This is an excerpt from from my new book, Success by Design: The Essential Business Reference for Designers, out now from HOW Books.

Culture is everything people in a design business do that supports the process of making work happen. Culture can create joy for designers, while improvements in process can facilitate profit. A common misperception is that culture emerges organically based on the decisions of a business owner or CEO. But a design studio’s culture is not created solely by those at the top. For a design-led business, culture is generated from ongoing contributions and discoveries from both studio owners and employees.

In researching my recent book on how design businesses can be more successful, I began to see important building blocks that were present in the most successful studios. These building blocks are divided into two groups: hard building blocks and soft building blocks. Hard building blocks are realized through a budget, meaning that you can allocate money and time for them as part of business overhead. The soft building blocks can be created through the decisions employees make over the course of their daily work, life and play (with less material investment by the owners).

A healthy studio culture draws equally from both types of building blocks. They provide emotional and material stability to employees in the face of ongoing work challenges, and often clients, family and the general public perceive them as ingredients of the company’s brand. These building blocks are equally present within design firms and in-house design teams—though for the latter, the composition of some building blocks may be heavily influenced by the company's overall behavior and needs.

Let’s take a deep dive into these building blocks, with important questions to ask yourself (and your team) in order to create a strong studio culture. 

The “hard” building blocks of design studio culture

Type of Work

Type of work is the largest cultural building block for any studio, as the majority of the time in the studio is spent immersed in the work.

The kinds of customers selected by the business owner, the design disciplines practiced by the staff and the way projects are delivered by the team all contribute to the excitement that motivates employees and owners when they start work every morning.

What follows are the questions you should be asking yourself before the phone rings and prospective clients ask you if you’d like to take on a project. Your answers, and how they may overlap (or not) with your staff’s answers, will help you better understand where you can take your studio portfolio.

Customer types

• What industries do you want to work with? As an example: Health care or consumer electronics?
• What size of client do you prefer? Working with small companies or only the Fortune 100?
• Are you working with for-profit companies? Are you focusing on opportunities from the nonprofit sector? Or are you interested in working with start-up firms?
• How deeply are you entrenched in helping shape your client’s business? Are you a strategic partner, or does the client see you more as an executional vendor?
• What types of brands are you seeking to work with? Small, hip local companies? Or older, established international firms?
• What ethical stance do you take on certain types of clients? For example, working with a religious organization may not be considered appropriate for some studios, while others would jump at the chance.

Discipline and practices of design

• What types of design does your studio want to practice? Print design? Interactive? Industrial? Environmental? Service?
• What tangible things do you want to generate? One of the benefits of designing products, environments and brand systems is that every project generates physical evidence of your efforts. When creating interactive products or online advertising, that may not be the case. You may blink and miss it.
• On what scale do you want to operate? For example: If your firm focuses on branding, do you want to create simple identity systems or the kind with hundreds of moving parts?
• What other disciplines would you like to partner with? For instance, an interior designer may work with an architecture firm to design a retail space.

Style of delivery

• What size projects do you seek? Do you prefer short-term projects, or would you enjoy working on an engagement that lasts years?
• Are there specific delivery processes you prefer over others? Some designers like to work in a controlled waterfall-style project process, while others like the close collaboration and constant change that emerges from an agile or scrum-based project process.
• Where are the clients located? Are you comfortable working with clients in a completely virtual manner, or do you prefer face-to-face interaction?
• What level of security do you want as part of the client relationship? For example, do you desire a client retainer, which guarantees revenue at the cost of freedom? Or do you generate revenues from flat fees, causing the staff to regularly propose and secure new work as part of their work life? This can influence the studio atmosphere.

Space
Once you know what kind of work you’d like to create, you’ll need a space where you can make the magic happen. Studio owners must carefully consider the placement of their work space, the studio layout, the use of the studio environment and whether a formal space is even necessary to get the design work done.

Placement
You may be tempted to lease or purchase space in a far away, yet “up and coming” neighborhood that is great for your budget. However, getting to work shouldn’t be hard work for your employees or your clients. Otherwise you are implicitly charging your employees time that they could be using to take care of their wants and needs. Well-placed studios can help support those needs, by being near local coffee shops and restaurants, gyms and yoga studios, public transit or the freeway.

Layout
The layout of a studio helps facilitate the flow of conversation and the style of work taking place. Studio layouts can be open, closed or some combination of open and closed elements.

Closed environments are manifested through cube farms, closed-door offices and conference rooms—areas where people can seal themselves off from others and focus on their work. My first years as a designer took place in studio environments where each designer had his own cubicle, and any ongoing conversations required us to peek our heads over walls. At one point, we joked about sawing holes in the cubicle walls so we could see each other’s faces without having to stand up. (This was before video chat, mind you.) The layout of the space was a direct reflection of the kind of work that was taking place: production-heavy print deliverables.

On the other end of the spectrum, I have been working the past six years in entirely open studios, with little to no privacy possible unless I exit the studio floor. The complexity of the work product—much of it rooted in designing and developing interactive products and services—requires constant collaboration. An open studio plan encourages ad hoc conversation and a cross-pollination of ideas that otherwise would never see the light of day. However, an open plan also requires pockets of privacy, whether via conference rooms or closed-door “war rooms” where the staff can work without distraction. Noise-canceling headphones also are handy—I consider them the new “do not disturb” sign.

Use of environment
Decisions about the use of studio space can have a major impact on culture for both employees and visitors to your studio.

Design Commission leases an affordable studio space within the Tashiro Kaplan Artist Lofts. As a requirement in the lease, part of the design studio must be run as an art gallery. Every first Thursday of the month, the employees have to put on a show as part of a community art walk. Year after year, they have exhibited work from a range of international artists as well as created their own interactive art installations. This activity is also reflected online through a gallery website.

Other examples come from design studios that intentionally preserve a portion of their space for bringing in visiting artists and fellows, running a small retail store or subletting office space to like-minded businesses.

Co-location via virtual spaces
Some businesses choose to forgo a leased office space and work virtually, using by-the-meeting office spaces for face-to-face meetings with clients. In these situations, design teams work from home or from a local coffee shop, connecting regularly through email, IM, phone calls, video chat and online collaboration tools such as Basecamp, Campfire and WebEx. With the recent increase in drop-in and shared spaces, you can have the benefits of a studio environment on demand—providing the needed infrastructure at a fraction of the cost of leasing a full-time space. Plus, you also get the benefit of having some office mates to chat with.

Amenities

Amenities help create an atmosphere that supports staff as they go about their business. These amenities can help satisfy creature comforts—such as the daily caffeine fix—or encourage the staff to stick around the office, whether to socialize or to stay at work a little longer. (Sometimes both.)

