Scott Berkun is the bestselling author of eight books on design, innovation, remote work, and more. His most recent book, Why Design Is Hard, is the second of a pair on why design makes a difference and how designers can best go about it. That is the focus of today’s conversation.

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Transcript

Jorge: Scott, welcome to the show.

Scott: Thank you. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Jorge: It’s a real pleasure for me. I’ll say this right off the bat: I’ve been following your work for a long time. I was making notes this morning in preparation for this conversation, and I’ve read six of your books.

Scott: No way. That’s more than my mom has read, so thank you.

Jorge: And this is the thing: that’s not all of them, right? So I’m missing several. You’re very prolific. Which is to say, it’s a real thrill for me to talk with you.

About Scott

Jorge: Some folks listening in might not know about you and your trajectory. How do you introduce yourself?

Scott: Talking about user experience topics, I started my career in UX. I was a user researcher at Microsoft a very long time ago. And then I switched within a year to be a project leader. I realized that I preferred being the person making decisions rather than being the person giving advice, which is germane to this book that I’m gonna be talking to you about today. And I worked in tech as a project lead person for about 10 years, and then I quit to try to become an author. And that’s mostly what I’ve done since. I’ve written eight books over 20 years. And those books are largely about leading teams or creative thinking, communication, all business and work adjacent books.

Jorge: There’s a post that you shared on your blog ten years ago, and I know because I revisited it this morning, where you posted a photo of an empty bookshelf. And, you want to tell us about that?

Scott: Yeah, I like visual goals, things that you have an easy reminder every day of what it is you’re trying to do. And when I quit and I thought, I do like writing, let’s see what I can do, I cleared the bookshelf that’s right next to my desk, so it’s actually right over there. And I cleared the shelf and I said, my goal is to fill the shelf with as many books as I can that I’ve written before I’m no longer here. And the mistake I made is that it’s a very big shelf.

Jorge: I was gonna ask you how much of it is filled.

Scott: Years ago, when I realized, oh, I’ve set myself up for failure here. This is my ninth book, and if the books are about the same length, I have to write about 30 books. Now, other people have said to me that maybe I should consider including translated editions or there could be other ways I can… whenever you have a goal, you have a metric, there’s always ways to game the metric, find ways to skirt the idea. But that is, it’s been a motivator for me. I don’t obsess about it, but I think it’s a good, “chop wood, carry water” attitude, that there’s always more to do, and it’s grounding and it’s focusing. So it’s been helpful to me.

Themes of Scott’s Books

Jorge: What would you say, if any, is the through line between the books?

Scott: Oh, I really care a lot about progress and about trying to make the world better and trying to find truth, and a lot of what happens in the world can be disappointing. So if I can use my ability to study and to think, and then to communicate to help people better, that’s incredibly empowering to me.

And so many of my books are from the perspective of “here’s this assumption you have about the world or your work or a problem, and it’s a flawed perspective on it. Here’s a better perspective.” So my second book was called The Myths of Innovation, and that book tried to take on this topic of innovation, which is so deeply soaked in hype and distractions and self-aggrandizement. And I wanted to take what I knew about the actual history of how inventions and developments happen and share that with people. And that book was a popular book from that attitude.

And then my third book was called Confessions of a Public Speaker. I’m trying to say, “Hey, everyone has all these ideas about what good communicators do. Here’s actually what it’s like from someone whose profession is to get up on stage and do it. Here’s the truth about that.” I think that’s definitely a through line in all the books, that “here’s this, and everyone of course thinks that they have the truth.” I know that I have flaws in my own thinking, but I take writing very seriously and researching very seriously to arrive at a perspective that hopefully has value to people.

Jorge: And I can definitely see that impulse manifesting in your two most recent books. And I’m gonna talk about them in that way because I think of them as being somewhat complementary.

Scott: I agree.

