Design Citizenry: Sharing What You Know

by Andrew Crow

July 28, 2010

Secrets. We keep them for many different reasons — surprise, protection, delight, shame. In business, where process and methodology are often the main product, secrecy is often competitive advantage.

Having an advantage over your competitors is not a bad thing. It’s part of a defensible strategy that gives you a unique position in the marketplace. Your execution on this strategy — your product or service — is why people come to you in the first place. However, I would argue that most of what we regard as valuable secrets can be given away.

I’m not proposing that Coca-Cola give away their secret formula or that the Department of Defense hand out its launch codes. But, as designers in a creative world, sharing our secrets may result in more good than harm. Teaching, inspiration, advancement of the craft and practice are core attributes of good design citizens.

Many design firms already feel that they are sharing their ideas. Blogging, speaking and talking about their work helps represent them as design leaders. For in-house teams, this may mean supporting the success of other groups through collaboration. For a services or consulting firm, it could be sharing insights into a design process. However, it’s important to remember that people don’t come to just see your awesome face, but to learn how you can help them. They don’t want to replicate your work, they want to leapfrog it. The value they find in learning from your mistakes and your solutions is immense.

When suggesting that a designer or consultancy share their work, fear is often the biggest argument they give against doing so. They fear that people will use their carefully developed “best practices” to advance beyond them, thus becoming a threat. Giving away a competitive advantage puts them in a weaker position to secure clients.

Bullshit.

Your process may be valuable, but it’s reproducible. Given enough time, your efficiencies and methods will be discovered by others and used as effectively as you use them. It doesn’t matter how many trademarks and acronyms you add to your portfolio of offerings. If you compete on a process parity level, someone will always catch up.

So, why give your stuff away?

One thing that became very clear to us in our work with Zappos is that they don’t sell shoes. They don’t sell clothing, accessories or housewares. They sell happiness. Their product is the service that you receive when ordering, returning or interacting with them in any way. People buy shoes from them not because of their prices, but because they know that Zappos will go out of their way to make them happy. Tony, their CEO, talks about this every chance he gets. He describes in his book, Delivering Happiness, how they go about doing this, even giving away the core principles that make up his business strategy.

Why would he do this? If his approach to customer service is their competitive advantage, why not keep it secret? He does it so that other businesses can learn and be better at what they do. He talks about how Zappos works so that customers understand where the company is coming from. People order shoes from Zappos because they trust them to provide a better experience. Businesses look to Zappos to lead which, in turn, makes Zappos the leader.

Similarly, Adaptive Path is a recognized design leader not because we wear black and use special idea-producing Sharpies. People know us not because of the four-letter words we make up or because of the crazy parties we threw before we all started having families. We’re sought after for how we solve problems, but we’re discovered because of what we give away. We work with our clients to share whatever interesting ideas we possibly can from our work together. We share the problems we encounter while we evolve and grow our business. We make a conscious effort to raise as many boats as we can wherever we speak, write and share. We do this because it feels right to give back to those we learn from. The surprise side benefit of sharing is that it actually creates a competitive advantage.

Potential clients are more likely to be attracted to designers they feel they can trust. This trust can be earned before you’re even hired if you can show how you might think about their problem. Openly discussing failure in addition to success showcases how you would deal with adversity during the project. And, let’s be honest, people want to hire the smartest and the best. They only way they know this is you, is if you show them.

If that’s not tangible enough to convince you to risk spilling your secrets, take a look at the open source software movement. Developers share the code they’re working on with the community. Other developers add to this code — optimizing it and improving it. Depending on the license agreement, people can build their own applications from this shared code. The net result is better written code, shared development and fresh ideas. This is not dissimilar to the current open innovation movement for product development.

A few years ago, Adaptive Path was inspired to design a new diabetes management system for people suffering from type 1 diabetes. There was no specific client, just a real need in the world for experience design to be applied to a tough problem. After weeks of research, ideation, and prototyping, we came up with a forward-looking solution that approached this problem in a whole new way. It would have been easy to sell this as a report or use it to attract a paying client. Instead, we published our findings and our process, effectively delivering a potential product strategy for free. Crazy? No. This effort was borne out of a desire to give back to the design community and to advance the efforts towards living with the disease. The net result was a considerable influx of new client work, opening us up to a whole new industry. No doubt some of these ideas are affecting medical product design today. Giving away this knowledge helped our brand, motivated us to do better and had a positive effect on other designers.

Giving ideas away has a wonderful impact on the design community. As designers, we share a collective desire to be better at what we do. We already spend time reading each other’s blogs and books. We support one another at events through speaking and swapping stories in the hallways. It’s clear we have in us a natural tendency to explore what makes us tick. Part of being a good design citizen involves taking responsibility for personal and community growth.

I recognize the fear that surrounds a decision to show others your secret sauce. I’m asking you to embrace that fear and push it into a place where sharing your inner-most design secrets becomes an advantage for your organization rather than a liability. I promise you the benefits will become apparent immediately. Establishing your company as an expert, installing trust in an educated client and raising the level of quality in our field is success that begets further success.