Amenities are factored into the studio overhead as part of the benefits provided to all employees. They may be as simple as free soda and juice in the fridge, or a studio iTunes account stocked with thousands of tunes. Whether it’s locally sourced fruits and vegetables as a daily late afternoon snack or ice cream sundaes with chocolate chip cookie dough on the side after a hard week, what does your studio provide to keep your staff well-fed and happy?

Amenities may also include side benefits, such as subsidized gym memberships, a weekly on-site masseuse or free dining for those who choose to work past 7 p.m. Be aware that these perks can say a lot about your firm to potential employees. If you offer free cab rides home after 9 p.m., you might be broadcasting that working there requires staying late.

Training

Training is a line item struck from studio budgets when cash flow is meager. But both on-site and off-site training opportunities help foster a culture of continual learning. Designers are refreshed and revitalized by information and inspiration from outside their daily purview or work responsibilities. This can happen in person or virtually, whether by attending conferences and events, taking classes in new techniques or technologies, or fostering staff-led learning opportunities within your company.

Strapped for cash but want to satisfy your staff? Rotate the staffers who attend important events and require them to summarize and share what they learned with the studio.

The “soft” building blocks of design studio culture

Community

All work and no play can make a design team wear away. For this reason, design business owners should carve out dedicated time where studio staff can decompress and grow closer on a personal level.

Community-building activities and social outlets may be designed into the workday by studio management and staff, but ideally they should be realized and enlivened by the staff. Whether movie nights, Friday afternoon cheese tastings or ad-hoc happy hours, semiregular social outlets are often the highlight of a busy week. They become rituals ingrained in the company operations.

When I lived on the East Coast, Wednesday lunch meant Tex-Mex. It was our ritual for decompression. The studio principal would take the last few minutes of lunch to encourage staffers to talk about what was happening in their work and to tap into the creativity of the other designers to help them solve any problems they might be having. (It also made the lunch billable!)

The larger the business, the more these connection opportunities will help define the culture and inspire your staff. “The details, rituals and the camaraderie are an important part of frog culture,” says Doreen Lorenzo, president of frog, a global innovation firm. “For example, coffee time is at 4 p.m. every day at every office. It is a time to pause, maybe grab a bite to eat, talk to someone you haven’t spoken to, even play a friendly but competitive game of foosball. I often thought that if we took coffee time away we would have the highest attrition frog has ever seen. These small details make it an important reason why people choose to work at frog.”

Philanthropy

While earning money is obviously important for running a stable business, many studios also donate staff time or money toward passion projects related to nonprofit, educational and philanthropic causes. Studios can provide staffers with charity days that they can use individually or in groups. Some studios donate their space or evening hours toward supporting local educational or fundraising events. The costs of these efforts are included in studio overhead and can influence the type of work that a studio receives.

Recognition

Design business owners set the tone regarding how the performance of studio staff and their work should be recognized. The best recognition for your efforts should come from your client’s customers. Studio staffers, however, may desire additional praise from their peers, the press or the blogosphere. Some studios take pains to enter competitions, though such efforts can be costly and steal time and attention away from other endeavors.

Also, recognition doesn’t have to be solely about the work. The personal passions of studio staff can be shared with the world, as long as you continue to support your studio culture and properly represent your brand.

Leadership

How the studio owners lead a team, as well as how staff are properly trained and supported in taking leadership roles, can have major cultural implications for staff happiness. Not enough leadership, and your core staff may feel adrift. Too much active leadership, and your staff can feel like there’s no space in the work (or the studio) for their vision.

Challenge

A high level of challenge in client projects can supercharge a studio environment. Smaller-scale, more tactical projects may exercise the staff’s skills and craft sensibilities. Tackling larger-scale projects and design problems can provide the studio with new perspectives on persistent issues in the world and give your staff the chance to make a difference.

Additionally studio owners and staff can take on internal projects and initiatives to stay nimble and challenged when the project work isn’t as stimulating as they would like. Regular critique of ongoing projects should also challenge designers and studio owners to realize their best work.

Ownership

Ownership is the one of the best indicators of healthy leadership. Ownership is when the staff feels like they have control over their time and their work product. It emerges when business leaders provide their designers with the necessary space to ideate and create appropriate design solutions. It can also arise when a designer is able to imprint her unique perspectives and expertise on any of the cultural building blocks, such as the design of her office space, securing the right type of work, gaining a leadership role, receiving recognition or even coordinating a guest speaker series for the office.

Some design businesses provide incentives for demonstrating ownership around growing studio accounts, such as profit sharing. Staff can also gain an ownership stake in the studio if they stay with the studio for a substantial period of time. However, such monetary carrots might not appeal to everyone, and they should never preclude your staff receiving regular opportunities that align with their evolving passions.

What studio culture would you like to create?

Now that you know the building blocks of design studio culture, what are you going to do to focus on the culture at your studio or business?

I’ve created a Studio Culture Worksheet along with David Conrad, the Studio Director of Design Commission, to help you answer the following questions: What can your staff do to create their ideal studio culture? And how can that culture align with everyone’s desired working environment?

Here’s how to use the worksheet:

1. Take the worksheet and list what cultural building blocks you currently have in place as part of your studio.
2. Consider, based on what you want to do in the future, what new building blocks might increase joy. Add them to the worksheet.
3. Highlight which cultural building blocks you could give to others to increase their sense of ownership.
4. Have other team members do steps 1–3 with their own copy of the worksheet.
5. Merge all of your answers together and implement what the majority of the staff want first. Delegate ownership of specific initiatives to those on your team that have growth goals aligned with the culture-building activities.

Get a copy of Success by Design: The Essential Business Reference for Designers on Amazon.com

Clients deliver feedback on everything we create for them: proposals, deliverables, project schedules, email communication styles, what we’ve worn to a meeting with their CEO, and so forth. Soliciting and receiving feedback from clients is a crucial part of any ongoing collaboration between a client and a designer. To quote Robert Allen, “There is no failure. Only feedback.”

The inability to manage client feedback causes your design work to suffer. Here are some ways to work with feedback that will help keep your design projects running smoothly, while reducing the tension that poorly considered feedback can cause in a client relationship.

Read this excerpt from Success by Design at FastCoDesign.

This is an exclusive excerpt from my new book, Success by Design: The Essential Business Reference for Designers, which was recently released by HOW.

As I read through his resume, the designer stared at me expectantly. He had a wealth of great design projects under his belt. He had been seeking out personal projects to build out his portfolio. He had internships with sterling businesses and design studios. But there was one thing that leapt out at me from the list of core skills he’d listed at the top of his resume: strategy.

Not brand strategy, content strategy, interactive strategy, media strategy, or the MBA-land of business strategy. Just plain ‘ol strategy.

