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Scott Berkun: Why Design is Hard
00:51:21
We chat with author Scott Berkun about how designers can learn to navigate organizational power structures and gain more influence over decisions that affect their work, how the myth of the “design hero” shapes young designers entering the field, and why design schools often fail to prepare students for the real-world dynamics of organizational culture and power.
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- [00:02]
Scott Birkin
Your relationships are just as important as your ideas, because your ideas can't go anywhere without the medium of the relationship of engineers and financiers and project managers. Without them, you'll be a frustrated designer with good ideas that don't go anywhere.
- [00:20]
Aaron Walter
As designers, we sometimes get caught up in our egos. I'm the creative one on the team.
- [00:26]
Eli Woolery
I'm the one who should have the.
- [00:28]
Aaron Walter
Final say on these designs. And I'm misunderstood. And I feel like I'm always having to teach people a new language. You ever said that to yourself? I know I have. Author Scott Burkin has a new book called why Design is Hard, which dives into why this ego trap limits designers effectiveness in their roles. We welcome him back on the show to discuss this new book and also to discuss how designers can learn to navigate organizational power structures and and gain more influence over decisions that affect their work. How the myth of the design hero shapes young designers entering the field and why design schools often fail to prepare students for the real world dynamics of organizational culture and power. This is Design Better, where we explore creativity at the intersection of design and technology. I'm Aaron Walter. You can get AD free episodes, bonus content, discounts on our workshops, and access to our monthly AMAs with really cool people in the design and tech industry. By becoming a Design Better premium subscriber, it's also the best way to support the show. Visit designbetterpodcast.com subscribe to learn more. We'll return to the conversation after this quick break. And now back to the show.
- [02:04]
Host
Scott Birkin, welcome back to Design Better.
- [02:07]
Scott Birkin
It is a pleasure to be back. Thanks guys.
- [02:10]
Host
When we last left our heroes, you had a book out about the power of design, How Design Makes the World Work. But now you're looking at the opposite side of this topic, which is why design is so hard. I have to agree with both perspectives. But tell us why this book and why now? Why is this an important thing to cover?
- [02:33]
Scott Birkin
Well, when I wrote How Design Makes the World, the goal for that book was to take on the burden of explaining all of these things that annoy us as designers that people don't understand, trying to explain good design to business people or engineers, I wanted to write a book that could be considered in the same category as Designed of Everyday Things by Don Norman or Don't Make Me Think by Steve Krug. Like an explainer book that could work for anybody. And in writing that book, I had to write for everybody, the widest possible audience possible. And while doing that, I knew at the Same time, someday I'd want to write a book where I could just talk directly to designers and say like, hey guys, hey folks, we got some problems. Let's have a conversation that's in house talk. We can speak frankly with each other and share some perspective. And so that's what this book is. It's basically a sequel, but one that's written for the design and UX community.
- [03:29]
Guest
One of the key themes in your book is this ego trap. And I think as designers and even, you know, more generally creative people, I certainly find myself there. We often find ourselves in a situation where, hey, you know, I'm the creative one, I'm special, I got these kind of creative superpowers. Why are people paying attention to me? So, so talk about that. A why does that happen? And then maybe why does that limit our effectiveness as designers?
- [03:54]
Scott Birkin
It's a better way to frame what goes on. And some of the research for the book I've been doing for a while. But asking designers what their biggest frustrations are, what their biggest complaints are. And the same kind of things come up, especially for UX folks, about they don't get it, like the executive team, like they don't get it. And I get ignored and I'm never invited to meetings like why, why, why? And those frustrations are valid and they do express things that should be better. But there's a framing in these complaints that's very self centered. Why don't they do something other than what they are doing? And it puts the blame elsewhere. And there's a kind of learned helplessness that is implied in that, that I can't do my job until all these other people who actually have very good reasons for doing what they are currently doing, they're paid very well and successful companies doing what they are doing until they change. So it's called a trap because it's something that prevents you from actually achieving what you want. It's a trap. It doesn't allow you to progress or grow because you feel validated and just calling out a problem. The thrust of the book is that these complaints are true. Yes, we have reasons to be upset or feel disenfranchised, but complaining to the sky doesn't change anything. And as designers who are creative and do have superpowers, we have special skills that can solve a lot of different kinds of problems. We have to get better at framing our frustrations to be things that we can take action on. And instead of walking to organizations, expecting them to understand design, expecting them not to be dysfunctional, expecting them not to have political infighting, which is a ridiculous set of expectations. Given our understanding of the working world, we should flip it around and say, let's train ourselves to expect some of these situations. Let's design our skillset and our attitude to expect these situations. And then at least we're not taken surprised by them. And we can maybe cultivate more of a culture of wanting to divide up these problems so we can attack them. So that's the ego trap. The book also talks about how valuable ego is. We need our egos. We need them to motivate ourselves. Ego is important, but beyond a certain limit, it becomes destructive and it becomes a source of resentment and bitterness and depression when there's a way to use that ego to take agency and to have more agency in these situations.
