Season 1, Episode 7: Peter Merholz
Peter Merholz is an experience design and product management executive with 20 years of experience across a broad range of digital media. In 2016 he co-wrote, with Kristin Skinner, Org Design for Design Orgs, the first book to address building and managing effective in-house design teams.
Peter’s got as varied and distinguished a resume as you can get in this field, including his role as co-founder of Adaptive Path, the world’s foremost UX consultancy.
Oh, and according to the Oxford English Dictionary, Peter gets credit for inventing the word "blog" circa 1999.
Dan Klyn: Hey, everybody. Thank you for joining us today. I'm still getting set here and I see that Peter has joined us, as well. Hey. Hello, Peter.
Peter Merholz: Hello.
Dan Klyn: Hey. [laughs] I was about to ask where are you joining us from today, but I see that you're joining us from Fawlty Towers.
Peter Merholz: Sure.
Dan Klyn: That's...Hooray.
Peter Merholz: I-I set this up once and I can't remember how. And every time I join it's too late to change it, so I just leave it that way.
Dan Klyn: Hm, I think you're bringing joy to a dark world during these dark times here.
Peter Merholz: It's, it's dark here. It's gray. So just like in Fawlty Towers, our sky looks about like that.
Dan Klyn: [laughs] Well, thank you so much for agreeing to talk with me about information architecture today as...
Peter Merholz: Wait, who?
Dan Klyn: Yeah.
Peter Merholz: Info what?
Dan Klyn: Information architecture. Which is, something that has been...Our understanding of it in this field seems to have changed over time. And by this ...
Peter Merholz: Okay.
Dan Klyn: And by this field, I will say, people who work on websites and complex digital information stuff. And so I have a lot of questions here. I don't want to start by going all the way back into the past because we could go pretty far. So, instead, how about the opposite of that, which is how about the immediate, right now? You're doing consulting and you've put your shingle out there with a provocative name.
Peter Merholz: [laughs]
Dan Klyn: That I love. And, so your business is called Humanism At Scale.
Peter Merholz: Yes.
Dan Klyn: And your...
Peter Merholz: Yes.
Dan Klyn: And your background, and this is how we'll get to the history of how does Peter Merholz become a thing in the world. Your background is in anthropology.
Peter Merholz: Well, so yes. So, my degree, at least, is in anthropology. It's hard to say my background, but...
Dan Klyn: Okay.
Peter Merholz: When I ended up getting a Bachelor's at UC Berkeley it was in anthropology.
Dan Klyn: And so is that-is that as far back as this humanism idea that you are tapping into today? Does it connect all the way back to there or-or what is this?
Peter Merholz: That's a...Yeah, so-so…
Dan Klyn: What is this Humanism At Scale?
Peter Merholz: What is this Humanism At Scale? So Humanism At Scale is the name of my company. Though I almost never use it in any public representation just because no one would know what that means.
Dan Klyn: I feel you. I have one of those, too.
Peter Merholz: Except for LinkedIn. You know, if you go to my website is petermerholz.com.
Dan Klyn: Yep.
Peter Merholz: But the idea behind Humanism at Scale is that I see...I associate myself with design, big “D“ design. And for the last few years, my-what I have felt is that design is the means by which we can imbue humanism in these organizations. Organizations, at least the ones that I tend to work with, the dominant culture is usually either one of business, like MBA culture. Lots of spreadsheets, lots of market sizing, lots of unit economics, and all that kind of stuff. And how are we going to build something that's viable, how are we going to acquire customers, and how are we going to convert them? And yada, yada.
It's either business oriented or it's engineering oriented. Uh, it's built on computers. And so we're going to create some nifty new technology that enables something. And both of those modes are inherently reductive and analytical. And not that there's anything wrong with that but it's insufficient. And I see companies are bringing design in. They're bringing it in…They often don't know why they're bringing it in, right? They're bringing design in because Apple is a trillion-dollar company. They're bringing design in because they're building more software and you need designers and usability when you build software.
Dan Klyn: Yep.
Peter Merholz: So they're bringing in designers thinking that designers are primarily creators of assets. But, given my orientation as-as a designer and someone who's been practicing this for over 20 years…
I recognize the value of design as bringing a whole other frame for approaching problems. Unlike the analytical and reductive frames that you get with kind of this business and technical approach, design tends to be more generative, tends to be more holistic, tends to be more big picture, tends to be more emotional and visceral. So what you get when you bring design into these organizations is you're actually getting all this other...You're getting this new approach at thinking about problems. And, the reason for humanism is that I find the word design to be somewhat reductive.
Dan Klyn: Yeah.
Peter Merholz: It is the Trojan horse for a much larger set of approaches, mindsets, et cetera…that-that is humanism, right? Design is the thing they know to buy that's humanistic. But if you look at something like design thinking, much of the value of design thinking is in the empathy generation, which is actually social science. It's not design. Right? It's ethnography. Or a content strategy. You could maybe loosely call that design but that's content, right? That's a different kind of thing. So-So design is this-is the tip of this sphere that is allowing all these humanistic efforts to kind of follow through. The issue being the receiving company is only seeing that tip of the spear, only really wants the pixels that designers use.
Dan Klyn: Yeah. The organ of admission may not be shaped like that whole wedge.
Peter Merholz: Yeah. Exactly. And so the-the challenge is how do we-how do you use design to create that opportunity to allow the humanism to flow into these companies. And Humanism At Scale is kind of a take on the phrase design at scale. You're hearing that more and more. The book I wrote, available at amazon.com and O'Reilly, is-is essentially a book about design at scale, though we didn't refer to it as that. And design at scale is a bit of a mean to hold design ups, revolutionists because we're starting to see these design teams growing unlike they have ever. And so, if there is such a thing as design at scale, I'm arguing there's then such a thing as humanism at scale.
Dan Klyn: And-And so it seems like one of the reasons you're framing it that way is to-to make sure that objects and artifacts aren't the focus.
Peter Merholz: I want-I guess, through certain contemporary language, I want to decenter design.
Dan Klyn: Yeah. Okay.
Peter Merholz: Design is a factor. It's a component but it is not-it is not the only value. it's just what the market recognizes. And so let's take advantage of the market recognizing design to bring a whole lot of other things that it didn't know it asked for. But will be better for everybody if we can get these different mindsets and different approaches taken up.
Dan Klyn: And so thank you. And I-I think I understand that better now. And now, if you would. If you're willing, I'm curious how-how far away from or how differently framed is that from what you and your cofounders did? I believe it was on a rooftop at SxSW.
Peter Merholz: [laughs] [crosstalk 00:08:31] yes.
Dan Klyn: And decided to create a consultancy around user experience design. how different is the impelling energy about what you're doing now from what you saw and your friends saw back in...When did you start Adaptive Path?
Peter Merholz: 2001. Well, we started talking about it in 2000 and we launched in March of 2001. And our first public event was on a rooftop in Austin, at SxSW at the former, no longer existing Waterloo Brewing Company. And it's funny. At the time we weren't talking about humanism. We were talking about web user experience. I had been working at Epinions, and writing, and been blogging about user interface design. Jeff Veen was writing the web monkey column at Wired and was leading the design of hotwire.com. Jesse [James Garrett] had around that time published the elements of user experience, the diagram.
Dan Klyn: Yes.
Peter Merholz: Janice had been at Netscape and, uh, had spoken I think at some events about user experience. Indie had been developing her mental models methodology. Mike Kuniavsky had also been at Wired with Jeff. And we were all just-we were all primarily working in some form of web design because that's what you did at the time.
Dan Klyn: Yeah.
Peter Merholz: Um, what's interesting, though, if you look back at the seven founders of Adaptive Path and connect it to this notion of humanism...
Dan Klyn: Yeah.
Peter Merholz: I have a degree in anthropology, Jeff and Jesse have degrees in journalism. Let's see, Lang had a degree in filmmaking. Janice, I wanna say history. She'd been biology and then she was a different social science. I think Indie might've been the only one who had something like an HCI degree. But we were all from humanities backgrounds because in the mid-90s and earlier there were no fields. There wasn't much of a field doing this. So the people who were doing this work tended to come from other backgrounds.
And I think it was Derek Powazek who kind of was one of the earliest to write about this broadly. But the web in the mid-90s was the best thing to happen to humanities majors, coming out of school in the early 90s into what was essentially a recession.
Dan Klyn: Yeah.
Peter Merholz: Right? And so because it-the web was a lot of content, we were comfortable grappling with content, we were stabbing it enough. We'd round up...A lot of us had played video games and stuff like that, so we weren't afraid of computers. We weren't necessarily programmers, right? None of us had, who started Adaptive Path, were really programmers. We might know how to hack Java Script or something like that. and so it was this opportunity for people with this understanding of humans and content but didn't fear computers. And, in fact, we were all...
I mean, one of the things that brought us all together is that we were all quite enthusiastic about the potential of the web as a medium. And so we wanted to do what we could to help everybody; make better web essentially.
Dan Klyn: And prior to that, so prior to 2001, you and some of those same people were doing that and calling it information architecture.
Peter Merholz: Yes.
Dan Klyn: And so-And so I'm curious about so many things about you still...
Peter Merholz: [laughs]
Dan Klyn: [laughs]
Peter Merholz: Let it out.
Dan Klyn: It's so glad to know you. I was looking at this unidentical twins thing that GK Van Patter wrote, back in the day. And I-If you don't wanna talk about this, there's a million…
Peter Merholz: Oh, no, no, no. Bring it on. Bring it on.
Dan Klyn: But he said something along the lines of I am shocked to find myself agreeing with Peter Merholz. And we could stop there and that might be interesting. But, when it comes to something that you said about a distinction that GK thought was meaningful, which was the difference between pre-dotcom era information architecture. Which he connects with his own work that connects up with people like Richard Saul Wurman and Nancy Green and a lot of other people who are doing visual design.
Peter Merholz: Mm-hmm [affirmative].
Dan Klyn: Or for whom visual-the visual aspect of their work is tangible. And, like, wow, it's-it's interesting.
Peter Merholz: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Dan Klyn: And you said-And he said so he agreed with you back then that in the dotcom era information architecture got narrowed into something smaller than it used to be.
