Scott Berkun's Blog, page 2

The Lost Designer

Designers are hired to change things, as no one one hires a designer to keep everything the same. The challenge is that often we want those changes to happen on our terms, using our ideas, methods and beliefs. This creates a natural conflict. The way we understand design is different from how ordinary people like clients, coworkers and executives do. It makes sense that designers often feel ignored, misunderstood or even lost. Yet somehow we’re surprised by these feelings. And over a career, they can grow into disappointment and resentment because we expect things to be different from how they are.

Design culture makes us prone to cognitive dissonance, where two competing ideas exist in the same mind. For example, many designers want to feel special, because in some ways we are, but yet we’re surprised when other people do not understand us or find us pretentious. We want other people to use our ideas, but don’t feel we should have to explain or persuade. We want privileges like power and control, but don’t want the politics or relationships required to earn and wield them. Logically we can’t have it both ways, but often we behave as if we should. It’s true that all people are prone to cognitive dissonance but as an uncommon profession it hurts us more than most.

The problem is not so much that we’re lost in these competing expectations, but that we’ve been encouraged to expect someone to find us. Design education and design culture set many of us up to expect a different world than the real one. We often complain “I shouldn’t have to”, “why don’t they” or “they just don’t get it” which can be healthy venting. But we forget that the word should is an appeal to an authority, like a parent or boss. It presumes they have the wisdom to know better than their current behavior. This is our mistake. Who exactly is the authority we are asking to do the right thing and why do we expect them to know what is right?

We forget that our knowledge isn’t common since we are experts in a specialized field. If we can’t convincingly explain the basics of our profession, why should we expect anyone in power to already grasp them? Where would they possibly learn them if not from one of us? Our job is literally to make things simple, effective and beautiful – if we can’t do that in explaining design itself, whose fault is it? It’s like we’re linguists landing on an alien planet and are angry that they don’t speak our language. We can decide it’s a stupid planet, which might be true, and leave, but if we choose to stay? What if we think all the planets are dumb? Whose problem is it then?

This realization isn’t fun, the big ones rarely are, but it’s a better explanation for why situations we experience as “designer hostile” are likely just design ignorant. They really just have no idea and don’t know what they don’t know. Or the organization has major dysfunctions that prevent everyone from doing good work, not just designers (which means we may have more allies for change than we think). It’s helpful to take design out of the equation when trying to understand what’s really going on in most organizations. Instead, ask who makes the decisions I should be making? What assumptions led to this? How can that change? Whose help do I need and how can I earn it? The power designers want has to come from somewhere, but we should realize most people who have power have little motivation on their own to give it away.

Somewhere in our education was the silent assumption design appreciation is everywhere. That we can just show up to a new job, sprinkle ideas around and watch them grow. Design schools are centered on design. So are design books, design conferences and design friends. But this is a subculture. The vast majority of important design work is not done in subcultures or in design magazines. Instead, it happens in the thousands of businesses and organizations in the world whose goals and values aren’t centered on design. This becomes obvious if you look at who starts organizations and why they start them or the design quality of things made by many successful companies. But yet somehow we’re surprised, or even offended, when we face design ignorance. The truth is the more important the work you are doing, the more ignorance of design you will face. We should see it as an opportunity for progress, rather than an annoyance to avoid. All designers should be good at explaining the basics, but we’re not.

To stop feeling lost we have to first be honest about where we are. Few organizations are going to shift to our language, we have to learn theirs. We have stop waiting for someone to “save design” in our organizations. We have to open our eyes to human nature and how organizations work (or don’t work). We may have to admit it’s influence that limits us, not our design talent. What good is more design skill if it’s ignored? Maybe there are other skills we need to improve first? Ones that chip away at the real roadblocks we face? Accepting all this isn’t easy, but it’s healthier than choosing to stay lost, and bitter, waiting for the fantasy of a design-centric company or a design-literate world to magically appear in front of us.

We forget that every place we read about where designers have the level of respect we desire was shaped by a design pioneer who led the way. Who are the real design heroes? It’s probably not keynote speakers or design luminaries who make us feel good and preach to the choir, but instead leaders who rarely get attention who persuade, teach and gain the influence required to set up their design teams to succeed. If the workplaces we find ourselves in leave much to be desired, it simply means there is more pioneering to be done. Who is going to do it?