Design Makes the World vs. Why Design is Hard

Jorge: The second to last one is called Design Makes the World, and the newest one is called Why Design is Hard. Can you give us a brief intro to what these are about?

Scott: Yes, so I had grown frustrated. Many of your listeners know very well the books The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman, Steve Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think—these are books that are canonical. They are so deeply in the canon of our field. And they have been worthy books that have helped a lot of people understand this work, but they also have limitations.

And having been someone who has worked in UX and trying to develop the field and help more people understand what good design is, I thought I could do… what’s the right, I don’t wanna call it an improvement necessarily, but write a more updated, broader, more inclusive attempt to explain good design to everybody.

So Design Makes the World takes on the challenge of this is a book you could give to anyone. You could give it to your boss, give it to your engineering team, give it to a client, give it to your friends who don’t know what you do, and in maybe 250 pages, explain everything. Explain why design is hard, although this book talks about that more. Explain why design is important, explain why it’s so hard to achieve. A primer book. I’d always wanted to do it. And it’s actually, even though I’ve had a long history in the UX community, it was my eighth book and the first book I’d ever written about design. No other book was really, I ever talked about it, and I thought, given my deep love and belief in the importance of design, that seemed like an oversight. So I wanted to do it, and then I did it.

Jorge: The reason I talked about them as a pair is that they feel to me to be complementary in that Design Makes the World feels like a way of framing design for people outside of design. And the new book, Why Design is Hard, feels like it’s reframing design for people who are practicing design.

Scott: Yes. You are correct that I do think of them as a pair, and I had not intended to write, it’s basically, a sequel, and the intent for this book was to speak directly to designers in a shorthand, and there’s assumptions I could make then about the reader and about their perspective and their frustrations, and I could be direct to the point in a way you can’t do if you’re trying to write for a wider audience.

Influence and Power

Jorge: You used the word “frustration,” and that’s a feeling that seems to me pervasive in the context which this book aims to address. In some ways, it’s an optimistic signal to folks who are interested in practicing design. I’m curious about your take on the state of design right now, the world into which you’re putting this book.

Scott: There’s always this feeling in the design community that design is at a crossroads. I don’t think there’s ever been a time in history that everyone felt that design has all the resources they need, they get all the respect they deserve, and that they have unlimited job security.

In the last year and a half for the tech sector in general, but I think more acutely for UX, it’s felt uncomfortable. It feels like there are new threats and new risks to that feeling, but that feeling is always there. Design is a creative field, and creative professionals tend to have more than average amounts of insecurity about what they do and what their value is.

I think that there’s probably more of a sense of that than I’ve seen in a while. But 10 years ago, 20 years ago, when you’re older, like I am, you’ve seen it before. Not to say that this is necessarily exactly the same, but it’s not uncommon for creative fields to go through these cycles.

Jorge: It does feel like the last year and a half, two years have been something of a watershed moment for the field. And the book, I got the sense that it’s a very pragmatic message to designers. I’m gonna read something back to you from the book, and I just wanna take it from there because it’s a passage that feels to me like it’s representative of the approach here. So you say, “One of the most dangerous myths creative people have is that good ideas speak for themselves. But history proves they rarely do. Ideas challenge people’s beliefs, their identities, and their habits, and they will instinctively fight hard to protect them.”

Scott: Yeah. I believe that. And I think that there’s something in the culture, in the design community, but it’s true for creatives in general about the primacy of the idea and this romantic notion that the idea is the hard part. And if I can find a good idea and say to someone, “Here’s my good idea,” the idea itself should be so obviously good that then people will go, “Oh, you have a good idea, great. We’ll do all the work now to build it, make it ship it, and that’s all. You can go home because you gave us your idea for the week, and that’s really your value. So we’ll give you your paycheck and thanks for the next month.”

