Erika Hall - The Business of Design

Mule Design co-founder and Just Enough Research and Conversational Design author Erika Hall and I chat about how a lack of understanding about the business aspects of their design works can lead designers to become the tools of extractive, unethical practices. We get into how this has played out in her own work and how Mule makes decisions about what work they will and will not do (and also why they're called "Mule"), why some companies choose not to have a sales team, the value of constraints in design, and lots, lots more.

Recommended books from this episode:

Designing Business by Clement Mok
How to Win Friends & Influence People by Dale Carnegie
Nicomachean Ethics, Book VIII by Aristotle (where he talks about friendship)
Putting the Rabbit in the Hat audiobook by Brian Cox

Our intro and outro music is "Humbug" by Crowander

Transcript

(Transcript courtesy Louise Boydon)

David Dylan Thomas 

Hey everybody, Dave here. Just wanted to give you a heads up that there is sort of a fuzzy sound that kind of pops in and out every now and then, the first part of the podcast. After the 23-minute mark it goes away – we figured out what it was, but if you can bear with it, I promise the rest of the podcast is awesome and there's a whole bunch of conversation after the 23-minute mark. So, trust me, there's a lot of good stuff there. Anyway, just wanted to give you that heads up. Thanks.

David Dylan Thomas 

So, welcome everybody to another episode of “Lately, I've been thinking about…”. My name is David Dylan Thomas, I'm coming to you from Media, Pennsylvania, which was formerly occupied by the Leni Lenape people until we all came and fucked it up. But we are here now and my special guest today, who we are going to learn what they've been thinking about, is Erika Hall.

Erika, I'm going to let you pick the context for who you are and what you do, but feel free to introduce yourself. 

Erika Hall

Okay. Hi, I'm Erika Hall and coming to you from San Francisco, which is a city on the ancestral homeland of the Ramaytush Ohlone people and it's fantastic to be here with you. We were just discussing I'm also in the Dogpatch area, which is a historic steelworks and shipbuilding area. I'm the co-founder of Mule Design Studio and the author of Just Enough Research and Conversational Design. I just like to help people solve problems, especially with how they're thinking about things.

David Dylan Thomas

That's a very good space to be in! I have a question for you. You probably know what it is, Erika, what have you been thinking about lately? 

Erika Hall

Well, I've been doing a lot of thinking lately because I have been thinking about working on my next book because I did a lot of research on that. So, the topic which really is at the forefront of my mind is design, and specifically how by failing to really deeply consider the business of design, designers actually allow themselves to become the tools of unethical and extractive businesses, even while in pursuit of humane and perhaps hopefully, ethical objectives.

David Dylan Thomas

This is funny because I remember two years ago, three years ago now, I was in San Francisco and you were sort of noodling with us, thinking about writing a book, and I was thinking it was going to be about this topic. It's funny because at the time it was blowing my mind. I was like, oh my God, you're right! Business is a thing that is influencing. Then two, three years post-pandemic later, we're like, oh yeah! This is for real! You were on to something there!

So, unpack that for me a little bit. What would be an example of a designer kind of getting in over their head, not realizing that by not considering the business, they're kind of being the tool of white supremacy or all these other things?

Erika Hall

I'll take an example without naming the name of the business – but I don't really have a problem with that – but just a general example is the restaurant meal delivery business, because this is one that has really exploded during the pandemic. So, you might be a designer who considers yourself a UX designer and actually, this is just an aside, I've never referred to myself as a UX designer for this reason, because I think when you think about just the “user perspective”, what that does is bury the question and paper over the question of who you consider the user of a system, right?

It really privileges one group of people and then allows you to kind of put this hygienic barrier around your work. So, we can set that aside, but that's one of the key ideas that I've been thinking about. 

Say you're a designer, like a UX designer, I want to make experiences delightful and intuitive and pleasant for people and do you know what's really pleasant and convenient for people? Having a meal delivered when they don't want to go outside for whatever reason. The designer works on the system, but what they're actually doing, they're working in service of a business that shouldn't actually really be a business at the scale they're talking about because restaurants and restaurant delivery is very local and the economics of that really depends, like transportation, on the regional economy and geography and all of that stuff. 

So, then they figure out they're working for a business that is trying to drive up fees to restaurants and drive down delivery costs, right? It's this multi-sided market. What happens is – and I am such a huge fan of, and proponent of restaurants – especially independent restaurants – as the absolute anchors of their local communities, and it's often the business that offers the entry way to employment for people who might otherwise have trouble getting a foot on the ladder to self-sustaining employment.

Restaurants are a whole thing, I love restaurants. And so this business comes in and not only takes a tremendous cut from an incredibly difficult and low margin business, but then they also try to get away with paying the delivery people as little as possible and contribute to this emerging worker classification that exists in the margins.

The designer might be really focused on, oh, I've created this interface that allows the user to select from a wide variety of restaurants and understand when your food's going to arrive and what the fees are and all this, but they're in service of what I consider to be an incredibly extracted and predatory business model. 

David Dylan Thomas

I think there are countless examples of that. As you're talking, I'm also thinking about like let's pretend slavery were legal. You could have a cotton business and I'm like, oh, I'm just a UX designer designing the interface for ordering cotton from this plantation. I could make it really great for the “user” who would be the person buying cotton and completely paper over the fact that this is a highly extractive business.

