Make room for curiosity along with space to fail and invite everyone in
By: Skipper Chong Warson
Tags: UI, Design, Principle, Product Design, Career

Make time to be curious and space to fail

In thinking about empathy, an oft mentioned concept in human-centered design these days, it is paramount to step into someone else’s shoes. For yourself and your relationship with others too. Observe, watch, listen, you will learn so much. This is true in user research, design critique, for our team members, for home, for peers, for strangers.

Last year, I attended a training called So Now You’re a Manager by Plucky and one of the things that we learned was the three levels of listening and how they might be used. This is an approximation of my notes from that training augmented by some findings from the Internet:

Internal listening — this level of listening is focused inward instead of externally, and it is very personal. It might include an inner dialogue that involves our own thoughts, opinions, judgments, feelings and conclusions. Focused listening — this level is at once intuitive and yet directed. It is a more active type of listening that requires concentration and interpretation to hear the context and “unsaid” themes and messages. Whole body listening — this level is the most active of the three. When in this space, the listener is aware of more than just what they are hearing, but also the entire environment.

It’s true, the current state of the world is one of distraction — 24 hour news cycles, smart phone notifications, voice interfaces all around us — but I think actively listening while sitting in the tension of silence will create fundamentally better team results as well as design outcomes which makes for stronger products.

Speaking of distraction, I want to say something about time management. I don’t think it’s possible to manage time. Unless you’ve got a time machine stashed somewhere. True, you can find more efficient ways to do things but the key revolves around focus and attention. See also my conversation with Jake Kahana on the second episode of How This Works.

You know, when I first became a manager, I wanted to “prove myself” to my reports and colleagues. I wanted them to know that I knew what I was doing and that I was on top of everything. So because of that and other reasons, I often spoke too much and did not listen near enough. But over time and by watching other managers, I realized that I was tripping myself up.

As a way to address this, I now resolve to listen at least 3x more than I speak. Instead of waiting for my chance to say something, I dig into what someone else is trying to say, I mean really listen, and make sure that person is able to fully speak their mind.

But listening is only part of the equation. Without room to fail or margin for error, the tolerance for risk within an organization drops to zero and isn’t able to keep up with or race ahead of the competition and grow properly learning from its mistakes. There are many procedures and processes within organizations that point to this general idea of learning from failures to improve future performance — end-of-project reviews, postmortems, and retros. But these often don’t lead to the desired change. Why? We have such a complicated relationship with the notion of failure. In 2011, the Harvard Business Review wrote an article where they talked about this idea:

First, failure is not always bad. In organizational life it is sometimes bad, sometimes inevitable, and sometimes even good. Second, learning from organizational failures is anything but straightforward. The attitudes and activities required to effectively detect and analyze failures are in short supply in most companies, and the need for context-specific learning strategies is underappreciated. Organizations need new and better ways to go beyond lessons that are superficial (“Procedures weren’t followed”) or self-serving (“The market just wasn’t ready for our great new product”). That means jettisoning old cultural beliefs and stereotypical notions of success and embracing failure’s lessons.

Without making time to listen and making room to fail, you might as well be trying a 5.15 rock climb (read: really hard) with one hand tied behind your back.