Peter Merholz: Yes.
Dan Klyn: Which is...
Peter Merholz: Yes.
Dan Klyn: And I love that-that line from…Maybe it's just from the movie, not from Lewis Carol, but, “you used to be much muchier.”
Peter Merholz: [laughs]
Dan Klyn: When Alice goes back to Wonderland and she's not really the badass that, people expected. So GK looking at what had become of IA, he called it findability focused IA or something like that. And saying in the dotcom era, my God, you, information architects got it so wrong. And you narrowed into this really boring thing. And, and Merholz sees that. So ...
Peter Merholz: Yeah.
Dan Klyn: And what you just told me about your friends at Adaptive Path, there weren't any visual presenters in that. So...
Peter Merholz: No. None of us were visual designers. We were-at best, we were a lot of content people, right? We had all wit. Uh, if I was-if you were looking for something that connected pretty much the seven of us it was that we were bloggers, or we had given presentations, or we had all...
Dan Klyn: Yeah.
Peter Merholz: Collected our ideas in-in some kind of writerly like fashion, right? So we were approaching it, probably, if I were to think about it more almost from an explanatory viewpoint, as almost-as opposed to saying understanding, right? So what you're referring to obviously in the name of your company, right? There was a whole, um, practice of design before pre-web, that was highly visual but highly drenched in information. That sought to understand. I remember my boss at Studio Archetype. So a woman, Lilian Speck, one of the earliest in information architecture, bosses out there. and she-we would talk about kind of design for understanding, right?
And start seeing that as a mode of visual design, information design, distinct from design for commerce. Design for communication, design for marketing. And, you know, obviously, Richard Saul Wurman falls into there, all of the access press stuff that he did. People like Maria Giudice and Nathan Shedroff working at the understanding business at the time. Uh, Erik Spiekermann, all that meta-design work in creating systems for the Berlin public transit network, right?
Dan Klyn: Yeah.
Peter Merholz: And all that stuff, right?
There was this whole field of design for understanding that preceded the web that was rich, varied, complicated, and interesting. But, to be fair, it also focused primarily in static media, right? Once you put that thing out in the world, it was done.
Then you have the web and you've got librarians, like Peter [Morville] and Lou [Rosenfeld] emerging who see the web as an opportunity to practice better library and information sets, or a means to library and information sets to help manage this-this emerging medium.
Dan Klyn: Yeah.
Peter Merholz: And they also call what they do information architecture, not unreasonably. And because...One of the things that happened basically from 1996 to about 2006, is that the web...Matt Jones had this analogy. Matt Jones, formerly at Berg. He worked with Nokia and now he's at Google. And he talked about how the web had been this gravity well that just sucked all the attention from all these disciplines to solve this fairly narrow problem of how do we make websites easier to use, and findable, and all that. And all of these other interesting problems, just no one was paying attention to software anymore. No one was paying attention to how to apply these practices to-to broader concerns.
And that's kind of GK's point. Information architecture just started chasing...Understandably. It's what happens in capitalism. You go where the money is and the money was in the web. And so we all just started chasing that. This was largely...And one of the biggest regrets of my career (I don't have many) is that my closing keynote at the IA Summit in 2005 in Vancouver was never recorded because this was all that I talked about [laughs].
Dan Klyn: That-That's terrible. What a loss.
Peter Merholz: Well, and 2005...
Dan Klyn: Did you write it-Did you write it down? Do you have a...
Peter Merholz: No, of course not. I have a-I might have the deck somewhere. I never wrote anything down. I might have. It's somewhere written down. 2005 was an interesting time because it was pre-smartphone as we know about it. The mobile was a thing, but it was also the rise of web 2.0. And so we were starting to see folksonomies and new ways of organizing starting to emerge. And it was allowing us to open ourselves up to information architecture being something other than, uh, cataloging websites. there was also-it was around that time that I saw, [inaudible 00:18:15] speak at a conference about the work that Mya designed for the public libraries in Pittsburgh.
Which was essentially service design, but it had a huge IA component. And so we're seeing how information architecture was-could imbue spaces. Like, 2005/2006 was this turning point of recognizing that we had, sacrificed or left behind a lot of interesting problems for information architecture that were worth pursuing. But it was another...I mean, you know this better than I, another five to six, seven years before the whole reframe IA really kind of helped bring that energy back more broadly into the discipline.
Dan Klyn: Yeah. Yeah. And your colleague, Jesse James Garrett coining AJAX at that time.
Peter Merholz: That was 2005. That was February of 2005.
Dan Klyn: Yeah. So the rectangle, there were things we were doing to make the rectangle work for business. A lot of those were organizational and findability focused. Information retrieval. And then this interaction world opens up. The rectangle starts to become dynamic. And, there's a whole bunch of new things that need to be named and a whole bunch of new ways to work on it that you and your colleagues invented.
Peter Merholz: Well, we didn't invent Ajax. Jesse…
Dan Klyn: Well, no. But-but a way to provide a consulting product to businesses that helps them go after whatever that is. That fundamental change that just happened to the shining rectangle.
Peter Merholz: Oh, I see.
Dan Klyn: Something that people will use.
Peter Merholz: Yeah. Yeah, no. And, I guess thinking back to GK's point, I mean, for me a eureka text in my career is-is Wurman's Information Anxiety. I was either a senior in college or it was just after I graduated and I was working two miles from here [laughs] as a research assistant for a professor in the department of education. And he was interested in computers in education, multimedia in education.
Dan Klyn: Oh.
Peter Merholz: And on his little bookshelf, you know, not much bigger than one of those BILLY IKEA bookshelves, he had the book Information Anxiety. And I took it off. It looked interesting. And I read it and it was one of those like "Oh, this is a way of approaching the world that I didn't know.” I didn't know that this could be a, almost like a practice, right? This thing, because-First with Information Anxiety and then with Norman's The Design of Everyday Things were-were moments. I mean, where I realized other people thought about the world the way I kind of did internally in my head and never talked to anybody about because it never came up.
Which validated, this is-it's not just me. And this is an approach. And, two, there seems to be work you can do in this regard. [laughs] Like, maybe I should try to figure out how to move in that direction professionally, whatever that means. So, I'm-I owe a lot of debt to Wurman and that kind of pre-web IA thinking, yeah.
Dan Klyn: Were you aware of him as a San Francisco ..At least what-for a week, a month, for a couple of years, as a San Francisco thing? When you pulled that book off of that shelf?
Peter Merholz: No. I had no idea who he was. Then, I wanna say, the access guides were probably my next, intro into him. So not long after I pulled that book off the shelf, which would've been around 1992, '93, and that book was five or six years old by then.
Dan Klyn: Yeah.
Peter Merholz: You'd-You know better than I.
Dan Klyn: [crosstalk 00:22:13]
Peter Merholz: Uh, I moved to New York to work for the Voyager company, which you understand what I'm about to say. The Voyager company, run by Bob Stein, who shot, cataloged, and distributed some of the first video of the TED conferences for TED3, I think. in...the TED2. Oh, a laser disk. There you go.
Dan Klyn: Like this.
Peter Merholz: Yeah.
Dan Klyn: [crosstalk 00:22:39]
Peter Merholz: And so it probably was when I went to New York and started working for Voyager that I started connecting some dots. That was also where I was introduced to Donald Norman because one of the first products I ever worked on at Voyager was an expanded book CD-ROM of his first three books; Design Of Everyday Things, Things That Make Us Smart, and Turn Signals Are The Facial Expressions Of Automobiles, which we put on the CD-ROM. And then augmented with audio and video of him kind of explaining the concepts. And so as I’m working on this, I'm reading the book and going, like, "Oh, so here I have Norman and Wurman, these kind of two pioneers that I'm just steeped in 1994 and 1995.” I'm 23, 24, maybe.
Actually, 22, 23. But, like, in that mode of just taking it all in. It's also around that time, probably another text...I don't have it here, but, it'll be too hard to see. A poster by Scott McCloud. Understanding Comics I found at the Saint Mart…No! Astro Place Barnes and Noble in probably 1995, just browsing shelves. Pulled that off a shelf, read it, bought it, consumed it, inhaled it. [laughs] Um being 23 is a-being 23 is very important.
Dan Klyn: Oh, man.
Peter Merholz: [laughs]
Dan Klyn: Isn't it?
Peter Merholz: You probably have students who are just, like, sponges, taking all that stuff in.
Dan Klyn: Oh, it's-it's...
Peter Merholz: And seeing their brains just…
Dan Klyn: It's amazing. It's thrilling how much, how much is going in that 23. So I think one of the reasons why I've been so pleased to get to know you over the years is because of how into Wurman I've always been. And the sense that the field didn't really get him, but you got him.
Peter Merholz: [laughs]
Dan Klyn: Right? And so, like, this guy's kind of weird, but-and he's part of the UX, uh, deep state. But, man, he gets Wurman. And...
Peter Merholz: [laughs]
Dan Klyn: How's that, by the way? I think-I think you need to put that on your next conference badge
Peter Merholz: The UX deep state?
Dan Klyn: UX deep state.
Peter Merholz: Oh, my God, but I'm...Ah, I have such a conflicted feeling around, you know, as you know, the term user experience and how it's applied, but...
Dan Klyn: Yeah. No, but I really think that that's part of, part of how I was able to, to connect with you, is because you get Wurman, and I've been trying to get Wurman for so long now. And one of the ways that you understood him, and I haven't seen anybody in our field, maybe with the exception of like Paul Bryan, is, a single track conference.
Peter Merholz: [laughs]
Dan Klyn: Am I wrong? Like, you understood something about what made TED work. And then you wanted that for us when you created, and for those of us (there's some olds on here. Hey Austin. Hey Bogdan. Hey Noreen.) with the idea conference, when you invented that, correct me if I'm wrong, but it was, like...for our community. It'd be awesome if we had a TED-like, thing to feed us from convergences in other fields that are not...So it's not a conference to hear from us about us, it's a conference for us to hear from the world.
Peter Merholz: Yes.
