ideas worth stealing2 rules for better design teams
There are 2 things every team can do right now to improve their chances of producing great results.
1. Designate a design dictator.
We all know that design-by-committee leads to subpar results. “Building consensus”, as many designers so eloquently put it, is just another way of saying that the team is willing to make and accept inferior decisions. Consensus is the death of greatness.
To fight against this, find your leader, give her the power to make final decisions, and then surround her by a team and make her use it.
Behavioral psychology research has shown that the leaders who achieve the best results are the ones who involve their teams in their decisions. In fact, teams produce better results than even the best problem-solver can produce working alone.
When a leader goes to a team for discussion, a wider range of expertise, insight, and effort is in place, and more people are available to perform tasks. A person doing this alone has to perform all the tasks sequentially, and must rely only on her own knowledge and insights.
Teams generate more ideas, and enable the best ideas to bubble up to the top, but good leadership is vital to bringing those ideas to life. Give one person the authority to make the final decision, and make sure that person considers the ideas and insights of the other team members when making it.
2. Designate a Devil’s Advocate.
When like-minded people get in a room together, they tend to have like-minded ideas. But very often, the best way to validate decisions is to have them challenged.
For each project, put someone in place to do exactly that. Simply by questioning decisions and presenting opposing viewpoints, the Devil’s Advocate (or “DA”) can help the team validate ideas, or push the team to find better ones.
When a decision is bad, the DA can cause the team to recognize problems and come up with new ideas. Even when a decision is the correct one, a DA can point out something no one thought about and prevent an impending mistake.
Any team can implement these two ideas without spending a dime, and all the teams who do can expect better results than even the best problem-solver can achieve on his own.
Posted by Robert on June 26th, 2008
5 comments
The first rule, which I definitely agree with, has a lot to do with responsibility. I’ve worked on several projects where designers were not the people responsible for the design, and so didn’t give it their best. When you’re responsible, when other people defer critical decisions to you, then you become a better designer. Non-designer managers who fail to push responsibility on the designers (because everyone wants to be a designer) ultimate get sub-par results.
@Josh -
Definitely. When a designer has ownership, great things happen. When a designer has no stake, and all the decisions are either made or changed by non-designers, things can go horribly wrong.
Good to hear from you.
Hey, good points. My creative team at my job (where I’m a developer) has one guy called the “creative genius” (He’s also co-founder). All final designs go through him, and I’ve seen nothing but great results.
One thing though, about devils advocate is the risk of paralyzing movement forward due to constant questioning of every small decision. I think that a lot of times when something needs to get done FAST, you just have to go with your gut and run with it. But with this in mind, I feel it can be a good way of being wary of narrow mindedness.
Btw- Does anyone ever use hidden input fields to catch spam bots for blogs? Your captcha is a bit hard to decipher…
@Jason —
The DA has to live by the same project constraints as everyone else. If you have 2 weeks to get something done, the DA has to operate on that same timeline. Paralysis averted!
I dig both if these ideas. Design by committee is evil and should be avoided, but listening to and working with your stakeholders to find solutions to design problems is absolutely necessary. With regards to the DA, I tell my team to justify everything. Every design suggestion must have a reason even when the reason is that it just looks better. It’s still up to the lead to make the decision.