Tag: diversity

Inclusive Design, Day 14/15: Diverse Teams Make Better Decisions

This is day 14 of 15 in a short series on inclusive design. If you missed any of the earlier posts, see day 1 here or view the full list.

Inclusive and diverse teams make better, stronger teams — and these teams make better decisions. Because our work and thought patterns are influenced by our background and biases, working with a diverse group means not only fresh, new ideas, but we also counterbalance the tendency to design for people just like ourselves. A higher standard.

And that is why representation matters, not just to those who are represented, but to all of us. Because it expands our sense of what’s possible, and what we have reason to expect. —Cate Huston

Bring diversity into teams
Screenshot of the Automattic Inclusive Design Checklist, under Teams.

For maximum learning and a broader perspective, not limiting yourself to your immediate team or company; seeking out a wide variety of inputs from mentors, coaches, and other advisors.

If your team is limited and you don’t have the ability to expand, actively seek out people with other perspectives to consult or act as project advisors, and give special consideration to their feedback.

I learned from Sara VanSlyke and Trace Byrd at Atlassian that it also matters how a diverse team is represented, in their article “Illustrating Balanced and Inclusive Teams.”

As a company that wants to unleash the potential in every team, depicting people is especially important. How we represent the people who make up teams should be just as important. We’ve always known that the best teams are balanced; made of a diverse group of people with different backgrounds and perspectives, but our illustrations haven’t always reflected that.

An Atlassian team article
Screenshot from the Atlassian team’s article about illustrating their diversity.

The authors found that even though their team aspired to be more inclusive, how they represented themselves visually wasn’t keeping pace with the true diversity of the team.

Promoting diversity and inclusion within our brand is a persistent and multi-faceted effort. And it’s a challenge to depict diversity without it feeling merely perfunctory or symbolic until the reality of our industry truly represents the customers we serve and the world at large. More needs to be done outside of the brand to promote an inclusive workplace, but we’ve found that the results of constant vigilance and open conversation are worth the time and energy.

To truly represent our customers is something Automattic is improving — we still have a long way to go. If you missed the story about updating the WordPress.com brand illustrations to be more diverse, see Inclusive Design, Day 5/15: To See Yourself in Imagery — with illustrator Alice Lee and my designer colleague Joan Rho.

See also this YouTube series introducing Automattic employees from all walks of life. A diverse group! I’m proud to work with them every day.

For a thorough treatment of this topic, I highly recommend reading and bookmarking “On Improving Diversity in Hiring” from my Automattic colleague Cate Huston. In this in-depth article, she shares her hiring expertise to build diverse teams, everything from onboarding and recruiting to specific tips and tricks during interviews.

Screenshot from Cate Huston's post about improving diversity in hiring.
Screenshot from Cate Huston’s article about improving diversity in hiring.

This rule of thumb about stopping the behavior before someone is hired hit home with me as this is something I need to improve on personally. An off-color joke here, a comment there; I’m learning to speak up more when I notice these things.

A good rule for inclusion pre-work to diversity is to stop doing things you would have to change if the demographics of your team better reflected the demographics of the world. —Cate Huston

One practical tip shared by Cate that I’ve put to good use is Textio, a service to help make job descriptions more inclusive. I used it in 2016 to update the Excellence Wrangler job posting, replacing phrases like triage ruthlessly with triage efficiently.

Textio website screenshot
Screenshot of the Textio homepage.

Cate’s influence in the last year or so has helped me improve my hiring to be more inclusive, both in mindset and in practice. She’s inspired me to read more broadly, and think more openly.

In closing, a word from Scott Page via his Aeon article titled “Why hiring the ‘best’ people produces the least creative results:”

When building a forest, you do not select the best trees as they tend to make similar classifications. You want diversity.

(Scott has a new book out on this topic: The Diversity Bonus, How Great Teams Pay Off in the Knowledge Economy. I haven’t read it yet.)

For day 15 of 15 of inclusive design, the last day, I’ll share a recap of all the inclusive design learnings I’ve shared in this series so far.

About this Inclusive Design series — Tomorrow I’ll give a talk on inclusive design at WordCamp Phoenix 2018. Leading up to the conference I’ve been publishing notes on voices, stories, products, and other resources: everything I’m learning about this emerging practice. This is day 14 of 15. Read more about the series.

Inclusive Design, Day 5/15: To See Yourself in Imagery

This is day 5 of 15 in a short series on inclusive design. If you missed the start, jump to day 1 here.

An inclusive design case study from the design team at Automattic.