Dan Klyn: [crosstalk 00:26:08] Humanism back to the humanities, back to a broad thing, not a narrow thing. Tell me a little about how you came up with the idea conference and...
Peter Merholz: Sure.
Dan Klyn: Yeah.
Peter Merholz: So the idea conference, that would've been I wanna say 2006, was the first one in Seattle. I was president of the IA Institute. And, as president, I see the value of events. We did them at Adaptive Path. And I wanted to see how an event could help us catalyze this new approach to IA. So when I became president of the IA Institute I was very much... My platform was trying to embolden IA again. Get it-Get it back to the kind of pre-web mindset where it's not just about websites but it's about information in the world. As Jorge [Arango] would now say, living in information. Like, it's all around us. How do we kind of re-embrace that?
And so, the idea conference came out of that. I forget what it stood for. Information, design, entertainment, engagement, or access. It didn't matter. But the point was to invite people from a lot of different narratives. Experience. Access. The point was to invite people from different backgrounds who were doing work in IA. And I was very much the curator of this. Sarah Rice should get all the credit in the world as what we would now call kind of the head of operations for it, right? She helped make that thing go. but I-I was the primary programmer. And, so we hosted it in the Seattle Public Library, which wasn't that old at that time, because it was this reflection of information architecture in the physical space.
Get everyone at the Seattle Public Library. The way they broke up the floors. And the spiral of the book collection. There's TED Talks by Joshua Prince Ramus. Read or see those if you wanna understand kind of how information helps them think about the physical structure. But we had the head librarian from the Seattle Public Library speak. My favorite was probably... We had someone from the National Park Service Harper's Ferry, a publication's group talk about the design system of the brochures of the National Park Service.
I had realized, having gone to a lot of national parks before, and had kids… My wife and I would do a lot of road trips. We would hit up all these national parks and you get the brochures. And you realize they were all built on the same, what we would now call, design system.
Dan Klyn: Design system. Yeah.
Peter Merholz: [laughs] And I dug into it a bit. Turns out, who else, [inaudible 00:29:05] had created this unigrid system for the national park service sometime in the 70s. And the quality, I mean, you know, you don't think of our... Sadly, we don't think of the federal government as a sponsor of good design but the National Park Service brochures are remarkable. So I had someone from Harper's Ferry talking about that and how... You know, you're talking about the brochures, talking about the signs along the trails, talking about the visitor centers… And how this was all considered holistically. For me, it was a lot about how do we recognize, how do we design information spaces holistically online and offline so people from a lot of different backgrounds...
Something that's forgotten that we also did. So there was the idea conference in 2006 and then in New York in 2007. One of the keynoters in New York was Michael Wesh, who had just... He's an anthropology professor at University of Kansas and he developed some notoriety with YouTube videos on Web 2.0, specifically one called The Machine Is Using Us. Which is still brilliant and he's still brilliant.
Dan Klyn: Sure.
Peter Merholz: But... Oh, in between, in the bitter winter was February in Pittsburgh because we're idiots. But we got like 30 or 40 people to come to Maya's design and do a workshop on what is essentially service design, but kind of information imbued service design. Did a workshop at Mya, then we all loaded up, into a rented school bus and drove to two different Carnegie library spots, the main library and the Squirrell Hill Library to see how it was-how the design had affected it. How did the design affect the interior, the way finding, the space itself? So that was-that was definitely a lot of my mission in 2005, 2006, and 2007, was trying to get information and architecture to not just be about screen based experiences.
Dan Klyn: Amazing. And so I thank you. And I think that maybe, if not the answer, the way into the answer to, Kerry Hane put a thing on Twitter that you responded to.
Peter Merholz: [laughs]
Dan Klyn: Myths-Myths about information architecture that need to be busted. And your offering was that IA is about UX, that that's [crosstalk 00:31:28].
Peter Merholz: It's not about UX.
Dan Klyn: Oh. Okay. [laughs] I'm adding the not. So say more.
Peter Merholz: Yeah. I mean, kind of similar to what GK talked about, and I think you referenced earlier on, probably the original sin of information architecture, of polar bear information architecture, was that it became seen as a component of web user experience. And thus minimize in terms of its application, when as again, what we talked about with reframing Jorge's book, Living Information. Information architecture is different and bigger than user experience. It is a substrate that feeds everything.
Jorge and I had drinks recently and talked about maybe getting up-going on his podcast. [laughs] And one of the things we started talking about, you know, so I in the last few years, thanks to Org Design for Design Orgs (available at Amazon and O'Reilly) I've become an org design kind of guy.
Dan Klyn: Yeah.
Peter Merholz: And in writing the book, I talked about this last year at the IA conference… After I wrote the book and reflected on it, I realized what I had written was how information architect looks at organization design. It's a lot of frameworks, it's a lot of-of structuring of the organization. what-how you know. Job titles is a classic labeling exercise. Um, career ladders and the progression there is an information challenge of how do you define junior people, mid level people, senior people, et cetera... That's an information exercise. How-uh, there's an information exercise in terms of the entity-relationship diagrams; essentially of humans and how they work with one another. So...
Dan Klyn: Well, I remember when you were at Groupon you had a realization that you shared, with me. I think we were at a conference and you said, I saw that where the sales guys sit is information architecture. And that, that…
Peter Merholz: It was determined... Well, because the sales guys sat based on a flawed notion of geography that somebody early in Groupon's existence had broken up the country into a set of cities and regions for Groupon. But without any... It was clear they hadn't used any authority in doing it. No-No place names authority type thing. And so it was a freaking mess, but it was so buried so many layers deep within the conceptual stack of the organization that it was really hard to fix. It was really hard to address and salespeople were seated based on the regions they were in because they wanted the people in the same region sitting next to each other, right?
And so for me, it was, like, just this reflection of something that was probably tossed off. Someone looking at a map, looking at cities on a map and typing them into a database. And then not thinking about it ever again. It ended up having this years long impact as the company grew faster than anybody had, been prepared for. Anyways, so what I was thinking, you know, as I've been thinking about organization design, like, that's another form of how these information architects sold themselves short by not being, uh, by not acknowledging how they can be applied to matters like organization design and organizational psychology.
For instance, I'm sure you can think of, you know, 1,000 different applications of information architecture, that are truly fundamental. I mean, how we work, how we-the structures in the conceptual structures in which we work that HR and finance determine, right? That should all be designed by an information architect and none of it is. It's made by people who don't actually really understand the material that they're working with. And I think it leads to a lot of the pain that we feel working in corporations is because they're badly designed because they're designed by people who don't know how to design. They don't know how to work again work with that material appropriately.
Dan Klyn: Yeah.
Peter Merholz: And the IA community has never really expressed all that much interest in applying their methods outside of user experience. And I think that's a huge, shortcoming of the discipline.
Dan Klyn: One of the ways that Jesse James Garrett has appreciated you is by saying that you are able to hold strong opinions loosely. And that that is a really crucial ability of a designer. And so I would like to ask you to flip over what you just said and tell me about the problem the-maybe the second or third day sin of original information architects. Which is the over specialization, the idea that, really? You just work on the structure part? Like, you're just in the first diamond? Then how the hell... Like, what the fuck? Is that just big D up front and you're some esoteric priesthood, who thinks you can, apportion the fundamental building blocks of the universe?
And then you go poof and then lesser designers color in your wire frames? Do you-is that interesting to you to talk about that opposite [crosstalk 00:37:25]
Peter Merholz: Well, it's one that I'm... Well, to be honest, it's a space that I'm somewhat challenged with and struggling with because generally I agree with kind of-what I think is your precept, which is that we... Well, let me-let me, reframe it slightly differently. There was a desire in-in our world of separating presentation from content. We somehow think this is possible, right? I just caused... Two weeks ago, one of the biggest shit storms in hashtag design Twitter by saying that you shouldn't put lorem ipsum in your wire frames. And, supposedly, half of the audience is like, "You're my hero" and the other half wants to, like, you know, chop off my head, put it on a stick, and walk it around the town.
And but the point of that is simple, which is that the content... You can't-You cannot separate content and presentation. How people receive the content is affected by how it's presented. And they're just too intertwined. There's 1,000 studies that show this. I remember Victor Lombardi sharing stuff in IA conferences in the early 2000s, that, you know, that he found. Like, academic papers around how people perceive content based on structure and how they imbue, meaning from the structure. Not just from the content, right? So you can't disentangle these two. And so kind of getting to the point you were just making, right? We have a habit of falsely separating these... You know, it's very waterfall or very kind of factory floor separating these different aspects of the design problems that we're facing.
Where we have people up-front thinking about them doing research, and coming up with models of user behavior, and a set of insights. And then that gets handed off to someone who can start sketching wire frames or whatever. And maybe separately, there's some information architects who are figuring out content models, or the labels, et cetera... And then, you know, it kinda merges together. And someone's kind of coloring in those wire frames. And you get this kind of factory floor approach to building a digital interface. And I think that is problematic. Like, all this stuff is a mess that needs to be kind of brought together. And then kind of molded in concert.
An issue, though, and this is where I might say... I don't know if it's controversial. There was a meaningful distinction between, kind of, strategy and execution. The-The first diamond and then the second diamond, right? The definition and then the...
Dan Klyn: Yeah.
Peter Merholz: And the execution. And the potentially controversial thing I'm going to say is that some people are better at one than the other. Um, there are strategists who don't know how to make form and there are form makers who cannot block strategy.
Dan Klyn: Yeah.
Peter Merholz: And I don't want to remove them from the conversation. There's value that they are bringing in their work. And because they're not able to cross that chasm, from the first to the second diamond, shouldn't mean that they're somehow excommunicated. And, so that's the struggle that I have is, you know, we want an entire team to work together throughout this whole process, but not everyone is suited to be there throughout the whole process. And so, grappling with that is something that I'm still figuring out. I think a lot about teams and one of the things I wonder about teams is, still figuring out, like, who is the core that does go with the whole process?
Some say the two, three, four folks who are there for everything. And then kind of you get specialists plugged in and out along the way where they can add value. Something along those lines. So it's not like you've got a group of two or three people making a strategy and throwing it over and the other group of three or four people building it. There's still some core that runs it together but recognizing that not everybody is good at everything. Because one of the biggest failings in, that I see in design organizations, right? Is this desire still in 2019 for a unicorn. You can somehow do it all. And those people basically...
