Kate Rutter

Episode 99
Brave UX

Cultivating a Culture & Career of Creativity

In this episode of Brave UX, Kate Rutter shares her thoughts on finding work in a challenging economy, how to design for great creative exchanges, and why she pushes back against authority.

Highlights include:

How have you pushed back against overly rigid hierarchies?
Why did you take a part-time retail job at a retail store?
How does the quality of the question influence the quality of the idea?
Why isn’t UX overly kind to late career-stage practitioners?
How are great creative exchanges like great sex?

November 29, 202201:25:27

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Who is Kate Rutter?

Kate is a Senior Adjunct Professor at California College of the Arts, where, for the past five years, she’s been teaching undergraduates creativity and storytelling, and masters’ students the foundations of experience design.

She is also the Principal of Intelleto, the consulting practice through which she creates and facilitates visual explanations that make complex ideas simple, memorable and shareable.

Before starting Intelleto, Kate pioneered the UX learning track at Tradecraft, an immersive learning program for product designers. She also co-founded the online education company Luxr.co, that helped early-stage entrepreneurs to find product/market fit.

During her 20 years in the field, she’s been a very generous contributor, including sharing her knowledge since 2015 through the “What’s Wrong with UX” podcast, which she co-hosts alongside her good friend, Laura Klein.

