One of the laws of stress
I think about stress a lot.
I learned yesterday about an interesting study conducted in 1908 related to the application of stress and the affect on productivity, a study that is still impacting how organizations view worker productivity today.
Robert M. Yerkes and John Dodson conducted an experiment with a box. The box had set of smaller boxes inside. One of the smaller boxes was black, one was white. They would put a mouse in the box. If the mouse walks into the black box, it gets a shock.
Yerkes and Dodson wanted to know if varying the intensity of the shock affected how quickly the mice learned that the white box was the safe option.
Then they wanted to know if the same rules applied when the boxes were obscured with a screen, making it harder to tell them apart.
They found some interesting results.
For the simple task--black box or white box--the mice learned faster as the shocks got higher.
For the harder task--when the screen made it harder to distinguish the boxes boxes--the mice learned faster when the shocks were lower, but performed worse as the shocks got higher.
This led to this general principle: environmental stresses help performance, but only up to a point. This relationship became known as the Yerkes-Dodson law.
Human biochemistry generally aligns with these findings.The body responds to both internal and external stressors with the release of stress hormones which negatively impact memory, attention, and problem solving.
Consider stresses that can affect performance. The last year has been an onslaught of external factors here in the US. The pandemic and its economic fallout. Incidence of police brutality and the subsequent racial unrest that gripped the country. An insurrection on the US Capitol.
Everyone is bearing witness to these incredible and stressful events, and experiencing the emotional impact of all of the factors above.
In the workplace, consider individuation of those factors; the pandemic has affected different people differently across broad factors like racial lines, economic lines. Personal and vicarious connections to racial and civic unrest weigh heavy on many. The frustrations of a virtual school society for small children, and on and on.
In an unfortunate turn, the Yerkes-Dodson law could easily be weaponized. It's a simple interpretation: break down each given job in your organization into the simplest tasks possible, apply stress to the workforce, reap the benefits of productivity. My immediate consideration is logistics. Whether it's Amazon fulfillment or UPS, the tasks at hand are monitored and optimized to be as simple as possible while ramping up quotas, targets, or other stressors.
But in the tech sector, so many job roles are living in an in-between space between the expectations of high performance and the perks and policies that are specifically targeted to reduce stressors.
As a manager, learning about the Yerkes-Dodson law shaped how I'd like to manage a team. Many of our design challenges are complex and under stress, these are exceptionally challenging. The pressures of the pandemic are putting people in to a high-stress state, even before they begin. If this most recent performance review season has seemed extra tough, then that's why--complicated, cerebral tasks like the self reflection and long-term thinking associated with career development can seem especially arduous for someone under today's conditions. As a result, I'll be working with my team to consider way to break down the tasks, and peel back the stressors, as best we can.
I'm going for an MBA
Well, here we go.
Why would a designer get an MBA?
Early in my design career, I was the only interaction designer at a burgeoning ecommerce startup. I found myself pushing pixels around my computer screen after hours in the latest of a string of late nights. I was in the process of transforming our company’s aging, buggy, and quirky checkout flow into a more stable and usable version that could allow the company to scale with confidence. The checkout flow of any ecommerce site is the linchpin of the business; any problem can have significant downstream effects on revenue, service level commitments, and customer satisfaction. It made sense that the VP of marketing would stop by to look in on my progress and ask a few questions.
“How do you think this will affect conversion,” he asked. He pressed further, “how do you know it’s worth the risk?” His questions were straightforward, but I struggled. “This will drastically improve the conversion rate for a wide swath of our customers,” I said, based solely on my opinion that the design looked better than the old version. I had no concept of how to measure that improvement and, most importantly, I lacked the vocabulary to describe the downstream outcome for the business.
In the thirteen years since that late night, my competency with business metrics has deepened significantly. My design process now goes much further to align business and customer outcomes. I have taken an active role in facilitating design projects with numerous business stakeholders, both as an in-house designer and as an independent consultant. I have guided teams through the Design Sprint process, leading customer research efforts, and designing new product experiences.
In spite of my best improvements, challenges remain in connecting business strategy with the design process. Business leaders typically only experience the impact they have on customers through a narrow set of quantitative metrics. Design leaders, while working directly on the products that affect customers, sometimes lack the vocabulary to articulate the impact of design decisions on business outcomes. This tension is where my career lives, every day.
While I have a design background, I have regularly taken steps to learn the language of business with greater fluency. It’s not hard to imagine the steady stream of business books and Medium articles, the webinars, the various workshops. Over time, this served me well, but now that I am assuming greater responsibility through leadership, I’m ready for a greater investment. The MBA is the next step.
Why this MBA?
I will be attending the Online MBA through Boston University Questrom School of Business. I landed on it for a combination of reasons.
Online format: I was looking at this option before the pandemic, but with social distancing rules in effect for everyone's safety, an online option has made a tremendous amount of sense. Day to day logistics of transitioning from work to class will be far easier (or at least faster) through an online program.
Diverse cohort: I'll be joining the second semester of incoming students for this program. So far, the program has accepted students from all over the world and in a wide range of backgrounds. The incoming class averages ~12 years of work experience, as well.
Generalist curriculum: I have some confidence in my specialization as a designer and design leader and I'm seeking greater foundation in business fundamentals, data, risk, and strategy. This program is targeted for people who people like me who are not trying to change career paths.
Cost: as I began researching MBA and Executive MBA options locally, they all ranged from $70-$125K all in, and those prices could change per-semester. This program's $24K cost, paid $4K at a time, is an amount I can live with.
The greater BU community: This is a lesser, but interesting factor as far as selecting this particular program. I don't have any connection to BU (yet), but I have been encouraged by what I have seen thus far. I am pleased that BUQSB has committed to the online MBA program with the hiring of a dean for online programs, Dr. Monica Moody Moore. Perhaps the most resonant development I found is BU’s commitment to racial equity, demonstrated in the selection of Dr. Ibram X. Kendi to lead the formation of the Center for Antiracist Research. Dr. Kendi’s work on antiracism has been an inspiration and I am thrilled to know that his work will find a vibrant new home at BU.
And so it goes. I'm looking forward to starting in January and following this path wherever it may lead.
A Design Practice
Over the course of my career, a framework has started to come into view for a establishing or augmenting a design practice. The framework has three key ingredients:
- Craft: What do you do?
- Infrastructure: What do you use to do it?
- Personal Growth: What are you getting out of it?
Attention to these three areas provides a foundation that is both flexible enough to work in organizations of different sizes and workflows, but clear enough to stay relevant under different methodologies.
Craft
"What do you do exactly?"This is the collection of executional tools we have at our disposal. This includes typical UX activities like card sorts, personas, prototypes, and critique, among others.
- Specific executional methods: typically the work that goes into design deliverables; personas, prototypes, card sorts, sketches, etc. There are dozens of options, appropriate at different stages in of a given design project.
- Participatory workshops: tactical, focused exercises such as kickoff meetings, research interviews, sketching sessions, etc.
- Processes: Executional activities and their resulting output is bundled into a process such as a Design Sprints or Lean UX sprint schedules, which provide a linear path for interactive discovery, design, and validation.
- A commitment to quality: throughout the above practices--and in many ways because of the above practices--there is a sustained commitment to quality. A thorough and focused practice keeps a designer performing at their best.
Infrastructure
"What do you use to do it?"This is typically what we would refer to as design tools; the software, team structure. But this concept goes further to include conceptual infrastructure like design principles that provide thematic support to all the aforementioned methods.
- Organizational infrastructure: team organization through clearly-defined team structure and roles--there's a lot more to this, of course.
- Technical infrastructure: software such as design and prototyping tools, file sharing, communication platforms, all of which facilitate the delivery of good work; also, reusable technical assets associated with style guides, templates, patterns.
- Facilitation infrastructure: provided through the use of meeting agendas and other materials that are re-used in workshops or other sessions--key for healthy engagement with stakeholders
- Thematic infrastructure: tenets such as principles, values, and methodology; tools that guide the team through tough decisions and elevate the team's thinking around solving challenges. Principles are the outcomes we seek in the work we create. Values are describe how we want to work. Methodology is the school of thought that ties together the methods at use on a project.
Personal growth
Everyone on the team is advised to approach every project as an opportunity for personal growth. I have found, historically, that not very many people look at their work this way, as an opportunity for growth. But those who do benefit both personally and professionally."What are you getting out of it?"
- Preferably, this starts with an introspective self-assessment to understand an individual's strengths and weaknesses and understand the need for addressing these opportunities
- Each project should be evaluated as a growth opportunity
- What opportunity do you have to improve your "on-screen" skills, the nuts and bolts of the design process?
- What opportunity can you find to improve your "off-screen" skills, your ability to work with stakeholders through facilitation, active listening, salesmanship, critique?
- Not every project has to be a growth opportunity, but we keep revisiting this as a means of maintaining that trajectory
Putting it in motion
High-quality design methodology, both in process and execution will always be critical to any high-functioning team. An efficient infrastructure liberates the team members from the burden of re-building and wrangling repeatable assets, cuts down on variability and error within the product experience, and removes the cognitive burden associated with smaller design decisions from the team while the work is in flight. But none of this is worth doing if it is not a vehicle for one's personal growth. We spend more of our waking day working than anything else and it should ultimately be a nourishing and rewarding experience.So I'll leave you with a hypothetical example of how a team would carry this through when starting a project.Let's say you start a project with a kickoff meeting (method). In this practice, the team would have a pre-set agenda for a kickoff meeting (infrastructure). The agenda had been tuned over time to assure that three criteria were met:
- Define the problem space and objectives
- Select design methods
- Make a commitment to complete the work
In the kickoff, the team works together to get a sense of what they need to do for the project. They refine and agree on a problem statement (method) and an objective that they aim to meet (method).Next, the team assesses what methods they want to use to reach that objective. Is field research the best way to get the qualitative data we need? Is there existing data from our analytics platform? Is Should we do a sketching session with the team to develop a direction for a prototype? Should we use the Design Sprint methodology for this problem?Finally, there is some assessment of the path forward, an estimation of how long it will take and, based on the needs of the project and the strengths and weaknesses of the people on the team (personal growth), a determination of who should do the work. So, if it's a mobile app project and a associate designer is looking to expand their repertoire with mobile, they could take the project on with a commitment from a senior designer to advise and mentor along the way, helping them ensure that the aligns with the team's values and the work is in line with the team's design principles (infrastructure).Naturally, once the team adopted this perspective, all their dreams were fulfilled!