“I hate politics, the work should speak for itself.”
It’s a designer’s affliction. But the work never speaks for itself.
In this week’s coaching reflections I talk about the need to shape the narrative of your work, otherwise someone else will do it for you. Usually badly.
For more of these, take a look at the Design Leadership playlist on YouTube
Check out my coaching practice here.
Transcript
Intro
[00:00:00] Andy Polaine: I hate politics. The work should speak for itself. I’ve heard it so many times in coaching.
My name is Andy Polaine, and every week I spend my days coaching design leaders and in these videos, I reflect upon the common themes and questions that come up in the week.
The work never speaks for itself
[00:00:13] Andy Polaine: And this week, I want to talk about like taking control of the narrative of your work. So when I hear people say, well, I just want the work to speak for itself. I think it goes back to an early part in people’s design careers, where you’re used to making an artifact, and then you present that artifact and go ta-da! Here it is. And the work should speak for itself.
But of course it doesn’t, you’re always presenting it. You’re always talking about it. The work can’t speak for itself. It’s just an artifact. Actually it’s not quite true. The work will always have some kind of messaging. The Marshall McLuhan idea of the medium is the message. It does make a difference. And so depending on the format you present your work in. The classic one is presenting something that’s kind of obviously rough sketches or pen and paper or wire frames, right, versus some really polished work will make a difference to how people receive that work.
The trouble is with trying to let the work speak for itself is it’s highly susceptible to interpretation. Now, if you think well the work can speak for itself, I challenge you to go to an art gallery and have a look. There’s often a block of text by the piece of work explaining why it’s significant and the history of it and the context of it. There are whole books on just single paintings, like Picasso’s Guernica or Leonardo’s The Mona Lisa.
Give your boss the mythology
[00:01:26] Andy Polaine: And certain mythologies and stories and narratives build up around those pieces of work too. One of the things I often hear is something like my boss is unable to tell the right story about design. The answer to that is to help her. How can you help her tell the story of the work and the narrative that is going to be the one you want to be told? You can’t just expect a person who isn’t really involved in design or doesn’t have that background, or isn’t really, that’s not their job to just get it.
It’s up to you to help that person do it.
So you want to think about, or what was the context and intent when someone is looking at this piece of work? Where do they place it? So they’re not just making assumptions or jumping to conclusions or making suggestions that are irrelevant.
Why is this piece of work important to the organization? Get the story of that really crystal clear. And what impact is it going to have? All of that is going to make the person who’s presenting it for you be able to present it better. If they can present it better, it’s going to reflect much better on the work you’re trying to achieve in your design capability.
Use video
[00:02:25] Andy Polaine: One really good thing is to make a video. That can be a screen cast. It can be a presentation like this. Do it using something like Loom. Or you can just do a full case study of the work, but you know, the deck is not the presentation. You’ve got something that can stand alone. And then you’ve got something that you’d actually present to, and it’s important to separate those two.
The nice thing about video is it doesn’t get messed up by someone presenting it wrong and that’s what can happen with a deck. Many of us have had that experience of someone presenting someone else’s deck and they go through and they’re clicking they’re "I’m not really sure what this slide is about" and they skip over it and they don’t have the proper narrative or sequencing. They don’t know what they should be concentrating on and what bits are less important.
When you craft a video and partly because you’re having to do a video, you get to plan it and you get to edit it. And then you can put together this really nice compact thing and videos are really transportable. You know, people can drop it into decks. It can sit somewhere on a on a website or internally or externally facing.
And if it’s any good people will use it over and over again. They’ll drop it into their own presentations. It will become a thing of its own.
Help me to help you
[00:03:26] Andy Polaine: If politics and self promotion, they make you feel a bit queasy then think of it instead as helping others to help you. And you’re helping them tell the story you want to be told.
Storytelling course
[00:03:35] Andy Polaine: Now this isn’t meant to be a promotion, but I haven’t on my course about that. I’ll put a link in the show notes and I’ll be running a masterclass about this for the service design network, which I’ll post about soon.
Outro
[00:03:45] Andy Polaine: I hope that’s useful for you. If you’d like to check out my coaching practice, it is at polaine.com/coaching. And I’ll put the link below.
If you’ve got any of your own tips about how you’ve successfully crafted the narrative about work and help others present your design work and capability and their organization, post a comment below. I really love to collect these and hear other people’s stories.
Thanks very much.
And I’ll see you again soon.
