CHIFOO June 2010 Will Evans

Tools Knowlege, and Power: Keys to being a Design Leader

Will Evans, an independent high profile UX designer and consultant (Semantic Foundry) in his June CHIFOO presentation said "It takes leaders across the full range from process oriented to visionary to fully activate innovation in an organization" But he also added a list of attributes that beyond "the vision thing" a design leader must be "mad, brave, craft-focused, creative, connected, engaged, directed, insightful, passionate, strategic. witty and irrerverent." This strikes me as being a bit like the old Boy Scout law saw that promoted scouts to be "thrifty, brave, clean and reverent," but for the creative community.

What Evans did was challenge designers. He presented a kind of fusion mash up of philosophy and interpersonal business theory, and andecdotes from his decades of experience in the UX/human factors environment realm to create a kind of "physician, heal thyself challenge to the interactive design community to use their tools for empowerment. He prods the UX design world to turn tools used outwardly in production to make changes in the kind of stuff that "makes designers grumble." Stuff like not owning the process, not having a seat at the table, having designs without traction, and having the status imposed status of being a "wire frame monkey."

He encouraged designers to use UX activities to explore possible futures for self, career and organiztion. In essence to use the tools used in the designer's kitbag for clients and employers and use these for their own self determination. He even went so far to list these tools and lenses specifically: research, personas, mental models, conceptual models, stakeholder interviews, sketching, open card-sorting, and strategy briefs. His opening slide encapsulated this intent: "To maximize impact on corporate outcomes, design should be the path to understanding stakeholder needs, the tool for visualizing new solutions and the process for translating cutting-edge ideas into effective strategies."

He also took a new spin on the bromide that knowledge is power by showing how this is true by mapping relationships and presenting a number of different models from sources as diverse as Kurt Lewin, Max Weber, Martin Heidegger, Michel Foucault, and Daniel Goleman.

One of the most intriguing and, perhaps useful to the design community, was a departure that began with Michel Foucalt's theory on power being relational and moved into a discussion of cybernetic modeling. He stressed how relatiships depended on first establishing a shared language and how when there is a non-equity betwen shared knowledge and language this creates a power relationship. Four main points about the relationship between power and knowledge were emphasized by Evans: Power and knowledge are intrinsically linked. Every field of power creates a body of knowledge. Everybody of knowledge creates a field of power. And the relationship between power and knowledge creates a current-like flow.

And he expanded on this further using Michel Foucalt's model of how power is created and influenced on an xyz axis of knowledge and the context of language, governace, and ethics. To attain power one must not be careful to missapropriate the language of the group they are working with (for the designer, this means truly understanding the language of business and economics) By governance, Evans was referring to the importance of understanding who sets the rules. Knowledge of the cultural norms of an organization or enviroment is also important. Poor or strong management and leadership can be assesessed by how well or poorly one deals with how one performs utilizing these three elements: knowledge, governance, and process.

It was almost nine when Evans was asked to define and discuss the role that emotional intelligence plays in these roles of leadership and power. At least for myself, this component of the presentation helped illuminate several of the other discussions and explanations that took place during the evening. The elements of self-awareness, self-management, social awareness and social skils are all aspects that one can help develop to be more emotionally intelligence. Refinement of these can lead to opportunities for one to become a better and more influential leadership.

It was a long evening filled with big ideas that ended with a quote by Bridget Botja de Mozota "Designers have a prescriptive job. We dream how the world might be; we are futurists to some extent. He concluded that "it is not just about learning stuff, its about the journey we want to take. Adding that we have the tools and one should treat their career or role in their organization as a project space.