Learning from interviews

Posted on March 21st, 2010 by Sacha Chua

David Ing (one of my mentors) thought it would be a good idea to help me learn not only facilitation techniques, but also Smarter Cities domain knowledge. He was working on an Industry Business Value Assessment study. In the interviews I observed, David set up the discussion, then focused on taking notes while another IBMer asked questions. Pairing up meant that one person could ask follow-up questions while the other concentrated on capturing knowledge.

Some interviews were scheduled for a week when none of David’s colleagues were available, so David asked me to lead the interviews instead. I was nervous, but I knew that he could always step in and ask questions to bring the conversation back on track if needed.

David handled the overview and the discussion guide. My role was to actively listen to the interviewee and occasionally ask follow-up questions.

What worked well:

Listening to people and guiding the flow of conversation through questions was surprisingly like hosting the tea parties I have at home. All I had to do was be interested—and with how passionate our interview subjects were about their different areas of responsibility, that was easy.

What I’m looking forward to doing even better:

I still need to work on asking more open-ended questions, but I’m sure that will come through practice and domain knowledge. Keeping a discussion guide in front of me will help, too!

It’s amazing how experienced people can put different insights together and make sense of a complex system. David and the two people helping us saw a lot of things I didn’t see until they pointed it out to me. =) This is great! I’m looking forward to building that kind of knowledge.

So now I know a little more about interviewing, and I know a little more about what people in city government think about. I’m glad I moved things around so that I could join the interviews!

More posts about: mentoring // 2 Comments »

Short URL: http://sachachua.com/blog/p/7083

http://coevolving.com David Ing

@sachac One of the first rules of consulting is to never work alone. It’s always amazing when two (or more) people go into a meeting, and come out with different impressions of what transpired. Immediately after a meeting, it’s helpful to take 2 to 5 minutes to discuss while it’s fresh in our minds, so that we each don’t go off in completely different directions. (From subjective views, this is formally known as sensemaking.

It’s been refreshing to have you make time to join in on these customer meetings. (We hadn’t discussed that those last minute cancellations had you playing a role of someone 3 to 4 jobs levels higher than you!) This provokes me to think about the organization of years past, when we would have more formal job rotations. In 21st century organization of rapid change, perhaps we need to think about small opportunities for alternative exposures to other parts of the business, rather than multi-month or multi-year assignments that are the normal periods for staffing.
http://sachachua.com Sacha Chua

Hello, David!

Glad to be of service, and particularly glad to have been able to do so when you needed the help. =D

I remember envying other people’s rotational programs, and wondering how I might get flagged as “high potential”-enough to get into something like that. I hear we still have rotational programs somewhere, but I don’t know the details, and my IBM Learning contacts shrug apologetically when I press them. ;)

So I’ve been stitching together my own rotational-ish program by talking to people across IBM, sitting in on meetings, helping people out, finding mentors, reading blogs and books, taking courses… It’s not the same as actually being responsible for something, and BizTech opportunities tend to be a hard sell in Global Business Services, but it’s a decent way to learn.

I want to know the bigger picture at IBM, and I want to be able to share it with others. It’s a huge company and probably impossible to comprehend, but I’ve got a feeling that we can bring more parts together than we could before. =)

On This Day...

2013: Listening to the clues about what’s working well: writing — I write down things I’m puzzling out, and I write down hints of things I might be good at. It’s [...]
2012: Happy monthsary to me! — One month ago, I submitted the paperwork for my very own company. I talked to mentors, set up my accounts [...]
2011: Learning more about Websphere and web service development — So I finally figured out what was wrong with the way I was trying to generate my web services for [...]
2011: Pirate kitties — One of the best things about drawing is that you can draw things that don’t exist. Somehow your world splits [...]
2009: Five reasons why I’m experimenting with outsourcing to virtual assistants — My experiments with outsourcing amuse some people and raise questions for others. It’s difficult for most people (including me!) to [...]
2006: Sick today — Not enough sleep and not enough water and certain other factors that occur on a semi-regular basis meant I was really, [...]
2005: Business book: Rich Dad’s Cashflow Quadrant — I read Robert Kiyosaki’s Rich Dad’s Cashflow Quadrant, another book in his Rich Dad, Poor Dad series. While I’m generally not [...]
2004: Buzzword for the day: named entity extraction — Apparently, it’s an established research problem…
2004: University of New South Wales: Concepcion S. Wilson — http://www2.sistm.unsw.edu.au/nps/servlet/portalservice?GI_ID=System.LoggedOutInheritableArea&maxWnd=%7BE8874FF7-0000-00F9-7CBA-C81A815EDE12%7D:-1115785899 - Information retrieval: Automatic indexing and classification of full-text documents - http://www.kmrg.unsw.edu.au/
2004: Computer science resources — - Computer Science Teaching Center, http://www.cstc.org - Computing and Information Technology Interactive Digital Educational Library, http://www.citidel.org - National Science Digital Library, http://www.nsdl.org
2004: Problem with footnote.el and auctex — From Rainer Volz: In case anybody has the same problem, I (probably) found the source and a workaround. The error “Symbol’s function definition [...]
2003: scrabble — Well, off to play Scrabble by myself. Or something.
2003: PyMacs — On #emacs today: solaries: is it still advantageous to learn elisp? I tried to do it, but if you always compare [...]
2003: thoughts for Ateneo — What can I give back to an institution that has supported me, formed me, taught me, and challenged me to realize [...]
2003: benefactor — Ateneo Scholarship Foundation Escaler Hall, 3:30 Mass, followed by the program. Semi-formal. Bring a small gift.
2003: [[bbdb://eric.vidal][eric]]’s siblings — “Jello’s the jock, Jove’s the lawyer. Joyce does architecture, Jaclyn does psych. And I’m Jay-jay.”
2003: web site statistics — Fascinating. 479 hits for ~sachac/ ! Cool. I shall try my best to be somewhat interesting, then… ;)
2003: [[bbdb://aadisht][aadisht khanna]] — Aadisht, you are for some inexplicable reason the top search query that leads to my site, according to http://richip.dhs.org/usage/usage_200303.html . [...]
2003: QuickBooks, cost estimates and job orders — Hmm. I got fairly distracted back there. Started reading up on QuickBooks and trying to figure out how I can work [...]
2003: swsusp still not working — Must find out how to debug…
2003: nintendo generation — Diane mentions the Nintendo Generation. Should be interesting – teaching tips?
2003: lilo.conf and make-kpkg — Note: Do not edit /etc/lilo.conf, make the Linux image something else (/boot/bzImage instead of /vmlinuz) and still expect a kernel-image [...]
2003: TrackBack — I should also think about trackbacks or some other way to let people who link to me let me know [...]
2003: lazyweb – many eyes make features shallow — “If you wait long enough, someone will write/build/design what you were thinking about.” http://iawiki.net/LazyWeb How did I get there? Google:RSS+blog+etiquette (such a [...]
2003: RSS publishing with remember.el — - I need to have a “template”, because I’m just going to insert text. - I need to update the timestamp [...]
2003: publishing my journal as an RSS feed — chrisb wrote in with a tip about Hugo’s http://larve.net/people/hugo/2003/scratchpad/RssForEmacsWiki.html . emacs-wiki-rss.el makes very nice lists of the wiki pages I have, but I [...]

sacha chua living an awesome life