Transcript

Brendan Jarvis:
Hello and welcome to another episode of Brave UX. I'm Brendan Jarvis, Managing Founder of TheSpace 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. You can find out a little bit more about that at thespaceinbetween.co.nz. 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 Kate Rutter. Kate is a Senior Adjunct Professor at California College of the Arts, where for the past five years she's been teaching undergraduates creativity and storytelling and master students the foundations of experience design, but it's not all academic with Kate.
She's also the principal of Intelleto, the consulting practice through which she creates and facilitates visual explanations that make complex ideas simple, memorable and shareable. Before starting Intelleto, Kate pioneered the UX learning track at Tradecraft and immersive learning program for product designers. She also co-founded the online education company luxr.co, that helped early stage entrepreneurs to find product market fit. Winding the clock back just a little further, Kate invested nearly seven years as an Experience Designer at Adaptive Path, one of the original and most successful North American user experience design consultancies of its day an expert in visual thinking, facilitation and product metrics, as well as a seasoned UX generalist with a sharp knowledge of lean practices. There's not many problems that Kate hasn't tackled in her nearly 20 years in the field during this time. She's been a very generous contributor to the field, sharing her knowledge since 2015 through the What's Wrong with UX Podcast, which she co-hosts alongside her good friend and previous Brave UX guest, Laura Klein, a funny, frank and gifted communicator for many years. Kate has also been invited to speak and facilitate workshops at events across the globe such as UX Week, enterprise, UX, UX Lisbon, expose UX, and Stanford University. And now she's here with me for this 99th conversation on Brave UX. Kate, welcome to the show.
Kate Rutter:
Oh, it's such an honor to be here and I really appreciate that background. It's kind of wonderful to go back and remember many of those great experiences and the people who I got to share them with.
Brendan Jarvis:
Oh, I'm very much looking forward to this conversation all holiday. I've just gotten back from two weeks overseas and definitely would love to go into some of those experiences with you today. I actually want to start by going right back to the time when you graduated from college and that was back in 1990 and you graduated from Wellesley College, which is a private woman's liberal arts college with a bachelor in fine arts. Yet it seemed to me at least looking at your LinkedIn profile that it was about 14 years later, so sometime around 2004, when you first became an experienced designer at Adaptive Path, what took you so long to find your way to UX?
Kate Rutter:
Interesting question. When I graduated, it was a liberal arts background and I had a wonderful experience there and I had started out wanting to be an electrical engineer and build basically technology through living things, so a lot of bionic work. And then I moved into architecture and then I ended up in fine arts where I found that visual expression and distilling information visually was really what inspired me. But when you graduate from a liberal arts college with a degree in fine arts, things happen. When I came back to my hometown of Tucson, Arizona, a friend of my father's said, look at me straight in the eye after hearing what I'd my degree was in. He goes, you were trained for nothing. And I said, I know, right? Because I kind of felt that by being trained for nothing, that I had a set of skills or wonderings that would allow me to go into a variety of different things.
So my first job as an admin assistant for a small business in San Francisco where I'd chosen to move to and then I fell in love with computing pretty early. So running a gamut from desktop publishing, which is what it was kind of cold back in the day, learning to use things like HyperCard to sort and sift information in really modular ways. So there was a lot of information design already inherent in that. And then I moved into a role where it was a nonprofit for career development, which allowed people to make informed choices about how they might select their livelihood, which was part and parcel to so much of what I currently still think about. But it was a small company, a small nonprofit, and wasn't a lot of computing experience. And so I loved the systematizing and got into being a system tech for them and then was invited to a new role of director of technology.
So that would've been about 94 at the time when the internet was starting to really emerge as an more visually based tool. We had browsers and the web rather than some of the other internet based communications and I love that. So I got to work with that organization and the staff there on our first internet site, our first intranet site. We had job listings online way before Monster. It was a very emergent time for that. So although I think my UX work officially started when I joined the adaptive path team in 2004, it was really 94, 95, 96 where I was building websites where I was looking at how teams and organizations could think differently about accessing and serving their communities through digital technologies.
Brendan Jarvis:
It's really interesting to hear you articulate that it's it's almost like there's timing was both fortunate for you in the respect of the internet and the worldwide web. More specifically taking off at that time and you were working in these tangential, if not related fields to what you would come to do in 2004 and how those skills that you developed there would serve you well when you did start at Adaptive Path. And I definitely wanna come back to something that you said earlier on there around wondering and being trained for nothing that sounded like scathing criticism from your father's friend. And I'm not sure it was intended that way but it's certainly something equality that seems to have set you up well for the career that you have held and wondering is really about curiosity. And this is a quality, I think I mentioned to you offline that I felt that we share, and maybe this is again blown my own trumpet a little bit here, but I also really admire that quality in other people which is probably not surprising. Now about your own curiosity, you have said, and I'll just quote you now I guess, if there's one thing you need to know about me, it's that I'm a wonderer. I wonder a lot, I design, I drive, I do other human regular things, but I actually do wonder and I look up at the clouds and I wonder about big things. So that was a few years ago when you said that, and I was curious, has that wondering, has this always been something that's been a part of who you are?
Kate Rutter:
Yes, much to the chagrin sometimes of my own needs to focus or other people who I get to work with who are eye on the ball, not the squirrel, but the wondering I think is atmospheric and keeps the world of possibility alive and I need that as sustenance to live. It makes it tricky to participate in environments where stability and operational concerns are the prevailing value system. But it's been very helpful and I might say wonderfilled, to be able to be in a place in time and history and located and have enough frankly of the privilege of education and stability in family and finances to be able to design a world where I can continue wondering for myself
Brendan Jarvis:
And thinking about the world as it currently stands. Now, as we were talking about earlier, you graduated in 1990 and I've heard you described the time that you entered the job market. You mentioned working as a CIS admin and doing various other things before you came to UX in the mid two thousands. But you described the job market at the time as being very piecemeal and that there was a bad economy at the time there as well. And I wanted to ask you about this because it's fairly clear now with over 60,000 tech workers in the US being laid off in recent months that we are heading into some stormy seas as we currently in which we currently find ourselves. So what words of encouragement or advice or warning do you have for those people who may be listening to us today who have recently found themselves open to work or they may be mid-career or later in their, their career or even excuse me, or recent graduates that are now you were back in 1990 trying to get established in the field yet finding it fairly challenging as far as the overall economy goes?
Kate Rutter:
Yeah, this is a trickier answer than I'd expected because I've thought about that and I remember things, the articles and the media when I was first coming into the job market were very PhDs can't get work and the recession was really starting to feel so much more profound. The benefit was is that I was trained for nothing is that if I could get employment and start to earn enough to survive, then I didn't have a lot of standards about what that was. So I think there's luck with that. There's certainly being, having a community, which I think whether that community comes from a professional community or a family or a faith-based community, but knowing people and caring about them and they in turn care about you opens up really important possibilities. Living close to the bone, living prudently and frugally [laugh] is also helpful because it opens up more opportunities to do different things.
There was something that happened that I hadn't expected, which was that I was, had I was able to see enough opportunities or be in the place where those opportunities emerged or to recognize them maybe, I don't know, I don't wanna take a lot of credit for that because I feel very blessed with it. But there were a lot of things that sounded fun, even if they didn't sound fun to other people. Redoing a filing system and making a filing system easy for people to find things in was fun. And that really started to hone systematized thinking that be was helpful. Then in my information architecture work, using everyday language was fun because I like many young professionals, was pretty overblown with my own vocabulary and it was pedantic and it was not great. And so learning to release speak simply and connect with people through words was fun.
All those things felt fun. I don't know that they intrinsically were fun, but if they can be fun, then if you can find the fun in them, then I think that what you choose to do for work is opens up more doors. You can choose things that may or may not make direct sense. If you have a very clear career path, which I never did, and a very high set of expectations, which I also really haven't had, then it's very limiting, it's very focusing, which is great, but it also means that you can go for quite a while seeking something when there might be other things that would be equally fulfilling that you're not seeing because you're so focused.
Brendan Jarvis:
So it sounds like almost not having a inflexible or a rigid set of expectations, particularly at a time like this where the economy isn't good, enabled you to find the joy almost in the things that you did end up doing. And I really was curious about that in particular as you were talking about that I couldn't help but thinking about what we were talking about earlier regarding wondering and that curiosity and whether or not there was a relationship or if there is a relationship between your fondness of wondering or being curious about things and then your openness or at least it seems that you're very open at that time of your life and possibly even now to pursue things that aren't necessarily directly within what you had expected when you graduated.
Kate Rutter:
I think there's a direct absolutely and almost a hundred percent overlap with that. And it is interesting, we'll talk about it maybe in later on, but that door to openness had gotten a little stuck shut and now it's been kind of creeped open again and feels really different at this stage of a career. But that openness I think still gives different possibilities. Here's something I don't often talk about. I've done one talk in a small community about it, but there was a period of time after Adaptive Path after lecture where dedicating myself more to a volunteer role and I was struggling with finding enough structure to feel productive and effective. And a friend of mine who's quite brilliant she said, maybe you need to outsource your schedule and structure. You could get a job. And I was doing consulting, I was teaching, there were a variety of these, what I think maybe our culture is or society is designed to think of as higher level work or more important work somehow.
But I needed something that would regulate some of these ideas in just this crazy ass schedule I had. So I got a job at the local store called Michael's, which is a craft store and big and it's a big chain, huge. It's probably the biggest company I've ever worked for. And they needed seasonal help and it was the season, so I worked between retail with a red vest and a name tag that said, my name is Kate. I had to learn a cash register, all those things. I'd done retail when I was y earlier in my life, but not as at this stage. And I didn't tell a lot of people about it, but now I wish I had because I think it's amazing what you can learn if you're willing to look a little ridiculous or to not feel like you're mustering up to whatever people's ideas about you might be.
But here's what I really, really loved about it is when someone would come in and say, where's the glue? Instead of saying, it's over here, I would say, tell me about your creative vision. And they would just unfold with these projects. It was a beautiful role to have for a period of time and it did help me really regulate in a different way. Now not everybody has that requirement, but if you're working, if you've got bits and pieces of work, sometimes working in a place that was unusual can help pay the bills and also give you other offerings. I mean really help me fall back in love with information architecture.
Brendan Jarvis:
You seem to indicate some social expectation or pressure that you felt. And you mentioned that you hadn't really talked about this very much. It seemed like you almost felt or used to feel ashamed of that role.
Kate Rutter:
I think ashamed is a little strong, but I think it would've been tricky about to have students come in where the perceived authority of a faculty member actually less students and probably more other colleagues were wondering. I mean that's the beginning of breaking Bad if I've never really fully committed to that, but he's working and there's this sense of, as a teacher, you should be doing something else or why are you going down? And I think all work is moral work and can be done with care and thoughtfulness and there's all kinds of roles that need to be played right now. And if we think that we're ever a thought that some work is beneath us, I get very surety about that. But I also recognize I'm not the one that calls and that there can be career limiting choices that do shut doors because of our choices. And I've become much more sensitized to that I think through my life experiences too.
Brendan Jarvis:
Well, I want, let's go into that in a second with regards to hierarchy. But let's just stay on this a little bit longer. I was interested in how evident it was in the moment when you were working in that retail role that you would fall back in love with information architecture. Was this something that you did knowing full well that you were looking for some new inspiration or some new input into your UX career? Or was this just a happy byproduct of making a brave decision?
Kate Rutter:
I think it was a good seed falling on fallow ground because I had part of the transition, especially into more of a learning facilitator through my faculty role, was feeling a sadness about not being able to do the practiced work, practice work that I had been so inspired by earlier on. And I think that happens to professionals as you move perhaps from a design craft role or an individual contributor into something that looks more like management. And I know that many of your guests have talked about the difference of skills and responsibilities in that, but I really like to keep my hands in the work and I find myself less trusting. This is where I can get a little fierce and need to look at that behavior more. But I find myself less trusting of people who haven't had their hands in the work for a long time because I think it's easy to get disconnected and think, well, why can't you just build that interface? Or why can't you just make blah blah blah because it can look so easy. The best crafters make it look easy. And we know that there's a lot of thought and care in that work in the details that sometimes are hard to remember when you've been out of that work.
Brendan Jarvis:
It's a really beautiful thing that prompt, it wasn't a question, but it's a permission that you gave people when they would come to you and ask for glue to tell you about their creative vision. This is probably more of an aside as far as we go, but I just feel like that is such a beautiful thing to give people the permission to do and otherwise very transactional environment. People go to a retail store to get a thing and then they leave. But it seems that you are not only able to give yourself a bit of joy in that moment, but also to give people, as I said, the permission to tell a bit of their story as well. I think it's a beautiful thing.
Kate Rutter:
Well part of that was also learning the story, you know, come in for glue and what you're trying to do with it makes a big difference not only with what kind of glue but actually where it was in the store. One of the things that I had fun as I was learning the layout was mapping all the places where there were letters cuz you can actually buy craft letters in wood and in fabric and in stickers and all these things. And I made a map of where all the letters were because that was a fascinating information architecture challenge. [laugh], because they were contextually placed weren't like someone came in and said, I need to spell something out. They could wander the store a long time and find a lot of opportunities, but if they didn't have some other criteria with their creative vision, I couldn't really be very helpful.
Brendan Jarvis:
You almost acted as a guide in that respect. Now let's come back to hierarchy or let's come back to this disconnection between practice and management and have a conversation about this now. Something that I understand about you is that you're not very fond of being told what you can and can't do. And you've said about this, and I'll quote you again now, I've never been very successful in strongly hierarchical environments and I still get my heckles up when someone says, pay your dues and then you can actually do the good stuff. Well I'm like, that's bullshit. Just start with the good stuff because the good stuff is constantly evolving. What is the good stuff?
Kate Rutter:
I think solving problems with an important outcome for humans and increasingly beyond humans. But you can talk about that later. I think the, there's a lot of good stuff in making decisions through iterating through wire frames if that's the language that a company needs to design their stuff. I know we have more sophisticated tools now, but arranging places and things on a screen-based layout is a thinking process, helping shape the actual behavior of a product rather than documenting those decisions through another outcome. So I have a long time sadness and frustration with product requirement documents that get so defined that the judgment and the human experiences and the lived experiences of the practitioners is kind of washed out. Then we really are just doing production work and not able to make recommendations if we've seen different things happen. And that's where that reinforces the risk of that disconnect between the making and the deciding.
Now I know we can't all be in every decision all the time that is unreasonable and unwieldy and people don't have information that they can make good decisions for. But the reason I think hierarchy is so concerning is because it intentionally by design separates the thinking and the doing. And when those get separated, then it's so easy to point fingers, well I'm just doing my job even though I know there's negative outcomes. But nobody listens to me is kind of the race to victimhood for a production person or producer. And then there's the, well I told them but they just screwed it up cuz they're not very good at their job, is kind of the management. And I think that balance of power is best wobbly and at worst damaging, putting a brick in a dryer, if you've ever seen that, it just tears the whole dryer apart that closed dryer dryer and is dramatic and painful and dangerous.
And I think that hierarchies inappropriately placed. There's some places where it really matters to have that communication and that power structure, but when it doesn't, just saying that's the way that business is run, I think is inappropriate and increasingly distressing. And we see that in the outcome now of digital products that have the thinking that might be more realistic for how it actually affects marginalized groups, communities that may or may not be the target audience or reflect the composition of the makers and the designers, the developers, the leaders. Those have very negative consequences and I think that that hierarchy allows that to get out in the world in a different way. And I going to blame hierarchy for everything. I get it. But to make the most of everybody's contributions and understanding and expertise, I think we need a different decision making model.
Brendan Jarvis:
I haven't been following it super closely just as it's come across in my feed, but it seems like the recent Twitter acquisition and some of the decisions that have been made as a result of that appear to be in the realm of what you're describing there where the brain is separated from the hands and it's creating this environment where it doesn't serve the users where both the hands and the brain appointing their figurative fingers at one another and the product as a result is degenerating. So it's a really key point that you point out there and it's a very unhelpful culture to develop if the hierarchy is too rigid. I was curious about your own operation within hierarchies cuz it sounded like you've had some personal experience here where you've had to, and don't let me put words in your mouth, but you've had to operate unhappily within or perhaps push back against this way of operating. How have you contended with hierarchies when you have felt that they are not serving the work and not serving the user and not serving the business in the best way that they could?
