“What happens when designers of minoritized communities who do make it through the door are socialized and hypnotized into an abyss of powerlessness where they believe their own identity is a liability? What happens to their imagination if they enter the clutches of the approving white gaze?” A great and astute article from Vivianne Castillo and Michael J. A. Davis, about what can happen when leaders perpetuate inequitable systems rather than working to undo them. Similar patterns exist among many women leaders who, after ascending to positions of power, often work to preserve the patriarchal status quo. What I appreciate about Castillo and Davis’ analysis here is that it holds these leaders accountable while also recognizing the powerful incentives that lead them astray. And they have very good counsel for how to push back if you’re among the people harmed by this behavior; I will second the advice to “learn the game” of HR systems: those systems are imperfect, but they aren’t immutable.
Recent entries from the blog.
-
In Vox, Emily Stewart calls out the phenomena of people who are fully employed but have nothing to do—one of the many kinds of bullshit jobs that David Graeber so capably wrote about in his book of the same name. Among the things that’s worth calling out here is that while some people may get along just fine for a while when so employed, most people find doing nothing at work to be deeply debilitating. This isn’t the kind of doing nothing that Jenny Odell prescribes; rather, it’s a combination of biding your time and being always ready to perform, like a coiled trap waiting forever to be sprung. It requires a kind of vigilance that can be more exhausting than many kinds of legitimate work. All of which is to say, if you find yourself in this situation, and it doesn’t feel like the gift horse you hoped for, you’re not alone.
-
Here’s Sara Hendren talking about commitment and provisionality as key elements of the design process, with reference to the work of urban design group Better Block: “It’s the commitment of a three-dimensional sketch, with a piano and furniture and semi-mature trees, but with the provisionality of impermanence. An idea brought to tangible life, and yet reversible.” I love this not only for its application for better streetlife but also as a framework for thinking about open design processes generally. And it makes for good questions of whatever it is you’re trying to do in your work: what commitment can you make, and what would it mean for that commitment to be provisional and temporary? What would it look like to try something that’s real and tangible but still reversible?
I’ve been thinking about this post from Erin Kissane—which touches on, among other topics, adrienne maree brown’s Emergent Strategy, a book that is very much part of my personal canon—and her prophecy about the near future of online communities. She writes, “I think things feel wiggly and interesting right now because we really just do not know how things are going to shake out. Which means that maybe people who make things online but don’t have billions of dollars or a seat at the VC table can have more influence over the next generations of online sociability and communal life.” I think she’s right about this, but it also occurs to me that the present haze of uncertainty includes a whole lot of people who find themselves in a weird kind of liminal space with respect to the tech industry, whether because of burnout or layoffs or sheer disillusionment. Uncertainty—especially at the scale of industry—is frightening and stressful, but it’s also an opening to experiment and explore, to make anew. There’s a story out there that says the future of tech is a dystopian mess of legless bots-talking-to-other-bots, and while I think we should heed the warnings, I’m also unconvinced that that particular future is preordained. It’s not the only story available to us, nor must we be the passive recipients of other people’s stories. We can write new stories, too.
-
I was reminded recently of this great post in Source about asynchronous meeting practices. In it, Sisi Wei describes a process that combines real-time discussion with inclusive facilitation principles and good documentation habits. One way I like to think about these kinds of systems is to imagine the collaboration happening in three phases: before a real-time gathering, during that gathering, and after. What kinds of structures and supports can you create that help people to participate fully, wherever they are, in all three phases?
-
Here’s an evergreen post from Ann Friedman, about how to map constructive feedback. On her matrix, the x-axis runs from people who know you to people who don’t, while the y-axis charts feedback from rational to irrational. The top two quadrants are great sources of good feedback (even, I’ll note, when it’s delivered poorly); the bottom two quadrants consist of frenemies and haters you’re better off ignoring. A great shorthand for when you get shitty feedback.
-
I have several thoughts about this post in the Times about the shift from “inclusive” to “belonging” in the context of diversity work. The first is that language around this work is, and always will be, changing. As words proliferate, they can easily become coopted, subverted, or merely stale, and often a word change is a way of shifting the conversation in order to bring some movement back to the work. This is normal, and very likely inevitable, and we’ve already seen it happen with past moves from diversity to equity to inclusion and justice and so on. But noting that the language is changing opens up space to ask what a particular change is moving toward, and what becomes more or less possible with that movement. As the article notes, the shift to “belonging” creates an opportunity to engage with people from privileged backgrounds while also potentially excusing the system (or those people) from needing to change. I’m not convinced that tradeoff is the right one. Personally, I try to avoid the shorthands and talk more openly about how this work is about dismantling white supremacy, or ending oppression. Will increased belonging help us achieve those ends? Maybe. But not on it’s own.
-
Ted Chiang: “For technologists, the hardest work of all—the task that they most want to avoid—will be questioning the assumption that more technology is always better, and the belief that they can continue with business as usual and everything will simply work itself out. No one enjoys thinking about their complicity in the injustices of the world, but it is imperative that the people who are building world-shaking technologies engage in this kind of critical self-examination. It’s their willingness to look unflinchingly at their own role in the system that will determine whether A.I. leads to a better world or a worse one.”
