Erika Hall on philosophy, StarTrek, & why working in-house is harder than ever.

Taxing the Obvious 

Why organizations keep having to buy consultants

Economists call it a collective action problem. Organizations should call it a 5 or 6 figure annual tax. 

Not speaking up about obvious problems is endemic to  organizations. Simple observations carry political weight. A team lead who notes that a flagship process is producing waste is not delivering an analysis; she is challenging the people whose careers were built on the process. A junior designer who points out that a product is hard to use is not offering feedback; he is implicating his manager's last performance review. The cost of speaking up is borne by the speaker. The cost of staying silent is distributed across the organization, where no single person feels it.

People inside firms see what is wrong. They cannot say what they see. The organization buys outside help to say it for them. The fee for that outside help is, in effect, the price of the firm's own withheld knowledge, repurchased at a markup. It is a tax. The cycle repeats because the underlying conditions — hierarchy, career risk, performance theatre — do not change between engagements.

Erika Hall, co-founder of Mule Design and a long-standing voice in interaction design, is unusually direct about this phenomenon and its implications for the design profession itself. The work that designers do well as outsiders, she argues, becomes much harder when those same designers move in-house. The same person, in the same room, with the same expertise, loses the ability to say the obvious thing once she reports to the hierarchy that depends on the obvious thing remaining unsaid. This is not a failure of courage. It is a feature of the system.

For senior operators in regulated industries, the implication is uncomfortable. The capability the organization keeps paying consultants to import already exists inside the building. What is missing is not skill. What is missing is the structural permission for that skill to be exercised. Until the organization addresses the second problem, it will keep paying for the first.

Ms Hall offers no tidy solution. She is too experienced to pretend one exists. She does, however, name the question correctly, which is itself the kind of obvious thing most organizations cannot afford to say. 

Surface the obvious internally

For the leaders on this list: If Erika's argument lands — that your organization is paying outside firms to surface what your own people see clearly but can't say — there's a faster, cheaper move available.

The Introductory SaaS Audit takes 2 minutes and produces a structured view of the digital portfolio your organization owns but can't cleanly inventory. It's not a practitioner tool. It's a diagnostic for directors, VPs, and senior ops leaders who already suspect the gap exists and want to see its shape.

Speak up without the Risk

Erika is right that no tidy solution exists for the political problem. There is, however, a methodological one for the diagnostic problem — a way to surface what people inside an organization see but can't say.

The HCD Discovery Guide walks through it. $19.99, ~90 minutes from cracking it open to having a plan.

What we’re into this week

Scott

Erika talked about the curse of knowledge here, which immediately reminded me of an article called Facing Our Fears from type studio Alphabettes, where they talk about the same thing. They talked about it in regards to teachers, but I find the same thing applies to managers. It’s tough when you’re faced with a new employee to remember that they don’t have the same mental model of the drive structure or whatever. It’s easy to ignore insider knowledge because it takes effort to surface it, but that initial inertia makes it hard to correct flaws in that knowledge. 

Ana

So right, Scott! This made me think a lot about my federal employee days. The worst move you could make as a fed was to embarrass another fed by pointing out obvious truths. I clearly was not successful in remembering that. 

Aaron

That’s what you were hired for, Ana, in your wave in 2016. Just the world changed. 

Ana

Thanks, Aaron. What about your thoughts on Erika’s conversation? 

Aaron

I went in a different direction. Erika’s discussion of text versus icon design made me really consider when and in what context iconography pays off and in which ones text is the better play. This balance is especially well-explored, I think anyway, in comic book design. There are so much use of icons and iconography in comic lore, but the stories still need the text to move along. Really interesting to consider how they boost each other—and in what situations one might be more useful than the other.  

Credits

Guest: Erika Hall
Host: Aaron Meyers
Producer: Ana Monroe
Article: A. Adams
Artwork: Gods and a Goddess in Conversation 1775/80 Jacques-Louis David
Why this artwork? David was an Enlightenment artist deeply interested in translating the best, most aspirational aspects of humankind into reality. By using deities in this composition, David asserts that conversation is a divine and powerful activity, worthy of study and practice.  

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For the leaders on this list:

• See the Digital Governance Structure (DGS) System → DGS System

• See the Enterprise Digital Experience (EDX) System → EDX System

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