Bringing what we do closer to our why

In a famous study conducted by Google on the traits of high performing teams, they found that it wasn’t who was on the team that mattered, but the ability to foster ‘psychological safety’.

Harvard professors defined it: ‘a sense of confidence that the team will not embarrass, reject or punish someone for speaking up’, or ‘a shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking.’

This made sense, of course. The ability to take calculated risks, to speak up when something isn’t right, makes a great creative environment. This environment encourages you to give and receive feedback without worrying about the need to read between the lines or being judged negatively.

But what does ‘psychological safety’ feel like? And how do we know instinctively when we find a great design culture?

Why I decided to design

To find the answer, I went to go back to the beginning. Coming out of university, I was a front end developer. I started my career working on Macromedia Coldfusion - this gives my age away a little. The agency I was working for built websites and it was there I was exposed to web design.

I’ve always been a visual person. When I saw the designers at work, it felt like learning a new, yet familiar language. The way colours and images worked against each other - how branding and type would make me feel one way or another. How shapes, lines and layers draw attention. It was fascinating.

As I started to teach myself to replicate designs through Macromedia Fireworks - I started to learn why certain combinations of colours, imagery and text made sense and why others didn’t. Why alignment, symmetry, hierarchy, contrast all played a part in drawing attention. It piqued my curiosity.

I decided then to study an intensive graphic design course and my design world opened up - the new language I was learning revealed its hidden secrets in all its glory. I knew, probably for the first time in my life, my career was going down the right path.

Furthermore, the classmates I met inspired me; these were like-minded souls, my people! We were connected through form - function, as I discovered, would come later. I started idolising design heroes like Deiter Rams, Saul Bass and Vince Frost.

Then, I got a design job.

Moving further away from the why

Suddenly, you were introduced to deadlines. Then clients, along with their briefs and own designs. Budgets popped up - I lost ample time to explore and create at leisure. You weren’t surrounded by fellow designers and their agendas weren’t always the same. Sometimes you were required to push pixels.

When I stepped into the corporate world I gradually incorporated UX into my processes. There was beauty I found, much like the visual language, in design thinking. Framing a problem, teasing out assumptions, then finding joy in validating those with real customers. There’s nothing quite as exhilarating as seeing another person interact with your creation behind a glass, or analysing pages of data to determine success. It felt like my brain was being defragmented and reconstructed all the time and it was a revelation. I’m still learning today.

At the same time, timesheets were introduced. Mandatory learning, shuffling priorities and enterprise system dependencies slowed me down. Projects became sensitive - so you needed to have secure connections, which also meant you were limited to the tools you could use. Politics. Admin.

In other words, these forces seemed determined to drive a wedge between what I was doing, from why I became a designer in the first place.

Don’t get me wrong, constraints are important. It gives me something to push against, a reason to get creative to navigate around them.

But sometimes they can push too far. Then you find yourself burnt out, unmotivated and uninspired.

Good design culture is getting back to the why

Good design culture, then, to me is about bringing what designers do back closer to the why. To recall, revisit and rebuild what made us love design in the first place.

I’d be curious to know what you remember what that felt like. It probably felt ‘psychologically safe’.

Thanks for reading!