Jen Briselli
Ambiguity, Systems Thinking, and Design
In this episode of Brave UX, Jen Briselli delves into design’s parallels with extreme metal 🤘, systems thinking, and creativity, sharing insights on embracing ambiguity 😱 and future-proofing a design career 🦉.
Highlights include:
- How did teaching physics shape your entry into design?
- How does preparation enhance the creativity of craft?
- What is over-indexing on the advice of other design practitioners?
- How can hierarchies and silos sometimes be good things?
- Where should designers get started with systems thinking?
Who is Jen Briselli?
Jen is the Co-Founder and Principal of Topology, an experience strategy consultancy focused on improving experiences for customers, patients, and learners 🌟.
At Topology, Jen helps organizations like Humana and Merck integrate human-centered experience strategy with systems thinking and complexity science 🌐, enabling them to make more confident decisions, build resilient organizations, and achieve meaningful outcomes.
Before founding Topology, Jen spent 8 years at Mad*Pow, a leading Boston-based experience design consultancy. She started as a Senior Experience Designer and finished as Chief Design Strategy Officer 🚀.
Alongside her consulting work, Jen is an Adjunct Professor at Northeastern University, where she teaches experience design 🎓. She also teaches in the Master of Design: Design Innovation program at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design.
Jen holds a Master of Design and Bachelor of Arts in Physics from Carnegie Mellon University, and a Master of Science in Education from Walden University 📚.
Transcript
- Jen Briselli:
- Almost everything you do will have unintended consequences. And the first rule is to just acknowledge that it doesn't mean they're bad.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Hello, and welcome to another episode of Brave UX. I'm Brendan Jarvis, managing founder of The Space InBetween, the behavior-based UX research partner for enterprise leaders who need an independent perspective to align hearts and minds, and also the home of New Zealand's first and only world-class, human-centered research and innovation lab. You can find out more about me and what we do at thespaceinbetween.co.nz.
- Here on Brave UX though, it's my job to help you to keep on top of the latest thinking and important issues affecting the field of design. I do that by unpacking the stories, learnings, and expert advice of a diverse range of world-class leaders.
- My guest today is Jen Briselli. Jen is the co-founder and principal of Topology, an experience strategy consultancy focused on improving experiences for customers, patients, and learners. At Topology. Jen helps organisations like Humana and Merck integrate human-centered experience strategy with systems thinking and complexity science, enabling them to make more confident decisions, build resilient organisations and achieve meaningful outcomes.
- Before founding Topology, Jen spent eight years at Mad*Pow, a leading Boston-based experience design consultancy. She started as a senior experience designer and finished as chief design strategy officer alongside her consulting work.
- Jen is an adjunct professor at Northeastern University where she teaches experience design. She also teaches in the Master of Design Innovation programme at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Rumour has it, she also used to be a high school physics teacher. More on that soon.
- Jen holds a master of design and bachelor of Arts and Physics from Carnegie Mellon University and a master of science and education from Walden University. And now she's here with me for this conversation on Brave UX. Jen, a very warm welcome to the show.
- Jen Briselli:
- Thank you very much for having me. And the dog already made his appearance, so hopefully he disrupted. You got the mute.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It's all good.
- Jen Briselli:
- Your button's ready to go.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- The mute button, we will deploy the mute button. I want to know something that you've said about your passion, if that's the right word for metal, which was, and I'll quote you now, I like some pretty extreme metal that people are going to think is weird. So I'm curious now, what is an example of that extreme kind of metal that people would find weird and why would they find it weird?
- Jen Briselli:
- Dude, you were just coming in hot, aren't you? We love it. I mean I what I mean, and probably when I said that, I can't even remember when I would've said it, it must've been another interview, but most people when they hear the word metal, they think of probably stuff that's relatively accessible. And you can hear it on the radio. And this isn't about me being like, I'm too cool for that. But there's this progression I think a lot of people have in a lot of things, right? The types of music they like, the other kind of interests they have that as you get deeper into something, you develop an ear for hearing things that you don't hear or see or whatever metaphor you want to use for the craft or the example. And so with music, it's the same for me with metal in high school if I liked Metallica and metal bands that most people have heard of, eventually you start to get an ear for and start to appreciate nuances and things that others are going to hear as noise.
- So to answer your question directly, finally, I listened to a lot of death metal and some black metal and some other sub genres that if you are a norm, you're like, I don't know what those are, they just sound weird. But really the sub genres of metal that are a little bit more extreme are simply more extreme. Because I think if a person who's never really heard them listens to them, you just hear a wall of noise. But if you listen to them enough, I can listen to a very noisy death metal and cookie monster style growl vocals. And I really like it because I can hear a lot of what the musicians are doing. There's a lot of incredible stuff that's going on in that music. I mean, of course it's aggressive, but it's just very nuanced and there's a lot of subtlety to it.
- And I have a buddy that has this saying that he's like, nobody just starts out listening to noise. There's an actual genre of music that is noise. There are people who like noise. I'm not one of them, but nobody just jumps from listening to whatever pop is on the radio when they're in seventh grade to listening to other more extreme forms of music. It's always a progression. So there's the answer. When I say extreme, I think it's the kind of stuff that if I put it on a lot of folks who are not really interested in metal or punk or other forms of music on that sort of end of the spectrum, they just hear a wall of noise. But what I hear is some really interesting and complicated things happening. And a lot of it has a bit of a progressive for my musician friends, a bit of a progressive feel to it. So time signatures that change a lot music that's doing something kind of interesting and isn't just playing a straightforward four beat all the way through. So
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It almost sounds to me like it's listening for you to that type of metal or the progression that you've gone on in your metal listening journey sounds almost a little bit like training, and I'm not sure why, but it sounds like you've been training yourself somehow through this exposure.
- Jen Briselli:
- I think that's true with one caveat, which is at least for me, and I think this is true for lots, it's not a conscious, I'm going to sit down and train for this. It's something that's happening organically over time, the way that normal human learning happens in context. And so yes, I would agree that what's happened as a result of me being interested in this genre is that I have trained my ears. I have trained the nature of my brain and my mental model of music to adjust and change and evolve over time. But it was, it's not a conscious I'm training, it's more like the training happens, the music is facilitating the training rather than I'm sitting down to train. And in that way, I think it also has meant, for example, you didn't ask this, but now we're on the tangent. If you think about metal, and most people I think can at least imagine if they're not into metal, they can at least conjure an example in their head, loud, aggressive guitars, whatever.