- [06:26]
Host
One thing I notice over and over again is designers often seem to be kind of on the low end of the spectrum of maturity of understanding power structures, political structures inside of organizations, and that lack of knowledge or lack of interest holds them back. I'm curious, what is it that designers need to know more of to have more influence in their organizations?
- [06:55]
Scott Birkin
Yeah, I'm smiling because of the statement you just said. Because sometimes when I say that, I get in trouble. So I'm glad that does the host.
- [07:03]
Host
Well, I'll raise my hand. That's been me. You know that. That has been me at times. And there's. There's definitely a school of hard knocks at trying to figure that stuff out.
- [07:10]
Scott Birkin
Yes, I do agree. I do think to be generous to designers. I think most people have the same complaints. Most people don't want to deal with power and politics. It's not fun for most people. Design is a community that we're in. So I witness it and see that pattern here. But it's a universal thing. I think if I were to poke at the type of culture, the kinds of people that are drawn to design, I do think there are some things that make it harder for us. I think that people who are drawn to design are people who like a certain kind of work. They like work where they have control. They like creative work. They like time working on their own. So you take a person who's developed a craft and a skill set where you are working in figma or Photoshop or on a sketchpad, it's a solitary creative experience. And it makes sense that people who are good at those things would tend not to want to be in lots of meetings and debating things and dealing with persuading. Room full of people that do something different. It makes sense that there's more of a tendency towards a certain kind of introversion. That makes sense to me. When I've given some of the advice in the book about taking more agency to some designers, they'll say, why should I have to do that? Why should I have to go and convince people of my ideas? And my answer to them is, you don't. If you're okay with your ideas not having as much impact as you want, you don't have to convince anyone. But to assume that you have some kind of idea privilege, that people should just follow what you suggest because you suggested it, that's a kind of ego trap. Nobody gets that kind of privilege in most word places unless they have power. That's the secret way out of not having to do that, but to have power. And this explains one of the things in the book of our obsession with talent. And we like to think that talent will solve everything. If we have the right skills and the right ideas, we can persuade anybody. But in our workplaces, a lot of the complaints that we have is the CEO or the executive who knows nothing about design. We know they know nothing about design, yet despite their lack of ability or knowledge, they get to make the decisions. So if we had 10 times more talent than we do, unless we have more power, influence, it doesn't have an effect on things. That's supported by the fact that people who have a lot of power and influence but low skill get to make lots of decisions. There's a recognition about the practicalities of how people work in organizations that we just don't want to fully accept.
- [09:41]
Host
Yeah, let's take a devil's advocate approach to this. You said that nobody gets that treatment where their idea gets listened to without them having to make a fair case or a business case for what they're doing. The exception I see there is engineers. Engineers often like, hey, you don't know what the hell I'm doing, but you believe that I'm super talented and I'm super valuable. So therefore, I don't have to present or spend too much time presenting these ideas to you. And people do sort of bend to.
- [10:14]
Eli Woolery
The whims of engineers.
- [10:16]
Host
I think that's part of the source of frustration with designers is that there's so much hand waving to just be seen and understood. And engineers just don't have to do any of that. People are just like, yes, we're so happy you're here.
- [10:31]
Scott Birkin
I have two answers to that. One. There's definitely some truth to that. And tech cultures, engineering cultures, are often where the founders come from. So the whole culture is seeped in a respect and a deference to the engineering perspective on things. They're seen as the primary intellectual workhorses for the organization. So some of that is definitely true. But the second answer is if you spend more time talking to engineers, they have their complaints too. They have their complaints about the decisions being made that favor the business over engineering quality. Engineers often have a lot of the same complaints. Obviously they're not as deep as complaints designers usually have because engineers tend to have a lot more organizational power. But they have their complaints too, about the things that they're not allowed to do or the expectations for how much work they're supposed to get done. One of the bits of advice in the book is the recognition of if there are people who are in the room who seem to have that privilege and you don't have it, then the tactic to take is to figure out how can you make them an ally? How can you use their power and their value in the organization as an asset instead of a frustration? I'm not saying that's easy to do. I'm not saying that's always possible to do. But in the landscape of how organizations work, how people work, you want to look around at the system around you and say, who has access to influence that? I don't? How can I learn how to influence them? How can I find out which person on the engineering team is actually the most invested in improving the design of the product? Who is that person? Now, they may all not be that invested, but of the 10 engineers, there will be one who is the most interested in learning more about UX design. Who is that person? That's a task that anyone can do, and that's where you can invest energy. Even in the most engineering centered culture, there's still someone there who's the most receptive. And if you can build that relationship, then their power becomes an advantage rather than a source of frustration.