All of that would fall under the radar of any typical agency doing UX work because when you are assigned the role, whether you're working for an agency, whether you're working in-house, you were given a brief, the user statement. The user problem is, as a cotton producer or a cotton buyer, I would like to be able to buy cotton at any time of day easily, go.

That's the context you're working in and I think what you're pointing out very rightly is that that's not the context. That's the least important part of that transaction.

Erika Hall

Yeah! Because of this framing and because I've been in this design consulting for a couple of decades now, a very long time. When I started my career, I think there was more of a systems approach and now we’ve filed that under service design and we were the Twitters and we see design Twitter, fighting once to self, not so much in the last couple of years when everybody's just been…but, talking about the different design disciplines. I think all of that is a real distraction from, putting my intellect and my labor in service of some small enterprise, any endeavor. There are many ways to do that because a designer is always in service to something else, some other problem definition or some other goal, whether it's their own, you can design things for yourself, but I think that is the problem that you're working on that makes you the designer you are.

I think designers talk about themselves based on the documentation they produce and so I really encourage people to get away from that sort of thinking. It's like, oh, if you produce wireframes, you're an information architect. If you produce visual interface, you're a UI designer, all this stuff.

It's like, no, what are you putting your skills towards furthering in the world? That's the kind of design you are in. Everything else is details and tool sets.

David Dylan Thomas

Well, it's interesting. I was having this discussion online with, with Amy Santee about even at the level of getting the job – so, if I'm interviewing you and I want to understand you as a designer from an ethical standpoint, as opposed to a documentation standpoint, or if I am auditioning the company, I'm trying to get a job there. I want understand where the company stands, not as a producer of widgets, but as a player in the world.

I don't know that we have the language or the field in LinkedIn to talk about this is where I stand ethically and I will not support X, Y, and Z. The closest I've seen to this is I did work for a company that just explicitly was like, “We're not going to work on tobacco products. We're not going to work on firearms”. They were in a position to work with a company in Saudi Arabia, where if they assigned a team, that team could not have anyone who was homosexual and any women would have to sort of have very weird rules to abide by, and they're like, okay, we're not going to do that.

But that is the closest I've come to leaving money on the table due to ethical concerns. Those are fairly extreme cases. There was nothing written down anywhere that said, “okay, when we are selling” – because that's where it all starts – if you're an agency, is the sales pitch, “this is what due diligence looks like for us.”

I've never seen that be a thing at the agency level or at the corporate level to have it instantiated that we're going to think about the business side of this. 

Erika Hall

Oh, we have always had that because the whole reason that Mike and I founded our own agency was because we said we really enjoy this work. This is fun, challenging work. You learn something even if a project goes sideways, you're always learning. When it works out it's incredibly satisfying, and from day one, we understood based on our previous agency experiences, that the clients you work with make you the agency you are.

That was day one the only reason that we were bothering to do this, because 80% of your work ends up being operational stuff and you’re like, I'm a designer running a business – cool – and the only reason was so that we could make that choice. Why else run an agency? It’s in the name!

You have agency. Why do it, unless the whole reason to do it is to make the choice, to have that choice of who to work with and who not to work with.

There were definite industries that seem obvious industries to network with, you know, tobacco and firearms, etc., but we've always had a set of more principles that are like, okay, number one, it has to be an organization that's doing something that we want to happen in the world, so we can really support this and stand by this. 

We've been doing this so long that it's kind of baked in these principles. We have to be able to support what they're doing in the world. It has to make sense. It’s not like you've got a really idealistic objective, but it's not going to work. You have to have the budget behind it to support it. You have to be committed to it because another thing that happens is some organizations will just have budget and they'll try things and that never goes well. 

Always, if we work with this organization, I am willing to shout from the rooftops that we work with this organization and of course some are more maybe high minded than others, but working with a business that just wants to make money doing things, that's also fine.  We've worked with plenty of nonprofit and mission-driven organizations, and I can tell you, philanthropy has its own set of issues.

David Dylan Thomas

Oh, yeah!!

Erika Hall

Nothing is pure and clean in this world. We're all interrelated, we live in society as the meme goes. I think a thing that I want to convey through this project that I'm working on to designers is that there is absolutely nothing wrong with just considering yourself part of a business that exists to make money. 

Why did humans come together at all? To trade. That's baked into why we have a social life. Some of the things we decided to trade were not great because sometimes they were other people and other non-ethical things. But just the sheer fact of, “I have something of value and I'm going to exchange it for something of value that you have and then we both feel better off and then we have lives that we enjoy”. That is fine. 

I feel sometimes designers want partition themselves off and think that, “oh, we're the best, most rarefied aspect of this business.” But my message to designers is you’re no better than a sales person, a customer service person, a manufacturer, any other role, somebody in HR – I don’t know, HR has its own issues!

I think design goes wrong when designers see themselves as apart, especially now that design is often an internal business function. You're part of the business, you are, and that's also why I really object to designers talking about working for brands. I don't work for a brand because when you say you work for a brand, that means you're working for the story and that again allows you to create that barrier between yourself and the business.