- And there are forms of metal and different sub genres of metal that pride themselves on being very technically clean and complicated. So lots of very fast notes and chord progressions like surgical precision in the drum beats and in the guitar notes and in the solos. And then that sort of sub-genre has taken off in a certain direction. And I'm finding myself increasingly less moved by it. And I have conversations lately where I'm like, why is this not interesting to me? It's more aggressive. It's a continued extension and evolution. But when I listen to some of that type of music, it doesn't have a soul to me because it's about the precision of the craft. It's about the surgical technique, but there isn't a soul behind it. And I think there's a really interesting metaphor there. So we can unpack that sometime if you'd like, but I'm just going to leave it right there, which is, I think some folks are very interested in the technique and the craft and the surgical precision with which something happens. And then I think there's also kind of the messy human part behind it. And that second part is what I enjoy. So the sub genres of metal that I partake in are the ones that I think are probably a little messier and less precise, we'll put it that way.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It's almost like your taste has become more discerning over time and thinking about this distinction, you're drawing between the surgically precise forms of metal and the sort of messier, more soulful, perhaps alternate more room for making mistakes, other types of metal. It seems similar to how I felt, at least initially listening to some electronic forms of music having come from a punk or more raw teenage musical style experience into then looking at things like drum and bass at the time. And at first I was really, I didn't feel it because I thought, oh, this is just manufactured by machines. But you're right, there is something really interesting in that notion of the surgical precision and then the soulful more human element that's in music. And I kind of was thinking when you were describing that it's almost like this broader debate that's going on within design at the moment between the benefits of people doing research with other people and then the kind of crowd that's really excited about the role that AI can play in research and that tension that's starting to surface within us there. I dunno, this wasn't where I was intending to go, but I mean, how do you feel about that? Is there a parallel between what you're experiencing in music and what you're also observing in the wider discourse and design at the moment?
- Jen Briselli:
- For sure. And whether or not it's easy to draw in that example, because a whole kind of separate piece to that around using AI to create synthetic users and things is a kind of separate conversation, which we can get into. But yeah, I do very much think there are some interesting parallels because there are, and there's no shade here. There are people who their entire conception of design their entire as a practitioner, what they care about is the precision, the craft. I keep saying craft, but I meaning in the literal actual technique of the making, and I am doing this, but I mean digitally as well, obviously. And so there's some folks that that's what they live for. And just having that component of the making process be as tidy and polished and perfect as possible is literally what gets them out of bed. And I think that there are people for whom it's much more a question of the human, messy, imperfect by design, just keeping space open for lots of different sort of forms and interpretations, which means the actual design itself might need to be fuzzy or imperfect or clumsy on purpose.
- I think that there's an interesting tension between those two ways of approaching design that most of the best design happens with both of those period. With music, with anything I can say, oh, there's certain forms of technical metal that I find to be soulless. There are a lot of metal bands that are very technically precise and play insanely, surgically, crazy, fast solos, but there is soul. That's what makes it good is that I like that it as both. I think that to your point about the role of technology, I think increasingly technology is kind of either putting a spotlight on that or maybe teasing apart those two things in a way that we can kind of see their difference. I don't know if I'm, I'm sceptical of ai. I don't think what we call as AI is AI to begin with, but we can go down that rabbit hole if you want.
- But I think that AI just represents an extension of other forms of emerging technology that have already started to put that spotlight on the fact that design is whatever definition you want, the rendering of intent, creating current situations into future preferred ones, like whatever it is, involves both the actual technique and the making. And it involves the reality that it's a thing that by virtue of suddenly being in the world will never be the thing that was envisioned. It will be made imperfect through interaction. So as folks try to achieve one without the other or get more and more perfect through use of technology, they're going to bump up against the bigger gap between the two when the thing is in the world. And I've gotten very abstract, so I'll just pause there.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I think what I'm hearing is that you're saying the world is an inherently messy place. So when we try and force the machine metaphor into reality, it bumps up against the imperfect messy reality, the chaotic reality of what we're all experiencing.
- Jen Briselli:
- The world is imperfect and messy news at 11, my gosh, you've got me on this podcast to tell people that these are messy.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Sometimes we need a reminder of that. I certainly do. I'm one of these people that aligns the remotes on the coffee table, and I've had to learn to relax and appreciate it when other people don't align them quite the same way.
- Jen Briselli:
- Think about what you've just talked about, your instinct is to do it, and now you've learned to not always do it. I feel like there's an important, people love a jazz metaphor in this world. We want designing to be more like jazz where you can improvise and iterate and sense and respond instead of a more rigid band, orchestra or something other metaphor you want to use. Everyone loves that metaphor, but you got to remember, a jazz musician is not someone who just gets on stage and starts blowing through their instrument, doesn't know what they're doing, making stuff up. A jazz musician has trained with scales, has trained in music theory and technique. They probably know their instruments better than anybody they might play with in that role or with that instrument. And yet we just talk about how the band is willing to sense and respond, but you have to have something on which to graft the flexibility.
- You have to have the or. The sports metaphor is the same thing. You got to learn all the rules, have the matrix or the design grid first before you can start to deviate from it. And I think a lot of people try to skip that step. So a good jazz musician, a good jazz trio isn't just making stuff up. They've all trained and could probably play very regimented orchestra music. And only once they know all the rules can they now really successfully break the rules and break the rules in concert with their peers, reading each other's body language and they can be reading ahead of what's happening. So to really abuse this metaphor that's like this three or four part metaphor, I think that there is a level of you being a person who wants your remotes in order. You've got a brain that has a grid, great, and now the grid now, if you let the grid get a little loose, that's an evolution versus just being someone who's like, I never cared if the remotes were ever put in order. It's two different scenarios.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yes, it is. And when you were talking about that, I was thinking about the conference presentation I gave last week at Design Outlook in Australia, and my natural inclination was to write my presentation, rehearse it to the point where it became natural, which maybe that sounds a little weird, but that's just my way of embracing that gr in my brain and actually to the point with the material where it was like those jazz musicians possibly, it was almost part of me, although I was delivering it as a presentation, I was more comfortable with the material than I would've been if I was just trying to freestyle it without any of that regimented practise that went into the delivery.
- Jen Briselli:
- And I noticed that you said you rehearsed it, but you didn't write a script and follow a script. Doesn't sound like you rehearsed it enough to know it and have it be internalised, but then if you needed to go quote off script in the moment because that's just the way that your brain took it or you were reading the audience or whatever it would be, I think that's an important, a really subtle but important nuance.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah. I found that when things inevitably when you're on stage didn't go to plan, so for example, the introduction to my podcast guest, which happened directly after the presentation, wasn't as part of the presenter notes that were coming up on my feedback displays, and I checked this with the production company before I had that moment where I'm standing on stage, I'm using the clicker, things aren't happening. I had hoped they would happen, but because I felt so prepared, I was able to then freestyle a little bit with the audience while I gathered my thoughts in the background. And then it came back to me because I had prepared earlier and I was able to deliver the intro in a way that I felt hopefully no one would actually have understood that things weren't unfolding like I had hoped they would. What you're touching on there that not skipping, not skipping the practise, not trying to jump straight into the deep end and figure it out, although there's probably a role for that, but I think it comes in really handy in certain forms of craft and practise and design to actually have gone through learning the dance before you actually get on the dance floor is kind of helpful.
