Our projects, ourselves
What if learning was not a luxury or trade-off, but instead a vital tool in our daily practice?
For most of us, we are always rushed, trying to beat deadlines and manage more work than can reasonably be done alone. Some literally are trying to do it all precisely because they are alone. It’s common enough that Leah Buley wrote an article to help discern a team-of-one job description, which is derived from her book on the subject. I have been there too; I see you. You’re not alone in working alone!
No matter our team size, learning at work is considered a luxury, an add-on, or a competition for our scarcest resource — time. If we do get to learn at work, it usually boils down to stopping what we are doing, removing ourselves from our daily context to go consume knowledge, and then returning to our desks to figure out how to make it useful in daily context by ourselves.
More often than not, we do not get time for that last part, or have to guess how to do it. And most of the time, we miss the important step in between of synthesizing what we consumed into our existing knowledge base. Because of this, learning at work remains a trade-off, a choice with a cost.
In her book, This Human, Dr. Melis Senova writes a striking paragraph about how your very identity influences your approach to creativity. When a new idea comes to mind, your brain quite likely: “tells you that the idea is beyond you and…Somebody’s probably already done it. This is a beauty. Somebody may have already done it, but YOU haven’t done it. By the very nature of you being the creator, your idea will manifest differently to anything that is already out there.” [Italics mine.]
We are comfortable advocating for iterative improvements in our work, as evidenced by agile project management’s popularity, but how about in ourselves as UX practitioners? What if learning was not a luxury or trade-off, but instead a vital tool in our daily practice?
Reframing learning
The reason learning is seen as a luxury is partly how it’s scheduled into our working lives to compete with other tasks, but also because of the assumption made that motivates us: we “do” learning at work because our knowledge banks are deficient or lacking. We have a gap that needs to be filled. Someone else typically fills that gap for us or assesses our own attempts to fill it.
When learning is reframed as a way of clearly bridging who we are to our ideas (and more broadly to our work as creative professionals) in the spirit of Dr. Senova’s point, it can change our relationship to it. We can tap into our innate curiosity and whole life experiences to start seeing new connections between the different kinds of knowledge we already possess, which can immediately provide value to a given idea or project. We can also more effectively incorporate new knowledge because we make sense of it as part of what we already know, rather than anxiously try to stockpile it as facts into a mental silo marked “work things I need to improve.”
What makes you you?
I read an article a few months ago by Florian Lissot, who talked about his journey to UX. What struck me was how he reflected on each phase of the journey and what it taught him that he brought into the next phase. Cumulatively these lessons became his toolkit as a UX practitioner. It works beautifully as a professional development activity and only takes a few minutes:
- Create some blank space to reflect, whether typing, writing, or drawing (or a mixture).
- Start with what you studied in school, then move into each job or role you’ve held (this absolutely includes non-paying ones, such as caregiving). It may help to just free-write briefly to let your subconscious bring out memories or thoughts.
- What is a notable skill or lesson that you took out of that experience and carry with you today?
This is your unique toolkit for how you practice UX. Regardless of how many wireframes you create, usability studies you conduct, and so on, you still have a style, a way of achieving impact that is yours. This assessment helps you articulate that style.
While I advocate everything I write about here when I spend time with other UX practitioners in person, I will be teaching this in a more formal way for the first time in February in Melbourne. However, this approach has already worked remarkably well with engineers, engineering managers, and product team members (designers, developers, managers). Pivotal Labs is one beautiful example.
Their business model in Sydney is predicated on their team members working directly with employees of businesses who develop software with Pivotal. Client relationships are a huge part of each of their jobs. It is difficult to find time for learning at work when clients are there in person (so Pivotal team members need to be there too), and when leaving to learn means handing off a workload to someone else who already has a lot to do.
I spent time with a mixture of engineers, managers, and product designers simply making space to unpack and examine what goes into a typical day, week, or month, and identifying the teaching skills that appear in that work. To connect those skills with their personal practice, we did the activity inspired by Lissot. Then we spent time reflecting and connecting this insights to specific changes each could make in those daily, weekly, or monthly routines moving forward, in order to measure effect and impact.
What landed most powerfully for the group (both in the moment and several weeks later) had to do with their deeper awareness of themselves and how their whole skill sets influenced their current practice. They felt clearer and more certain about working with clients and therefore improving the customer experience for those clients, as well as more empowered to better manage relationships between each other in their workplace.
Then take it one step further
The outcome of this reflection activity also acts as a bouquet of places from which your innate curiosity arises, which become frameworks for how you think about the problem-solving and critical thinking that are vital to UX practitioning. When you find yourself in stakeholder meetings, for example, responding with “Oh! That reminds me of…” or in whiteboarding sessions, noticing, “This feels a lot like…” you are showing signs of making connections between your existing knowledge base and the work at hand. As you make more “unlikely” connections between information, you start asking more original lines of questioning, and get to more unforeseen potential solutions.
This curiosity can also help with relationships at work. Considering, for example, that 70% of US managers are scared to talk to their employees, there is a lot of room to work on this (lest you want to excuse yourself if you are outside the United States, I encourage you to not). Your ability to practice introspection and empathy and then use your learning in each to develop the other, in other words, your ability to practice inpathy, shifts your mindset around how you interact with others. This opens up the possibility for clearer and more meaningful connections to other people such as your team, managers, and stakeholders.
This is not an either/or proposition
To be clear, none of this is to say that you should not attend conferences, meetups, workshops, or otherwise learn in isolation. Never learn in isolation. I want you to be able to think differently about not knowing something at work, and have a way of proactively strengthening your skills that is immediately, and directly, meaningful to your everyday tasks. Learning is not an additional task that you do. Being a learner is who you are, and how you meaningfully, uniquely connect to others and your work.
- Thank you to Florian Lissot for agreeing to have conversations with me from across the world, contributing his talent to my beautiful Guadalajara, and graciously giving his permission to turn his writing process into a reflection activity. Thank you to Jonathon Colman, Amirul Nasir, and Sam Rice for reviewing and helping me work to make this piece into something better than it would have been otherwise.