This has been happening more and more frequently, for a few reasons. In the process of providing strong service to our clients, we increase the likelihood of becoming a strategic partner. We finally have a seat at the table when the client is talking strategy—and we can offer a range of strategic services that verge outside what may be considered a designer’s core area of expertise. This is a good thing. With the ongoing expansion of design’s role in business, today’s designers are helping to solve problems that transcend mere decoration and instead impact the core functions of a client’s business.

But in our haste to be strategic partners, I’ve discovered that many designers don’t fully grasp how strategic services fit into their client offerings. And when I ask designers out of sheer curiosity how they’re functioning as strategists—what experiences they directly bring to bear on being strategists rather than having a strategic orientation—they can’t easily answer the question.

If you’re going to run a design-led business, it’s inevitable that you will need to talk strategy with your clients. So let’s explore the types of strategies you might create as a design businessperson, as well as how they may support the efforts of your clients. It’s my hope that this information will open up some new paths for you to explore in your career as a designer.

This is a post in an occasional series I'll be running on ChangeOrder about the benchmarks that design businesses use to help maintain their long-term success. These benchmarks are drawn from the research that I conducted when writing Success by Design: The Essential Business Reference for Designers.

In my previous post, I wrote about how it's important to encourage new clients to pay you in advance of providing design services. Many designers and studio owners struggle to put this advice into practice, as their clients often have their own accounting and bookkeeping policies that conflict with paying for services in advance of their completion.

So, how do you bend these policies in your favor? A number of studio owners shared with me the following line of text that they had included in the estimates and invoices they'd provided to their clients: "Client shall receive an % discount if payment is received in advance of date."

That's right. Many companies have policies that require advance payment of an invoice if there's a discount. It doesn't have to be a huge discount, too—sometimes as little as one to two percent off a large-ticket project can be enough to encourage advance payment. (Though I've seen it at anywhere from 2.5% to 5% in previous agencies I've worked at.)

Highlighting this clause during contract negotiations will help you, as long as you preserve your profit margin for the project if the discount is exercised.

Other posts in this series include:

• Extending Zero Credit
• 80/20 Rule of New Business Development
• 3% Proposal Percentages
• 50% Bid/Win Ratios

This is a post in an occasional series I'll be running on ChangeOrder about the benchmarks that design businesses use to help maintain their long-term success. These benchmarks are drawn from the research that I conducted when writing Success by Design: The Essential Business Reference for Designers.

When starting up a design studio, it can be tempting to do whatever it takes to win project work with new clients. A common mistake, however, is to extend credit to new or existing clients rather than require payment up-front for project work.

It's never a good idea to extend credit to a brand new client, and minimal credit should be extended only for long-term clients that have a strong track-record of deposits, on-time payments, communicate about honestly money, and have asked you for the privilege.

In our laissez faire, credit-saturated culture, it can seem as easy to use credit cards as it is to provide credit to others. However, as a business owner, taking on debt in order to fulfill a service isn't wise. Take a deposit on the work that you'll be completing, with a signed contract in place that outlines a payment schedule tied to your project milestones. No work should start until the first payment is received and deposited.

Running a credit check on a client isn't enough. You may discover that a client has ample income at their disposal to pay you, but that isn't the only issue. You want assurance that, as the project progresses, there will be a fair balance between what compensation you receive and the you've created that is shared with the client.

Imagine in your head an old-fashioned scale. This is the kind where you place objects on one side of the scale, then various weights on the other to assess how heavy the objects on the other side are.

Let's say the client has one side of the scale, and you have the other. On your side, you pile up your expertise, which they've hired you for. It's invisible and weightless—you haven't created anything tangible yet. On the other side, the client places their money. Oh, wait—they haven't paid you yet. So right now, the scale has nothing on it. It's in balance, right?

Wrong. Your side is burdened with your studio's operational overhead, the hours that you'll be spending working on the client's work, and the projected value of each deliverable that will be provided in return for due compensation. If you aren't paid up front, the scale is always tipped in the favor of the client. With each hour that you plan to bill and each deliverable that you provide without compensation, things are further and further out of balance. You're beholden to the payment terms you'd set up in the contract: all the time you've spent working on the client project, plus all the time it takes for them to pay you back.

The larger the client or project, the harder it is to make this happen. They may have a blanket policy for how they handle vendors, or for how payment up front should be handled. They may be under the gun and want to start the project as quickly as possible, no matter what due processes must be followed. And in some cases, they may believe that since they have the money, they have the leverage. Believe it or not, some companies have unspoken policies to drag out payment for vendors as long as possible, as they can earn interest on that large amount of money in the short term before it's disbursed.

The right way to handle the situation is to make what's on the scale even. When you start the project, the client has place a deposit on their side of the scale, and on your side, you're placing a hold on the time and materials necessary to get the work done equivalent to that deposit. If you aren't paid up front for that first chunk of work, you're the one bearing the full onus and risk.

Instead of offering Net 30 payments on invoices for work that you've fulfilled, set up a clear schedule for payment. Depending on the length of the project, split it up 50/50 (half at start, half when you're halfway done) or 33/33/33 (a third at start, a third at the first third, and a third before the final stretch of the project). If the payment doesn't arrive on time, per the terms of your contract, you stop work and there is a fee to restart the project (this is in your contract).

No matter what, ensure that your final invoice is paid before you deliver the final work for your project. This isn’t NET 15 or NET 30. It’s NET 0. Mark the final invoice "Net 0" and circulate it with them well in advance of final delivery, so you don't end up in a situation where you either withhold providing your final deliverables to the client or end up showing a "good faith" measure.

Letting invoices ride out can be "business as usual" if that studio has a strong cash-flow buffer and clients that regularly pay on time or early on those estimates. You may feel like you have little to no leverage in negotiations, especially when it comes to the size of your project fee or when you expect to get paid for the work. But it's your business, and your rules regarding how you run it and how you manage your company's cash-flow. Choose them wisely.

Other posts in this series include:

• 80/20 Rule of New Business Development
• 3% Proposal Percentages
• 50% Bid/Win Ratios

This is a post in an occasional series I'll be running on ChangeOrder about the benchmarks that design businesses use to help maintain their long-term success. These benchmarks are drawn from the research that I did when writing Success by Design: The Essential Business Reference for Designers.

Do you track how many of your clients come back and work with you again? I hope so. Ideally, 80% of all new business should be repeat business. It should come from your existing clients that you're working with right now, or clients that are returning to you after a successful project in the past. This is the 80/20 rule of new business development. You should aim for an 80% retention rate for existing clients, and diversify your client base with 20% new clients and projects.

I'm not suggesting, however, that 80% of your retained client work is coming from a single source. Many design studios will end up being extremely successful with a single client, and without paying attention that client will command fifty to eighty percent of the studio's portfolio of business. (At this point, the studio needs to diversify and find new clients to help reduce their dependency on that single relationship.)

