“Cultural" Competence for Designers

Vicky Teinaki -

I was lucky enough to see Kim Goodwin speak at UX Scotland 2016 on organisational culture. Here she continued on this discussion.

Culture is:

  • the outcomes you value, and the skills and behaviour you value
  • how you decide (org structure)

Process values determine how we should act, how to persuade stakeholders, where you spend resources

Not all values are the same, are they:

  1. Values we claim, or
  2. values we act on

When your decisions are clearly you, making decisions beck earlier – Roy Disney

What gets rewarded? What do hiring and review systems encourage?

What build in biases are there in the system?
Does your company really have a no asshole rule? Check your team, ask for stories of past behaviour (or see how they treat the office staff)
Develop shared competency models to allow for transparency
What arguments work? What makes decisions stick?

Design leadership involves knowing when to work with vs on the values (what battles to fight)
You’re still a designer … of teams, process, and culture