- [12:36]
Guest
I want to take another twist at this question, and I think for some of us it can be easy to take a little bit of a more cynical view toward corporate hierarchy. And you both might be familiar with that very simple corporate hierarchy pyramid where it's sociopaths at the top and then clueless and then losers at the bottom. It's like, I think a lot of us have been in situations where that's, that's how we feel. But that aside, if we want to take a more empathetic view, or if we are leading a team and we are in A sociopath. How might we think about kind of empowering folks that are a little lower on the totem pole to help give input into these more strategic decisions that we might be making?
- [13:16]
Scott Birkin
I think that's something a manager would always want to do of figuring out what are the ways to engage the people on your team and do their best work. I think because we're talking about designers and I mentioned this more introverted attitude about work is things like making sure there's multiple ways for people to participate in. Suggesting ideas like this is classic preference to verbalization and brainstorming meetings. You know, whoever's loudest and speaks the fastest usually gets heard the most. And there's little things like brainwriting where you make the process for coming up with ideas. It's something that's written down. It's less based on who's loud. So there's things like that that you can do to help diversify the process by which ideas are even heard. That comes to mind. But you have me intrigued by that hierarchy, you know, that cynical hierarchy, which I was laughing at, which it was sociopath, idiots. What was the. What was the bottom layer?
- [14:09]
Guest
Yeah, losers. Yeah, losers. It's Hugh McLeod, and I don't think he meant losers. Sort of, you know, the social sense. It's more like they're losing out on the arrangement here.
- [14:18]
Host
Yeah.
- [14:18]
Scott Birkin
That made me think of an important thing in the book. It's early on in the book. I quote from the book Designing your life. And in that book, they talk about gravity problems. They talk about how there are all these things that are unavoidably frustrating and that the healthy outlook as a designer but as a person is not to get hung up on the things that you really have no control over. That's a platitude you hear all over the place. The stoics talk about it. You know, it's a very old idea, but I think it's an idea very relevant to us in that if you do work for a place that's run by a sociopath and middle management are a bunch of largely incompetent people, nothing you do in a design presentation is going to fix that. Like, there's no idea that you are going to have is going to transform the culture of your company, it's just not going to happen. And that's not a limitation on your abilities as a designer or a creative person. The same amount of acceptance to have about your limited ability to change some of these fundamental things, and the more time and energy you allow yourself to spend Complaining about them. Some of that is therapeutic for sure. And it's venting and it's getting validation, but finding ways to be creative about how, again, of the idiots in the middle, who's the least idiotic? How do you get on that team? Who's the person who seems really, really good in your organization at persuading the sociopath at the top to do good things? How do you learn their techniques for doing that? There's always a way with our creative abilities. There's always a way to ask these kinds of questions and become curious and become investigators of the way things really get done. And then there's some agency, even if it's a tiny bit of agency, tiny bit that leads to what we want, which is more influence and better products and better services and less terrible stuff in the world. And that's really the core message of the book, is finding healthier ways to deal with what are unavoidable challenges of being a creative designer at tech and large organizations. There's fundamental things and we have to be better at admitting that. This is going to be the common case.
- [16:22]
Host
I'm going to shift us into a different gear, away from cynicism and sociopathy. You write about some design heroes in your book, folks, that we really love. Paulasure as a former guest on the show, Dieter Rams, and you talk about how they often faced significant challenges beyond their iconic work. How do you think the myth of the design hero influences young designers entering the field today?