You work for that business. You work for every aspect of that business. You don't just work for, “Oh, I work in the innovation lab and they do some really gross extractive stuff over here.” No. When you work for a business or they're your client, you work for the business. The brand is a part of that, but you do not work for the brand. I don't know when people started saying that, but I feel like that is some disingenuous garbage!

David Dylan Thomas

It's interesting too, I'm curious about the intake process, when you have decided to say we will consider the business before we consider the business, before we prefer to take your money, I want to understand what our business model is.

But yeah, so tell me a little bit about that. Is that something that’s sort of a written down procedure of “first we asked this and then we asked that”, or is it more of just like a feel, how do you do that? 

Erika Hall

Well, some are obvious, but most of them, I would say 80% are super obvious, and because we're so outspoken, I mean, not so much in the beginning, but over time it got really self-selective and I have a funny story about that. But we have had some cases where it's like, is this cool? And then we would talk with everybody working for us if it was one of those cases, because if somebody was like, no, then no. Basically we always treated it like everybody had a veto for the whole company. It wasn't even like, oh, you don't have to work on this project. But if anybody working for us said, “I am not okay with that” they'll always be another client.

Also, this is something that we got from places we'd worked previously when we saw the agency principles or the owners not protect their people from the client. That was also a very instructive lesson because we always said we take care of you first before the client. And so, we would never say, “oh, we're putting your feelings aside, your life aside for this client.” Again, why run an agency unless you can make those sorts of choices. Sometimes we had lean times because we passed on things. 

For example, we once were approached by a publication.  We've done a lot of work with media and journalism and that's been really interesting. So, I will say a high-profile celebrity news organization sent us an RFP, and that was one of the ones that we really had a discussion about because we said on the one hand this would be sort of fun and interesting. But we really thought about it. We said, well, while they do occasionally break stories that are stories, we don't support that type of reporting, that sort of the paparazzi, the borderline stocking, the getting involved in people's personal lives. We really thought about it and were like, “Nah, we just can't do it” and so we didn't pursue that one. 

David Dylan Thomas

Was that the funniest story you wanted to tell?

Erika Hall

No!

David Dylan Thomas

Oh, tell me the funny story!

Erika Hall 

The funny story was – and this was pretty early on at this point because I remember where our offices were. Maybe this was 2005-ish, 2006-ish. This Republican blog publication came to us and first of all, we're like, why on earth would they get in touch with us?? And so, we said, “these people, oh my God!” because they were getting into some stuff at that point. They were in the news for the sort of stuff they were doing themselves. We wrote back, we said, “oh, thank you so much for your inquiry. We just don't think this is a good fit for us.” 

That usually does it, they’d be like, “Okay, well, we'll go elsewhere.” That's the most like generic, diplomatic, we're not going to do this. 

And then they came back and they said “why? We want to know why?” And we said, “well, we disagree with your politics” – and I forget how detailed. We said, “we have certain views, we, as the owners and we don't agree and we can't support what you're doing, but whatever.”

And we thought that would be like, we just feel generally our politics are a different level and we can also get into the issue of what it means to talk about politics at work, but they did not take no for an answer.  This is something that we have seen that's mind-blowing when prospective clients don't realize that you can turn them down.

This was a case where it was just fascinating to us because they came back and really, like, why do you want to work with us so badly? Are you trying to convert us to your ways of thinking? I have never really understood this, but then they came back and what they said was so telling! We explained to them that we had this rubric for client selection and they didn't exactly meet it because we had to be very willing to confidently tell other people we worked for this organization and they said, “you can just take the money and not tell anybody.”

David Dylan Thomas

Wow!!

Erika Hall

Literally said that and our response was, “and that’s difference between you and us!”

David Dylan Thomas

Yeah, wow! That's amazing

Erika Hall

Yeah!

David Dylan Thomas

So, what you're saying about the client that just wouldn't let it go. I think you hit on something there when you were talking about how it didn't occur to them that an agency could turn them down.

I think when we're having these discussions about picking your clients, there's a certain power differential that comes into effect there, right? Because first off, that notion that there's always going to be another client, a lot of places, especially when they're smaller and starting out, that is a big fear.

It's like, “really? Are you sure there's going to be another client because I'm looking at the P&L statement. I'm getting kind of nervous here!”

But the idea of power I think is really important to kind of key in on, because when I have seen agencies throw their own people under the bus, what's been made completely clear is that the agency does not have the power in that relationship. The client does. 

That is why your workers are being thrown under the bus here, because we're not here for you, we're here for them. And then maybe if there's time, we're here for you. 

So, talk a little bit about that decision and what goes into even defining that power relationship when we're talking about business?

Erika Hall

Yeah, that's a great question. Let's start with what we named our company!

David Dylan Thomas

Go on!

Erika Hall

So that was from day one. After we said we want to start an agency, what are we going to call it? And we definitely had a reaction to all of those ninety’s agencies with the fancy names that either they'd paid for a naming agency to invent by crunching up morphemes so they all sounded the same.

The first agency I worked for was Studio Archetype and they were A+, top of the business, but that name conveys a certain elitism, but it was super awesome. I mean working at an agency like that, super fun! Walking around and feeling cool in our black turtlenecks with our black mugs and we're Studio Archetype – that’s great!

