Invisible Structures, For The Win

I get in trouble sometimes for pointing out the obvious.

And that’s okay. I’d rather get in trouble than toe the line.

In our careers, we spend a lot of time not saying what we think. That subway ad of “see something, say something”? Imagine if we all actually had the courage to do that at work. But we don’t. We simply don’t. We look the other way. We grin and bear it. Or we get fed up and leave.

The theme of this year’s Awwwards Conference is about making money through design. There are quite a few speakers who will be speaking more directly about the making money side of things. I’m more interested in talking about the other side of it: losing money. Specifically, losing money by how we work and the things we choose not to speak up about.

What makes our work life harder? I’ve interviewed a few hundred people over the past decade to understand what we do blindly, day in and day out. What are the things we quietly acquiesce to that just aren’t natural, either to our nature as human beings or to the nature of what our disciplines require?

If you’ve chosen design or engineering as your profession, it means you’re a maker at heart. And if you’re a maker at heart, it means you want to spend most of your waking hours making something amazing, making something meaningful. #makersgottamake

Basic Truths

Before we dive in, let’s establish two basic truths that form the basis for this talk today. And these are two truths that I’ve been grappling with over the last decade. It’s not to say I hadn’t thought about it before, but more to say that I began thinking about it quite a bit in recent years, almost obsessively so.

Basic Truth #1: Time is the one thing we don’t get back. We can make more money. We can replenish our energy. But once time passes, that’s it. It’s gone. That’s just how it works. It’s the one thing you can’t get back. In that classic triangle of time vs money vs quality, time continues to remain the most evasive and elusive of the three.

Basic Truth #2: We will experience the full range of human emotion at work, regardless of how much control we try to exercise over these emotions. If we live long, illustrious lives, our professional careers could very well span 50+ years. I want most of that time to be spent feeling good, not feeling bad.

Given these two basic truths, I’ve found myself in the relentless pursuit of (1) making more time for the things that matter and (2) feeling happy at work. While this relentless pursuit can start with yourself at the individual level, the real challenge — and marker of success — lies in making this happen at the team level and ultimately at the organizational level.

Guiding Principles

What’s interesting—and upsetting—is that people won’t talk about these basic truths explicitly. Thematically, you’ll see it come through in project reflections, quarterly pulse checks, exit interviews, and the like. But people typically won’t come right out and ask for it. And that’s where guiding principles come into play. You have to create the principles, explain the principles, and live the principles. Every day.

When I’m in a position to influence better ways of working on a project, these are the three big principles I care about the most:

Principle #1: Give the gift of time to yourself and to others. Create sacred, uninterrupted blocks of time. This won’t happen on its own, en masse. If you’re in a position of influence, it’s on you to make this happen.

Principle #2: Take more care in how you listen, how you speak, and how you write. If everyone took this to heart and made an earnest effort, we’d all have more clarity and less confusion, more time and less heartache.

Principle #3: Afford yourself the freedom to be creative. When we don’t put invisible structures in place—afforded by principles one and two—it’s damn near impossible to free ourselves up physically, mentally, and emotionally. Makers gotta make. Give yourself the latitude to do so.

Let’s dive in to each of these.

Principle #1: Give the gift of time to yourself and to others.

We spend (or are supposed to spend) 1/3 of our life sleeping. Another 1/3 is spent working. And the remaining 1/3 is spent on “other stuff”. If we apply this to a single 24-hour day, that comes out to 8+8+8.

But the reality of this is something much more different, where the numbers skew in favor of the time spent at work. I graduated from college in 1997, so I’ve been working for 22 years now. And in that span of time, how much of it’s been an 8-hour day vs a 10-hour day vs a 12-hour day vs a 16-hour day. I didn’t track this religiously, but I can say with certainty they were mostly not 8-hour days.

So let’s for a moment suspend what we know about the reality/myth of an 8-hour day. And let’s take a closer look at time and the human brain. There are so many ways we can carve up the day.

Each of these days is very different from the other. The yellow line represents a good day. The white lines show what last week actually looked like. What happens when we chop up our time into itty bitty bits? More specifically, what’s happening with our brains?

We’ve all heard about the myth of multi-tasking and the inefficiency of context switching. While it may feel like you are successfully completing two or three things at once, the brain is actually processing individual actions in rapid succession, switching from one to the other and back again. That start-and-stop process actually costs us time and efficiency, leaves us more prone to making mistakes, and can be incredibly exhausting when repeated over and over.