I’m doing all I can to help designers find their way. I believe you should have great faith in design. I wrote a book that teaches everyone how to appreciate the important work designers do. If you feel lost or want to help with this mission, get in touch.

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Management of the Absurd

Do you wonder why we obsess about categories and labels for things? It goes back to Plato, Aristotle and the birth of Western philosophy. They pioneered ways to use language to understand the world, but there were some unintended consequences.

Richard Farson wrote:

“The great contribution that Eastern philosophies can make to our own thinking is that they have little difficulty embracing the co-existence of opposites. That’s because they were very little influenced by Aristotle. He had the idea that things should be categorized; that if something was true, then it couldn’t be not true. He left that mixed legacy, that unfortunate dichotomy, to us Westerners and we honor it to the present day.”

We’re aware of eastern philosophies like Yin and Yang, how dark and light forces can stay in balance, but we rarely internalize those ideas as deeply as other cultures do. Instead we think the goal is for one force to dominate the other (e.g. good vs. evil), rather that dualism where both forces are needed (day and night).

One of my favorite business authors is Richard Farson, who wrote two books that explore these ideas in the context of work, Management of the Absurd and The Innovation Paradox. As the titles suggest, there are fundamentally strange things about how work works, or doesn’t work, that we tend to to ignore. We struggle to process absurd realities about life and avoid even talking about them. Part of the popularity of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War in the West is it’s paradoxical premise that the best way to win is to never have to fight.

Generally books like these don’t tend to be popular in the U.S. They’re too weird to most people and do not promise easy answers for how to be productive or succeed. And yet it’s these kinds of books that are my favorites. Books that don’t quite fit in a category and don’t promise conventional satisfaction, like Shlain’s Art and Physics or Anne Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. They provide the deepest experiences by capturing what’s puzzling, weird or simply hard to explain, and helping us to hold on to thoughts and feelings over time. These ideas stay with us longer because of their mysteries, because of what’s left unresolved that keeps us curious for years or even a lifetime.

Here are some of my favorite quotes from Management of the Absurd.

‘There is a difference between absurdity and stupidity…  Paradox and absurdity keep us off balance. In so doing, they produce the humility, vitality and creative surprise that make life so worth living. But they cannot be controlled. They will always defy the attempt.”

“Some senior managers who have been at the job 30 years don’t necessarily have 30 years of experience. They may have one year of experience thirty times.”

“Technology helps us in countless ways, but it always backfires. The term for this phenomenon in medicine is iatrogenic, meaning “physician induced.” Examples are complications from surgery, side effects of drugs, infections that result from hospital stays. There are more than a thousand different diseases that would not exist if not for the practice of medicine and the existence of hospitals. Half the time any hospital staff is spent treating iatrogenic disease.”

And from the Innovation Paradox:

The price of success too often is a loss of focus and daring. The tendency is to try to protect one’s accomplishments by shifting into cruise control. This syndrome gets played out repeatedly in the television industry. One network climbs to the top, begins to play it safe, repeats what worked in the past, slips behind, then gives may to a competitor on the bottom who’s taking creative chances because it has no reason not to.

According to an old military axiom, the weakest point always follows success. At those times it’s hard to resist the temptation to loosen up, take a breather, and abandon the intense concentration needed to fight your way up the next hill. Once a battle is won, soldiers are liable to ignore the sound of a twig snapping beneath the boot of an approaching scout, or overlook the glow of a distant campfire. Like soldiers, mountaineers say the most dangerous moment of their ascents is after they’ve reached the peak of a mountain. That’s when they’re most likely to fall into a crevasse or slip on a ledge. Surgeons, too, can find it difficult to stay focused once an operation has apparently succeeded. Until then, the demands of operating absorb their attention so completely that the scalpel seems almost to move itself.

Success is at least as hazardous as failure. It means redefining our sense of self around being a success rather than an unfinished portrait (This is a much tougher task that it sounds to those that never had to try.) We also no longer have failure to blame for feeling unhappy. If success can’t make us happy, we then must ask, what can? If we don’t feel successful and our life is problematic, it’s easy to see a connection. Obviously we surmise, the reason we have so many problems is our lack of success.

