The Human Solution to Design Process

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

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

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

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

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