Doctor's Note - Issue 31 - On Mediocrity
Doctor's Note - Issue 31 - On Mediocrity
In this issue: Mediocrity and the State of Design / Power of Ten / Defensive Calendaring / Guff of the Month / Book Corner / The Linkhole
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On mediocrity and the state of design
I started writing this piece about mediocrity and then Robert Fabricant's The big design freak-out: A generation of design leaders grapple with their future article came out. There is a tight relationship between the two, which extended this essay considerably.
Robert Fabricant’s article provides a good historical summary of how "design" got to where it is, how the big management consultancies acquired design agencies. The tl;dr summary is that a generation of design leaders are grappling with uncertainty about their futures, that many design execs have had their positions and departments eliminated or placed underneath Product in the org, and there is now a crisis of confidence among design leaders. He frames the piece around three key questions:
Were we unprepared for our success?
Did we misread the signals?
Did we struggle to adapt?
It's here that I smelled a whiff of apologist victim self-blaming (c.f. Sara Wachter-Boettcher's Hey designers, they’re gaslighting you. article). I don’t think design, specifically, should be required to “demonstrate its ROI” any more than any other function. If you hired a bunch of designers, presumably you thought you had a reason to do so. It's on you, not them to prove their ROI. This is not an argument ever levelled at accountants, HR folks or CEOs, as far as I know.
The headline of the "big design freak-out" fails to differentiate between design in digital/digital transformation and the myriad other design disciplines out there. We also have architecture, industrial and real product design, graphic design, communications design, motion graphics, visual effects, games design, 3D, typography, textiles, fashion, automotive, systemic, strategic, and service design, to name just a few.
The Silicon Valley narrative is so pervasive that we have been persuaded to believe those are the only business models worth discussing. I don’t want to negate the pain of those who have been laid off or are struggling right now. It is very real. But design is a broad church and to frame it as a big design freak-out suggests one sector represents the whole of design. In many other sectors, design seems to be doing just fine.
But let's come back to the area of design Fabricant is talking about, since it is also the world I know. I have been in "digital" for 30 years (yes, that makes me feel as old as you might imagine). A decent amount of that has been on digital transformation projects. I contend that The Design Project—design moving beyond its role as simply a decorative function—has been a success.
On the most recent Power of Ten podcast, Peter Merholz and I talked about the Cambrian Explosion of design of the past 15-20 years. Fuelled by digital transformations, scaling ambitions, free money through 0% interest rates, organisations across the world invested heavily in design.
For the kids reading this, 15 years ago there were few in-house design teams. Agencies did the bulk of this work. Even 10 years ago, I would go into an enterprise like an insurance company and talk about the need for, say, a customer journey map and be met with blank stares, as if I were an alien.
A lot of my professional work was training those in-house teams and these days design is no longer alien. Much as it's difficult to remember the days before smartphones, I cannot over emphasise how much the landscape of professional design has changed in the past two decades.
Most organisations that have a significant digital presence have—or had—a design team. Most have some form of design system or product process up and running. These teams—along with their engineering counterparts—broke the back of the heavy design work needed to drag these companies into the modern era of digital.
Structural issues play a significant role in the current "freak out" situation that have little to do with design or its ROI.
The first is that most of the layoffs we’re seeing are not due to an actual economic downturn. At least not one that is not an artefact of social contagion. Musk fired most of Twitter and the market rewarded him for it. The other tech companies followed suit and market investors (wealthy gamblers, as they're known colloquially) rewarded them with higher stock prices, because lower headcount equals greater profits. In other times, the layoffs would have raised questions about leadership, whether something bad was going on behind the scenes, and stock prices would be punished.
The Product Factory
The second structural change has been the enormous success of product leadership and processes.
Peter Merholz pointed out that, having set up these massive engineering teams as part of digital transformations, organisations needed designers to supply those development teams. Then they needed product managers—a lot of them—to supposedly oversee all of these folks.