Kate Rutter:
Well, I think one of the things that has been a behavior that often is useful, but something I can't seem to not do is asking why certain things are the way they are [laugh].
Brendan Jarvis:
Very dangerous, very thing to do, Kate. Yeah,
Kate Rutter:
Yeah. The three letter letter World destroy or why, and we know as designers one of our best answers is it depends and but when there's decisions made based on a criteria or a protocol or a standard, and we don't periodically, if not constantly reconnect with why and how those decisions were made to have that standard, then we don't know that we're doing the work that we need to be doing. So that's pretty abstract. So let me give you an example of a non-profit. I was working with very, very stable, long standing, over a hundred years old, longstanding community, civic organization. One place where it was part of the culture to laugh about because we've always done it that way which of course it was lockstep, unchangeable, and it would grow and grow and grow, but it would never change. And the outside environment changes and I mean the everyday environment of how people live and how we think and how we expect others to behave towards us and power distribution and power sharing, all of that shifts over time.
And the organizational structure was not shifting, but when I started to ask just mostly honest questions, why is it that we do it this way? It turned out that the system had been going for so long without that reflection, humans reflecting on that and being articulate about it that nobody knew. So there's an old mantra or a saw about the cook who is putting a ham in the oven and it's like you cut the butt off the ham and then a younger generation person says, why do we do that? It was like, well, because my parent always did it. My parent always did it. And the answer was the oven was too small to fit the whole ham or the pan was too small to fit the whole ham and so you were cutting the butt off the ham. Maybe the best part because of it what became a cultural tradition in that family, but really the context had changed didn't matter anymore. And that's where I think asking why can reveal those, but asking why also reveals power structures and value systems and some of those are more effective when they're hidden. And that's I think why it gets me so shirked up is because hidden power structures allows for hoarding in different ways and it confuses people even as it cuts them off from contributing. And I don't think that's a humane way to
Brendan Jarvis:
Live. Have you paid a personal price for asking that three letter world destroying question?
Kate Rutter:
Yes. Yeah. I mean you stop being asked because you're like a two year old asking why it takes time. It can be a severe distraction. Sometimes the answers are already there, but I can fall into not agreeing with the answers and then pushing back on that. And that's a whole other set of relationships and work. And so at that point you just don't fit. There's places where we don't sometimes fit. I like it when it's more clear making an intentional choice. These are the standards, these are the decisions, this is what, is this a place or not? And then I get to make my choice on that. I'm not as happy when other people make that choice, but they've often made that choice for me and I've lived with that, whether it's being laid off or whether it's being fired or whether it's not being invited back. Yeah, there's ways to remove people who are problematic from a company and that works, that works, whether or not you think it's a better choice to remove them or a worse choice to remove them.
Brendan Jarvis:
That clarity around why things are done the way they are. It's reminding me of a couple of conversations with Amazon employees that I've had on the show one of which was Odell and the other was Amy Jimenez. Marquez. And Amazon for all of its criticism seems to have a very clear idea about who it is and what it stands for. And it isn't uncommon for people that have worked there as far as the ones that I've spoken to take issue with that and to recognize that actually I've done my time now and it's time for me to go the corporation is not going to change because I might take an objection with something that it does or that the senior leadership does, which to me could potentially feel quite disempowering. But it seems almost that when people have reached that point, and feel free to disagree of course, but that there's almost a liberation that comes around that decision with realizing that this isn't the place for me anymore and that you can actually put a positive spin on that.
Kate Rutter:
Yeah, there was a conversation I was having with colleagues and actually family members too about, we talk a lot about the onboarding experience when you come new into an environment and how people are greeted, made, feel welcome, get up to speed, quickly, feel oriented, et cetera. And sometimes there's offboarding, but often the separation feels like it's not like the separation isn't so good, the company's downsizing and people are let go. Or there's always the risk of litigious action if you feel that there's something, I mean you're dealing with people's livelihoods, so it can be the loss of income and the loss of support and resources. That's nothing. That's a big deal. But we don't really design our environments commonly as, I hate this phrase, I know they use it in Netflix as a tour of duty, but there are flows, there are seasonal flows. I think that we can think about that and there's growing, there's life cycles of anything.
I'm really, really helpful. I like to think I've been helpful in emergent environments where things are unknown. There's a lot of unknowns where you have to make something even though you don't know very much about it. That's why entrepreneurship and actually entrepreneurship within the entrepreneurship burgeoning community at luxr.co was so crucial was because there was a lot of unknown unknowns in that and a major philosophical shift with how companies and organizations could be formed through the lean startup philosophy that was new and emerging. So that was meaningful to be involved with that. When things start to become more regularized, then I think I get much more disruptive. It's not a place for those skills. So I've been able much more I think, aware to realize that it's not just being in a company and having it grow and staying or having a different role in it, but to actually go elsewhere
Brendan Jarvis:
And play. It sounds like play to your strength as a result of going elsewhere, your dislike of authority, if that's the right way to frame it. Where does this come from? What's the earliest memory you have of that feeling of disease or unease with an authority? And then what was it that you did as a result of experiencing that feeling?
Kate Rutter:
Sure. On my better days, I think it's recognizing that every human has capacity and gifts and the power that comes along with that and being emboldened and invited to use that power for good and community is really why we're here as humans together. On my bad days, I don't like being told what to do and I really don't like telling other people what to do. I used to like that a lot more. Turns out that's a hypocrisy that I had to, I had to recognize. But I think that human inventiveness, I enjoy my own sense of invention, even if it feels completely inappropriate sometimes I have a sense of humor about what's possible. I like to experiment a lot, be very experimental. And so to me that is where life quality happens. And so that's often not because it's not on task, it's not. He sometimes as helpful and authority figures are great for expertise and knowledge and I very much like that exchange, but I always would consider myself on an equal playing field as a human being.
And that exchange, that collaboration or that co-creation, however you can closely align is beautiful and interesting. So power differentials I think are very sensitized to mostly because I think that when people have so much power and authority that they have too much influence and that it's easy to objectify and to other humans, other life forms, all kinds of things. And when we, other things I think bad things start to happen. So you don't have humans and contributors and Brendan or Kate working together. You have human resources and we become, we're not interchangeable. We all have unique gifts and skills and when we can find them and be in an environment that recognizes and cherishes them and honors them, then I think we have a much more humane place to work. And I've seen teams do that. I think adaptive path for all of its ups and downs stayed weird and stayed wonderful because every individual was there as themselves, not as a role.
And if you tied to hire someone into a specific role, then that didn't work. As well as inviting a set of life experiences, perspectives, personality, quirks and gifts into a community that then learned to make the most of those, that's why we didn't have bosses. I don't wanna get into too much detail because nothing is a hundred percent wholesale, but one of the models at PATH was to have an advocate instead of a manager. And project teams had leaders and they needed make hard calls that were sometimes unpopular. That's part of that authority responsibility. But as far as individuals, we had someone that we could pick to be our advocate who would help us get to that next level of growth that we wanted and had defined for ourselves. And that autonomy and that agency is not something that our systematized corporate environments have really done well with. It's really hard to scale.
Brendan Jarvis:
Right, right. Coming back to what you mentioned there with adaptive path and the role of advocate, I understand that your advocate was actually the chief operating officer, if I recall correctly.
Kate Rutter:
Well, yes. I had so early on, Brian Mason was the COO and a long standing adaptive path member, not as much, not on the design side but on the business, make it go side. And he told me one of these most wonderful things, which is I'm, I'm chaotic to work with and not always easy and it's sometimes been a balance is whether I'm worth it to work with. And that company and the group there really shaped me in a way that I am so thankful to those colleagues for that. But one of the things Brian said is he is like you're kind of freaking your team members out cuz you're super controlling and you're creative and it's a little hard to get you settled down. He goes and I said, yeah, but I love that about me. He goes, I think you should rethink that as a set of skills that you wanna continue and work on Calm and simple.
