Rich McCoy
Overcoming Fear and Leaning Into Creativity
In this episode of Brave UX, Rich McCoy unpacks some formative experiences from the Kalahari Desert, how we can conquer our creative fears and why designing lean creates value faster.
Highlights include:
- How has growing up in the Kalahari Desert shaped you?
- What does it mean to “get primal” with design?
- How do we get over our fear of showing our work?
- What are some clues that product teams are out of alignment?
- How has Dyslexia influenced your creative practice?
Who is Rich McCoy?
Rich is the Design Lead on Flying Blue, the loyalty rewards programme for KLM & Air France. Currently he’s managing to do that role working remotely, from the confines of a cupboard underneath a flight of stairs in New Zealand.
Before KLM & Air France, Rich was a Senior Manager of Design at Nationwide Building Society, in the United Kingdom. He also spent a number of years at Trade Me, New Zealand’s version of eBay, where he was a Design Lead responsible for the creative wellbeing of 13 other designers.
Rich also runs a coaching and mentoring practice for other creatives, and is a very talented and established Fine Artist, working through photography, sculpture, paint and digital mediums.
Transcript
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Hello and welcome to another episode of Brave UX. I'm Brendan Jarvis, Managing Founder of The Space InBetween, the home of New Zealand's only specialist evaluative UX research practice and world-class UX lab, enabling brave teams across the globe to de-risk product design and equally brave leaders to shape and scale design culture. Here on Brave UX though, it's my job to help you to put the pieces of the product puzzle together, I do that by unpacking the stories, learnings, and expert advice of world class UX, design and product management professionals. My guest today is Rich McCoy. Rich is the design lead on Flying Blue, the loyalty rewards program for KLM and Air France. Currently he's doing that working remotely from the confines of a cupboard under a flight of stairs in New Zealand. Aside from the cupboard part, that's a 10 hour time difference. And he's also recently had twin boys.
- I really dunno how he does it. Before joining KLM and Air France, rich was a senior manager of design at Nationwide Building Society in the United Kingdom. He also spent a number of years at TradeMe, New Zealand's version of eBay, where he was a designed lead responsible for the creative wellbeing of 13 other designers across three offices during his 25 year career. And as an exceptionally talented and versatile designer, rich has built up extensive experience working for agencies, including AKQA, Sachi and Sachi, and as well as product led companies. But to just tell you about Rich's commercial design experience would be doing him a disservice. He runs a coaching and mentoring practice for other creatives and is also a very talented and established fine artist working through photography, sculpture, paint, and digital mediums raised in the Kalahari Desert to the age of 11 and described by others as having a wild, untamed and barefoot approach to life. I think we're in for some interesting stories today. Rich, welcome to the show.
- Rich McCoy:
- Thank you Brenda. That's, that's very, very nice.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You are most welcome. So tell me the cupboard and a 10 hour time difference with twin boys. What is that all about?
- Rich McCoy:
- It's about pain and punishment at seals. Yeah. So I landed on this, it's working contract. This contract while still in the uk. Was teamed up with a copywriter who decided to move to Canada during the project. So she was in France and she moved to Canada. And I was like, well, I'm not really enjoying being in England. Let's go back to New Zealand. We've got the twins, we need support. So I had an all, what I presume to be, would be a much more awkward conversation than it was with my client. And we just went, yeah, let's just do it. Me and I get up, but it's only fair that I wear the discomfort rather than you guys, although they fit in meetings at around four o'clock. So I get up at one 30, have a coffee and something very light to eat and then hit the ground running at 2:00 AM usually with a presentation of what we've been doing or a meeting with some such. It's hard. Real hard.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It sounds hard. It really does.
- Rich McCoy:
- Yeah. I'm only doing it till the end of the month and then I've got a full-time job in New Zealand that I'll be doing. But I'm looking forward to working days again and having proper night's sleep. And I say proper night sleep. You never have nights, proper night sleep with babies. It's certainly not two of them. And we do the whole co-sleeping thing as well. So very sort of HandsOn. It's not a matter of putting the two boys down in another room and letting them cry out. Yeah, it's
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Aged, very involved.
- Rich McCoy:
- I aged a lot in the last year.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Well see. Well seeing as we were, we've been talking about baby boys and aging. Let's rewind the clock a little bit and go back to your childhood. You were born in the UK but as I mentioned in your introduction, you were raised in the Kalahari Desert, which is in southern Africa until the age of 11. Now have, I've obviously done a bit of research for today and read ahead and have some more insight than our listeners do into some of the things that you experienced there. But given what those things are, without giving too much away, which will come to shortly, some might question the judgment of your parents, what can you tell me about your parents before we get into some of those stories? Well,
- Rich McCoy:
- My dad got into it very quickly. Back in the sort of sixties, late sixties, seventies. He was originally a punch card carrier for general foods in Banbury after being a carpenter there. So he helped build a factory and then got a job working there and that's where he met my mother. And this was back in the early seventies and England, by the sounds of it wasn't the greatest place to be. There was a real sense of we need to go elsewhere. And so I think they came up with the options of either moving to Canada after I was born or moving to Africa after I was born. And my dad decided he didn't like the cold, so he moved to, we moved orig originally to South Africa where he worked in a computer room at a mine. And I don't have any other childhood upbringing, but I, I would assume my childhood was fairly atypical.