- Let's come back to something which is maybe it's a long bow that I'm drawing between your unconscious training and metal and something that you've said about learning. I just want to quote you now. So this is you talking about loving learning and you said, I like how that feels. I like having to learn in new domain and concept how it ties to mental models in new ways. I like that I get a dopamine rush out of it. It's on the level of I seek it. I was curious about when you remember, if you remember when you first felt that dopamine rush, what was it that you were learning or looking at or enjoying?
- Jen Briselli:
- I mean, it goes back as far as childhood, whatever. The first thing I, okay, let me think about it. Let me do the question justice. I mean I probably, it's certainly been true since I was young, but I would like to be able to give credit to good teachers or parents or whatever it would be. I know some of this is probably how my brain is wired and only really kind of coming to a sort of realisation in the last couple of years that there is a dopamine hit. I might be addicted to learning in a problematic way, I don't know. But probably those early memories are going to be things in school where we were studying something very abstract or strange and everybody's had some experience where something clicked, whatever early click. For me, I couldn't tell you, I don't have a first memory, but I would guess that probably I had enough of those experiences where something just made sense.
- And for me, a lot of times when for whatever reason I have a pretty easy time reading about or learning about something independently and then when I need to seek out either someone's perspective or get someone to answer some questions for me, then I will or seek extra information. But I know that's not true of all people. Everybody's got different brain wiring and learning styles and such, but I think that just when I realised that that was something I could do and I could do it on my own for the most part, and I didn't need to rely on other people for learning as a small child, I remember having that kind of wait, I can learn about stuff, and it was not at all tied to the actual role of being a student in school. While these experiences probably were happening mostly in school, I didn't feel like it was tied to a school student identity.
- It was really just a wait a minute, I can figure this thing out and figuring this thing out, unlock something else. Whether it gives me the power to do something or go somewhere or like, gosh, man, to be asked this. I can't even conjure in a specific example. There were definitely in high school physics, there were definitely a lot of those and math there, hard classes where you're doing calculus and you're not even using real numbers anymore, you're just using symbols and like that. But it was a much more emotional and less specific thing. It was just that a moment that wait a minute learning is you can't take it away from me. You can't stop me from learning. So that was cool.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Physics is, from my perspective, not being someone who's studied physics, but listening to you talk about it and from the lay person's understanding that I have of it, it seems like it's a fairly fundamental raw core domain to try and get to the bottom of things. You studied physics and then you went on to teach physics in high school for I think near enough a decade, and then you found design now. So that's like the TLDR of your career progression of how you got into design. And there's many things in there, so feel free to take this where you like, but some people might be looking at that or in the same or similar circumstances having spent 5, 10, 15 years maybe in another field or perhaps multiple fields and are considering getting into design or have recently entered design and maybe feeling like or thinking that that sounds like time wasted. How do you say it?
- Jen Briselli:
- So before I answer, I have to acknowledge that in 2024 gestures vaguely at everything, I don't know the answer to that anymore because the state of design, I don't even know what the word design means anymore. The state of UX, the state, that's another tangent. The existential crisis that design is having or that design has created for itself or that the world isn't foisting on design might change the nature of this answer, but my answer has always and probably will continue to be some flavour of nothing's a waste, none of it's a waste. Even if you realise you don't want to do anything that you've been doing for the past 10 years anymore, something has occurred over those 10 years that have meant the evolution of your perspective about yourself and what you want to do with your time. So no matter what, there's something in those, I'm just saying 10 years, there's something in that time that is valuable and led to adaptation and change.
- So now whether it's something you can put on your resume and call it a UX skill or sell it to an employer becomes a whole nother conversation. So I promise I don't always float up here in this abstract philosophical level. I got to get a job, man. I've had a lot of conversations with younger folks, earlier career folks who want to know like, Jen, how did you convince someone to hire you after you had been a high school teacher for 10 years and then you wanted to be a UX designer? The short answer is you tell the truth and you explain how it connects. And if you can't figure out how it connects, that's assignment number one. Spend some time introspecting figuring out why the hell you started doing what you started doing to begin with. Now looking back on it, how does it connect to what you want to do in the future? Figure out how to tell that story and test it with people, talk to people about it. And then as you get to talking to people who might hire you or who want to collaborate with you or who in some form want to be in community with you, it will become a really wonderful natural filter because the people who go that, none of that makes sense. You were a high school physics teacher for 10 years and now you're UX designer.
- Those aren't the people who are going to be good collaborators for me and vice versa. And again, no foul here. It's like, Hey man, this is fine. You'll find somebody else to collaborate with, you'll hire somebody else. But it's a nice filter. People will self-select into knowing and working with you when you can tell that story. And I know that there's a lot there that I'm hand waving to. It takes a little bit of work, and I had to figure out through trial and error, how to talk about my physics degree, my time as a classroom teacher being a physics teacher. Those were three different things. And then how that related to wanting to design other types of experiences. And now even today, people go, oh, it's interesting you have a physics degree. And that's kind of relevant now, especially because systems thinking is having a moment and my education and systems and complexity science goes all the way back to physics.
- But these threads, it's a braid, it's a multi-threaded braid your career and your life. So anything that you've spent time doing is one of those yarns or pieces of thread in the braid. You can't treat it like, okay, now that ends and this next piece starts. To me, it's just they're all braided together. And so truly, if anyone's actually listening to this and thinking about that exact scenario, like I am coming from a different career, I'm trying to make this transition. How do I talk about it? Your assignment is absolutely number one. Figure out how it connects for you and figure out how to tell that story in a way that others can understand and then it can make for a really rich kind of collaboration with the right people who understand it.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- There are so many things in there. There's systems thinking. I think you touched on the state of design and the unsettled place that we find ourselves in. There's obviously the specific advice that you've given there in terms of how to connect your previous experience for employers into entering the field and making most, making them to that time you've invested elsewhere. And I've just asked you to share your advice or you've just shared your advice and your previous, but it's all good. It's all good. And I want to pick up on something else that I've heard you say before, which is my favourite piece of advice to anybody is don't over index on the advice you get from other practitioners.
- Jen Briselli:
- Yes, that's my favourite. Don't listen to me or anyone else.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I mean that's curious on many levels, but the key in what you were saying, there seems to be on the not over indexing, so to you, having just given and shared some advice with people that are listening to this, what would you see as being over-indexing?
