Design Talent Is Overrated (Frix and Frax)
Your ability only matters if it leads to better project decisions
The reason why talent is overrated is simple: talent does not make you effective. Of course this depends on how you define the term design talent, but it’s fair to say that this term usually refers to creative ability and skill for coming up with ideas. If you heard someone say something like, “wow, she’s a talented designer”, you’d assume they were referring to that designer’s output: the ideas, sketches and plans they made. My point is that someone can be amazingly talented in this regard but also useless to an organization (or the world). If they are not effective at getting those ideas put into action in products and systems, what good are they?
Imagine we have two designers, named Frix and Frax. And let’s say we evaluate designers based only on two traits: talent and effectiveness. By effectiveness, I mean the ability to listen, persuade, earn trust, collaborate and deliver on promises to others.
Let’s say Frix is a 10 out of 10 on the talent scale, a true design genius, and Frax scores only a 5. If we only think about talent, Frix seems like the far better designer to hire. But let’s say Frix scores a 1 out 10 on the effectiveness scale, and Frax scores a 7. If we total these scores up, the approximate value
FRIX: 10 (talent) x 1 (effectiveness) = 10
FRAX: 5 (talent) x 7 (effectiveness) = 35
Frax is able to get as much value out of their talent as possible. None of that talent gets wasted. They are effective. Whereas, while Frix has more talent that talent remains potential value, value that may never be realized in the world. In other words, no amount of design talent compensates for being ineffective. A less talented designer who is effective does more good for the world than a very talented designer who is ineffective.
Ask: "How can I be a more effective designer?”
It’s important to note that many workplaces make it hard for designers, or anyone, to be effective. Designers are a minority role and many organizations aren’t mature enough to set designers up to succeed. But this state of affairs has always been true and may be true forever. It’s what’s known as a gravity problem: a truth that no amount of complaining or finger-pointing will change. It’s up to us as designers to decide how much responsibility we want to take for creating environments where we can be happier and do better work. Blaming gravity problems doesn’t change anything.
One easy first step is just to ask coworkers: how can I be more effective? Invite them to share their perspective on what effectiveness means and where you can grow. Maybe you’ll discover they have different goals than you do and by aligning them better everyone will be happier. Just listening to their answers without being defensive is a power move of effectiveness on its own. You’ll earn some trust just for wanting to get their feedback and for listening.
Most of the skills required to be effective are often minimized by the label soft skills. They are considered an afterthought, things to develop to round out a designer’s professional abilities. I’m here to say this is a tragic mistake. We should be working the other way. In other words, most designers most of the time in most workplaces would be better off learning how to be more like FRAX and less like FRIX. Your design talent is not your bottleneck.
The reason why is that if you look at all of the poorly designed things in the world most of them have basic problems. It’s not a shortage of design genius that holds good design back, it’s that no one in these organizations is effective at prioritizing good design decisions, even for the most basic things. We have plenty of design talent in the world, but much of that talent is directed ineffectively.
The rub is that design culture is obsessed with people like FRIX and ignores and belittles people like FRAX. When hiring designers we look at a designer’s portfolio first, which is a superficial measure of design talent, and only then perhaps lazily inquire about their effectiveness on projects. Our design books presume the reader works on a project team that loves designers and that the designer has built effective relationships with all key decision-makers, two things that are rarely true. Design culture continually focuses on what we are already good at and ignores the simple things that hold us back. All this leads us to believe that more talent all on its own can magically make you effective, but it can’t.
And of course others have written more generally about our misguided obsession for the poorly defined concept of talent itself:
