I gotta hand it to you. You have a way with cutting into things that I find illuminating. Thanks for taking the time to share it with us.

@Eric

I do have one comment to make about your types of habit.

The list doesn’t include things that, at some point in your life, have become innate. Sometimes, even if you KNOW it exists, the pattern repeats. It’s not easy to change these patterns; you have to reprogram yourself.

This means that, in some ways, we have an internal organization that, in order to implement a new strategy, includes many stakeholder “habits” that must collectively buy in. That’s why it’s so helpful to get outside perspective.

(Thanks to @Rob for his comment as well.)

RE: The ability to wonder

So…maybe…(crackpot psychology disclaimer)…the problem ISN’T that there are people who don’t get it because with the right amount of reason, practical example or subterfuge, they could get it. I know this is true because I’ve seen it work even at an organizational level. It’s a glacially slow process and if I didn’t have a 6 year timeline to stand back and observe it, I probably wouldn’t have seen it.

The problem is that there are those who flat-out CAN’T see it and never will due to an inability to shift gears back & forth between wonder (conceptualizing) and execution. This then is why practitioners have to run to managers, directors or execs like a teary school-kid trying to get the bully to stop messing up the game or should I say; “get an escalated ruling” because…after all, we are professionals.

It’s this whole-brain creature that can:

…suspend belief, fear or prejudice long enough to wonder and (with further apologies to Dr. Thompson) are willing to “buy the ticket – take the ride”.
…put their practical suit back on to analyze what the experience yielded
…wonder again what they might do with that information
…get practical again in order to execute an idea.

Not to boil it down to chemistry but I think this might explain the number of adults ADHD sufferers who gravitate to this arena and, by logical extension, why I’ve been doing this longer than any other career choice.

@adam – I think successful folks working in the UX arena need to be culturally literate. For my own part, I simply won’t hire people who have tunnel vision. Curiosity is also high on the list of talents I look for. Often, changing jobs provides this depth of knowledge. And experience from several different areas helps a lot (although I’m still not sure how playing piano in a whorehouse has helped me professionally).

The last couple of paragraphs in your post intrigue me. And I do agree with you. Perhaps the key is to get folks to wonder. The act of “wondering” is essential when shifting from a left-brain to a right-brain thought process. If someone is unwilling to consider that alternatives exist, then, for them, the alternatives will never exist.

And thanks for the 70-80 years of experience remark. Proof that I can multi-task :)

@andrew – Yes, certainly, our professional life shapes us tremendously. I had a horrible “work” experience as an 18-year-old that continues to shape my decision-making process, my politics, and many other things. But I like to think that the broader our range of experience, the greater the nuances we bring to our jobs. I would hate to think that I could never change or was permanently scarred by past events.

I’m glad you guys brought up this idea of having a variety of career paths in one’s background. I almost mentioned it in the post, but didn’t want to clutter the point too much.

I myself have gone through several professional identities (both in grad school and in my job life), and I do absolutely think can enhance the ability to shift gears, see things from other perspectives. As opposed to professionals who started out as graphic design majors, for example, and have done that their entire professional lives. Nothing against that, by the way: doing graphic design at a very high professional level (and many other things, like programming, musicianship, etc) requires a great deal of concentrated effort over time.

Of course, this is just a general observation and there are certainly outliers.

In my research & obsessions on ‘communities of practice’ I’ve run across some great stuff talking about professional identity, and how deeply our work life (culture, history, education, social circle, etc) affects us as people. I’m not sure it’s possible to overestimate how much this shapes us. We like to think we’re totally autonomous agents, but we’re just not — we’re very much constructed of the memories formed from our accrued experience. Knowing this about ourselves can be unnerving, sure, but I think it can be liberating because it shows us we have the ability to revise and recompose that stuff, if we can see it clearly for what it is. And we can better grasp where others are coming from, because we’re more likely to look beyond the present moment to try understanding their own history, background, personal context.

Understanding, for example, the philosophical bent of the garden-variety MBA program, and the culture of management professionals, can do wonders for finding the right way to explain a new idea to a VP. Same goes for advertising, marketing, engineering, etc.

Teabaggers, though … that could be a lost cause ;-)

So here’s a question.

It’s not unusual for many of us in this environment to have had multiple careers in our lifetimes. You played piano for the sportin’ girls. I put in commodes and we both spent a fair amount of time in advertising (We could read any number of things into that particular cross-section of professions).

Could it be that we’ve learned the propensity for adapting simply because we had to over 20-30 yrs (70-80 in your case) – that the hardness of the die depends on how long it spent being cast? That’s not to say it still can’t be broken but don’t you think time and experience with adaptation makes a difference when it comes to accepting, embracing and participating in change?

Along another line of inquiry regarding the distinction between two things. I agree with your last point but it seems to me that there is a tendency to manufacture a distinction where none exists (another advertising staple).

Real distinctions do exist but I don’t think you can know that until you have made the comparison for similarity and genuinely observed the differences – which as you point out, requires the willingness to take the hard look and by extension, the honesty to acknowledge what you see.

I’ve seen creatives in ad agencies (and web firms) fall into two extremes: Everything needs to be done in the mold of their biggest success or everything needs to be a one-off; special and unique. Why is this? Ego (definitely) fear, laziness, boredom, jadedness, the awful reality that this person may actually lack imagination – pick one. The fact is that in some cases either approach might be prudent – just not ALL the time.

Just wanted to say ‘hi’ – met you when we toured Elvis’ airplanes back at IAS09 Memphis in March :)

People can change and adapt – even well into middle age, perhaps beyond. Having worked as a copywriter in advertising from 1985 to date, and as a content provider for interactive media from 1979 to date, I know that writing can be a truly skizophrenic experience if you’re expected to switch from one discipline to the other on a regular basis (like from hour to hour, as I did when I worked for an advertising agency that was pioneering multimedia).

Perhaps one of the generic problems leading to a fixed mindset is that if two tasks “look” similar, the tendency is to choose a single set of rules. Websites used to look like brochures. And all writing involves wordsmithing, a dictionary, and a style guide. Maybe a keyboard…

But there are a LOT of different writing disciplines. And “twains” don’t always meet. “Good” writing one place may be crap somewhere else.

For example, I’ve written a couple of non-fiction books, but I can’t crack fiction – it’s a different discipline entirely. Nor do I write poetry, although I’ve written hundreds of song lyrics, which one would think was more similar than it is.

Unless you are willing to take a long hard look at your abilities, it may not be possible to see that two things are more “different” than they are “similar”. Maybe creatives at ad agencies are too ego-driven to see this.

Agendas….yeah…I’m laughing as I’m reminded of something one my team members told me once (forgive me Margot Sayers if I don’t quote it exactly) “When you realize that what’s happening makes absolutely no sense, you’ve just uncovered the politics of the thing.”

You definitively have to switch gears but that’s the point. That agenda will always track back to something that’s causing pain. Unfortunately, it may also have nothing to do with the problem you’ve been asked to address for example: “I want to push for quick release because looking aggressive will get me promoted.” I didn’t explicitly decide to sacrifice good business practice but by placing a higher priority on my career prospects as my real motivation, lesser priorities will suffer.

Since you can’t (usually) call the guy out and say “Your ambition is keeping us from being effective!” You can couch solutions in a way that suggests that a different course of action will actually enhance their chances for advancement while the current approach may actually harm it.

Certainly, it’s not as easy in practice as it sounds here in a comment box but again, if you can build that trust so that Mr. Agenda knows when you’re talking about color palettes and drop-down boxes you’re ultimately talking about speed, efficiency, cost savings, revenue generation, etc., you create the ability to have those discussions.

That’s what occurred to me when @Andrew suggested approaching these circumstances as a design problem. You’re “creating” a functional relationship by taking the draftsman’s approach to understanding the framework of a situation whether it’s the micro-biological assembly of neurons, your grasp of physiological associations, organizational behavior or cognitive psychology.

This is a fun thread. Thanks guys.

@dave It’s actually not “hocus pocus” but pretty solid science. I doubt I did it justice in my explanation, however, so please don’t judge the truth of it based on my articulation. Language is indeed a powerful factor in all this. But language doesn’t exist in a vacuum — it’s encoded in our neural structures, which are also shaped by experience, cultural patterns, and the people and problems we encounter in a huge percentage of our waking hours (that is, at work). But metaphor is certainly a powerful tool for bridging the gaps I mention. Good use of metaphor is good writing, which is good composition — and composition (at a higher level) is central to all good design, IMHO.

@rob I’m glad you mention psychotherapy: I’ve been learning more about it lately (partly because I’ve been benefiting from it for a few years now) and it’s fascinating how various psychotherapeutic methods (CBT, etc) make use of these concepts to give us tools for changing our own behaviors. Even though a lot of this stuff was invented before the current revolution in neuroscience discovery, it’s amazing to see how one is validating the other in so many ways. Also, the marriage counseling example is very apt: and I have to wonder if there are things design professionals could learn from the psychology profession, about communicating, listening, collaborating.