- I think that's the right word. It was an unusual upbringing. It was one surrounded by violence, not on behalf of my family, but the surroundings around it were really quite hard in the seventies in South Africa, they had the foresight to send me to the Lee Multiracial school in the country, which was a convent. And so they had the special rules where they could get away with doing mixed race things. And it was a strange way to grow up. It was a very strange way to grow up. And then we moved to Botswana, a job in a place called Sleepy Pi in the center of Botswana, which was at that time it was the art end of nowhere and we just jumped in the car and we drove through the desert and we broke down in the middle of the desert. And my dad ended up pitching a lift to the nearest town, leaving my mother and my brother and me in the car desert whilst, oh no, that's not true. Actually I got that wrong. He put me, my brother and my mother in a stranger's car sent us ahead and he stayed back with the car until we could get help. So they were adventurous. They were reckless to an extent. It's something I also inherited. I've never really stuck in one place too long. There's a real gypsy blood there. Real adventurer. Yeah.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- So is there actually gypsy blood?
- Rich McCoy:
- Oh yeah, yeah.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It's
- Rich McCoy:
- My partner's.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Same. Yeah. And I, the stories, and I want to get to one of these now for people because they are quite marvelous actually and quite terrifying for the general observer. And one of them happened in 1979 and it was in a small mining town in Botswana. And I think you were about six years old at the time, set the scene. Take us back to that moment. What was it that you discovered at age of six in this small mining town?
- Rich McCoy:
- So this was in sleepy picky and my mother, I remember this really vividly, it's a very strange thing to remember. She had gone to a group to learn how to make, so she was in this group in the town hall making, did she do? Yeah, my brother and I were just playing outside and she did. And I came around the corner of the place to see my brother surrounded by HIAs and I'm just like, what the heck? I would've been like I said six, but thankfully I remembered something my dad had said that hyena's a cowards, they are frightened if anything louder more aggressive and bigger than them. So I quickly sort of picked up a stick and started shouting and screaming and sort of ran towards his Hs and they all ran off. And I think in hindsight it was a fairly formative experience of teaching that there are scary things out there. You've just gotta use your wit and knowledge and courage to vanquish them. And that's kind of what I learned there. I quickly regretted taking my of his life. I had joke, but [laugh] three years younger than me for the rest of my existence until we both became adults and still we don't see ooi. But yeah, no, it was,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Well at least you can always hold this. You can always hold this over him.
- Rich McCoy:
- Yeah, yeah. I do tease him about
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It. You mentioned that Africa was a very violent place to grow up. There were a couple of moments there that you've spoken about in the past where you experienced that violence. What can you tell us about those situations? Yeah, but also as someone who was so young, how did you process this and how did it help to shape, as you just mentioned with the story there with the hyenas, how did it help to shape you as an adult?
- Rich McCoy:
- Yeah, I think it puts a lot of things into context. There's been situations where I've needed to draw on that sense of peace with stuff and put into context of going compared to this that's not quite so bad. I went through a messy divorce and separated from my four children and all this kind of stuff happened. And it's just, you find a practice and you find a calmer place to go to because you've experienced so much more. I mean the converse can also be true where it can compound. There have been moments where things have happened and you just overreact but then quickly come back to that sense of self and perspective. But yeah, it's seeing your dad thrown over a bonnet of a car with a policeman with his gun to his head because he beat the horn and things like this and getting lost in the desert and looking around you and you can see skulls of people and you go, this is a very strange per place, very, very strange place. I wouldn't rush to go back. Certainly not with my children. There was a love there of the place, but a respect there as well.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Mm-hmm Can imagine there would be a deep respect because you came very close to death a number of times as a child there. And there was a story I believe involving a black widow spider.
- Rich McCoy:
- Yeah. But it's bit my hand. I nearly lost my right arm. These photos of us traveling around Kenya with my arm all sort of bandaged up and it's still, you take that smell sense, you'd never really forget the smell sense of your own flesh kind of petrifying is it's a very odd one. It meant that I learned the difference from my left to my right.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Well there's certainly positive that that came out of it. What was it that brought after all of that time, what was it that brought your family back to the uk? Mean, why did they leave
- Rich McCoy:
- No school? There was no school in Botswana. It's certainly not in sleepy picky for the age that I was becoming. So there was that, there was decisions to be made of going, well, do we move back to the uk? Do we move back to South Africa? Do we send rich to school in South Africa? Do we send rich to boarding school in England? I'm thankful they chose the one they did. I don't think I would've survived boarding school very well. And I certainly wouldn't have survived national service in South Africa very well. Certainly not during that time when apart rightfully came, tumbling down would've been, it would've been an awkward situation to be in the military. So you can hear the babies have just woken up.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Sounds like they haven't been great fun. Yes. Well look, speak. Speaking about children, I mean you, you've mentioned, I think you had mentioned four children in your previous marriage and now you have the two baby boys. Given your experiences as a child and what you experience with your family, how does your view or your comfort or relationship with familial risk taking differ to that of your parents? Where's your line? Wow,
- Rich McCoy:
- That's a really interesting one. The one I'm, I'm going to have to think about a bit. I think that they're a different generation. They were definitely a different generation. My dad, he lost his own father at 10, so he really struggled to relate to people. He say he wasn't a warm person, his would be wrong, he was very warm internally, but big war, like massive war, he had a huge hole in his comfort. I believe that he filled with drinking. And that really put a massive strain on our relationship. A huge, huge strain certainly as a teenager where you have issues with your parents anyway. And so the father son or son father relationships can be quite awkward. That was really tricky. And there were certain experiences that were also quite formative for me as an adult of dealing with very an alcohol dependent father who was aggressive and learning to stand up in your own power and face that down and seeing a shift in respect when you meet that head on and you stop cowering as a child.