And that is a romantic idea in the sense that it is a fallacy. There’s no actual story of a creative person, even the ones that we hold up to be heroes, that was actually true for. And the first chapter of the book, right off the bat, talks about Paula Scher and Dieter Rams, who are two of our most famous and respected designers. And I take on some of their most famous stories that are often held up to be, “Oh, they’re brilliant, they had the idea,” and I walk through the actual history of those stories and prove that from their own description of their success, Paula Scher and Dieter Rams, their success was about relationships. It was about the social nature of design, that they had to interact with others who had more power and interact with people who did not necessarily agree with them and persuade them, and that was a critical factor in their success. So that’s the first message of the book, dissuading this notion that anyone really has the privilege to just have ideas or just have talent.

One of the main thrusts of the opening section of the book as well is this Dunning-Kruger element to the idea of talent. There are not that many designers in the world. We are a minority profession. We walk into organizations that know very little about design. It should not be a surprise to us that they cannot recognize our talent. They don’t have our background, they don’t have our experience, so they can’t recognize our talent any better than we could recognize the chief financial officer’s ability to do financial forecasting. We’re ignorant of that, but we have the presumption to assume, which is the same fallacy, that because we’re so talented or our ideas are so good, it should transcend the general ignorance that everyone has. And that just sets us up to be miserable. So, a lot of the book explains that perception and how to reframe that to make it healthier.

Jorge: Can you tell listeners the story of Dieter Rams? That was such a great image.

Scott: Dieter Rams, for those who may not know, is a legendary designer who worked at Braun, and those designs that he gets credited for were heavily influential to Jonathan Ive at Apple. And the story that’s told is from an interview from like 1986. Rams was talking about being a younger designer at Braun, I believe, and he noticed that there was some trouble on the team, the engineering team and the design team just were not getting along.

And this is a problem that is very common today, of cross-functional teams not getting along. Most people would wanna avoid that problem and let it be someone else’s problem to figure it out. “I’m just gonna make good ideas.” But what Dieter Rams decided was, oh, these teams are not getting along. He realized the engineering team liked brandy, so he would bring nice brandy and share it with the engineering team.

And the quote, this is a verbatim quote from the interview: He says, “Being a good designer is half being a good psychologist and understanding people’s needs, understanding their belief systems.” And the message in the book is if Dieter Rams, one of the greatest, most well-known legends, if that’s his message and we are all less talented than Dieter Rams, then maybe we need to be like two-thirds psychologists, three-quarter psychologists, and invest in relationships and connecting with people as a conduit for our ideas.

Jorge: I thought it was a great illustration because Rams is seen as a design hero, and there are all these monographs with beautiful photos of all his amazing products all laid out in a nice grid, right? And it’s very elegant stuff. And you can clearly see the influence in Apple’s stuff, right? And not only that, he’s also famous for these 10 principles of design that he articulated, which could lead one — and I’m thinking of folks entering the field, who perhaps haven’t yet been exposed to the level of, I’m gonna use the word politics, that it takes to get stuff done — it might lead you to thinking that all you need is this set of idealistic principles and good taste and force of will.

As someone who studied architecture, we would study people like Frank Lloyd Wright, and his story as a designer is a story of trying to impose his will on clients and the built environment in general. But that’s not how most architecture gets done. And your book feels to me like it’s a reminder, there’s more to this than what you think of as design, right?

Scott: I do really deeply believe that the skills that we have as designers — and I use that word “designer” very broadly, I think anyone who works in UX and contributes to making the design of things better, I use that word widely, so researchers and content strategists and information architects. I have a wide idea of that term. But I think that the skills that we have are very important. And all the things we want the world to become — better tools, better systems, more equity in the world, a better environment — all the things we want requires people with our skills. I really deeply believe that.

But no one understands our talents. We cannot presume to believe that people are going to just know how to use us. That is a very bad, false requirement that we have about our work. And it’s deep in design culture not to think about that. It’s deep in design culture to think all we need to do is improve our craft and the rest will take care of itself.