- [16:49]
Scott Birkin
There's some really destructive things about it. Now, I caution that and want to couch that by saying we need heroes. There's a romantic thing. We all need to inspire us to want to pursue this kind of work and to get in a field. And romantic stories and mythological stories have a valuable role to play. They do. The destructive part is when we try to emulate a fantasy in our actual working life. The story that you're referencing, Dieter Rams, I found a story about him that I thought is really important that doesn't get told very much. Dieter Rams, one of our most well known designers in the world, heavily influenced the direction of Apple and there, Jonathan Ives, all their product design because he's such a hero. Most of the images you ever see of him is him standing alone, often in front of the finished products that he has worked on that are in museums now. It's one person standing alone and we all know any of those products. You know, there's like a razor and a radio. That radio probably had dozens of people working on it. Engineers, marketers, people who Ran the business plan, project managers, people who did the manufacturing plan, dozens of people. But he's the one person we see. There's no mention of anybody else. You think of the collective number of people represented by all those things that he's standing in front of hundreds of people, but we see one person. So we're presented with the notion, which is a fantasy, that Dieter Rams showed up at Braun, sketched something on a wall, and then a team of minions said, we'll go build that for you. And Dieter Rams went on vacation for a year and came back to take the photo and then goes on vacation again. That's really this fantasy we have of the designer is just the hero and they're alone. So the story that I share in the beginning of the book, Dider Rams is telling a story in an interview with the New York Times about his early career. And he tells a story about seeing the engineering team and the design team not getting along. And rather than doing what most of us would do, what I have done, like, who wants to get involved in, like a cross discipline tension? Like, no one wants to get in the middle of that. It's not fun. It's certainly not something a designer normally feels obligated to do. But he's like, look, I can see there's tension here. I know the engineering team likes brandy, so I'm going to get a nice bottle of brandy and I'm going to share it with the engineering team. A designer is going to go and share it with the engineering team. And his quote is almost verbatim, quote is basically, to be a good designer, you have to be half psychologist, and he means half thinking about relationships with people. This is the story. Early in his career, this is what led him to become the person who then gets their picture taken in front of all this work. It's through human relations, through earning trust. And of course, buying gifts is just a very shallow way to build a relationship, but it can be the start of one. It's an offering of something to another person and the beginning of a connection. And I had never seen that story told anywhere before. And I thought it's exactly the kind of story that we need to be better at telling to designers, that your relationships are just as important as your ideas, because your ideas can't go anywhere without the medium of the relationship of engineers and financiers and project managers. You have to have those relationships. Without them, you'll be a frustrated designer with good ideas that don't go anywhere.
- [20:03]
Aaron Walter
We'll return to the conversation after this quick break.
- [20:11]
Eli Woolery
Design Better is supported by Doer. Eli and I are very busy people. When we're not in the studio producing the podcast and publishing new articles, we're.
- [20:20]
Host
Often doing something active and creative.
- [20:22]
Eli Woolery
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- [21:06]
Guest
Yeah, I got one of their tech fleece denim jackets in black color and it's really nice. It's soft, it's comfortable, it's warm enough for those fall days that are just kind of creeping into the lower digits and yeah, really loving it.
- [21:20]
Eli Woolery
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- [21:29]
Host
You use our exclusive URL, you'll get.
- [21:31]
Eli Woolery
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- [23:08]
Sponsor
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- [24:54]
Aaron Walter
And now back to the show.
- [25:01]
Guest
Let's talk about another story about a design hero. In the book, this is Paula Scher and her famous story of the $1.5 million napkin sketch. She actually came on the show and talked about it. We'll link over to that as well. And she had a slight correction to the record there, but the gist of the story is true, and I'm curious. So that sketch was done on a napkin, very loose and famously, a decision was made to run with that concept or something very similar. In our current age, it's very easy to go from something like a sketch to something very high fidelity and we've been seeing this. We've been running these workshops that are about AI plus design thinking. And part of the workshop, you come up with some ideas and then have AI help you make some generative solutions to it. And its tendency is to leap into something very high fidelity, whether that's like a product rendering or app screens. And I'm just curious, what do you think is lost in that right now? Or what are the sort of cautionary things that you might talk to designers about, given our ability now to just almost instantly create something high fidelity?
- [26:04]
Scott Birkin
Yeah, I have a similar opinion on this that I'm guessing that you do, which is you lose a lot. But I do recognize I'm old. Like, I'm 52. So there is an element I see in it of like, cranky old guy. Well, when I was a designer, I had a, you know, I had a car of the whiteboard out of stone. And, you know, I do sense in myself a little bit of that. But I do think that whenever you move up in fidelity, you are now changing the kinds of feedback you're going to get. You're now more attached to things because they feel more complete and it's easier to go astray. I'm a big believer in trying to keep things fluid. And the more you're comfortable tearing things down and revisiting them, you're going to get better ideas. You're going to get more thoughtful and deeper ideas. So there's something very dangerous about the allure of fidelity. We've all felt this when we've presented stuff to executives who don't really understand design very well, that once you show, like, a highly rendered screen, like, the attachment to the details of that now become things you can't undo. And that's why it's so preferable to try to stay in low fidelity for as long as you can. It gives you so much more room to focus on the problem and the solution.
