Scott Berkun's Blog

Beyond the Myths of Innovation: Live

One of my most popular books is The Myths of Innovation. It was published years ago but I’m still regularly asked to talk about the core themes of tech-hype, survivorship bias, the flaws of tech-determinism and what true innovation looks and feels like.

Recently I was invited to give a talk called Beyond The Myths of Innovation as the opening keynote at Interface – Québec this year. I briefly explained the Myth of Epiphany, but then told stories that are not in the book. It was an excellent event and I felt honored to be there.

They kindly recorded my talk and you can watch it here for free.

New book update: Rules to live by

For my tenth book, about wisdom, I’ve been experimenting with Substack, posting draft ideas each week. In a recent video update I explained I’m now starting phase two: revising these shorter, informal pieces into a complete first draft.

What does this mean to you? I don’t know!

My ambition for this project is to capture the best ideas about living well I’ve encountered in life and do it in as concise a way as possible. AND also avoiding the common annoyances these kinds of books have.

If this interests you, it’s a good time to join the Substack for this book. Why? You’ll be first to see parts of the project as they develop and as phase two completes I’ll likely send the entire draft to the list for your feedback.  

If you want to learn more, here are the first ten draft rules I’ve posted: 

What is a good rule?Don’t DieBe self-aware (but how?)Be here now (but how?)Be amazed by everythingDo it anywayEmbrace your luckYou are not your thoughtsDon’t polish your dreamsHarness your demons

That’s all for now. Cheers.

When should my free office hours happen?

For the launch of my latest book, Why Design Is Hard, I did weekly office hours every Thursday on Zoom. Anyone could show up, ask a question, get advice, or dig in on a topic I’ve written about before. Sometimes 10 people showed up. Sometimes just 2. But it was always fun, with lots of laughing and great conversation. I looked forward to it every week.

It was so fun in fact I will do it on a regular basis starting next month. And open it to everyone my mailing list, and to any topic from all of my books and essays (rather than just UX).

To me this is a service I can provide to you for following my work. And as a service, this means you get to help me decide when it will happen. Please vote. Thanks.

The official invite (with Zoom link) will go out to my mailing list, so join it if you are not already on it. I will likely skip this holiday week in the U.S. and start the following week. Cheers.

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Why Design Is Hard (new book)

My latest book, Why Design Is Hard, launches next week. This is a sequel to How Design Makes The World, but it’s written primarily for designers.

The core message of the book is that designers have the power to reframe their biggest frustrations into solvable problems. Instead of complaining and waiting we can take action.

It’s a short, fun, and opinionated reading experience. It’s the honest, real-world book I wish someone had given me when I started working in UX way back when.

If you want to check it out, here’s how:

Pre-order on KindleWatch the explainer videoJoin the substack Read the free excerpt

Leading Design 2022: Live Notes

I’m in NYC for Leading Design 2022, and I’m livebloging the event (taking notes in real time, updated for each talk). You can alos see my notes from the 2021 and 2016 events.

Comments in brackets [] are mine.

1. Kat Vellos – Better Than Small Talk

Vellos is the author of the excellent book, We Should Get Together. In addition to being a design leader she’s a facilitator and community builder. Conversations are a key part of this. But we live in a world starved of meaningful connection, even before the pandemic.

She created better than small talk, a simple system for better conversations, and some cards from this system were given out at the event. The core idea was to get beyond the basic, cliche conversations we’ve learned to have but that don’t really work. Generous curiosity isn’t hard to cultivate. Questions are a doorway to connection. A connection creates relationships that define the quality of our lives.

2. Peter Merholz – The Evolving Design Leader

The Peter Principle: how people get promoted into their level of incompetence. Five years ago Merholz gave a talk on design leadership of Coach, Diplomat, Champion and Architect.

Coach: Your job is to get the most out of your team. Diplomat: Creating a space for design to do well across functionsChampion: Managing up and out. Engaging with stakeholders and executives.Architect: Putting things in place so good design can scale

Design staffing continues to grow very fast. And that means that leaders and managers need to grow and we need more of them. We are putting people into management and leadership without preparing them. He wants us to get out in front of this incompetence.

“She went too deep too fast” – about a new design director, from a VP of Design. New directors tend to focus on what they are already good at (classic Peter Principle).

He described the path of becoming a design leader: leader, to manager (front line manager), to director (middle management), to VP of design (executive). In each of these stages, you are evolving into a new form.