Clement Mok was so ahead of his time, in terms of thinking about the relationship of interactive design to business. His book still stands up, it's amazing.

David Dylan Thomas

What’s his book?

Erika Hall

Designing Business.

David Dylan Thomas

I’ll put it in the show notes, cool.

Erika Hall

He talked about the role of information architecture and content strategy and design to furthering a business. He wrote that book in 1996 or something. So, people have forgotten those principles 10 times over since the mid-nineties.

So, we said, well, we're doing this because we really enjoyed the work. We said mules like to work. And the more we've looked into mules, the better it sounded because a mule is a designed animal. A horse you can basically make a horse do anything. They're beautiful, majestic animals, but you can work a horse to death. We always tell the story, if you take a horse down the Grand Canyon, it will take the most direct route. Then donkeys, donkeys are super smart, but they're kind of small. So, then you combine the strength of the horse with the smarts of the donkey or the jackass. This is our deep lore, because “why is your company called Mule?” is always a clients first question, especially in the early days.

So, it's a designed animal. It's designed to work and it won't do anything that it thinks is not in the best interests of itself or of the people it's working with there. 

That was from day one. We were very clear that we're in this so that we have that power. What we learned was that if you assert that power at the beginning of the relationship, great! Clients want that, but designers, because they aren't given these skills – negotiation skills, sales skills, in design school, because they're given a different set of skills and there's this uncertainty when dealing with clients and this fear of where's the next job coming from. 

Designers give up all this power and once you give it up, that's it. You can't go back. There's no backsies if you don't clarify in the beginning that we're working together as equals, if you don't do that from day one, you'll never get that back and you'll end up in a bad spot.

Often you're working because you are working for organizations that are larger and more powerful than you in an operational level. You're working with an organization that perhaps has enough lawyers to sue you out of existence. So, you have to assert the power that you have.

David Dylan Thomas

It's interesting because what I've observed as someone who advocated for content strategy at pretty much every company I've worked for, inevitably, the crucial battle was sales. If content strategy isn't sold into the project, good luck getting it in later.

Erika Hall

So sales and agencies, or even honestly, in an organization, because every organization is selling something, and their sales staff wants to be able to sell X, Y, and Z. And then the design team has to deliver on X, Y, and Z.  That tends to be who is leading and not coincidentally, who's making the most money.

If you want to assert that power, what role, even in the selling of the project, maybe before you get to the point where people are selecting you specifically for your moral stance, is that where you start to put in the leverage or really what I'm saying is how does your sales work? Because that sounds like it would have to be a crucial part of it?

Erika Hall

Yeah. 1000%. 

I'll tell you when we were first starting Mule, we went around, we did our research. We talked to people we knew who had started businesses, started agencies before and asked for advice. The thing that we heard a lot was never hire salespeople.

David Dylan Thomas

Wowww!

Erika Hall

We heard that from multiple people because if you have a commission sales person, they're just going to want to win the business. We did end up for a period actually having a salesperson, but it was somebody who came out of agency work and kind of got the deal, so for a time we did have that role just because it was when we were really scaling up the size of projects we were taking on and that relationship building and proposal writing was getting so huge that it made sense to have a dedicated role, but that was once we had matured our network enough so that it didn't run into problems.

In the early days, it was really a lot of filtering. At various points the people working on sales and the people working on research, the initial discovery research, same people – because it's the same. It's the same sort of research that you do on behalf of the organization, you do about the organization and it's a conversation because we'd go in and we'd say, if somebody sent us an RFP, we would talk to them about it. 

The reason we've won business in competitive bids is because we didn't take the RFP literally. We’d say, okay, this is what you're asking for, but we're going to tell you what we think you need. That comes out of the research and that's always been a competitive advantage for us because other agencies that felt themselves more in – because we feel that we're in service – but it's in service to what people actually need, not what they ask for. It's not to make them feel pampered, it's to genuinely serve their needs with our expertise.

We would ask a tremendous number of questions to make sure that we were a good fit. Because again, if we weren't a good fit, we wouldn’t take the work just because it was work.  Even again if it was like, wow, we could take this money, but we're not the right people. I think because we had such a strong sense of self from the beginning – and of course we've made a shitload of mistakes the whole time. 

Then we would learn and learn and learn. So, it started from day one. It would start from a conversation and if the people on the client team didn't want to have that conversation with us, because one of our key principles is also the way that the client, the people that you're interacting with who represent the client, the way they behave during the sales process is the way that the project's going to go.

That’s why it was also important to have the people doing the work involved in the sales process and not have some sort of handoff with like, oh, a salesperson landed this project, and now you've got to do the thing. No, everybody has always been involved. 

David Dylan Thomas

That's so wise. It's funny, I think about my experience in publishing, where I was an online editor-in-chief for a bunch of trade publications websites. Inevitably we would call it ‘sell and run’ where we would have some salesperson promise a whole bunch of ad space on a newsletter or some kind of weird deal in a forum or whatever and we're supposed to do that how? It’s like, I don’t care, just make it happen. I promise that we're getting paid for it. See how much money they're going to pay us for it – how much money they're going to pay you, the salesperson – but it was how much money they're going to pay us for it.