- [27:18]
Host
You mentioned in the book that design education often fails to prepare designers for real world dynamics, organizational culture, power dynamics that we talked about. What changes?
- [27:30]
Scott Birkin
If you had a magic wand, would.
- [27:32]
Host
You recommend to design schools to better equip students for realities of working in a complex organization?
- [27:38]
Guest
Yeah.
- [27:39]
Scott Birkin
Thank you for asking me this question. I want to caveat that I am a critical design education in the book. I also recognize that being design educator is really hard.
- [27:47]
Host
Oh, it's hard.
- [27:48]
Scott Birkin
Thank you. And also, it's so easy for people like me to write a book or have a tweet and say, this school of education should include X. But I am not thinking about what would have to get dropped from the curriculum to include the thing that I'm asking for. It's kind of an unfair critique. So I admit that what I am arguing for is that if we know that most designers will enter the workforce and spend most of their time working with non designers, normal people, that has to be something we are prepping them for. And that could be prepped through. Part of a senior project is to work with actual engineers in the engineering school. That could be prepped through a workshop on how to explain your work to people you meet on the bus. That's a two day workshop of just preparing you for the reality that when you leave design school, this is probably the last time you will be around 95% of designers all day, every day, unless you work at a design agency. There are some exceptions, but even then when you go to visit your client, you're in the normal world where design is not understood. You are a minority, no one knows what you do. That will be your everyday experience for the rest of your life as a professional. There has to be some accounting for that as part of a design education. And I know people already told me that their programs and their classes, they do some of this and that's great. I still think the critique is valid. That by and large that is not the case. And that's what I'm arguing for. This book is an attempt to do it. This book can be read in like three hours. I think the book does a good job at framing this problem and giving tools to solve it. There are other books like it. Taking responsibility for that, I think is something we have to do for young designers, prepare them for the reality of being a designer as a person in the world.
- [29:37]
Guest
I think it's a very valid critique and something that we're always trying to address. The class that we teach, which is a project based, team based class, but the students are largely collaborating with their own peers and they're not cross connecting necessarily over to the engineering department. That happens sometimes organically. But at many of these institutions there's almost a sort of bureaucratic allergic reaction to bringing different departments together. And you know, to give a concrete example, when I was in the product design program at Stanford, there was a very tight connection to the art department, largely through one faculty member named Matt Kahn. And it was great. It was like you got this great art education and you got this great, you know, more engineering, technical design education. And it was a great blend for a number of reasons that broke down and I think the students are worse off for it and we're trying to repair those bridges. But I do think that that's a important thing to ideally bring into a program. You also mentioned negotiation as a design skill, which, which I also think isn't really taught, at least at our program, so much we don't emphasize it. Why is that important? And what do you think, folks who might be in the workforce lacking it, what can they do to resolve that?
- [30:47]
Scott Birkin
My background was a weird combination of computer science and user experience stuff. When I graduated, my first job was as a user researcher at Microsoft. And then I switched to be what was called a program manager. But it was the role that did the most interaction design work. And also I had to be a project manager. So I did a lot of design work there. My job title, I didn't have the word design in it, but I did the prototyping and the sketching and the. A lot of it anyway. And I remember early in those experiences I have these ideas and I bring them to someone like an engineering team and they would just say no and I'd be really angry. I'd be like, you know, in my head I'm thinking like, this is great. This is the ego trap. This is great. And I didn't have the tools or the confidence to figure out how to negotiate. Which negotiation is like, well, like you're selling, but you're also trying to understand better the other point of view, why? Like why? And then you can now have a conversation about the actual design. Like the actual design is not what's in the designer's head or in the prototype or in figma. The design is what happens when the ideas meet the person who's going to do the work. And now it's going to be interpreted and there's going to be trade offs made. That's actually the design for what's going to get built. And the recognition of that means that the negotiation is an essential part of that. Because if you don't know how to negotiate, you end up feeling like you are throwing your design over a wall. And good luck at what comes out the other end because you don't know how to influence those decisions. I think negotiation is actually a natural skill that designers have. I think we do it internally with ourselves. We're trying to decide how to design something. We recognize in ourselves. Tension between should it be this way or that way, should be this color scheme or that color scheme, should the hierarchy go this way or we do it in our brains with ourselves. All the time we come up with different versions of things and then we negotiate with ourselves for how to decide between those. So to me, negotiation is sharing that kind of process with other people who have different preferences and knowledge. I think we're capable of doing it. We just have to learn how to externalize and share that process. And then design becomes fun because then engineers and marketers are now engaged in this dialogue around the best possible ideas for all the constraints, instead of just the constraints that we as designers would prefer. So I do, I think it's essential, I think that helps explain designers who like, again, Dieter Rams. There was a kind of negotiation move to want to butter up the engineering team with like a nice liquor. You know, that does give you a little bit of extra room that you've had coffee or lunch or you can play golf with your co workers. Negotiation sounds like a confrontational skill and I don't think it has to be. I think it's a sharing of the process and an awareness of the unavoidability of making trade offs.