“Multi-tasking is like constantly pulling up a plant. This kind of constant shifting of your attention means that new ideas and concepts have no chance to take root and flourish.” (Barbara Oakley)

We’ve all experienced this at work before. At any given time, we might be working on a project, listening to music, answering a question from a colleague, checking a calendar invite, glancing back and forth between three different monitors, and feeling the buzz of a smartphone notification, all in the span of a few seconds. Are you multi-tasking? Or are you just constantly blowing up your brain in a dumb way and not getting s*** done.

Researchers at the University of Sussex found that high multitaskers had less brain density in the anterior cingulate cortex, a region responsible for empathy as well as cognitive and emotional control. Neuroscientist Kep Kee Loh, the study’s lead author, explains the long-term implications:

“I feel that it is important to create an awareness that the way we are interacting with [different stimuli] might be changing the way we think and these changes might be occurring at the level of brain structure.” (Kep Kee Loh)

Yeah, there’s a possibility that multi-tasking actually alters the structure of the brain, and not in a good way. Scary.

The inefficiency of interrupting a task and starting another has long been known by factory managers, who have sought to minimize the number of “changeovers” on the assembly line (a changeover is when you stop running the assembly line to start up production of a new or slightly different product). The task-switching and startup time to get the line running at its previous high speed greatly dampens productivity. It’s a crude analogy, but that’s basically how it works in the brain.

Other studies have found that excessive multi-tasking can have severe effects on our mental and physical well-being. It causes us to make more mistakes, having the same negative impact as losing a full night of sleep. It negatively impacts your working memory, also known as the “scratchpad” area of your brain. It leads to increased anxiety because your mind’s energy reserves are being drained. It inhibits creative thinking by taking up too much space and not allowing for the incubation and marination of ideas. It stops you from entering a state of flow, which some people claim gives them a 500% boost in productivity.

And because we might pay a bit more attention when we see a big price tag, all of this fractured attention comes at a cost. In the United States alone, over $650 billion a year is lost in productivity, simply because we don’t create long stretches of uninterrupted time for people to think and make (study by Basex, a business research firm). Regardless of the size of company you’re at, the dollar amount will vary; but we’ve all felt the same incessant tug on our brains.

In one 2009 study, Stanford University researcher Clifford Nass found that people who were considered heavy multitaskers were actually worse at sorting out relevant information from irrelevant details. This is particularly surprising because it was assumed that this is something that heavy multitaskers would actually be better at. But that wasn’t the only problem multitaskers faced. They also showed greater difficulty when it came to switching from one task to another and were much less mentally organized.

What was most frightening about the results, Nass later suggested to NPR, was that these results happened even when these heavy multitaskers were not multitasking. The study revealed that even when these chronic multitaskers were focusing on just a single task, their brains were less effective and efficient.

“We studied people who were chronic multitaskers, and even when we did not ask them to do anything close to the level of multitasking they were doing, their cognitive processes were impaired. So basically, they are worse at most of the kinds of thinking not only required for multitasking but what we generally think of as involving deep thought,” Nass told NPR in a 2009 interview.

Multitasking and context switching are a huge drag on our brains. I want to take you through a project from a few years ago, where the stakes were high and I knew that big structural changes in how we work had to be the first thing I addressed.

I was brought in to run a megaproject at a megaagency for a megaclient. When I arrived on the scene, the team was burned out, attrition levels were high, patience was running thin, and the client’s confidence was shot. This was going to be a Titanic-sized, right-the-ship kind of project, in a sea of icebergs. And I was now at the helm of it.

I had to put in place stringent guardrails that protected everyone’s time. Once I had a handle on the big picture and had absorbed and internalized the 600+ user stories (think Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man), I divided up the larger project team into five sub-teams by area of focus. Each sub-team was comprised of ten disciplines: project manager, strategist, data analyst, researcher, interaction designer, visual designer, copywriter, front-end developer, back-end developer, QA engineer.

Every discipline was represented on day one of the project. We didn’t wait to include visual designers until partway through. We didn’t onboard QA at the end. We were all on the project from day one and we all had shared ownership from the very beginning, and thereby shared respect. This part was key. It’s not fun for any discipline to join partway through and be asked to simply “execute” based on decisions already made by others. In my book, it’s downright disrespectful.