Dan Klyn: Yeah.
Peter Merholz: ...Don't exist. And if you rely on unicorns, your-the design of your experiences is going to suffer. And so striking this balance between recognizing people can only be great at a limited number of aspects of this digital design work. Um, and if we want greatness, we wanna tap into that. Figuring out how to balance that with this desire to have as many people involved in as many phases is something that I'm still grappling with.
Dan Klyn: What's the-the overhead of the complexity in order to support that model that you just described? Because I can see it as you're drawing it in the air with your hands, right? Like, there's the nucleus that persists throughout and then there are these touchpoints. Have you seen anybody implement that? Have you worked in this way?
Peter Merholz: As close as I've seen, it's probably... Let me think here. I mean, if you're in-house, that essentially becomes... That nucleus ends up becoming a product manager.
Dan Klyn: Yeah.
Peter Merholz: Right? Is this-it is this person who's just kind of there along the way.
Dan Klyn: Yeah.
Peter Merholz: And they might, if they're not working in some type of truly kind of balanced team, squad mode, kind of pulling in people as needed. Um, throughout even if they're in a balanced team and squad mode, you still often... You know, you have people within the team that's usually product management, design, and engineering but you still have folks coming in and out, like research, data science, content, et cetera… Right? And so someone who's organizing that, if you think about, one of the ways that Adaptive Path in 2001 and 2002 fought convention was that we would have project teams of two designers who were with the project from beginning to end.
We would work on it all for the entirety of the project. It'd be the same two designers, whereas if you had gone to other kinds of digital design agencies at the time, you might have a creative director, say, like, overseeing a project. And then you'd have a series of specialists coming in for two weeks at a time. Right? You'd have your researcher come in and then go out, and then you'd have your IA come in and go out, and you'd have your interactions designer come in and go out, you’d have your visual designer go in and come out. And you would have this one person who kind of was orchestrating-would be orchestrating them.
And the point of that was, in... Well, a large part was because the designers were highly specialized in the late 90s, early 2000s. Still kind of borrowing on a pre-digital design for mindset. But it also meant that you could have designers working on multiple projects. And utilized at a greater rate, right? So it was seen as financially beneficial. And whereas our approach, having two designers just working on a project was, you know, we weren't using-we weren't extracting as many hours out of our labor, as maybe we could
Dan Klyn: Having a utilization column in the spreadsheet was not always happening, then?
Peter Merholz: Well, yeah, but-but it was our company and there were seven of us, so we didn't care. We're, like, we wanted to do it our way. And the only other company I know who was trying-who's basically working in a similar mode (we weren't as, specific in our methodology as they were) was Cooper, right? Cooper always had two designers working from beginning to end on a project. And, some of our approach was actually inspired by Cooper because I-I remember having conversations with Johnathon Corman, who back in the late 90s, early 2000s who would be like, "It is insane to expect a designer to work on more than one project, on more than one software project at a time because software takes over your brain.
It just has a complexity that-that even the simplest software has a complexity too great for any one person to work on two very different software projects. They-They'll just lose their mind. And I realized I agreed with it.
Dan Klyn: [laughs] Yeah, I can attest to that.
Peter Merholz: [laughs] Right. I agreed with them. And so that was why, at Adaptive Path, if you were on a project, that was your only... If you were a designer on a project, that was your only project. Project managers would be on two or three different projects but designers would only be on one project at a time. And so, you know, kind of getting back to that question, you don't [laughs]... You don't see-I don't see anyone operating in the way that my brain wonders is somehow optimal.
Dan Klyn: Right.
Peter Merholz: Um, but, you know, I would love [laughs]... I'd love an opportunity to try to find a lab where I can create this model of, you know, two, three, four cross-functional folks. Generalists, though, right? So even if they're cross-functional, they're that kind of broad-more broadly scaled. Maybe not going deep in any one thing. Um, who are the core of the team that's bringing something forward. And then giving them these touchpoints to bring on, super deep crafts people, right? I think one of the things that we've forsaken is an- a respect of deep craft in an interest of just pumping stuff out. And a recognition that, you know, it takes years to be a truly brilliant visual designer, a truly brilliant information architect, a truly brilliant user researcher.
And if we shove everyone immediately into a generalist mode, then we're getting folks who are, you know, kind of classically broad but showering. And we're missing out on greatness, on-on certain greatnesses, right? Apple, for all their problems, from a user experience perspective has clearly great industrial designers, right? Um, and folks who just obsess on that. And that's one of the things that people connect with when they connect with Apple products, is something visceral around that. And-and in our desire to...
Yeah, to kind of generalize everybody, we miss out on that-that exceptional depth that can really cause an experience to go from “eh” to singing.
Dan Klyn: Yeah. Yeah, that... It's a dependency, perhaps, that business does not want to have the dependency on craft and greatness.
Peter Merholz: That's-I mean, that's probably true. I mean, it took a weirdo like Steve Jobs to create a safe space for that. And he clearly just couldn't think of it in any other way. It didn't occur to him that what he was doing was weird. It just made sense to him but it made sense to him because he was kind of weird. [laughs] Right? In that regard.
Dan Klyn: Yeah. And they seem now to have lost their way, too.
Peter Merholz: They do seem to. [laughs]
Dan Klyn: What's good-What's good out there? What are you-are you seeing anybody, anything, that lights you up in the hopefulness department? The, "Hey, there's a virtuous, horizon, if not a path, to get there.” Like, one of the things I wonder about what you think about is organizing designers the way that Mike Montero and others have called for…
Peter Merholz: Yeah.
Dan Klyn: If there is a way for us to protect, to talk about craft, talk about business… Not-preferring not to have the dependency on greatness, or on craft, or on doing it right. When I think about that prospect, I've got a 17-year-old kid who wants to get into UX. And, if his rights as a worker were protected by union…. I live in Michigan. We don't have-we're a right to work state now but we used to have really vibrant labor unions. And those were terrific jobs. And families were provided for those...
Peter Merholz: Yeah. Yeah, so my general feeling is one of professionalism. Exactly what form that takes, I haven't done the thinking to figure out kind of the means forward. If it's certification, if it's licensing, if it's unionizing, some combination of these things. You know, if you would ask me 10 years ago, I would've been fuck all that. It's the wild west, we don't know what we're doing. We're still inventing this. And if we try to professionalize now, we're going to cut ourselves off. We're not-we need to flourish. We need the messiness.
Ten years later, we've got a few form factors that have basically become, standardized. And we know what good design looks like. We know how to do good design. It's not a mystery anymore. One of the reasons I left Adaptive Path, and this was a little... But even before then, a little over 10 years ago, I realized around 2008/2009, methodology had stopped evolving. We had literally kind of basically figured out how to do this work. No-There was... And I recognized this in Adaptive Path, some, generation, for a lack of a better word, intellectual property.
You know, through 2008, we were writing essays, and blog posts, and giving talks about new ways of doing things and inventing good design faster. And our design strategy and design research methods, and our interactions on methods. And we were a methodological house on fire in 2009. It all stopped.
Dan Klyn: [laughs]
Peter Merholz: And I realized it took me about a year or so to-to try to, like, reflect on it. And it's because we kind of had all the tools in our toolbox. Our toolbox was full, we know how to do good design. that was around the time I started shifting to think about organizations. That's a separate story, but so now we know how to do good design, we know how to judge design if we need to assess it. We've got tools for that. We know how to deliver it. We're all solving a lot of the same problems. Every company has to solve onboarding or whatever. And then just, like, that should just be done.
It should be, like, architects and code of-of how do you design the stairs. Like, that's not the architect's challenge. Like, we've figured that out. We know how to design stairs to work for humans. Just do it. And so as so much of this work has been-been figured out and as this work is becoming essential for living, [laughs] we-in order to survive as a human in the world you need to be-you are subject to interactions. To interfaces. And those interfaces should be designed in ways that we know that work because we know that there's almost no interface out there. You know, if you look at 95% of interfaces that people are using to manage their life (email, web browsing, online banking, whatever it is…) those are solved problems.
Are you still there? I'm ...
Dan Klyn: Yes.
Peter Merholz: Great. Those are all solved problems. So this is a long answer to kind of what you were saying. Like, yeah we're ready for some form of professionalization. And I do think, as someone who... Even as an entrepreneur, manager, I have always been pro labor. Labor's always gonna get the shift. And so I will go out of my way to-to support labor in enabling security, consistency, stability in their lives. Because it's important. It's the right thing to do. And so yes I am kind of, I encourage people to read Montero's Ruin By Design. I encourage people to think very seriously about what would it mean to certify or license.
I'm receptive to some concerns, as that has been approached, right? Some concerns, particularly from people in, representing more at risk communities, say, "Great, another barrier to entry."
Dan Klyn: Yeah.
Peter Merholz: Right?
Dan Klyn: Yeah.
Peter Merholz: Which I totally get.
Dan Klyn: Thank you.
Peter Merholz: I totally get.
Dan Klyn: Yeah.
Peter Merholz: And that's valid. And, you know, if you've ever ridden a London cab, you know what it looks like when a unionized workforce tries to keep others out. London cabbies are all a bunch of white dudes who've been very active in not letting people who don't look like them, into their club. And so I still think it's a design problem, right? And I think you can design a system that enables and supports, people from all communities to have access to it. You need to be very intentional about it.
And I'd think it is, it is high time to take that seriously. It's too important and we have too many people who don't know what they're doing designing interfaces that are critical. When we know, again, how to do it. And we should raise that bar, raise the floor to ensure quality, more broadly, in our society. Both for all of us who have to use these interfaces and then for the people making those interfaces to ensure they are protected.
One of the things, the last point (I know I've been rambling) but the last point on this that I thought-that I'll raise, that I think is interesting because it's from a parallel community to ours… I attended... Oh, what the hell is it called? The design systems conference, Clarity. That Gina puts on. And, in it, Ethan Marcott, basically puts out a call for unionization among the design systems community.
