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Sturgeon’s Biases
Gold
Wednesday, September 25, 2024 • DesignOps 2024
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Sturgeon’s Biases
Speakers: Adrian Howard
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Summary

Every designer has a story about a terrible experience with developers, or product managers, or the business. Unfortunately the reverse is equally true. We’ll explore these problems through the lens of Sturgeon’s Law — usually stated as “ninety percent of everything is crap”. And “everything” includes Design! We’ll see how people inside and outside of a discipline can have radically different experiences of its competencies. Then we'll work through options to help break down those misconceptions — so we can create happier, more empathic, organisations.

Key Insights

  • Sturgeon’s Law applies not only to fields but also to communities, creating biases in how disciplines perceive themselves and each other.

  • The best practitioners cluster together, forming an 'awesome bubble' that skews their perception of their discipline to be far more positive than widespread reality.

  • There is a second bias where the public or presented image of a discipline is 90% awesome, but many people’s lived experiences are flawed, causing skepticism.

  • Bad experiences in one’s career (e.g., with testers or research) can profoundly bias how we judge entire disciplines later on.

  • Design ops work can be misinterpreted as a power grab or redundant work if implemented without considering teams’ autonomy and context.

  • To rebuild trust, leaders must listen to and believe people’s lived experiences before attempting to educate or advocate for best practices.

  • Using alternative labels and focusing on outcomes rather than jargon or processes helps overcome negative preconceptions and opens dialogue.

  • Questioning your own assumptions and recognizing which 'bubble' you live in enables more empathetic and effective collaboration.

  • Organizational transformation is messy and disciplines going through change are not unique—everyone is adapting simultaneously.

  • Focusing on outcomes (e.g., risk reduction) rather than specific methodologies helps align teams with differing past experiences and biases.

Notable Quotes

"90% of everything is crud."

"The best people in a community experience it as 90% awesome when the reality is 10%."

"If somebody tells me agile is wonderful and my only experience is a process-heavy, estimate-driven feature factory, it’s hard to take them seriously."

"Believe people’s lived experiences and actually listen to what people tell us and believe them."

"Use different words. If somebody has a terrible experience of work labeled a certain way, it’s really hard to use that label without bringing those experiences back."

"Talking about outcomes first is a powerful technique for people who have had bad experiences in discussions about good and bad practice."

"Question your assumptions, question your immediate reactions to another community or discipline."

"Transformation is top of everyone’s mind right now, but that means we are not alone."

"We can’t innovate until we’re aligned with everybody else over what works and what doesn’t work."

"We have to explore and understand both the good and the bad so it can build something better together."

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