Every morning, myself and my counterpart would meet with each of the five sub-teams for 30 minutes. A focused, direct, frank 30 minutes together. Same bat time, same bat channel. Every day. It was consistent, expected, and a morning ritual we looked forward to. And if course correction was needed, no one felt bad about it, since only one day had passed since we last spoke.

Beyond those 30 minutes in the morning, that was it. If the sub-teams wanted to talk to the client or do some other internal stuff, they had to do it in the morning. This essentially allowed for most of the morning and a solid chunk from 12:00 PM to 5:00 PM to be an uninterrupted big block of time. And we wanted everyone to focus during the day, then leave at 5:00 PM. Yup. Crazy. I know. While some days ran long, we really wanted everyone to have their time back. And the satisfaction we felt in having gotten through a substantial amount of work in a real way during a big block of uninterrupted time was priceless.

No one wants to be swatting at mosquitoes all day. And that’s what it feels like when your day is sliced up into impossible increments of time. Not everyone is cognizant of protecting their time in this way, or wants to fight the machine, or be that person who asked for more time. If it’s within your power to help change how we respect time — and thereby respect the people we work with—then by all means, give back the gift of time.

Principle #2: Take more care in how you listen, how you speak, and how you write.

The next big thing to address on this megaproject was how we communicated with each other. And communication means all the facets of listening, speaking, reading, and writing. I had walked into a culture of redlined documents tossed over the fence like a hot potato, three-hour faceless phone calls full of cryptic jargon, and impenetrable specifications that guaranteed we wouldn’t end up coding what we were designing. There’s way too much cognitive load in every interaction, and that’s the single biggest thing that keeps us from understanding each other the first time around.

So how did we address this, specifically? For the nature of this project, we had to take some extreme measures. We needed to knock out a whole laundry list of communication frustrations all in one fell swoop. And we needed to make sure it felt good and healthy and fair for everyone on this 200-person team. We were designing and building something that would eventually be rolled out to 110,000,000 customers in the U.S. And we had 24 weeks to do it. We had zero time to lose on miscommunication.

Every Thursday morning at 7:30 AM, we would take a charter bus from our studio in Manhattan to the client’s office 90 minutes away. We would spend the entire day there, then take the bus back at 5:00 PM. The morning ride was quiet and contemplative. The evening ride was a full-on, let-loose party with strip lights and music, barreling down the highway at 60 mph.

So why Thursday? And why a whole day? After an early trial and error of having incorrectly chosen a different day of the week, I learned from one-on-one conversations and full team retrospectives that everyone needed more uninterrupted time to work. Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday were dedicated to each of the five teams to have their uber-productive, power-through time. Thursday was the day we would all come together as a larger group to share progress and plan out the next bits. Friday was a day to decompress, re-group, tie up loose ends, get time with the rest of the studio, and start happy hour early.

So let’s deep dive a bit on Thursday. When we’d step off the bus, we would all assemble inside a large room—large enough to hold a hundred people. We would often have that many folks attending in person, and many more dialing in from other locations from around the country and around the world. We would then spend a couple hours having each sub-team of the project share the actual work-in-progress from the previous week. And we very intentionally referred to this as a “workshare”. This was not a “working session”. This was not a “workshop”. This was not a “presentation”. This was not a “demo day”. All 200 people who were part of this project came to use the same language to describe Thursday mornings as “workshare”.

And this was an important thing. We wanted to make sure designers could stand up in front of a room with a Sketch file and quickly zoom through ideas that were still just hand sketches, half-baked screens, or fully-baked screens. We wanted to eliminate the formality and mentality of creating a polished deck, because that was not the point of a workshare. The design research team could show clips from recorded sessions and play a few audio files of real people as they became ready on a rolling basis, rather than sitting on the research for weeks at a time. The engineers could show an area of the application that was partially working, with full understanding from the audience that this was work in progress and that everyone would be kind.

So the term “workshare” really did mean sharing your work, wherever it may be in its state of doneness. Get comfortable showing how the sausage gets made. And let everyone understand where things are on a project, in a way that is more visceral and more substantive than a bullet point on a status chart. You are not a bullet point on a status chart. Nor is your work. And you simply can’t understand what the heck all these people are working on if you don’t look at the work in a real and meaningful way.