Dan Klyn: Yeah.
Peter Merholz: And when he did it, he got a standing ovation. And this is in San Francisco, among a bunch of technical people who you would think are kind of the exact type not to want to be unionized. If anyone was going to not unionize, right? They're-They're always able to get good work, they're highly fluid in their work, they're paid well, et cetera… But I think there's a recognition among the design systems community that their work can be-that their labor can be used... [laughs] That their labor can be used for ill purposes. And if they are not, you know ... They're making a bunch of parts. And how those parts are used, they're not necessarily in control of it.
If they wanna be able to have more agency in that, I think they're seeing professionalization in unions as a way to protect not just the labor of the design systems community but the output. What their material is.
Dan Klyn: Yeah.
Peter Merholz: Is then used to build.
Dan Klyn: To make it not have to be an individual choice about the virtue of adding your labor to an organization and what that organization's effect is in the world. It seems to me-and that's something, I'm curious if you had a mentee who was considering a job at Facebook or Amazon, would you bring the moral, ethical, dimension into that conversation with them?
Peter Merholz: I probably wouldn't even have to.
Dan Klyn: If they're asking for it?
Peter Merholz: Well, I-because yeah. At this point, and this is another one of those conversations that-that crops up on Twitter and that you realize, like... I would almost expect the mentee to be the one to bring that to me, right? As a concern, should I work at a place like, you know, that’s involved in some form of either surveillance capitalism or just surveillance now.
Dan Klyn: Yeah.
Peter Merholz: And how to navigate that because, you know, there's a lot of jobs at those companies. They're well-paying jobs. one of the things that Montero points out is how a lot of people in these companies, you know, they either have massive student debt or they're working under some form of H1B visa. And so they're-they feel kind of compelled to work.
Dan Klyn: Yeah.
Peter Merholz: And, it's a reasonable concern. And so, you know, I wouldn't... I don't think I would discourage outright anyone from working at any of these companies. I have friends who work at all of these companies.
Dan Klyn: Yeah.
Peter Merholz: And these companies, like our country, like my state, like my city, is complex with a lot of different moving parts. And some that are good and some that are not so good. And it's not as simple as, you know, Facebook bad, Amazon bad. It's stranger and weirder than that. And so it's a matter of... And not to excuse any of the negative consequences going on in those organizations, but, you know, I have to recognize that I get value out of seeing my friend's family's pictures on Facebook. Like, that is a societal good that has to be weighed against these various societal bads.
And so, you know, I think that for that mentee, it's a matter of helping them identify their own moral compass. They might not even have one, or know they have one, or think about it much. And so we're helping them recognize the value in developing that understanding. For me, not to impose my values on them, right? Different people are gonna have different value systems. And so to help them understand how they can articulate and develop their own value system. And then, for them, I think the one that I would encourage, frankly anyone especially working in design, is that student debt and H1B visa is notwithstanding.
And I don't wanna diminish it. I think most labor has way more power than it recognizes. And management doesn't want you to know that.
Peter Merholz: Right and so to encourage a mentee in these contexts to speak their voice and to be heard and to recognize that they can work. We're in a fortunate position right now that you can labor in an organization whose values align with yours because there's so much demand for digital design labor. And if it's not one of those companies there are others and you probably won't get paid as much, right? There's gonna be trade-offs but you can still get paid good money. Not even like...
'Cause you're not at minimum wage here right, you're gonna get paid good money. It's just not all the money, right. And so it's helping people recognize, you know, that these are the kinds of trade offs we have to make in our lives and you kind of have to find your way, through.
Dan Klyn: I like that. Thank you. before we open it up to our, live audience here for their questions, I'll ask Austin's question from earlier. do you want to talk about the Warriors at all?
Peter Merholz: [laughs].
Dan Klyn: Do you want to talk about... Do you want to talk about the NBA and China and, professionalism in that, realm at all?
Peter Merholz: I've given up on the Warriors this season. They an interesting sideshow. I'm one of the ratings in the NBA are down across the board and I'm part of that. it's not, it hasn't been as interesting. [crosstalk 00:01:37]
Dan Klyn: Is the commissioners, is the commissioners’ attitude toward it, behavior, with regard to expanding into China and things is that part of you being less enthusiastic of a fan?
Peter Merholz: No, not the China stuff. I just, it's one of those things where you have to ... Life is management of time, particularly when you're a busy professional type person with kids and families, et cetera… And you can only spend so much time doing so many things. What I've given up in basketball I've probably made up for in the English Premier League so I'm still wasting time watching sports. It's just a different one.
Dan Klyn: Your wastage to a different mentality.
Peter Merholz: Yes [laughs].
Dan Klyn: Oh, that's great. Okay well, we've got some folks here and, if you just want to unmute yourself if Zoom will let you, you do that, if anybody's got a question, have at it.
Austin Govella: This is Austin. I have a question. ...
Dan Klyn: Yes.
Austin Govella: We were talking about information architecture being one user experience and, and Peter who mentioned people who have a facility or training or experience with working with material. something. I've noticed in our company we've been pushing design thinking everywhere and, one of the core tenants there is that you need kind of cross-style collaboration for success. So kind of you know along the lines you've mentioned, you know, generalists are better at the core [inaudible 00:03:01] specific core specialists.
Something that's happening, which is both good and bad, is now other people are facilitating workshops and some are better than others but some are really good at it. So like non-designers are doing this. We have non-designers doing user research, non-designers creating personas and journeys. We have non-designers creating interfaces. I think, philosophically, I believe the more design literacy organization the better. At the same time though I'm kind of looking around wondering at what point... It seems like there's a tipping point there to where everyone... At some point everybody is a designer at that point then what is it that we're doing at the core? Like what, what do you see that is?
Peter Merholz: So, so this is [laughs] ... I, I love this. This, this is an IA question, right, because it's about fuzziness and it's, it's a lumping and splitting challenge because you were saying that you have non-designers designing interfaces, which I would argue makes them designers, maybe not by job title, but definitely by activity. and this also kind of gets to what we were just discussing though around, professionalization. The only way that you can, legitimately claim that everybody is not a designer is if there is a clear understanding of what a designer is and we don't have one. At least not within digital design.
And so we have, as a community, we have a responsibility then to either define what it means to be a digital designer and back that up or we have to accept that people are going to be drawing wireframes in PowerPoint decks and that's some form of design that we have to recognize. Another thought that your question triggered (and I don't know if I'm actually answering it) but another thought that your question triggered is so I call my company Humanism at Scale. In part, because I see design as this wedge that allows us to bring all these other humanistic practices, but one of the means by which we're seeing humanism at scale is through the spreading of, for lack of a better phrase, design thinking in these organizations.
And from what I can tell in talking to most people, the companies that have done this, it has been a net positive in that you're getting more and more people recognizing one kind of value, of different approaches, of tackling problems. You’re getting more and more people trained on new ways of trying to solve problems, right? They're not just loosely brainstorming or they're not just trying to spreadsheet their way to success, right. They're... It's easy to [inaudible 00:05:43] sticky notes and whiteboards but, but that kind of distributed cognition actually is a... I oftentimes say more successful tool for thinking through hard problems, than, than whatever people were using before.
And so I'm generally a fan of this spread of design, kind of design type activities throughout organizations. And from what I've heard, in your experience, it sounds like it's kind of you're seeing both sides of this. From what I've heard, the more that "non-designers", people without design backgrounds, are exposed to design practices the more they appreciate trained designers and the efforts that they are delivering and the better they can prepare themselves to engage. They can be a better, for lack of a better word, client or collaborator with those trained designers than they would've been in the past.
So, at this point it feels like it's a net benefit. There might be the occasional downside of someone feels like they're kind of, practicing beyond their capabilities. They're too confident and they're not ready yet but that occasional downside seems to be outweighed by the upside. I'm curious if, if that's been your experience, Austin or if you, if you're seeing something else.
Austin Govella: No, I think yeah, generally it's net positive. I mean we haven't seen the way it falls all the way through philosophically but that's more d- more [inaudible 00:07:23] which is better in general. You know I'm just curious that once everything [inaudible 00:07:29] off if we were to compressionalize and define ourselves like what, what that kind of core, what that core craft would be.
Peter Merholz: [laughs].
Austin Govella: I think if we're not visual, right, and if it's not if it's not the research, and it's not the interface design. I mean there's something there. I guess I have trouble identifying what that kind of [inaudible 00:07:52] is. It's doesn't [inaudible 00:07:55] stickiness on boards there. I mean that's [inaudible 00:07:56] I do that for everything but everybody does that. But I don't know what that means.
Dan Klyn: Austin, I'm curious if you, if there's any corollaries between the, people doing design work who are not called yet designer and what that's doing in the organization that you work in or ones that you know of. Is there any associated risk of the expansion of or the redistribution of the label architect in your organization or in organizations that you work in? Is it the same set of dynamics? Is there just less risk of the expansion of architect into non-specialist roles?
Austin Govella: Oh, no. We threw that, that around like to anybody. And it's essentially anybody who is more senior thinks about things a little bit more holistically, whatever their field is, they kind of get the architect label it seems.
Dan Klyn: Thank you. there's a note here, from Tim Gasperic.
Peter Merholz: Tim Gasperic. He's, he's an old friend.
Dan Klyn: He's logged in as his partner Barb. "Following Austin's question I've been asking myself a lot lately higher order. Higher order design is transdisciplinary so what of engaged transdisciplinary projects is lost by framing such projects as design?" That's the first part and then the second part is, "Similarly, what of design is lost by framing transdisciplinary projects as design? I think the risk is often too narrow in our conception."
Peter Merholz: Tim you, you've posted a tough one here, as I would expect. And you probably know, you probably have a better answer to this than I do. I'm vamping a little bit here so that, Dan can develop an answer 'cause I'm... He's a smart guy who probably has thought about this kind of thing.
Dan Klyn: I'll, I'll just throw in, the thing that occurs to me is when you call it design. Design is problem solving. There are few, and I've looked at this with colleagues and other languages across the world, design as a synonym for problem-solving is a thing. Not just in English, not just in first world contexts, although it wiggles in interesting ways around the world, but that's the one that I'm interested in preserving if we choose not to call something design is to make sure that there's room for, the kinds of things that we all like to do and that are essential to how we eventually solve the problem. But to not have to have the banner of problem-solving over top of a lot of the activities, that's, that's one thing that occurs to me.