As a consequence, he argued, all the investment was in the second diamond of design (referring to the double diamond model). There was also a dearth of PM talent:
"The problem is there weren’t thousands of qualified product people in the world at the time, especially in these companies. And so what they did was they re-tasked one of three types of roles: program managers, people who could organise and distribute work; business analysts, people who could try to understand the impact and analyse what was going on; or subject matter experts. And these are the ones that I’m seeing more and more recently, where someone who’s been at the company 10-15 years, understands the product well, which means they kind of understand the industry, they’ve had some interfacing with customers, they understand the details of the product, and so they are now put in charge of the product.
The thing is, none of these people—program managers, business analysts, nor subject matter experts—none of them understand the single most important thing we want from a product manager, which is how to run a product development process."
It's here where one layer of mediocrity crept in. My main job is coaching design leaders. Many of them have great, peer-level relationships with the product leadership in their organisations. Those companies are generally doing well. They have a vision, they have focus and they are improving their customer experience and their business.
But a significant number of design folk have terrible relationships with their product leaders. I hear stories of some very mediocre Product Managers who simply don't know what they're doing. Those companies are, unsurprisingly, crazy, chaotic messes of velocity without vision. They are generally not doing well and the panicking VCs, greedily wanting the 10x returns they saw their peers enjoy, just make it worse. Scale faster is the singular mantra.
At this point, I would like to emphasise that I'm not saying all product management is mediocre. When done well it brings clarity and focus to flailing organisations and teams. I am saying two specific things about product management:
When product is done badly, but dogmatically, it makes organisations flail even more, because of the self-deception of believing they are doing all the rituals, so it must be right.
And I'm saying that an overheated job market with inflated salaries always attracts dross, charlatans and dilettantes in the lower third-to-half of that market. This goes for product design as much as product management.
Organisational amnesia
Organisations are not single entities. They are made up of people and people come and go. This gives rise to organisational amnesia, dooming organisations to repeat themselves and their past mistakes.
I contend that many of the stakeholders dedicated to either sponsoring or actually doing the work of building in-house design capabilities have now moved on. With design systems and design capabilities set up, product leadership have moved into the role of running these teams, sometimes with great success, sometimes as factory overseers with all the problems outlined above.
If we view the last 20 years of investment in design as an unusual blip like the aforementioned Cambrian Explosion, it is natural for some correction to happen. This sucks massively for those of us working in the industry, just as it did post-dotcom crash, post-GFC, and for people who used to call themselves Flash designers. You may, or may not, take solace in the likelihood that, one day, Product Management and Figma will also no longer be a thing.
As old stakeholders move on, new ones come in and see the results of The Design Project's success, but with no idea how it came to be that way. The factory is ticking along just fine, so why do we need all these whiny designers? Can’t AI can do what they do anyway? All they're doing is producing artwork based on Product Managers' text prompts, right?
Everything will seem fine. Until it's not.
Until they need to maintain a gradually degrading design system. Until the design becomes blanded out by ubiquitous design patterns and/or AI. Until their product squads have siloed the touchpoints or parts of touchpoints (AKA "features") so much that the whole thing is a messy glom of different parts and a disjointed user-experience.
I suspect this, because it is exactly where those orgs were 15-20 years ago and I'm having the same conversations now that I had back then. Organisational amnesia leads to regression.
This is fine
Alternatively, leadership of those orgs will be quite content with the bland mediocrity they have ended up with. It does the job, so what's the problem? Shocker, I know.
Peter Merholz again:
"The thing that designers have real trouble coming to terms with is that you can run a perfectly successful business with perfectly mediocre design much of the time."
One of the things I learned at Fjord/Accenture was just how happy many stakeholders were with mediocre work. I really don't mean this in a disparaging way, either. I mean it as a reality check for me.
Yes, it was frustrating to work on projects and deliver 70% of what it could have been, but Fjord's 70% was high quality, even if it felt “less than” to us perfectionist designers. Yet it was 200% better than the crap the client had before. The Client Account Leads were happy, since they didn't know better anyway, and the client was happy because they got something much better than they had before, within the budget and timeframe they had available. So, really, what is the problem?
This used to depress me somewhat until I realised that we all go for mediocre more than we care to admit. We all make compromises in our lives. We buy an H&M t-shirt or a boring car or don’t go to the finest possible restaurants all the time. Perfect—or even just the best possible at the time—does not always make sense and is not always affordable.