- Jen Briselli:
- I think that over-indexing in that way that I think I was probably saying it is to follow anything like a recipe or to follow anything like a codified, always reliable, always applicable framework. I love a framework, I love a conceptual model. I love 'em all. I collect them, but there isn't one to rule them all. It's not Lord of the Rings. And I definitely think there's an instinct to look for the one right piece of advice or the one person to mentor and give the advice, and if not one, then two or three, whatever it is. But there's a natural human instinct I think, to seek from somebody who knows more or has more experience. What can I learn? What is a recipe I can follow that they've shared or that I can follow the model that they've set? What is a secret they can give me or some perspective they can provide?
- And these are all great, healthy things. This is the nature of apprenticeship. We should talk about that in a second. This is missing right now in the design field. But I definitely think it's a normal human instinct to want to have something to grab onto, especially again, if there's a level of insecurity or imposter syndrome or which whatever that is, there's just this, but I caution people if you feel like you're kind of floating out there and you need something to grab onto to get your bearings, don't let the thing you grab onto become an anchor that holds you in place. That's what I think that that becomes for a lot of people. So being able to say, I need something to get my bearings. I need something to hold onto for a minute while I just get a breath or just figure out where I am in the world or in my career.
- And once you've gotten your breath, once you've taken that advice, once you've tried that thing that someone said, swim on to the next thing, now you're learning. What I do to metaphors is I just use them and I use them terribly, but they're all over anyway. That's what I mean by it. And I would caution that with everybody. Anything I've ever said in a past podcast or in an interview or an article or anything, I've written on medium, I hope that there are people who read it and they're like, that sounds great. And then later they're like, that was bullshit. That's kind of what it should be. And so I encourage that. Somebody has asked me a couple of times over the years, I've been asked multiple times, I guess we'll put it that way. But I remember the first time someone asked me, who's your mentor or who are your mentors?
- And I'll ask it for you on your behalf, who are your mentors? Jen? I hate this question. I had a hard time answering it the first time someone asked me this because the truth is, I don't know. I don't have a person, I don't say this person, this professor or this early career manager or this designer I look up to. It's not to say I don't have mentors and I worry about how to answer this in a way that doesn't sound arrogant, but the answer is life. Every person I interact with provides some level of mentorship. Dead people whose books I read, people who've written things or produced things whose work I interact with in the world way, way more junior to me, people that I talk to who spark things. So when I say don't over index, it means take advice and take mentorship and be an apprentice in every part of your life as best you can.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I get that myself actually, I've often struggled to answer the question, who do you look up to? Who are your mentors? And there are a number of people that I could name, but I haven't anchored myself to any particular person or creed or anything that I would hand on heart not be willing to explore further or renounce if I felt the need to. It sounds like maybe I'm using some strong biblical type language here, but it sounds like to me at least listening to you explain that need for people to grasp onto something, and I get it. I understand when things are uncertain, people turn to things that make them feel more certain about the world, but being able to be in that uncertainty to find a port of refuge for a short space of time, but then to be looking for other sources, not to be caught up in this monotheistic kind of one, there's one truth and only this truth and not be willing to be introspective about what you're hearing and critical about what you're thinking, I think is a skill. I feel that probably forever but possibly more so right now in this current point in time, more important for people to invest more into.
- Jen Briselli:
- Yeah, I think, and you said uncertainty, and I know that how many think pieces now start with the world is growing more uncertain and ambiguous every day. Even I've started to do conference talks with that, right? So it's out there and I'm not convinced that's true, but I think we're more aware of it. Whether it's true or not, I don't know, but we are definitely more aware of the ambiguity, the complexity, the uncertainty in the world, and there's this thing that is called uncertainty tolerance. It's just your natural tolerance for uncertainty. Not always trying to reduce it, but just tolerating and working in it and thriving in it. And I have yet to see anything very compelling about how to help others or how you as an individual want to increase. There was something a couple years ago, I remember encountering that was a group somewhere, gosh, I can't remember the details at all, maybe based in the UK that was doing some kind of research project to see if they could develop a sort of rigorous programme or sort of a set of exercises that one might go through to help them build up and increase their tolerance for uncertainty.
- I remember going through it, I wanted to see it. I wanted to think if this seemed like it was effective, I would share it with others At that point. I believe that was when I was in the chief design strategy role and I was like, I'll share this with the team, but I wasn't all that impressed, so that's probably why I'm not going to go look up the link. I don't want to shit talk anybody. But that's the thing. I do think that's one of the challenges of our day is to be whatever your role in designer or outside of it to be increasingly comfortable with uncertainty is going to serve you so well and almost never be a bad thing. So anything in your power to practise navigating uncertainty without always trying to reduce it or to become more certain.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- This is the secret, and it's certainly one of the provocations that I've heard you make before, but you were quite clear in the distinction that you drew, and I'll quote you again now, you said about ambiguity and becoming more comfortable with it. You said it starts with a dose of self-reflection and understanding how comfortable you are, not just with ambiguity because everyone and their mom is comfortable with ambiguity, but really swimming and thriving in it instead of trying to reduce it. So when you think about what we've been talking about and what you've said previously just then, why is that so important for designers?
- Jen Briselli:
- Well, I think because the world is ambiguous and because everything that you do as a designer is fraught and that there is never a single thing you can do as a human, let alone a designer that won't have unintended consequences. So there is all of that. But ultimately I think because the nature of, especially if we're talking about design, and I guess I should say for what it's worth when I say design, at least in this context of this podcast, I mean design kind of in the nebulous umbrella term, anybody who is involved in any kind of designerly thinking and practitioner of any kind of making or generative or research kind of roles. So all the design, if you're engaged in that kind of work, there's a huge gap between what you envision the impact of the thing that you are working on, whether it's again, a product, a service, a programme, a system, somewhere you're going to unleash an intervention into the world, whether it's a thing, a website or a non tangible kind of wiggle on the system.
- You cannot predict exactly what is going to happen. And because of that, even if you've done your homework and you've done tonnes of research, and even if you're dealing in the most predictable linear kind of scenarios, which show me one of those anyway, these days, no matter what, there will be some kind of gap between what you might envision and what may actually really happen. And that gap is never going to disappear. You can reduce it through again, good work and careful human-centered, compassion driven, blah, blah, blah design. But that gap is always there because that is the gap between two humans. I don't know what it's like to be you. You don't know what it's like to be me. We can get really damn close, but we are two humans living in two brains. We're going to get into phenomenology here, but that gap exists and it will never not exist.