- So that was very different. There's a difference there. I want my children to grow up in touch with emotions. I want my children to grow up knowing that whatever they choose to be, I'd be proud of them as long as they choose to be something. Don't stumble through life if you can wanna be an accountant, but if you wanna be a creative, I'll certainly stand behind that. There was no support from the, well, certainly not father regards being a creative, he thought it was very unusual and not really something to be done. Conversely, my brother studied economics and we both work the same kind of job now. It's really odd. I studied sculpture, he studied economics. We both work on the internet.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- A bit of irony in that. Yeah, I did wanna talk to you about being a creative person. And actually just before we move off this, one thing I wasn't surprised to learn is that one of your favorite is Dr. SU's are the places you'll go. Yeah. I thought that was very, very, very fitting.
- Rich McCoy:
- It it still gives me a lump in my throat when I read it. I read to my twins every night and that's one of the ones we go to. And there are passages in it that pull up the heartstrings. It's one of my favorite books to buy people with children for their children. Yeah, it's a very powerful book at a very important age to read something like that and to look at the light and the shadow of growing up and to sit with them and say, I believe in you to a child is really, really important I think. Yeah, it's formative. It's an important dog.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And also that ties back to what you were saying about your dad as well, not necessarily having that support. And that's something that you want to bring forward into your relationship with your children. And I also learned when I was having a look into your life for this conversation, that's something that you, again, I'm projecting here a little but struggled with when you were growing up was dyslexia. Mm-hmm. And I wondered what role and everybody has that, but that's also not too uncommon. And it seems at least generically to me to be something that is more common amongst creative people. And that's a huge assumption. But I was curious about in your personal circumstance, what role dyslexia played in your development as a creative person? Yeah,
- Rich McCoy:
- That's a really big topic. Something I'm really interested in and would like to focus more on in my life in that, no, I wasn't diagnosed with dyslexia until I was in my early twenties and I really struggled at school and there was a real sense of really disliking authority because I felt it didn't get me, it felt it failed me and there's a battle there and it was an uncomfortable thing. You know, mentioned it in our pre-chat about the fact that I speak in a very kind of calm way. A lot of that is me working through my cognitive process with dyslexia. So I slow myself down on purpose and just to make sure I can find the right words at times. I think the reason why a lot of we discovered that a lot of creative people are also dyslexic is I think that the creativity is what comes from your mind working in a different way than society is set out to.
- So you are constantly finding coping mechanisms to work through how to operate in the world. Quite often the language I'll use will be somewhat poetic and [laugh] unusual, but that's because I can't remember the right word for it. My mind will go, how do I explain myself? That's how I get there. So that's how that worked for me. But it's also about trying to find your voice when the normal tools that we taught and the way we're taught them don't serve. You find your own voice and you find your own way of getting things out because everybody needs to be heard that everybody needs to feel that. I say everybody must be careful with absolutes, but most people feel that they need to be heard and feel that they need to put themselves out there and be seen.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Have you always seen yourself as a creative person?
- Rich McCoy:
- No, I think initially I just saw myself as me cause that's all I knew. I've always been relatively introverted. So it gives a lot of self-reflection. And then it was a really funny, there was a moment in the school library of all things where somebody, I can't remember who it was, turns me you're bohemian. I was like, I have no idea what that means. And I looked it up and I was like, yeah, I can live that. I'd be happy with that. And I think I've kind of lent into it. So yeah, I am by nature a creative person. I get uncomfortable in long periods of not being creative and not doing things. If I'm doing the job that's not particularly creative, I have to find those outlets elsewhere, whether it be cooking or painting or whatever, or rearranging the cupboards, [laugh] because whatever you can, something fixing pottery or whatever, it has to be something in the day that I feel I've been positive and done something.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Well, in terms of an outlet, I did have a good look through the artworks that you've created and that I could see online. And one of the ones that took my eye, which I mean my reaction was, I think this is quite funny, but it also, there could be more to it. So I was curious to ask you about what's called abusive stones. Oh okay. And just for the people listening so they can get an idea of what this is. And I'll link to Rich's artworks and the show notes, but it's literally, it's two individual paintings, each of a stone saying something abusive. I was really curious what was the story there?
- Rich McCoy:
- So yeah, that was a very, very difficult time in my life, very hard. My marriage had broken down, my wife and children moved to England, I was still in New Zealand working and there was a lot of things said and I was in the family home alone, going through some really unpleasant stuff, waking up, dreaming that I was covered in blood and all this kind of weird psychological processing that was going on. And there were things being said to me by all parties and I was like, I've gotta own this, I've gotta lean into this. I've gotta create something from this before it destroys me. So there was that playing with the whole sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me type thing. I was like, I'm just going to paint stones and make them call me names and because humor is a great way of dealing with things and it's like just laugh at, laugh at it. Don't allow yourself to go down that rabbit hole of believing this stuff. And so I wrote a list of all the things and I would create a stone for it and then just cross it off the list, erase it no longer existed. It was a beautiful thing and no longer a piece of abuse. Yeah, that's a fairly raw thing to talk about, but there you go.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It is well that that's brave. That really is brave rich. And while I did say that, I sort of saw some humor in there and you did touch on it being something that you tapped into help move past that. I did wonder if there was something sort of more substantial behind a piece of art like that. So I really do appreciate you sharing no drama that story with us today. Now I want to come to some design topics and something maybe a little bit lighter as well. I feel while it's been really deep, it's also possibly been a bit dark. I want to help lighten the mood and I get the sense rich that you enjoy design the commercial aspect of design, but it's more of a means to an end than an end of itself. Would you do product design if you didn't have to earn money?