To a lesser degree, but same principle in the design agency world, and I think what it kept coming back to is commission. The salesperson is incentivized differently than everybody else on the project and that never sat right with me because I felt like whenever you incentivized differently, you're going to be at crossed purposes.  You just are. Inevitably, a lot of the friction that I would find in the design world came from, “Hey, whoever sold this hasn't done a day of content strategy in their life. Whoever sold this, we weren't advised, whatever they were promising, we weren't asked if this was even a good idea if this was even what the client needed.”

I think that makes a lot of sense. It's interesting though, because while that sounds like radical advice, don't have a sales team, what could you possibly do because so many entrepreneurs are told early on one of the first things you need is to hire a salesperson. That's terrible advice from the perspective of we are here not just for a cash grab, but here to actually do something. 

Erika Hall

It's funny because I was just talking to someone yesterday about the fact that they switched from being in sales and marketing to design and felt a certain amount of imposter syndrome around that. I said, you have an advantage over designers who don't understand sales, because it's all sales, it's constant sales. I think it goes back to designers overidentifying with the documentation they produce because a good salesperson does understand people and is customer-centered and doesn't want to sell something that somebody actually needs.

I think the problem is that there are a lot of bad salespeople out there. And another thing about me and my personal background – and this is what I was talking about with this person yesterday – is that two very close people in my family were salespeople the whole time I was growing up. I was just constantly getting insight into this – and very principled salespeople and it was all relationship.

They sold microchips and I heard so many stories and it was one of my uncles who won every sales award and made just a tremendous amount of money because he would say you understand their need, you go above and beyond to win the business, but because it is genuinely in their interests for you to have that business and you take care of them, but not at the expense of yourself. 

Then you develop friends and relationships that actually last your entire life because they started out as these sales relationships.

Talking about content strategy one of the things that really bums me out is when I get cold sales emails that are so bad. I tell people to read Dale Carnegie all the time. I say How to Win Friends and Influence People is the number one interaction design manual because it starts with be interested in other people.

It all starts there. Sales and design are the same, because most designers, interactive designers that is, it's either you're trying to get people to do a thing, to do some behavior that benefits the business, that's just sales. The interface is always selling you, but it should sell you a good salesperson because a good salesperson understands what you need. They make you feel good. They make you feel taken care of. They anticipate your questions. 

Any interface you're dealing with should treat you as though it's a good salesperson and you're a valuable customer. I just think there are a lot of bad salespeople and the humanity has come out of sales because there's a lot of scamming going on out there.

I think sales and design are incredibly compatible and if you participate in the sales process, you understand what the client values and what they're willing to pay for and what they're more reticent about because maybe they're like, “okay, you're twisting my arm. You're making me pay for content strategy.”

Then when you're at the point of working on the content strategy, you understand that they don't value that, or they don't understand the value of that and that changes your engagement and you're able to better support them in terms of seeing the value of content strategy and you wouldn't know that if you weren't in those sales conversations.

David Dylan Thomas

I mean, it's funny too, because I agree and my latest talk, I talk a lot about persuasion and if you are trying to advocate for change at your company, here are some things we know about bias, but at the end of the day, what I'm talking about is sales.

Everything I'm talking about applies to – and has been used in and learned from – a lot of actual early 1950s persuasion psychology came out of advertising.

Basic things we understand about bias came out of that so it is kind of the same thing, but it's interesting when we talk about good and bad sales, what we're really talking about is the difference between being relationship centered and being Filthy Lucre centered. 

I love that idea of I am establishing a relationship in a way where it will last for 10 years, for 20 years versus a cash grab. Nobody robs a bank and tries to become friends with the bank teller. It's like, you're here to give me money, that's it. Once I've got the money, I never want to see you again.

I think that at the extremes are kind of the spectrum of good and bad sales and also good and bad design and also good and bad business and good and bad being a person.  I feel that the centering of the relationship actually ends up being a really good – metric is the wrong – rubric maybe, for thinking about these things.

Erika Hall

It goes back to Aristotle and he talks about different types of friendship, and of course he's very problematic. He was like, women aren't even your friends, but he talked about the difference between an instrumental relationship where you're just using the person to get something and a real true friendship.

It's different, are you just using this person? Because again, it goes back to people getting together to trade, to come away with everybody gets something of value, everybody feels better off, that sort of core social relationship. If it's purely transactional and you're like, okay, I'm not thinking of you as a person. I've got my value out of you. I've extracted value and I'm just going to treat you like a resource that I can extract value from, which is how these businesses are working – that’s bad. That's just bad. 

How you get out of that is by personally, if you have the choice – and people have more choice in a lot of matters, a lot of people have a lot more choice. Some people of course don't have choices, don't have options, but a lot of people – especially anybody in our business, you have choices. You don't have to work for Facebook or you'll starve. There's nobody in that position. 

What we found over our many years in business is if you say no to the bad clients and yes to the good ones, then the good ones refer other good ones, and then all your businesses referral and reputation, and all our businesses referral and reputation now, it's totally paid off.

Every time we said no to bad work, that paid off a thousand-fold.

David Dylan Thomas

And I'll bet you were so much happier too. Just the actual experience, what you'll be doing with most of your time is working with these clients, not selling them – that's this much of the time. The vast majority of the time is going to be working with them. So yeah, you probably also spared yourself months of just misery!