In the 1950s it was thought that the success of television would lead to radio’s demise. Instead, radio reinvented itself as a talk-show drive-time medium and roared back stronger than ever. Far from wiping out the market for fresh produce, as was feared, frozen vegetables whetted our appetite for fresh ones in countless new varieties. Convenience foods fueled a renaissance in gourmet cooking. Fast food inspired a passion for leisurely dining.

The Insider’s Guide To Evangelizing Good Design

Do you wish you had more influence on product decisions? Or that more of your talents were put to effective use on projects? This is for you.

The tech world often uses the term evangelism but you should avoid it. No one likes to be on the receiving end of evangelism. The self-righteousness inherent in deciding ahead of time to convert other people to your views without knowing anything about them has a dubious history and is often self-defeating. The first lesson is to use a wiser approach.

I realized this years ago and wrote How Design Makes The World to give designers and UX pros more constructive ways to show regular people the value of what we do. If you want lessons on this approach, join my free live event on Wed April 7th, I use stories and questions as the primary methods and they are central to the book and my advice. These are the most powerful tools for engagement that we have. The advice in this post comes from the same spirit.

A common mistake we’ve seen repeated at events and in articles is to start by teaching design theory. Or starting methodology warfare. Grand theories are intimidating just like overly complicated user interfaces. They don’t meet people where they are. We fall back on UX jargon and methodology-speak because it’s a place of confidence and we presume it will convince people of our authority, when in most cases we don’t have any (if we did, we wouldn’t be reading articles about design evangelism).

Here are my ten lessons:

A better model is to be an ambassador. Unlike evangelism, an ambassador has to learn the local culture and language. They are better designers of their message since they learn about who they are working with before they try to influence them. Ambassadors are not passive: they have an agenda. They just study the locals before acting and see their fluency with local culture as a key advantage. They know that earning the ear of powerful people is one of the most effective ways to get things done. Being a leader is a good model too, but for that you must earn followers. There are three tactics: broadcast, personal and situational. Broadcast is when you give a big presentation: wide reach but shallow depth. Personal is one you talk to someone one on one and try to persuade. The most effective is situational: your team faces a problem and you help solve it (using knowledge you hope they will adopt more in the future). You need some of all three, but situational is the most important as it’s the only direct credibility you can earn. Broadcast becomes more effective when you can refer to personal and situational evidence of success, but it can also be the way you learn about people and situations to focus on. Aim for small wins, not conversions to a belief system. No one transforms their beliefs all at once, except in movies. Instead of grand theories, find clear places where you idea solves a problem for one specific person. Pick the person who is most receptive to you (or least against you) and has some decision making influence. Ask about their problems. Find one your skills can resolve and offer to help. Provide value on their terms first and build from there. Common organizational situations UX design can contribute to solving are “how do we know what the right features are?”, “how can we save engineers time?”, “how do we improve customer satisfaction?”, “how can we increase revenue?” or “how do we earn customer trust?” Enter these conversations or initiate them, but use their language and goals first. If the title of your meeting request or first sentence of your advice is is one of these things, people will give you their attention. As opposed to “Give designers a seat at the table” or “You’re wrong because of the design thinking law of transverse usability matrices which dictates we re-initialize the project’s flux capacitor.” Allies matter more than ideas. Once you solve a small problem for one person, they are an ally. Everyone likes people who solve their problems. You can enlist an ally to help you convince someone you don’t know, but they do, to let you try and solve a similar problem for them. Eventually when it comes time to convince a leader, it’s your allies on their team that will make all the difference. Moving upstream in the decision process depends on allies more than your ideas or your charisma. Sometimes people have the same problem you do and they can become natural allies (who is equally frustrated by their lack of influence? Can you help each other solve the problem?). Your bigger goals require more powerful allies. Who has the power to make the organization change the way you want? It’s likely a VP, a director of engineering or a general manager. You often need smaller allies to gain medium ones and medium ones to gain big ones. But at some point you will need a relationship with whoever has the power to make the changes you desire. They have to know you personally and trust you. Before you try to persuade a powerful person, have two people that report to them already on your side (or who make the pitch for you). Design maturity grows one step at a time. Organizations only grow at a certain pace. If you expect to jump from level 0 to design nirvana in a month, you will never even get to level 1. Ambassadors are patient. They study the pace of change in their culture, and other similar cultures and define stages of progress (you should have a design maturity model). It’s demoralizing to the people you are trying to convince if you often express, even passively, how backwards you think they are. Engineers have more power than you realize. They have great influence over which defects they fix (including UI issues) and what the work estimates are on project tasks. They are a great source for small wins. Having even one engineer as an ally can make all the difference. How do you start? Express curiosity about their work, earn some trust, find out their frustrations and see if your skills can reduce them. The messenger matters as much as the message. We judge messages on how much we trust the person giving them. It’s hard to influence someone who barely knows you. Match the size of what you are asking for with their level of trust in you so far. As you grow trust, the size of your requests can grow with it. Like good product design, don’t blame the user. We’d never let an executive say “it’s the customers fault they can’t figure out how to use or product.” We should apply the same design ethos to our internal efforts as we do in products. Of course there are organizations that are so dysfunctional or poorly led that progress is improbable, but resist this judgement. You may have simply not found the allies you need yet, or developed the ambassadorship skills, to turn things around.

