If I could change ONE thing about how everyone doing "creative problem solving" worked, it would be to stop brainstorming ideas and start brainstorming questions.
Brainstorming and ranking ideas is the worst and it puts team members in competition with each other to look smart.
But if you get everyone in a room (virtual or otherwise) and say "OK, what are all the things we're assuming or simply lack information about?" and then "Which of these areas of ignorance are highest priority?" that is both immensely useful and enhances collaboration.
But the idea that "ideation" is a good and productive use of people's time is so baked into how people think about design and business.
Because it's easy and fun and everyone secretly wants to "win" at group ideation.
Asking the right questions is so critical to success.
Having a "brilliant idea"…eh, not so much.
Design processes that put ideas ahead of questions are the equivalent of not listening in conversation and just waiting for the other person to stop talking.
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The missing role at most organizations is a communication/collaboration facilitator—a person to help create intentionally humane and effective communication protocols.
So much of work is communication in many modes and channels. And it's really really hard to get right.
IT picks software tools. Facilities runs meeting rooms (in the before).
No one thinks about how to orchestrate the most functional communication among various roles/tasks/etc. People just treat it like something that everyone knows how to do well.
Creating the conditions for healthy communication among people *is* interaction design.
Just having physical meeting rooms, or slack channels or zoom is like giving the end user a command prompt.
That's a bad metaphor because the command line is less taxing than zoom.
I ended up with my subspeciality in design research because the most critical problem in the design of any policy, product, or complex system is that humans have a tough time with critical thinking and evidence-based decision-making.
IMO you can't claim to be doing human-centered design or care about human-computer interaction if you don't take as table stakes that humans are shitty decision-makers who will ignore evidence in the face of hierarchy and in-group/out-group status concerns.
The most striking sentence in this NPR piece about the doctor who discovered that handwashing prevents the spread of disease:
"Doctors were upset because Semmelweis' hypothesis made it look like they were the ones giving childbed fever to the women."
Let's talk about being metrics-driven. If you are focused on metrics rather than learning or outcomes, you risk extreme tunnel vision.
I mean for any of us who grew up in the US and went to college, our education and capacity to learn was reduced to GPAs and board scores that determined our fates at a tender age, so it isn't surprising this mindset is appealing to any manager who did well by those numbers.
At the extreme end of managing to a metric, at all costs you get Wells Fargo.
Today: what if uncritical infatuation with the Bauhaus is contributing to the inability of some designers to engage with the underlying social and economic implications of their work?
"The Bauhaus is an answer to the question: How can the artist be trained to take his place in the machine age."
—1938 MOMA retrospective catalog
Substitute internet age for machine age and that's an appealing framing for anyone looking to reconcile style, craft, and scale.
The principles of functional beauty made attainable through mass production are inherently comforting to designers who might feel lost in a world of design systems materializing from rapid growth enterprises.
(I'm slightly surprised BauhausOps isn't yet a thing.)
If the facts are on your side, you often have to work many times as hard to be understood and believed by the people you most need to convince.
This is a truth that people with facts on their side tend to resist.
If you're a designer, you're a researcher. Asking and answering questions, gathering and critically evaluating evidence, are all part of the job.
If you're in research, you are also in sales.
Paradoxically, if I try to use facts to convince you that you should tell stories to get people to believe facts, I am making the same mistake I try to warn people away from.