Your ego is hurting your career

The ego trap strikes again

There is a thoughtful essay called Design was never the bottleneck by Angelos Arnis that tries to capture the state of things for designers today. He writes well and early on he uses Stanisław Lem's Solaris in an elegant way to capture the challenges of AI in the working world. It’s my favorite part of his essay.

I likely agree with Arnis in many ways about the world he wants to live in, but I disagree on how to get there. I believe design culture has flaws that work against us and only we can correct them. This is the theme of Why Design Is Hard which opens with the dangerous idea of the ego trap.

The ego trap is the false belief that because you are a designer you should be the creative hero in the story of your organization. And any organization that doesn’t treat designers this way is doing it wrong. This belief is both popular and self-destructive and it’s a theme in his essay that I’ll explore here.

What is a job anyway?

Arnis shares this observation:

the institutional arrangements within which design operates are configured to extract design’s value while withholding design’s autonomy and authority, and that no amount of individual skill development will change the configuration.

My issue is that this describes having a job. Almost any job. Plumbers, accountants, chefs all provide value in exchange for money with little autonomy. If you want other people’s money you must negotiate their requirements for giving it to you. Do we have to debate this? Most people with jobs have complaints about their jobs.

One important omission from his description of a job is that the institution is paying a salary. Without mentioning this, it sounds like a system crafted to make designers unhappy. But that’s not what it is. It’s a trade: we give value and get money. We might like a better deal, but that’s a different problem.

He’s also wrong in self-limiting designers here. Nothing prevents a designer from becoming a project leader or an executive with more autonomy and authority. Many people have done it. They might have to switch job roles, or make other sacrifices, but so would anyone else. Authority naturally resides in roles with more general responsibility in the organization. Design is a specialization and naturally has a lower ceiling for authority.

Disarm the ego trap through… plumbing!

One great way to defuse the ego trap is to replace the word designer with a different job. For example:

the institutional arrangements within which plumbers operate are configured to extract plumbing value while withholding plumber autonomy and authority, and that no amount of individual skill development will change the configuration

It feels different now, doesn’t it?

Now you might say, “well, being a designer is far more valuable than a plumber.”

BINGO. You are in the ego trap.

The value of designers varies widely from organization to organization. Most designers are ignorant of the fact that the majority of businesses, organizations and project teams across all industries in the world have ZERO, or near-zero, product designers. Small businesses, factories, coal mines, farms, oil refineries… it’s a big world. They function just fine without our involvement.

Another way to wake up from the ego trap is to realize that good design is often less important to businesses that making products at low cost.

In Why Design Is Hard, I explain that bad, or no, design often makes money.

Better design means improving quality but quality is expensive and expenses eat into profits…. and often consumers care more about affordability than any other factor. Some frustrated designers think they’re Michelin star chefs and are in denial that they’re employed by the equivalent of the local pub (and there just are not that many Michelin star restaurants).

Designers often believe implicitly that all restaurants in the world should be Michelin star restaurants, or, to translate out of my metaphor, that all designed things should be beautiful and inspiring. The problem is someone has to pay for it.

The frustrated desire to make great things is universal. Most engineers, marketers, chefs, doctors, lawyers, and even plumbers all wish they were able to work on something great and feel their talents are restricted by their workplace. The potential for making something great is one of many factors we choose in where we pick to work and most of us prioritize stability and pay above that potential. Designers are not alone here! And if we are smart we can ally ourselves with coworkers in other roles who want to make better things.

This sucks. How is this supposed to help?

I know, I know. You might be worried about your job or the future of your career and this is not what you want to hear. I get it.

But my intention is to help. These issues are what hold us back from what we say we want. We complain about being ignored but some of that is for good reason: we are ignorant of the constraints the people we work for face. Or we are nieve about how ideas move through organizations regardless of what job role they come from. And we are in denial of how parts of design culture makes being a happy, fulfilled designer harder. My goal is to make it easier. But there is some tough love required to do it.

Well what should designers do then?

My advice to designers is simple.

The core advice from Why Design Is Hard on how to have a happier, more fulfilled career is on page 10. And the rest of the book teaches how to do it:

A. Seek power. Being undervalued means you do not have the power you need. Who makes decisions you think you should be making? Who doesn’t listen to your advice but really should? Designers need power to design. There’s no way around it. Decisions are really about power, and you need to increase how much power you have [including moving into job roles that do not have the word design in them].

B. Become influential. If you don’t want the responsibilities that come with power, that’s OK. Instead, become an influencer. Think of your job as a consultant or an advisor, and draw from the rich heritage of skills those roles have always had. If the powerful people you work with listened to you 30% or 50% more often, and gave you more credit, would you enjoy your career more? If yes, then influence is the way.

C. Be self-aware. Even without wanting more power or influence, if you can mature your beliefs about design and escape the ego trap, you’ll become a healthier person. Your career will have more flow and be more fulfilling. You’ll get smarter at identifying healthy places to work, or perhaps you’ll realize you want to be your own boss. By becoming self-aware, you’ll be less reactive to the messy reality of human nature in organizations.

This list may scare you. Much of design culture rewards pretending there’s a safer way. We’ve searched, and we don’t think there’s an alternative. Paula Scher’s story about how ideas don’t advocate for themselves illuminates the necessity and purpose of this book.