The 80/20 rule is a hard benchmark for a service business to meet, for a number of reasons:

The studio isn't tracking client retention—or retention isn't even a focus. Some design studios are so focused on getting the work or fulfilling the work that client retention is an afterthought. Just beginning to keep a metric of how many clients are retained year-over-year can send a strong message to both studio employees and studio leadership about how important it is to provide great design work AND a great client experience.

The studio isn't seeking out long-term fit when landing new business. A common reason studios don't hit the 80% retention target has to do with how they initiate relationships with any new client. Design studios in general need to put more diligence into vetting client fit when pursuing and winning project work. When submitting a proposal for any potential studio project, you should be looking closely at what long-term potential there is in working with that client.

The studio isn't providing solid client services alongside the work. If you're doing killer creative work, but every deliverable review with your client feels like another round of The Hunger Games, you're not going to build relationships that last outside of your projects and lead to future work. (This should be obvious, but I'm continually surprised to meet designers that harbor an us versus them mentality regarding how you collaborate on a client project.)

The studio isn't staying in touch and directly asking for future work.This may seem like a duh. If a project goes well for a client, you shouldn't be afraid to ask if there are any other potential opportunities to work with them in the future. You should also plan to regularly contact them just to stay in touch. It's possible that if they go to another company, they may be able to bring you business from that company. Keep in touch, and there's a higher likelihood you could start a conversation around a future project.

The studio's work isn't strong enough to stand up to competitors. Usually, we lose clients because of poor client service or project management. But if you start slacking in the quality of work that you deliver across a few projects, you can risk losing the relationship. Take a hard look at what you're delivering, and maintain the quality.

Keep in mind that not every project needs to be about the long term. Truly great projects come along all the time where we do great work, we have a satisfied client, we put the work in our portfolio, and we move on. But be aware that your studio becomes more efficient when securing new projects from return clients. Plus, working with the same clients can help contribute to the profitability of future projects, if they are managed effectively.

Other posts in this series include:

• 3% Proposal Percentages
• 50% Bid/Win Ratios

This is a post in an occasional series I'll be running on ChangeOrder about the benchmarks that design businesses use to help maintain their long-term success. These benchmarks are drawn from the research that I conducted when writing Success by Design: The Essential Business Reference for Designers.

You need to write that proposal to get the project. And you need to do a good enough job of writing the proposal to make sure your client understands why you're the right partner for it.

But that proposal isn't going out the door until it's been finessed within an inch of its life. Right?

As designers, we may be perfectionists at heart. But when crafting a proposal, we can't be carried away and lose ourself in the effort like we're polishing a beautiful design.

A useful benchmark to make sure you're not spending too many hours on your proposal is to hold yourself to a three-percent proposal percentage. This benchmark was shared with me by David Conrad at Design Commission. His studio uses this benchmark to make sure that they never spend more than two to three percent of proposed project budget to secure the project. This includes any necessary negotiation and revisions with the client through the new business process. The time spent on new business is then factored into the hourly rate and overall utilization of the studio, rather than being tied to successful project fulfillment.

Putting the hours used for writing a proposal against the future project budget is a big accounting no-no. This is a common mistake a lot of design studios make.

Why is this a bad idea? Because you are blurring the lines between the expenses your firm bills against the project budget and the expenses that your firm incurs on all the activities acquired independent of staffing those projects. You should be optimizing your new business process to acquire work independent of how efficient you are in fulfilling the projects once they're in your studio. This is the equivalent of trying to keep a monthly budget for your household, only to discover that someone else in the household has been using your credit cards and racking up debts that suddenly you're liable for. This isn't fair to anyone involved.

So get out of this "credit-card spending" mentality. You don't have an incentive to spend weeks on a proposal. You should be spending the minimum necessary effort to generate the best proposal for a potential project that you have a high likelihood of winning.

If you're going to try and keep to this percentage, here are some common issues that stand in the way of successful implementation:

You haven't set up templates to work from on your proposals. If you're generating new or custom proposal elements that can't be leveraged or updated for future proposals, you're burning time that won't make your new business acquisition process more efficient. Even if you're selling bespoke services, you can generate templates for how you sell them.

You aren't pitching a good fit in terms of subject matter or expertise. If you're conducting reams of research to figure out what to say in every proposal, you may not be perfectly suited to win the work. Be selective about where you make these investments at the proposal stage, rather than have those activities become part of the paid work.

There is too much time to write the proposal. It's important that you ask for the appropriate amount of time to craft a quality proposal. However, I've seen proposals drag out in draft after draft because there isn't adequate motivation or pressure to complete it and send it out. This is where bad habits can form. Try to hold yourself to a "shadow budget" and realistic schedule for writing, vetting, and submitting your proposal.

Other posts in this series include bid/win ratios for new business pitching.

When first striking out on their own as businesspeople, many consultants and designers don’t know how to bargain or strike a deal. In this exclusive excerpt from Success by Design: The Essential Business Reference for Designers on FastCoDesign, read about the strategies consultants use to successfully come to meaningful agreement with their clients.

Check out the article here.

The SCAD graduate students split up into teams and gathered around their copies of the Collective Action Toolkit (CAT), considering their homework assignment for their next class period. Their task: To pilot the first activity they would use with local high school students as their first introduction to working together in a group. In two days, they’d have to do a dry run with their classmates. As they looked over the toolkit’s action map, they began to where they should they begin? By having a “Knowledge Fest” or a “Skill Share?” By helping their group identify a goal right away, or by having fun and getting to know each other?

The CAT has been out for almost two months, and situations such as the above are happening more and more. The toolkit is being deployed far more broadly than expected, such as in our new Chinese language edition. People are finding new uses for it, from local education to entrepreneurship in global organizations. And frog has embarked on our first educational pilot, working with SCAD’s Design for Sustainability program.

How did this happen? And in what ways can you use the CAT that you may not have considered?

Read more on frog's design mind blog: ("How Are You Using the Collective Action Toolkit?")

Read about my involvement with the SCAD + CAT educational pilot on the Design Ethos blog ("frog + SCAD Design for Sustainability pilot frog’s new Community Action Toolkit").

This past September, I spoke at AIGA Seattle's Into the Woods, a multidisciplinary retreat whose theme was "Survive and Thrive." Five speakers were asked to speak on that theme through the particular lens of their practice, on topics as varied as sustainability (Scott Boylston) to inspiration (Jeanette Abbink) to creativity (Howard Lichter) to business (Seth Johnson and Karen Kurycki). The topic I was asked to speak on was design and education.

At the event, as we participated in far-reaching conversations fueled by everyone's passion for what design could accomplish, it seemed like each night would never end. But just like a long college weekend, we would still have to drag ourselves back to class (and/or work) on Monday. And even if you haven't been to college, you know what that feels like. We've lived it, as part of our experience growing up with school.

