Reflections on 6 months of design at the Energy Decarbonization Division

Standard disclaimer: perspectives presented here are entirely my own and do not necessarily represent those of my employer and/or colleagues.

This piece is a bit overdue. I told myself I’d write routinely when I first started in this role as Director, Strategic Design at the Energy Decarbonization Division (EDD) within the Ministry of Energy, Mines, and Low Carbon Innovation (EMLI). Ambitions for monthly reflections became quarterly, and now here I am, over half a year into things, finally putting words to page.

There’s a few thoughts I’d like to coalesce via the rigour of writing, and shoutout to everyone who’s had a wandering conversation about design with me over the past 6 months — it’s helped me both crystallize and dispose of certain threads, unpack ideas, and release some inner pressure. This piece is about me looking inward, not the specifics of the work itself. I work with a wide range of folks in this role, both within the BC Government and externally with our myriad partners and collaborators. For this purpose it’s about tracing my experiences to pull out themes that perhaps others can relate to and build on.

Starting up in a new domain is always a bit of a crash course and I feel even more so for me at EDD. The world of energy is highly complex and technical, unbounded and emergent. Most folks working in this space have invested their academic and professional careers into it. I, however, am a design generalist who chanced into collaborating on heat pump futures with a great group of people, and this became an opportunity to focus on it full time. Constant growth and learning has been the best part of working in the public sector and this role made so much sense for me as someone deeply interested in the entanglements of a changing climate: adaptation, mitigation, resiliency, justice, equity, affordability, etc.

Now’s a time when the calculus around clean energy transitions and efficient use is growing ever more qualitative in texture. In a hot and expensive society, who has access to new technologies? What role does government have in these interventions and market transformations? Who benefits? How might policies, programs, and services work most effectively for the people they’re intended to serve?

I’ve talked a lot in recent years about designing policy-to-delivery and this is a unique opportunity to directly affect change in a domain I’m passionate about. It also feels like a natural next step in my journey as a strategic designer and design leader. The following are a handful of observations and insights from the months since I made this move.

Imposter syndrome is a given

Or, retaining your identity and confidence in the face of overwhelm.

The first month or two at EDD I felt a profound imposter syndrome, perhaps something of an inverse Dunning–Kruger. At this point I know I’m a competent designer and effective public servant, but the technical intensity of the energy domain caught me off guard. All areas of public service tend to have their own esoteric language and this was no different — stack that on top of complex partnerships and relational dynamics between other levels of government, utilities, NGOs, think tanks, private industry, etc, and you’ve a real washing machine for the brain. Feeling like you have little value-add can be quite demoralizing, and I perceived myself as floundering at first.

Lesson: be patient and graceful with yourself, it’ll come. I let my anxieties in those first weeks lead to negative self-talk and doubt, when acceptance and positivity would have a much more useful framing of the experience. This happens to everyone; it’s the rule, and I’m no exception. Perhaps I’m just saying the obvious thing out loud, but I think it’s worth it. Persevere.

Design team of one

Or, how to avoid subsumption by the norms of the organization, even as an experienced designer.

Rarely would we ever recommend a design team of one (ps, I contributed to piece on hiring design recently), but a leadership position with broad remit across the organization is a different dynamic; my role is more to consult, strategize, and plot courses of action, rather than function in an sustained individual contributor capacity.

Still, it’s the daily interactions using the vernacular and methodologies of design that keep you rooted in your practice and confident in its efficacy. And while I’m fortunate to work with designers and design teams on varying scopes across our portfolio, often I’m in deep with seasoned policy and program folks who have different ways of approaching the problems. At points in my early days in this gig I felt a bit untethered as a ‘designer,’ wondering what the title should mean.

It’s easy to lose yourself in the dominant norms of the org. There’s a bit of cognitive dissonance in this: I’m working on a complex challenge with a diverse team of staff, vendors, leaders, etc.; we’re doing things in organizationally normative ways and I know what useful redirections or interventions might be. But I doubt myself, because of my newness, because of the powerful currents I’ve entered, because I don’t want to rock the boat. And those who know me would hardly characterize my professional demeanor as passive or avoidant.

This is the conundrum of a design team of one, even at a leadership level. Designers, as with all types of professional practice (but perhaps even more so as still novel resources), need to organize their thoughts through dialog with other designers. We do better when we work in generative environments and think in the open, building off each other’s insights. We grow more confident in our value when validated, challenged, and expanded.

