20 years ago my first book, Making Things Happen: Mastering Project Management, was published and sold over 100k copies, launching my career as an author. I’m grateful to everyone who has bought the book and supported my work over all these years.
As thanks: here in one short list is the best advice from that book and what I’ve learned in 30 years of leading projects and teaching leaders:
Everything is a project. Every activity or goal in life can be framed as one. If you master how projects work you can master your life.
The three things you need are good people, clear goals and wise leaders. If you have all three, success is possible. If you have two or less, good luck.
Anyone can ship garbage on time. Many teams ship trash late. The quality bar in the world is low.
Project management in many organizations is project rescue in disguise.
All schedules are guesses. Better schedules consider more factors but you can never account for them all.
Projects are made of people. People thrive on trust. Trust is hard to earn and easy to lose.
Clarity creates speed. Going slow to go fast is a sign leaders have succeeded before.
Good leaders earn trust, teach well and model behavior for everyone.
Stupidity travels down. Fools at the bottom are easy to ignore. Stupidity from the top is hard to escape.
Odds of success improve the smaller and clearer your goals are.
Projects in trouble should have smaller teams and simpler ambitions.
The iron triangle of cost, scope and time can not be beaten. You can not escape tradeoffs and if you try it will destroy you.
The more goals you have the more ways there are to fail.
All work lists should be in priority order. This is harder and more important than it sounds.
You must be good at saying no, otherwise your yes means nothing.
Most project failures were people problems first.
Resilience beats perfection. Things go wrong but healthy teams grow from it. Calm seas make poor sailors.
Learn from mistakes. Avoid blame. If you hide it or shame it you will repeat it.
When in doubt, look up. Chronic problems are caused by leaders.
Good people love systems that help them do good work. If they resist, something is wrong.
(bonus) If you want to look back with pride, make sure your projects are used to help the world.
For my tenth book, about wisdom, I’ve been experimenting with Substack, posting draft ideas each week. In a recent video update I explained I’m now starting phase two: revising these shorter, informal pieces into a complete first draft.
What does this mean to you? I don’t know!
My ambition for this project is to capture the best ideas about living well I’ve encountered in life and do it in as concise a way as possible. AND also avoiding the common annoyances these kinds of books have.
If this interests you, it’s a good time to join the Substack for this book. Why? You’ll be first to see parts of the project as they develop and as phase two completes I’ll likely send the entire draft to the list for your feedback.
If you want to learn more, here are the first ten draft rules I’ve posted:
For the launch of my latest book, Why Design Is Hard, I did weekly office hours every Thursday on Zoom. Anyone could show up, ask a question, get advice, or dig in on a topic I’ve written about before. Sometimes 10 people showed up. Sometimes just 2. But it was always fun, with lots of laughing and great conversation. I looked forward to it every week.
It was so fun in fact I will do it on a regular basis starting next month. And open it to everyone my mailing list, and to any topic from all of my books and essays (rather than just UX).
To me this is a service I can provide to you for following my work. And as a service, this means you get to help me decide when it will happen. Please vote. Thanks.
I’m in NYC for Leading Design 2022, and I’m livebloging the event (taking notes in real time, updated for each talk). You can alos see my notes from the 2021 and 2016 events.
Vellos is the author of the excellent book, We Should Get Together. In addition to being a design leader she’s a facilitator and community builder. Conversations are a key part of this. But we live in a world starved of meaningful connection, even before the pandemic.
She created better than small talk, a simple system for better conversations, and some cards from this system were given out at the event. The core idea was to get beyond the basic, cliche conversations we’ve learned to have but that don’t really work. Generous curiosity isn’t hard to cultivate. Questions are a doorway to connection. A connection creates relationships that define the quality of our lives.
Coach: Your job is to get the most out of your team.
Diplomat: Creating a space for design to do well across functions
Champion: Managing up and out. Engaging with stakeholders and executives.
Architect: Putting things in place so good design can scale
Design staffing continues to grow very fast. And that means that leaders and managers need to grow and we need more of them. We are putting people into management and leadership without preparing them. He wants us to get out in front of this incompetence.
“She went too deep too fast” – about a new design director, from a VP of Design. New directors tend to focus on what they are already good at (classic Peter Principle).
He described the path of becoming a design leader: leader, to manager (front line manager), to director (middle management), to VP of design (executive). In each of these stages, you are evolving into a new form.
Design leader’s area of attention:
Creative: vision, direction, practice, standards (goal is quality)
Business: design work aligns with business, cross function and planning (goal is business sucess)
People: recruiting and hiring, performance and career development, culture (goal is team health)
Operations: Program management, communication, budgets (goal is effectiveness)
How the focus of design leader’s shifts as you rise:
Lead -> Manager: mostly creative leadership and people management
Manager -> Director: shift to cross functional relationships – less time managing down – sideways and up. Bad middle managers are a black hole, since they are such a pivot point.
Director to VP: You are not recieving strategy, you are informing strategy. You define what quality means and how it can be achieved. You are responsible for defining and delivering on value.
As you rise your attention shifts to more and more managing up and away from your own team
The org looks to the design leader as their figurehead – the designers want this person to be an inspiration. And they are expected to do everything (design savior). How can we shape design leadership teams so that the burden of leadership is shared?
She opened her talk sharing a story about her Mom, who is ill, and needs an entire team of people to give her support. Over years silos have formed and individual experts have their own systems, that don’t work very well in aggregate. She has spent most of her career working on design systems at big organizations.