Often people ask me “Why should I have to do all this?” to which I say, you don’t! I agree that often designers are set up to fail by leaders of organizations. But recognition of this doesn’t change anything on its own and can be self-limiting. If you feel it’s unfair that your knowledge isn’t presumed to be valuable that’s fine, but do ask yourself, where does this feeling come from? Why do we expect regular people to know anything about good design or how to manage designers? How will they learn if a designer doesn’t teach them?.

The question is: do you want progress or not? Designers and researchers will always be minority professions. There aren’t that many of us. The word should implies there is some authority out there we can appeal to that will take responsibility but I don’t think there is one. The question is do you want progress? If you do, it’s up to us. If that’s you, I’m here to help.

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Thanks to Tony Santos and Melanie Hambarsoomian.

Hope to see you on Wednesday April 7th, 12pm. Register here.

Credit for arrow image: pixbay.

Event: Beyond How Design Makes The World

Did you enjoy the book? Or own it but haven’t read it yet? This session is for you.

To help you get as much value from the book as possible, this session will give you a fresh perspective on what you learned. I’ll give a quick recap on the core ideas, with new advice on how to apply these lessons in your work and your organization. I’ll share some new and behind the scenes stories as well as answer your questions on how to put the book to work for you.

When: Wednesday, April 7th, 12pm PST
What: Beyond How Design Makes The World / Design Evangelism
Register: click here or on image.

Are You a Self-Limiting Designer?

“self-limiting – an organism or person that limits its own growth by its actions.”

Do you want to make plans or decisions? There is no wrong answer, and perhaps you want both, but the question is rarely asked. The profession of design is rooted in craft, with one person working with their hands and ideas to make something. This is the way most design schools teach designers: that you will be in control of your projects. However in the working world to be a designer is often to be a plan maker, or plan proposer, where someone else decides the goals, and how the plan will change when it’s executed. This might be a project manager, an engineer, a VP or a client, but they have the power to change the plans and decide the fate of the real design that will go out into the world.

For many designers there is a a bright yellow line between work they think counts as design and work that doesn’t. The kinds that count often involve visual creativity, exploring ideas, using maker’s tools and refining work until it’s high quality. The kinds that don’t are often just about anything else. Since general decision making roles, like project leaders, aren’t seen as creative, many designers avoid them. And learning how to be persuasive is seen as equally uninteresting. The trap is that this guarantees the decision makers will primarily be people who know little about good design or its value. And it’s those decision makers who decide when designers get involved and when they don’t. This self-limiting trap gets set all on its own.

I’m not here to tell you to change your job or your preferences for what kinds of work to do. Perhaps you organization is fundamentally dysfunctional and you have every reason to just throw plans over walls and call it a day. Or you don’t mind following people’s foolish whims if they pay you well enough. However, I am challenging you to ask who set the boundaries for you for what counts as design work? What imagined outcomes made you want to be a designer in the first place? Was it having plans that are mostly ignored, or was it to make decisions that define what the real design is that will go out into the world so progress can happen?