- [33:37]
Host
Let's double click into this a little bit more because I think the relationship building thing is like the key skill to learn to be a very successful designer or anybody working in a large scale organization because it all resolves back to people problems one way or another. You alluded to some kind of straightforward relationship building techniques, but let's pretend that you're new, you're starting your career, you've just joined a major organization. What would you do to get started building relationships that would help you be a more successful designer and also just like happier doing your job?
- [34:19]
Scott Birkin
I acknowledge that some of this stuff is hard, especially if you're younger. This is really hard to figure out how to build relationships with people you don't know who are older than you and more experienced than you and more powerful. It's intimidating. And there's nothing in the book that says you have to do this or that. It's easy. The book just observes that power and decision making is a social process. So the less social you are, it's probably going to be harder for you to gain power. The more social you are and connected you are, the easier it probably will be. Your specific question, the simplest thing I know of, Leah Bouley in her book UX Team of One, which is a great book, she talks about doing a walking tour. There's other terms for this, but basically you're new, you don't know anything, you don't know anybody. Nothing prevents you from making a list of the five or 10 people in your project that you think you might need to work with and ask them if you can meet with them for 15 minutes to learn more about what they do. People like people who are curious about them. And this is where the investigative ability that designers have to be curious and to investigate and to try to learn, to go to these people with no agenda. You're not trying to sell design. Selling design is usually a terrible mistake. Like you don't want to show up as a salesperson. Show up being genuinely curious. Ask them what's interesting about their job, ask them what they're working on, ask them what their favorite part of it is, ask them what their least favorite part and just listen and learn. And you're now building some trust and respect with these people. And your curiosity will be sparked. You'll hear things you didn't know, they'll show you things. And then when you're thinking about what you need or what your goals are, it's now infused by your understanding of your coworkers. Just by walking around having listened to them, that's not going to be a magic trick. It's not going to mean that your next design idea is going to get supported. But you are building a relationship. You're learning more about their perspective, they're learning a little bit more about yours. And then you figure out the people who are friendlier or the people who seem more receptive, maybe ask them to coffee or have a follow up with them. But it's about being curious, focus on curiosity. And that is usually the healthiest way to make some of those relationships start.
- [36:23]
Host
That's great. Shout out to Leah, who's a former colleague of ours and a friend of ours. Her book UX Team of One is often cited on the show. It's a great book.
- [36:33]
Guest
So as a designer, many of us, especially earlier in our career and potentially later too, might have misconceptions about how decisions are made. And that may especially be the case if we're going back to our pyramid scheme of how organizations are set up. But if you find yourself in that situation and if you have a good leader, they're going to be more transparent, likely about what the organization's vision is and what the goals are. But if you don't, and if you're kind of mystified, what misconceptions might you have and how might you rectify those?
- [37:05]
Scott Birkin
It's hard. I mean, whenever I think of these sorts of questions or situations, I'm always thinking about the people. A thing I often hear from designers is they Feel left out. They feel they don't have agency, decisions are made without them, and they feel they want to be more central in the process. How do I become more central in the process? And my brain flips into just, okay, that makes sense, it's a good question. But I flip into people. Who is the person that is the most central in the process? Because I bet that most people in that room also feel a bit disenfranchised. There's way more of this feeling pervasive in organizations than designers often realize. We are not alone in feeling this way. Most people wish they had more power. Most people wish they had more influence. So the question then becomes, who is the person who feels, yeah, I got enough power, I feel good. That's the person who's probably driving so much of what's happening. Can you get access to that person? Probably not, because they're powerful and everyone wants access to them. So then I'm thinking, okay, if it's not the most powerful person, who is the person who is most influential to them? Maybe it's the engineering lead, maybe it's the market. Someone who's a little more accessible, who probably has the best ability to persuade them and understand what's going on. Can I get access to them? Is that someone that I did a walking tour with three months ago and I had a lovely conversation with them about their work and now I know them well enough, I could send them a private DM message and say, hey, I'm a little confused. What just happened in that meeting? Having people you can ask that question to is like gold. If they trust you enough and you know them well enough, you can ask that question, what just happened? I was there. I don't know what happened. That's a six word question. Anyone can ask it. And that will lead you to people who understand that you're curious about what's going on. You want to be engaged. You're not blaming anybody. You're not saying, why didn't I have a seat at the table? You're not saying, design should be more involved. You're saying, help me understand what happened. And they'll tell you. They'll tell you that Scott, you know, is a jerk and he's having a bad day. So you didn't do anything wrong. Like, Scott's just not the best manager and he was having a bad day. And you go, oh, I thought my presentation or I didn't do the ROIs, or getting that kind of insight about what's really going on is gold. And you only get that from people. You can't get that from some methodology or some, you know, book of tactics. It's that, do you know people well enough? You can have that conversation and then you get that conversation and now you're learning more about what to do next time and what the insight is, what the real story for what's happening is.