I was like, ooh, calm and simple. But that allowed me, the gift of that feedback allowed me to use that phrase as a safe word within the teams that when I was freaking out and doing that horrible behavior that didn't make anybody comfortable, but I didn't know how to control but calm and simple was kind of the way I needed to hear that and allowed me to pull back, be more reflective, be more self aware and intentional. And we used that. We would like to say that at the beginning of a project I'm like, okay, my safe word is calm and simple. So when I start doing that thing, that's the signal to me of a change I want to make in my world and my life and myself. And I had a beloved colleague cross stitch it onto a framed panel, which literally is sitting right there that I have cherished for over a decade now. Calm and simple, still hard for me to do, still working on it. But that gift of that advocacy who's like in order to be successful and helpful here, you're going to need to work on this. That was a real gift.
Brendan Jarvis:
What was it about your energy, the excitedness or that you were describing there? What was it about that that didn't quite sit quite right with the team?
Kate Rutter:
I think it's very self-centering and I think it takes a lot of time to listen to someone think out loud about infinite possibilities. Frankly it gets boring for others even if it feels good for ourselves. And I wasn't practiced as identifying when those times would be appropriate for that really rampant, fast moving generative, fairly chaotic energy. And when it was really time we talk about the double diamond when it was really time to turn that corner and start to shape towards a resolution and at after path. And the places I've been able to be after that have really, and the individuals I've worked with have been so fundamentally helpful in recognizing that the skillset to resolve and to close down and to make those decisions is something that I needed to work on.
Brendan Jarvis:
You spoke about that feedback being a gift and that soft often a phrase that's used to describe feedback and I feel like that's for very good reason and it's really refreshing the honesty that you've described that situation and with as well as the fact that you still have that statement calm and simple and embroidered and with you it's just goes to show that no matter how old you are or experienced you are or public profile or whatever it may be, that there are always things that people need to work on. And to suggest that we get to a place in our lives where we've ironed out all of our kinks and quirks will frankly that sounds boring to be fair, but it's really interesting to hear that that's still something for you that you need to work on and that you do work on. Kate, I want to talk about, you spoke about creative exchanges very briefly a few moments ago, and I know that that's something that you've also spoken about in the past and I also appreciate that you have a very analytical side to your practice or you have done around product metrics, but let's just stick with the creative or start with the creative.
Now I wanna quote you again. Now you've said, I like to think about having ideas as breathing. You start with questions and you breathe the questions in and somehow you breathe those ideas out. How much does the quality of the question influence the quality of the idea?
Kate Rutter:
That's a fascinating question in and of itself I would probably say a lot, but we have no idea because none of those exist out of a context. So an idea might be a question, might be two, a very broad question. And so it brings out a lot of ideas, but there's no one standard for whether those ideas are good or bad. They're always more or less helpful or more or less appropriate or more or less feasible. And it's that decision making that I think we need to do in community. And even the questions if you understand the context or the purpose, I mean I think a lot about context and purpose is those shaping forces. Why are we here? What are we trying to do? If anything, everything has to have a directed purpose, but it's helpful especially in a business context if it does.
And then what is the context? So what is the environment in which this happens? Not just the creative environment of how things get ideated and envisioned, but also the purposeful context of how they're going to be used within the real world or applied within the real world. So I think that's the nature of the UX work, which is why it's such an incredibly rich and burgeoning field and why I think there's so much growth just in it naturally is it's really driven to the tempo of technological change, but just the many variations and breadth of context and purpose is huge. It's just huge. So yeah, I think that if part of the ideation and the facilitation that I do when I work on those projects is trying to get some of those questions to feel like those are the most helpful and most important questions to focus on so that when we're inspired by those questions and we start breathing out those ideas that they're informed by the purpose of why those questions are meaningful, we know why we've picked those questions.
And that brings us back to UX research, whether it's generative research or whether it's evaluative research. I mean it's very hard to get a good usability take on a prototype or an early stage or even a launched product if you don't know what tasks you want people to do. And if you can't validate that you are trying to help ensure that a certain aspect or a certain workflow or task flow in a product is useful and usable or usable, not useful, that's a different set. But it is very usable that if you just say, Hey, go and play around with this for a while, you're not going to get that information. So that context, that protocol is crucial.
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah, a hundred percent. Yeah, the protocol is almost the question in this analogy that you're giving, this idea that creative exchanges like breathing makes a lot of sense. And I think in the context that you'll be very familiar with, which is say fine arts for example, often at least the idea that I have there is that it's a solo practitioner and the creative exercise is breathing with themselves. But in the business context that's often not the case. And I know that you've we're going to get a little risque here, I know that in the past you've described creative exchanges in a commercial setting and slightly different use a slightly different analogy. And you've said, I also like to think about ideas a little bit like sex. And that obviously makes everyone's ears pricks up it. She certainly did mine, but you made a very funny and very valid point. How are great creative exchanges, great sex?
Kate Rutter:
Well, you wanna have a lot of it, you want it to be with great people and hopefully you wanna have something as a result of it. Although great sex and great kids don't always go together, we know that. But you want it to have some kind of outcome, hopefully joy and happiness all around. That's a, that's from the Way Back machine. The article that I had visualized of that the inspired the talk where that quote happened was by Teresa Emma Belay, who's a creativity researcher at Harvard University. And she was talking about how to create a creative culture, but it was actually a Harvard Business Review article about how to kill a creative culture. And she used that the things that we would recognize as being creativity killers as a lens by which to create the positive version of that spectrum. And I read that on a plane and it took me two and a half years to actually create the visual that resulted in and it was worth it because the whole time that the structure of those ideas remained kind of itchy.
And I was also in a company, I was an adaptive path at the time where we were instantiating a lot of those abstracted ideas into real ways that the teams functioned. And so seeing that we could take general broad principles of creative culture and then start to look at how individually as team members or as cult as managers or whatever role you is, start to put in place real world behaviors, tools, processes that reinforced and allowed for that was a worthy investment of ideas. It was incredibly brilliant article and I just couldn't get it outta my head, but I wanted to take it further and I couldn't take it further when it was locked into only words on an article. And so I needed to find a visual way to componentize it or atomize it so that I could look at each of those pieces individually and see how real world procedures in a company enable or deflate creative activity.
Brendan Jarvis:
So what's an example of how a culture can be created and fed and supported to lead to better creative outcomes?
Kate Rutter:
A couple that I think many companies use is just maintaining an open space for learning whether, and I love the lunch brown bag, I don't know that we are doing that as much. I know that there's donut on Zoom, which is a product people use to get to know each other as team members. But I really miss the brown bag culture that I've had in a few of the organizations I've been a part of, which is someone invites someone in to come talk about something interesting, they're like many conferences. And just that opening up of those ideas breaks the routine and keeps things, keeps the it aerates, it's like good soil is aerated and it keeps aerating the idea space in a company or a group. And I love that. I think that's a simple one, but it's fairly incredibly useful. Another one is allowing people to choose the work they do.
Not as easy. And really when a consultancy, this is where I think it takes best form because there is a practitioner penning Fisher who I had the pleasure of working with. And he said, when I am leading a project, when I'm a practitioner on a project, I wake up in the middle of the night and think, how am I going to solve this design problem when I'm a leader on a project, I wake up in the middle of the night and think, how am I going to work with the stakeholders so that we come to agreement on this problem? That's a different set of skills and a different set of challenges and certainly a different set of stressors. But what was great about that is that in many consultancies, once you're a project lead, that's all you're ever going to do. And the fatigue of all those decisions, unless you're some egos where you have to be in control all the time and those are out there too.
But being able to be a practitioner within someone else's leadership structure is incredibly informative. We don't often get to see other leaders being leadery unless you're in a individual contributor or a team participant role. But if it feels like it's a loss of status or a loss of money or a loss of role, loss of authority loss of credibility to go back into a practitioner role, then we're not going to do it cuz people aren't. So being able to pick your work and sometimes pick work that might not be at the same level that you have done in the past is a great way for amplifying that creativity of the team and individuals.
Brendan Jarvis:
And it also sounds like the culture, the overall pervading organizational culture being permissive of that and not having any shame or stigma attached to that in terms of the way that it's designed into the way in which the work happens.
Kate Rutter:
And I think that's partially what, again, back to the hierarchy or the constantly advancing culture, if you feel like you are moving up in a company and it has a hierarchical responsibility and role, it gets very politically, financially and personally risky to admit that you don't know something. And so it creates this anaco chamber of overconfidence that I think can be very tricky. Now that's one standard business kind of mechanism. There's other more collaborative cultures for sure. And I know Peter Holtz has done quite a bit of work with Kristen Skinner and a few others about organizational design so that those structures, we have different opportunities because design I don't think works super well in a, you know, decide and they implement kind of world. We've already covered that. But it's that sense of if you're going to give up a lot by saying you don't know, you'll never say that. And I think the inner story we tell ourselves that we do know when we don't, creates an overconfidence that can have really big problems
Brendan Jarvis:
Understand it adaptive path that you almost tried to shake that fear of being wrong out of the culture by one of these practices that you were just talking about, brown bags and other things. I think it was called Five Minute Madness.
Kate Rutter:
It is, and it came from the Information Architect conference. I think Jesse James Garrett brought that in or Peter, there's so many people who'd been long standing as the emergence of IA information architecture happened and the IA Institute and the conference that resulted from that was such a flourishing of ideas, idea sharing, culture making, et cetera. And the five minute madness was, I was started years before I ever got to go to that conference where you say something and then there's five minutes someone makes a statement that they don't believe is true or that they believe might not be true. It's usually not a question, I've seen it done both ways, but I think the questions feel more, they just feel more defensive. Why do you think blah blah blah. So you make a statement, an assertion and then for five minutes people can talk about it and you can say kind of anything about that.
And one of them that happened, we would do it at our team meetings at Adaptive Path and one of them that was up was usability testing should be done on every single project. So there was a lot of conversation about that because whether or not, because it wasn't done on every single project, but that was a conversation. So things that you would feel afraid to say in an unprotected unsupported environment could be said there. And that was good for us to experience and good for us to witness and good for us to make space for. It was never comfortable, but it was always informative.
Brendan Jarvis:
It's interesting you say it was never comfortable and I can see that there's a separation and organizations between the things that they want to do, these activities like five minute badness and people's level of engagement with those activities. Now I don't wanna assume too much here, but I get the sense having spoken to a number of people who worked at Adaptive Path, now I get the sense that there was a very strong relationship between what people contributed in those sessions and how they felt about the company in a positive sense. And I'm curious to understand from you, what was it about Adaptive Path that enabled people in those sessions, like Five Minute Madness when they have to take a risk and it's uncomfortable, what gave them the confidence to do that and to be in those situations in an open way that was actually going to be useful and not just performative to the company?
Kate Rutter:
That's a good question. I can only respond is a use case of one on that. I think one of the benefits of the companies that it consistently tried to maintain it being a human oriented place to work, not just for good reasons or good moral reasons and ethical ones, but also it was the nature of the work we were doing caring about the humans. And so that said, it wasn't as challenging as many because there wasn't a lot of diversity, there was gender diversity and there was I think about the faces of different perspectives. So different faiths, different ages, different choices such as career children, different ethnicities, cultural backgrounds and skin color and then sexual identity, sexual preference sexual behavior, et cetera. So if you think about those as an acronym of faces, I believe the most robust communities come when all of those life experiences are drawn on.
And adaptive path did not have a lot of that. So it was a fairly close circle of thinkers in that and in some ways that made it a lot easier cuz what was risky was not super risky because it wasn't all that different. It was almost always more focused around the nature of the work, which we were all shared to. But I think what did create the sense of safety with it is that for as much as possible things that were said were tried to make true. So it felt like there was that walk the talk idea in any culture, I think when it becomes so obvious and so glaring that the talk and the walk are so far away from each other that there's no trusted environment there that I think people want to commit to because you can't trust what gets said and what actually happens and it's betrayal really.
And that's and hypocrisy and that's really hard to live with because it's so inconsistent. So I think that being able to feel like a culture of safety is probably not ever something that we can ever guarantee. We talk about this a lot in classroom dynamics. I don't like the term classroom, but in creating a learning environment there's a lot of important thinking and techniques around creating a culture of safety. And fundamentally the ethos of that is absolutely unassailably true, but you can't guarantee safety. You can create a place where people might be comfortable being brave or safe when they're not comfortable being brave. But you can't keep everyone safe cuz we can't control each other to that degree, much to the chagrin of many people who would like to control each other. So I think that that was, but being able to see behavior in actual decisions and follow up and form, I think goes a long way towards that trust. And therefore people take risks.
Brendan Jarvis:
And that starts at an early age. I'm very conscious as a parent of a now four and a half year old that what I say and what I do, I have to be very careful about what I say because if what I do doesn't align with what I say, then what kind of message am I actually sending Teddy, my son? And we are clued into that as children, we watch and we observe and we try to understand, well thinking of my own childhood here, try to understand what's at, what's actually going on with those people in authority and this case our parents. And it's very jarring when the reality doesn't align with what's being, with what's being said. Before we move on to something different, I just want to dive into one more thing here with you on creative culture. And that's something that you said that sounded to me at least might be at odds with a fast moving product culture.
And the reason for that is that the types of organizations that, and I don't wanna go on a limb here, most of us are working in here, are operating in a environment that seems to be changing fairly rapidly. And you said goals that don't shift and time for exploration, those are the things that research has shown is really important to foster a creative practice, freshness and liveliness. So thinking about that and thinking about the environment that we're in, is there a tension here between what's going on at any given time within the wider economy, the established business practices of whatever corporate or enterprise that we're we are operating in, big or small? And what is actually optimal for creativity?
Kate Rutter:
That is a big, big question. So maybe I'll piece away at a couple at aspects of it, you know, should probably add to the list under context and purpose, also tempo. I think that's one of the major things that shapes, that's a shaper that really has effects on how we think and what we do and what happens as a result. The breakneck pace, I used to find so much energy with that and be constantly pushing it faster and faster. And I think there's good reasons to do it. First of all, if you have the closing, the timeline between input and output and feedback and response is makes for smaller loops and therefore you're less likely to kinda get out of sync. That was the big principle around lean startup is when you're, you're actually releasing smaller things and with more judicious set of criteria. And so you see how they actually work in the world and then you make adaptations based on that.
And for a long time, big top-down design was design the whole system. And I have done plenty of those myself. And then by the time just the mechanisms of the complexity of a big system gets released, the context has shifted enough that it's not there any longer. So I think this idea of goals that don't shift is important, but that doesn't mean they have to be shifting goals forever. I mean goals do shift because progress happens and the world goes on and time happens, but I think the most important goals not to shift. The ones that I've felt most confident contributing towards are really little goals where the timeline to implementation or release and the objective are very small and close together. And then the big goals, what is this entity or this company really founded on the basis of what's the vision, what's that kind of north star?
And if that sways too much, then I think you get whole teams of people who are just turned through because their work doesn't never release, you know, feel like you can't contribute cuz your work doesn't matter. And I've worked on projects where I intentionally wanted to design more and more and more before any feedback and that overall shots on goal is not gone as well as to try and design smaller things. And I'm not really necessarily talking about incremental design changes, but at least smaller pieces of the work instead of one task flow or one workflow through a product instead of individual screen-based adaptations and changes.
Brendan Jarvis:
That makes a lot of sense. That added clarifier of tempo I think was the thing that I was missing there. And that's really, really clear. Speaking of tempo, let's shift tempo now and let's talk about the future. We've been reflecting a little bit here on the, I suppose the present and the past and I feel like now is a good time to think about the future and to talk about that. A few years ago you spoke about, I think it was in 2019, about your observations of practitioners who are now from the first wave, if you like, of UX now entering the latest stages of their careers. And you said about this, and I'll quote you again, I think it's interesting to see really the first cusp of practitioners hitting what I would call retirement age, getting to the point where maybe their prime growth years might be behind them and yet our field doesn't really allow for that. So picking up on the theme of tempo here, I suppose what is it that our field doesn't allow for?
Kate Rutter:
