Mar 27, 2022
Collaboration and moving at the speed of trust
I’ve been watching the wuxia drama Legend of Fei, and I’m struck by how the main characters are highly competent and also act with consistent integrity.
Back in secondary school, 1 of our core values was integrity and I used to think it was very duh, cliched, like yeah yeah honesty is best policy we get it. Being older has made me realise that practicing real integrity is so exacting, difficult. Inconvenient. "Inefficient".
A lot of social and work settings are set up in a way that acting with full integrity will bring you troubles big and tiny. Troubles that the wuxia main characters encounter time and time again, with life and death stakes.
Once, I was in a meeting where a stakeholder asked a product leader if we could test a design with users, and the product leader said “yes that’s a good idea”, and implied that we’d go do some quick testing.
I followed up with my product manager afterwards to discuss the timeline for usability testing. Then she told me not to worry about it—we weren’t actually going to do usability testing, the product leader was just making an empty promise. Which was a super weird thing for me to hear as an intern.
The project shipped a few weeks later as is. The conveniences of empty promises... And this product leader is known for being great at unblocking projects.
Which reminds me of a tweet I saw a while ago, about how you rarely find someone who's really good at influencing colleagues and navigating org politics while keeping integrity. Also reminds me of adrienne maree brown's "move at the speed of trust".
I just see so many ways we could’ve reached the same outcome while being honest with the stakeholder that yes, testing would be really nice, but not needed for this very reversible redesign. It was a chance to bring nuance into user research decisions. A chance to choose integrity over speed.
I’d much rather move at the speed of trust.