Team of teams
understanding a team of teams
What holds us back
Removing the blockers
Four archetypes for teams:
Command – hieracy is efficient, but least resilient
Command of teams: teams work well, until they hit a silo
Team of teams: each individual knows one other person on another team
She used to study food systems, how people obtain and are provided with sources for food. She was in Austin during the big storm in 2021, when the power went out and they lost all of their food. Soon they learned through neighbors and text messages who had surplus food. Sometimes systems that are organic and informal have more resilience than the formalized ones.
messy relationships and messy cities are the most resilient
– Erin White
What if we redesigned teamwork to be more collaborative? IBM had a tool called Radar that allowed teams to switch perspectives, changing their view to be less siloed.
Org charts are hierarchical, but there are many other ways to map the relationships between people and teams.
What holds us back?
Common false beliefes:
“it will slow us down.” – a fear that if we aren’t sprinting, we must be falling behind. Leads to burnout.
“We’ll give you visibility.” – giving visibility can just be theater – if it’s not tied to planning and restructuring.
“Management won’t buy in.” – suggests that you need permission to try somerthing new. But often bosses care about the results more than the means.
“Our roadmap is already planned.” – this is a fear of ambiguity and change. It is safe to hafe a plan, the reality is that most things don’t go as planned. There must be room for emerging opportunities.
“We own this.” – ownership can be the kiss of death for collaboration. Stewardship is a better model.
Eventually we need to redesign organizations to better afford the real goals, instead of what traditional organizational design tends to be good for.
FInal aspiration: she encouraged us during times of uncertainty, crisis and growth to choose collaboration over silos.
She grew up in Chicago and is an amateur physicist Planck value (or constant) is a fundamental law of how atoms work and it doesn’t stay in the normal bounds of how we think the world works. She started as a designer, went to design lead, then design director and now is a VP. She says Merholz is right in how unprepared people are to be in these roles, and as you rise more time is spent with other roles than with designers.
We can’t keep our insular preciousness about our craft – we have to be collective if our goal of human-centered design is to get good design into the products and services.
Her statement for what she does: “To amplify the beauty of humanity with design while avoiding practices that exploit its fragility.”
“Design is the conscious and intuitive effort to impose meaning order to chaos” – Papanek
“Without design leadership you dob’t know where you are going.
Her definition of a good manager: My job as a leader is to have you operate in your jam 90% of the time. 10% is unavoidable BS.
She told a story about working with young children and teaching them a design thinking method. She didn’t use any of the formal language we do. The task was to redesign the classroom. They emerged into a natural and shared approach to problem-solving (collective leadership tenets):
They treated the class like an ecosystem
Share and rotating decision making
People are trusted
Success comes from diverse perspective
Transparent and effective communication
4. Alice Quan – Designing Your Dream Job(s): The Art of IKIGAI
In this short tlak, Quan offered that she is in her 6th dream job. She grew up in a small town in Illinois and her parents immigrated from China and Hong Kong (they are “asian tiger parents”). They didn’t have much (his family pooled their money to send her father to America) so she learned to make things scratch, and the idea of working with teams in organizations to make things means much to her.
Her father explained that she had three career choices they’d support: doctor, accountant or lawyer. But her best friend from high school studied design and she was intrigued. On her own, she built a portfolio and applied to design school but was rejected. But she persisted and asked for feedback and eventually got in and got a full scholarship. Only then did she tell her parents. (She joked that she catches herself doing the same things to her kids, telling them that e-sports is not a real career).
This was her Ikigai origin story. She was slowly learning how to apply the framework in her own life (she references Karate Kid, and how it takes commitment and patience to find your way. IK = ALIVE / GAI = BENEFIT).
5. Dianne Que – “I got you”: A Meditation on Radical Inclusion
The first step in inclhsive leadership is to see people as people. She shared some of her personal history (child of imigrants).
Meditation: a practice of cultivating understanding, love and compassion by looking deeply, first for ourselves and then for others.
Incluion: the practice of building the culture of belonging by actively inviting the contriubtion and participation of all people.
Practice is something you need to do regularly and often in order to get better at it.
Story: May 26, 2020. Day after George Floyd was murdered. She was on a work call created to create space for people to discuss their feelings about what happened, but there wasn’t a single person of color on the call. With the support of her manager they created a series of conversations for their creative managers. They started with managers and hiring managers (there was a lot of open head count on the team).
First question from management was: “What outcomes can we expect from these conversations?”
We have a culture that emphasizes:
doing over reflecting
quantity over quality
efficiency over relatonships
Urgency over Empathy
It’s common to hear people say things like, “I’m all for giving people a chance. but I don’t want ot hold anyone’s hand” which creates a paradox.
The process and the conversations that can often have the most value and creates the possibility for the desired outcomes.
Start to build empathy
Start to identify WHY
Start an ongoing conversation
Start to develop a shared DEI vocabulary
The business why / The moral Why (source Michelle Kim, 2021)
DEI is good for business / it’s the right thing to do
DEI leads to innovation / I want to help others
DEI leads to profitability / People are suffering
“I trust you and will back you up” Is a rare thing to hear from a (hiring) manager. Which leads to a culture of “I got you. We got us.”
She closed referencing many of the books and sources she has learned from.
6. Samantha Warren, Designing creative collaboration in a virtual world
[Warren is an excellent speaker and I confess i didn’t take great notes because I was enjoying her talk so much].
She wanted to be a designer when she was growing up (which other speakers mentioned was not their path). She observed her father visiting design studios and observed their creative spaces and was inspired by them. And she felt like she was observing unicorns work – and that these were her people.
She had a creative career and worked for a long time, until the pandemic happened. It changed how she felt about work. In March 2021, she wondered about how there might not be a return to design studios. Staring at a box, with little boxes in it, didn’t feel creative. She used to love planning offsites and thinking about how to cultivate safe and fun environments.
The key to workplace creativity is buildng psychological safety. But the nature of work psychology has changed because we are all remote.
She took time off and traveled. And talked to her friends and family. And tried to reframe the problem shw was trying to solve.