Design leader’s area of attention:

Creative: vision, direction, practice, standards (goal is quality)Business: design work aligns with business, cross function and planning (goal is business sucess)People: recruiting and hiring, performance and career development, culture (goal is team health)Operations: Program management, communication, budgets (goal is effectiveness)

How the focus of design leader’s shifts as you rise:

Lead -> Manager: mostly creative leadership and people managementManager -> Director: shift to cross functional relationships – less time managing down – sideways and up. Bad middle managers are a black hole, since they are such a pivot point.Director to VP: You are not recieving strategy, you are informing strategy. You define what quality means and how it can be achieved. You are responsible for defining and delivering on value. As you rise your attention shifts to more and more managing up and away from your own team

The org looks to the design leader as their figurehead – the designers want this person to be an inspiration. And they are expected to do everything (design savior). How can we shape design leadership teams so that the burden of leadership is shared?

3. Hayley Hughes – Trust Between Teams

She opened her talk sharing a story about her Mom, who is ill, and needs an entire team of people to give her support. Over years silos have formed and individual experts have their own systems, that don’t work very well in aggregate. She has spent most of her career working on design systems at big organizations.

Team of teamsunderstanding a team of teamsWhat holds us backRemoving the blockers

Four archetypes for teams:

Command – hieracy is efficient, but least resilientCommand of teams: teams work well, until they hit a siloTeam of teams: each individual knows one other person on another team [image error]

She used to study food systems, how people obtain and are provided with sources for food. She was in Austin during the big storm in 2021, when the power went out and they lost all of their food. Soon they learned through neighbors and text messages who had surplus food. Sometimes systems that are organic and informal have more resilience than the formalized ones.

messy relationships and messy cities are the most resilient

– Erin White

What if we redesigned teamwork to be more collaborative? IBM had a tool called Radar that allowed teams to switch perspectives, changing their view to be less siloed.

Org charts are hierarchical, but there are many other ways to map the relationships between people and teams.

What holds us back?

Common false beliefes:

“it will slow us down.” – a fear that if we aren’t sprinting, we must be falling behind. Leads to burnout. “We’ll give you visibility.” – giving visibility can just be theater – if it’s not tied to planning and restructuring.“Management won’t buy in.” – suggests that you need permission to try somerthing new. But often bosses care about the results more than the means.“Our roadmap is already planned.” – this is a fear of ambiguity and change. It is safe to hafe a plan, the reality is that most things don’t go as planned. There must be room for emerging opportunities. “We own this.” – ownership can be the kiss of death for collaboration. Stewardship is a better model.

Eventually we need to redesign organizations to better afford the real goals, instead of what traditional organizational design tends to be good for.

FInal aspiration: she encouraged us during times of uncertainty, crisis and growth to choose collaboration over silos.

4. Ovetta Sampson – The Planck Value of Design

She grew up in Chicago and is an amateur physicist Planck value (or constant) is a fundamental law of how atoms work and it doesn’t stay in the normal bounds of how we think the world works. She started as a designer, went to design lead, then design director and now is a VP. She says Merholz is right in how unprepared people are to be in these roles, and as you rise more time is spent with other roles than with designers.

We can’t keep our insular preciousness about our craft – we have to be collective if our goal of human-centered design is to get good design into the products and services.

Her statement for what she does: “To amplify the beauty of humanity with design while avoiding practices that exploit its fragility.”

“Design is the conscious and intuitive effort to impose meaning order to chaos” – Papanek

“Without design leadership you dob’t know where you are going.

She referenced this paper (Core Responsibilities of Design Leaders in Commercially Challenging Environment):

Design is a verb:

how a produt is developedHow it worksHow it is experiencedHow it is improved

Her definition of a good manager: My job as a leader is to have you operate in your jam 90% of the time. 10% is unavoidable BS.

She told a story about working with young children and teaching them a design thinking method. She didn’t use any of the formal language we do. The task was to redesign the classroom. They emerged into a natural and shared approach to problem-solving (collective leadership tenets):

They treated the class like an ecosystemShare and rotating decision makingPeople are trustedSuccess comes from diverse perspectiveTransparent and effective communication

4. Alice Quan – Designing Your Dream Job(s): The Art of IKIGAI

In this short tlak, Quan offered that she is in her 6th dream job. She grew up in a small town in Illinois and her parents immigrated from China and Hong Kong (they are “asian tiger parents”). They didn’t have much (his family pooled their money to send her father to America) so she learned to make things scratch, and the idea of working with teams in organizations to make things means much to her.