If you are passionate about the outcomes then you owe it to yourself to reevaluate what design talent means. Many designers feel disappointment at the mediocre work that their organizations produce. They feel their talent is wasted. And yet when it comes time to develop their career what do they do? They invest in improving the same kinds of skills that are already being ignored. It’s another self-limiting trap. This one is failing to see that what holds them back are other skills, ones they don’t have, or don’t like, or don’t consider as part of design, that they need to grow to achieve what they want.

The only way organizations that produce mediocre work improve is when someone with design knowledge either becomes a decision maker, or improves their skill at influencing decisions. This means facilitation, persuasion and relationship building can be just as essential to good design as design plans themselves. But when these skills are frowned upon or stigmatized, the self-limiting idea of a designer holds back entire teams. Perhaps even more challenging is when the director of the design department is neither good at these skills (so can not set the example), nor chooses to make it a strategy for the future of design in their organization. Design managers can be a self-limiting force too.

In the end this means there may be clear reasons why you feel limited or that your organization limits you. The tough news is that it may only be you who see the problem for what it is and can do something about it. And to get others to see the problem requires the ability to influence them.

If we want a better designed world, there are only two paths:

Widen what it means to be a designer to include the ability to influence Encourage more designers to move into decision making roles

Is there another way? If so, help me see it. If not, help me spread the word.

The Best of My 20 Years of Writing on Design

In might be a surprise if you know me for my books and talks, but back in 2000 I mostly wrote about design. If you’ve followed me long enough to remember uiweb.com or the crazy Interactionary events I did at CHI, you know different but that’s not many of you. Back then I was the design advocate for Microsoft, promoting good design and usability practices across the company. While there I wrote a design column for MSDN’s developer magazine. I thought someday I’d write a primer on good design, I just didn’t anticipate it would take 20 years until I did it with How Design Makes The World.

Over my career I’ve rarely had the word design in my job title, but design has always been central to how I think. It explains why even Making Things happen, a book about project management, uses design concepts more that project management books do. If you look at my books or talks you’ll see a kind of design at work. What is a book or a presentation if not a kind of designed human experience?

Sorting through the archives to find these essays, I picked ones that were most popular and still held up despite all that’s changed. My best writing is likely in my books, but I always try to write in a timeless way.

Most of my writing is free, but if you find value here, please support me by buying a copy of How Design Makes The World or my other books. Thanks for your support.

Here’s my best writing on design from 1999 to 2020:

Why Good Design Comes From Bad DesignThe Myth of Perfect DesignHow To Give and Receive FeedbackHow To Run a Design CritiqueSimple Isn’t Always GoodThe Future of UI Will Be BoringThe Real Reasons Bad Design HappensGood, Evil and Technology5 Dangerous Ideas for DesignersGood Beats Innovative Nearly Every TimeThe Myth of DiscoverabilityWhy Software SucksWhy Designers FailThe Myth of Epiphany (From The Myths of Innovation)Programmers, Designers and the Brooklyn BridgeUsability Is Not a VerbSimple Isn’t Always GoodThe Future of UI Will Be BoringHow To Learn From Your MistakesWhy Designers Hate Politics and What To Do About itHow To Pitch An IdeaEdison Did Not Invent The Light BulbThe Powerful Decide (Chp 8. of How Design Makes The World)Questions for the Next Design Revolution? (IDSA Keynote)What Can We Learn From The Eiffel Tower?Designers, Morality and the AK-47

More specialized design essays like Fitt’s Law and the Web, Lessons on Design from Filmmaking, the Art of Usability Benchmarking, the Web Shouldn’t Be a Comedy of Errors, Critical Thinking in Web Design, Why Great Technologies Don’t Make Great Products, The Art of UI Prototyping, The Role of Flow In Web Design and others still live in the old archive from the uiweb days.

My most recent essay, How To Put Faith in Design, is my best design essay so far this year. You can also visit all 170+ posts from the design archive. Or my best posts of all time.

Leading Design Festival 2021 – Live Notes

Here are my notes from Leading Design Festival 2021, liveblogged (recorded in real time and updated as I go). My notes from the 2016 LD event can be found here.

1. Julie Zhou – The Many Facets of Design Leadership.

[Note: I was disappointed design ethics did not come up at all, given her history at Facebook. It’s the toughest design leadership issue we have and her insight would be valuable]

What she thought would make her a great design leader was just being a great designer. If you don’t know what good design looks like, how can you know who to hire? While it’s great to keep your skills sharp. the flavor of what it means to be great at design changes. it’s not your execution skills, but how good your eye is. It’s the difference between being a creator and an editor.

