Zen and the Art of Organizational Maintenance
What it takes to Design for Diversity
As a designer, maybe you’ve noticed, but statistically, there’s not a lot of diversity in design. We rarely think of this as a design problem. I hope to convince you otherwise. What follows is some thinking I’ve been doing about how we might move the needle on diversity in meaningful ways. I’d like to propose that we can work against bias by starting with new experiments and new assumptions. But first, a story…
A Japanese zen master once received a university professor who came to inquire about Zen. The professor was so excited, he spoke at length about all the things he had learned about Zen in his studies.
The professor shared so much about his studies and travels it was well into the late morning before he stopped speaking. Eventually, he asked what the master might teach him. Pausing a moment, The Master stood, grabbed a teapot, and filled his visitor’s cup. When it was full he kept pouring. The tea began to run over the cup, and then over the edge of the table into his lap. The professor was shocked, he watched the overflow until he no longer could restrain himself. “It is overfull. No more will go in!”
“Like this cup,” The Master said, “you are full of your own opinions and speculations. How can I show you Zen unless you first empty your cup?”
The Full Cup and The Diversity Question
Like the professor, we have many opinions and speculations about what might work best in organizations. We have assumptions about the uniqueness of our own companies and stakeholders, assumptions about the approach to challenges of diversity. We think we know diversity, how important it is. We have heard ideas about the best ways to achieve it, to harness it as a competitive benefit. What we have not heard much of, is what I intend to share some thoughts on: Seeing diversity as a design challenge.
Like the professor, in my quest for knowledge, I have had more than one master pour tea until I learned to stop talking and empty my cup.
I believe the practice of Design whether it be for software, cities, or policy depends on a deep understanding between designers and the humans they design for, and that this human understanding begins with the self. That is to say, begins with me.
I have found a need to empty my cup many times over to reforge these human understandings, to not take them for granted in my work.
Beginner’s Mind and the Quest for Questions
When I was in college, I read a lot. I don’t know that I read more than my peers, but I read at least 15 books a semester. Reading was my lifeblood, my passion. But in learning, I had learned, through ego, to shut out possibilities. To reach conclusions and fortified by my own insecurities, my urge was to use the new knowledge to cement answers in my mind. The quote that follows was my undoing.
“In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.” — Shunryu Suzuki Roshi
What Roshi means, is that expertise, exposure to and learning of knowledge can give you deep insights, but it can also lead your mind away from curiosity. The mind is open, curious and and creative by nature, we see this in every generation of children that gather in schools and at parks to share questions talk openly and prod at the world around them in a quest of questions. As a young student, that quote made me wrestle with the person I’d become and caused a year’s worth of studies to come crashing down into uncertainties. But what emerged from the ruins was not a mess, but rather a more open mind, and the process has repeated itself several times with great success.
When you’re at a new company, you don’t know anyone, the culture, the reasons people are there, their motivations, their fears and hopes. It’s a new place with new ideals, new intricacies, new cultures. One of my favorite things is onboarding new people. I love the beginner’s mind, the questions, and the new eyes looking at the way the ‘experienced’ do things.
It is the newly experienced that asks “Why are you doing that?” The naïve and sometimes repetitive questions of a new co-worker can dramatically alter the way the experienced practitioner’s point-of-view. My favorite is when someone has questions about something I’ve practiced for a long time, because it gives me a chance to re-hash my understanding, and try to generate a newer shorter way of communicating the basics.
In Zen Buddhism, a beginner’s mind encourages openness, eagerness, and a lack of speculation. For beginners, everything is exciting, waiting to be explored, discussed. We do not often take this approach with things like diversity or organizational design. Our assumptions carry us along a path to conclusions that may or may not be justified. Beginner’s mind asks us to put on new eyes for old knowledge. For design leaders, this is the way to begin understanding the possibilities your team faces today.
Diversity in Design Today
When human beings become used to things, having repeated exposure to a problem, or finding patterns in things, we tend to stop asking questions about it. This is part of our evolutionary gift, we recognize a pattern, habituate a response and internalize what we are accustomed to. It creates a pattern we learn to look for.
When it comes to diversity as a design problem, I do not mean to make it academic, speculative, or abstract. In fact, I embrace design as a pragmatizer, something that will help us put it in human context.