But talk to any designer who has been in their workplace for more than a year and they won’t be complaining about their lack of craft. They’ll be complaining about getting ignored. They’ll be complaining about not getting listened to. They’ll complain about the classic not having a seat at the table.

They’ll complain about this “politics” word, which I’d like to talk more about. I think that word is a fallacy itself. The top list of complaints will have almost nothing to do with a typical set of skills that we talk about designers needing to have. And so the thrust of the book is to say, let’s stop worrying about our talent.

Let’s stop worrying about new methodologies. That’s not the problem. The problem is influence. The problem is to have more of our talent used every day that we’re at work. We don’t need more talent if only 10% of our talent gets used. So what has to change? That number becomes 50%, 70%, 90%. It’s all these other things that often designers want to say, it’s not my problem.

They should know better. They don’t know better. But we can, we might be right that in the grand scheme of the universe, there’s some authority figure that decides what is good or bad. But they’re not paying attention currently to solve it for us. So even if we’re right, that’s not gonna change the outcome.

Jorge: In the book, you talk about influence and power, and now I’m super curious about where politics comes into that, because, in my mind, those things are closely related, right? What’s your beef with politics, Scott?

Scott: I think that there’s a lot of externalization that we do. It’s not just designers. I think everybody wants to externalize blame. It’s a lot easier and it can be satisfying to say, “My organization is stupid or dumb.” The word “politics” is often an externalization. It makes a pejorative or a negative out of what is a fundamental set of patterns that happen when multiple people are involved in making a decision where they have different agendas.

So in a simple case, if I wanted to go out to dinner with some friends and there’s four of us and two of us want to go and get sushi and two of us want to go and get pizza, there’s gonna be some politicking about where we go. Maybe one of them owes me a favor and I’ll say, “Hey, Sally, do you remember that thing I did for you? Can I change your…?” I’m gonna try to use my relationship with them to influence them to get the outcome that I want.

Is that politics? In the social setting, no. It seems like normal human interaction. But you take the same dynamics and put that into a workplace, and if we’re talking instead about, what did I say, sushi and pizza, it’s about using one interaction design model versus another or one feature set versus another. I would employ the same tactics. I would go to the director of engineering and say, “Remember I bought you that nice bottle of brandy? How about you approve my feature idea instead of Sally’s?”

I’m being very blunt about it. But these patterns, I think, are normal in human interaction. Some level of it will always exist. If it’s healthier, then it feels less manipulative and it’s more transparent what is happening. When it’s less healthy, it becomes more Machiavellian and it’s behind closed doors and it’s secret groups.

But either way, that is a natural part of the system, the nature of human behavior. And if you are someone who has ideas like designers, you have to accept that is the system of interaction that your ideas need to work their way through. But to say, “Oh, my team is so political,” externalizes now all the responsibility, it makes it sound like it’s basically, it is impossible then to influence it because it’s political. And I think that is a self-limiting belief.

There are definitely organizations that are that messed up where nobody could achieve anything. That is definitely true, but I think it’s far too easy to use that label and now feel vindicated in not trying to get better at influencing people.

Jorge: It feels like it relieves you of responsibility in this situation just because it carries this kind of negative connotation. I wanted to just clarify something for my own understanding, because of the example you used with the bottle of brandy. I thought that part of the reason for the effectiveness of that technique was not so much that it established this kind of transactional tit-for-tat relationship, but that the engineers felt heard, in that Rams, in some ways like used his skills as a designer to observe what moved these people and then found a lever to engage with them at a level where they would be responsive, right?

Scott: Yes, thank you for correcting that. You are absolutely correct, and I made it sound like it is a more manipulative, bribing technique. That is the spirit of how I take the Dieter Rams story as well; it was a genuine offering of connection, and we are biological creatures, and breaking bread with people is a way to feel you are similar, and it also invites a deeper understanding of who they are, genuinely.