- [39:44]
Host
There's so much subtext in big organizations of what's going on with individuals. I'm glad you pointed that out. Let's talk about it maybe from the flip side here. So far we've been talking about what designers can do to sort of think more broadly, plug into the organization better. One thing that I observe is that large scale companies especially, but probably mid sized companies as well, just move closer and closer to a work environment that is just not conducive to creative work. And creative work, if you're a designer, creative work, if you're an engineer, if you're in sales, et cetera, what advice would you have for organizations to make more space and honor the creative work that's required for innovation?
- [40:35]
Scott Birkin
Yeah, it is kind of an unfair dynamic. There's so much talk about innovation and wanting ideas in a lot of companies, and then so little in practice supports it. It almost works against it, which creates burnout. I think that an easy one, or at least a simple one, is the recognition of the difference between the output and the time that goes into it. We still have a lot of work cultures that are based on like nine to five working hours and that you're supposed to put in hours of work. The input of time is not really the value, the value is the output. And so it can take a creative person a weekend of thinking about an idea in the back of their mind before they show up on Monday and they figured it out. Now, are they getting paid for that time? No. But sometimes they're treated at work as if the only thing that matters is how much time they put into it. So it's a common thing about designers being told, you know, why does it take so long? And an attitude to the work that reflects a production mind, that it's like making widgets in a factory or something and X units of hours will guarantee you Y units of output. And we know it's well documented. Creative work doesn't work that way. If you're expecting all this high minded talk of innovation and new ideas and changing things, that's not going to come about that way. And a recognition of that means people should be managed differently. There should be more autonomy for people to decide their working practices. Remote work for me is a factor in that too, of giving professionals the ability to choose for themselves the environments that will make them most productive and judge them on their output rather than the methods by which they're doing it. I wrote a book a long time ago called the Myths of Innovation, and a lot of that book was based on researching how did successful R and D labs do what they did. And most of the successful ones, including like Xerox Parc, had cultures of a high autonomy. Now, there was high expectations, but there was high autonomy and people could choose to work how they wanted. That became the model for a lot of, like, startup culture, early startup culture, where people could decide their hours, it didn't matter, just as long as they got their work done. And I think restoring that in larger organizations is entirely possible. It just requires someone who's a director level or an executive level who recognizes that they have to take on the responsibility of showing results to their peers and to the CEO. But they're going to manage their team and create a culture that's a trusted culture where people are rewarded for their output and evaluated for their output, rather than for the tools they use or the methods they use. Because that's really not going to be the determining factor.
- [43:11]
Guest
And not to pick on any company by name, but I will used to be that Google had this idea of 20% time where you could take 20% of your time and work on something that interested you. You know, it had to be related to what the company is doing. And the great stuff came out of that. Things like Gmail. But now it's, I think, internally known more as 20% extra time. Like this one has been an extra 20%. Yeah, 120%. So, yeah, it'd be probably nice for folks working there to bring back that kind of mindset. But let's talk about superpowers for a second. And if designers want to have influence, it's probably helpful for them to lean on things that they're already really good at. And one of those things is visual explanation. And you have some nice little illustrations in the book that show this. So first maybe elaborate on one or two of the superpowers, and then how can designers lean on those to have more influence within a company?
