Some business announcements this week, and then a brief note on fiat plays:
- Our repositioning is more-or-less complete. If you find anything on our site that looks off or requires a rewrite, please let us know.
- We’re kicking off a major summerlong project on the topic of onboarding, and I’m doing a small literature review for it. I’m already intimately aware of Hulick’s work, but if you have any other books or resources for me to review, hit reply and point me to ‘em.
- For the first time in five years, we’re going to be changing our fees for new work in a few weeks. Since we could change it all right now, that means a lot of things are on sale as of the conclusion of this sentence. Now would be a very good time to book a roadmap, call, or retainer, if you feel so called. Thanks for your support of us, now & always.
- Lastly, one brief question: what would you like me to write about next?
We’ve come to learn two things about executives over the past 20 years:
- Their decisions are mostly economic in nature. Put another way, executive work is economic work. They understand how to use capital, how to invest with low risk, and where to put effort in a broad sense.
- They exist to serve those who work for them. This goes for any form of management, of course, but the higher up the org chart the more true it becomes. Good executives listen before acting. They’re excellent at asking questions. They operate from a position of knowing they don’t know all the answers, and those who are actually getting their hands dirty know a lot more than they do.
And so we find it fascinating that a lot of the current design winter can be attributed to executives taking back decision-making authority. Because design is a form of leveraged power, you’d figure that executives wouldn’t want to wield all of their power all of the time. Do so, after all, and you cease to be taken seriously within your power.
Plus, executives typically have enough on their hands? Making design decisions themselves is unsustainable, but it’s what’s happening right now.
There’s a fun genre of this manifestation that we call the fiat play. Here is how it goes:
Designer: “We should do X for A, B, and C business reasons.” Executive: “I don’t want to.”
And they go and do something else. Fiat plays are design decisions made by executives when design is resourced, but the executives both goes against their advice and doesn’t tell them about it.
We mercifully don’t encounter these often. They’re a fireable offense here at Draft, and our qualification process sufficiently protects us and our clients’ businesses from such actions.
It’s worth contractually protecting yourself from fiat plays. Doing so helps:
- The businesses you serve (protecting them from low-quality decisions)
- Your businesses’ customers (by insulating them from the effects of those decisions)
- Yourself (you are able to have a job)
What occurs in place of fiat plays? A conversation. A slowing down of the felt “need” to make any decision. Since value-based designers are co-creative equals in the strategic process, the conversation must exist, and it must shift from “what is done” to “how to be.”
From the executive: instead of “I don’t want to,” there will be “that doesn’t help us, and here’s why.”
From the value-based designer: instead of “that is bad,” there will be “what will that say about us?”