“You can take the worst feeling in the world and reframe it so that that terrible feeling becomes its own solution.” – Milton Erickson
It is design’s responsibility to lead broad concept making (low fidelity) to specific execution (high fidelity).
When you don’t have a whiteboard in the hallway, how do you replace that persistent team level open space? They use Canvas, but there are other tools. She explained the design process she used (and how the diagrams for design processes aren’t realistic).
She wasn’t sure in the pandemic that she wanted to continue in design. But in reframing the problem she has found new ways to collaborate and is optimistic about the possibility of connection.
(I misssed the last talk of the day, by Leslie Yang).
8. Cap Watkins, How To C-Level
[Sadly I lost the first half of my notes <shakes fist at ‘autosave’. He did an excellent job explaining why many leaders are indecisive and the basic psychology behind it.]
Symtoms of Indecisveness:
Consensus building – people who won’t say yes unless everyone else does
TMI – leaders who require too much information or impossible research
Reopening doors – leaders who make a decision but then revisit it over and over again
He explained that becoming an executive should be driven by either the desire to do better than the managers you see, or to find the right altitude for the kind of work you like to do.
Major reasons leaders struggle include indecision, lack of resilience and being stuck in the past.
“If you hit a wrong note it’s the next note you play that determines if it is good or bad” – Miles Davis
Good leaders understand good people will make mistakes. Etsy had a “three arm sweater” award to the best (worst) mistake made that year.
His company uses a 4 day workweek. Which many companies talk about but few have tried. His team started it as a two month trial. Immediately people were happy about it. At the end of the trial they decided to extend it another few months.
He’d be asked questions like “how are you measuring productivity?” and his answer was mostly, “we don’t”. His company does make physical products so there are more measurable than the average tech company, but he thinks these questions come from fear.
They created resiliency and flexibility in how they manage people. Their retention numbers have remained steady from before and through the pandemic. The four-day workweek helps, but their culture is likely the greatest factor.
He thanked all leaders for what is a very difficult and lonely job during a time when it is very hard to do.
In Q&A he mentioned an exercise from Designing Your Life, where you track your activities and note if you feel energized after or drained. It can help a manager learn if they should stay in leadership roles or would be happier in a different role.
9. Returning to our maker roots, Baxley, Black and Walter
Baxley, Black and Walter are friends who started a podcast called Reconsidering, which explores larger questions about life. What keeps me here, with these people, doing these things?
Baxley read an article that Walter wrote and they became friends around 2014. Baxley had worked with Black at Pinterest in the past. Black was an early guest of the show who shifted into a producer role.
As you get distant from the thing that got you into this profession, you tend to feel disconnected. Play and curiosity often gets beaten out of us.
Baxley offered that software is an unusual medium in that you rarely get to see people use your work in the wild. But the podcast has been satisfying in that it’s a different medium.
The fact that they do it together makes it easier to do all the reading and it feels like less of chore. They hold each other accountable.
They shared stories about how in the last few years they’ve reconsidered how they structure their lives. Black and Walter acknowledged that their career has taken up a disproportionate part of their lives, something the pandemic has made even clearer.
They ask each guest: what advice would the 24-year-old you give to you now?
“Keep doing what you’re doing. You’re making a difference. And don’t worry so much.” – Judy Wert
“Choose uncomfortable expansion over comfortable diminishment” – Oliver Burkeman
She grew up with an Asian tiger Mom. She wanted to be a poet and a writer, but she was enrolled in a private boarding school. She learned she received love and attention when she achieved. She worked her way up all the rungs of the career ladder. She thought she had it all. A husband and two kids. She had a process of ruthless prioritization. The “punishment culture” of always expecting more from yourself.
She shared the story of her husband telling her their marriage was over and a few minutes later having to meet with her boss to do her performance review. And she broke down. She learned that she did really well but didn’t care at all anymore. After a few years of processing and grieving, she left the company.
She learned the lesson she valued people and processes more than products. Now she’s a leadership coach and helps people find their north star. She coaches like a designer.
The patterns we use keep us safe and they are ways to get through. But these patterns can then become our identity and that’s where it can become dangerous.
Imagine a crit scenario where the leader is too commanding and controlling. Armor can be a way of being. Imagine another crit where there are questions and explorations. Doing is climbing up the ladder.
“Management is efficiency in climbing the ladder of success; leadership determines whether the ladder is leaning against the right wall.” -Stephen Covey.
ME = Community + Projects + People
She shared a story about a woman she coached who was told to be more assertive (which can suggest bias). But she was a quieter person. She had to work to find ways to make her “weakness” a superpower. She was never going to be loud and assertive. Instead, she found ways to prepare for meetings and help other people to prepare (by creating pre-reading and other tasks that would improve how the meetings went).
She offered the method of tracking your activities and noting what gives you energy and what makes you feel drained.
We all work with some difficult people: focus on the 10% truth you can agree with.
Experiment: What is something you heard today and try it. Let her know how it goes.
This is my first blog post in almost six months, the longest lapse I’ve ever had. Hi! How have you been? I’ve had a rough year but I’m doing better now and wanted to catch you up on some things.
In June of last year my right vocal chord was paralyzed. During a simple surgery on my neck some nerves stopped working for reasons not entirely understood. I was still able to speak, but I was suddenly a very quiet person, unable to raise my voice. I was told it was likely permanent and if I recovered it could take up to a year. This had a profound effect on my mental health, as I wrote about in my newsletter. I thought my public speaking career was over but more profoundly had the first identity crisis of my life. Every social interaction was now a major challenge. Two months later my voice did slowly start to recover (it’s nearly 100% now), and I can’t express how grateful I am for this turn of events.
Ironically, the audiobook for How Design Makes The World released days before all this happened. I didn’t get a chance to promote it as my (professional) life entirely shut down just a week later. But still, the cosmic absurdity of these two events did make me laugh.
