Why Conforming Should be Avoided
Bill Buxton, as a keynote speaker for IxDA Interaction 08 (The Design Ecosystem), performed a simple demonstration. You get some yellow globs of paint, some red globs, a blue glob and green and so forth. That’s a healthy heterogenous environment where everyone has different talents they bring to your team / organisation / project. But the pressure always exists when you enter a team to become homogenous, to fit in, to conform to the group think. So how does that demonstrate with the paint globs? Bill swirls them all around in circles until they become grey. That is how we make mediocre products – by creating homogenous environments, by stifling people, by demanding they conform to the grey norms that make us comfortable.
To illustrate this point he tells us that all the talent to make the iMac and iPod existed at Apple for at least 5 years and Steve Jobs walked into his meeting and said one sentence.
I’m going to turn the company around through industrial designSteve Jobs
I must have watched this particular presentation around 4 or 5 times. It’s about Design with a big D. It’s about how to create remarkable products. You need to scroll down that page to see the video though, so you might have missed it – The Design Ecosystem runs for 51 minutes.
So my big tip for life, and work and design and whatever, for the first day of 2009 is to stay a coloured glob of paint. There will always be pressure to conform and be a muppet – either the designer rules the roost or the lead programmer, for example. If your passion and talents aren’t working out for you where you are then consider a change of career or apply for better work. Because, as Seth Godin pointed out some time ago, there’s a natural opposition out there to new ideas and innovation and better ways of doing things. Call it the Forces of Mediocrity. People have invested in their methodologies and skillsets and here you come with your bag of new big ideas that threatens them.
The truth is that the better the idea the more opposition that you’ll probably receive in response. Expect that to be so, even if your new idea is obvious. Especially if it’s awesomely great. Imagine if you had have been walking around with the iPod design two years earlier – do you really think at the Apple front desk you would have been invited in with a big WOW? Microsoft wouldn’t have answered your calls.
Remarkable visions and genuine insight are always met with resistance. And when you start to make progress, your efforts are met with even more resistance. Products, services, career paths… whatever it is, the forces for mediocrity will align to stop you, forgiving no errors and never backing down until it’s over.Seth Godin
To make brilliant products you need what Bill Buxton calls T Shaped People in your organisation. You don’t need another you, you need someone who is better than you at the things you can’t already do. That’s how value comes to the organisation. T Shaped People have a strong core skillset that is unique but a wide broader literacy of other key areas. So you can see two things that correlate – heterogenous environment, and T Shaped People.
As human beings we’re very much about Tribes, we can’t help a lot of that. We like people who are the same as us, we are predisposed to accept that same politics, same clothes, same outlook means a potential ally in a hostile world. But, if only for this year, how about trying to look outside that paradigm and expanding your heterogenous social network. That’s a network of people who have different skills than you, who make you smarter because they’re your goto person and you make them smarter by being their expert on whatever it is you do – design, coding, or the law. For this year stop asking everyone in your work environment to become grey – find out their unique skills and capitalise like Steve Jobs did over at Apple.
Because who wants to make mediocre products? Seriously? Happy New Year everyone… remember it’s not the thing in the box, it’s not the thing. We’re about designing, building and selling experiences. That makes great software. By the way, 2009 won’t be my Year of the Beamer but it’s coming.
