Thread by @mulegirl

Some day I'm going to do a big piece on the origins of our popular frameworks for business decision-making.

It drives me bananas when designers adopt these concepts wholesale without questioning them or seeking to improve upon them. If they are useful, great.

We don't talk about the lingering influence of WWII and the Cold War on our business culture. So much management science comes from the military or military adjacent.

I mean, here we are on the internet, sure.

But we still talk about hard/soft skills like that's a real thing.

And take something like return on investment (ROI). Before you read or write another defensive "ROI of UX" piece, stop and ask yourself, do you know where the idea of ROI as a management control device comes from?

It's not a law of physics.

The DuPont Corporation started using a 3-part ROI analysis in the 1920s after DuPont explosives salesman Donaldson Brown invented the model in an internal efficiency report in 1912.

It was used by DuPont and adopted by other organizations to assess division performance and help analysts understand the source of superior (or inferior) return by comparison with other companies or other industries.

So, a division manager’s ROI, is the profit earned on the investment at their disposal.

This framework is too simplistic for thinking about the value of evidence-based, humanistic design, which is not a set of assets on a balance sheet, but a way of making decisions.

Just like NPS, the appeal of ROI is that it's a single calculation that allows comparison among firms.

Appeal and efficacy are two totally different things—especially efficacy over the longer term.

Managing to quarterly ROI creates an incentive to cut back on anything that *feels* discretionary.

Notice how many expenses seem to be outside of the reach of ROI calculation and justification, like executive compensation.

I mean, no one talks (enough) about the ROI of fucked up meeting culture. You ever look around a room and do the math on that pointless hour?

It is really useful to ask the question "Is this the best use of our time/money?" constantly.

But also ask "What is the basis for that assessment?"

If you are a designer (and that's everyone, right?), don't buy into the framing you are given.

When someone tries to put you on the defensive about ROI of insight, start talking about the risks of ignorance.

Get them to justify placing that bet based…what?

To what extent do you believe a management model developed by an explosive salesman 100 years ago and adopted by the auto industry in the middle of the last century should constrain your ability to solve problems in 2019?

Somewhere between gunpowder and unicorns lies the answer.