Friday Gems (Complexity Blindness, Aura of Care, Perspective Taking, and much more!)
Practice Makes Perfect When It Comes to Perspective Taking
Hello dear readers,
We are complex beings living in a complex world with other complex beings and within complex systems. So imagine how much more complexity arises because of our interconnectedness, our constant evolution, and our emergence as we interact with each other and the beings all around us. This complexity brings challenges, volatility, uncertainty, but it also brings amazing opportunities for us to connect with each other and the world in new and creative ways that unlock infinite potentials.
“Some problems are so complex that you have to be highly intelligent and well informed just to be undecided about them.” --Laurence J. Peter
Together we can navigate uncertainty, find meaning, and flourish not in spite but exactly because of the complexity that defines us.
Today's Gems
Systems Thinking: Complexity Blindness
The Mindful Designer: The Aura of Care
The Mindful Designer: Perspective Taking: A Brain Hack That Can Help You Make Better Decisions
Spotify Playlist: Tom Morello’s Fuck Ice playlist
Systems Thinking
Complexity Blindness
Why do we remain stuck, unable to effectively address the world’s most challenging problems? Why do capitalist and conservative paradigms persist despite intensifying threats like climate change, systemic inequality and other deeply rooted issues? Why do so many people turn to conspiracy-driven ideas to make sense of the world, and why is there such widespread faith in technology’s power to solve our most pressing challenges? While these questions seem disconnected, they are actually deeply interwoven, revealing a fundamental shortfall in our conventional ways of understanding and responding to the world.
The world we live in is complex. The people we interact with are complex. We ourselves are complex. When we put all of this together we end up dealing with a lot of complex issues yet we approach issues we think in simplistic terms,
A leads to B.
This is causing that.
We think we are dealing with isolated individual parts that can be controlled and we can predict interactions.
But we don’t live in a simple world.
We live in a complex, deeply interwoven, interconnected, dependent, and emergent world.
Our education and socialization have primed us to break down problems into isolated parts, relying on simple cause-and-effect relations and assuming control and predictability—qualities often absent in complex systems. Yet we live in a world of deep interconnections, feedback loops, nonlinear dynamics, emergent phenomena and nested systems working at multiple scales.
How can designers overcome complexity blindness?
Seven helpful practices are recommended:
Create networks of collaboration
Refine their work through real-world feedback
Draw ideas from different contexts to spark innovation
Work to balance various impacts on stakeholders to prevent favoring one group excessively
Create mutually supportive connections between system elements
Guide stakeholders through complexity by illuminating intricate connections
Foster gradual change, recognizing meaningful transformation often requires patience.
We are deeply woven into the fabric of life, inseparable from the flow of complex planetary ecosystems. Embracing our own complexity and interconnectedness, we can engage in a deeper, more genuine relationship with the intricate world we inhabit.
As designers we need to be comfortable with complexity and harness tools and techniques that enable us to work and lead through uncertainty and the complex nature of the systems we are a part of.
🔗 Whispers & Giants / Complexity Blindness
The Mindful Designer
The Aura of Care
If we look at industry-wide examples we can see how intrinsic care replaced with business incentives leads to low quality black-and-white photocopies of the original ideas. Everything becomes optimised to meet business requirements and any surviving sense of care that remains is there by chance.
Each day there is news about a company finally owning up and doing things right for its customers. However they conveniently overlooked any dark patterns and shady practices on their way from 0 to 1. This article highlights this pattern that is all too familiar with tech companies.
UX ignores questionable usefulness and the bright aura of care distracts from real questions of ethics and harm.
The “Aura of Care” is the idea of companies gaining false legitimacy through UX. It’s about absolving a company of practicing dark patterns and ignoring the voices that called for better experiences to help it’s customers instead of misleading them for corporate profits only after they are caught and have bad publicity.
Basically, seeking forgiveness from the public after the fact, after the damage has been done and after being caught red handed. Renewing focus on a better UX helps legitimise products that are intrinsically bad for people who use them.
UX needs to make clear distinctions between commercial design work and design as a social good so the aura of care is not just an aura. Until that happens we’ll continue to see the worst companies hire the best people to help them make the worst things.
🔗 THE AURA OF CARE
The Mindful Designer
Perspective Taking: A Brain Hack That Can Help You Make Better Decisions
As the speed of work gets faster each day and we deal with more complexity there is a tool that can help us make better decisions and solve problems more efficiently, that is taking the perspective of others. This stance helps us get out of our own heads, assumptions, and biases to see how others view the same situation or problem, which I learned from this article is also supported by neuroscience.
Importantly, perspective taking may improve business outcomes not only by giving us access to more information than we would have without it, but also by ramping up activity in core brain regions involved in creative problem-solving and innovation.
Turns out that perspective taking activates the same core parts of the brain that are used for creative problem solving. So taking other people’s perspective helps us open up to new possibilities and ignite our own creativity.
As designers it is important for us to be comfortable with understanding other points of views so we can collaborate across teams to solve the complex challenges we face.
Want to strengthen your perspective taking muscles? Try the exercises listed in this Wharton @ Work Nano Tools For Leaders: REAL BRAIN TRAINING: FIVE MINUTES TO BETTER DECISIONS
🔗 Knowledge at Wharton
Also…
Here’s a playlist by Tom Morello, from Rage Against the Machine. “A rocking little soundtrack to enjoy while you drive those bastards out of your neighborhood!”
That’s it for this week’s Friday Gems.
In stillness, find your next step.✊🏽