For months I’ve struggled with anxiety, depression and PTSD. I’ve never had serious issues with mental health before, but this crisis sent me into the darkest of places. I lost all interest in reading and writing, two of my favorite things to do. I found watching movies (another favorite), or listening to music (same), too triggering. My ability to communicate in person or over the phone was drastically reduced. My sense of isolation and brokenness was profound. The peak tragicomic moment was calling the speech therapy clinic on the phone to make a first appointment, the only way to contact them, but they couldn’t understand what I was saying.
I’ll write more about this entire experience someday and what helped me on my path to recovery (there is so much junk mental health advice out there). I’m doing much better now but still have more work to do.
I returned to FT work a few weeks ago, rejoining Automattic, Inc, where I was employed years ago to write The Year Without Pants, an early book about remote work.
In this crisis, I lost most of my motivation to work on my own and to pursue writing books. This was shocking: given my ambition for most of the last 20 years was to write as many books as I can. I discovered a deeper need for connection and teamwork, something I’m sure the pandemic contributed to. I wrote about Automattic in my 2013 book The Year Without Pants, an early book about remote work, and it has felt so good to return. My role there is as a product and design coach to the company, helping teams to make better products. I’m grateful to Matt Mullenweg and everyone there who has welcomed me back.
I’m grateful to everyone who reached out. So many of you wrote me long emails or sent messages checking in on me and trying to find ways to show support. I don’t know that I’ll ever find a way to repay you, but I do hope to be writing and creating more soon.
I’m doing much better now. If you follow me on Twitter you’ve noticed my activity is back up as I’m able to read and write again, something I never imagined I’d lose the ability to do. I can’t express how grateful I am to the universe for this turn of events.
I’m not sure what’s ahead for me. This has been a profound and unexpected time of reexamination. I’m old enough (I turn 50 this year) to have felt I knew myself well, but now find I have more questions than answers. I promise to do what I can to share what I learn.
One thing I’m sure of: I’m grateful for the writing and speaking life I’ve had so far and I have you all to thank for it. Thank you.
Excited to announce the audiobook for How Design Makes The World is now available on most platforms. I worked with a great narrator, Keith McCarthy, to craft an excellent listening experience for you.
The book is about how design applies to everything, but it’s already in the top #10 audiobooks for architecture on Amazon and Audible.
Two weeks from today tune in for this live presentation on the greatest design lessons I know. It’s a free event and all are invited.
There are many important lessons to learn about good design but I’ve picked the five most important and powerful ones. This interactive session is aimed at everyone who makes things for others, from UX designers to team leaders to engineers and managers. Surprisingly the fundamental mistakes we all make are often the same, but the real lessons run deep and are easy to overlook, and that’s where my advice comes from.
When: Tuesday, June 8th, 1pm PST / 10am EST Who: All are welcome – designers and anyone interested in good design Register:Free at this link
These lessons come from insights I’ve learned from studying over 100 design books, my 20 years of experience and what I’ve learned since How Design Makes The World was released. It’s the best single small package of design advice I can possibly give.
It’s the perfect event to share with your team and organization. Both for design teams and for everyone designers work with every day.
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
pg. 80, had a great a great
p. 99 “insights that makes” -> insights that make
p. 117 “…going to difficult” -> going to be difficult
p. 151 “that devil live” -> that devils live
154 –“hate traffic when that are in it…” -> hate traffic when they are in it
The risk with lists like this one is it’s easy to fall into the trap of blaming others for what are our limitations. This violates our own advice:
It’s true that some people we work with should have learned these by now, but it’s wise to err on the side of improving how we teach rather than blaming the students. All experts forget that what is basic to us isn’t basic to everyone else.
Doing research up front will not slow you down, but will save you time (#).
That vision work and deep thinking through longer term complexity takes time and that time trades off against filling the timeline with reactive/nearterm work (#).
For me, it’s that there’s a difference between knowing the space and knowing how users experience the space(#).
That we can’t make the currently being worked on feature the most discoverable. No matter what you’re currently working on, it has to be in the context of the overall journey(#).
That I am not the source of ideas. That I can’t work in a vacuum and produce user experiences. That UX is not a single input at the start of a pipeline of work, or a checkbox on a project list (UX is a process, not a deliverable)(#).
That we dont have all the answers. Our job is to help uncover the answers (#).
Design coherence. A solution is not simply a collection of features or functions, it is the way they fit together in a sensible, useful way. Adding or removing an element may be easy to do gracefully, or very hard, depending on the overall design (#).
That a single change often has cascading consequences — that parts are (or should be) always related to the whole (#).
If you aren’t designing the right thing, you can’t design the thing right (#).
You must define functionality before implementation. And probably draw a map in between (#).
Pretty and efficient aren’t mutually exclusive, but pretty ≠ efficient (#).
In the case of software especially, we have to consider not only how it feels to do a task once, but how it feels to do that same task ten times a day, every day (#).
The “user experience” is not owned by a company, but by people. It’s actually people trying to live, tackling their problems or striving for their aspirations. Their experience is bigger than any single touchpoint or brand (#).
The complexity has to live somewhere. You can’t make something powerful and infinitely flexible for power users ALSO be intuitive and simple for beginners (#).
That I usually should not (and often can not) provide off-the-cuff design advice without understanding the context of a product/feature/service (#).
Reminding people that we have to avoid shipping the org chart (#).
The user experience doesn’t start and end at the confines of a screen (#).
Defining the problem and the outcomes is key – the same design can be done 10 different ways but each of those 10 options are solving for different problems and lead to different outcomes (#).
