Note: when I say designers below, this can apply to any technical+creative types, such as engineers, product designers, etc.

You put five designers in a room with a big free slot of time to let them solve a challenging and contentious problem. What you get out might be a solution, or it might be a bigger headache — and so many factors impact that outcome.

It’s easy to assign blame to the low-hanging fruit, such as a particular intransigent team member, a lack of cohesion within the group, a faulty premise for the discussion, an insufficient amount of time; while any of these (or other) factors may be true, in most cases none of them either completely explain the problem, or more importantly, provide a means to solving it.

It takes a lot to get to the root of an issue, especially an interpersonal issue, and all the more so when there are so many legitimate conflating factors. Sometimes it’s not even necessary to get to the root of the problem, but just to ferret out the major culprits in such a way that they can be resolved.

The Meeting

To take the abstract into the concrete, let’s say our five designers from above have been tasked with thinking up a good user flow for a new ordering system, but the workflow to purchase this particular item requires a bunch of legalities which promise to make the user experience unpleasant and cumbersome. The designers go into their meeting each having come up with two basic premises for how to get around this problem, which they will spend the next four hours hashing out until they pick one, iterate on it to iron out the flaws, and then pick that solution for future development.

But their meeting is marked from the beginning by subversion — one coworker is quick to point out the many flaws inherent in most of the ideas presented. The other designers quickly become irked at their coworker’s demotivational approach. But they recognize, grudgingly, that the solutions they’ve brought to the table are lacking. Now they’re faced with the choice of scrapping all the ideas and starting over, which might get them a better idea in the end but require much more time and rescheduling the meeting, or pick the best idea of those they already have, and do the best they can with it, knowing it’s not ideal.

Nobody really likes either of the choices, but facing the conundrum, they naturally fracture into two groups, with three people preferring a fresh approach and two preferring to iterate on what they already have.

Unable to convince one another, by the end of the first hour of the meeting, nothing has been accomplished and all the ideas they started with are effectively off the table. They finally agree that sinking more time into this meeting will get them nowhere, so they cancel and decide to reschedule for later in the week when they will have had time to think things over more. In the meantime, the development schedule will be set back by several days.

The Problem

So, what’s to blame? Is the root of the problem the difficult coworker who shot down all the plans? It’s true he could have handled the situation better, been more constructive, but he was doing his job in pointing out the issues he saw.
Is the root of the problem then the ideas themselves? Well, most ideas can be resolved into better ideas, and you can ask why none of the ideas were any good — it seems like then the designers themselves are to blame. But they’re good designers, and you trust them to have good ideas. They always perform well. This design challenge is just very stubborn.

If not that, then maybe their inability to come to a resolution during the meeting was the root problem? If they could have achieved a compromise, maybe the meeting could have moved forward.
But if they legitimately perceived issues with the situation, and had a fundamental disagreement about the best way to move forward — neither of options being ideal — it’s likely that if the meeting had been pushed to continue and one option selected, further issues would have arisen. It’s hard to force a bad solution to succeed.

The Culprit

There are several potential culprits in the failure of this meeting. Pinpointing a single one as the root is difficult, and possibly inaccurate. At any rate, since there are so many factors, and they all interrelate, it’s unlikely that isolating one factor would actually be that beneficial.

This failing might just need to be chalked down as “inevitable roadblock,” which is utterly unsatisfying but is a legitimate difficulty that arises on occasion. So how to move forward, if you can’t find one item to blame and solve?

Examine every step taken at that meeting, replay it even, conceptually if not physically. Have some discussion around the meeting from start to finish, not to point out problems but to identify how each decision, discussion, or contention branches into others, how alternative paths in the design process depend on small factors and can change on the use of a single word, a different term, or way of phrasing something.

The Resolution

If nothing else, the takeaway can be a somewhat heightened awareness of the process and of oneself. The next time this situation arises, there may be a little voice in someone’s head that offers a new perspective or approach. Taken singly, these instances may not effect the outcome (and in fact, you may still have a failure), but accumulated over time they will almost inevitably add up to transform bad situations into tolerable ones, and potential failures into possible successes — which is about all anyone can ask of a meeting, anyway.