- Rich McCoy:
- Would I do product design? I think I would be very selective about what I designed. I think I take certain projects that I'm not a hundred percent comfortable about where they sit with me. I really do enjoy the challenges of product design though there are elements of it. It's that creative problem solving and I actually probably enjoy a lot of the drier stuff more than most. I love a really complicated issue. One of my favorite pieces of work that I've done was a bill tracker for the House of Lords and the House of Commons. So when a thing goes into law and how it moves through, I had no idea how it happens. And I was working for Liberty Human Rights Organization who I just loved the organization, I love the people and everything and it was a real contrast to previously working for people like Nestle and stuff like this who are like, Ooh, it's a bit that doesn't quite sit that well with me, but we all have our cross bear in feeding our families.
- But getting a piece of the logic you just don't understand. And I think it really that, I actually spoke to one of my clients this morning about it being dyslexic and having a really poorly functioning short-term memory is a really helpful UX tool and I really enjoy tapping into that because if I can make it so that my kind of monkey mind, my sort of real short-term memory can understand something because of proximity and how we present something, then that's a really good indicator that it's going to be easy for the uninitiated to understand. So I'm always kind of taking myself into that beginner's mind set to use a Buddhist phrase of stepping back and going, if I know nothing about this, how would I understand this? So I find it very easy to slip in there cuz my mind can be very dumb sometimes and that's a useful thing. So to answer that question, would I still do it if I didn't have to? Probably not actually, probably not. I enjoy the freedom of being an artist. I enjoy the challenge of working in UX but if I was to be 100% honest, so nice just to have free reign and it's like there's that, there's the wild man in me that really enjoys that. There's also a civilized part that enjoys the technical challenge and I must be pretty good at it cuz I keep getting hired. So I think it's
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Something there. Rich, I've heard you talk about in the past getting primal with design. What did you mean by that?
- Rich McCoy:
- I think so alongside my sort of fine art background, which to me is about philosophy and ideas and getting involved in the tools. I also study philosophy and psychology and sociology. So I'm really interested in people, I love people, I love people's stories, I love how they interact and things like this. And I think that there's a real love that I hold with really understanding where people meet businesses and meet technology and meet each other and picking things out and making those interactions as fluid as possible, but also making them as unseen as possible. I think we betrayed me. We did this thing where we looked at trying to understand what the other person's spirit animal was and I worked with a phenomenal designer Cody, who came to the conclusion after the interview that I was my cian and I was like, okay. So there's that idea of getting into the weeds and really getting into the deep down homelessness, the fabric of a problem and trying to create solutions that solve that and break down the rots and the assumptions that businesses have about the way they should work and the assumptions that businesses have about their users and the assumptions that people have about design and how design should work and how people should design and these things and just break that down and really try and understand the viscosity and the rawness underneath that.
- I think that we create too many layers of complexity in our lives that stop us from actually seeing what the issues are.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- One of the tools that I understand that you use a tool might be a bit of a specific word, it a bit should be more broadly applicable than this, but is this lean approach to design what that could mean a number of things to people, but when you talk think about lean and how lean can help you get primal and get past some of those issues that organizations have with design. What do you mean?
- Rich McCoy:
- I mean with lean, I think for me what I mean by lean is it could be jokingly referred to as doing as little as possible or lazy design or are you equate it with some forms of Daoism in the kind of just doing what's required, doing what's necessary. You're not doing more than you need to because I think quite often, and I'm managing design teams and working in design for 25 years, there's a safety in delving into design programs really quickly. We tend to go, okay, here's a solution, let me run away and spend two weeks sitting in front of a computer in Slack, in Slack, in Sketch even and there's the word confusion coming in sketch and I'll design something and I'll bring it back to you and it'll be fantastic. And it's like that's not how it works for me. And I think that the best tool we've got is this is the pencil and paper and our mouths and our ears and our eyes and conversation and our interactions between each other.
- If I can solve a UX or a product design problem with a conversation and a piece of paper and passing the pencil around in five to 10 minutes, I'll take that approach rather than if I can justify my wage by spending two weeks designing something. I don't think that's right. So that's what I mean by lean. I think it's about doing just enough to solve the problem and no more. But in doing that, what you do is you allow yourself the freedom to really deep dive into what the actual problem is. You focus on the problem not coming up with this thing. Yeah,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- This perfection and that that's a hard thing for a lot of people. I mean you've managed a lot of designers over the years and how do we help designers get over this fear of showing the work, even if it's at a very basic and early stage and involving other people in that design process.