Peter Merholz: Yeah, I'm, I'm weary of design as problem-solving as a frame because well, because I believe that design is also problem framing. And problem framing is often more important than the problem-solving. But we too often accept as given the frame and then solve against a frame that isn't the right one. That design, I mean maybe this is an IA problem, right? If-the analogous practice that I often find myself turning to is filmmaking, where you might call someone a filmmaker but people tend not to have as a role or title filmmaker, right? And when you're making a film, there's directors, and producers, and editors, and cinematographers, and camera people, and actor. And there's a whole group of roles and practices that lead up to the making of a film.
And I'm wondering if we need to think of design as filmmaking and it's this big thing that has a lot of stuff that contributes to it or is design one of the roles and, if so, what is that big thing that we haven't really been able to successfully articulate as a way, maybe, of addressing some of this. I think part of the problem is design is one of those words that's just used in so many different contexts and you have to... I mean, I spend this workshop that I teach around organization designing or design org. I spend the first 20 minutes just defining what I mean by design so that there's a common understanding. Because even within our own field, we don't have one.
And so it, it's this unfortunate word that's slippery. I mean, there was a long period of time where Adaptive Path, we didn't use the word design in talking about what we did. We talked about user experience because we saw design had been primarily associated with styling and visual design. And that wasn't what we were selling or offering. Tim, you might even remember that. Tim worked with us for about a year at Adaptive Path.
And, I think, you know, design has now been reframed as something bigger and more interesting. Though, frankly, a lot of people still think of design as styling and so it's this term has… With this term comes a set of associations in people's minds that you do not know. And so every conversation has to start with trying to get a common frame before you can then move forward. And I don't know how to get out of that.
Tim: Yeah. I figured out how to unmute myself here finally after what... This Zoom application is really...
Peter Merholz: [laughs].
Tim: ...confusing. Anyway, hi, this is Tim. I used to work with Peter long ago. Peter and everybody. I think, our old friend Brian Boyer, the last I heard, was actually in the process of trying to write a book about what it meant to be a designer when you didn't have the title designer any longer. And Brian comes from a civic background in the architecture world and functions in the world of design pretty fluidly but there... You know, there's often no role of designer as a title in the context of a city and can... You know, and I think Brian's contention is that we can still be effective as designers even though we're not called designers. And this is kind of tied to this question of designers functioning at a transdisciplinary context that I'm really fascinated with these days.
Peter Merholz: Yeah. Well, and to follow or to draw up that thread a little bit, just with some stuff I've been exposed to, Scott Birkin's writing a book called Design Makes the World, which is, you know, trying to help a non-design audience understand design and how to engage with it better. And then, Erica Hall has been asking a series of questions and posing a series of things on Twitter around some of this challenge of the fact that when it comes to digital design we still don't really have a great critical language for talking about it. We, we don't have in the way that architecture, graphic design, or other practices, filmmaking, you know… There's a way that you can approach in discussing the work and its outputs that is shared. We just don’t have that.
And so there seems to be the thread and pulling out from them, what you just said about Bryan is there seems to be this recognition that we need to kind of ladder up and develop a common frame for this so that everyone can come in and engage with it more productively. You know, I think Andrew Hinton was scratching at that with understanding context, which is a great book but way too inside baseball. It's not, it's not approachable by normies. We, someone, and if I have enough time maybe it will be me, needs to write the understanding context for laypeople book. Because I think what he was touching on and I think what we're all talking about is crucial. But, it's still very much mired in the language of our practice that, that we know that is not commonly understood.
Dan Klyn: Agreed. let's see what else is going on in chat though, per Erica, "The thing is, though, there's a huge corpus of academic critical thinking and design that most of us working designers aren't aware of."
Yeah. what do we do with that? At the IA summit, or the IA conference now, there's been a couple people in our community who have been trying to be the human duct tape between the world of practice and whatever it is that's going on in academia. To your point you just made, Peter, about Andrew's book and the...
If you were conversant with other readings and embodied cognition or cognitive psychology you would not have any problem with Andrew's book. If you were assigned thousands of pages of reading as an academic regularly that book would not be, there would not be barriers to entry. But that's where a lot of it is, in the hard books. What's... And if it's only the stuff that benefits business, that gets, across the transom there, that's not helpful [laughs]. Do you have any ideas for, engaging the world of academic design and what academics know in all this?
Peter Merholz: Not of him. Were... What I'm wondering is just how many practicing architects really understand that architecture theory, if that is part of the their training or if that is you know, in the same way that you kind of distinguish film theory from filmmaking, right? Is architecture theory distinct from architecture making, like art history and art criticism, is distinct from the practice of art? And then in some way though, those theoretical foundations are unable or can imbue practice, even if it's not realized [laughs] by the practitioners.
There's something in how that theory imbues practicing. And, and if we do look at these other practices, they're all much older. I mean, I do wonder if we're on a perfectly fine timeline, that 27 years in that "Yeah, we haven't figured it out yet." But 50 years in, 70 years in, "Oh, okay. We've, we've got it." Right? But it takes a while, you know, to articulate that. Eisenstein's film form wouldn't have been written, that would have been written in the mid to late '20s, which would have been, you know, 30 years after commercial filmmaking had begun and kind of a good 20 years after it had been going to truly be accessible.
And so, you know, maybe, maybe this is just... It's okay the throes that we're in and the pain that we're feeling is actually a sign that we're on the right track. And emerging from this will, you know... We’ve now, we now have a more... It's not, it's no longer an unknown unknown. We have a known unknown. We know it. We're struggling with it but that's the next step towards getting to the known layer.
Dan Klyn: I like that.
Peter Merholz: Right?
Dan Klyn: Yeah.
Peter Merholz: And I think we're just on that trajectory. And I'm hoping that if enough people are chipping away at this common problem we'll create that body of understanding that we can all draw from.
Dan Klyn: This is a little bit weird but, if you were to go into school right now to talk about academia, somebody gave you a gift card for the holidays this year. You pull it out of the envelope. It's you can go study for a year at any college or university of any discipline, any area of human knowledge through that lens of the academic, you know, a thousand-page or... What would you pick? Is there, is there a dimension in there that is especially curious?
Peter Merholz: Yeah, the one right now, and I thought about this... Is organizational psychology. And in better understanding. I think there is likely a lot that is known about how people work and work in teams and work in organizations and work in businesses. That is, you're getting bits and pieces, you get folks like Adam Grant or Amy Edmondson with teaming and some of this becomes kind of fashionable and makes them really...
Dan Klyn: Yeah.
Peter Merholz: into practice. But I, I wouldn't be surprised if there's a real interesting depth there that would help me as I'm trying to go from thinking about designing design orgs to now kind of what is the concentric circle out from that and maybe a concentric circle out from that.
Dan Klyn: Yeah.
Peter Merholz: I just spent a year supporting Kaiser and part of that I was working up with some folks, really trying to think differently about how you organize a lot of people in their labor. Basically, how do you adopt agile cross-functional modes to non-software problems. And what does that organizational machine look like? And I in September attended this, it's called the Responsive Conference and it's about the responsive organization. So, it's not about responsive design, in terms of mobile and web. It's about responsive organizations which is a label that community uses for things like holocracy and self-organizing companies, morning star. You know these types of firms and kind of engaging with that world; TL organizations and all this stuff. Like, there's a lot going on there that I think is potentially quite relevant to my interest.
And at the end of the day, all I care about still is how do we get better experiences out in the world. And for me, the insight was it's the machine of the organization that is inhibiting that. So how do we tune that machine so that it pumps out better experiences? So, better understanding how to design that machine.
Dan Klyn: That's awesome.
Peter Merholz: Yep.
Dan Klyn: May that gift card show up in your stocking. ...
Peter Merholz: [laughs].
Dan Klyn: Nobody here knows how to use the software. I'm impressed that Andrew taught Gay or...I mispronounced your last name, Andrew. But it says that you've got your hand up. So, unmute yourself and what, what do you want to know? What's your question or your comment?
Andrew: Yeah. This cute little button over here. Hi, my name's Andrew [inaudible], from Des Moines, Iowa. And I hope this kind of hits on a couple of things that we've been discussing. Yeah, I think generally, people want to make everything better and a lot of it gets around to organizing labor and, you know, effort and attention on different things. And I feel like there's, kind of going to conferences and reading, it feels like there's almost a subset of design towards facilitation. So, less of an expert practitioner who is a designer, or researcher, or a strategist, or architect, information architect… And more towards, you know, almost like a professional co-designer or service designer who isn't making the artifacts but they're getting the people in the room and making sure that all kind of, [inaudible 00:24:31]. And then maybe a bit of sun setting at the end.
For context, I'm going out of role where I still see myself as doing more research in [inaudible 00:24:41]. I just started a new job. It's more of a pixel designer towards the latter end. And I think it was probably like three years before I figured out, "Oh, I want to specialize in this thing." But I feel like there's this interesting trend coming up, especially in civic spaces and trying to address wicked problems. And I feel like there's a need for that facilitator type but I also don't want to... The things this has been hinted on earlier kind of diminish, my brand or specialty as a designer or a UX person. I don't know. I'm throwing like seven different things at the wall, but I'm kind of curious what your take on some of these things are.
Peter Merholz: Yeah. I wish I had... it's too bad I'm using Zoom on my iPad and not on my laptop because I could share. I can dig up a deck from a little over a decade ago when we published, when I was at Adaptive Path and we published subjects to change and we would then give a presentation about it. And we talked about design, we had like design as Rockstar design, as styling design, as all these things. And where we ended up in this presentation is design as a verb; design as an activity and an activity that everyone is involved with. And that the role of the designer is to be a facilitator and the realization that we had over a decade ago (and it wasn't even new at that time) is that the problems that we're trying to solve are more complex for any one person to solve. Right?