She referred to the book No Hard Feelings, and this diagram.

Which she redesigned to be about design.

She offered that design is still a growing profession. It’s at a place where the industry knows they need more designers, but they may not understand design or how to empower it in their organization.

Designers aren’t helping in our jargon world. We discuss abstract topics, but our peers, engineers and others, often don’t understand us. Great design leaders need to translate their concepts into words others understand. She’d get huffy about it and get frustrated. And they’d stare at her blankly. She’d point fingers at the environment and say “is this place hostile to design?” She didn’t have control over the environment, but she could learn to talk in analogies. “stop talking about clutter and space, and talk about the impact on other people”.

Too much clutter = lets reduce choices people have to make.

Catch yourself with jargon and remember to translate. Translation is different from good communication skills. It’s more targeted and specialized.

Excuses stop mattering. She referred to a story about Steve Jobs: Somewhere between the janitor and the CEO reasons stop mattering (why is this a mess? Is not something you can blame on others). And that’s where you are as a design leader. As you become more senior this expectation rises. The heart of it is the business: how will this organization be viable in the long run? What keeps the CEO up at night? The business is the context. Designers get a seat at the table because they understand the wider context of the company and how design can solve those problems.

Diagnose with data. Treat with design. It’s great that we have more information about what people actually do with our products. It’s also a way to keep us honest that our intuitions have the results we expect them to. If I showed you data that said 20% growth year over year, is it a great product? Great is subjective. Great compared to what? To last year? To our competitors?

Team process is design. How do you consistently get great design outcomes? It’s a kind of design problem. There is no formula. But look at poker. There are patterns and habits you can learn. You can’t just wait for a great hand. Move from design, to creating environments so others can design well. What is the meeting cadence? What is the psychological feeling the team has? It’s up to design leaders to decide and to help their teams win more hands.

Andy Budd asked “How to balance a company’s desire to a/b test everything?” Zhou replied that instincts are good for finding gaps with particular designs and good for novel ideas. In the v0 to v1 phase you have to start from first principles. But in second phase, after product market fit, it’s about optimizing. And that’s where instincts start to fail and a/b tests surprise designers (micro-levels). But always trust your instincts even when some data shows improvement, but you suspect it may create other problems. It’s a sign you’re past the point of low hanging fruit and should move on to bigger objectives. [Andy pointed out that a designer’s intuition improves by comparing it regularly against the data, insead of being afraid of it].

How to bond teams while remote? Have 5/10 minutes time at start of meetings where people play simple games (someone suggested https://skribbl.io/). We’ve lost the natural fun that happens between things and need to put it back in.

Question on personal growth. Start by asking how individual want to grow? Build out from that conversation to discover what kind of help they need and what can be discussed in one on ones.

Don’t forget about yourself. It’s easy to get lost in exclusively serving others. The role is about helping others, but still make investments in yourself, in mentors and network, and time to reflect for yourself.

2. Up next. Aaron Irizarry Leading Successfully Through Ourselves.

In order to help our teams, he suggests sometimes we have to learn first ourselves.

Leadership is not about being in charge, but taking care of those in your charge.” Simon Sinek

We need to get better about EQ.