- And so because of that, there will always be an ambiguity, there will always be multiple possible scenarios and rights and wrongs. And any designer who I think any designer who wants to navigate the world and not always be working in fear of that fact needs to figure out how to work through it and just be uncomfortable as they do it. And that's easier said than done. I mean, don't get me wrong. It's not like, cool, I'm comfortable with uncertainty, but my boss wants this thing to have this exact effect and my KPIs need to get met and I get all that. But it starts with having the actual internalised sense that this is going to always be fuzzy. And so don't let you be the one who defeats you because you're uncomfortable with the uncertainty when you bump up against somebody else's inability to navigate or be comfortable with uncertainty or ambiguity. And we're using these words interchangeably and probably shouldn't be, but let some other wall be the place where you butt your head against that. But don't you be the person where you defeat yourself by trying to make something more concrete than it can possibly be.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Do you see design as a white collar field or a blue collar field?
- Jen Briselli:
- I don't really see it as a field. I see it as a human activity. The field that calls itself design is a white collar field that wants to be a blue collar field or wants to pretend that it's a blue collar field. I think remember the Twitter wars about whether everyone's a designer, if you're out there, we see you. I don't mean that. I don't mean the question of if some person inside a company somewhere that doesn't have a design team figures out how to meet a need that hasn't been met and has done design, whether they've ever heard the word or have ever been trained or whatever, that's not what I mean. But I think more generally, design is having the existential crisis that it's having right now because it's all of these things. And the reality is that as a field matures, and you even had some really beautifully intelligent conversations with past podcast guests on this, so I won't try to rehash some of those, they've said it better than me.
- But as the quote field of design has matured and evolved naturally, you are going to see as we are the different sort of divisions of and applications of and altitudes at which this practise or this way of designerly thinking is applied. And so I don't think of it as a field anymore, and I don't know if I ever did, and that might be part of my own training. I mean, a lot of that comes from being a teacher first before I became a designer. Teachers are designers, teachers were talking about student-centered learning as opposed to teacher-centered learning. Well before human-centered design became a thing before Stanford and IDO decided to teach teachers how to do human-centered design teachers we're doing student-centered design. I think to try to bring this to a coherent place, design is much more easily understood and talked about if we talk about it as a practise or a collection of practises and worry less about it being a discipline or a field or a subset of jobs, which is what I think really people mean when they talk about it.
- Because as again, the field changes, the field over time changes. There are many jobs that make use of these types of practises. And I think most of the existential dread and consternation that we're seeing today, aside from layoffs and such, is largely because people can't figure out how to define design and what is the difference between UX and UI and experience and interaction and service and all these different forms of design. To me, who cares? Obviously it matters for specific things like designing roles and carving out what you're going to work on, what I'm going to work on, but especially to the extent that people are working so hard to create a universally agreed upon definition, we designers, we will never get to decide and define ourselves. That's just never how it works. It's how people who aren't us define what we are. So as long as you care deeply about that, you'll always be frustrated by it. So I took that really, really far out and not at all relevant, but I'd like to know, especially when you asked about white collar versus blue collar, I think there's a very interesting tension in the fact that we want to see ourselves as a profession in the sense of the word like licenced credentialed profession, and yet aren't. There's an interesting kind of something there, but tell me more about where you were thinking when you asked that.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I think I'm tapping into that tension that you've touched on between, and I'm going to use the language I know here, the little D design and the big D design and how we seem to want to make those two things coexist under the same umbrella. And silos often get a really bad wrap, but it's almost like we've tried to remove all the silos between all the different sub-specializations of design and have just created this giant mess that has become amorphous and no one can really truly speak to things in precise terms anymore that are useful and applicable for other people that are searching for something when they're listening to these conversations about design that we are having. And again, this is probably needing to be brought back down into reality soon, but I do find that there is a tension between are we hands-on crafts people or are we this bigger, broader, strategic thing? And I think clearly the answer is we're both. Maybe we could see a field in the future that is actually redefined in some way that's more useful and meaningful and separates those two things more distinctly and that might not be a bad thing.
- Jen Briselli:
- Here's a thought I've had, and I haven't really articulated it much and I don't know where it fits, but actually I'll come to it in a second. But going back, you made a point about silos. We love to hate silos in the same way. We love to hate hierarchies right now, and I'm right there with it. You've probably seen my other podcasts where I'm like, yeah, I'm an anarchist man. And I mean it philosophically like an hierarchy without hierarchy, but hierarchies are not always bad. Silos are not always bad. And I think this is really fundamental misunderstanding, but also, again, very human instinct to say, okay, this thing we have when hierarchies or silos, they're not the same, but I'm just using them both in the same way when they crystallise into a rigid form where there are power imbalances where we cannot cross boundaries, that's a problem.
- So yes, that's bad, but that doesn't mean that we have to go clear the other side of this scale or that all silos are bad because silos, if you take the word in whatever ways people are often using it. Silos are parts of organisations or groups or communities where there has been carved out some kind of safe space for either innovation or expertise. And I remember very dearly when I was in the executive role at Mad Pal, one of the things I was leading a team of practitioners who were all very hybrid skills. Mad Pal was full of brilliant people with the most interesting myriad kind of mixes of skillsets. Nobody at Mad P was just one thing, even though everybody had a title and sort of had one or two primary focus areas as far as their practise research or visual design or UX design or behaviour change.
- So everybody was super hybrid, but we still needed some level of silo because in systems silos are how you create those spaces where expertise can actually grow. You want to maintain the rigour, et cetera. What is the problem with silos is not the silo itself, it's the information flow between them. So if we talk about silos now more in the way that you were talking about it like job titles and stuff, I think the same principle applies. There's no harm in having specific specialties. We need specialists, even though I feel like most of design and I'm one of them are like, I'm a generalist and I'm transdisciplinary and don't put me in a box and guilty, but we need specialists. There's a reason that is the way that some people are wired and evolutionarily they provide us good things. So it's less about good or bad silos or hierarchies, and it's are these things flexible?
- Can information flow between them? Can people enter and exit them? If you want to think about a rigour, a specialty, it's not about making the boundaries open so anybody can go in and do this stuff and it's more about making it more accessible. You can keep your ivory tower, but just give people a ladder. They can get up to it. So all that said, I think that I lost my train of thought where I started. Do you remember what I was going to comment on next? Do you remember what I was starting about at the beginning of this? I got so off track on the silos.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You were talking about silos and actually being creative to be a good thing. You got it.
- Jen Briselli:
- I thought it. I remember it. Yeah. So basically that whole challenge of so what is design, right? I think a little bit about medicine in a parallel way here. Okay, doctor, you're a doctor. Is there someone who's literally just a doctor? Is there anybody out there who's title is just literally doctor? No. Yes, to your point, way back in the early days of medicine. But you've got obviously many, many specialties within medicine, but even the generalist, general practise doctors have some level of something that makes them general practise. And then you've got all of your various subspecialties and they involve different forms of training. They all have the same rough foundational kind of, I'm a doctor, therefore I will learn these certain things and I have this base knowledge, but I think there's something there that is worth exploring. There are probably people far smarter and more articulate than I that have actually explored this exact topic.
