The culture UX designers could create

Bad bosses. Unreasonable clients. Lazy coworkers. User experience designers contend with all of them occasionally, but when your everyday environment is made up of these elements, Teresa Brazen suggests your organization has a culture problem.

At the recent Fluxible conference in Kitchener-Waterloo, Brazen gave a talk entitled “Make culture, not war,” in which she discussed both her own experience at Cooper, a design agency where she serves as design education strategist, as well as principles and ideas culled from a variety of other experts and firms. She urged her peers to tackle cultural problems head-on, rather than succumbing to the anger and frustration that the tough times can sometimes bring.

“Don’t let your culture hold you hostage,” she said. “I’m not advocating for you guys to stick it out in the culture that’s horrific, but all cultures get better when people take responsibility for their impact.”

Some of the elements that Brazen said UXers need to think about as they influence or help shape their organizational culture included the following:

Vision: Every single person needs to understand how they connect to what an organization is doing in a way that gives them purpose, Brazen said. Unfortunately, that’s where a lot of visions break down. She pointed to Morningstar, a tomato processing company where there are no managers, as a case study in how this might work better. At Morningstar, each person has a personal mission statement, where they capture in a couple of sentences their part of pushing that vision forward. “Do you and your colleagues understand your connection to that bigger vision? Do you have practices in place to help you stay connected to that when you’re working on projects. Often times, by the time we’re half-way through, we’ve forgotten.”

Autonomy: “We have an innate desire for ownership,” said Brazon, making reference to Drive by Daniel Pink as a great book that touches upon how a certain degree of autonomy can fuel high-performance teams. One idea is to allow employees greater leeway in getting whatever tools they need to pursue their work, even if it’s expensive.

Inspiration: Brazen has led or participated in “exploration workshops,” a dedicated time and place for team members to exercise some divergent thinking. Other ideas included “15-minute Fridays,” to squeeze in at least a little time for brainstorming.

“How good a job are you doing of cultivating inspiration?” she asked the Fluxible crowd. “If you are not, there’s no way you’re going to come up with amazing ideas. You’ll end up with lukewarm iterations of basic ideas you’ve done before.”

Chemistry: Often neglected, this is about how well employees can relate to others as human beings and not just as coworkers. A big part of getting this going is by making sure people are somehow connected. At Cooper, everyone gets together for lunch on Wednesdays, Brazen said. In other firms where teams are spread out, they could leave Skype on all day, “where (the other employees) are a sort of ambient presence,” she said.

UX designers will get better at contributing to organizational culture if they treat it like a design project, Brazen suggested. “This is where you get your ethnography hats on,” she said. Look inside at how conflict is handled (and whether it’s resolved), take notes and pictures that show how culture manifests itself. Then look outside to successful firms that seem to have fostered a healthy culture.

“Think of it as a project to create a culture about creating culture,” she said. “What would be possible if everybody that you work with really saw and took responsibility for creating culture? Imagine the amazing vision you could come up with collectively.”