Her father explained that she had three career choices they’d support: doctor, accountant or lawyer. But her best friend from high school studied design and she was intrigued. On her own, she built a portfolio and applied to design school but was rejected. But she persisted and asked for feedback and eventually got in and got a full scholarship. Only then did she tell her parents. (She joked that she catches herself doing the same things to her kids, telling them that e-sports is not a real career).

This was her Ikigai origin story. She was slowly learning how to apply the framework in her own life (she references Karate Kid, and how it takes commitment and patience to find your way. IK = ALIVE / GAI = BENEFIT).

5. Dianne Que – “I got you”: A Meditation on Radical Inclusion

The first step in inclhsive leadership is to see people as people. She shared some of her personal history (child of imigrants).

Meditation: a practice of cultivating understanding, love and compassion by looking deeply, first for ourselves and then for others.

Incluion: the practice of building the culture of belonging by actively inviting the contriubtion and participation of all people.

Practice is something you need to do regularly and often in order to get better at it.

Story: May 26, 2020. Day after George Floyd was murdered. She was on a work call created to create space for people to discuss their feelings about what happened, but there wasn’t a single person of color on the call. With the support of her manager they created a series of conversations for their creative managers. They started with managers and hiring managers (there was a lot of open head count on the team).

First question from management was: “What outcomes can we expect from these conversations?”

We have a culture that emphasizes:

doing over reflectingquantity over qualityefficiency over relatonshipsUrgency over Empathy

It’s common to hear people say things like, “I’m all for giving people a chance. but I don’t want ot hold anyone’s hand” which creates a paradox.

The process and the conversations that can often have the most value and creates the possibility for the desired outcomes.

Start to build empathyStart to identify WHYStart an ongoing conversationStart to develop a shared DEI vocabulary

The business why / The moral Why (source Michelle Kim, 2021)

DEI is good for business / it’s the right thing to doDEI leads to innovation / I want to help othersDEI leads to profitability / People are suffering

“I trust you and will back you up” Is a rare thing to hear from a (hiring) manager. Which leads to a culture of “I got you. We got us.”

In summer of 2020 there was blackout Tuesday. It was supposed to be an act of solidarity. It had an unitended effect of making actual BLM content harder to find. We will make mistakes, but the question is what will we do next. Commit to a life of stumbling forward (Contradictions for while people in racial justice work).

Why: our liberation is bound togetherEmbrace the process and the outcomeCommit to a lifetime of stumbling forwardHold multiple truths. Embrace the status quo.

She closed referencing many of the books and sources she has learned from.

[image error]6. Samantha Warren, Designing creative collaboration in a virtual world

[Warren is an excellent speaker and I confess i didn’t take great notes because I was enjoying her talk so much].

She wanted to be a designer when she was growing up (which other speakers mentioned was not their path). She observed her father visiting design studios and observed their creative spaces and was inspired by them. And she felt like she was observing unicorns work – and that these were her people.

She had a creative career and worked for a long time, until the pandemic happened. It changed how she felt about work. In March 2021, she wondered about how there might not be a return to design studios. Staring at a box, with little boxes in it, didn’t feel creative. She used to love planning offsites and thinking about how to cultivate safe and fun environments.

The key to workplace creativity is buildng psychological safety. But the nature of work psychology has changed because we are all remote.

She took time off and traveled. And talked to her friends and family. And tried to reframe the problem shw was trying to solve.

“You can take the worst feeling in the world and reframe it so that that terrible feeling becomes its own solution.” – Milton Erickson

It is design’s responsibility to lead broad concept making (low fidelity) to specific execution (high fidelity).

When you don’t have a whiteboard in the hallway, how do you replace that persistent team level open space? They use Canvas, but there are other tools. She explained the design process she used (and how the diagrams for design processes aren’t realistic).

She wasn’t sure in the pandemic that she wanted to continue in design. But in reframing the problem she has found new ways to collaborate and is optimistic about the possibility of connection.

A big update on my last few months

This is my first blog post in almost six months, the longest lapse I’ve ever had. Hi! How have you been? I’ve had a rough year but I’m doing better now and wanted to catch you up on some things.