- I haven't even searched it, but it's just something that's been rattling around in my head because I was thinking about this in conversation with somebody recently that wouldn't it be nice if design, if it ever wanted to get its act together and try to become more of a profession with a self-imposed, but also in some way in partnership with others kind of regulated licensure or credentialing, which I also have mixed feelings about because credentials, we'll talk about that in a moment, but what would it mean? It would mean something not unlike medical engineering architecture fields and the notion of design as having a sort of core fundamental understanding of what it means, work and design, practise designerly thinking. And then from there you can go off and if you really want to get into your subspecialties, go for it. But I don't know if we'll ever see that day. I think that industry has gotten its claws into design in a way that might be hard to extract it.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, there is that alignment, isn't there? Thinking about what you were talking about regarding medicine, my wife's a doctor and so I've had sort of an outside perspective on her journey through into almost becoming a specialist. There is that core that they all share when they go through medical school, but then there's a very wide and varied approach to where they go next. Do you become a physician? Do you become a surgeon? Do you go into something that's perhaps more a big D design, which is public health? Yet you all share those fundamental understanding and appreciation and the time and the collegiality that you invested in together when you were going through your training, which gives you somewhat of an anchor to understand each other and to feel like you're part of a whole, even though you've gone off and done the things that play into each of your individual strengths. So yeah, there's probably something in there for designers to explore.
- Jen Briselli:
- And you take a Hippocratic oath,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yes,
- Jen Briselli:
- Which we could do with equivalent,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Which is of course around the ethical responsibility that the doctors have to their patients. And more recently, I think there was a Kiwi doctor that had their first amendment to the Hippocratic Oath approved a few years back, which was the responsibilities that doctors now also have to their own health, which is a recognition I think, of many things and could be applied across many different fields as well. I want to give some deeper insight for our listeners and perhaps viewers if they're watching this on YouTube into where you come from, Jen, and I want to do that by picking up on the first two words of your LinkedIn headline, which are chaotic. Good. Now, I know that some of our listeners will inherently know what that means and where that comes from, but for the ones that don't, what do those words mean and why did you choose to lead with those?
- Jen Briselli:
- There's actually a bit of a double meaning in there too that I realised at some point that I'm happy about. So for those who have never played Dungeons and Dragons role-playing game from the eighties, you see how these things all link up now between Dungeons and Dragons and metal. So within Dungeons and Dragons or lots of fantasy novels and such, there's called one's alignment, which is just simply whether they are. It's a three by three. We all love our grids so that you are either good, neutral or evil, and then you're either chaotic, lawful, or neutral. So basically chaotic good is the alignment of characters who are good. So not just neutral, good, trying to take action in ways that will increase the utility or benefit to or do good for other humans. But then the means by which you do it may be chaotic, meaning it doesn't always follow the law.
- So for example, a lawful good person, I always love a lawful good person is following the rules all the time. They're not going to hurt people. They want to do good for people, but they're following the rules. And a chaotic good character who I really don't think in, if we're going to get into the semantics, can a human really be chaotic? Good. I don't know. Probably not. But what appeals to me about that is that it acknowledges that rules are made by humans, and humans are imperfect as we covered earlier. Therefore, laws are not always themselves. So when your guiding North star is to try to help other people or facilitate other people's freedom, which is kind of how I tend to think about it more, increasing people's freedom. That means sometimes you can do it in ways that don't follow the law or the rules or the policy or the social norms, or what does law stand in for here?
- So anyway, philosophically, there was a point at some point in the last maybe five years, this came up with other colleagues and we had a good laugh and we were all talking about what our alignments are, and everybody seemed to agree that I was chaotic. Good. So I said, okay, I appreciate it. The other piece to it though is as I alluded to earlier, I'm very much a student of systems science and in particular complexity science. It's something I've actually very much found interesting from the very early days when I was studying physics in undergrad. Some of my favourite parts of that were the bits that we touched on chaos theory, a little bit of complexity and some things related to that information science and such, and so chaos here also does double duty in the sense that I think we could all do with a little bit better understanding of the nature of chaotic systems and complex systems. We operate in far more complex and maybe sometimes even chaotic systems than we do in ordered linear simple systems. And I don't know, I think there's something poetic about that. So
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Well, let's keep the poem going. As I understand that in his book, the Fifth Discipline, the Art and Practise of the Learning Organisation, Peter Senge said, and I'll quote him now, cause an effect are not closely related in time and space, thinking about complexity and chaos and systems thinking, the area of expertise or areas of expertise that you're currently applying, how is that way of thinking what Peter is saying there? How is that relevant to designers?
- Jen Briselli:
- And I think I even mentioned this earlier, you could really sum it up with the fact that almost everything you do will have unintended consequences. And the first rule is to just acknowledge that it doesn't mean they're bad. They could be great. You could do something whether as a designer or just a human that has some amazingly great beneficial unintended consequence, consequence. I know sometimes has this negative connotation, but let's just say consequence is a neutral term here. It's just a fundamental understanding that we know from the study of complex systems, which for anybody who is not acquainted, complex adaptive systems or the study of those, which is usually called complexity theory or complexity science is a relatively nascent field. Origins go back quite a ways, but really studied in depth since the eighties. So it's kind of a new science, but it's a science, it's a natural science, it's an understanding of the way both human and non-human systems work.
- And it's teaching us a lot, one of which is exactly what you've just said. And I think if you're a designer, one of the most important takeaways, even if you don't want to study anything related to complexity, is to understand cause and effect are often too far apart in space and time to really see. And I think a lot of people respond to that by going, well, if I can just broaden my view, I can eventually see the matrix and I can find the lever and I can, oh gosh, okay, the root cause is way upstream, chronologically, or it's just far away. Because this thing is like a system and there are structural forces. And while that's true, and I am definitely myself, someone who often will tell others, whether it's collaborators or working with clients, one of our goals is to zoom out in space and in time to get a better picture of where we're working, what we're doing, and what's at play.
- But no amount of zooming out is going to actually give you the ability to see a cause and effect. Because in complex systems, they're not linear. You cannot actually see them until after the fact. When post hawk, you're looking back and going, oh, that thing probably led to this thing. There's not going to be that nice clean linear causal chain like this happened, then this happened, then this happened, then this happened. That only really exists when we're going back to tell the story afterwards when we have to give a simplified view. So as a designer, the big takeaway is to just understand that and embrace that and ask yourself, how does that change your practise? Now, if you're just designing a screen deciding whether to move the button on the e-commerce page three pixels to the left or the right, maybe you don't care about complexity, that's fine, because that's not a complex domain.