For many stakeholders decently mediocre is fine. The thing got done. That’s their metric. Next project, next promotion. The challenge is to discern whether what got left out matters or not. Sometimes it does, because it sets a brand up for easy disruption or builds up experience debt that will one day need to be paid off, wasting resources. Sometimes... well, sometimes it really doesn’t matter, hard as that is to stomach.
AI will design. It will be bland.
I once heard a quote some time ago attributed to John Maeda that, “Adobe is the world’s Art Director.” If you look across the longer history of design, you’ll see that every tool leaves its signature, whether that’s Kai’s Power Tools adorning every homespun rave poster, Twitter’s Bootstrap framework on so many start-up websites, or Figma design patterns that make every new app look the same as their competitor’s.
Since velocity is an unquestioned mantra of product development, it gives rise to stressed people. Those people are not given time to ponder, to turn ideas over, to try out different approaches. What time-poor designers do is lean on what the tools of the day do easily. That’s why so much design work looks kind of slick, but also bland at the same time. It has no opinion, no design point of view. There’s no time for that. It’s an H&M T-shirt.
And that is probably fine. Figma slaves and, soon, AI will carry on producing this kind of work. I don't think AI will produce much bad stuff, but I don't think it will produce much great stuff either. It will be competently bland and plenty of organisations will be quite happy with that and it may not matter much.
Sorry designers. I know. It sucks, but check out your own wardrobe. You do it too. (Okay, not Matt LeMay, but the rest of us do).
Where did all the designers go?
I believe the shedding of design capabilities will come back to bite companies as the effects of their organisational amnesia become apparent. It will take a few years to happen, but this cycle is not unique to design.
The mid-century to 1990s advertising industry had a similar pattern. The bread and butter work used to be direct marketing layouts (catalogues and junk mail) and media space selling. Occasionally, a brand needed a complete refresh for which high-quality creative was essential. After that the creative runs on autopilot for a few years until it falls apart, goes stale and the cycle repeats.
My friend Rebekka Bush pointed out the second analogy:
”Is design the new Research & Development? This is where (product manufacturing) companies used to cut when they wanted to save money but eventually came to realise that it was all very well in the short term, but mid-to-long term they were cutting their own revenue streams and gutting their knowledge folk and it was hard to replace their experience later.”
The final analogy is manufacturing outsourcing in the name of business efficiencies. The recent Boeing door blow-out scandal was a tragic example of organisational amnesia.
In his excellent analysis of Boeing, James Surowiecki explained:
”For most of its history, Boeing had what you might call an engineering-centric culture, with power in the company resting in the hands of engineering and design. But in 1997, Boeing bought another aircraft manufacturer, McDonnell Douglas, in what turned out to be a kind of reverse acquisition—executives from McDonnell Douglas ended up dominating and remaking Boeing. They turned it from a company that was relentlessly focused on product to one more focused on profit.
Harry Stonecipher, who had been CEO of McDonnell Douglas and was CEO of Boeing from 2003 to 2005, said: “When people say I changed the culture of Boeing, that was the intent, so that it’s run like a business rather than a great engineering firm.”
(Peter Merholz pointed out that Boeing was already a decent business. It just wasn’t a financial instrument.)
Boeing’s engineers complained about outsourced manufacturing, the company’s hostile stance against unions (often responsible for ensuring things like training and safety are maintained), and the effort required to attend to the quality and details of over 600 suppliers, many of who subcontract to others.
The relentless drive to efficiency, utilisation rates and velocity over quality, is a pattern many designers will recognise.
Everything is a cycle
My hope and guess is that some organisations will realise they neglected their design garden and now they need someone to come in a re-landscape it and, oops, they fired all the people capable of doing that.
Maybe AI will take over the world and none of us will have any jobs anymore, beyond writing text prompts for Design-GPT to spit out mediocre design assets. Maybe that’s the future of product management, too.
I’ll leave you with this final quote from James Surowiecki. You can email it to your former employer:
“Boeing migrated away from an engineering-centric culture in order to boost profits and shareholder value. But over the past five years, while the S&P 500 index has risen by roughly 80 percent, Boeing’s stock price has fallen by about 35 percent; over the past decade, its annual returns have trailed the S&P 500 by almost 6 percent a year.”