- Rich McCoy:
- It's a really interesting one and there are a few words and sentences that make my skin crawl. One of them being pixel perfect design. It's like that's that. That's great. It has its place in product design. I don't think it's as important. I think what's important is being responsive and getting stuff to market and seeing how it's working and truly understanding the problem and putting your own prejudices and baggage aside. So we help young, young people. I think we do that by modeling that behavior, by encouraging them, by going, yeah, it's not the prettiest solution but by God it works by encouraging conversation and with your squad and bringing the squad on board. Well one of the things that I did when I started introducing sort of lean design to trade me when I was the head of design for Marketplace and we just merged with several other departments and it became a huge kind of, I think there was over 150 people in the department and it was like, we're all designers, all 150 people of you are designers. There's no way that I can do this. So we heard a conference and I got kind of put in a position when I had to present to 150 people about what lean design is. Pure terror, absolute terror.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I can imagine.
- Rich McCoy:
- Yeah. I'm not a person that likes to be seen in that way very often. I haven't historically been, but that was a good reason to lean into it and do it because I knew it scared me and I think you should push yourself to do things that scare you, which is kind of an answer that. So what I did was I employed a mural artist, a phenomenal mural artist to create three big pieces which was better in a billion tiny ways, beautiful piece of script, three things. And I gave people permission to draw. I gave all hundred 50 people this permission to draw something, to draw a listing, take a photograph from TradeMe and draw the product. And they were supported by the design team. The design team were there to support people in the drawing and make them feel comfortable about it and make these, it doesn't have to be perfect, but it just has to get this across.
- And then once they practiced and practiced within this hour and a half that I had, we got them drawing on these banners. And these banners were then split between three different offices sent to Christchurch, sent to Auckland, sent to Wellington and they were hung there and with the encouragement of just keep drawing just and what that opened up for so many people was a reconnection. So many people came and said, I haven't drawn in 30 years since I was at school. Thank you for that. And it it's about making it okay to be less than perfect in what you're doing. It's being okay with knowing that it's about getting the idea across and not about perfection. We can polish up if we need to have pixel perfect product, pixel perfect designs, we can get to that. But let's not start there. Let's start there with actually solving problems and doing it in a very quick lean cost effective involving way. Developers are designers too. They often can give you so many insights that you would never understand if you dump into designing for a sprint and then hand that over to a developer. I, I've seen so many issues happen whereby that doesn't work or the developer doesn't feel on board or the testers don't feel on board or the product owner doesn't feel on board. It's like start with conversation, get everybody on board, you'll get the best solutions that way.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You have to design the designing and coming back to your activity that you ran where everybody was contributing to those banners that you created. Business stakeholders or non designers doesn't have to be just business stakeholders. Non designers are often not that psyched or sometimes not that psyched about picking up a sharpie and mucking in with the design team. Why is that?
- Rich McCoy:
- It's a fear. I think it's a fear of being exposed sometimes. I used that in the presentation. I used that fear in the presentation. I used my own fear in the presentation. My manager very, at the time I was a very burish burly Scottish guy, very alpha male and he kind of heckled me going, what if I'm scared of drawing? And I was like, right, yeah, what if you are? But I can tell you now, I utterly petrified stood here in front of every one of you guys. If I can stand up here and talk to all you people, then I'm sure you can pick up a pen and do a doodle. It's just like it's not precious. We bring all that baggage to drawing into creativity. It's like just drop it. You don't need to carry it with you. Okay, it's okay to be seen as not a perfect drawer or perfect creative. It's about making it okay to be fail, which is great.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And quite frankly a lot of our society's not really set up to warm people up to that idea. We spend a lot of time trying to be right or at least being seen to be right. And I get the sense, actually, I've just realized listening to what you were saying there, that designers are often quite brave in the way in which they live their professional life because what designers create is always on show and it's always a very visible representation of their time, energy, and effort in previous experiences where a lot of other people that work in product organizations or in agencies, they don't necessarily have their work on show in the same way. They don't necessarily have as much to lose.
- Rich McCoy:
- And I think that's why you get design egos that can be really hard to work with because a lot of that's the shadow of that needing to be protective of yourself with if you create this persona which is ego and then you're protecting yourself get a lot, I see a lot of designers that just present the work and that presentation's very cold and that's seen as the thing to do with design. I've always taken a slightly different approach and it's been noticed. I tell a story about who I am and I give my work context because well that's differentiator and I think that's the whole person. When you're working with a designer, I want to work with the whole human being. I wanna welcome that whole human being into the design practice because it's important
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And that collaboration and the process is important and design particularly at the level of complexity that product calls for, isn't something that's done in a vacuum. We've talked about just recently how we involve other people in that process and it can make the process more effective and better and richer than we can just as islands. Are there any areas though in design in where designers shouldn't ask for input?
- Rich McCoy:
- I think sometimes I'm, when we're talking about aesthetics and the rules of aesthetics and the rules of good in bracket's capital D design, I think that's something where we really need to own that stuff. It's like many designers, not myself, we'll spend many years studying design and being taught practices and being taught good practice about what is good design. I think that's something that designers should definitely own is this is just good visual design, just good visual communication. I think that I need to rush to them to the assertion that lean works best when you've got a great implemented design system in place, that's when it works best. When there's predictability of how something is going to look, because you've had professional designers do that aesthetic piece, you've got that predictability, that's when it works best.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- So reflecting on your time managing design teams and interacting with other people and that aren't designers in the organization, people and the squads, the product owners and the engineers and other people, what are some of the behaviors or clues that might be indicative of people being out of alignment and needing a little bit of help to get back on the same page?