Reframing. The thing they think they want turns-out not to be the best opportunity, but once they have that thing in their mind, it’s impossible to convince them it won’t work (even if something else will work better) (#)
That UX is not just doing what customers want but that it is the process of understanding what customers need and combining with the business goals to deliver best experience (#).
Research is (MUCH) more than usability testing (#).
The easier it looks, the more work it took to get there (#).
Metric tradeoffs: why sometimes it’s worth it to take a short term hit in a key metric in exchange for an overall experience improvement that harder to quantify (#).
The fact that designers and everyone who intervenes in perception have an ethic responsibility to those humans first, not to the business. As designers we have a responsibility to be congruent & empathic and to hold the people we design for in unconditional, positive regard.(#).
Even the best UX design can’t fix messed up organizational structure or people problems (#).
The difference between strategic work (decision-making) and tactical work (hands-on crafting), and how designers must be good at both (#).
That UX debt (the many small decisions that lead to inconsistencies and bad behaviors) will cause major negative consequences both for internal teams and customers down the road. It’s worth it to put in more effort to avoid it even if it takes more time (#).
The fact that ‘It depends’. Context has a huge influence on what could be the best solution to a problem, but my experience has been that often people expect the UX designer to have answers based on abstract rules instead. Yes: there are best practices, but still … it depends (#).
Progressive Disclosure – a design should only be as complex as they are ready for at the time (#)
Have one that isn’t listed? Or a great way to explain one of these? Leave a comment.
They say the web is decaying all the time and it’s true. When sites redesign they break hundreds or thousands of previously working links. I discovered this fun interview from 2008 by Sara Peyton at O’Reilly Media had disappeared.
I recovered it thanks to the Web archive and reposted it here. It’s based on the Proust questionnaire, a parlor game by the eponymous author. You should give it a try.
12 years is a long time and I need to reconsider my answers to some of these questions, but for now I’ll stand with them as they are. ———————————— Scott Berkun Answers Proust’s Questions By Sara Peyton, June 2008
An evening spent drunk as a loon, looking up at stars, sitting by a bonfire, laughing with friends.
What is your greatest fear?
Waiting to die with a mind full of regrets.
On what occasion do you lie?
This is the first lie I’ve ever told.
What is your favorite journey?
Wherever I’m going next that I haven’t been to before.
Which living person do you most despise?
It’s a tie between Bill O’Reilly and Dick Cheney.
Which words or phrases do you most overuse?
My friends would say its mother*****r. But I don’t think this word can be overused.
Which talent would you most like to have?
Mind-reading is hard to beat, but I’d settle for time-travel.
If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?
The willingness to let myself make more mistakes.
If you could change one thing about your family, what would it be?
Open their eyes.
If you were to die and come back as a person or thing, what would it be?
If a thing, the most perfect object in NYC: The Chrysler Building. Or maybe Central Park (is it cheating to call that one thing? I like to cheat). If a person, I’d like to be me again.
What do your consider your greatest achievement?
Writing every day. Ok, that’s a lie. I don’t write every day. But just trying to write every day is hard enough.
What is your most treasured possession?
My mind. I dont care much for material things. Besides, you never have to worry about someone breaking into your mansion and stealing your mind, you know? It’s the only thing than will always be only yours.
What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery?
Watching someone innocent suffer for your own carelessness.
What is the quality you most like in a man?
Integrity.
What is the quality you most admire in a woman?
Curves. What do you most value in your friends?
Brutal honesty, dark comedy, and trust under fire.
Who are your favorite writers?
George Orwell, Henry Miller, George Saunders, Raymond Carver, Bertrand Russell, Peter Drucker, Loren Eisley, John Gardner, Ray Bradbury, Hubert Selby Jr.
Who is your favorite hero of fiction?
How can you top Don Quixote? There’s no way.
Who are your heroes in real life?
Don Quixote isn’t real? Are you sure?
How would you like to die?
Drunk as a loon, looking up at stars, sitting by a bonfire, laughing with friends.
What is your motto?
Be amazed by everything.
It’s taken quite a few years but the audiobook versions for three of my most popular books have finally been released.
I gave them a listen and they’ve been well produced by Tantor Audio. They’re available through Amazon or Audible through the links below, including free samples:
Does your creative team need a morale boost? Perhaps some inspiring new stories of how to design and engineer great things? An inspiring change of pace to help them recharge?
The stories and ideas from How Design Makes The World can inspire your staff, let them laugh and learn, all while discovering new ways to think about their work that they can bring into the rest of their day.
Here’s all you have to do:
Purchase 30 or more copies of How Design Makes The World for your team and I’ll talk to up to 100 people. A huge discount from my typical event speaking fees.
Contact me to schedule a day/time that works best.
I’ll share key stories and lessons from the book, followed by an extended Q&A with you and your team.
Here’s a sample of what you’ll experience (from my talk at Google Talks):
Yesterday I’d planned to do a livestream about ideas from the new book, but Twitter/Periscope refused to allow it (Vague “Initializing stream…” message never managed to finish it’s job).
Instead… I improvised this short explainer video. Which was surprisingly fun to do. Did you like this? Hit the like button or leave me a comment here and I’ll do more of these.
Who is the book for? Why did I write it? Why should you care? It’s all answered here.
The question: what well designed common object goes unnoticed because it works so well?
The premise: We forget that what we do everyday depends on countless inventions, discoveries, designs and systems. Just to flick on a light switch requires centuries of work and effort on the part of people we never even think about. It’s powerful to take a moment to look thoughtfully at the designs around us. There are inspirations and stories waiting for rediscovery.
Have an interesting one I should consider? Leave a comment.
Yesterday my feed had many references to a new Marc Andressen essay titled It’s Time to Build. I understand its popularity as it has an enthusiasm that’s in short supply in the tech world today.
