Leading with…Jane Ruffino
Ahead of this year’s Lead With Tempo, we caught up with speaker Jane, to find out what inspires her.
What book have you read that’s really changed how you approach work or life?
Anna Lowenhapt Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World traces the world of the matsutake mushroom, the world’s most expensive mushroom, which needs human activity to grow, but can’t be intentionally cultivated. She follows the stories of this mushroom across time and space, from the Pacific Northwest of the US, to the forests of Finland, and through the history of Imperial Japan, guiding you through different parts of this huge global entanglement.
She gets to the end of the book, and it’s basically, “if I could have tied this all up in a neat conclusion, there would have been no point to it, so — the end.” I’m paraphrasing, but I had such a strong, positive emotional reaction to this because I didn’t know you could just do that in an academic work. It helped me to own how I wanted to feel in the world as a person who loves to go down rabbit holes, that those rabbit holes aren’t always diversions, sometimes they’re relevant parts of a broader entanglement.
But I think it’s also relevant for content design. Our job is to be guides through all of these different worlds. We take a topic and have to quickly develop clear, confident language around it. And we don’t get to have neat and tidy endings. Everything is “it depends.”
This book also made me go, “I want to write the mushroom book, but about data as a material thing.” And then I wrote a PhD application over a weekend just to see if someone would let me do it, and unfortunately, they said yes, so now I’m still on the hook for a dissertation, which, if I try very hard, could be almost 1% as good as the mushroom book.
What’s the best advice you’ve ever been given?
About 20 years ago, I was making my first radio documentary, and I was really inexperienced. One producer I admired told me that when you make radio, the most important thing is to “always keep the tape running.” People will say the thing they mean in the most casual, interesting way, you’ll capture some piece of context that will bring the whole thing together or you’ll get some new piece of information you didn’t expect.
I think about this all the time, and it translates to what we do, not in a literal “recording people” way — I tend to not even record a lot of user research sessions — and not in a creepy surveillance way, but just in the sense that we should always be listening and observing. To people’s reactions and movements, their facial expressions, to what they share in casual moments, tuning in to all kinds of details in the spaces around us, just to see if there’s something deeper to notice.
I guess it ties in with what Anna Tsing talks about in her book, where she asks what happens if we “look around, rather than ahead.” Taking in information about the world around us is helpful even if we can’t always operationalize it, and “forward” isn’t the only potentially fruitful direction.
And the worst?
Any form of “Just think positive” or “Have you tried yoga?” any form of “girlbossing,” or other things that presume the listener’s problems are purely internal. These are just different ways of saying “have you tried being rich?” Sometimes people have real external problems.
I try not to give advice unless it’s specifically asked for, and I am allergic to receiving it if I didn’t ask for it. People sometimes try to circumvent this by saying things like, “Would you like to hear my reflection?” or other non consensual amateur therapy-speak. It’s all judgment and weird little power moves dressed up in the plausibly deniable language of self-help books and the Wellness Industrial Complex.
I went through a brutal 9 rounds of IVF and had a difficult pregnancy before having a baby at an alarmingly old age. With the amount of advice I have received even just on that topic, I think I deserve a trophy for not just blowing an air horn everywhere I go so I never have to hear another word of it.
Do you have any of your own advice for someone new to leadership?
Like I said, I am not a huge fan. I’m not even sure I’m a proper leader. So I’ll just say, about myself, I only take advice from people who I know want me to win.
You do what works for you — you are the expert in being you, and nobody gets to try to shape you into their image of who you should be.
How do you relax outside of work?
I used to think people who said “I spend time with my family” were just being boring, but my kid is great. She decided she speaks Swedish, English, and “fågelspråk,” which means “bird language.” So she just stands there and tweets with the little birds in the hedges. We play a lot of little-kid board games, read a lot of books, and hang out with our senior dog.
And a lot of children’s cultural stuff — books, music, theater, etc — is just incredible. It makes me furious that society values boring things like makey-uppy “innovation” that’s just an ATM for venture capitalists when children’s theater is infinitely more difficult to do well. Have you ever done something so engaging, it made a 4-year-old sit still for 45 minutes?
I also enjoy the trifecta of things appropriate to my demographic: gardening, group chats, and girl shows (supernatural crime thrillers, scammer podcasts, ensemble comedies, and all incarnations of Love is Blind).
What recent developments in tech and design most excite you about the future?
It’s been confirmed by a few car companies that knobs and buttons are coming back for key controls. I love when there’s a realization that a form or feature persists because sometimes the “faster horse” part of that innovation parable is, in fact, the thing that’s needed.
I’m also excited to see more returns to playful, simple web design. Neocities blogs. People removing analytics from their personal websites. All the things that say no to scale and remind us that we only equate tech hypergrowth because that’s the story we got fed by a bunch of VCs. Plus, these are part of the antidote to the thing that rhymes with Partificial Mintelligence.
Why do you think events like Lead with Tempo are important for the content design community?
Because we don’t have a ton of spaces like this, to talk about how we’re doing, not just what we’re doing to solve design and business problems. I don’t think what we do is that hard as a craft, but it can be emotionally difficult, especially since so many of us have creative backgrounds and find ourselves in environments that don’t value those skills. And a lot of us are doing it in relative isolation.
I think Kristina Halvorson is who said this years ago, but all content strategy is change management. All of that emotional labor we do is leadership work that’s part of change management, which we’re often trying to do without a mandate. We don’t always have the titles, either, so we need spaces to have our own definition of what leadership is and what a leader looks like.
Can you give us a sneaky teaser about something your talk will cover?
I haven’t written it yet, so I hope I don’t promise something and don’t deliver, but I am 90% sure I will explain what a Ketchup Stakeholder is. The talk has a sort of goofy title, but it is a serious talk about the value and importance of building relationships.
Tickets to Lead with Tempo are on sale now, and you can join us virtually or in-person.