- Rich McCoy:
- Yeah, that's a really interesting one. I think one of them is with certain people you start to see slightly sloppy work in implementation. There's this stuff that gets implemented without conversation, so you know can see it where somebody will just implement a button and they'll not really take care. It's just like, I've just done it, it's far enough. Or they'll be talking of designers as a group rather than my squad designer rich like that disrespecting of the human and talking it just as a role, and I know I've done it a couple times with regards to talking about developers, but there's that breakdown in human respect there that sometimes happens or there's res breakdown in respecting the work, just pushing things out without checking in with the designer. But that being said, designers are just as guilty of these problems as other squad members. We don't always put our arm around the other disciplines or see them as less important or just carrying out our work.
- And it's like, it's not about that the squad's work. You are providing that function and it's your job to welcome people into design because, well, it's important also not to dwell within the arrogance of the designer. You don't know everything, you don't know how to implement this stuff all the way. You can only find out through the combination of all efforts through everybody's skills and knowledge and even the most unexperienced person in a squad can offer some real nuggets of information. I think you watch watch and you learn and you see how people are interacting and you start to look for toxic habits and you try and work through them. I'm a big advocate of radical candor saying what's important, what you need to say, but in a way that you really care about how that's going to be heard. I think that's really important for creating emotional safety within squads and I think you need to invest the time in a squad to get to know each other and to respect each other and to trust each other, which is hard to do remotely, but it's important to do.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah. Well let's talk about that. Let's talk about creating emotional safety within the squad and within the design team and still are, I imagine in some ways an individual contributor on some projects, on some products, but you've also had many years experience as a design leader and you've been responsible for, as I mentioned, the creative wellbeing of other designers. How do you ensure that the design team or people you are looking out for psychologically safe and are able to perform at that high level that's caught upon them to do?
- Rich McCoy:
- Yeah, so I learned the most about this through my time at TradeMe through working with people like Roxy and the rest of the design team who are now dispersed around New Zealand doing wonderful things. One of the most important things I've found useful is taking time out to get to know the person. I'm a massive fan of one-on-ones, a massive fan of walking one-on-ones. So getting people outta the office, getting them outside of that environment of like, this is not work, we are talking and I'm listening to you and I'm prompting you to open up and explain what's going on for you. And it's not a feigned interest. I'm genuinely interested in people I genuinely sort of love and care for the people that I'm responsible for. I don't always see eye to eye with them, but that's, it's your job to move past that. So it's important to put your arm around people and give them your time and give them your ears and give them your responses in a non-judgmental way.
- We touched on the fact I started using those skills outside of the work environment and just mentoring and coaching creative people. And I've worked with some really fascinating people like leather workers and jewelers and people outside our new ex world because they suffer from the same issues that we do with, they don't believe they're good enough, they can't work out how to manage their days and stuff like this. They can't work out which, which idea to follow next and how to take their business. Just real similarities. And I was like, I've been doing this for 20 years, how can I really help the people around me, the people that are becoming friends and their friends and so many of these people I've just never been listened to. They've never had somebody sit down and go, I care about your business, tell me about it. What are you struggling with? Probably a good 50% of those initial conversations I've had with people had people break down in tears explaining what's going on for them in their business because I don't, and it startled me to start with, I just couldn't understand it.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I was going to say, were you prepared for that? Was that an outcome that you were expecting from these conversations?
- Rich McCoy:
- No, no, not really. I spoke to my partner about it and she sort of points out this says because so many people go through their lives without being heard, especially women, especially creative people, they feel they're not heard. So for a middle-aged white man to sit down and just listen and just be there to help and support, it's a very rare thing. There's no agenda. I wasn't getting paid for most of it. I found it rewarding. It got me outta the house in a very dry period and got me learning about businesses and people and the community around me. So yeah, I wasn't prepared for people to cry and it was startling, but it's okay with that. It's part of my practice. Okay.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You've spoken about both coaching and mentoring and I understand that those are two different things. How are they different though in practice? How does your mentoring, I think it's a mentoring focus to your mentoring of other creative as opposed to what have been a more coaching focus for your direct reports and say, trade me. How do those two dynamics differ?
- Rich McCoy:
- That's, that's something I'm always struggling with trying to work out and it's something I keep going to look up and it's almost the difference between coaching and mentoring and I come away and then I forget what the difference is. That short term memory, I was like, I can't remember what those words mean. Well
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Neither can I, so no,
- Rich McCoy:
- It's ok. I think I slipped between the two kind of organically. I don't have any real agenda where I sit down, no, I'm only coaching you or now only mentoring you I think, yeah, it's a very fluid thing for me. It slips between the two and the boundaries become, messy would be the wrong word, but become fluid and sort of nebulous and I think that's okay as long as you are there for that person and there to help that person. I think that within a certain environment you do have an agenda to some extent if you are managing them, you know, have an agenda to make sure that they're performing to their best ability and you are trying to guide them to develop their career. Whereas with other people, I have no agenda as to what a poet does with their time other than they've come for me with help with how to organize their day and how to explore ways to make money from their craft. I'll help them pull that out. But there's no other agenda than that other than just wanting to be just a good human, which is really important.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, isn't it?