But what he has to say floats about the fray in a disturbing way – thousands of people are dying from a problem we aren’t sure we know how to solve. Unemployment is rising towards 20%, which means basic needs for many is now a struggle. The government decisions happening now will determine how many more thousands of people die, especially front-line workers and the poor. And his essay doesn’t give consideration to them at all: having everyone build now will solve everything is his empty answer.
There’s much more. Let’s dig in:
Every Western institution was unprepared for the coronavirus pandemic, despite many prior warnings. This monumental failure of institutional effectiveness will reverberate for the rest of the decade, but it’s not too early to ask why, and what we need to do about it.
This sounds compelling at first as I hoped he’d explore what the rest of the world did right, so we can learn from them, but that is nowhere to be found in this essay, despite how well documented our lessons are. What did they do right? Is not a question he seems to have studied. A sign of things to come, or more precisely not to come.
Many of us would like to pin the cause on one political party or another, on one government or another. But the harsh reality is that it all failed — no Western country, or state, or city was prepared
Here he has made pandemic response binary, either you pass or you fail, which is not how things happen in the world. There’s always a spectrum for how to evaluate outcomes. If he wanted to write about the future he could have, but he starts in the present and makes everyone equal as a way out, which dodges learning anything from what’s happened.
Some U.S. States and European nations responded much better than others, as evidenced by the countless charts we all study daily. But that spectrum isn’t convenient for what Andreessen really wants to say, so he frames the world as pass or fail so he can confidently say that everyone (except for all of Asia which he won’t talk about) has failed.
And pinning the blame means you blame someone who was not involved (which he calls here pinning the cause). You can’t say this about someone whose job is precisely to prevent a thing that ends up happening.
For example, if a CEO calls the threat of a competitor a hoax and tells his staff to ignore it, despite their knowledge and interest in doing something pre-emptive, and then that competitor devastates them a few weeks later, and the stock price tanks, and 20% of staff are fired, it wouldn’t be pinning the blame. Instead it’d be holding the people in power accountable for the consequences of their actions.
Andreessen is avoiding politics by not mentioning Trump, or his staff, or any government agency, all of whom are accountable in degrees for what has happened. Andreesen wants to avoid alienating anyone but he’s doing it at the expense of credibility. Later on he writes:
“We need to demand more of our political leaders…”
But he does the opposite in this essay. We pay our leaders to plan for, respond to and be accountable for the outcomes of major events and he gives them a free pass, without even a mention of who has served their citizens well.
We see this today with the things we urgently need but don’t have. We don’t have enough coronavirus tests, or test materials — including, amazingly, cotton swabs and common reagents. We don’t have enough ventilators, negative pressure rooms, and ICU beds.
A cursory look at the successful pandemic responses showed that if you act early and shut social interaction down quickly, you never need vast quantities of ventilators or ICU beds. I’m not saying we should copy what they all did, as there were many tradeoffs, but we should start by learning from it, instead of leaving it out completely from essays on the subject.
Even if prevention wasn’t possible, we could have had the supplies we needed. They were for sale. But someone has to decide it is worth keeping massive expensive inventories that are rarely used. A hospital owned by a corporation that wants to stay lean to keep profits high, is unlikely to do this. What corporations call inefficiency, in the short term, is often very important in the long.
It’s governments that historically are well suited to insure societies against uncommon but devastating events, like wars, famines and natural disasters. Without shareholders and profit motive they can prioritize differently. America’s prized $748 billion military mostly stockpiles missiles, guns and aircraft that will never be used for their purpose, but we pay anyway. Why? In case we need it. That’s what a government can do. Why the same logic isn’t used when it’s about the health of citizens is a better line of inquiry than simply pointing out that we didn’t have enough of something. A small percent of that military budget might have been enough.
This was not a building problem. It was a priorities problem. A logistical problem. A leadership problem. You could call it many different kinds of problems but building isn’t high on the list.
Making masks and transferring money are not hard. We could have these things but we chose not to — specifically we chose not to have the mechanisms, the factories, the systems to make these things. We chose not to *build
Finally we really get to what he wanted to say all along: BUILD!
But he’s off the rails already. Sure, making masks that sit in a warehouse and transferring money to individual consumers are easy. But that was only part of the challenge. The other parts were:
How to pay for a stockpile of masks/resources that are unlikely to be used for decades
How to quickly distribute masks/resources across 50 states, or between dozens of counties within states, and through various agencies who may not have coordinated before (or pay for the training and exercises to make sure they are always ready)
How to build a public tech money transfer infrastructure within existing legacy (e.g. COBOL) systems that can service citizens during a national crisis
These are hard problems to solve, or in his language, hard solutions to build. He doesn’t frame the problem this way because… I don’t know why.
Maybe because it doesn’t support what he really wants to say? Or maybe he has little experience with massive government infrastructure problems with 30 year old COBOL codebases and didn’t talk to anyone who does, like the folks at 18F or USDS who are technologists who work in the U.S. government and can explain exactly why these challenges are far harder than they appear.
I agree with him that these should be solvable problems but part of the answer is having more of our best young technologists choose to work to help society in profoundly important ways instead of being recruited to join one of Andreessen’s startups that’s going to go try, but likely fail, to disrupt something or other that everyone involved admits isn’t really that important but happens to have a bigger “growth opportunity.”
You don’t just see this smug complacency, this satisfaction with the status quo and the unwillingness to build, in the pandemic, or in healthcare generally. You see it throughout Western life, and specifically throughout American life.
Who has smug complacency? I do not know who he is talking about.
If anything, most of America is angry, scared, lost or grieving, and feels let down in one way or another, which is neither smug nor complacent.
Is he including the people who work at his startups, or use their products? Or the millions of people who use the products his startups are busy competing with to convert into their own customers? Who is he rallying against here? I don’t know and he doesn’t say.