Take this scenario. It's your third cup of coffee for the 8 AM seminar, you sit down, and the room feels like it's filled with an incandescent haze drilling holes into your cerebral cortex. The teacher is passing out a handout, you turn it over, and suddenly you realize: You've been smacked with a pop quiz!

The fog lifts as the adrenaline courses through your veins. Sure, you've watched all the lectures, jotted down the occasional notes, and maybe done some of the reading while catching up on Breaking Bad. But the information swirling in your head hasn't come into a coherent whole. Maybe this is what your professor thinks she needs the class to do to critically master the material. And if you're going to get that degree next year and stumble out into the world, this could have an impact on your GPA.

You turn over the paper and see the first question: Can design solve most of society’s biggest problems?*

"Of course! Design can change the world!" You blurt it out loud, without even thinking. Everyone in the room looks at you. Oh, this is going to be easy, you think. I’m just going to write in “Yes.” Next question.

Then, you notice the asterisk. Your eye drops to the disclaimer lurking at the bottom of the page: *Be sure to show your work.

Suddenly, this test doesn't look so easy anymore.

If you'd asked me this question two years ago, I'm not sure I would have had a good answer. It wasn’t until this point in my career, 17 years in, that I could even venture taking a shot at it. So this is the topic of this talk: answering that question. And here's the response I'm going to write on my pop quiz:

Design can solve society’s biggest problems… if we cultivate a love of learning through the design process.

So while I'd been asked to speak on the subject of design and education, my talk wasn't about educating designers. It's about how we learn. The next big disruption in lifelong learning will be by design. We are innately trained and poised to have a global impact on how other people can survive and thrive, whether they are designers or not.

The above slides are from a talk where I outlined how designers can do this better. I argue in this talk that the mode in which designers learn—with a focus on practice and reflection, supported by theory—is not limited to just designers. Taking this orientation towards learning hacks how we learn. This is an approach we can communicate to others.

I believe that anyone can adopt the range of skills that we regularly exercise, and learn about a variety of topics of value to them, without having to formally be or become a designer. This can happen not by redesigning how schools work, per se, but by looking at the design process as a form of skill development that can help people change their world. Within that process, there are simple tools we can teach others that help them to create more meaningful lives, independent of formal design work.

In the first half of the talk, I talked about what survival means through the lens of design and lifelong learning. In the second half, I shared tools I've gathered that have helped me become a more adaptive learner and designer, using the action map of the Collective Action Toolkit as a way to organize them (at the time still a work in progress).

"In the span of one lifetime it is, of course, possible for every human being to improve himself—within limits set by energy, time, temperament, and the level from which he begins…. But the limits within which such improvements may be made are small in comparison with the vast aspects of our nature and our circumstances which remain the same, and which will be very difficult to improve even were it desirable to do so. I am saying, therefore, that while there is a place for bettering oneself and others, solving problems and coping with situations is by no means the only or even the chief business of life….

No one imagines that a symphony is supposed to improve in quality as it goes along, or that the whole object of playing it is to reach the finale. The point of music is discovered in every moment of playing and listening to it. It is the same, I feel, with the greater part of our lives, and if we are unduly absorbed in improving them we may forget altogether to live them. The musician whose chief concern is to make every performance better than the last may so fail to participate and delight in his own music that he will impress his audience only with the anxious rigor of his technique."

—Alan Watts, from "This Is IT" in the essay collection This Is IT and Other Essays on Zen and Spiritual Experience

The above quote struck me on so many levels when I read it today: as a human being, a husband, an artist, a musician, a designer, an [insert label] of who I may be in 2013.

The above image #3062391516 by Insousiance is shared via an Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic License via < href="http://www.flickr.com/">Flickr.com. It's also of one of my favorite bands, Sigur Ros.

Numbers surround us every day. They’re woven into the fabric of our lives, part of the advice and cliched folk wisdom that we dispense to each other: Two's company, three’s a crowd. A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. And so forth. Every one of these cliches, however, started out as a rule of them, intended to help us learn from our previous positive experiences and failures. They’re patterns we can follow that can help contribute to our future successes.

I'll be posting over the coming months numbers I heard from the design businesspeople I interviewed while writing Success by Design: The Essential Business Reference for Designers. These people had specific rules of thumb they followed as in order to ensure the health of their design business. They were either handed down to them from co-workers or mentors, or derived from hard-fought experience. I’ve added to these numbers the ones that I’ve recorded from my experience working at a range of small and large design studios.

It’s my hope that these numbers will help you establish useful guidelines that'll help you better manage your projects and operate your design studio.

Let's start things off with your business's bid/win ratio.

Anyone who runs a design business knows that if you aren't winning projects, you won't stay in business. So when you seek out new business opportunities, how do you determine which to pursue and which to turn away?

When researching Success by Design, a number that kept coming up in my interviews with studio owners was fifty. Or, to be clear, a 50% bid/win ratio for your studio's new business efforts. This is the number you should try to hit or exceed, and it correlates with how many potential projects you need to convert from proposals to paid projects every month. Otherwise, you'll be billing to much time to studio overhead (writing proposals) instead of working on paid client projects.

There are specific criteria you should use in order to try and hit that 50% number. These include gauging the following:

Dollar value of the proposal. This should be averaged over the number of staff members and hours required to fulfill the estimated scope. This assumes, of course, that you have the capacity in your studio to fulfill the work.

Level of competition. If your client won't tell you what other design businesses are in the running for the work, at least ask them how many other businesses might be in competition for the work. If you're filling out an RFP or RFI and throwing it over the wall—the odds of winning the work can be stacked against you.

Fit for the studio. Is this work that will contribute to staff happiness and morale just as much as your portfolio and pocketbook? You should determine this before you agree to write a proposal as part of your pre-qualification process. (You've got one of those, right?)

Relationship with the client. If you haven't sat down with this client and truly understood the problem they're trying to solve, you may not even be in the running at all. You also may miss nuances and politics that may be stacking the deck against you.

There are other factors to consider, but the above are mandatory considerations before you go down the path of agreeing to craft a proposal. Think about like going to a casino and choosing how to gamble your money. Say someone handed you $10,000 scot free and said, "Go bet this all on the roulette table, and if that number comes up, you get to keep the money I gave you." Would you rather put your money on a single number? Or on all odd numbers? This benchmark is intended to help you control risk and look beyond individual project possibilities to the overall impact your business development choices are having on your cash-flow. This isn't to say that you shouldn't take risks on projects that may be a great boon to your studio, per the above criteria. It's to say that your risks should be measured.

Be aware as well that when using this ratio is that you may not be winning the most valuable projects, balancing the above factors against sheer dollars and cents. If you aren't winning approximately 50% or more of the potential revenues available across the proposals in your pipeline, you may need to reassess your new business strategy.