CEOs really have failed to demonstrate their ROI.
Power of Ten
Ig you haven’t checked out my Power of Ten podcast, you’ll find all the episodes and transcripts here. My YouTube channel has both the video and audio versions. Videos are usually released ahead of the audio, but I’ll get them in sync pretty soon.
My two most recent, wonderful guests provided excellent insights and conversation:
Linn Vizard — Service Design for Real World Outcomes
Peter Merholz - State of the Design Nation
Defensive Calendaring Tips
I released a video on defensive calendaring and taking back control of your time, your most precious, non-renewable resource.
Guff of the Month
For years I've been collecting vacuous statements from people in business and consulting when they really don't know what they're talking about but want to sound like they do. It's called The Big Book of Guff.
This time around, it’s a cringe-inducing video from the young analysts at KPMG Canada (thanks to Joff Outlaw for this one). Instagram's embed code is heinous, so here is the link.
The Linkhole
The aforementioned Robert Fabricant piece: The big design freak-out: A generation of design leaders grapple with their future
Good piece by Marzia Aricò – The Seat at the Table: And why I think designers should stop demanding one.
Erika Hall also wrote a great antidote to the whole “designers failed to prove their value” nonsense.
The excellent Joe Macleod was featured in FastCompany about his approach to “Endineering,” helping companies design the end of life for products.
I’ll admit I’m sometimes one to feed the trolls. Daniele Catalanotto has a nice approach in how he responds to aggressive comments online
In an age of profits over employee wellbeing, TTRPG publisher Monte Cook warmed my heart with Putting Happy People over Everything Else.
I hear all to often from coachees complaining about managers who expect 24-hour availability. Australia just past a Right To Disconnect law, including (for now) jail time for bosses who email after-hours..
Zombie leadership: Dead ideas that still walk among us. A paper by S. Alexander Haslam, Mats Alvesson and Stephen D. Reicher. (Alvesson was co-author of The Stupidity Paradox: The Power and Pitfalls of Functional Stupidity at Work). The abstract is chef’s kiss.
Bruce Sterling posted a couple of charts showing big tech’s revenues versus layoffs.
Is GenAI’s Impact on Productivity Overblown?. Spoiler: probably.
John Scott-Railton documents Twitter's AI bot problem in which a spam account posts an AI-generated description of an image without the image, then swarms of blue-check bots reply with generated replies complimenting the nonexistent image. What a time.
Because crypto didn’t burn enough energy needlessly, the bros have switched to AI. Find out just how much in AI has a terrible energy problem by Mark Pesce.
I used to love Balsamiq Mockups and there is real value in visually signalling that a mock-up is a draft. Since the kids today all live in Figma, here’s a Paper Wireframe Kit for Figma by Method, Claire Norman, and Tyler Sharpe. (Via Stéphanie Walter).
Note-taking nerdery, PKMs, all those tools can sometimes suck the life out of the creative process. So says screenwriter Julian Simpson in On notes, outlines, and somehow cobbling a script together....
I’m not alone in my thinking about firing designers coming back to bite companies. Some folks in Infosec have the same idea.
Books
I have made a return to fiction recently and devoured Rebecca Yarros’s The Fourth Wing and its sequel Iron Flame. Kind of Top Gun with a cool, kick-ass female protagonist and dragons instead of fighter planes and without the macho cheese. Yarros is infuriatingly good at chapter cliffhangers.
I think and coach a great deal about what we should be spending our time on. Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman, which I think everyone may have read by now, is the go-to reminder that using your time on this planet for something other than productivity is a good idea.
I wrote the foreword to my ex-student, Daniele Catalanotto’s new book, Service Design Principles 301-400. The whole series is worth checking out. I really love his quirky humour and very human approach to a field that can sometimes be overly academic.
Jorge Arango’s book, Duly Noted, on cultivating your personal knowledge garden, is finally out. Definitely check it out, as well as my interview with him on Power of Ten.
Cory Doctorow’s The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation is a must-read if you want to understand the background to everything I wrote about above. I remain in envious awe of Cory’s insight and prolific writing abilities.
That’s it for this issue! Thanks for making it this far and for all your reading, listening and watching time. I enormously appreciate it.
Until next time,
Andy
❤️
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