We have top-end universities, yes, but with the capacity to teach only a microscopic percentage of the 4 million new 18 year old’s in the U.S. each year, or the 120 million new 18 year olds in the world each year. Why not educate every 18 year old? Isn’t that the most important thing we can possibly do?
I actually agree that education in America is in a bad place but we’re in a crisis. And even if we weren’t this isn’t a problem of building. It’s a problem of systems, of leadership, policy and bureaucracy. I don’t think Andreessen has watched season 4 of the Wire. If he had, he’d understand how school quality is inextricably linked to city and state politics. It’s a really hard and long term problem that is rarely solved by budgets and technology alone.
You see it in transportation. Where are the supersonic aircraft? Where are the millions of delivery drones? Where are the high speed trains, the soaring monorails, the hyperloops, and yes, the flying cars?
We are now fully in bad example territory.
Supersonic aircraft? The Concorde was expensive. And noisy. And is convenience of faster air travel really important for the foreseeable future?
High speed trains? Much of the world has them, but America has not invested much in infrastructure in 50 years. Our highways are bridges are literally falling apart. And our culture has a huge preference for cars over public transportation. In a democracy that makes it pretty hard. Like masks, high speed trains exist, but someone has to decide to pay for them and we haven’t.
Soaring Monorails? I live in Seattle. I know about monorails. They are inefficient and expensive (They also don’t soar – birds do. Maybe he meant speeding monorails? But they don’t get very fast either.) There isn’t one non-imaginary city that uses them effectively (and DisneyWorld doesn’t count).
Hyperloop? Is he only going to mention technological ideas that most experts think are ridiculous for very clear reasons but the uninitiated love to romanticize?
Flying cars? Yes! He did it! Had he mentioned jetpacks too he would have had the full set.
Had he simply listed important problems that he feels we have underinvested in (education, infrastructure, emergency response, climate change) I’d be fully behind him. But that’s not what this is. It’s an underthought list of tech-lust thinking. He was trying to be inspiring here but these are terrible examples.
How about free internet for all? (A timely problem since underprivileged kids can’t do schoolwork from home right now). How about ensuring basic health care for everyone or even that every family has enough food to eat for the next few months? Those are building problems too, but they don’t sound as cool to the tech-centric as his list does. Historically the truly important things technology can do for us in the long term don’t seem cool, but maybe a silver lining of the pandemic is that will change.
Building isn’t easy, or we’d already be doing all this. We need to demand more of our political leaders, of our CEOs, our entrepreneurs, our investors. We need to demand more of our culture, of our society. And we need to demand more from one another. We’re all necessary, and we can all contribute, to building.
I’m doing my part my demanding more from his essay. And you can do the same by demanding more of mine.
I’d prefer you also go into the part of your community that is struggling right now and help them get the basics they need. If you go to them (virtually of course) and listen, and pay attention, and learn, I bet you’ll find plenty of easy things to build that will help them right now.
Even better, find people already building solutions, and have been working on these problems for years, who need more money or other support. Builders are often bad at helping if it doesn’t involve them building something themselves (e.g. the mostly pointless pandemic hackathons), even if they’re not the best person to do it.
There is only one way to honor their legacy and to create the future we want for our own children and grandchildren, and that’s to build.
I can agree with this. Provided we’re talking about building societies, safety nets, higher quality of life for communities and the tools they actually need to make that future, I’m in. Or building better tools and telling better stories for reminding us how interconnected our fates are.
But first we have a crisis to solve. And unless you’ve lived through a pandemic before, it’s time to learn before we act. We have to look to our experts who know the options and the tradeoffs and how they played out in the past. And more than anything, resist the temptation to jump ahead and likely repeat the mistakes that have been made before.
[UPDATE – WINNER HAS BEEN CHOSEN: will reveal who won once they confirm.]
I have a free conference pass for IXDA’s Interaction 20, in Milan, Italy this year. I was granted a free pass to the conference in return for speaker coaching for their speakers, but turns out I can’t use it.
I’d hate to see it go to waste, so if you’re able to go (Feb 5-7, 2020) and arrange your own travel, leave a comment.
This Friday I’ll do a random drawing from the comments and pick a winner (and will update here that it’s all over).
If your comment makes me laugh, I’ll count it twice in the random drawing.
My next book, which teaches just about everyone how to understand good design, is on the home stretch (release May 2020). Which means it’s time to get your feedback on cover design directions (I’m working with PageTwo Books).
If you haven’t been following along (outline and more at the link), Here are the book’s goals.
The book’s goals are:
To teach anyone to see people, places and things more like our best designers do.
To invite everyone to ask better questions about the designs they experience every day.
To give designers a compelling, short book they can share with coworkers, clients and friends to explain what they do and why it’s so important.
To have fun while understanding the world. Life is too short.
Stories in the book explore city design, product design, web design, aethetics, design process, flow, user research, mobile design, ethics, system theory, inclusion, business, org politics, tradeoffs, design for conflict and more.
Rules for Feedback
These are preliminary so the specific images or objects should be considered placeholders.
You’re voting on the approach, rather than for these being the final cover.
The book is for everyone, not just you. Your personal opinion is interesting, but if you’re a designer most people buying this book won’t be.
The brief is: clear, simple, inviting. Fun if possible. Readable in a thumbnail.
Thoughtful comments welcome.
Approach A
One approach to thinking about the world, with a sample map etching as the background.
Approach B
Simpler visual style one an anchored image, in this case a globe (one idea for representing the world). Some variations below.
Approach C
Rough sketch – the idea here is to show some kind of progression in style and fidelity. This was done quickly but if we went down this path we’d invest in high quality hand lettering.
Approach D
The background images suggest different kinds of design, and there could be many different options for what’s put there. Or how many there are.
Option below shows a different orientation of the images.