I'm honored to have been able to contribute one of frog's 20 Tech Trends for 2013, "Micro-Networks Rise":

Micro-networks are intimate communication networks that people form around subjects of interest to them, whether as simple as their love of chocolate or as complicated as a shared passion for creating change in a local community. Most of these micro-networks are private, and rarely visible to the designer or trend-spotter.

These micro-networks have been fostered in local communities via face-to-face conversation or via email and phone, but just-in-time communication tools have allowed the content of these conversations to persist—and store what people are sharing over time. They encourage connection with people that had previously not been able to join those conversations.

Social platforms such as Quora and Facebook have exploited the budding micro-network trend, allowing knowledge to surface from these communities. Platforms such as Neighborland, frog’s Collective Action Toolkit, and Change.org allow micro-networks to gain momentum and grow around desired political and community change.

Identifying micro-networks and ethically researching how people participate in them will be an important part of how we design any product or service that’s meant to collect and share knowledge in 2013. By combining ethnography with an awareness of what people are doing through their micro-networks, we can gain visibility into trends that are happening, but aren’t always in public view. It can also point us to new and growing private communities that help illuminate for us emerging shifts in customer behavior.

Take a look at the whole set of trends above, or download the poster below:

There is a constant tension between the demands of your business—receiving monetary reward for your level of effort—and the knowledge that what you make has some form of meaningful impact. As design business owners and leaders, we wrestle with certain fundamental questions: What if I can’t earn a living running a design business? Am I going down the right path? Does this work make me happy?

Exactly how do you balance the competing demands of sustaining a profitable business with a joyful design practice? In the coming weeks, I'll be sharing the worksheets that comprise the last section of my new book Success by Design: The Essential Business Reference for Designers. You can use them to determine what your ideal design studio experience should be like. David Conrad (studio director of Design Commission) and I devised them, and we hope you can use them to better structure your design business to support what you love. Profitably.

The worksheet that kicks off this section of the book is The Elements of Design Studio Experience. This is a revised version of the framework I first wrote about two years ago on this blog (read more about it here).

Here's the new version of the worksheet, which you can download from SlideShare:

In the coming weeks, I'll be providing activities and accompanying worksheets that help you determine the five key elements in this framework that are necessary to create a stable design business: 1) Philosophy, 2) Customers & Staff, 3) Process & Culture, 4) Market Need & Capability, and 5) Product. By working your way from the bottom up, you’ll better understand how structure your design business to support your goals. I'll also provide you with an additional activity you can carry out to course-correct your business every three months.

Note: The worksheets I'll be sharing are covered under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License. For details on this license, go to creative-commons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0.

Another sunny Saturday morning in early fall 2001. The starlings in the nest outside our window wake us with their cassette-tape song on rewind. Stirring from sleep, my wife and I settle into one of our rituals—acquiring lattes from one of our favorite coffee roasters before the morning escapes us. Pulling on our clothes and shoes, still a bit groggy, we make our way out of our third-floor Seattle apartment. The door clicked behind us, and as we headed down the stairs and out of the building, I realized the keys were sitting on the counter inside.

My adrenaline spiked. I thought to myself, Don't panic. But I couldn't help myself. At our previous apartment in Alexandria, Virginia, we would just walk down to the management office and ask them to unlock the door with their master key. But our landlady here lives on an island, many hours away. There was no way she could help us get back in.

Mary and I debated our options. It seemed like all we could do was bring in a locksmith. But I was loathe to make the call. We had just taken a full month off for an amazing cross-country jaunt as part of our move to Seattle. Due to the impact of 9/11 on the marketing and design industries, it had been hard for me to find work since our move. Going for coffee was a splurge, and if I had to call a locksmith to open up the door, there wouldn't be any more coffee dates for a good while. There had to be a way to open this door without a key.

The solution came to me in a flash: My next-door neighbor was a mountaineer. And the door from our balcony into our apartment's living room was unlocked. We knocked on his door, explained the situation, and I asked if I could borrow one of his climbing harnesses, a rope, a belay device, and a chair.

Standing on the chair, I popped the door to the roof open. My wife and neighbor clambered up after me. We tied off the rope and tugged on it with two people's full strength to make sure the chimney could bear my weight. I strapped on my harness and threaded the belay device. With my brake hand firmly on the rope, I winded two curls of the free rope around my right leg, peered over the edge, and took a deep breath. Without giving it too much thought, I turned around backwards and backed myself out until I was parallel to the roof's edge, slowly providing slack to the belay device until I went from parallel to dropping over the edge.

With a jerk, I came to dangle five feet away from our balcony. To my right, the Olympic mountains were rimmed with liquid yellow fire, late afternoon sun painting the houses below me with golden light. I lowered myself down and untied my harness, then walked through our apartment to pop open the lock on the front door.

Problem solved… until three weeks later, I was hanging upside down from a rope tied to the chimney of my apartment building, many stories above the asphalt pavement of our parking lot, thinking to myself: How did this happen again?

Instead of the keys sitting on the counter, they were in my jacket pocket in the hall closet.

*

We can be creative about dealing with what we've forgotten. It is much harder to prepare for what we never want to forget. We are swimming through possible consequences, rather than acknowledging what’s in front of us.

Routines and systems only go so far. You can’t fully run a life on punch cards and coffee makers with timers.

My wife and I started leaving our keys in the same place—our overflowing change tray—every time we walked in the door. We made a spare copy of our house key for our next door neighbor. I kept my bag I take to work in the same place, the larder stocked with cereals and soups in the same locations. Our bookshelves, while not alphabetized, became organized by genre and when they will be read or revisited. But there isn’t a place for every item, every detail, with absolute certainty. I somehow forget the grocery list, which causes me to have to take another trip for critical staples. Or the transit checks to load onto my Clipper card. Or my phone. Or my laptop. Just this past week, I forgot my keycard for work. Twice.

I had to turn this over this habit in my mind for a long time to realize: in every one of these situations, I was one step ahead of what I needed to do, right then and in the moments before that I couldn’t recall.

What are you thinking about before you start checking your pockets, trying to find your car key so you can get to work on time? When you left the car keys on the counter yesterday? When you were driving home? We spend our time rewinding the clock, while also addicted to the adrenaline spike in the present moment. We’re addicted to crisis. The tickets to the rock concert. The passport for the international trip. Paying the monthly rent on time.

By this point, it’s too late to unfurl memories about places you don’t even remember. We think we’re taking a well-worn shortcut, only to discover it’s an even further path to the actual destination we had in mind. With the sticky note reminder on the door, we walk right past what connects our livelihood to our well being, implicitly accepting the behavior.

The hard work is not in the future. It is confronting our decisions in the here and now.

My second book, Success by Design: The Essential Business Reference for Designers, came out early! You can purchase it at your usual online retailers, including Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble, and My Design Shop. You can also grab a copy at your local fine bookseller when it arrives in stores on December 4th, 2012.