And, and at that time, we were still kind of pushing back against this myth of the lone designer. I think we're kind of beyond them. Now some people still have it but I think we're more beyond that than we were a decade ago, right? So we have to push back on the myth of the lone designer because in order to solve a software problem, an urban planning problem, a service problem, you need to involve specialists or people from a bunch of different disciplines in the problem solving and so that... I don't know why the designers tended to be the ones who stepped up to be facilitators, that probably touches on the humanistic approach that designers have. Like anyone could have in a cross functional team found themselves being the facilitators. For some reason, designers found themselves being the facilitators.
And there's a role in design to bring those folks together and to get the best ideas out of folks and to help them shape their ideas a little bit better. And then that was the first slide. And then the second slide is, the next slide is then the role of the professional trained designer to take those ideas, refine them, hone them, shape them, recognizing that, that there is still value in that craft. And in that form, work as a designer. So, I mean, I think what you're sensing and talking about is, is right on. It's only more important 10 years later than it was when we had identified it 10 years ago.
But this dichotomy, and it gets to what Austin was talking about earlier... And actually a little bit of what Tim was talking about.
It's the slipperiness of the word design. Because it now requires people to think of design as two things; a set of practices that anyone can do, kind of like writing, and that we can bring people together through facilitation exercises, Google design sprints and workshops and all that. So that's design. But design is also this, deep craft with a lot of background methodology and legacy.
And what I found when I was doing this work with Kaiser Permanente, I found that when you talked about design, people were thinking about it as one or the other. And they had trouble thinking about it as both. And, I don't know how we either... Do we either get everyone to recognize that design can be all of these things or do we choose design means something and then we call the other thing something else? And I don't know what that is.
They're clearly connected but there's something about their difference that muddies the discussion. And that's something I haven't figured out. I'm struggling with... I would think that people can hold two... They're not even competing. They're just a pair of adjacent concepts in their head and they can't even do that. They want it to be one simple thing.
Dan Klyn: Yeah. Andrew, Andrew typed in that he's nodding his head a lot over here in the monitor.
Peter Merholz: Yeah.
Dan Klyn: And, I'm curious if Andrew is an “iny” or an "outtie" because I could see the danger, if you are inside of an organization, if you start to show that you are really good at facilitation, is that you will then be steered into, encouraged to do that more and better inside. And then on the outside, if you're a consultant, same problem but maybe expressing itself a little differently if the facilitation piece is what you are valued for then you might, you might focus on that and do facilitation as a job and offer that as a service. And then maybe in that way, you're expanding your inventory.
I can help you design stuff or, and/or I can design the way that you design stuff. Some of the highest praise I think we've ever received in my company is after a meeting when the stakeholder says, "That's the best meeting." And, it, I've heard it a number of times. First time I heard it was when Abby Covert was working with us is, "That's the best meeting I've ever had in 25 years working in blah, blah." So, yeah, I, I feel you Andrew. I don't know, kind of ...
Peter Merholz: Well, and I think. Well, and I guess my thought on this is trained designers can be somewhat dismissive of these design thinking and facilitation practices. And I think that is problematic. I think we support our brothers and sisters in this work. and what I'm starting to see is that... Like when I was at Kaiser, we actually opened a role specific to what we called design facilitation. We were having trouble even figuring out how to name it. But we're seeing ... I'm seeing more and more companies, hiring design transformation/design thinking specialist. Sounds like Austin, that might be happening in his organization.
And when I was at, when I was working with Kaiser, I was working with this gentleman. Tim Keishnick has been there 30 years and he was ... His motivation is he would talk about it is he's like, "You know what? We could hire 2,000 designers the way that IBM did and that would be great. But that would still mean there are 228,000 employees here who aren't doing design or have access to design or touching design. Or we can help those 220,000 employees embrace some design in their work and that would make everything better for everybody. Right?"
And I, for some reason, you know, we tend to think it's either/or…There's that gift that I often pull up, "Why can't we have both?" Like the little girl, "Why can't we have both? Like we can have both. We should have both. Why is this a struggle? Why is this a fight?" I think we need to figure out how to enable both. And then I look forward to the problems of resolving that kind of trained craft designers engaging with these folks who have developed some, you know, or practice some design skills. But that's a problem I would, I'm eager to have as opposed to the problems that we tend to have today.
Dan Klyn: Yeah. Well, I really appreciate your answer there, Peter. especially reminding us that the stuff that we're working on, you can't fix that with one person. And increasingly for us the feeling of a good solution is one that you couldn't trace the author to a person or even do for us... And it may sound counterintuitive, maybe not, that you can't trace it to the consultancy. Like when we come in, we're there for 10 weeks, what they end up making, if it isn't like, "Yeah, Todd came and gave us this really great design. And isn't it neat?" It feels like the stuff that is really sweet that we get to work on you couldn't trace it to a person, it's a different... You got there a different way than, extraordinary personality.
Peter Merholz: Right. Well, and then-
Dan Klyn: Extraordinary interpersonality perhaps.
Peter Merholz: But, if you're saying that, what that starts telling you the question or, you know, but that requires designers to minimize and possibly sacrifice their ego, right? They want to be seen as the creator, as the problem solver, as "I, I got to work on a cool project. And the coolness was I came up with some solution." And what you're talking about is actually a potential future for design as the conduit, the spirit passing. We're here at Sunday service, the spirit is passing ...
Dan Klyn: Yeah.
Peter Merholz: ...through you.
Dan Klyn: Yeah.
Peter Merholz: But you are simply a vessel, you are not an act...You're not, you're moderately active but-
Dan Klyn: Well, yeah. Maybe not simply a vessel. My friend wrote in her, she says, a doula.
Peter Merholz: [laughs].
Dan Klyn: Right? Like-
Peter Merholz: We're, we're idea doulas?
Dan Klyn: Yeah.
Peter Merholz: We're helping birth-
Dan Klyn: There's something really fundamental, there's something really human about it, there's something ancient and important about it, there's something that gets handed down about it. Life and death is involved. but the experience of the people who are going through it, they may not really remember that you were even there.
Bogdan: And Dan, if I'm allowed, I think this is a great framing because many times, like Peter said, we want both. And, why not want one and solve that problem? What is the problem that we're solving? Because that's what businesses, organizations expect from us. What can you do? What is the problem that you're solving? And now we're facing two problems because first, I don't know how to solve your problem and I need others. So I'm just the guide and finding all that information. Right? And this is a thing Don Norman and John Maeda kept saying for years, right? You are just the guide. You're helping others. And that's the facilitator role. Right?
Dan Klyn: Yeah. And as Austin is pointing out, though, doulas are licensed. Or at least the midwife. I don't know about doula. I've had, I've seen some ladies just show up who are called doula who's really like your best friend. but yeah, the point is ...
Bogdan: How rewarding that is, right? Because when he's doing a workshop, a design thinking workshop, that brings everyone together and the solution is better, right? Because they bring skills, they bring comparisons. While I find designers, most of the time, especially at conferences, working on designer's problems, arguing about things that we argue about and no one cares about that because you don't see a lot of other disciplines showing up at designers conferences. "Hey, we're interested in this. This is valuable." No, it's not that valuable. It's probably valuable for us but not to the outside world.
Dan Klyn: That's one of the counterintuitive things about TED when Richard ran it, is he insists it wasn't a design conference. And, when you think about how many different kinds of people showed up there and the convergence that he was interested in eliciting that, yeah the designers talking about design is...
Bogdan: Non-problem to the world.
Dan Klyn: Yes. And ultimately not helpful to us as the interlocutors.
Bogdan: No.
Dan Klyn: Which, but I do want to... The flip side of that, back to the holding both, we're holding two things, strongly and loosely is, the damage of saying, "Well, we can't define the damn thing. That you having that conversation is somehow harmful." I'm curious, both Bogdan and Peter, you've been around, You've both been in the field for a long time. Is defining the damn thing, bad for us?
Bogdan: No, not necessarily but I...No one asked me to define the thing. If everyone is asking me to solve the problem and they pose a problem, "So here's the problem I have. Can you solve it?" And so I have two options. "Yes, I can completely." If I'm asked for a wireframe, a prototype or whatever or not “so then I need help.” So then I step into the facilitator role, "Hey, you guys are smarter than I am. Help me out here. Even help me understand the problem because I'm so stupid. I don't even understand the problem correctly, let alone solve it. Right? So help me with that." Right? But no, I don't think the definition’s outside of design, I've never encountered that much. And I think I told you before then everywhere I worked, no one knew about who we are. Now, I've never worked for anyone who knows who Peter is, or...
Peter Merholz: [laughs].
Bogdan: You know what I mean?
Peter Merholz: Yeah.
Bogdan: And I, and I have the books like, subject to change is like right over there.
Peter Merholz: He invented the word blog for God's sake.
Bogdan: Right, right. And, you know, hundreds of books, thousands of books. No, I'm, I'm solving a different problem.
Peter Merholz: Yeah, no.
Bogdan: Solving a different problem. That's what I've been interested in. This is why I exist in the world to solve this problem, not how to align two objects in [inaudible 00:39:24]. That's not a problem for me.
Peter Merholz: So, I ... unlike many of my colleagues, I love defining the damn thing problem. Michael Welsh actually pointed this out at Idea 2007 that...Because it came up even then, you know, IA and what is an IA and what is user experience and all that. And one of the things that Michael Welsh pointed out is that it is a sign of an...It's a sign of a community, it's a sign of...It's positive, energetic sign within a community when it has these struggles, that it's grappling with its identity. That's actually a good thing that we'r trying to figure ourselves out, find ourselves, discover ourselves, do that kind of work.
And so historically, I've been a fan of defining the damn thing. Now, connecting with what Austin was saying earlier and what we were saying also around professionalism, though, I think we're starting to get answers. I think many of these things we can define if we bother to just sit down and write down, "Here's what a user interface designer is and does." We could define that it could be broadly and generally agreed upon. We could stamp it, license it, move on [laughs]. Like, I think we're now getting to that clarity with some.
Dan Klyn: Yeah.