- [44:02]
Scott Birkin
The book calls out four or five superpowers, and one of them is our ability to explain. I mean, that's really what we do for users. We built this great skill set of explaining. We take these concepts and technologies and we force the team to try to have better language and metaphors. And then we build these systems for users, ordinary people, for them to understand. We're great explainers. And that is a superpower in a workplace. There's so much factionalization in workplaces and siloing and tension between different subcultures that use different language. There's a great opportunity for a designer to step into that and solve problems, functional problems on teams. Whenever there's a situation where there's a concept that people are trying to explain with paragraphs of text for us to come in and just sketch a diagram, we can do it quickly, easily. Do you mean this? And to show that to a room full of busy executives, that could be a transcending moment for a culture and a team to look at an image and realize it represents the thing they've been fighting about and struggling to explain for weeks. That's a powerful thing. But designers are often reticent to use those skills. Where I feel a little uncomfortable. I've had this conversation many times with designers that designers don't want to race to the whiteboard to sketch something out because they're afraid their sketch isn't going to look good enough. I've heard this a million times. And maybe it's less true now with younger designers because maybe there's less sketching on whiteboards altogether. But my response as a manager to this was always, you're a designer like you're quick sketch be better than the next hundred people in this building because this is what you know how to do. You should never be afraid to do that. So there's a thing in here too that hearkens back to the earlier question about what you do as a young designer. There's a certain amount of confidence required to step into some of these confusions and mistranslations. But that's what I'm suggesting. Do you mean this? And show something is something we are very powerful at doing. It's a simple question. There's very low stakes. Even make like a two by two chart. Do you mean this or that? Like just to simplify and make visual a discussion. Something that I think is a natural toolkit for us. And we don't often get invited at first to do it because it's like the Dunning Kruger effect. Non designers don't know that we can do this for them. They don't know to ask. But once we show it and it has that effect on the conversation, people will feel it. Then they'll start to say, hey, can you come to this meeting? Because it's going to be difficult. And I want you there to help explain things visually. Like, that's something we all want to hear, but no one can know to ask us that unless we show it first, and we have to show it.
- [46:49]
Host
Scott, one thing I admire about you is you go into these book projects with a thesis, but with a lot of questions. And so, presumably, working on this book, you went in with a lot of questions and curiosity. What did you learn from that process? What do you know today that you didn't know before you started this book?
- [47:11]
Scott Birkin
Well, so the book started as kind of a manifesto kind of thing. And I'd always wanted to write a manifesto. I did a bunch of research on manifestos. Like, I read a bunch of them, and I thought I was going to write this manifesto. They'd just be like, manifestos are meant to be provocative and opinionated, not back anything up and just kind of stir the pot a bit. That's what the plan was at first for this book. And then little by little, I'm working on that. There was feedback on the manifesto draft. Everyone kind of hated it. It wasn't very good. It was just too cranky. And then I had to revisit how to try to explain this stuff. The superpower thing was something that only surfaced midway through the project of how do you make this less of a depressing, critical book and make it something that was actually uplifting, that had a way to give agency. That's really what I wanted to do in this, give agency. So that stuff was a discovery midway through. To try to frame this in a way where, you know, what? We are good at solving some of these problems. We just haven't connected the dots completely between our skill set that we love to use and these problems that frustrate us so much. And if I can do anything to make more designers feel comfortable using our skill sets that we love to solve, the stuff that frustrates us, that seems like a great victory. Better design in the world, happier designers, you know, less terrible stuff that we're forced to use, better systems of government and public transportation. You know, that's really what I get excited about, Trying to help that sort of free up that amount of talent and make it move from. From a feeling like you're underutilized to be having more agency, I think wasn't something I fully understood, I cared so much about, until I was midway through this book.
- [48:50]
Guest
Scott, what are you reading or watching, listening to right now that's inspiring you? It doesn't have to be within the realm of design. Could be anything.
- [48:57]
Scott Birkin
I just finished. I've always been a philosophy person and I'm thinking of writing more philosophy stuff. I just finished reading a biography about the French philosopher Montaigne. He's, you guys may know, but he's the person who invented the word essay, basically invented the idea of writing short, personal things. So I just finished reading his biography. And as a writer and a thinker, I do get a lot of mileage out of reading what were these people's lives actually like. I to get past the hero part and understand who this person who I admire so much, what was their day like? Were they like a good neighbor? Like, would you want to go for a walk with them? Like in reality, you know, we like to think all these people were perfect and wonderful. And so I just finished reading it and I'm still thinking about it.
- [49:41]
Host
Fantastic. Well, Scott, it's always a pleasure to talk to you. Where can people learn more about this new book and all of your other books and what you're working on?
- [49:50]
Scott Birkin
Easiest way is designishard.com all the information about this book is there and it's on my website with all the other stuff, too.
- [49:57]
Host
Scott Birkin, thanks so much for being on the show.
- [50:00]
Scott Birkin
Thanks for having me.
- [50:06]
Aaron Walter
This episode was produced by Eli Woolery and me, Aaron Walter, with engineering and production support from Brian Paik of Pacific Audio. If you found this episode useful, we hope that you'll leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen to finer shows. Or simply drop a link to the show in your team's Slack channel. DesignBetterPodcast.com It'll really help others discover the show. Until next.