Interview with David Dylan Thomas

David Dylan Thomas is author of Design for Cognitive Bias from A Book Apart and creator and host of the Cognitive Bias Podcast. Founder and CEO of David Dylan Thomas, LLC. He has developed digital strategies for major clients in entertainment, healthcare, publishing, finance, and retail.

We catch up with David ahead of his talk and masterclass at UX Fest.

UX Fest: What did 2020 teach you about design leadership?

David: I learned that leadership is very much about how you react. Not just to your own company, but to what’s going on in the world and create an understanding about what you owe the world, not just your shareholders.

You start to see a real difference between walking the walk and talking to talk. Sara Wachter-Boettcher talks about this. You have some companies, posting statements about how Black Lives Matter and that’s great. I mean the term wouldn’t even be uttered by a corporation, a year before. But you had other companies who said, Hey, we are simply not going to pursue facial recognition technology anymore. IBM straight up saying we’re just not going to do it, and I have to feel that, while it was probably calculated, to some degree, it had to hurt because I don’t think they spent zero dollars up until then, researching and investing in facial recognition technology. They had to leave a considerable amount of money on the table. It made a difference.

So what I learned about design leadership is that if it hurts, you’re probably doing it right.

UX Fest: How can we all encourage more diverse design teams?

David: I love the term cultural growth in response to this notion of cultural fit.

Cultural fit sounds good at the beginning, especially if you’re a young company. You’ve got something about you that is positive, like really good work-life balance because the people who started your company hated that about their last company. The new company inherits their values. And so you create this great culture around that.

But if that’s all you’ve got, when you bring people in who are diverse, you’re going to want them to just fit whatever your culture is. If they have something new and positive to bring to the table, like notions of salary transparency, if that’s not something you’re used to, you’re going to try to get them to conform to the way you think. And that’s why you see a lot of people of colour who come into largely white organisations not stay very long. They’re not being asked to grow the culture. They’re being asked to fit into the culture, to assimilate. They’re being pushed out.

Then there’s mystification like, “Well, we gave people of colour jobs, what do you want from us?” But it’s a fundamental mind shift. It’s not just the quota system.

I think you do need to be thoughtful about numbers, but when they get there, why do you want them on your team? Do you want them on your team so you have a broader colour palette? Or do you want them on your team because you actually want your company to change? Do you fundamentally believe that your company should change?

I think that is the defining characteristic of effective diversity. If you don’t really think there’s anything wrong with your company and you’re just responding to conflict and controversy, then it’s not going to work.

A company is a growing living thing and it should change. The analogy I love to use is the Avengers where if I already have Iron Man, I don’t want another Iron Man, I want Scarlet Witch, I want Black Panther. I want different skill sets. I’m not just gonna hire ten Iron Men and call them the Avengers. It’s boring.

UX Fest: What are the greatest opportunities to improve inclusive design?

David: I have what I think is a very boring but effective answer to that which is: get it in the budget. Most corporate environments I work in, if it isn’t in the budget, it doesn’t exist.

It could be any inclusive design practice. It could be an assumption audit, which is where you talk about your biases before you begin the project. It could be Red Team, Blue Team where you bring in a different team to examine your work before it launches.

But for any of these practices, it’s one thing for me to talk about them in my talk, and you think that’s a great idea. It’s a whole other thing if you go back to your company and you convince the powers that be that when we budget a project we always leave time for an assumption audit or Red Team exercise.

I’ve been in estimating sessions. I know how this works. If it’s already there, people just assume it. Everything that isn’t in the template for a project, or for a budget, you have to fight for. Everything that’s already in there, if you just leave your hands off it, it’ll probably just happen. That’s just the human reality of budgets and project plans at large enterprise, or even at agencies.

Not everybody necessarily understands that the boring side of activism is 100% the most important part. Being able to create a budget, being able to create all the bureaucratic pieces.

Redlining and police brutality and all of these things get to persist because of boring things no one’s ever heard of like qualified immunity. There’s all these little tiny little laws that got passed. And you find out because of that law redlining proliferated. Or little things that chipped away at the Voting Rights Act. Because of this, all these horrible people were able to be elected. You see all of these huge outsize things that come back to some really boring law or policy or regulation.

So I’m actually a very big proponent of taking these kind of boring paperwork things and elevating them. Because, I’m almost disappointed to say, they really really matter.

How do you view the relationship between design and business?

David: For a long time I never even questioned the idea that there’s a business and then there’s ethics. And the ethics are like the icing on the cake. Almost like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs; you’ve got to pay everybody, you’ve got to make the shareholders happy, and then if you’ve done all that you get to have the luxury of having ethics. And it’s always this tension between ethics and business.

If you step back from that and think about it for even five seconds, that’s horrible. If I’m deciding between business and ethics I have to make a subcategory. A subcategory of design that’s ethical design. Wait! If that’s a subcategory, what the hell have we been doing all this time? That’s horrifying!