- But I suspect most people who are really immersed in the kind of topics that are going to be part of this podcast are thinking, yeah, I'm designing things inside highly complex domains. Even if the material isn't complex, the human environment is complex. There are a lot of people in this environment. I have stakeholders, I have business models, I have things I'm trying to reconcile with each other all of a sudden. Yeah, it's an extremely complex domain, which means you cannot look for a linear causal chain. You have to accept that what you're going to do is going to have an effect, and you probably can't predict it entirely. Will it do what you think it's going to do? Sure, but it might also do things. You have no idea. So the trick is to be ready for that. Just be ready for that. Now, readiness is a whole nother conversation, but be ready for the fact there will always be unintended consequences, and what will you do with them? Here's the spoiler, you should learn from them.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Readiness to me speaks of needing to first be aware of what you've just talked about, that the consequences can be unintended and occur in places that you don't necessarily anticipate. And that reduces the bluntness or harshness of when things happen. They were almost known to happen, but you've kind of predicted that something unpredictable will happen. So there's some comfort there. And I've heard you talk about systems before or systems thinking, and perhaps it's diving into complexity theory as well here and framed it in the way that I'm making sense of the complexity in the world is achieved by looking at the holes and the relationships between things. You also spoke about there this idea of adjusting your altitude to look at a system, but you then raised the third dimension. I think it's the third dimension of time. So there's adjusting the altitude and then there's also looking at things across time. There's a lot going on there. Where do you get started? I mean obviously situations dependent, but if people were wanting to dip their toe deeper into the systems thinking pull here, where would you suggest that they start to try and get a practical grasp of how they can apply this way of thinking in their design practise? I
- Jen Briselli:
- Do think, and I'll just repeat myself, but I'll give an example. I think that some of it really is getting good at zooming out, but also remember having you have to zoom back in. That's kind of one of the things that as a designer, so I think systems thinking, and I'll just say systems thinking as this huge umbrella term, which is its own problem, and then complexity within it is a wonderful sense-making practise, it's more than that. But for designers, and I'm speaking in the designer language to designers now, systems thinking can enhance your sense-making. But at the end of the day, what you do about it is still very much the design that and love, the design of affordances, the design of conditions and environments that will give rise to something is where design lives. So what ends up happening is when I talk about systems thinking with other designers and where does this show up in my practise?
- It doesn't actually radically change what you see in the practise. What it does is change the zoom in and out, the level of information that you have about something that you're doing or working on, and that information can change or connect dots that weren't there before. So for example, when I say the zooming out and I say zoom out in space and zoom out in time and rightly so, you're like, oh my gosh, that's an x, a Y and a Z. Oh God, I don't have a physics degree, Jen, like you, what the hell? You don't have to do 'em at the same time. So what do designers love doing? Mapping. We all map things, right? Doesn't everybody love to make maps? And our clients get sick of the maps because they go, wait, the journey map didn't solve all my problems. I don't want journey maps anymore.
- I want jobs to be done. This is where I don't care if it's a deliverable, forget about that. It's much more about the intermediate sort of artefact that is part of the designerly thinking process. But if you think about mapping space, zooming out in time and mapping like an ecosystem map, a relationship map, you might historically have looked at either the user, the use case, the thing that you're thinking about in this moment. I encourage you to zoom out a little bit, get a little silly map out a little further. Either in geographical space or in terms of organisational, whatever it is, the thing that you're mapping or designing for. If you're designing for a user who's trying to buy a plane ticket or whatever, classic example, people like to go with thinking right now about the ecosystem around the act of buying a plane ticket.
- People are probably going to be able to come up with some kind of map that has the person at the centre and a few things around them. And then I would say start by going a couple rings further, further than you think you need to. You might see something there, you might not, but that's the practise that's zooming out in space and then zooming out in time, do it chronologically. We all know a good journey map or flow, anything that's got a chronological component, once again, extend it a little further than you're used to. That's it. Start there. Just start by going a little earlier. Go all the way back to before that person was born, even before that, that's more than a little but the same thing after. Go a little further. Look at what are some downstream consequences that are like 18 orders past the point where you're used to looking.
- These are the kind of practises that if you're really like, let's just get concrete, how do I start doing this? That's it. Start there. What you're doing when you do that is you're zooming out in space, you're zooming out in time. You might connect dots between things. And then I always say, as I said earlier, you don't stay zoomed out. You can't do much from the 10,000 foot view. And this is a fundamental problem I see with a lot of people who become enamoured with systems thinking is they want to stay at the 10,000 foot view and they want to change the system as if they're outside of it. And you are not in traffic, you are traffic. We are in the systems, we are part of the systems. We can wiggle the systems or nodes and pieces within them, but there's not much you can do to the whole thing as a whole.
- That's not realistic. So thinking less about staying at that huge zoomed out view and zooming back in and saying, okay, I've seen this from an aerial view, from a zoomed out view with that knowledge now let me get back into the local level and what can I do in that local small intervention that I'm working on that might be better informed. I got the aerial view. I actually saw a cartoon and I've saved it and I don't know who it's by, it's not from design, but I would like to kind of modify it and of course credit the author one of these days. But it is a cartoon of somebody who's in a maze, like a garden maze, a hedge maze, and all they can see are what's in front of their eyes, all the hedges and things. And then there's a version where they can see overhead and they can see the maze from above and suddenly they can see where they are in the maze.
- But then you have to come back down to the point of view of the person. You're still in the maze. You being in the maze doesn't mean that you are going to suddenly get above the maze, look at it and solve all your problems, but you being in the maze with the benefit of an aerial view, now you're like, I kind of have an idea of where I need to go. So getting that zoomed out view would be like, you're in a hedge maze, you got a drone taking an aerial picture of the maze that sure is going to help you, but you're still in the maze and have to walk through it. I just think that's the right metaphor here for in a beginner sense, to take something like systems or even a complexity informed approach is just to get into the habit of extending that view. But remember you have to bring it back to the local intervention level that you're actually working at.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I was at design Outlook as I mentioned last week, and one of the keynotes was by a First Nations Australian called Alison Page. And Alison does many different things. I think that her main design discipline is architecture and art. It's a bit of a crossover, I'm not quite clear, but one of the things that listening to you describe the maze cartoon and relating back to her talk was around the fact that most of the first nations Australian art is depicted from an aerial view and it allows them to communicate, this is my recollection anyway, the relationships between various things in landscape, whether they're a real representation of a landscape or an imagined representation. And then that knowledge is used while people were navigating on the ground from that first person perspective. And basically it's just a riff between what you were saying and then what I was listening to last year. So yeah, if you google aboriginal Australian art or something to that effect, you'll see what I mean. It's very much that map view, but it's used in a practical sense
- Jen Briselli:
- And it's so much, it's interesting because I know I've said the word altitude a couple times earlier and even starting to think about Richard Buchanan's four orders of design, which is I think, and for folks who don't know, it's really just this notion that the first order of design is things like symbols, communication, graphic design. Maybe in that sense you move up a level, you get into interactions and then into services and then programme systems, what the four orders are depends on which talk of his you look at and who's interpreted it in some way. But years ago I started talking about those as altitudes with people rather than orders, even though I understand the semantic choice in the word order because I think that's just the way the brain is. So I love hearing that because there's a lot about, I think indigenous knowledge that we just need to reconnect to.
