Empathy, Perfectionism, and Prototyping: Lessons for Design Leadership
Musings and reflections at the end of my design school journey.
604 days ago, I sat down in my first class in a graduate design program. I was filled with excitement combined with a heavy dose of imposter syndrome. What was I doing at design school? I had never taken a design class in my life or ever worked in a job with “design” in the job description, let alone the title. I had just quit my full-time job as a database administrator. What did I know about design?
As it turns out, what I didn’t know about design didn’t matter. For the next 604 days, I would learn the skills and methods of the design process; more importantly, I would practice how to think like a designer and view the world from a designerly lens. Now, with my final semester coming to a close and graduation less than two weeks away, I want to share two takeaways that I think design leaders of today should take to heart.
Empath Is Not a Buzzword
Something that has made a significant impression on me throughout my time studying human-centered design is in regards to the way designers speak about empathy. Before studying design, I understood empathy to mean “feeling the emotions of another person.” Empathy represents the emotional connections we have to others, especially in feeling and validating someone else’s pain or negative emotions. Having previously worked in the human services sector, I observed many of my peers and colleagues bringing deep empathy to their work and often suffering from compassion fatigue, a form of burnout caused by emotionally intense work. I saw highly empathic people being drawn to empathy-heavy work, giving their full emotional selves to it, and burning out from the continual overdraft of their emotional labor.
Juxtapose this with empathy in the context of human-centered design. Designers and design researchers often taut the fundamental importance of building empathy with the user/customer/patient/insert-any-noun. While I am not questioning that designers and researchers are full of empathy for the people they are researching or designing for, I stand against the misconception that design practitioners are the sole keepers of empathy. Formally incorporating empathy into the language and process of design runs the risk of reducing empathy to jargon, sacrificing the depth of human meaning in favor of corporate palatability. I encourage all designers and design leaders to reflect on what they are really trying to say with the word empathy. Is it a depth of human experience and complex emotions? Or is it a feel-good synonym for market research?
Returning to the empathy burnout phenomenon that I had observed in human services workers, I ask design leaders to take into consideration how empathy is a significant act of emotional labor. If you are leading a team of designers or design researchers who are frequently asked and expected to show empathy, hold space for complexity, and process the emotional layers of users’ experiences, keep a sharp lookout for the signs of emotional burnout in your team. I get concerned when employees are supposed to produce empathy in their work while receiving little empathy from their own leadership. Employees are not empathy vending machines — not even designers. Empathy is not a commodity, an emotional widget to measure productivity. I am critical of spaces where empathy is loudly and overtly spoken about like some kind of asset, but not demonstrated in internal interactions. If empathy matters to the design process which ultimately contributes to business success, then make sure it is being shown back to the employees who are cultivating it from their own emotional storehouses.
Perfectionism vs. Prototyping
“You’re such a perfectionist.” When I was a child, I thought this was a compliment. Who wouldn’t want to be perfect, right? Now as an (extremely imperfect) adult, I see my perfectionistic tendencies for what they are: inhibitions rooted in the fear of failure that prevent me from fully investing myself in my decisions and commitments. My perfectionist patterns got a serious shift and reframe when I started to understand what it really means to embrace ambiguity. Of course, it didn’t start with an embrace — first a tolerance of the discomfort of not having the answer, then an acceptance, and finally a wholehearted invitation.
For me, the rebuttal to perfectionism is best manifested in the process of prototyping. Prototyping means making a version of something that can help answer a question. The question could be “How big should this product be?” or “How will someone interact with this app?” or “Is the idea in my head even possible to translate to the real world?” Prototyping can take many methods, but the true value is in the process itself: making the intangible (a thought or idea) tangible (you can see it, touch it, react to it). Perfectionism is the opposite: a fixation on an intangible ideal that cannot be achieved in the tangible world.
Unchecked perfectionism can not only inhibit your decision-making and investment in the choices that you have already made. What’s worse, particularly for design leaders, perfectionism does not leave space for humility. Demanding perfection and unattainable standards from yourself and from others with a never-be-satisfied mentality may garner praise within corporate grindset culture but fails to leave room for humble, grounded self-awareness and reflection on lessons learned. If everything must be perfect yet it never is, there is no lesson; there is only an unending meaningless grind towards a non-existent finish line.
I’m not saying that we should not have high standards for ourselves, or that leaders should not have high standards for their teams. Used well, high standards are critical in motivating high performance and achievement. Where the danger lies in the blinders that perfectionism puts up, blocking curiosity, self-reflection, and nuanced insight. If you identify as a perfectionist, I challenge you to redefine your relationship with that aspect of yourself. When you are able to make space around perfectionism, possibilities of exploration and new paths forward will emerge and lead you forward.