Erika Hall

Yeah! And I think because of the way we were optimizing for things; we've worked with a lot of great organizations that weren't necessarily high profile. If you're an agency and you're like, oh, I work for big brands. Why?

I mean, then that's a whole extra topic. Just because an organization is large and famous doesn't mean that your work for them is going to be important. In fact, a lot of those organizations are the ones that secretly have five of the same projects going on at the same time, in some sort of stealth bake-off sort of thing, or it's a dead-end because I'll say the other really key criteria for the clients we work with is that the work has to be critical to their business. 

That is of all of them the one that is the most connected with project success. Because if people come in – and this is why we've worked with a lot of organizations also going through some sort of business transformation – because that's the moment when they're like, “okay, we've realized that the way we've done things in the past, won't serve us in the future. We're changing everything about how we're thinking about ourselves or we're changing some critical aspect. If this design project doesn't work out, that's my job, that's our division.”

If they come in with those stakes, that project will go so much better than somebody who comes in and says, “oh, I have some budget and I want to try something” that project is going to tank, but if you have everybody's commitment and interest on the client side and you can get the information and attention from people, that project will go well.

That's a huge, huge determinant and it sounds scary initially because you're like, whoa, if this project doesn't work out, especially if only a small part of the success of this business is really subject to our influence, because how they take and use the work, but then if you can get into their heads, like, okay, we've learned that here's what you need to do to really succeed with this design. If they take that to heart, because you have that trust that you've established from day one and they're confident that you aren't just telling them what they want to hear – which is also the ticket to badness. No, the projects where people have come in and said, “this is incredibly important to the future of our organization, the future of our business, the future of my job.” Those are good projects.

David Dylan Thomas

It sounds like the trust thing is true because what I think when I hear that is that means I'm definitely going to have your full attention, but it could also mean that you're going to be super risk averse and second guessing yourself, not you, but the client will be second guessing because it is so important. 

How do you kind of navigate that? Because it seems to me that might be an overcorrection precisely because it's so important to the business?

Erika Hall

Oh yeah, but I'll tell you, here's something I've found over the years. The people who are the most anxious were anxious about things that actually didn't matter. Like weird politics. If they're anxious about the politics but if they're well-informed enough to know what the make-or-break stuff is and why the work that we do is important to their business, which is the stuff that's in their RFP or project description or whatever. If they've identified that we need these outcomes and these outcomes are important to us and we have those good conversations in the beginning, and we have that trust, and we do that in the beginning and put that into the statement of work. Here's what we're doing together before we begin, that's all before we begin.

You have that relationship. Of course, things go sideways, someday we'll do our fireside stories book or whatever, with all the ways we've seen things go wrong. If you don't have that trust that's the thing you can't ever get it and that's a hard thing to convey to people is that you have to trust us.

But because what they do is they keep testing you and testing you and the overhead of a lack of trust or the overhead of anxiety. Then as designers, all you're doing is trying to serve that anxiety and the work suffers.

David Dylan Thomas

It's such a miserable experience. I have had clients where it's just constantly going around in circles about the same stuff and you're just sort of like, oh my God. I mean, you're right. It's always the least important stuff.

Erika Hall

If you can learn to identify that and mitigate it early on, because sometimes we've also had clients who put up a good front and then halfway through the project, like where did this come from? But trust the value of trust and if being honest, if clients withhold information, because sometimes they do that for whatever reason, the business overhead of being anxious or dishonest or untrusting is huge. When clients come in and they want to save money, the best way to save money is by trusting your damn designer, and being honest. Otherwise, that's where you just set fire to piles of cash is when you make your designer jump through hoops for political or ego reasons. 

But politics and ego are always going back to what you said about incentives. It all comes down to incentives being aligned.

You’ve also got to take care of that in the beginning.  You've got to be honest about where the incentives are because good designers can solve for anything. There's always constraints and significant constraints often make for some of the best design. So, any client who comes in and they're like, “blue sky!”, that's garbage.

You want them to come in and say this is like an Indiana Jones movie where the door's closing, the boulder’s rolling. That's where you're going to get the best heists. Good design projects are like heists.

David Dylan Thomas

We used to make these stakeholder maps at the beginning of projects to start to try to approach this.

I would love a kickoff where it's just like, “okay, that's Betty. She hates the color blue, whatever you do, do not show us something that’s blue. I can't tell you why, just know that.” This person over there has been trying to get this job for five years and thinks this is the ticket, so just know that.

They need to be convinced. Just give me the dirt. Give me the gossip on day one. This project will go so much better!

Erika Hall

Yeah. That's why the stakeholder interviews and the internal discovery are more important than the research, the customer, or user or external research. Sometimes people talk about research as though it's only user research. User or customer or external research is the easiest research. I mean, we know about people, we know a lot about people at this point, it's the organizational stuff that will determine whether a project succeeds or fails and that's why having those one-on-one conversations where you're like, “okay, tell me about everybody you hate in this organization and how they want you to fail.”

Then what we can do is we talk to all of those individuals in a safe space. They're totally honest with us. We synthesize and rationalize that. We reflect back what we've heard in a very strategic manner so that everybody's like, “Ah, now we're in the shared reality.”