We’d then break for lunch, sit outside, and get a bit of sunshine before diving into a full afternoon of breakout sessions. Each sub-team would have a dedicated room to work in. Every discipline would be represented from the client side and the agency side (and there were multiple agencies working on this particular effort). And everyone brought their homework. The mandate for the afternoon breakout sessions was simple: work through all the tough sticky stuff together, in person. Don’t save it for email. Don’t save it for a long drawn out phone call. Don’t save it for a redlined document. Do it in real time instead. Sit at a table, look each other in the eye, and sort it out together. There is no substitute for both the efficiency—and the humanity—that happens when we “cross the aisle” and work side by side with each other.

These all-day sessions on Thursday played a large part in eliminating a long laundry list of complaints. No more redlined documents tossed over the fence. No more faceless phone calls that would last hours. No more meetings at random points throughout the day. No more finger pointing. We knew we would all be spending some quality time in person together every Thursday. And that served as motivation to be a good human when we were together.

This weekly in-person component was a big fix and anchoring point on how we communicate. We also addressed issue-by-issue what needed fixing for phone calls, Slack, and email. I could spend a full day talking about some very relatable examples and the broken stuff that needed fixing. To wrap up principle two, here’s what I will say:

Words matter. And our delivery of those words matters. Whether it’s spoken or written, email or Slack, there is an overlay of design inherent in all modes of communication. Every time we communicate, without exception, we have to train our brains to always think about what’s going to make this thing I need to say easier to receive for the people on the receiving end. And it’s not just in the so-called “moments that matter”. Every micro-moment actually matters, because it all adds up in a pretty big way.

In the same way that we create frameworks for the things we design, we have to have similar frameworks and rigor in how we listen, how we speak, and how we write. Being sloppy about any or all of those things dramatically increases cognitive load, wastes a bunch of time in the back and forth, and inevitably chips away at the hearts and souls of those we work with.

Principle #3: Afford yourself the freedom to be creative.

It is difficult to create with intent and with focus when each day feels like you’re just trying to keep your head above water. There is a compacting of time and brainspace that we let happen to ourselves, mostly because it feels like “How could I possibly pause to do something about this?” Or, “I’m a nobody. I don’t have rank. I don’t have influence.” The truth is, if we don’t tackle it with some small measures to start, then we continue to feel the squeeze. It’s difficult to be creative when you’re being squeezed.

What I describe in principle one and principle two can be neatly summed up in the phrase “invisible structures”. I’ve only recently started calling it that. But it’s something that’s always been there, a scaffolding of sorts. When I was starting out in my career 22 years ago, there were people who had put these invisible structures in place for me. And then there were people who had not. Experiencing those projects, one by one, year after year—it all became quite clear. And the clarity came by way of contrast. Some projects felt so good, so healthy, with so much growth and learning. And other projects were a total shitshow. Invisible structures—or lack thereof—would make or break us.

No random internal meetings at odd hours scattered throughout the day. No surprise meetings at the client’s behest. No longer fighting against time, or each other. No longer just surviving a list of “deliverables”. Invisible structures give us an established cadence, a way of communicating with clarity and efficiency, a welcome predictability in the things that should be predictable—those are the invisible structures we want in place to let great work happen.

And that’s when it happens. We have the freedom to think again. Ideas start to flow freely. I’m actually happy to see you and riff with you. Playfulness comes back into our work. And we get to feel more human again in this job we have designing for lots of other humans.

Making It Happen

I’ve seen this work on projects of all sizes, regardless of industry, regardless of who you’re designing for. And it’s also meant to work for you in a solo situation or if you find yourself on a 200-person team.

I have been working in service design for over a decade now, and it’s the role that I play at Fjord and Accenture. For anyone who has ever made a journey map, you know that it’s all about starting with one-on-one interviews, putting pain points on sticky notes, bucketing things into logical groupings, and then working with a bunch of people to come up with solutions.

This is exactly how these new ways of working came to be. We understood some basic truths, committed to a core set of guiding principles, and worked to ensure that the solutions we came up with felt real and felt achievable. Most importantly, it had to be human and it had to be designed for the people who would be living the realties of this project every day.

Great teams and great work happens when we start from a place of truth and principle. Fight the good fight to make it happen.

#makersgottamake