a modest proposal
SOOOOooooo much has been written about the current state of things in research, design and content, IA, and other disciplines I’ve worked in for the last 20 years (mostly in tech, but I bet this happens in other spaces as well).
As the market starts to ease and opens up again, which it will because we are needed, I want to cast a vote for a way of working that might help us avoid this situation again. Or at least mitigate it.
But first, a lil’ anger
The thing that makes this hard to do, at least for me, is the more pointed... more personal? feeling of the “prove your value” gaslighting Sara Wachter-Boettcher has so eloquently described.
The broken trust and degraded relationships gaslighting created, the active devaluing of what we do through layoffs, and a dadaesque level of absurdity in the subsequent job search, makes an honest appraisal harder.
Add in corporate greed, callous and unskilled executive leadership, and finger pointing at us, of all people, about “the user experience” we did not have the pull, power, or political know-how to truly set or shape.
To put the nail in the proverbial coffin, there’s nothing quite like having your “role eliminated” to make a person angry enough to give the whole tech world the high hat/middle finger and go find something else to do. Like bake.
Being honest: I don’t want to “be generous.”
But… anger, I learned a while back, is really an indicator that I need something to change for me.
So after a few weeks of being laid off, after looking long and hard at my relationship with work itself, after I did some baking, talked to my mom, therapist, friends, and new people in my network, spent many therapeutic hours at the dog park, and getting very peaceful sleep, here’s where I got to.
What’s been lost
We’ve lost the ability to build things together.
The muscles have atrophied, maybe.
Instead of research, design and content working together to make an idea better and stronger, less easy to poke holes in or more business-aware; instead of looping in product or engineering as partners, not stakeholders we have to cajole or please; and instead of treating data science as someone who can inform what we make instead of measure it after the fact, we spend our time coming up with our own versions of a thing and set about arguing for it.
Research needs to ‘field a study’ and design needs to ‘do our exploration’ while content struggles to gain access to a single Figma file to even see what’s needed. Data science could tell us what’s worked well in the past but we don’t ask; sometimes their teams are too small to answer. Information architecture is lucky to get invited to a meeting only to be told their naming isn’t “sexy” enough.
Product probably knows something we don’t about the roadmap or priorities that could help us scope our work but we don’t work with them until we have a report or mockups done. Engineers probably have ideas for how to do something efficiently but we don’t even try; we end up in negotiations after we’ve got a too-complete idea instead.
We don’t even work together on decks to present to leaders to get buy-in -- such a missed opportunity.
I add my slides, you add yours, and there’s no story when we go to present. It’s much easier to poke holes in work and dismiss a team that doesn’t show up together.
We’ve straight up stopped collaborating. We talk at each other, past each other, wait for one person to finish so we can make our next point.
In our defense and beyond our reach of influence or power, we are still laboring in poorly designed remote work situations and only beginning to process what the pandemic has done to human interaction. The layoffs going on also make us protective of what we do in case we have to prove our “worth.”
It all results in a pretty poisonous mix, the output of which is seen on LinkedIn by everyone. We are having our very own underpants problem: putting our internal problems on display, on the outside.
(Also, obvious caveat: this is not all teams and not all of us, but this is something I’ve seen and heard about a lot.)
What’s worth regaining
The truth is, I had a lot more success in my work when I joined forces with other disciplines to create and present a more convincing, less brittle reason to move in a particular direction.
I did that by being more open than I want to be right now. I did it by being aware of the context I was working in but not overwhelmed by it. I did it by spending what seemed like aimless time thinking and bringing back what could be terrible ideas that I trusted my teammates to help me make better.
They always listened, and they always helped. Because I did that for them, too.
I was more successful because the team was. We won together. We lost together. We were able to gain the buy-in needed to do the right thing.
The most functional team I ever worked on, where it was okay to be as open and collaborative as I truly like to be, did something pretty radical in terms of trusting each other and combining functions.
We had the whole team listen to recordings of user testing as they came in, and then we synthesized together. Our researcher led the conversation but we all participated. We all learned, in the same afternoon, not just how people felt in a visceral way, which made us all say, “we have to do something about this!” but how to do a better job analyzing what we heard so that we took better action.
When I teed that idea up at the next workplace people looked at me like I might have more than 5 heads. “We like to keep our studies clear of that kind of input,” I heard. And designers said, “I’d rather just get the recommendations.”
Yikes. Like, wow. I pushed it, but I didn’t get far.
So when I reconsidered those experiences, I realized that if I’m going to feel that way about my work again, I might have to work harder than I used to to trust the people I work with because of where we’re at as a field.
Is shifting our attitude toward one another harder? You bet. Does the kind of collaboration I’m talking about take a couple of intentional extra hours? Yup. Do you have to get less precious about your “craft” and expertise? Less process-focused? You betcha. Does it always work to persuade higher ups? Not every time.
But trying something like that will make working on a team feel like an actual team and improve your odds with senior execs because you will all be telling the same, connected story. Like watching a movie where the people in it are having a blast is much more fun, people are more likely to get behind a team that is working together.
I think if we were just slightly more in it together, if we could just crack the door to trust and real collaboration, we’d get better results, full stop. Maybe we’d even be worth listening to on LinkedIn.