-
Now’s a good time as any to re-up Astra Taylor’s very good piece from 2018 about the “automation charade.” There is a lot of handwringing going on about how AI and related technologies are going to eliminate jobs, but as Taylor notes here, that claim has been made before, and usually doesn’t play out the way people expect. “Jobs may be eliminated and salaries slashed but people are often still laboring alongside or behind the machines, even if the work they perform has been deskilled or goes unpaid.” That said, If you’re reading this blog, you’re more likely to be working on the systems that do this deskilling than you are to be deskilled yourself (at least in the near term): which begs the question, what are you going to do about it?
-
Speaking of scaffolding, I’m in the process of prototyping some new programming around the always-challenging topic of feedback. I’ve written about feedback before, and likely will again, as it continues to be a common, and often thorny, subject. Which leads me to the current experiment: I’m opening up a small number of short, focused coaching sessions—called “lab sessions”—specifically oriented around the topic of feedback: how to give it, what to do with it when you get it, how to think it through, and more. Think of these sessions as a pop-up laboratory where you can quickly and safely form a hypothesis, test it against what you know, then take your findings back to work. Sessions are always totally confidential, but I intend to use trends I glean from them to inform future programming.
Lab sessions are free but very limited, and available on a first-come, first-served basis. Learn more about lab sessions or book your session today.
-
John Cutler has good notes on creating a writing culture, including a neat definition of what that is: “A write-and-reading-and-feedback-giving culture requires time to think, process, and respond. Writing isn’t the end goal: thinking and improving is the goal.” I’d expand on that to say that the output of the writing isn’t even the goal—it’s the process of writing, reading, and gathering feedback that delivers the real benefit. In other words, a writing culture is very different from a documentation culture. Cutler mentions that documents should be living, to which I’d add a caveat: some documents need to live, and should be governed as such. But plenty of docs are just the debris left behind after some collaborative thinking has occurred, and it’s perfectly ok to let them decay.
-
This post from Andy Revkin is about tornadoes, but has a great and very relevant definition of risk. He writes, “Risk is the probability of harm, not the probability of storm.” That is, it isn’t the tornado (or the pandemic, or the earthquake) that creates risk so much as the lack of means for surviving it—tools like storm shelters, building codes, and vaccines all mitigate that potential harm. I like this for thinking about risk generally: you likely can’t stop or even predict storms in the form of bank failures, market collapses, or new competitors. But you can consider what you might need to defend yourself in those circumstances. The question then becomes not how to avoid the storms but how to prepare shelter for when they inevitably arrive.
-
Rayne Fisher-Quann writes about isolation as being in opposition to living, and while her topic isn’t work per se, it feels like the lessons she shares hold as much truth for how we live while working as how we live while doing everything else. “Relationships with other complex, flawed people are beautiful and transformative and fulfilling, but they’re also inherently maddening, infuriating, hurtful, stressful, and yes, triggering,” she says. Sometimes I worry that the discourse around work (intentionally or otherwise) shunts us into thinking that the fewer interactions we have with other people the better. But the people are the work, not a distraction from it. Even when—especially when—it’s the people who create our biggest challenges.
-
I’m not sold on the pitch of this piece by Aki Ito—that middle managers need to be “saved”—but I do think there are two good lessons in here: first, the old adage that people don’t leave companies, they leave managers, also works in reverse—a good manager will keep someone around (and doing good work) even if they are frustrated with the larger organization. Second, there’s a discourse that returns every few seasons in which management is talked about as if it were dead weight, as not the “real” work. In addition to just being wrong, that discourse serves to deter people from seeking management roles, leaving management to be filled by those with fewer skills and even less support. I won’t argue that some organizations don’t have too many layers of hierarchy (plenty of them do) or that middle management isn’t often a fraught and problematic role (I’ve been there, and it absolutely can be). But the act of demeaning management is a self-fulfilling prophecy: commit it and you will receive exactly the bad managers you deserve.
-
This post from Kate Manne (author of the very excellent Down Girl) is about weight loss but also includes her description of what she calls the “harder-better fallacy,” defined as the belief that “that which is the most difficult to achieve is deemed the most worthy, regardless of its actual desirability or value.” I find this to be a very applicable framework to a lot of reflexive habits, among them the persistent idea that the more difficult or challenging career path must necessarily be the better one. Manne wisely asks, “is there a practice in your own life where you think you might be buying into the harder-better fallacy? What do you gain by so doing? And what might you stop losing if you were to give it up?”
-
Recent and unfortunate research into workplace misconduct shows how common it is for people to sympathize with perpetrators rather than their victims. I think there’s a tidbit of guidance here for leaders who want to avoid this fate, however: the research showed that people who “endorse values such as deference to authority, in-group loyalty, and purity” were more likely to disbelieve accusations. That strikes me as a list of values we can and should purge from our workplaces; in their place we can cultivate egalitarianism, healthy conflict, and transparency—all of which make us safer and more likely to succeed where other teams do not.