- Rich McCoy:
- Yeah,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I think so. More mentoring. Well yeah, I definitely is. Yeah, I think the more we can focus on being good humans, the better we'll all be. Coaching and mentoring is a very good human thing to do and to take seriously. I mean some people I imagine don't relish that role because it comes with a lot of responsibility or at least it does from my way of looking at it. You touched on before in your coaching or mentoring business with other creatives that they come with the same hangups that most of us have about not being good enough. If we take that thread and if you reflect back on the designers that you've mentored, so the product designers, the UX designers, what are some of the hangups that designers have that and also why do they need to get past those and how can they get past those?
- Rich McCoy:
- I think for me we hear talk about it, the strongest issue that I encounter with creatives and we all suffer from it is that of imposter syndrome. When we initially first started having conversations about doing this, I suffer terrible imposter syndrome. What you wanna talk to me, I don't understand this, but for me imposter syndrome is the shadow of integrity. It's the shadow of wanting to be your best self. And I think it's really important to frame it as that the imposter syndrome is not you, it's the shadow of everything that you hold beer and you're trying to push for and you're trying to improve. So it's just that it's run rampant and unchecked. I think it's important to put your arm around that shadow and just embrace that child within you that doesn't think it's ever good enough through whatever's gone on in your past or whatever.
- And also because of the pressure that we talked about before about being seen and we put our work out there, we're seen. So if we're judging ourselves first, then it can help as a shield of armor to the values of other people far. The strongest issue that comes up is that I'm not good enough. I find it especially prevalent with when I'm employing young women because of the social conditioning that happens. It's not just young women that have it, but I think the conversation I tend to have is, well of course you're good enough otherwise hug and I wouldn't be having this conversation in the first place. I wouldn't have brought you on if I didn't think you were good enough if I didn't think you were up for it. And we've got such a, quite often we have quite complex recruitment processes with lots of checks and balances. So you're definitely good enough.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You just need to believe that you are. Yeah.
- Rich McCoy:
- Are you perfect? No, but none of us are. Mm-hmm. Is there room for development? Well of course there is. We develop until we die, we can always improve it. It's about having those honest conversations with people and there's no point shouting at your shadows. They're there because you're doing something you, they're there because you have a light.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I think we were talking about Bob Baxley just briefly before we started recording, who is somebody that I spoke to a couple of weeks ago on the podcast and that what you are saying is reminding me of something that he told me about Steve Jobs. And I think this is a widely publicized Steve Jobs ism. I'm not going to quote it directly cuz I don't have it in front of me, but Steve used to say to people, do you particularly young people look around you and look at everything that's in your environment, any product or thing that you can see and know that that thing was made by someone who's no more gifted than you are. And I think that is that's really stuck with me the last couple of weeks.
- Rich McCoy:
- There's a film quote who, the film, I can't remember the title of, and the quote is like, any man can do what another man can do. And this was just this guy who's a high flyer, the name escapes me. They get lost in a mountain. And that's the principle that gets them through surviving the wildest, any man can do what another man can do. And I think it's really important to embrace that. Yeah, we are our biggest saboteurs always this we will sabotage ourselves before any, I don't know, that's a very privileged statement to make, but I think that in core of it where I am, I'm my biggest saboteur. I my own self doubts and fears. And they would look around me in a room of designers and go, I'm sure that's the same thing. There were different shades of it, but
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah. When you were younger you met a very famous designer by the name of Ralph Steadman. Yes. And it'd be great if you could tell people a little bit about who Ralph is. Yeah. But I wondered now that we've been talking about some sort of imposter syndrome for creative people or designers generally just everybody, to be fair, I think it's widely recognized that most people carry this with them. What sort of reaction or imposter syndrome, if any, did you have going on for yourself when you met Ralph?
- Rich McCoy:
- Yeah, so I've been a fan of his for a while. He is the illustrator behind what people understand to be Hunter s Thompson's image, that scratchy free flowing, hyper creative illustrator. He's a character, a phenomenal character, a very much larger than life or it looks like larger than life character as you'd have to be to spend any time with Hunter Thompson. And that was just one of those situations I threw myself into. I didn't have enough time to get scared. It was the day after my 21st birthday, I was terribly hungover and he turned up at the university where I was studying in in cna. It was PR planned, but they needed somebody to film his workshop. I knew my way around a camera and my lecturer came up and said, look, we're supposed to be doing this. The person who was supposed to be filming it has dropped out. Can you do it? And I was like, who's it for? And this raim. And I'm like, oh shit, okay. And I had a moment of fear going, oh am I okay to do this? What am I going to do? How's this going to work? I'm hungover, I can't really think straight. And I was like he's dealt with worse. [laugh]
- Probably hungover too. So I just threw myself into it and got behind the camera and filmed it and learned it and had conversations. The conversation I had with him, we were eating cucumber sandwiches, which is a ridiculous British thing. Everybody tells you the queen likes cucumber sandwiches and this than the other. We were eating cucumber sandwiches in the print facility of the university. And he said oh. And he went back and he was like, I need to sign this because it's not a piece of work art until it's signed. And then he corrected himself again. No, it's not a piece of artwork until it's sold and it's cress and a lot of the sort of art purists will bulk at that. But as a person working in the commercial sector, it was a really, really important thing to hear as a second year art student with all precious ideas about your work to know it doesn't mean anything until, unless somebody's willing to give you money for it. Unfortunately in this horrible capitalist society, that's how it works. And I get so much validation when somebody buys a painting. This is something that I've decided to do and somebody's bought it rather than somebody's come commit to me and said, I've got a problem. Can you solve it?