- And that actually kind of comes back to, we touched on it earlier, but for so many folks, I think most people have an instinctive and intuitive understanding of the complexity of systems. If you have children, if you've navigated traffic, if you've had to make a hard decision that didn't have a right or wrong answer, we engage with complexity in the world and everyday life, but for whatever reason, work, and maybe to an extent traditional schooling teaches us to disconnect our understanding of it from that part of our brain. And so for me, a lot of working in what I might consider a complexity informed way in my work isn't that I'm trotting out all these complexity science principles or teaching people all the jargon, which sometimes I get to and that's awesome. But really it's kind of just helping people reconnect something that's already there. The understanding's there, it's almost just like the hose has been kinked and I'm trying to kink the hose for people. And that's how I look at a lot of the work I do, which again, secret is learning, but nobody wants to learn. So we don't use the word learning.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I suspect that people listening to this podcast do want to learn and thinking about this idea of UNC kinking the hose and systems and complexity. And I think we started our conversation with some form of acknowledgement of the uncertainty, whether it's more or less than before. It's real in terms of people's perceptions at the moment of the world that they're navigating. In particular for our design community, it seems like there's probably, because we're part of it at least, and it's probably most of what we're hearing, but it seems like there's a lot of it out there at the moment. So from what you see and perhaps from where you draw from for your own sense making into what, and I'm going to ask you for some more advice here. So people have already heard that caveat earlier into what should we as designers or design people, be investing our limited time and resources into give ourselves the best chance of thriving as designers in tomorrow's world,
- Jen Briselli:
- This is going to sound like I'm a broken record. I'm a hammer who only sees nails. I kind of am, but it's learning man. I had this epiphany several years back where I had done a lot of, I was reflecting on my career, some of the stuff we were talking about earlier, having conversations with people just in an organic way. I wasn't trying to solve anything and I was thinking about what connected all of it, even though I do still teach just now, instead of teaching physics, I teach design in certain programmes, but people ask me once in a while, do you miss teaching? And the answer is no. I do still teach, but even if I wasn't in a formal teaching place, I am facilitating learning all the time. That is this difference between teaching and facilitating learning. It's the latter for me. But that got me thinking about how that connects, sure, my career, but it also connects all of the various practises that I have engaged with, and I see it for others as well.
- And there was just one conversation where I was like, holy shit. It's learning. It's learning guys. Learning is the thing, but the problem is the word learning is not a good word because we hear the word learning and you think of school, that's its own thing. You also think of training. You think of skills. You think of building a capability to do a thing. You think of learning as a means to an end, and I kind of want to just radically encourage as advice with a big old caveat next to it, right? As usual, don't listen to me. But it's learning. It's learning all the way down. If there's one thing you should invest in, and this isn't even just true for designers, it's humans, it's learning. But I don't mean invest in the courses. I don't mean invest in the books or the mentor.
- It's invest in your ability to learn kind of on a meta level. So as a designer, I don't just mean you as an individual, but that's part of it. Get good at learning. But I don't mean just get good at watching YouTube videos. It means figure out how to learn, figure out how you like to learn, and not just the skill to put on your LinkedIn, but when you are facing a problem and you need to get an answer, how do you get the answer? Learning what's research, a form of learning, and then as a team, and no longer just an individual, how does a team learn? How does a team get smarter? A team gets smarter by figuring out how to leverage the different people on the team and the perspectives they bring and the different approaches they might take to something like having different windows into the same room will give you different angles on the thing in the room and then take it up a level from teams to organisations or whole communities.
- How do they learn? How do systems learn? There's not much advice here and sort of go out and do a thing. But if you want to invest in any one thing, I think that it is figure out how to learn because the future is inherently uncertain. The world you work in is inherently ambiguous. You will never be able to predict, let alone control the future. The one thing you will always be able to control is how quickly you learn and adapt what you're doing to whatever you see around you. And that's the meta superpower. And it is hard to say all that because nonetheless, I still know people can hear that and they think, I got to get good at learning. I should go back. I should take that class. I should go do that course. I'm like, no, guys. Not that. I mean, yes, that's like an example, but I mean truly what stops you when you have a little spark of curiosity, like you're driving in the car somewhere and you go wonder about, but what stops you from pursuing that?
- Go find out the barrier that stops you from following and remove that barrier and get good at following those huh moments, because that's good training for when in your career or in a moment where you're trying to design a solution or you're trying to engage a stakeholder or you're trying to convince somebody to do something or persuade from a behavioural perspective or change an attitude or a mindset. All of those are going to be things that are better powered by your ability to quickly learn in response. So learning, that's the answer. I've been toing with the idea of writing about this, so maybe this is me trying out some of what this makes sense, how this makes sense to people. If anybody listening to this wants to chat more about this, I would love that because I don't know, I'm starting to get to a point where I'm going to shout it from the rooftops.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Well, it's a great provocation to end our conversation with today, Jen. Plenty of advice in there to listen to and ignore if people choose to ignore it. Lots of big juicy ideas and avenues for people to explore. Thank you for so generously sharing your stories and insights with me today.
- Jen Briselli:
- This was my pleasure. I have no idea if there will be anything useful to anybody listening, but if anybody made it all the way through, my God, thank you. Shoot me an email or find me on LinkedIn so we can talk about it.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Well, I was going to ask if people want to do just that, what's the best way for them to do it?
- Jen Briselli:
- LinkedIn's probably the easiest. We can do my email too. It's [email protected], but find me on LinkedIn, connect with me there. We can hook up and have a conversation. I invite it. I love it. Anything we talked about, good metal band, Rex, a little jazz, we like a little jazz. Yeah.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- All good. Thank you Jen, and to everyone who's tuned in, it's been great having you here with us as well. Everything we've covered will be in the show notes, including where you can find Jen and all of the things that we've spoken about.
- If you've enjoyed the show and you want to hear more great conversations like this with world-class leaders in UX research, product management, and of course design, don't forget to leave a review, subscribe, so the podcast turns up every two weeks in your feed. And also tell just one other person about the show if you feel that they would get value from these conversations at depth.
- If you want to reach out to me, you can find me on LinkedIn, just search for Brendan Jarvis. There's also a link to my LinkedIn profile at the bottom of the show notes, or you can head on over to thespacinbetween.co.nz. That's thespaceinbetween.co.nz. And until next time, keep being brave.