Comfort, however, is not often equal to progress. When it comes to expanding your mind to new possibilities and advancing your knowledge and skills, a little dissonance goes a long way.

One popular phrase you hear thrown around is the “wisdom of crowds” – the many are smarter than the few. However, it is important to note that the wisdom of crowds does not equal crowd psychology (the power of people acting collectively). Instead, the wisdom of crowds is only true when the crowd consists of a variety of people with different viewpoints, opinions and backgrounds.

Why is it that we need this diversity to excel and grow? It’s because as we become certain that something is true, our mind locks onto that idea. We have a tendency to filter out any information that may conflict with our firmly held opinions, and only focus on those that support them. This behavior, of course, strengthens our existing opinions and sheds no light on alternate solutions and beliefs that may be superior to the ones we have chosen to latch onto.

As Jonah Lehrer says in How We Decide, “The only way to counteract the bias for certainty is to encourage some inner dissonance. We must force ourselves to think about the information we don’t want to think about, to pay attention to the data that disturbs our entrenched beliefs.”

The way to overcome our certainties, and to challenge ourselves to new heights of accomplishments and knowledge is to consider other perspectives than our own, to surround ourselves with people who will challenge our beliefs. And then we must listen. We must not filter out their commentary, we need to consider it and view our problems with a fresh perspective. That’s how we develop our skills and that’s how we create new, innovative solutions.

Basically, for those of you who haven’t seen it, it shows how a typical person opens a banana using the stem. As we all know sometimes this method works just fine and sometimes the stem is tough and we have to struggle a bit to peel it, smashing the top of our banana in the meantime.

A monkey, meanwhile, simply pinches the other end of the banana, which causes a split in the banana peel, and then smoothly peels the banana. It works amazingly well.

What’s the point? The point is, this morning I thought I knew all there was to know about peeling bananas. I would never have expected that there was a better, more efficient technique I could be using. I was very confident that my method was the best one out there.

How many times do we take that approach with our design or development skills? We assume we know all we need to know about a topic, so instead of continually experimenting and reanalyzing our techniques, we plod along confident that our current method of work is the best. Even if there is a better way, we certainly wouldn’t find it by reading that book or that blog.

Meanwhile, there’s a better way out there. It might be only a minor improvement, or it might be something that completely alters the way we work. We won’t know it though, unless we continue to question our knowledge and show a consistent desire to improve. Sometimes, no matter how much we think we know, we can learn from even the most unlikely sources.

Excuses, Excuses

There are several reasons why people tend to pass on acting on their own ideas. Some of the major ones are fear of criticism, fear of failure, self-doubt, or the feeling that there is not enough time. Based on these reasons, we can come up with a multitude of alibis for not pursuing these ideas.

One that I commonly use is that the “time is not right”. I often tell myself that I should wait on acting on my ideas until sometime where the circumstances are better aligned for it. Sometime in the future when I have more of the knowledge necessary or where I have more time available to me; that’s when I’ll move forward on my ideas.

The fact though, is that postponing ideas quickly becomes a habit. The truth is, there will always be more research that could be done, and there will always be distractions that make us feel like we don’t have the time to act. Acting on an idea will always expose yourself to criticism, and there is always the chance that the idea will not be perceived as a success. If we keep waiting until the circumstances are “just right”, we’ll be putting that idea in a perpetual holding state, until either we decide not to act on it at all, or someone else has already beaten us to it.

Make Your Ideas Count

At least by acting on those ideas, we make them count for something. They may not be met with an extraordinary amount of success, and occasionally they may even be met with flat out failure (though I believe that if you really go after your idea with vigor, true failure will occur very infrequently). For each non-successful idea you have and pursue, that is one more lesson you’ve learned and one more step you’ve taken towards making your next idea meet with greater success.

The conclusion then, is that ideas were meant to be pursued, not postponed. Quit coming up with excuses and start moving forward on those ideas and goals that you’ve been putting off. If you never try any of them, it is a certainty that none of them will work out. By pursuing them, at least you give them the chance.

The discussion that led to Budd’s little slice of wisdom revolved around how to get a company’s designers and developers together and interested in usability testing. One response was to entice a team with pizza and soda and make a day out of it. Budd’s response was that if you have to bribe your developers for them to take an interest in improving their products, then “hire better people”. As Budd said, “It’s everyones job to build better ****!” (Profanity excluded but I think it still makes the point!)

Budd’s passion on the topic was inspiring, and the point he raised was an excellent one. Continually improving your skills, and therefore the products you develop, should not be a chore; it should be the goal.

