Sturgeon’s Biases
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
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Sturgeon's Law—that 90% of everything is crud—applies not only to fields but also to groups, causing biases in how disciplines view each other.
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Top practitioners cluster together, creating an 'awesome bubble' that biases them to see their discipline as mostly excellent, while others see mostly poor work.
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The visibility of voices in a community is uneven; keynotes and articles showcase the best work, masking the widespread mediocrity.
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Negative prior experiences heavily influence how people perceive and trust disciplines like design ops, user research, and testing.
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Rebranding or using different language for familiar concepts can help overcome preconceptions and open dialogue.
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Focusing conversations on intended outcomes rather than specific practices enables better stakeholder alignment and reduces resistance.
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Listening, believing, and empathetically asking for stories about bad experiences is crucial to changing perceptions.
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Discipline boundaries are fuzzy, overlapping and constantly evolving, requiring humility and openness from practitioners.
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Transformation challenges are universal across product, design, research, and development, emphasizing the need for cross-disciplinary collaboration.
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Questioning one’s own experience and assumptions is essential to break out of bias bubbles and discover new opportunities.
Notable Quotes
"90% of everything is crud."
"The best people in a community experience 90% awesome when the reality is 10%."
"If somebody tells me agile is wonderful and my only experience is a feature factory, it’s hard to take them seriously."
"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."
"Believe people’s lived experiences. Actually listen to what people tell us and believe them."
"Ask for stories. Can you tell me about the last time you shipped something that ended up not working well?"
"Talking about outcomes first is a really powerful technique for people who have had bad experiences."
"Question your assumptions. What bubbles are we living in?"
"Design ops can help, but only if we can talk about it in ways that other people can hear."
"We can’t innovate until we’re aligned over what works and what doesn’t."
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