That's the most important design research you can do is understanding the organizational context of your work. I think a lot of designers totally gloss over that. I hear a lot from people who say, well, I can't do the internal discovery in house and it's like, yeah, you can! 

Maybe it doesn't look the same, external projects and internal projects are very different, but you can accomplish the same objectives. You can have a phone conversation with somebody. If you're in an environment where you can see people in person, grab a coffee with somebody, just talk to them. It all counts, but if you don't deeply understand the dynamics and the decision-making – the way decisions are made. This is why good design is good decision-making. 

Again, a thing that designers who have more traditional educations aren't taught at all, is about decisions and it's only about artifacts. It's like, “but I made beautiful artifacts. Why did the thing that launched suck?” Well, you didn't understand decision-making.

It's fun. This is what I talk about in my workshops all the time, a lot of people have a lot of concerns about research, but it's super fun to learn about people and if you define success for yourself as always learning, that can make really frustrating or otherwise unrewarding situations, a lot more rewarding because you're always getting something you can use.

This is why I'm currently finishing up listening to Brian Cox’s memoir. Do you watch Succession? 

David Dylan Thomas

Oh yeah! I was actually very curious about it. I read an interview with him about it. Please tell me he narrates it?

Erika Hall

Oh, of course!! 

David Dylan Thomas

Oh my God. Okay. I could listen to the voice…

Erika Hall

Yeah, that's why the audio book is the only way! So the thing that really comes through and his ethos is very much like, kind of our ethos, which is, I'm doing this because I love the work and I'm always learning. The way he's defined successes, and he's had various goals at various times to do certain types of roles or achieve a certain amount of standing in the acting community or a certain amount of payday.

Those things are important and he doesn't deny that those are important, but he's like, “I learn, I'm always, always learning and I'm working and I learn by working and I want to work with people who are also open to learning”. It could be called acting as a job because so much of it is just like his whole life story about working class in Scotland and, “here's how I ended up where I am today, which is an interesting journey and my personal life is kind of trash, I have these personal issues”, but he takes the craft of acting so seriously and that's why he talks trash about people because part of it is the fun of just hearing him talk trash about people. 

Johnny Depp is the one who's gotten the most heat for it, but it’s because he has a way of thinking about the work and he talks about learning and if you're always learning, then there's no opportunity. Maybe that project didn't work out. Maybe it didn't launch and that was a bummer. But if you got paid a fair amount, however, you set up your prices, if you got paid and you learned, and you live to fight another day and you weren't subject to trauma or abuse or exploitation, great!

But I think in design I think there are a lot of parallels with how he talks about being a movie star versus being an actor and I think there's working for a big brand and what that means and, doing the work of design that helps make something a bit better somewhere without making things worse.

David Dylan Thomas

Honestly, I found some of the more interesting – because I've worked for big brands and I've worked for companies I've never heard of on topics that I didn't even know existed – at the end of the day, the difference was always the people, who am I working with? What are they like?

Trend wise the big brands didn't necessarily have more interesting problems. In a way they very consistently almost had more boring problems because a lot of the times working with the bigger companies my job was to help that division get more money for a project. I'm actually spending a lot of time just making PowerPoints for people to sort of help them sell their idea inside the company.

Once you get to a certain size, that is how a lot of time is spent when you're a big company with a lot of money and everyone inside the company wants some of that money, so guess what we're spending our time on versus something smaller or middle or niche.

It's like, I have this particular audience that has this one peculiar problem. Can you help me figure out how to solve that? There's less ego and honestly, less money so they can focus on the problem.

Erika Hall

I mean, we've worked with organizations of virtually every description and size at this point. The other thing is the larger the organization, the slower they are to pay you.

David Dylan Thomas

That makes no sense! I mean, I get it, but actually no, it does make sense, you tell me if this is your experience, the longer they can hold that money, the more interest they can make on it.

Erika Hall

Yeah, because that's another thing. I know agencies, they're like, “we have 90-day payment terms” and I'm like, what? Because the other thing that we got super good at is getting paid. And again, the relationship. 

So, here's another key biz dev tip that has to do with research and sales being connected. Where the budget comes from tells you so much about the parameters of the project. 

It could be a project that if you just described the project could sound like all the projects sound the same, we're redesigning this design system or we're rebranding this thing or whatever, or it's this type of strategy project and it could sound the same, but is it coming out of marketing? Is it coming out of engineering? Is it coming out of product? Is it coming out of some whack doodle left field new entrepreneurial business unit? Over the years, I think somewhere I have a spreadsheet of cataloging this.

That will tell you of looking and saying, okay, where did these projects come from? Do they have a chief content officer and it came out of content? Or it came out of sales? Is this a special project out of the CEO's office? All these things. 

So that alone, knowing whatever it could be the same amount of money it could say, okay, $300,000 is coming from any of these places and I could tell you so much about that project, just knowing where that money's coming from. 

David Dylan Thomas

Oh my God. It's so true. I feel like people in general, but yes, specifically designers need to know more about money.  Everyone kind of needs to know more about money, but designers especially. That is going to affect what is expected, what problem you're actually trying to solve, who needs to be impressed and what it will take to impress them.  All of those things.