I can think of two reasons for not trying to continually improve your current set of skills:

1. You have no desire to improve.
2. You feel there is no need.

No Desire to Improve

If you have no desire to improve, find a different career. Sorry to be blunt, but I believe we are not intended to spend our lives working on something that we have no desire to be doing at the highest level of competence that we are able to obtain. If you’re not in a profession you truly enjoy, find one that you do.

No Need to Improve

If you feel there is no need to improve, that you know all you need to know about a topic…then you’re doing it wrong. Whether it be improvements to your speed, efficiency, quality or general knowledge base, there is always room to improve. If you think you know everything there is to know, you most certainly do not.

For truly great work, you must be passionate about what you do, and you need to surround yourself with other passionate people. If you’re not in that situation, whether it be the people who surround you or the career you’ve chosen, do whatever you must to get there. Life is too short to not spend it doing something you truly enjoy.

Always being right means we’re not challenging ourselves enough. It means that either we’ve become comfortable and content with where we are at with our skills, or that there is no one challenging us to improve those skills. In either case, we’re not progressing.

If we’re wrong, it means we’re pushing ourselves to explore our limits, to continue to expand our skill set. Being wrong opens the door for constructive criticism, which in turn leads to opportunities to learn. People who are willing to tell us when we’re wrong are the kind of people we should be surrounding ourselves with…they’re the kind of people who challenge us to become better designers and developers.

One quote, that I believe sums it up pretty well, is by Bill Buxton a Principal Researcher at Microsoft. In his book “Sketching User Experiences“, Bill has the following to say:

People on a design team must be as happy to be wrong as right. If their ideas hold up under strong (but fair) criticism, then great, they can proceed with confidence. If their ideas are rejected with good rationale, then they have learned something. A healthy team is made up of people who have the attitude that it is better to learn something new than to be right.

While Bill’s quote is aimed at designers, I think the rule applies to both designers and developers. Making mistakes, getting constructive criticism, and learning from that criticism is a healthy thing. It allows us opportunities to expand our skills and grow in our field. Only through this kind of healthy criticism can our skills, and ultimately the products we produce, become finely tuned.

How very true. Respecting what we don’t understand is if not impossible then extremely hard to do. Without some sort of knowledge of the process and steps involved in arriving at the solution, how can we really respect the work required to make the solution? I think this comes into play when working with both clients and co-workers.

As far as clients go, the solution involves making sure good communication takes place between you and the client. I think involving the client early and often helps to build respect and knowledge of what you do. If we meet with the client about a project, then hand them a design some time later, they are not going to have any idea of the process involved. To them, it’s like delayed magic…they ask us to come up with a design, and viola, we come up with one.

However, if we go through a more involving process, they start to get a taste of all that goes into designing/developing the final product. We can start to show them our research, information architecture, wireframes and prototypes, all before actually showing them some sort of design. By walking through the project with them, a few things happen. First, they feel more involved. This can be great for clients…it’s always difficult to just blindly trust someone else with such a crucial part of your company’s marketing.

Secondly, by allowing the client to see a lot of these steps, they begin to gain a greater respect for what is involved. Let’s face it, a lot of people simply don’t realize how much goes into developing their site or application. The web is open to anyone, and it makes people feel like anyone can just jump in and throw together a website. That’s why you run into clients whose site was developed by their mothers’, brothers’, lawnmowers’, sons’ cousin! By letting them see a bit more of our process, we help them to gain a bit more respect for what actually is going on in the professional development of a site or application.

Clearly, this can be taken too far. You don’t want to involve the client too much. If you do, you may end up confusing the client, which leads to frustration. It’s important to remember that while you want to get them involved, this is not their expertise, and anything you show them should be a very general perspective, and should be explained in non-technical terms.

I also said that respecting what we don’t understand comes into play with co-workers. A co-worker with no knowledge of CSS is going to have a difficult time respecting your job of creating cross-browser compatible layouts. I think in this case we just need to try and remember just how involved our job can be, and should assume that so and so down the hall’s job is just as involved.

I think there is an excellent argument to be made here for the “Jack-Of-All-Trades” worker. Having at least a basic understanding of a variety of topics will help you to respect the work of the people using those languages or techniques (not to mention, at least in my opinion, make you a more attractive candidate for employment).

In the end, it all comes down to communication. If we can find ways to effectively communicate to our clients and peers throughout our working process, we can hope to achieve some level of respect.