Peter Merholz: Not all. I, I think things like service design, I think, systems design, there's gonna be, there's gonna be elements of this that that are still too fuzzy to clarify but I think if we wanted to do some form of software interface designer role that's defined we can do that now in a way that we might not have been able to five to 10 years ago. I think we could, start defining those things. Now to the other part of this conversation, that is not of any interest to anyone outside of this design community. And that's fine.
Dan Klyn: Yeah.
Peter Merholz: You know, they're...I don't have to know what a gaffer does or a [inaudible 00:41:24] does to enjoy a film. I don't even have to know that to probably work in a studio [laughs]. It kind of depends on your role. And so, there are things that you need to know, depending on kind of the work you're doing. And there's things you don't need to know. One, one of the things this calls for...So one of the other drums that I'm beating a lot right now and it's a focus of my work in Humanism at Scale, is around leadership.
And I think many of our problems as a community are because our leaders, particularly within organizations, within companies, people who have been deemed leaders of design, are not serving one of their most crucial functions, which is as an interface between their team and function and the rest of the company. They don't know how to mediate that conversation and they are inhibiting their design team’s ultimate impact. They get too inside baseball, they talk within their company as if they're at a design conference when they need to be having a different kind of conversation. And that's something that I'm also quite interested in, trying to influence, [laughs] for the sake of the kinds of values that I think the people in, at least in this conversation, would want to advance.
Dan Klyn: And that it strikes me as pretty hard to teach. Like, the wisdom to know about the metacognition required, to know how to not be doing the one or the other at the wrong time, to spare the rest of the people in the organization, the inside conversation and knowing where that line is, how do you...It seems to me that there is a, you would have to observe elders in your discipline who know how to do something at that level of subtlety. So maybe, in the time that we have left...I love teaching, it's the best thing that I get to do.
I've heard and I think it's true that your boss can't be your mentor, that there's something about the power dynamic there that's a little off and so the subtleties that are necessary in order to not do harm with the great power that we have as designers and design leaders and then thinking about bringing up the next generation and the generation after that, have you seen or anyone left on the call here, models. And maybe starting with you, Peter, from an organization design standpoint, there's the, "How do we use designers? How do we use product people? How do we structure the work?" Talk a little bit if you're interested in learning about the junior, about the ...
Peter Merholz: Yeah.
Dan Klyn: How do we, how do we use juniors well and not exploit them and have them be able to do the osmosis thing? I got to watch Peter Morville, you know. Like I got, I've been in commercial engagement. Bob Royce, other people who are really great at the real subtle aspects of consulting and being a designer. But I'm a lucky white guy with 10 million tons of privilege that I get to climb up on every day. What would the orgs do with juniors to make them be good?
Peter Merholz: Well, most don't do anything. Unfortunately, I want to push back a little bit, or I want to at least interrogate the idea that your boss can't be your mentor. And that most of the mentors I've had were my...if I've ever had a professional mentor, it was my boss. So I guess if I think if I...Also, if I think back, I haven't had many mentors. That's a separate ...
Dan Klyn: Mm-hmm [affirmative].
Peter Merholz: ...It's a separate issue. But, but I take seriously my mentorship of the people that I work with. And so I think, you know there needs to be a responsibility within the leadership, within those who have access to a leadership role, to use some of that authority and power and influence to mentor and bring up. When I created the levels framework…A story I tell when I teach the workshop, I hate, I hated when I joined big companies that we had to...I had to create a career ladder and I had to do a levels framework because it's HR bureaucracy bullshit.
Dan Klyn: Yep.
Peter Merholz: But I was able to embrace it. When I started thinking about if I was one of those juniors, I'm someone...This is my first job. And I don't know what my career in UX design, product design, whatever you want to call it is going to be. The framework that I created was, in part, meant to be a potential map of your future. Right?
Dan Klyn: Yeah.
Peter Merholz: Like, you can kind of plot a future through this spreadsheet towards kind of how you might grow in a way to have a better conversation with your boss. But I embraced it once I was able to see that these juniors are struggling and figuring out what their future holds. And, you know, I think we need leaders, I think we need managers, I think we need, to encourage our company's learning development groups, et cetera, to develop...
Because I think all of this leadership is teachable. That's a set of skills that is teachable. We tend to think that you can only teach the craft skills and that everything else, you just kind of know where you don't know, that's bullshit. I have become a better professional, I have become a better communicator, I have become a better leader, I have become a better listener through practice and ...
Dan Klyn: Well, that's to put to fine a point on it, but that proves that it's learnable but not necessarily that it's teachable.
Peter Merholz: Oh, well, that's an interesting distinction. Yes, it's learnable. I think it's teachable or at least it's coachable maybe is there a better frame, right?
Dan Klyn: Right, right.
Peter Merholz: It's not something that you're necessarily gonna get in a classroom but it's something that you get through experience iteration and someone there helping you, "Try this. Try that, try another thing," until you find your way forward. And you need that guide to work with you, to help you get better. But I think for that junior person and for everybody is to recognize...
I mean, we talked about growth mindset versus fixed mindset, right? This we need to encourage that growth mindset that just because you are an awkward communicator now doesn't mean you will always be and that you can learn how to communicate better, you can learn how to own the room, you can learn how to listen better, you can learn how...Whatever it is, those are things that you can develop and I think we don't do enough to stress that and we focus on what's easy to understand, it's developed, which are the craft skills because those are more kind of measurable from a quality standpoint.
Dan Klyn: Yeah, and artifacts, right? Like, like a fixed...Something that isn't still moving. I can look at an artifact that you made, look at another one and then we can talk about how to make yours be more like that other one. But these, the soft skills so-called are just so subtle it...I'm such a fan of it when I see somebody being great in an interpersonal way, delivering the kind of work that we do and, as a teacher, somebody who's paid to teach kids at a university just like...And I can't, I can't teach. Like I don't know how to teach that. I see it happen, I've seen people learn it, I hear people like you who I believe saying that you pick it up. And you see people pick it up and you coach people through it but ...
So maybe to land, for people to teach themselves, maybe we can agree to disagree on how teachable or not teachable this is but there's a certain amount of autodidactic-ness to everybody who's successful in this field, at least that I have observed. That people are really going beyond just what their role and their job is to teach themselves. So do you have anything on your nightstand right now? Any, when you pick up a new mentee or you're coaching somebody, a resource that is a go-to of what you gotta read, Ram Dass or...
Peter Merholz: [laughs] No. No I don't have go-to resources for that. It's probably a lacuna, a gap, that, that would be worth...Because I know I've drawn from resources. You know, as a leader...Like one book that comes to min Drive by Daniel Pink. It's the one that he talks about mastery, autonomy, and purpose. And I think that's important for leaders, and management, and executives to understand in terms of how do you get the most out of your teams. But I don't have one for that kind of...If I'm younger wanting to grow not just my craft skills but these interpersonal and leadership skills, you know, How To Win Friends and Influence People I've heard is probably good in this regard. but, I, I don't have it [inaudible 00:51:49].
Way of the Peaceful Warrior?
Dan Klyn: Sure [laughs].
Peter Merholz: Getting to Yes. I, I don't know.
Dan Klyn: Okay. Well, we're almost out of time. So anyone who, any of our patient friends listening in, if any of you would like to turn your mics on and ask Peter a question, you're welcome to. Otherwise, we'll get about our business on, this second Sunday in December.
Peter Merholz: Yeah, I guess I've got one more question not to hog Andrew again.
Peter Merholz: It's all good.
Andrew: Cool. so if it wasn't from books necessarily, for both of you Dan and Peter, is there a way that you have grown those interpersonal skills? Has it just been kind of like a byproduct of more and more experience and one day, you know, "Oh, yeah, I've gotten better at this stuff"? Or, you know, are you like journaling and unconsciously thinking like, "Oh, man, that meeting with Mike didn't go so good, you know. I'm going to analyze and chart out how I could do better next time"? What has your progression been like? I suppose.
Peter Merholz: Yeah. for me, and this is something that I'm seeing more and more people talk about in terms of what they look for in others, is self-awareness, and a recognition that you don't have it all figured out and that you can likely improve. So just that...I mean, whether it's a vulnerability or openness to that. And then, I don't know how intentional it was, but, you know, especially...probably the bulk of my learning in this regard happened while I was at Adaptive Path. Very much had to learn on the job. There were seven of us who were equal to begin with so there's a lot of jockeying in that context.
And then as we started to grow, we're recruiting and hiring, I'm a leader. I've got people looking kind of up to me. And there's a weird dynamic there that I had to learn how to manage. I couldn't treat team members the way I treated my partners. You know, with my partners I could kind of engage in rough and tumble conversations and it was all good because we were all equal. If I tried to do that with my team members they would feel attacked, even though my intent was not to attack, it was to engage, right?
And the way I learned that was through having people who were willing to call me on my bullshit and listening to them…You want to have some people around you who you trust, who are willing to help you, and you will listen to them when they give you news that you don't necessarily want to hear but you need to hear. And having that as a resource that you can draw from was huge for me in my development and evolution.
Dan Klyn: Oh, that's great. I think we'll just leave it there. I mean, it would just be gilding the lily at this point...
Peter Merholz: Hat on a hat.
Dan Klyn: Yeah no. That's terrific. Thank you Peter for talking with me today. Thank you friends in the right rail who have listened to us today.
Peter Merholz: [laughs].
Dan Klyn: My goal, I've been pushing this forward in time. Each month, I get to have one of these great conversations and the podcast with all of these conversations and the transcripts will be ready next week or the next week. It keeps being pushed out into, so by...January 31st is my goal...Not, no. Ooh, that sounds even better. December 31st to put out a podcast with the recording of our conversation, Peter, and all of the previous ones as well.
Peter Merholz: Oh, excellent.
Dan Klyn: ...I will have a human edit transcripts of each of those. Because you mentioned some resources, a lot of my previous guests have as well, so thank you...
Peter Merholz: That's great. My pleasure.
Dan Klyn: …I hope your family has a terrific rest of 2019, the most amazing 2020, beyond your dreams an, I hope to see you in 2020.
Peter Merholz: I look forward to it as well. you as well keep warm this holiday season. Take care.
Dan Klyn: All right. Well, thank you. I appreciate it. Bye-bye.