Erika Hall

What's their value system? I mean, one time we had a project that went fine, but it was for a large city newspaper, and the project came out of the CTO's office and that was just really interesting because of the kind of proposal they were expecting and the degree to which they expected us to be able to specify things, because this was an office that wrote specs. 

But because it had started as just moving stuff to a new platform and then they realized they really did need design strategy on top of that, but at the core, they conceived of this as like a technical migration project, even though it was all these other things. That was very interesting. 

David Dylan Thomas

I could talk about this stuff forever but I'm going to let you go, but before we sign off here, I am curious, do you have a timeframe in mind? want to read this book. I want Brian Cox to record the audio books, where are you in the process? 

Erika Hall

I’m re-engaging with the material because I did a tremendous amount of research at the beginning of last year and then I was aiming to have it done last year.

I'll say this year, because the more I talk to people, the more I think I've just got to do it. Let's say fall!

David Dylan Thomas

I find if I just pick an arbitrary but realistic deadline and keep reminding myself of it, it happens. If I have no deadline, it never happens. But if I just say, hey, I decided at the beginning or the end of the year before last, I'm going to have, if nothing else, a rough draft for my screenplay by the end of 2021, and I did. That was all I committed to, but that's what I committed to.

So, I find the line in the sand helps. If this encourages you, the more we talk about this. I don't think that I think of this personally, I don't think of this as just, Hey, here's a cool new design book. To me, this is a new design genre. The business/design genre because a lot of what we've been talking about since we had that first conversation in 2019, is this notion of design thinking sucks because design thinking perpetuates white supremacy. It was this radical notion, but what that notion is really pointing towards, a lot of the things we're talking about today around if you do not understand the business model, it is really easy to perpetuate a lot of stuff you don't want to perpetuate.

Erika Hall

Yeah. Well, thanks for lowering the stakes!

David Dylan Thomas

So all I'm saying is the future of this genre and dare I say, America, hinges on the success of your book, so have fun!!

Erika Hall

And the world! My other message for designers though, who are sort of daunted by these topics is these concepts are not complicated. All of the complexity is in the same way that the way making mortgages complex led to the crash of 2008. The concepts are straightforward when complexity is introduced into those concepts around business models or around valuation and things like that. That's when you know shenanigans are happening and you can actually very simply graph business value against customer user value against harms or benefits to the surrounding system extremely simply.

You can sit down in front of a piece of paper or a whiteboard and diagram this stuff with a pencil in five minutes and be really clear on who wins and loses. I think all of the obfuscation allows people to let themselves off the hook because they get down in those weeds.

If you go up to the high level and you're like, how do we make our money and is the way that we make our money actually in the interests of the people who are paying us? Are we really, if we're super honest, are we benefiting them or at least not harming? Because 20% of life, you’re gonna sit around and eat ice cream and that's fine.

There’s no harm. Harm is an app that encourages disordered eating and makes money off of that. Harm is not selling people ice cream. So, if you're super honest about the harms and benefits of how the business really truly makes its money, you could figure that out real fast if you genuinely want to. If you're looking for a narrative that allows you to deceive yourself, you can also do that too as a smart designer person. 

David Dylan Thomas

There’s something someone posted on Instagram. Their nine-year-old was reading a book about racial equity and the nine-year-old was a young, white girl. The parent was like, “well, how is this hitting you?”

She was saying the nine-year-old was like, “the people who are really disturbed by the stuff are probably the people who want to do this stuff.”

I think that's where you are with the business. The people who really are twitchy about investigating their business model are the people who kind of want to do bad business models.

Erika Hall

Because it's the same thing! I think we're up against this with all of the discussion around climate change and it's that mindset of we're not going to run out of ways to make money. We're not going to run out of clients, if you're good at your job, if you're a designer, an independent designer, there'll always be another client. If you're a business, there's another way to make money. 

I’m sorry if you're in fossil fuels, we can't be in fossil fuels anymore, but we're not going to end it tomorrow.

David Dylan Thomas

I think – and I keep saying this over – but yeah, you're in fossil fuels or you're in getting people to get from point A to point B. There's lots of ways to get people from point A to point B.

The whole running out of clients thing, I think of it more like we're never going to run out of people who want good relationships and if you see your goal, your endeavor as making as many good relationships as possible, you're never going to run out of people who want that. The ebb and flow around how many of them have money, that might change. But at the end of the day, there are always going to be people who will seek that out, at least that's the positive spin I like to put on it. 

Erika Hall

Absolutely and sometimes events conspire and it's fortune's wheel. There's good times and there's bad times and things are crappy, but maybe here's where we end.

The thing that gets you through the hard times are those relationships, because where does new work come from? When you run out of work, it comes from having that strong network of people to refer work to you. People you can get in touch with. 

That's even saved us when we’ve been trying to get an invoice paid. It’s always been relationships. If something went horribly south in the business relationship, we need to repair it. It's always what gets you through a crisis are the relationships. That's all about community collective action. All of this is really what's at the heart of improving an individual situation.

David Dylan Thomas

Awesome. Erika, thank you so much! 

Erika Hall

Thank you for having me. I love this conversation. It's great to talk with you again. 

David Dylan Thomas

Excellent. So, “Lately, I've been thinking about…”, I’m David Dylan Thomas, and we will see you next time!