Concurrent with the print edition is the release of the eBook, which you can get for Amazon Kindle and through iTunes for your Apple devices.

Want to read a bit of the book before getting a copy? Other than clicking to look inside on Amazon.com, you can also see a preview through Google Books.

Here's how I've introduced the book on the back cover:

In your career you may have been like me: Trying to keep projects on the rails and clients happy. Digging through blogs for useful advice. Wondering if there was a better way to handle all of the demands of being a design professional and running a creative business.

The wisdom contained in Success By Design: The Essential Business Reference for Designers will help you become a stronger businessperson and better plan your career path as a design leader. This book was born from in-depth interviews with a slew of successful designers, studio directors, project managers, and client service professionals across a wide range of creative industries. It contains the business secrets I needed the most when I started as a designer sixteen years ago.

If you'd like some background on how this book came about, I was recently interviewed by GraphicDesign.com about what inspired the book. In the coming weeks, excerpts of chapters from the book will be appearing here on ChangeOrder and in other publications. There are also a number of free worksheets and resources mentioned in the book that I'll be blogging about. Links to them are aggregated on my website at http://www.davidsherwin.com/success.

Here are some kind words from people who took a peek at an advance copy:

"The best design business secrets are out of the bag--and it is about time! David has found a pithy and brilliant way to share the wisdom and knowledge that most of us had to learn the hard way. I wish I had this book when I was learning to run a design business unit at IDEO."
--Dr. Kristian Simsarian, Interaction Design program Chair at the California College of the Arts and IDEO Fellow

"With your nose up against your monitor, it's easy to lose sight of the big picture. This book reminds you to step back and take inventory of all of the things that impact the success of your projects, products, and teams."
--Kendra Shimmell, Director of Cooper U

"The world of design is famous for its mystique, secrecy and "special sauce" but David Sherwin breaks it all down into the three fundamentals of team, client and project management, taking out the complexity of what it's like to run a design practice along the way. He organizes the book with straightforward concepts and follows up with easy-to-understand language. But make no mistake. This is not a primer, but rather an insightful work drawn from a keen understanding that the essential element to being successful in design (and therefore with clients) is the human element."
--David Merkoski, Chief Design Officer at Greenstart

"David's comprehensive and thoughtful treatment of the business of design is an education by proxy. As any experienced consultant, he maintains a fine balance of caution and enthusiasm yet withholds nothing, offering a depth and care typically only found in the classroom."
--Christopher Butler, Vice President of Newfangled and author of The Strategic Web Designer: How to Confidently Navigate the Web Design Process

If you want to delve deeper into the book design, I've created sets with most of the chapter illustrations on Flickr and Pinterest. Here are a few of my personal favorites:

Today, frog released the Collective Action Toolkit (CAT). The CAT is a package of resources and activities that enable groups of people anywhere to organize, build trust, and collaboratively create solutions for problems impacting their community. I was part of the team that helped create the CAT—you can read about my involvement in an article posted today in FastCoDesign.

frog developed the CAT to help groups of people create positive change in their communities. Inspired by frog's collaboration with Girl Effect and the Nike Foundation (which I participated in) the toolkit provides a dynamic framework that integrates knowledge and action to solve challenges. Designed to harness the benefits of group action and the power of open sharing, the activities in the toolkit draw on each participant’s strengths and perspectives as the group works to accomplish a common goal.

While intended for use by leaders in local communities, the CAT draws from both frog's social innovation work and their expertise in encouraging grassroots innovation within startups and large-scale organizations. It can be used as an accelerant for group problem solving, whether by local community groups, schools, nonprofits, corporations, and so forth.

Here's a presentation I gave about the CAT at The Feast Conference in New York City in October to a group of social innovators:

You can use the CAT with a group within your organization or your community to: 

Solve problems: No matter what size of problem you’re looking to solve, the activities in the CAT can help your group investigate and generate solutions for community problems. For example: you might be motivated to help people around you get access to healthier food, reduce how many people are becoming sick because of an infectious disease, construct a new building, or start a small business.

Build new skills: Gain important life skills with you group and understand how to best put them to use. For example: critical thinking, listening to others, asking better questions, generating ideas, active collaboration, creating better stories, and inspiring and sustaining collective action.

Gain knowledge: By pooling what you know and who you know, you can better support each other in your group and beyond. For example: with your group, you can gain perspective on a community problem or need, as well as reach out to more people that could support those solutions.

In the coming weeks, I'll be sharing more about the Collective Action Toolkit on my blog on frogdesign.com and here on ChangeOrder—how it came about, as well as upcoming pilots that we'll be conducting with organizations and educational institutions such as Savannah College of Art and Design's Design for Sustainability program. 

Until then, you can download it free by visiting http://www.frogdesign.com/collective-action-toolkit.

As part of the research for my new book, Success by Design: The Essential Business Reference for Designers, I interviewed a wide range of people who had run successful design studios. When I drew up my shortlist of who I should talk to, Ted Leonhardt was at the top of my list. Specifically, I wanted Ted's perspective on what it's like to grow a design business.

Ted and his wife Carolyn founded The Leonhardt Group, an agency that they grew to $10 million in fees and a staff of 50. In 1999, they sold their agency to Fitch. Ted went on to the position of Chief Creative Officer for Fitch Worldwide with responsibility for 27 offices from London. In 2003 Ted began his management consulting practice. Carolyn provides support while creating and bringing new vintage homes to market in St. Helena, California.

What follows is a transcript of our conversation in April 2011.

DS: How do you grow a design business?

TL: My favorite quote on this is from Michael Gerber who says, “Work on the business, not in the business.”

Design business founders who want to grow must move from being an expert in a skill area, like design or strategy, to being an expert at running their business. That's a very fundamental shift. You can't concentrate on growing your business if much of your time is taken up in project work for clients. Client work is all consuming and it should be. Great work is the result of that total focus. But, your business needs the same kind of total concentration if you want to grow. Your business must become your project. Many designer/owners are reluctant to make this necessary change.

The single most important factor in successful design businesses is the people. And the most common problem is poor people management.

Design comes from people. Great design comes from happy, committed people. Happy committed people see a bright future for themselves and are receiving coaching, praise and regular constructive feedback. If employees feel they are a valued part of a team, doing work they respect and enjoy, the firm will grow and prosper. Carolyn and I used to say: “great work plus happy people produces profits.”

Ironically, owner/designers can get in the way of growth. As a successful designer, you have insights into how things should be done. You develop a feel for how to produce great work and deal with management and client situations. As you transition other people into design leadership roles, inevitably they're not as good as you are. They make mistakes, and instead of providing clear, instructive feedback you take back authority and solve the problem yourself. Or, you see something that doesn’t work and you criticize instead of helping them understand why it doesn’t work. Over time these negative experiences turn people off, and instead of growing in their positions they begin to lose their commitment to you and your company. They lose their belief in the vision that attracted them to the business in the first place. And the result is that your business doesn’t grow.