Self-Awareness. How do I show up? How do I recognize and manage my moods? What is my ritual for getting into a mental space where I can manage and lead? Self-Regulation. How do I control or redirect disruptive impulses or moods. He has used note taking as a way to keep in control of his thoughts before he acts on them. Intent. A passion for work that goes beyond money or status. Empathy. It’s a buzzword, but the ability to understand the emotional makeup of a person or situation makes us observant and more productive. If we don’t have empathy for our teammates and partners first, we’re kidding ourselves. Social Skills. Introverts sometimes have better social skills as they’re more measured. It’s not about extrovert/introvert, but more about how to read the room and find ways to connect. This should be modeleld behavior. Lead with vulnerability and transparency. Not assumption driven thinking, but with clarity and candor. So people feel like they know where we are going. Show your team you trust them enough to share their concerns. It’s a balance to not overwhelm people with being too transparent, but not being too closed that they’re not connected. Communicating Openly. Collaboration is rooted in trust. Adapt our communication styles and leadership approaches. Everyone is different with different needs. There are foundational things, like meeting cadence, but as he engages he tries to be contextual. Make an effort to recognize how communication style impacts other people. I’m a high strunk guy. I always engaged and I talk too much. I work with others who may not work that way and want me to slow down. Take the time to consider how different perspectives affect perception. I’m in so many meetings and the vibe at the end of one meeting carries over into the next. It impacts everyone especially when they are back to back. Be intentional in planning for ambiguity or confusion. When he is in partner meetings with his reports, it can be confusing about how things are messages or what is nailed down or still up in the air. Be an agent for clarity. Take note of team members and partner communication styles. Help people feel like they have been seen and heard. Lead through autonomy and enablement. He tends to be a hands-off leader until he isn’t. He has set up guidelines for free space and put your imprint on it. Other times he’s more open about assignments. It’s a balancing act and sometimes he gets it wrong. And he wants to get better at it.Model an autonomous working style. How much does he need from his boss? When does he ask for clarification and when does he pave the way?Get out of the fucking way. This is still a problem. How to balance facilitating without slowing things down. Create a vision statement that is a north star. This helps people be autonomous and keeps the manager out of the way.Check in on a regular basis. What is working? What isn’t? And where they need you to show up. Establish personal norms. Our vibe sets the tone. Imagine how not sleeping, being too tired, spread too thin, so the vibe is off. How he shows up sets a tone for their day and their ability to show up. Sometimes it’s just how it is, but he wants to be mindful of it. Manage our time well. If I’m in 15 meetings a day how can I possibly be there for my team?Invest in our own personal development. He’s planning on watching all the other talks.Establish healthy routines. He realized his choices at events like this weren’t always great. But that the he needed to make adjustments so he’s refreshed and recharged when he needs to be.Get a therapist. If he has someone he can talk to on a regular basis about whatever is going on he does much better. Get a personal board of directors (but that’s more business focused).

“I’m a leader struggling to lead my people. This is a good community. Reach out”

3. Kristin Skinner — Co-author, Org Design for Design Orgs, Founder & GSD

[Kristin went fast with dense slides. There were are few references that went by too fast to catch.]

How teams work is as important as what they make. She told the story about how the Golden State Warriors basketball team transformed over years to be a balance of talent and good management.

Three key areas define effective teams:

Foundation OutputManagement

She identified a list of common problems.

This means we need continually redesign our organization. And you can use these lists to help score and rank the issues that people experience. Which helps everyone feel responsible for identifying and dealing with change.

Common goals to strive for:

realize investment in designattract talentplan for growthand find roadmap detectives

“People spend 60% of their time on what they call the work about the work – trying to figure out who’s doing what, when and why” – Chris Fainacci, COO Asana

Common issues design teams face (from survey she did?):

Limited time or resourcesInvolving the right people or teamsLack of proven value

She referred to a Harvard Business article about the value of metrics and measuring outcomes. Then she explain how this translates into what designers can do.

The Design Management Framework: People, Practice and Platforms. A framework like this helps make sure you have happier designers, better designers and more effective teams.

Organizations change every 30 days. It’s always shifting in different ways. And many efforts to do deliberate change (she offered three models of change but too quickly for me to catch).

She offered a stat about how 90% of organizations (from the McKinley survey?) about design leadership expressed that it had little impact on design maturity growth in those organizations.

What can leaders do?

Know your maturity. How is your team partnering with the rest of the organization?Design your Design org at all levels. Org health and team health are not the same. Org health is the environment and conditions. Approach designing your org as you would any other initiative. There is no “end state” to org design. it will always be evolving.How will you know you if you’re successful? You need some measurements to track and compare over time.

Talks continue tomorrow.

4. Doug Powell: Sketchbooks over Spreadsheets: Designers as Leaders In A Complex World

He opens with a story about how Randy Hunt wrote a simple diagram during a meeting explaining, in a passed sketch to the CEO, how the organization currently worked. It helped the CEO to understand how things were working and suggested how things could change. Powell considers this an act of clarity, alignment and velocity.

