We complain about static things: this boss, this company, this culture. There is a better way: look at your situation as part of a system of feedback loops. This view reveals how things really work and you can use it to your advantage.
Here is the chapter from Why Design Is Hard about how systems thinking will help you.
Imagine what would happen if we had a time travel machine and transported legendary electronics product designer Dieter Rams, in his prime, to a job at a small farm on the outskirts of Cairo, Egypt, in 1874. How successful would his product design career have been without indoor plumbing or electricity?
In his book Out of the Crisis, author W. Edwards Deming estimates that 94% of the success of an organization is its systems, rather than the behavior of individuals. That’s a shockingly big, and curiously specific, number to hear at first. But think about how many necessary factors there are for a project to succeed that are greater than what any one person contributes. From that point of view, Deming’s estimation makes great sense.
Consider that we don’t pick the year we are born, what country we are born into, or who our parents are, yet these are likely the three most important factors that define our lives. The individual choices we worry about pale in comparison to the systemic factors we never had control over in the first place.
In her classic book Thinking in Systems: A Primer, Donella H. Meadows offers this definition:
A system is a set of things—people, cells, molecules… interconnected in such a way that they produce their own pattern of behavior over time.
For our purposes, the most interesting thing about systems is their interconnectedness. It means that each part has many relationships to other parts, and the system works (or fails) for a chain of reasons, rather than because of a singular cause. For example, when only one tire on your car wears out, you might just think it’s a bad tire and replace it. But the real cause might be that the tires are out of alignment, or there could be a problem with the suspension system and not the tire itself.
Humans are prone to shallow thinking and we’re attracted, like a moth to the flame, to simple explanations. Explanations based on singular causes are easier to say and remember, even when they’re wrong. Thinking in systems usually provides better explanations for why things are how they are.
Think about the last time someone at your workplace did a great job on a project or made a terrible mistake. Odds are they got much of the credit or the blame. But if we think in terms of systems, we can ask better questions that help us really understand what happened:
Who decided what work this person was assigned?
How was this person hired, trained, and managed?
How were they rewarded, supported, or punished?
What powerful people enabled this situation or failed to prevent it?
Did this event happen in line with the team culture or in rejection of it?
Just a handful of questions improve the quality of our explanation. Similar techniques like root cause analysis or the 5 Whys (i.e., ask why repeatedly to understand something’s true cause) serve the same purpose. Using these tactics when you’re frustrated or stuck can help widen your perspective on what’s really going on.
Renowned scholar Theodore Zeldin wrote, “The people with the most power…are those that have been trained to look at the world as a series of systems, not of individuals, and who therefore can produce systematic solutions.” We’d add that this ability to see in terms of systems is why some people are able to obtain power, despite not being born into it or having it gifted to them.
When we look at our workplaces in terms of systems, it’s easier to see that the friction we experience is probably an efficiency for someone else, usually someone more powerful than we are. Because of our output worship and detail-obsessive tendencies, we’re prone to waiting pridefully for organizations to conform to the way we want to work (e.g., throwing design work over the fence to engineering). Even if we don’t want to do the work to close the gaps we find, we have to be mature enough to see that if the gap remains, it works against us eventually.
This realization often leads to another flawed approach designers are fond of: revolution! We try to take on a whole system ourselves. It feels heroic, and movies and myths make it seem realistic, but when you work against a system, it’s like swimming upstream in a powerful river. You can be talented and hard-working, but even simple actions are hard. You will exhaust yourself. Even if you have some success, the inevitable burnout might take years to recover from. We don’t recommend doing this. The place you work for is unlikely to be worthy of this kind of sacrifice.
Instead, step back and, this will sound strange at first, empathize with the system. If you think of your organization, or the river in our metaphor, as an organism, it’s just doing its job to survive and thrive (or to externalize costs and maximize profits). The river pushes things one way because that’s what it has been doing successfully for a long time. Even inert elements, like leaves and branches (or bad middle managers), help the system too, because once they fall into the river and float along with it, they work against anything trying to go the other way. Successful systems are self-reinforcing, which makes them powerful.
So what does this mean? You don’t have the luxury of assuming the system you work in is designed to make the high-quality design work you want to do easy. It almost certainly won’t be. Instead, use your investigative powers to:
Make good maps to ease navigating the system
Look for points of leverage where your assets are greater than your liabilities
Find allies in the system so their status becomes an advantage
Because these aren’t design tasks in the strictest sense, your idealistic mind might resist and ask our familiar question, “Why should I have to?” And your creative brain might be thinking instead, “Why can’t I redesign the entire system from scratch and make it better?”
Even if you had the power to do this, which you don’t, you’d likely fall victim to the blue-sky fallacy. Creative people frequently fantasize about having a clean slate and starting over (i.e., the only constraint is the blue sky above us). Most of our design methodologies suffer from blue-sky thinking: they somehow assume a blank slate of a team waiting for a method, instead of realizing there’s a pre-existing power structure that leaders like and have no interest in changing.
Part of the blue-sky fallacy is the lack of awareness that every single system that disappoints us with its brokenness and sheer stupidity started as something that someone somewhere designed from scratch. It almost certainly worked well when it was first made, but over time, unanticipated challenges accumulated and the system declined. It’s only ego and ignorance that make us think the solution is to give one person—the designer, of course—supreme power to start everything over. As tempting as it is, this is not the way.
Instead, the path to redesigning systems begins with what is known as Chesterton’s Fence:
You should never destroy a fence, change a rule, or do away with a tradition until you understand why it’s there in the first place.
By choosing to be an investigator first, you’ll actually understand the problem you really need to solve. For example, often designers discover that their organization is siloed, or overly divided, which makes good UX design harder. Don’t assume everyone wants to change this. Instead, find out who benefits from the status quo (e.g., busting silos shrinks the empire of selfish silo leaders). Then compare that list with who, besides you, benefits from a shift to a more holistic culture.
For organizations, good investigation begins with making your own useful maps. While existing ones like org charts and official processes tell one story, and probably not an accurate one, bet on your curiosity instead. In their book Hack Your Bureaucracy, Marina Nitze and Nick Sinai explained:
Relationships, knowledge, and power aren’t captured by traditional org charts. [Make] your own map of who knows what, who controls what resources, and who is in cahoots with whom.
Never underestimate the power of cahoots. Organizational systems are made of people, and people behave in preferential ways to people they like. Leaders often feel the need to obscure their preferences under the guise of professionalism, trying to give their behavior the illusion of Vulcan-like rationality. When you can see past it, it may explain some of the behavior that has mystified you in the past.
To construct your map, consider the following questions:
What is the real path ideas follow to get approved?
Who are the true influential players on that path?
What secret passages or backchannels do they use?
Who trusts you? Likes you? Avoids you?
Who owes you a favor?
How diverse, in role and background, are the people you talk to every day?
Which powerful people are looking out for you, or could be?
With good system maps, you will find leverage points. Meadows defines leverage points as “places within a complex system where a small shift in one thing can produce big changes in everything.” For designers in organizations, they often include things like:
A person at the right level of power who trusts you
A project small enough that you can successfully influence it
A team, or its leader, that is open to a new approach
An ally with inside knowledge to guide you in selling your ideas
Experience with the goal that the team wants to achieve
When you have leverage opportunities, you’ll no longer feel like you’re swimming against the current of the river. You’ll see the breakpoints where the current changes, sunny banks providing places to rest, and even (solar-powered) motorboats your allies are driving that have space for you, taking you in the direction you want to go. You don’t need the whole river to change all at once, you just need to invest where the system works in your favor, so you can grow more leverage points and repeat.
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.