Erik Michielsen: How are you learning to communicate more effectively?

Hammans Stallings: That's the one area where I'd say I get the most benefit of working in an environment like Frog where Frogs naturally are able to communicate with lots of different levels of people at once. So, not just groups but also making great things that communicate to perceptual abilities, say just the -- the form or the image itself speaks to nonverbal aspects of -- of the mind, which I think is critical to really being good at communication as getting beyond verbal, naturally -- really a more strong working in -- in the language, in written language especially. So, working with people who are so good and have been with in nonverbal kind of ways is tremendous and so, that's -- that's a -- what I've -- what I've -- where I've grown the most is a rendered appreciation and -- and understanding the kind of the -- the tools and processes that people use to do nonverbal communication.
We kind of enter a shared space with say, a whiteboard, and we both inhabit that. You know, they come in from their perspective and I from mine, and then it's a conversation with a lot of, say prompts and a lot of, say prototypes and we iterate. And so, it's an iterative process as opposed to a linear process, but it's mostly about creating an environment in which you can have an open, I’d say somewhat detached conversation about something, so it's not personalized in a way. That means that you can talk about something, evaluate it and not sort of see it as something that's critical about yourself. So -- and it works both ways. So, when they kind of help evolve an idea, I can sort of tell them that the compromise they've made in a certain way creates a -- it really loses, you lose some of the -- the meaning of, say it's what I'm trying to communicate, so we have to kind of continue to evolve it. So, it's depersonalizing it, and it's iterating, it's also, you know, creating a kind of a distributed cognitive state where you both can kind of work on a problem but from different perspectives.