of just a recipe book for better, more productive meetings, better outcomes out of meetings, I started realising, OK, people can do this and if they are not self-aware or aware of some of this other stuff around beliefs, they can fail to achieve their objectives and so how do you solve a problem when let’s say the person that’s reading the book is the problem? Right? How do you solve that problem without it being a self-help book? Or is contributing the problem or is contributing in a way that they are unaware that they’re contributing to the problem. I mean any book, right, is a… I mean a book is a kind of a rhetorical device, right? A book is, the purpose of a book is you want to read it, if it’s a non-fiction book, let’s say, you want to read it and you want to come out the other side changed in some way for the better, improved. So by that definition any book that’s about learning is a self-help book, right?
Gerry:
Yeah, fair point. Tell us about your dog, Dave.
Dave:
[Laughs] I have a dog. I use the dog in the book, I told a story or two about the dog because I think it’s very, you know when you think about beliefs you think of them as something that is a product of the higher mind and just even dogs have beliefs and you know when you start to look at beliefs and start to deconstruct them and see them for what they are and how they operate, it’s a little bit humbling because you can say “Oh well, okay, so what’s a more powerful force in the dog’s life? The dog’s beliefs or my beliefs about the dog?” And in my case I found that it was my beliefs about the dog that had the most powerful effect on improving his life and mine and by, and I think that’s something that, the reason I think that’s important is because we often look at our challenges with other people and we look at it, OK, the problem is this other person and the problem that I have to solve is to change that person’s mind.
Gerry:
Yeah, I like the story you told about the dog snarling or snapping at a family member. Can you tell us about that because I thought it was quite indicative of...
Dave:
Yeah well we think usually the problem is in the other person, right? And part of the goal of this book, and maybe that’s where it becomes uncomfortable like a self-help book, is that you might pick it up because your goal is to learn how to change other people’s minds and you might find as you read the book that you’re learning how to change your own mind. And the fact is that your mind and that other person’s mind operate together as a system and the story about the dog is a good one. We adopted a rescue dog, his name was Spitfire and his name was Spitfire for a reason. He was high energy, very, very high energy dog. He seemed great and we, I think it was Thanksgiving, and my wife said “Oh, as a celebration, we’re all having a great time, I’m going to give the dog a big bone,” and that dog turned into a very snarling, angry dog as soon as he had this bone and that happened on a couple of occasions where the dog reacted in a way, it just transformed into a, you know it was a Jekyll and Hyde kind of phenomenon, the dog just transformed from a happy-go-lucky thing into just a snarling beast. And my first instinct was, you know this is a problem dog, we should take this dog back to the pound, this dog cannot be around kids, this dog cannot be, should not be, you know it’s a problem dog. And we brought in a guy… they call him the dog whisperer, he was kind of a dog therapist or something. Anyway, my wife had heard about him. He came in, he met the dog and he told me “just think about it this way. This dog probably had to fight for his food for his whole life and you don’t know the situation he grew up in but he probably had to, if he had anything good, he had to protect it with his life or it was going to be taken away. And it’s just going to take him a while to learn that he’s safe and the way to do that is to build a relationship with this dog.” And he said, “You spend twenty/thirty minutes of quality time with this dog once a day and you’ll find a completely different animal.”
And I did that and I started carrying little treats around and whenever we would meet another dog where he would you know at first when he would meet other dogs he’d be anxious and snarling and just looking at them as an enemy. I started to slowly train him out of that by whenever we saw another dog I would give the other dog a treat and then I would give him a treat and so he started to look forward to seeing other dogs and by me changing my perception of him, over time that was able to change him and I think that’s what I mean when I say that we often look at our conflict with another person, let’s say a boss or issues with our significant other or kids or whatever and we think well that other person’s the problem. They need to change. But a lot of times what’s required for that change to happen is for us to change how we show up in those situations that are these self-reinforcing behaviour patterns and if you could change the way that you show up and have different expectations and be and believe differently in those situations you will find, it’s often the case that you can create a lot more change than you would think simply by changing your own mind about things.
Gerry:
Mm. I did have another question here but it’s a cynical one. So you’ve talked me out of, you’ve convinced me it’s the wrong way to ask so I’m just going to...
Dave:
[Laughs.] Go ahead and ask me.
Gerry:
No, no it doesn’t fit in anymore. It’s gone now. But listen, Dave, I listened to the old 2007 podcast and it struck me that you’re definitely on some sort of journey. Where are you going?
Dave:
Yeah that’s a great question.
Gerry:
All my questions are great questions, Dave.
Dave:
It’s a yeah I’m not sure, I think that you know I was born and I was one of those kids that never had a lot of like, I was never confused about what I wanted to be or where I wanted to go and when I was a kid it was all about drawing and I wanted to be drawing, visualising and making sense of the world. And then as I got older, it became well this drawing is a skill for helping create understanding and I guess I think I’ve always been fascinated by this process by which we understand and make sense of the world and drawing was just one of the mechanisms for that and we are born with this amazing engine, this mechanism, this thing that helps us translate all these abstract patterns that are hitting our retinas and our nerves. Somehow synthesising that into a cohesive world, sense of the world that we can operate in and we can operate with each other, I’m just completely fascinated by this mind, the human mind and the way that it operates and the way that we make sense of and understand the world and I think I’m just going to continue to explore how we can understand better how to make sense of the world, how to operate with each other, how to make great things happen together, how to avoid making terrible mistakes and how to counterbalance those things like cognitive biases and things that get in the way of us seeing clearly. I think helping people see and operate in the world in a way that’s where they see clearly and they’re able to communicate clearly and achieve their goals and operate effectively, that’s just my journey and I don’t know where it’s going to take me next but I’m fascinated by it.
Gerry:
Well, Dave’s book is fascinating. I read it overlooking a beach in Greece a couple of months ago and it’s called Liminal Thinking; Create the Change You Want by Changing the Way You think. You can get a 20% discount at the Rosenfeld Media website with the code UXPOD.
Dave Gray, thanks so much for joining me today on the User Experience podcast.
Dave:
Thanks for having me, Gerry, it’s a pleasure.
Gerry:
That’s a wrap for me, Dave, anything else that you wanted to cover off or mention or…
Dave:
No, no… I was curious about your cynical question.
Gerry:
Ah the cynical question was, you had already covered it off, I’d said: “Many listeners are hard-nosed UX people, what’s the practical relevance of liminal thinking to them?” But I think you’d well and truly hit that one on the nail, hit that nail on the head by the time we got to it.
Dave:
Okay, I mean UX people are the frontlines of change, right, Gerry? If you’re a UX person and you haven’t bumped into someone who needs to change their mind about something, you must not be doing something right. [Laughs.]
Gerry:
Yeah that’s true. All right.
Dave:
Great, awesome. Thanks Gerry.
Gerry:
Great to talk to you again, take care. Cheers.
Dave:
Likewise, take care, bye-bye.