[crowdsignal poll=10452044]
(Hi folks – the blog has been quiet for awhile. Good to be back! I’ll explain more soon. Happy Monday to you.)
For many years I’ve been the speaker coach for Ignite Seattle, a local event that centers on diverse ideas and challenging stories told live on stage. We decided last year that a central part of our mission (we’re now a 501c3) is to help all people, in all walks of life, to tell their stories and teach their lessons.
Alternatively, If you’re looking to improve the speaking skills of your team or organization, you can bring me in for my in-depth, practice-centric, full day workshop, thru SpeakHQ.
Do you like to take photos? Do you own at least one of my books? Then this contest is for you.
Take a photo that shows the books of mine you own, share it and you get a chance to win a bundle of all 7 of my books personally signed to you and a $100 Amazon Gift Certificate so you can buy even more books (or other nice things).
To enter to win:
Take a fun photo of your Berkun book inventory (you need at least one book 🙂 Selfies are welcome. Or make it an action photo. Be creative. Make me laugh.
Post it to Twitter, FB (public, otherwise I won’t find it) or Instagram – use #berkuncontest. You can also add it as a comment to this post.
Or if you’re afraid of social media and/or think it has destroyed humanity, just send me a link to the photo.
Contest ends noon PST Friday 2/9/2018
Sharing the photo enters you into the contest and by entering you give me permission to reuse the photo, OK? Winner will be chosen in a semi-random method of my choosing (but photos that are creative or make me laugh will have extra odds of winning).
To give you some ideas, here are some of the photos so far.
On Tuesdays I write about the top voted question on Ask Berkun (see the lovely archive). This week’s question came from Sam K. [via email]:
I lead a team in a very political organization. It’s hard to make things stick. I want to focus my team but I struggle with how to defend priorities as my boss and her peers often change their minds and commit to more things than we can possibly do. Any advice?
If you can’t say no, you can’t truly say yes either. The reason for this is if you’re always saying yes you’re giving away the limited resources you have to tasks that are not the most important things to do. This is like like having a savings account for retirement where you are always making withdrawals to buy what tempting things you happen to see: it’s not really a savings account anymore. And it follows that a project that says yes to fun, but low priority requests, isn’t really a project anymore: it’s just a collection of random bits of work. Without the authority to say no, it’s nearly impossible to do well at any kind of project.
Sadly some people in management positions struggle with this basic notion (and I fear for the state of their retirement accounts). They want to please everyone, and in trying to please everyone they likely end up failing everyone, as the project work that truly needs to be done never gets completed.
Master the many ways to say no
The reason why every project needs clear priorities is it provides a tool for everyone about what to spend resources on. It tells you what kinds of ideas or requests what to say yes and no to. While it can be hard work to get all the leaders to agree to one list of priorities, it’s essential to getting you the leverage needed to say no (and to manage a project well). Once the agreed priorities are in place, that priority list becomes a kind of contract. And you should confirm with the leaders that your job is to defend the priorities, even against requests they might have in the future.
This means when a new idea or request comes in, you simply check the priorities list: if it fits, you can consider it. If it doesn’t you need to say No. There are many different ways to say no and you should master them. You can say it with an explanation, a smile, an argument, a counterproposal, an offering of a glass a wine, or a reminder that you are not just saying no to them, but that you are defending the very priorities that they agreed to previously.
To prepare yourself for this, you need to know all of the different flavors that the word no comes in:
No, unless this fits our priorities (which it probably doesn’t). This is the most common flavor of no that wise leaders use. It re-establishes that the priorities drive decisions. Early on in a project this often leads to a rehashing of why the priorities are the priorities, but that’s a healthy discussion. They may suggest a way to refine or clarify how the priorities are written. But the later you are into a healthy project, the firmer you should stand.
No, only if we have time. If you keep your priorities lean, as you should, there will always be many very good ideas that didn’t make the cut. Express this as a relative decision: the idea in question might be good, but not good enough relative to the other work and the project priorities. If the item is on the priority 2 list, convey that it’s possible it will be done if there is extra time, but that no one should assume it will happen.
No, only if you make <insert impossible thing here> happen. Sometimes, you can redirect a request back on to the person who made it. If your VP asks you to add support for a new feature, tell him you can do it only if he cuts one of his other current priority 1 requests. This shifts the point of contention away from you, and toward a tangible, though probably unattainable, situation. This can also be done for political or approval issues: “If you can convince Sally that this is a good idea, I’ll consider it.” As you may know that Sally is unlikely to say yes, which sends the requester towards a dead end: but it’s a dead end that leads away from you.
No. Next release. Assuming you are working on a project with more updates (e.g. a website or software project) or sprints, offer to reconsider the request for the next release. This should probably happen anyway for all priority 2 items. This is often called postponement or punting.
No. Never. Ever. Really. Some requests are so fundamentally out of line with the long-term goals that the hammer should come down. Cut the cord now and save yourself the time of answering the same request again later. Sometimes it’s worth the effort to explain why (so that they’ll be more informed next time). Example: “No, Fred. Our mobile app will never support the Esperanto language. Never. Ever. Because no one uses it and never will.”
Another approach that Zac Cohn suggests is using customer validation. “Very cool idea. Once you talk to some customers who express a need for that, come back and we can explore the next steps in validating that idea. Once it’s fully validated, we can determine the appropriate place in the roadmap.”
On the day you are assigned a project, you should clarify with your boss that you need their support in saying no to people. It needs to be established across the organization that in most cases they’ll get the same answer from your boss, as they get from you. You can also familiarize your coworkers with this list of ways you are likely to say no, perhaps even keeping it up on your whiteboard, prepping them for the likely conversations you will have in the future.
This is based on an excerpt from the bestselling project management book, Making Things Happen. Other classic chapters include:
