… can be found here: http://arstechnica.com/staff/fatbits/2009/05/hypercritical.ars

A great article on how Apple has pinned down the affective dimension of design.  Even though it’s obviously a tech sector article it’s still got immense parallels for stakeholder engagement, summed up by:

Have you ever met someone who holds strong opinions but is completely incapable of explaining them? “I really hated that book.” “Why?” “I don’t know, I just didn’t like it.” Who wants to be that guy? That’s no way to live.

Maybe you’re afraid you don’t know enough about anything to trust the validity of your criticism. Putting aside the extremely small likelihood that this is actually true, it shouldn’t stop you. Developing your critical thinking skills necessarily involves applying your critical thinking skills to…your critical thinking skills. It’s recursively self-healing!

Up until now I’ve been thinking about stakeholder engagement problems mainly from the point of view of helping them to understand what we present to them, but here’s the same problem from the exact opposite perspective!  We also need to help them tell us what they are thinking…