Rambles on Design Leadership
I hope y’all, whoever you are, find this design leadership tail less mechanistic and sparse than others… this one… is more of a sauce.
Firstly, there’s been a diverse set of leaders in my life, while some have gone unnoticed, some are literally cartoons.
STEVE from Cloudy with a chance of meatballs, is a mentor figure to me: simple, correct and prone to yelling.
Martian Manhunter and the tropes he embodies have also had a profound influence on me.
I have had, and still have, a few mentors that make me feel like I am standing on equal ground with them. I am able to speak calmly with them and they are able to do the same with me. Not being yelled at, or, spoken to in a raised voice, is quite refreshing, so, I recommend finding at least one such person for yourself. Many “leaders” try to impose, on others, what others “need” or should say, those people are self-serving. They collude, harass and manufacture warrants for their rationale. Leaders that do that do not listen or care to foster an environment where others feel comfortable.
Other mentors in my life have been yell-talking narcissists trumping for whose decisions created “the recent win” in the face of the team that supported them. … I think the most important mentors, co-workers, classmates, what have you, in my life so far are the ones that are a bit out of touch. The ones that drive me away from myself, away from purpose, those mentors are the ones I aim to help.
Though I prefer to keep a sterile and academic temperament, I do think there’s a place for yelling, like STEVE, and that there is sometimes a need for yelling, but unpacking that is for another time. ;)
I can tolerate, accommodate, and, change myself to conform to the needs of others, I’ve been highly considerate, perceptive, and awarded for being courteous from a young age, and the ways I have contorted myself to support others has been a didactic journey and exercise. I have been told “You are the most cognitive person I know” and “you are highly intuitive.” But, enough about me. I can see myself, and measure how others have projected me, the delta between myself and the strings of assertions held over me by bad leaders that shape what their version of me does. An action a leader writes for you, or into you, is one of the most important elements of my group behavior research and one of the biggest challenges I’ve come to note about my leadership journey. Althusser calls it interpellation and Harvard Business Review writes about it here.
On positive leaders and mentors.
I’m not sure I have truly-appreciated the depth of those who have had a positive influence on me. I suppose my steadfastness, my guiding light, is their doing. So, my appreciation, my heralding over their influence, is vested in my gazes, my focuses into those bright futures I act toward and create. Perhaps, their influence has pooled to shape the lens through which I project, and, I honor them with higher frequency than I or anyone may realize just by having vision and thinking. Hmm… You can check out my compass as it relates to Design Innovation, here.
Though I like Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs and STEVE, it was a mentor that pulled me back to earth by pointing out the dark sizeist depiction of The Mayor of Swallow Falls. Turning a blind eye to the bad stuff is very easy when you are only choosing to see the good, but as it seems, the opposite is also true.
To shift gears, check out Welcome to the Dark Side?, a collaborative post, by three MDES Class of 2020 course-mates, that I oversaw, to read about potential dark sides of Mixed Reality. If I post on the development process behind it, I’ll replace this blathering reminder explanation with the link. :D
I can describe a few mentors in my life as both good and bad. I can remember one AWESOME boss from my past that had such far-reaching spirit and creativity, but with that, came farsightedness. It was as though they couldn’t see what was right in front of them, sometimes including their own employees. The dark side of genius, I suppose?
The reality is, nobody is AWESOME, it is important to have equitable conversation now and again, and there is a special place in my awareness for those soul-sucking, sexist and sizeist leaders in my life. I especially cherish those trying dynamics, the ones that stretched the boundaries of whom I am capable of working with in order to act on purpose. Sidebar — No one says it better than CJ Craig from West Wing, view here.
LET’S SWITCH GEARS!
Storytime — Leaders can be anyone.
Last night, I chose to get outside and go shoot a few hoops. Half the court was already playing 4 on 4. I shot around a bit on the open half, I couldn’t run drills. Some kids show up (white) and we share the half-court. Then, I step out and two (black) kids show up, so I prompt these three white boys to ask these two black Spanish speaking boys to play. (I specify race because it’s still important.) They choose not to join, but then the three white kids ask me to play, and there’s a welcoming behavior set. Then, the guys on the opposite side of the court, the older guys, ask me to play. This was after I started a round of “king of the court” with the little ones, playing left-handed. I felt a little bad leaving the little ones… at another time scale, it might have been like I was the middle school big brother leaving them to hang out with my new high school friends. I went to play with the “big boys” anyway. Then one of the three little white boys piped up. “Can I play too?” He said. They welcomed him and in the first 30 seconds, he hit a jump shot. I lite up, and smiled before saying, “He’s got proof!” in a manner that didn’t feel too loud. … I love when whole spirits beat Goliaths.
As we scrimmaged, I saw that the two Spanish speaking kids had joined the other two boys and were having fun. Their races dissolved. I smiled again.
For the most part, I have been playing basketball by myself for 6 months, bouncing the ball from outside my apartment door up my side street to the court as a means of measuring the community. Leadership on the community level is important to me, but I am biased because it is what I have been researching for years.
Finding the synergy between the foreign hull of the community and the self while playing a game, in this case basketball, has enabled communities to, as if one bodied organism, code into me, the method user, in a way that affects my actions when I lower my inhibition. My reactions to the community level organism become expressions of community influence, and, so, a measurement such an organisms health. Regardless of what this technique can diagnose about communities now, what it is is a step forward with regard to ethnographically founded design research methods. Developing accessible, non-invasive and relatively innocuous techniques, like this one, in reasonably safe environments, that, put the practitioner at risk, and not the community, for the purposes of community development research is a critical means of uncovering human factors on, and, designing interventions for, the population level. Look forward to more formal development of this methodology when I publish my thesis, tentatively titled “Where’s Waldo’s Big Bad Warden: a study of functional social support in context with implications for organizational design.”
Framing yourself to play a role, in, sometimes, convoluted ways, may not always be revered as positive, but it’s the job. So, I find small wins in the work that I do, lighting the way. Whether interventions like these are marked as innocuous, but recurrent, sentences in the zoned transcript of conscious communities, or, marked as litmus tests designed to measure a community’s health, I am not certain… yet. It wouldn’t be Socratic to think I am…so I digress.
Before I ramble too much, as if I haven’t already, I’d like to reveal my reason for this story and wrap up.
I’m finding that my leadership journey is practically defined by the absence of leadership. But, isn’t everybody’s?
Even as far back as high school, I have felt compelled into leadership positions, in whatever small way, I find myself in them… I suppose I simply cannot be party to conscious neglect. So, I wonder if… like myself, every leader’s experience is evidenced by actions like these, where they could not see any other way, but to step up without a clear example.
Finally, what might compel us to take up responsibility and lead in unknown territory?
I suspect, since, knowledge does not exist as a list of temporally constrained facts, but as a generalizable and timeless concept, that in witnessing beams of knowledge breaking through clouds of action — a kid with a killer jump shot — we find light at our backs. And that light functions as reason enough, for me anyway, to leap into action, blind or otherwise.
“When we shift our emphasis from behavior to character, people evaluate choices differently. Instead of asking whether this behavior will achieve the results they want, they take action because it is the right thing to do.” p170, Originals by Adam Grant
At some point you get the sense that there is not a road map, but there is a feeling, and a confidence in a some purposeful path forward, however convoluted.
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A special thank you to MDES — Leadership Design Lab instructor Jen Briselli, VP, Experience Strategy & Service Design at Mad*Pow for encouraging me to reflect on leadership.