The arc of design in government is to become an everyday role as any other in the era of modern public service. I do think we’re headed in that direction. For now, we may still find ourselves ‘designing’ as teams of one. I’ve been reminded just how isolating that can feel, and its potential effect on the designer psyche. An important reminder for me to avoid putting others in that position.

Epistemic friction

Or, dialectics-lite in your 9 to 5.

Working in this role as a designer — defined here as someone with an reflexively qualitative approach to understanding and an iterative and malleable way of working through problems — I’ve been thinking about Gila Sher’s theory of Epistemic Friction. In brief, this is the position that ‘knowledge’ is not just a passive collection of facts — it’s an active process where beliefs are constantly tested and refined through interactions with the world and others with their own (different) beliefs, ensuring that our understanding becomes more accurate and reliable. And we live and work within constraints (space, time, etc), creating ‘friction’ in our ability to gain a comprehensive understanding of any given issue. There’s a lot of crossover here with dialectical reasoning, the process through which different viewpoints or ideas are contrasted to discover the truth through reasoned debate and logical discussion. This approach aims to resolve contradictions through synthesis (a designer specialty), ultimately arriving at a more fulsome understanding or solution.

What does this mean specific to my experience over the past 6+ months? I’ve been in unfamiliar territory in both domain and dynamics, working collaboratively with policy and program experts, leaning on hard-won experience to guide my inputs. In a legacy environment when you bring not just a different skillset, but a different way of ‘knowing,’ there will always be some rub. This may just be a more heady framing of ‘constructive conflict,’ but I think new multidisciplinarity is more than just different ideas of ‘good’ or ‘right’ in a given challenge.

Design, to complement core organization accumens such as policy and program skills (in which there is no small amount of ‘design’), necessarily embeds an additional tension in our processes, surfacing new knowledge and experience that become more than the sum of their discrete occurrences. This is extremely positive for a durable, heterogeneous organization, and helps us expand past the contextual frictions of what’s achievable in the workday, and how broad our organization’s line of sight might pragmatically be.

Beyond design, alleviating persistent epistemic frictions might include diverse sociocultural and socioeconomic inputs and experiences, broad representations, other lenses that may show be missing in our status quo. It’s no stretch to characterize the public service as a bit of a mirrorworld, where we generally see ourselves reflected in those we work alongside — educated, relatively financially stable, biased towards western academically-influenced norms. Design helps push this ever so slightly outside this familiarity, but there’s so much further we can go to better create deep value in our work.

What are the limits of design as a legible practice?

Or, is what I’m doing even ‘design’ anymore?

I think it is, perhaps at one its more final forms. As my friend and colleague Tess framed it, it’s like advanced skill at any sport or craft — you’re no longer thinking about doing it, you’re just doing it. But I’m not sure my day to day would be intelligible to any design school I’m familiar with, other than my explicit references to the methods and artefacts folks are familiar with.

As I’ve written about before, my practice now firmly resides with the dark matter of things; the manipulation of opaque nodes and relationships, rewiring the connective tissue, generally being a responsive ‘fixer’ and wearer of whatever hat serves best at the time. However, this does not make for a legible and repeatable practice, and that is a risk. What makes what I’m doing provably ‘design’? How is what I’m doing scalable to other parts of the organization — or have I built this role too much to the tune of my innate skills, personality strengths, and individual experiences and interests? When the ‘design’ is fragmented, context-shifted, and hard to cohere into a simple narrative form, it’s challenging to expect others to understand the practice, value its inputs, and identify opportunities to recreate the role in different problem spaces / org charts.

I feel like the point is to be really helpful and that’s my goal, every day. But by being so far away from a structurally identifiable practice, I do feel like I’ve bumped up against the limit of ‘design’ as a word that might have shared and common meaning. Buy the ticket, take the ride, I’m extremely grateful to get to work in this way, regardless of how hard it can be to tell a lucid story.

I’d love to chat with others operating at the leadership level in their organizations, ‘designing’ fluidly across domains, articulating the thread they’re tying in ways that make sense for others though patterned language and objects. If that’s you, please reach out.

Collective growth

Or, a shoutout to my colleagues at the Energy Decarbonization Division.

I’ve grown so much professionally in the past 6 months, and I think there’s been no shortage of learning by my colleagues through working with me. I dropped into a high velocity, politically-visible area during an election year. We deliver amazing programs that really do help change the world. I’m humbled to continue in a domain I care deeply about, with whip-smart, passionate, and empathetic people. A big thanks for everyone who’s taught me something about energy networks, building science, transportation, fuels, utilities, economics, the list goes on and on. I’m thrilled for these opportunities to show up and help make things better together.