Well, but I don't recall saying that exact quote. So it's important that I rehear that and be responsible for the thoughts that might have inspired or that inspired that quote. I'll admit that I fall into some of that arrogance thing. That UX is a new field and we did all this pioneering and et cetera, but it is one of many, many, many fields that have grown quickly and then stabilized over time. Every field probably does that. And I think UX right now is probably in digital product design is many fields. It's no longer the one thing but there was a whole early group of folks who were playing and using the digital technologies of the internet that hadn't been available really before. Certainly broadly that were playing with that, that then used that as their primary livelihood for a long period of time. And I think Jesse spoke well about this and his talk with you about now there's thousands and hundreds of thousands of people in the field and that's so much richer, it's so much wonderful, but sometimes the romanticism or the poetry or the uniqueness of it feels like it shifts, becomes more known.
And what we don't know is what that offboarding, that offboarding looks like for practitioners. We know that, I do know predominantly that probably a pensioned livelihood is not the same fin. We're not going to get pensioned off because companies don't function that way predominantly in the United States any longer. Maybe there was a wealth event if you were very, very lucky and you might ride on that for a while. But basically how are we going to live and how are we going to contribute and how are we going to emotionally be sustained when now the risk is that you're like, Hey kids, get off my lawn and shaking fist at clouds. You don't wanna become old grumbling people and how can we still be useful and contribute? And I think what I've seen is the trend is people are making choices to harvest their UX experience and skills and networks and relationships and put them somewhere else like in coaching or in therapy or in books about and work about friendship and relationships within companies inclusion and ethics.
So some of these much more, less hands on, less tangible topics I think is where that the cusp of early contributors is really moving towards. And some are those leave going to not leave the field but just move on to something very, very, very different. I don't know what retirement looks like, it's still a little early for that but that's a whole different topic. But as far as how to maintain contributions, I think it's moving more into the human people relationship side for most folks. And I wonder about that. I think there's a lot of other opportunities where people can spread the skills learned in a UX practice and do different things.
Brendan Jarvis:
So I don't like this term obsolescence. Well I've used it so maybe I have to stick with it now. But this idea that when you get to the latter stages in your career that there is something inherent in the pace of technology that isn't kind or not necessarily doesn't recognize the value of people who have been in the field for a long time in the same way that it might some new superstar younger designer for example, there's something in that, an ageism is definitely a thing that's not just isolated to user experience. But I'm curious about your thoughts on this cuz it seems like you feel like there's an opportunity here, it's just a matter of how you look at it. And I dunno if I'm drawing a line between two dots, they don't exist. But similar to what you were articulating when we first started speaking about the attitude that you took when you were entering the job market in a bad economy, that there's very much, I get the sense of it depends on the way that you look at it and you seem to adopt a very positive, and not in the Tony Robbins throwaway type of positivity, but a very, let's see what I can make of this lens to this.
And I understand that for a while there you had an aspiration to be a truck driver and that when you turned 40 apparently you wanted to leave what you're doing behind by a big rig and drive the roads and then driverless trucks happened. How was driverless trucks a good thing in the end for you?
Kate Rutter:
Well, I still long, we're not all driverless trucks. I still long for the life on the road, but I wonder about the driverless trucks is when something, a piece of work that used to be needed to be figured out is fully figured out and there's enough rules and regulations and standards to it then doesn't need to be a human to do it. And I think the answer's probably no. I mean it's certainly in a late stage capitalist environment or humans are expensive and so that doesn't seem to be the best if they're not really required. But I don't have a lot to say about the driverless trucks and the trunking except that I was just thinking about that yesterday and the long of a dream that didn't happen. And I don't wanna romanticize truck driving. That is a hard job and when worthy of a lot of respect.
But it's also just the, for some reason always wanted that in my life. But as you were talking earlier, what happens about obsolescence and it's funny because I look at obsolescence, I really don't planned obsolescence from product because again, I think that that's a late stage capitalist extortion method. But obsolescence I think has a wild and rich beauty. Maybe we don't need to be all on all the time. That's been a little more open to hearing about aging and what happens in aging and some models for that. That used to really scare me and I would push them away and I didn't wanna think about them and now I need to think about them. But there's also a lot of just different tempo and beauty to that and vulnerability, whether or not we want it. And so I wonder how much of that would've been different and interesting for me to be more embracing of earlier in my career in life. Maybe I would mean I've do love looking at clouds, but I spent most of my career looking at screens and the clouds were maybe in the windows 95 backpack or
Brendan Jarvis:
Something. I remember those clouds. Yeah.
Kate Rutter:
And so there is something about being out in the world, just being that I wish all of our practitioners, all of our humans had the space for if they are in a very fast moving driving environment. Cuz I think that can, it's exhilarating and exciting but it's also it's very waring and burnout is real and it's not pretty and it's very hard to recover from. So mixing things up and allowing for different spaces, whether that's longer scale and a sabbatical kind of mindset, I think that organizations that offer that sabbatical kind of can reinvest in their people differently. Or whether it's just taking your vacation company cultures that have where not taking vacation is a badge of honor are like that is not a good thing. And one of the things that I used to, it's so funny, the backlash on this that was a principle about vacations at a couple places I've been is that if you didn't take it, you lost it. People are like, wow, that's so retributive, right? That's awful. But the answer is like you take your vacation, you have two weeks a year, take it, don't bank it, take it. So if you're going to lose it, you'll take it. And it turned out to be again, one of those unexpected design triggers that opened up people taking their vacation, paid time for work, you should take it. So I think the US has a very different work culture than other communities globally and other people are doing it better than we are.
Brendan Jarvis:
Well I was just about to say we have four weeks of annual leave by law in New Zealand and that is a very good thing. And you cannot be paid enough to burn out. There is no price that someone can pay you that warrants working yourself into the ground. And so I really hear what you're saying Kate, and I think it's a far more positive culture to develop, take that leave and to not see it as some sort of disservice to the organization. I think that's a very unhealthy view and an unhealthy culture to operate in. And you're also making me remember something that I learned on my recent holiday to Australia, which is not the same country as New Zealand. In case you were wondering, people who are listening the aboriginal people in Australia, which are the first nations people of Australia, they have a practice of burning the bush as far as I understand.
So the trees and the shrub and the point of burning the bush, and it also happens organically in some areas is that the burning down of that bush, that scrub, that forest actually promotes the rejuvenation of the forest of the bush and leads to more habitable environments for the Flo and fauna that occupy space. So it was just something that came to mind as you were describing that. Now Kate, after 134 episodes of what's wrong with UX, the podcast that you co-host with your friend Laura Klein, you called it quits on the podcast recently, but it's not just quits that you called on the podcast, is
Kate Rutter:
It? No, there was an opportunity to just have a pretty significant life change. I think opportunity's not maybe the best word. There was a requirement, there was a necessity to have a shift in my life and really was at a crossroads. But I doubled down on the world of metrics and product, which is for my heart has been for a few years. And that was going okay and then I made a very sudden very definitive choice to not continue to work within a UX or a design role either for myself or with clients or teaching or in a company. And so in a nutshell, I'm trading screens for greens. I'm getting out in the physical world and looking at how land care and management and plants and nature need better human interactions now. And I think the degree to which the ID other nature and had plant blindness, not even seeing or appreciating what I was looking at is really quite stunning to me.
So I spent most of my career inside with things and ideas and I am now hoping to spend the next phase of my career outside with an equal mix of 30% dirt time, 30% desk time cuz that's how a lot of our work happens in the world nowadays. And 30% discovery time which would involve wondering and staring at clouds and experimenting and doing things. So it was kind of a mix between, I think pandemic changed a lot of us and shifted our priorities in ways we could have never predicted. I think that one of the saving graces of mental health that I had during that time was doubling down on a visual community. I've been a long time member of, which is a nature journaling community, which is observing things in the world of nature and using pen and pencil and sometimes watercolor to document and ask questions about them. It's very much a curiosity practice. I call it documented curiosity instead of drawing botanical illustrations. And that is what got me through the hardest times of the pandemic. But there was also a big change in my family. I lost my dad.
That was a big rip, big rift in the system. And so I recognize that what it was had been happening in the past wasn't going to work for a livelihood. And now when I think of livelihood, I add a Y to it. I wanna be a lively in my hood. And so I refactored as a family, we've refactored our finances to try and allow for less earning potential cuz UX has a pretty good earning potential and to make a different kind of contribution. So maybe that's pre or proto retirement, I don't know, don't feel very retiring about it. I feel pretty aggressive. And the learning curve is steep and exciting. It's going into a world of environmental education, naturalist work, restoration work, all of which is very well understood, but still a lot of areas for experimentation and growth. And that has seemed more like a calling, going back to the career choice of, or the job choice of, gee, that sounds like fun.