He then referred to a talk Kate Aronowitz gave where she reported that there were 66,000 open executive design jobs [I think he misspoke and its design leadership, not strictly executive roles, as she explained in this article – he didn’t provide a link so this is the best I could find. Also without comparison to how many engineering, marketing or other unfilled leadership roles there are it’s hard to frame if this is unique to design or not.]

Who are the people who are going to fill these roles? What skills do they gave? Will they be ready? The demand for people to fill these roles has exploded. What are the missing skills required to effectively play senior business leadership roles in complex organizations, and how to designers acquire them in the middle of our careers?

From a summary paper from MIT Sloan management school (which I had to dig up since he didn’t have a reference. He had other unreferenced quotes From Harvard Business and Forbes). Only 12% strongly agree that their leaders have the right mindsets to lead them forward. [Note: w/o context of how many moderately agreed it’s not really clear how big a problem this is. And the summary paper does not share the complete survey results, I looked, which is always concerning.]

He suggests chasing after the established methods of current business school methods, which he believes are behind the times, is not what we should be doing. But instead think about what we need for the present and the future.

He refers back to the summary of the MIT Sloan study, which says:

“we identified a number of leadership teams that are embracing new ways of working and leading. For example, many of them are increasing transparency, demonstrating authenticity, and emphasizing collaboration and empathy.” 

He argues that most designers actually possess the skills to effectively lead in this transformative era. Leading to a reframing of his core question: How do we retain, enhance, and maximize unique differentiating skills as designers?

He returns to the opening story. Randy knew his CEO responded to simple and direct messages. He quickly made a prototype and delivered it in a way Anthony could consume. He considers this a design act.

He shared a story from Raquel Bretenitz, head of Aperture Health, who noticed “We were sitting in the same office, but the design, data, tech, and social media teams were completely siloed.” And she led her team to pick up their stuff and moved to the dev team’s workspace. It was cramped but it made a huge difference. He sees this as a a use of her design skills.

He sees that there are surprisingly simple skills designers have that have greater value than we think. We can turn business challenges into design problems.

In his role he facilitates meetings between design leaders and the senior business leaders, or GMs. They’re called design program reviews and they happen annually. He’s found it’s good to approach these meetings as a UX design problem with the GM as the primary user. They know GMs are: busy, data-driven, opinionated, competitive and no BS

This informs a 6 slide review deck template used in these program reviews. He believes it works, and quoted an anonymous GM – “This review has helped me understand the need for design resources… We can double this design team with no problem.”

What we can learn from vaccine website failures (Fast Company)

There’s been plenty of news about Americans struggling to register to get vaccinated for COVID. I noticed a story missing from the news: no one was asking about the problem from a design perspective. So I wrote this piece for Fast Company that explains what we all can learn.

It’s easy to dismiss news like this and shake our heads. But it turns out the mistakes made here weren’t just about web design, but about management, planning and lip service policies, issues many organizations in the public and private sector struggle with too. Few organizations ever do usability studies and, like the vaccine websites, they have the results to prove it.

What we can learn from vaccine website failures

There’s been plenty of news about Americans struggling to register to get vaccinated for COVID. I noticed a story missing from the news: no one was asking about the problem from a design perspective. So I wrote this piece for Fast Company that explains what we all can learn.

It’s easy to dismiss news like this and shake our heads. But it turns out the mistakes made here weren’t just about web design, but about management, planning and lip service policies, issues many organizations in the public and private sector struggle with too. Few organizations ever do usability studies and, like the vaccine websites, they have the results to prove it.

How Design Makes The World: Typos and corrections?

Did you read How Design Makes the World? Thanks. I’m glad you did.

If you found any any typos or mistakes along the way, I apologize. But I’m asking you to report them here so they can be corrected in a future edition.

The first edition of the book has 130+ footnotes, 60+ recommendations and dozens of properly attributed photo and media credits. I work hard to get it right, but alas mistakes do happen.

Please leave a comment, and a page # if possible. Much appreciated.

Here are the known issues:

Print edition

pg 41, Hundertwasser was Austrian, not German 154 – 5th line from the bottom, “People hate traffic when that are in it…” – should be they Pg. 188, Maurice Sy -> Marice Sy

Kindle / Digital

pg. 50 / Chapter 7 – fonts missing (Kindle only)