That said, I am also not above bribing people. I think there are situations where if you really care about your idea and you’re sure that you’re right, to “bribe” is too strong of a word, but be a little bit more manipulative as to why you’re doing it. That is part of sometimes what you need to do to get things done. And I’m a pragmatist about good ideas. I think Dieter Rams, Paula Scher, many of my heroes, and not just in design, but in the history of innovation, people who invent things and make progress happen, they are extreme pragmatists, and they are willing to do what is necessary to move things forward, and I think that pragmatism is really important.

Designers are rightful in thinking we are good at framing problems. We are good at finding creative solutions, and that is in our wheelhouse. So, for someone who is creative and good at framing problems and good at finding creative solutions, to hit something and go, “This is unsolvable. Politics, unsolvable,” I think it’s a betrayal of what makes us do our job so well: the ability to ask a better question, frame it in a different way, attack the problem in a different way.

And that kind of pragmatism is definitely at the heart of the book, is that if you really care about moving things forward, then there’s better questions to ask when we’re stuck in these situations. There are better tools we can borrow from other disciplines that face the same challenges. We just have to step outside of the design box to see how they’re done and then learn to include them more.

Jorge: Okay, so we’ve covered one aspect of this, which is the fact that you’re not working in a vacuum; you’re working in a social environment, and you have to become adept at working with people.

Gravity Problems

Jorge: But there’s also another idea in the book that I wanted to talk about with you, which has to do with recognizing where you do have agency and where you don’t. I think the phrase you use is “gravity problems.” Do you want to talk about what gravity problems are?

Scott: So there’s a book called Designing Your Life. I forget the author’s name, but that term comes from that book. So it’s not my term. If I recall, the way they define it is just like we don’t complain about gravity on a daily basis. We don’t wake up in the morning and go, “Oh, it’s so hard to sit up. I wish I was on the moon where there’s a tenth of the gravity that we have on planet Earth.” We just assume that’s a constraint that you have to deal with. We don’t spend much time on a daily basis complaining about it.

And the philosophy that they offer is that we can all do that in our lives, that there’s not much reason to fight against something that you have no control over. Now, if you read the Stoics and other historic philosophers, the same idea comes up all over the place about recognizing the difference between what you can control and what you can’t. And if you focus on what you can’t control, you’re just going to be unhappy.

So some of the gravity problems for designers are some of the things we’ve already talked about in this conversation about how, in general, most professional people are ignorant of what design is, or how we do it, or its value. That’s just a gravity problem. That’s going to always be true. We will always be in the 1-2% of the working world. It’s just we are in a specialized, and I think very special, field; I think we’re fortunate to have these jobs or these jobs with these kinds of activities.

Scott: But the gravity problem is that we’re a minority. The gravity problem is we work largely in corporations that are going to be focused by their own design, like these corporations are designed systems, they’re designed to seek profit over most other considerations. So to show up at a corporation and complain about how the company prioritizes profit over the well-being of the planet is a gravity problem.

As much as I would want it to be different perhaps, why waste your time complaining about these things? Instead, yes, you can agree that we don’t want dark patterns. We don’t want to participate in taking advantage of people. Absolutely true. But we can try to frame the problems we attack then in ways that are tangible, that we have a good likelihood of having some success, and chip away at the problem until we understand it better, or gain more resources or more power or more influence so we can take on bigger problems.

And there’s a crusader, heroic mythology in design, just like I think there is in architecture and in many fields. I think it’s a very American idea of “one person can take on the whole system, and if they’re really smart enough, they can show up and give a rousing speech to the board of directors and show a great prototype of how it should be,” and that’s the way that you affect change.

And one of the things I learned from writing the book, The Myths of Innovation, is that almost all of those stories are not true. They show up in movies, they show up in anecdotes that get told. But when you dig into the research of what actually happened that allowed these things that we admire to have been achieved, that is not what happened. It’s far more pragmatic. It’s far more about influence and far more about power, which is why those stories from Paula Scher and Dieter Rams are so important: because most designers, even though they achieve success through similar means, they’re rewarded more in our culture for telling the hero stories, for focusing purely on their own creative process and omitting all the partnerships that they needed, all of the allies they needed, all of the resources they had to accumulate before they could start the project that they became famous for. We don’t talk about those things. They’re not as interesting to our romantic ideal for what a designer should be.