What might happen if we operated and designed our organizations from the assumption that most human beings are overwhelmingly capable of bringing value to them? What could we achieve if we not only recognized the patterns of homogeneity in our organizations, but worked under the assumption that outside voices could immediately contribute value to our efforts?
Design has struggled to make a business case for itself for a long time, but now that we have achieved it, it is time to demonstrate how tackling diversity as a design problem can help create positive growth in our organizations. There are patterns to the way we hire, and we must approach with beginner’s mind, full of questions, and ready to upend things that do not work.
Sentiments like “culture fit,” are often laden with unattended bias, things that lurk at the edges of decision making and whisper collectively across our ears. If “culture fit” is important to the way you hire, make sure you have some guidelines on what that looks like for your organization, so you can reduce the amount of unconscious bias. It should be very clear that “culture,” has standards that include diversity as well.
In hiring for design positions, identifying and confronting our unconscious bias is essential to producing better work. Our limited organizational perspectives can unconsciously result in narrow markets, or poorly thought out products.
Design has struggled to make a business case for itself for a long time, but now that we have achieved it, it is time to demonstrate how tackling diversity as a design problem can help create positive growth in our organizations.
As design leaders, we must approach with beginner’s mind from the very outer fringes of brand awareness, all the way through the hiring process and into career development. For both individuals and design teams, expanding horizons and new perspectives illuminate our unconscious bias. Expanding our ability to think on the edges of what we know as an organization isn’t just innovative and pioneering, it has real impacts on the way we design user experiences.
What a Wonderful Party
Recently, I had my team work on an activity. We designed party invitations. I asked my team to think of a party and design an invitation. I gave them about 15 minutes to work on this. At the end, everyone showed off their invitation and read it out loud. Then I asked, “Could a blind person have fun at this party? How would they know?” This was a great exercise in creating awareness for my team. Most of the invites did not have any mention of things besides roller-skates, (the team had decided to do a roller skate party).
It is little efforts like this that can have a big difference, and we can do similar things for hiring and interviews. When I run interviews, I rarely look at education and schools, I look for thinking, empathy, and curiosity. I care more about whether someone is the kind of person who pushes themselves to think at the edges of their comfort zone, vs. someone who is happily insulated from caring for others.
What it takes to Design for Diversity in an Organization
I’m sure we’ve heard the word empathy at least half-a-million times in the past few years, from CEO’s to thought leaders, but it’s true. All good design must come from a place of empathy, even organizations. Without a deep appreciation for complete humans whose uniqueness is welcome, we are doing our organizations a disservice.
The parts of our personalities that do not fit job descriptions are just as vital to the organization as those that do. I have worked a few places where my multi-cultural background, my love for tech, or my ability to understand critical infrastructure was seen as “outside the role of a designer,” and those were some really uncomfortable places to work.
Without an appreciation for human complexity, we risk missing the bigger picture, the unspoken, for the details we’ve brought with our cup of tea, full of ideas and speculations. It is far easier to control people, as a leader, when you bring your assumptions to the table and categorize things. But control is not going to create meaningful work.
What might happen if we operated and designed our organizations from the assumption that (most) human beings are overwhelmingly capable of bringing value to them?
Sensibility is meaningful, necessary precautions, never total control.
So, how do we practice this?
- Be aware of Expert Mind: Next time you face a problem, remind yourself that the expert’s mind is an inherited bias and is always prone to seeing constraints. Push yourself to find the most meaningful possibilities for your organizational problem.
- Ask questions: Listen carefully. Do your best to separate established fact from assumptions. It never hurts to ask open ended questions either. There’s actually a world of difference between ‘Is there anything else?’ and ‘What else is going on?’. Use “What else is going on,” as it presumes there’s something more, and can generate insights by predisposing someone to talk.
- Listen Between the Lines: Be mindful of the difference between how things work and how things should work. There are things that go unspoken, and we can find new patterns if we look between the lines. Your team are the experts on their work, trust their insights, and listen as you make your decisions.
The journey begins with a single step, and it is the most difficult. All our lives we’ve been taught to practice certainty. Step back into your beginner’s mind, and discover new paths to tread, new journeys to go on.
Hope you enjoyed some thoughts. If you did, make sure to recommend the story by pressing the button.
Follow me on Twitter @Elisymeon
Catch me and Molly Beyer on March 22nd at the O’Reilly Design Conference for a full talk on this subject.