Employees need clear positive guidance, instructive feedback and specific praise when they do something right. We all need this kind of clarity in order to keep on track and moving in the right direction. That’s what management is all about.

Owners who want to grow their businesses need to understand that the business is their creative project, and that empowering their people is the way to grow. That means that the virtual circle of the business is your job, but it’s powered by your people. It’s your responsibility to make sure there is enough work, that the work is being done well and that it meets expectations and that completed projects are turned into marketing tools that support your outbound sales effort by creating inbound opportunities. You negotiate new opportunities as they come in. The one area of expertise you can never give up is sales.

DS: What about an individual looking to grow a studio?

TL: Step One is that first hire. Look to your skill set and say: “What functional role can I give up? What role can I easily fill with billable work? Which role will relieve me from something time consuming?” Perhaps it's one of your weaker skill sets, something someone else will do better. Manage your employee, treat him or her with respect and honor. Keep things friendly, but professional. Then look for employee #2.

Second, you must learn to lead by setting expectations: creative expectations, budget expectations, time expectations and deliverables. You work with the team to make sure the expectations are appropriate. You ask questions to find out what is going on if expectations are not met. Another great rule of thumb for managers is “ask, don’t tell.”

The third factor is client management, and that means understanding other people’s agendas. The overall agenda and goals of a client project may be clear, but within the client team the goals may be different. One client may have a baby at home, and need to be home by four every day – putting unexpected time constraints on team meetings. The Senior VP may be focused entirely on a particular feature of the project rather than the publicly stated goal because he has been a champion of that feature in other products. So, he’s thinking “I must have a hit with this product feature” throughout the effort. Meanwhile the rest of the team is wondering why he continues to bring up a single issue. Understanding these semi-hidden agendas and dealing with them in a positive way is essential to your success and to growth. A common hidden agenda is the client team leader’s need to appear knowledgeable and effective to the other team members and senior management. Your job is always to help your client succeed and look good while succeeding.

For the success of a business, the most important group to be involved with is the client team, so you are in the meetings when the project is being discussed, and not relying on PDFs and emails. You must know why they are making decisions to push something this way or that. You must be there, listening, asking questions and refining your perspective on the fly.

DS: What factors or metrics can a studio owner use to monitor their overall happiness?

TL: Creative shops are happiest when there is slightly more work than what the numbers say you should take. You can calculate how many hours to expect from a billable employee — 35 hours a week x 50 weeks — to determine your revenue target and work load. Then focus your sales effort on achieving 5–10% more sales than that. Creative people like to be busy. The worst is not having enough to do. It's demoralizing, and it destroys budgets as people expand their project workload to fit their free time. Happiness comes from being busy, but not overwhelmed — a delicate balance. We always kept the staff load and head count slightly below the actual dollar count coming in.

The other number to focus on is fee revenue divided by staff size. Well managed firms in the US produce around $200,000 a year in fees per employees. In major markets it’s higher, in smaller markets it is less.

At the recent HOW Interactive Design Conference in Washington DC, I gave a presentation called "Know Thy User: The Role of Research in Great Interactive Design." This 30-minute high-level talk was intended to provide conference attendees with repeatable processes that will help them integrate user research into their interactive projects. Other presenters at the conference went more in-depth into some of the methods mentioned in this talk, but I felt that it was important for attendees to understand the role of specific methods and activities within the research process on any design project.

When I started working as an user experience designer, I had a thousand questions about how to conduct research. I was lucky to have great mentors and have the chance to collaborate with outside practitioners on a variety of projects. They helped me learn how to do everything from recruiting people to facilitating activities to understanding how we could make sense of the data we gathered from them.

When I came to frog, I discovered a deep global research practice with many designers and strategists who have helped me become a more rigorous and creative researcher. I now have fewer questions about how to practice user research, so I'm doing my best to return the help I'd received over the years and answer some questions for those who are new to the role of research in interactive design.

A few years ago, I hated flying. I'd been deathly afraid of it since I was a kid.

I knew this was a completely irrational fear. I knew the odds: only a 1 in 20,000 chance that anything might ever happen to me in my lifetime. Compared to the odds of dying due to cancer or a heart attack, I had bigger fish to fry.

Flying was something I knew I needed to do, especially as I grew up on the East Coast and have lived on the West Coast for eleven years now. Whether to see family and friends or take off on an adventure, I'd have to fly. But whenever possible, I would try to avoid flying. Even for most vacations, I was content to stay in Seattle or drive to somewhere in the Pacific Northwest.

Last year, I had an epiphany that helped me to better understand this fear, and make some peace with it.

It was on a plane flight two years ago, commuting to Austin to help lead a work session. We were at that fulcrum point in the project, where you start moving from the initial immersion and research into full-on design. There wasn't any more work I could really do to prepare, or try to stave off how most designers feel at this point in the process: a mixture of excitement and fear.

I was staring out the window of the plane for a really long time. Just sitting with the discomfort: my fear of flying, blurring into my excitement for us to get there and start doing our design work.

At a certain point, I realized they were almost one and the same. Excitement, because we were about to create solutions that were going to help people in need. And fear, because we didn't know exactly what we were going to make yet. This fuzziness, in the journey we take when we work in a creative discipline.

When you get on a plane, it's really easy to imagine the journey. Through the magic of technology, you'll be thousands of miles from your home in a matter of hours. San Francisco to Boston. There'll be a crappy in-flight movie. Some peanuts and soda. Germs and crying babies.

My fear about flying was all about the reasons why we might not reach Boston, or Austin, or Madrid. And I realized those are some of the same hurdles that stand in the way of someone who wants to lead a design team.

When you're a design leader, you're the one getting on the plane for the trip and you're the one flying it. But it's not clear if you're going to Boston, Shanghai, Toledo, or some borderland between countries that no one has ever visited. Would you tell someone flying on a plane that's where you're going when you take off? A city that does not yet exist, with an airport that needs to be built while you're in transit.

This is the challenge for a design leader: making awesome s*%t real. You could argue that any designer is a futurist. But the best design leaders that I've worked with, the ones that inspired their teams to go far beyond what they thought was possible, were able to describe a place to travel that did not yet exist and say, "Go there." They didn't exactly know where we would end up. But they knew by attempting to get there, the right destination would emerge from the haze. That excitement and fear blurred together again, as we discovered where we could travel next.

The only risk is that where you're at in a project may not feel like a natural end. You would have to go somewhere new before you had a sense of the destination where you'd arrived.

That is the journey that we all take as leaders, and the vision that it takes to sustain that journey, trip after trip, year after year.

And you'll have the frequent flyer miles to prove it.