So gravity problems are a reminder that if you complain about something enough, you’re probably missing an opportunity to reframe the problem so it is tangible enough for you to feel like you’re moving things forward.

Jorge: One of my pet peeves is the phrase “I fight for the user,” which is something that I think is reflective of what you’re talking about here. Is there something about UX design in particular that is overly idealistic? What’s the challenge there?

Scott: I think there’s two halves of this. I have those ideals. That’s part of why I got into this career originally. It made a lot of sense to me, of, “Oh, once you learn some of these skills, you see how it’s easy to look at the world and see how broken it is, and how are these things that are so broken and how people are, in some cases, struggling or have frustration that could be relieved.”

It’s almost like the Hippocratic Oath in a way. We see it as a way to reduce suffering, and when you have that lens on the world, it’s hard to unsee it. So it’s easy to have that feeling of the self-righteous, “I can fix things and make the world better.” That idealism is important. That’s the first half of this. That’s what motivates us to do our work. And I think some of that is necessary.

Where it becomes a liability is when it’s used as an argument in contexts where no one else has the same ideals. If the people on the engineering team have different ideals, their ideals are about reliability or performance or their own ideal for what great work is, because engineers do have one. They have a similar set of idealism, a similar kind of idealism that designers do. It’s just angled differently, about what greatness looks like.

But when you bring our idealism in contrast to theirs, ours just doesn’t make a whole lot of sense unless we’re able to articulate it in terms that they understand. I told you earlier, I switched careers early on. I was a user researcher for a year, but I had enough of a technical background that I could become a project leader. And a big part of that job, was called a program manager, was basically being a project leader. I was told by my first boss in that job that my value was not my ideas, my value was not writing specs or triaging bugs, my value was in persuading engineers to do the right thing.

He told me my job was relational. When I took the job, I thought it meant that I had gotten power and I could decide things, and he dissuaded me of that notion very quickly. I had to be able to explain things. So walking into a meeting or having the rallying cry, “I fight for the user,” is not translating. If I was translating, I’d go to the engineering team and say, “Hey, what makes you proud about your work? What makes you excited to do this work? What is the best thing you’ve ever worked on and why?”

I want to understand their view of what greatness is, and if I listen to them explain their view of greatness, I can probably find some overlap between their view and my fight for the user idealism. And if I can understand their perspective and start using their language, I can probably start to achieve some of my idealism but have them as an ally in doing it.

And that’s a very user-centric attitude. I’m doing user research with my team before I show up and tell them what the rallying cry should be. I’m gonna listen, I’m gonna be curious. How does this person think? What are their values? And work from that first. So the idealism is great, but in practice with people, coworkers, clients, it has to be pragmatized into being user-centered, learning, listening, translating, being an ambassador, and then earning the credibility to persuade.

Jorge: I love that suggestion because it’s basically communicating the same ethos by demonstrating it rather than telling them to embrace it. If you’re really like trying to learn about the people that you’re working with and then shifting your approach to respond to what you detect being the things that move them, you are demonstrating a very kind of designerly approach to the work.

Closing

Jorge: This is a book that I think anyone involved in design should read, particularly folks who are starting in their careers. Where can folks go to find out more about the book and about you?

Scott: designishard.com. All the resources for the book are there, the links for purchasing it. There’s an explainer video; I made about a 20-minute talk that walks through some of the ideas of the book. So designishard.com is the easiest place to go.

Jorge: That is very easy indeed. Thank you, Scott, for sharing it with us. Good luck with the book, and thank you for being on the show.

Scott: Thanks for having me.