I really wanted to change. I didn't realize it, but what I really need now is not that sounds fun, that sounds important. And going from a community of practice to a community of purpose. And those I think can happen to anyone at any point in their career. I'm embarrassed I waited a little too long for me maybe, but being able to be in the world is part of nature and to heal some of those rifts and the othering that we've had for the natural world and to look at the extractive quality of business and culture as we know it is I think is the next terrain. So that's where I'm spinning my time. It's funny cuz I really know nothing about plants and I knew nothing about plants. I know a lot more now cuz I've been spinning last year or so learning about them and learning from them, which is even more important. It felt more like a calling in the same way that early work in computing felt like a calling instead of just a job. And I think one of the reasons you recognize a calling is that you feel unprepared for it. And so the first step is to get oriented and start being better prepared.
Brendan Jarvis:
The passing of your father sounded like the catalyst, but looking at and looking at the previous things that you'd said, I think when you were around 51, so I think it was about three and a half years ago, you said at 51. It's been interesting to look back and think in some ways I still feel like I'm not quite adulting in my professional career as I've always been curious about the things that haven't been fully adopted, but that vanguard can also get tiring. So it almost sounds like that your enthusiasm for the field had start, started to wane by that point. And I'm really fascinated by this community of practice versus community of purpose. And I think if anyone has listened to several of particularly the recent episodes of this show, this is something that I've explored with practi seasoned practitioners in the field. And I know you mentioned, for example, Jesse, he's gone into coaching instead of design leadership directly within organizations and there's a number of others. But this idea that it sounds like almost like the purpose that you initially found in user experience is no, was no longer or is no longer there for you.
Kate Rutter:
I would say that's true. It's a hard admission to make and I wanna be thoughtful and not cavalier about the work that still needs to be done and is important work and not doing it. I don't think of, I'm trying not to think of as an abandonment that work is important and matters, but there's other work that's important and matters too. And there's a lot of amazing practitioners carrying on the work in the field that I got to participate in for many years. And that's no longer, it's just so strangely, deeply held as a conviction that is no longer your place. And it almost feels like something is outside of me is telling me that. And I'm like, okay, I'll show up somewhere else different. And it seems like maybe with a lot of the climate crisis and a lot of people who have been living clueless about nature of which I was maybe my learning experience into appreciating and understanding and shaping my life so that there's more stewardship of the natural world could be helpful to others as well.
But right now I can't even think about being helpful. I just need to be informed. And that is its own learning and growth. I will say one thing that the tempo of nature oriented work is very different and we don't define and we don't race, that we are actually through climate change, escalating that and making those tempos different. But really the real tempo of the seasonal changes and the phenomenology of how things work and the interaction of ecosystems, those are things we can observe and learn from. But we're only very one very, very small part as humans. We're only one very small part of that. And I think that humility in that small place and that participation and a greater scheme of the kinship of nature is something that is really important, something that I need to spend my time with.
Brendan Jarvis:
Given that you no longer feel that depth of connection to the work of UX, was it a bit weird for you discussing all those things that we talked about before we started talking about what's next for you?
Kate Rutter:
It's so interesting you say that because I was in it, you know, brought up good memories and good thoughts and things that I've spent years working through and with. So it does feel certainly an integrated part, but it also feels a little bit like having a dinner with an ex-boyfriend or an ex-partner, right? Good times over right [laugh] like we're not going to continue to see each other.
Brendan Jarvis:
So there's going to be no, there's going to no XX going on here.
Kate Rutter:
Yeah, no, there's no, no. So I think, and it does feel sad, it feels like a goodbye. I'm very blessed and that many of the relationships and the people who I absolutely admire and enjoy and have learned so much from and still learn from are still in that world. You don't say goodbye to everything but slowly. I am noticing over time my participation in groups and newsletters and watching videos and the podcasts and is certainly shifting. And in fact, I think when you and I first started to talk in conversation, it was with a recognition that I didn't know how helpful or useful I would be in this conversation because that wasn't going to be where I was being putting my efforts in the future. But there's a lot there to harvest, there's a lot of past that. And I think what's interesting is to think, help people to recognize, yes, there is life after UX because we didn't know that there was or not.
I thought I'd be doing UX till I died. And in some regard I will be because being all the things that we learn and practices and methods and tools and approaches are still incredibly helpful for participating in any community. And I think that's a real, that was something I would never have predicted to happen. I still read Jesse's book, I still read a lot of the new books and also the old books. If you want new ideas, read an old book. And I go back to some of the very early works and I'm reframing those through, how do I see that? Through contributing to a very different field and the broader world in a very different way. And I'm getting a lot of insight out of that. So that's great. So it's super fun to shun jump ship, but maybe not for everybody all the time.
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah, you just, you're jumping ship but you're still jumping it with some of your old clothes on so to speak.
Kate Rutter:
One would hope. One would hope. There's a lot of swimming. I know that,
Brendan Jarvis:
Kate, this might be a bit of a strange question to pose to someone who is moving into a new chapter in their career, but I understand that in your career in UX you have lived by a number of principles and that you adopted these principles fairly on in that career journey. So just thinking about this as somewhat of a parting gift perhaps for the people that are listening or watching to us today, what is the principle you feel that has served you the best?
Kate Rutter:
This one, I think the came out of work, but I really only put it into words when I was working at Leor and it's, it's really about learning in public and finding the bravery to do that and not, and being okay with not knowing what you don't know and finding those questions. But if I'm extremely reluctant and even embarrassed to show something, then I'm doing it right. And if I'm comfortable or proud of it, then I've waited too long. And if I feel stuck to try and go faster, make it a little bit smaller, make it a little bit doing, I recently did a commissioned portrait of women in the nature field and I found it daunting. It was a large scale watercolor. I hadn't done something like that before. I had a personal relationship. It was high stakes, didn't wanna screw it up. And I just told myself, I'm going to make six of them.
Whether or not I think one is working, I'm just going to make six. And so I did. And that actually allowed me to kind of break through that. But I showed them to the client when if she didn't have the ability to kind of envision what they could be, it would've been like, fire this person because it's never going to happen. But the conversations that resulted from that were what made the work actually work. And so the first three were rough and ready, but the last three all offered really good options and I had to go fast to do that. So again, tempo comes back, but I think that's the fail equals win checklist. That's why I think about
Brendan Jarvis:
It. Okay. That's such an important message to conclude our conversation with. I've really enjoyed our chat today. It's a shame that we have to bring it to an end. Although we have gone 20 minutes over our time, it's been so engrossing. Thank you for being so kind and generous with your stories and insights for today, but also for the past 20 years that you were in the field of UX, you've been such a wonderful contributor and all the very best for the next phase in your career.
Kate Rutter:
Well thank you. It's been an honor to talk to you. You're a lovely host.
Brendan Jarvis:
Thank you, Kate. You're most welcome. Definitely my pleasure. And if people want to keep up with you and what you are doing now what is the best way for them to do that if indeed you even want people to do that, Kate?
Kate Rutter:
Yeah, I think the best place to keep an eye on is my personal site intelleto.com. It's been with me before consulting roles and now it will stay with me afterwards. It's my one little corner of the internet. I might make recommendation. I'm at Kate Rutter on Instagram. My Mastodon presence isn't quite really there yet cuz I don't understand that product. That'll be a fun learning curve. But my socials are, I think LinkedIn, I'm always hanging around on LinkedIn. I'm not super active but probably my personal site, if you just wanna check in once every six months when I kind of update it, and maybe I'll get a little bit more time based on updating my blogs on that one too.
Brendan Jarvis:
Perfect. Thank you Kate. And to everyone who's tuned in, it's been great having you here with us. Everything that Kate and I have covered will be in the show notes, including where you can find Kate as you just mentioned. And all of the things that we've spoken about will be chaptered specifically on the YouTube video. If you've enjoyed the show and you want to hear more great conversations like this with world class leaders in UX, design and product management at depth, don't forget to leave a review on the podcast. Those are really useful for helping people to understand what's going on here, subscribe so it turns out weekly. And also don't be afraid to pass the show along to someone else that you feel would get value from these conversations. If you wanna reach out to me, you can find me on LinkedIn, just search for Brandon Jarvis, and there's also a link at the bottom of the show notes to my LinkedIn profile. Or you can head on over to thespaceinbetween.co.nz. That's thespaceinbetween.co.nz. And until next time, keep being brave.

Kate Rutter

Cultivating a Culture & Career of Creativity

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Who is Kate Rutter?

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