Now that you dimension it

I know it’s been a hot summer for most of you who are in the northern hemisphere, but if it helps I’ve been melting lately too. Only my brain, though, as I attempt to get my head around the 4th dimension. It’s all about different perspectives offering new ways to see the same objects.

We can’t experience that 4th spatial dimension personally, so every non-mathematical explanation is based on analogies and metaphors that try to attach abstract ideas to our physical lives. It would help a lot to have a 4th dimensional being pop over (or in?) and explain things, because they’d at least have lived 4D experience to share, but as far as we know that hasn’t happened yet.

What we can easily access are the lived experiences of our fellow 3 dimensional beings. We can talk to people from the finance department who bring a different perspective on how service is costed, funded, and measured. We can ask questions of the sales team, who constantly talk to people that are not convinced our product is worthwhile. We can understand an engineers view of technical constraints and invisible costs that impact the product roadmap.

All of those opinions about the exact same product or service can be true at the same time. You just need to hold a broader perspective, and to come at it from different angles. When support teams stay inside their bubbles (or, depending on your company vibes, stay trapped inside their high-security silos), their understanding is necessarily limited, though they might not ever be able to perceive it.

The same is true for other kinds of diversity. Diversity of culture, of financial background, of language, of race, and gender, and sexuality. All of those things, and more besides, create new angles from which to see things, new perspectives that you might never even know exist unless you have access to someone who is willing to share them with you.

The challenge for all of us is firstly to make sure we’re opening the dimensional door¹ to those people, and then to listen to those perspectives with curiosity instead of defensiveness.

In this week’s Supportive Podcast I chat with Help Scout’s Tom Walker about his past experiences in support hiring, trying deliberately to broaden Zapier’s team so that it better reflected the population it was hiring from, ultimately delivering higher quality service to a global customer base.

Tom gets into some specifics of what changed in the interview process, how it shifted the team culture for the better, and his advice for people building support teams today. Have a listen in your podcast player, or watch the video on YouTube.

¹ Which admittedly is not easy. It’s a 4th level spell, after all.