DesignOps 2020: Not Black Enough to Be White (Session Notes)

Speaker: Dean Broadley, Founder-Designing Humans

— Topic of talk is going to be about mental models for resilience and talking about Dean’s personal story and a broader journey

— Dean comes from South Africa. To get to South Africa, go to Africa, and go down until you can’t go down anymore.
— The country is marred with different colonial backgrounds, but is an beautiful place to grow up in.
— Before Dean came along, country was deeply segregated. The country was oppressed psychologically and racially, so it is not surprising to see symptoms of the past persisting into the present.

 

— Have 11 official languages, and can’t hide or be too contained in your own space

 

— How country was divided in apartheid
  • White
  • Black
  • Indian
— Definition of each group were very specific, and fourth definition of colored

 

— People struggled with managing the colored category
  • Colored could be further categorized as Cape Malay, Cape Griqua, Cape Colored, Other Colored, and Other Asiatic
— Different classifications led to different jobs for people,  determined where you lived, whether or not you got education at all.
  • People fought to get into the best community they could get into under the system
— When apartheid went away, there was a desire to wipe slate clean
  • It was not quite that easy
— Dean started pre-school and grew up in segregated playgrounds. People needed to put him somewhere
  • He was not black enough or white enough
— Even among  his quote-unquote “own people”, Dean was not even colored enough

 

— Learned nobody knew where to put him, and that people didn’t like that
  • Dean asked why it was so important to for him to be classified
  • Being outside of circles Dean could look at outside-in and can look at everyone else
— Dean could see pains of people and their discomforts
  • Not belonging everywhere meant he had access everywhere
  • He was not constrained by a group identity
— Dean could go wherever he wanted, as he wasn’t assigned a specific identity
  • This was an empowering experience

The “Edge” Effect

— The edge effect is an ecological concept, where you have two merged environments. Where the environments meet there is the edge. At the edge, there are:
  • New species
  • Greater resilience and ecosystem diversity
  • Longer-lived species and groupings
  • Higher population density
— People in Cape Town are most genetically diverse in the world.
  • Hard to do genetic mapping as a consequence
— There is also a cultural edge effect, where being excluded from different groups helps you think more inclusively
—Dean could spot gaps and where people felt left out in existing processes.

 

— For example, as he ran his first corporate team, Dean got hit by large amount of pain and feeling of loneliness
— Country’s breakdown is 90% people of color, and 10% white
— South African design industry demographics are inverted, and designers are overwhelmingly white
— It was hard to hire new designers of colors and to make space for them.
  • For first nine years Dean didn’t put his profile up online
  • Figuring out space for future for fo all desgners
— Weird to work in industry that didn’t have space for him

Availability Bias

— People stuck with preconceived ability to focus on designers based on what they thought a typical designer looked like. This meant it was hard to identify colored designers

 

— For young people coming up in the school system, who didn’t see people who looked like them in design made it seem like design was not a career path they could follow

Advice from Dean

How to handle these issues?

— First, care less about being certain, and more about being effective. This requires bravery, and being able to decouple what one believe to be true, versus what needs to be done to be effective.

— Next start at Level 1 with everyone.

  • It doesn’t matter whether you are working with interns or Level 100 unicorn employees
  • Take in the whole person who you are working with

— Consider the following Ancient Greek quote:

— Think about which things the person is doing that they are a planting seed for future generation, which things are supporting the tree, which situations are you working to reap the fruit of previously planted trees.

— If you look at a potted plant:

  • Someone else is required for the plant to be able to grow. And when potted plant is removed from its constraints, the plant is at high-risk of falling apart.
  • Dean provides a human example of a potted plant, through an engineer he met who said he left his last job because no one in his prior company was growing him.

 

— Now look at a crab:
  • Tough and resilient
  • Crab shells are finite, and crabs can recognize constraints of shells.
  • To get stronger and bigger, the crab must be able to shed things that protect them
  • When we reach edges of capabilities, we tend to shrink to edges of constraints. But we need to be vulnerable and willing to push our boundaries.
— Crabs also come together when they are shedding their shells
  • Come together to stay safe when they are shedding shells
  • No matter big, old, or strong.
  • The only way to get stronger, bigger is shedding strengths that got you where you were to a specific point
  • Discomfort can be a sign of growth, and space to grow, lets you have ability to take on new challenges

Beware the End of History Illusion

— The End of History Illusion says: we all think we are done “loading” after a certain point is reached.
  • No matter how young/old we are. We understand we are people we are today because of past experience, but mis-estimate how future experience will shape us.
  • So be wary of how organization is changing you, as you are working to change the organization.

— Pot plants need others to define themselves (if you need company, constraints for you to grow, think about parts)

 

— Go through discomfort to define yourself. Find other crabs/teammates to grow through journey as well.

 

— Dean concludes with an African proverb, “To go fast, go alone. To go far, go together”.

Questions

  1. How common is it to find most language indigenous to South Africa?
Very uncommon. But language are related to each other.
  1. You do chili-breeding. How it makes you a better designer?
Interesting plants, as they make firery fruit, but plants themselves are fragile
Made Dean a better leader/manager.
  • Can’t baby the plants or treat them too harshly
Need to slowly expose to different things, so they can eventually thrive
  1. Would you say a “crab family” is important to have when growing past your limits?
Constraints good way to channel focus, but over-indexing on constraints can be a problem in itself. Being too good at something can be as limiting as not being good as something.
  1. What were Dean’s inspirations?
Had benefit of extremely influential parents and grandparents, who had gone through many tough things during apartheid period
His grandmother had to raise ten children, and  ended up becoming the director of  a cleaning company
Very introspective, and go into period of extreme introversion. Being willing to look at people and analyze behaviors
Tend not to take himself to seriously
  1. Power of cultural edge effect? Why are people so freaked out about those on edges?
Thinking it comes down to brain to not have infinite categorizations and expensive operation at biological level
Easy to have mental short-cuts
Flip-side is that people on the edge feel they have been categorized, so why can’t you
  • People try to delete their own edges. Can see someone going through XYZ
  1. Work with Designing Humans? Where to learn more? How to incorporate it?
Writing is being worked on, but haven’t written much. More verbiage kind of human
Look for Designing Humans twitter account, and workshops and course-work
  • Stuff on mental models and career
  • Thinking about time of career (five years of experience vs. one-year)
  • Leadership and building teams in communiity
Reach out to LinkedIn and helping people with growing Design Organizations and telling story differently
On Slack, and can link up with a bunch of resources
  1. What advice do you have for others to huddle together when shedding shell?
Definitely big contributor will be team culture and what kind of environment you are in
For high KPI organizations, issue is finding time,
Second part is putting yourself out there.
  • Put yourself at risk, but rewards are great
  • Ability to get other to speak out themselves
If you put yourself out there, you can find groups that way
If leader of team
  • Find strengths to share, and make person’s strength shared throughout the team
Only danger is risk of it becoming a therapy group, where you moan about everything

  1. Current state of design community in South Africa and where it’s heading?

Starting to mature and more heads executives are design focused.