When we get to that point, we need to rethink business.

There is a priming exercise where if you were in a room full of people, and there is a briefcase visible in the room, people will act more competitive. And that is shocking, but not surprising because we have so aligned the idea of business with competitiveness and viciousness — a very hyper-masculine coded version of what commerce looks like — to have even the sight of a briefcase make us pull out our knives. That’s wrong. We need to look at that.

So when I think about business and design, I think we need to start from a place of ethical value, the surface values. That’s something I’ve learned through therapy, through exposure to bias. If you try to make it about “are you a good or a bad person?” or “are you a good or a bad business?” you’re asking for trouble. Because you’re never going to be definitively one or the other.

If you make it about “what are our values?”, and then make it a conversation about “what is our proximity to them now?”, “are we getting closer?” and make it about that journey, you’re in a much better position. You’re tying into something that hopefully won’t change, and hopefully, you’re picking positive values. You don’t ask “are we an inclusive company?” but “are we more inclusive than we were yesterday?” That is a much more viable question to ask, and it’s a much more actionable question.

So I think the relationship between businesses and design has to be about not these two binaries so much as what value they are both serving.

But it can’t be about competition between business with the assumption that the only point is to make as much money as possible and design, with the only point being to make things as functional as possible. That that kind of ideology I think will always get you in trouble.

What advice would you give practitioners who are just starting out in their careers?

David: Define for yourself what your values are. I literally at some point wrote down on a sheet of paper, “This is what I believe.” I can always check in with those and when I have to make a decision and be like, “Okay, do I really feel like this isn’t aligned with that? Is it getting me closer to them? Is it taking me further away from them?”

Learn what you can about ethics and social science. I have a friend who lives in Sweden who was telling me about his design education there. You don’t go to school to study UX, you go to school to study social science for a couple of years and then you decide, “Am I going to continue academically and do research or am I going to do applied social science and do UX?” They look at UX as applied social science, not as a discipline unto itself. So before you do a single wireframe you already understand some fundamental things about human nature and motivation and psychology. Hopefully, some ethics are in there.

If you’re just starting out, it’s way easier to learn wireframes later than it is to learn moral philosophy later. And to learn how to prioritise things in a way that thinks about the greater good. It’s easier to do that on day one than it is to get used to thinking about the bottom line and making your bosses happy and making your clients happy at the expense of the greater good and then have to somehow shift your thinking around. That’s much more difficult.

So if I had to pick the order in which I learned those things it would be ethics and social science, then however I’m going to apply that. It could be medicine, law, technology, design, running a bookstore, whatever it is, I want to have that foundation first. Then I apply that. Again, it’s a mental shift. Any particular discipline you’re in, you are applying a set of ethics, an understanding of people to that. And it’s a lot easier to learn the people and the ethics part first, because that to me is far more complicated than whatever the individual discipline is.

What’s the best thing that you read, watched or listened to recently?

David: My favourite thing from 2020 overall was a show called Ted Lasso, which is just fantastic. I’m a filmmaker, myself and as a filmmaker, I find it difficult to do happy well and not have it seem cheesy or insincere and it does happy well. It is a show where, from within the first five minutes, you’re rooting for everyone, even if they’re in conflict.

The number one thing that I really noticed about it going back to the very first question about design leadership, it is a wonderful example of what good leadership looks like. It doesn’t rely on people being demeaning or cruel to each other just to create drama. It managed to create tonnes of drama without resorting to lazy writing. You get to see in the character of Ted Lasso this remarkable, and very rare for television or movies, display of what positive meaningful leadership looks like. And again it’s not easy. It’s not lazy about it. It’s hard. It costs. But it’s just amazing to watch.

Is there anything else on your mind at the moment you’d like us to mention?

David: Support Black business. I feel very strongly that regardless of capitalism’s flaws, I think that there is power in small Black business.

When we think business, we think Amazon and Facebook and these big companies. And by dollar share, yeah, that’s most of business. But by actual number of businesses and actually even by dollars, to some extent, it’s mostly small businesses. And we don’t think about them.

There’s a website called Rebuild Black Business that a friend of mine worked on last year, and it lists literally 14,000 different Black businesses you could be supporting.

We’re delighted to have David Speaking at the conference on
Wednesday 2 June, with his talk Design for Cognitive Bias: Using Mental Shortcuts for Good Instead of Evil. Tickets here.

David is also running a 90 minute Masterclass Tuesday 15 June, 16:30–18:00 BST on Inclusive Design: Creating a Bias-Informed Practice. Tickets here.

On the web https://www.daviddylanthomas.com/
On Twitter David Dylan Thomas

UX Fest is brought to you by Clearleft, a strategic design consultancy based in the UK. We work with global brands to design and redesign products and services, bring strategic clarity, and transform digital culture.