How To Grow Up

Why is immaturity so hard to escape?

No one likes being told to grow up. When we’re kids, the message is clear that adults do not have any fun and we’re lucky to be so free. Culture, and John Cougar Mellancamp, tells us to hold on to our childhood for as long as we can. Dr. Seuss himself once said that “Adults are just obsolete children and to hell with them.” But we all know there are some things in life we can’t do if we don’t grow. The problem is no one really tell us how to do it, so we often get stuck somewhere in between.

In Paul Adam’s classic talk, The End of Navel Gazing, he offers this:

I’m going to start with somewhat of a rant, which is to say that it’s high time we grew up. This is the grand conclusion of the talk, by the way – that we UX people need to stop navel gazing and grow up.

I agree with Adam, but one curious fact is that navel gazing, as a term, is a snide reference to something with positive, perhaps even mature, origins. In Yoga, the navel is one of the chakras, and focusing on it is used as part of the practice of meditation. Somewhere along the way the term became a joking reference to people who are self involved. Yet meditation can lead to greater self-awareness, which is definitely something we need more of.

Adam’s point, body part trivia aside, is that designers have a vein of self-delusion in our profession and it works against us. For example, when we use the term design maturity, it’s usually a measure of the organizations we work for. We don’t talk nearly as much about our own immaturity: how do we need to grow? Where are we stuck? Where are our blindspots? Those aren’t things that come up too often since our own turf is far more dangerous to explore.

The title of this post is HOW to grow up, so I’m obligated to offer solutions. The problem is the best advice on this is also the kind most people don’t want to hear. But here we go:

Growing up requires accepting a tough truth.

But who wants tough truths? They don’t sell as well as the easy, fun ones. Growing pains are a real, and mostly unavoidable, experience. Well, you can avoid the pains but then you miss out on the growing too.

To grow up means letting go of an immature belief, an attitude, a hope or a dream (see gravity problems). It hurts. It’s scary. It’s the opposite of comfort, which is why it’s so tempting not to grow up at all. Many adults never do. We prefer the familiarity of our complaints and frustrations to the uncertainty of letting them go. Who are we without them? It’s easy to go for years, or decades, holding on to the old truths, repeating the same sad, unfulfilling loops of thoughts over and over again… until we die! (Well, this post has certainly taken a dark turn, hasn’t it? If you need relief, scroll back up to the lovely bit about navels).

Our inability to let go is fascinating when you consider that it should be the easiest things in the world. Releasing something is LESS work than grabbing hold of something. If you were holding a baseball in your hand and were asked to drop it, you could do it easily. But when it comes to beliefs, or feelings, which are barely even a handful of atoms in our little minds, letting go can be the hardest thing you could ask a person to do. We might be willing to do anything just so we don’t have to do it.

In Adam’s talk he focuses on a kind of design narcissism he realized he had. How little he understood about how the company he worked for functioned, until he moved into a senior role:

I thought finance paid my expenses. I didn’t think that they might be thinking about the financial health of the whole company. That they might worry about how everyone’s salary might be paid next month or next year…

… if you’re anything like I was for almost all of my career, you never really thought about all these other functions. You mapped them, maybe here and there, but you never really thought about them. We spent all our energy talking to ourselves.

It’d be one thing not to know how your company functions if you are happy, fulfilled and successful. But if you are unhappy, unfulfilled or unsuccessful and that doesn’t lead you to question your deepest assumptions about why, whose problem is it really?

Adams goes on to explain a shift in his thinking. He used to always feel that UX and design were always the most important thing. That “our users should be at the center, and therefore, as a user experience person, we should be at the center [of how the organization works].” But as he matured and grew to understand how his organization functioned, his opinion changed. The growth came from acknowledging this truth: We are not the only voice of the user.

He realized there are many different roles that can claim to be the voice of the user. The sales team talks to customers every day, and knows what they will pay for. It doesn’t matter if something is easy to use, if nobody buys it. He realized the support team knows what people struggle to do: they know more about what people are trying to do but failing than anyone. He realized leadership and finance know the profit and loss for the quarter: if they run out of money, everyone loses their job (and the customer gets nothing!). These different views lead to different opinions about what is best for the customer. Adams had the epiphany that, “No one here is wrong. This is only a recent revelation for me. No one here is wrong.”

What all this means is that someone has to combine all of the different views together to make good decisions. Who should that be? If designers assume their perspective matters the most, or worse, are ignorant of the others, it forces someone else to do the synthesizing (maybe a product manager or the head of engineering). It makes us designers easier to ignore, because our perspective is too narrow to make the best decisions.

Adams instead suggests:

Stop having this existential crisis about what we do and who cares, and who values what, and who talks to who, and instead go out and talk to other people… Analytics, biz ops, marketing, sales, support, recruiting, finance, HR. Talk to these people.

This doesn’t mean becoming a mega-extrovert. Instead it’s the listening that matters here. Most of these roles have a lot to say, and often feel just as ignored or underutilized as designers do. Just being curious and interested in what they see goes a long way. And the more you use your design powers to incorporate the insights other people have, the more support you’ll find you get for your own.

Of course maybe you have already grown up in this way and you need to accept a different truth in order to grow. It could be accepting that you can be better at persuasion, or negotiation, and it’s those skills that you need to get what you want from your career. Maybe it’s accepting that you need to become a manager and a leader, or step down from being one. Or could be you have the right job, but you’re in the wrong kind of organization. Growth is personal and I can’t presume here in this post to know what the right path is for you.

However if you find yourself repeating the same complaints and have felt stuck for some time, odds are good you are resisting growth. There’s something you have to let go of, something you are holding onto very tightly, to move forward.

Maybe part of why growth is so hard is we try to do it alone. By ourselves it’s too easy to trick ourselves out of it, with well practiced denials and avoidances. If we bring in other people and trust them to help us see our true selves, the work of letting go becomes shared too.