In June of last year my right vocal chord was paralyzed. During a simple surgery on my neck some nerves stopped working for reasons not entirely understood. I was still able to speak, but I was suddenly a very quiet person, unable to raise my voice. I was told it was likely permement and if I recovered it could take up to a year. This had a profound effect on my mental health, as I wrote about in my newsletter. I thought my public speaking career was over but more profoundly had the first identity crisis of my life. Every social interaction was now a major challenge. Two months later my voice did slowly start to recover (it’s nearly 100% now), and I can’t express how grateful I am for this turn of events.Ironically the audiobook for How Design Makes The World released days before all this happened. I didn’t get a chance to promote it as my professional life entirely shut down just a week later. But still, the cosmic absurdity of these two events did make me laugh. For months I’ve struggled with anxiety, depression and PTSD. I’ve never had serious issues with mental health before, but this crisis sent me into the darkest of places. I lost all interest in reading and writing, two of my most favorite things to do. I found watching movies (another favorite), or listening to music (same), too triggering and my ability to communicate in person or over the phone was signifigantly worse. My sense of isolation and brokeness was profound. Peak tragicomedy was calling the spech therapy clinic on the phone to make a first appointment, the only way to contact them, but they couldn’t understand what I was saying. I’ll write more about this entire experience someday and what helped me on my path to recovery (there is so much junk mental health advice out there). I’m doing much better now but still have more work to do. I returned to FT work a few weeks ago, rejoining Automattic. In this crisis I lost most of my motivation to work on my own and to pusue writing books. This was shocking: given my ambition for most of the last 20 years was to write as many books as I can. I discovered a deeper need for connection and team work, something I’m sure the pandemic contributed to. I wrote about Automattic in my 2013 book The Year Without Pants, an early book about remote work, and it has felt so good to return. My role there is as a product and design coach to the company, helping teams to make better products. I’m grateful to Matt Mullenweg and everyone there who has welcomed me back.I’m grateful to everyone who reached out. So many of you wrote me long emails or sent messages checking in on me and trying to find ways to show support. I don’t know that I’ll ever find a way to repay you, but I do hope to be writing and creating more soon.I’m doing much better now. If you follow me on Twitter you’ve noticed my activity is back up as I’m able to read and write again, something I never imagined I’d lose the ability to do. I can’t express how grateful I am to the universe for this turn of events.

I’m not sure what’s ahead for me. This has been a profound and unexpected time of reexamination. I’m old enough (I turn 50 this year) to have felt I knew myself well, but now find I have more questions than answers. I promise to do what I can to share what I learn.

One thing I’m sure of: I’m grateful for the writing and speaking life I’ve had so far and I have you all to thank for it. Thank you.

I’m for hire for FT role (an explanation)

These last three months have been a wild ride. If you’re on my newsletter you’ve been getting updates about what has happened. My voice was injured during a routine surgery making it harder to speak, which was rough. Fortunately, after two months, my voice did recover. Which has been great news!

Yet I’ve felt over the last few years that the solitary work of writing books hasn’t been as interesting to me as it used to be. Then the pandemic hit and like everyone, I’ve felt more isolated. And now with this experience of losing and recovering my voice, my passions have shifted. I need to be part of a team again, which is why I’m looking for a job. I need to be part of a group working together, something I’ve missed for too long.

As far as what I’m looking for, looking back over my career (LinkedIn) there are two strong themes. I’m hopeful I can find an organization that needs someone to influence the direction of UX, PM, innovation or remote work, the subjects of my books, through coaching or leadership. Writing, speaking and teaching are all in my wheelhouse. Or perhaps I’ll return to something more in line with the PM roles I’ve done in the past. I’m looking first for a great culture where my skills can have value.

I plan to continue writing, teaching and tweeting, but there will be some adjustments along the way.

Please do get in touch if you have something interesting in mind for me. Thanks.

Watch this short video if you want to hear my voice – I’ve missed it and I’m so glad to have it back.

Audiobook for How Design Makes The World

Excited to announce the audiobook for How Design Makes The World is now available on most platforms. I worked with a great narrator, Keith McCarthy, to craft an excellent listening experience for you.

The book is about how design applies to everything, but it’s already in the top #10 audiobooks for architecture on Amazon and Audible.

Audible / AmazonLibro.fmGoogle PlayNookScribdKobo

The Greatest Design Lessons: Tue. June 8th (live)

Two weeks from today tune in for this live presentation on the greatest design lessons I know. It’s a free event and all are invited.

There are many important lessons to learn about good design but I’ve picked the five most important and powerful ones. This interactive session is aimed at everyone who makes things for others, from UX designers to team leaders to engineers and managers. Surprisingly the fundamental mistakes we all make are often the same, but the real lessons run deep and are easy to overlook, and that’s where my advice comes from.

When: Tuesday, June 8th, 1pm PST / 10am EST
Who: All are welcome – designers and anyone interested in good design
Register: Free at this link

These lessons come from insights I’ve learned from studying over 100 design books, my many years of experience and what I’ve learned since How Design Makes The World was released. It’s the best single small package of design advice I can possibly give.

It’s the perfect event to share with your team and organization. Both for design teams and for everyone designers work with every day.

Why Bad CEOs Fear Remote Work

Remote work expert David Tate wrote that when fearful CEOs talk about workplace culture, they’re really talking about workplace control. Their insecurities demand that the way work is done by employees is always visible, highly regulated and uses the methods executives prefer, rather than what’s best for everyone’s productivity. Remote work is seen as a threat to many CEOs simply because of their fear of change and resistance to progress. That fear leads to an irrational rejection of remote work, instead of a thoughtful examination of where it has succeeded and what can be learned.

In her May 6th Washington Post opinion article, I worry about the erosion of office culture with more remote work, CEO Cathy Merill makes two fundamental mistakes common among fearful executives. First, it shows an ignorance of alternatives, as many organizations have worked remotely for years before the pandemic and have solved problems she considers unsolvable. She may not prefer these approaches, but her lack of awareness of them is incompetence. Second, she is infantilizing her employees by presuming they are not capable of and motivated to be productive and collaborate even when the CEO can’t see them down the hallway. 

We are over a year into a pandemic and an era of great social unrest and uncertainty, yet Merill has chosen remote work, and not other likely psychological or cultural factors, as the singular reason why workplace performance has declined. And if this wasn’t enough of an oversight, her evidence against remote work consists mostly of examples from executive friends of their self-described management incompetence. 

She offered the story of an anonymous CEO with a new but struggling employee. Yet none of the leadership team did anything about it:

 A friend at a Fortune 500 company tells of a colleague who was hired just as the pandemic hit. He struggled. He wasn’t getting the job done. It was very hard for the leadership team to tell what the problem was. Was it because he was new? Was he not up to the work? What was the specific issue? Worse, no one wanted to give him feedback over Zoom when they hadn’t even met him. Professional development is hard to do remotely.

This is simply a management failure. Does this company not have telephones? Or email? Have they never worked with a vendor or client that wasn’t in the same building? They are responsible for helping this employee regardless of what technologies are available or not. This is inept management hiding behind technological fear.  

Merill estimates that 20% of work is helping a colleague or mentoring more junior people, extra work that she feels is impossible to do remotely. This is despite dozens of popular collaboration tools and mentoring programs that work entirely online. It also denies the dozens of remote corporations like Automattic and Citrix that have vibrant work cultures where these “extra” activities are successfully done remotely.

Merill and her peers might not like these alternatives, but she never explains why. She even goes so far as to suggest that remote workers should be paid less and lose their benefits, since in her estimation they will never be able to contribute in these extra ways. She effectively threatened her own staff through the article (she apologized later after her staff revolted).

If the employee is rarely around to participate in those extras, management has a strong incentive to change their status to “contractor.” Instead of receiving a set salary, contractors are paid only for the work they do, either hourly or by appropriate output metrics. That would also mean not having to pay for health care, a 401(k) match and our share of FICA and Medicare taxes

One quality of a great CEO is the ability to look into the future and show their organization the way forward. Instead of blaming employees, they take responsibility for solving problems. For every serious issue that arises they ask themselves what can I do or change in my own behavior that can lead my staff to a better place? They diversify their network to ask “who has solved the problem my organization is facing somewhere else and what can we learn?” Or perhaps most critical of all, they invite their own employees to participate in both defining the problem and exploring ways to solve it, instead of drawing lines in the sand and assuming the only way forward is the one that makes them the most comfortable.  

Technology is often seen as a silver bullet, oversold as the magic solution that can solve hard problems. This overestimates what a technology can do, as often it’s the management culture that is the real cause. But in the case of Merill, her CEO peers and remote work, technology is being used as a scapegoat. It’s the safe target to blame as it requires no introspection or accountability. Leaders that do this become fear-driven, allowing their competitors an advantage simply by exercising curiosity and seeking new knowledge. Smart CEOs chose to invest in their work culture and grow it for the future instead of hoping for the past to return.