- Are buying something from me that I've created outta my own impetus and desire to do so.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And you are buying something unlike design that you were able to create entirely of your own constraints and conditions and that you imposed on yourself, which I can imagine is incredibly rewarding.
- Rich McCoy:
- So going back to the question you asked me before it is, would I do UX design but didn't have to. That's why the bus you get from creating your own thing, I long to create my own product. I'd love to create, I'd love to do what you've done with the space and go, I have a thing that created and people come to it that's a phenomenal feeling. Like the ego loves it and we are creatures of ego at some point. We can't be 100% selfless as much as I've talked about welcoming people in and not being selfish and eager with things. It was a good experience
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And it's reminding me of an author that I quite like David Baker. He writes a book called The Business of Expertise. He's also a coach of sorts to mm-hmm [affirmative] creative entrepreneurs. And he's realized in his decades of doing that work that some people just don't have that inherent confidence in themselves. And so they need to get that through what he calls marketplace validation, but that's basically people buying what it is that you've made and that through that, that can actually build that confidence. And he is also seeing others that seem to have too much confidence for their own good. And the product doesn't necessarily support that, but for some reason other people respond really positively to that confidence.
- Rich McCoy:
- Yeah, I see that a lot. I'm fascinated by that. And I, there are people whose work gets so much attention and I look at it and I'm like, I don't understand it. And I find myself going down a rabbit hole just exploring their work and going, what is it it they believe in? Why is this And trying to understand it. I've rarely come away with a full understanding. Well not a conscious one anyway. I do, I must admit, I do respect somewhat distastefully that overconfidence. I
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Can't say yeah, there's something in it. There is definitely something in that. I think it's almost, it's the work that goes on outside the work.
- Rich McCoy:
- Yeah.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I haven't really unpacked that myself fully, but yeah, there are some people that you look at what they're up to and you just can't really work out why people are responding in the way that they are, which is probably means we are missing something to be honest. There's something to learn there.
- Rich McCoy:
- Absolutely. Yeah. It's one of my favorite responses when people go, I don't understand this. It was like, but that doesn't mean that's something wrong with it. It's means that there's a breakdown in your understanding of it or it's communicating its value to you. I dunno,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- [laugh] Rich, it feels like a good place to wrap up the conversation and it's been a really thought provoking conversation all the way through actually. And it's got me thinking about life and a larger sense outside of product to be honest. And the sort of realization that life is short and you know, are someone that has led from a very early age, a life that's been fairly adventurous. And you've been fairly open today on the podcast talking about some of the challenges that life has presented you with. For the people that are listening to today's episode and have heard your stories and might be worried that they're not living up and into their potential, what do you want them to know?
- Rich McCoy:
- Yeah, be careful of that. We live in an age where we are faced with people's artifice all the time. You know, go on social media, you see people's beautiful light on Instagram and you hear stories about people living interesting lives and this that and the other. And there's a temptation to measure yourself up against that. And that's a dangerous game because what you are doing is you're measuring yourself up into that artifice. I'm very boring at times. Very, very boring. People's Instagram posts and their social media and their LinkedIn profiles, that's what they choose to put forward. There are stuff that's going on in your own head that probably wouldn't happen in the person who's who you're looking at and going, what's this? It's like everybody is interesting. Everybody has their own things to talk about. So try not to be caught up in the artifice, especially now, especially in these weird times where we are more isolated and all you see is what people present. A good thing is I'm much shorter than people think. People meet me on the internet and I have had plenty people I've known for years on the internet and quite overwhelmingly when I meet them, people go, oh, you're not as tall as I thought you were. And I think that's
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Cuz you're not wearing shoes most of the time. Yeah,
- Rich McCoy:
- This is true. I'm not now. I think this is because people see what you present and they feel like psychologically you are bigger, you're more interesting than what you are. You're all a little bit dull sometimes, I think is what I would probably say to that.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Oh, that's a really important message. Rich, I've really enjoyed the conversation today. It's been wonderful to hear your stories and the insights that you've learned across your career. And I really wanna say thank you for so generously sharing those with everybody today.
- Rich McCoy:
- Thank you Brendan. I, I've really enjoyed it. I thrive on these kind of conversations, so thank you very much for allowing me the opportunity.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You're almost welcome, rich. Cheers. Rich. If people wanna find out more about you and what you're up to. Mm-hmm. The best way for them to do that
- Rich McCoy:
- I think would be to delve into my own website, which is mccoy.co.uk and everything else can be found out about and send me an email, send me a text, send me a message. Just let's have a chat. I'd like to said, I love people. I love learning about them and their challenges and helping them where I have the energy and the time.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah. Thank you. We'll make sure we link to your website, rich and also to your art website and all your other wonderful things that you've put out there. And to everyone, it's been great having you here as well. Everything that we've covered will be in the show notes, including, as I've just mentioned, where you confined rich and his artwork and all about him. If you enjoyed the show and you want to hear more great conversations like this with world-class leaders in UX, design and product management, don't forget to leave us a review and subscribe to the podcast. And until next time, keep being brave.