Details matter for inclusive design, as noted in this item from the Inclusive Design Checklist found under the “Building including into designs” section: Choose copy and imagery with care.

choose-imagery-with-care.png
Screenshot from the inclusive design checklist.

As a practical example from 2017, I’d like to point to an inclusive illustration project led by Automattic designer Joan Rho with an illustrator named Alice Lee.

Quick scenario: You’re on your phone, going through the onboarding flow for a new app you just downloaded. Helpful illustrations appear, guiding and educating you through the process. Now hold up: are the characters in these illustrations diverse or mainly white? Do they seem to be young tech-oriented millennials, mostly men?

Tech illustrations often feature the same sets of things: young, white people (usually men), surrounded by gadgets, with a cup of coffee, in a beautiful tech world. For consumer-oriented products, this creates an incredibly limiting and exclusive brand image…

When the WordPress.com design team asked me to develop their illustration brand and 60+ product illustrations, these values were a major focus of the project, especially as part of their mission to democratize publishing. — Alice Lee

Here’s the end result of the work to create a more representative set of illustrations, showing the English-language WordPress.com blog home page as a visual example.

Read a full project rundown on the WordPress.com blog: Inclusive Illustrations, By Design (May 2017).

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The WordPress.com blog post explaining the project.

Alice Lee wrote up her thoughts on her site, as well: Inclusiveness in illustration — WordPress.com: Designing an Inclusive Illustration Brand.

alice-lee-inclusive-illustrations.png
Screenshot from Alice Lee’s post about the project.

If there is one takeaway I’ve learned from this project, it’s that it is challenging but always necessary to address your own biases & assumptions in order to produce better, more inclusive work.

This was also an incredible learning experience with respect to the lessons in inclusivity. It’s by no means a finished product or a checkbox to tick off and forget about; it’s a constant work in progress, and I’m happy to have grown along this spectrum. — Alice Lee

To see a similar project from another company, check out Illustrating Balanced and Inclusive Teams by the Atlassian design team.

atlassian-meeples-2017.png
Screenshot of Atlassian’s updated “meeples” illustration library for 2017.

(And let me know in the comments if you’ve seen other examples of this type of inclusive design work elsewhere; I’d love to see it and learn more.)

Inclusive design considers everyone. Wouldn’t you want to see yourself in the imagery?

Starting from a high-level ideal is important — diversity and a broader representation — yet the finished product must reflect that vision down to the smallest design details.

For day 6 of 15 of inclusive design, I’ll dig more into recognizing exclusion as a starting point for better design and good business.

About this Inclusive Design series — In about 10 days I’ll give a talk on inclusive design at WordCamp Phoenix 2018. Leading up to the conference I’m publishing notes on voices, stories, products, and other resources: everything I’m learning about this emerging practice. This is day 5 of 15. Read more about the series.

Mary Meeker: The Best Decisions Are Often Made by Diverse Groups of People

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One of the things I have learned about effective decision making is that the best decisions are often made by diverse groups of people. Saying or hearing these words is magic: That’s really interesting. I had never thought of it that way before. Thank you.

A gem from Mary Meeker I found when reading the 2017 Internet Trends report published by Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers (KPCB). Via John.

A Higher Standard

Last week I shared Amazon’s Leadership Principles, which includes “insist on the highest standards.” Modeling the higher standard myself, and expecting it in others I work with. The concept of leaders training new leaders is on my mind a lot lately, because it’s central to my role at Automattic and in the WordPress community.

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When looking for new models to refresh my inputs and broaden my understanding, one logical source of inspiring leader is the military.

My introduction to military leadership started with One Mission by Chris Fussell, which led to Team of Teams by General (Ret.) Stanley McChrystal — see my notes here.

Now I’m pleased to discover A Higher Standard by General (Ret.) Ann Dunwoody (Goodreads), the life story and lessons from the first woman promoted to four-star general in US military history. Hat tip: Matt.

The book follows Gen. Dunwoody’s wonderful and amazing life journey through career, family, and life. She grounds the narrative with lessons and principles. Guideposts.

Here are a few guideposts that resonated with me.

Whatever you believe about the nature of leadership, true leaders never stop learning, refining, growing, and adapting—and that’s the primary focus of this book.

On setting a high standard:

Meeting the standard is the expectation, but those who strive to exceed the standard send a signal about their character and their competence.

After managing nearly sixty-nine thousand employees, one thing is clear to me: there is a higher standard that provides the foundation upon which every effective leadership journey is built. It’s the difference between the leaders who excel and the leaders who fail. It’s their thought process, attention to detail, and execution that enables them to inspire and motivate their workforce to create and sustain high-performing, successful organizations.

If you take nothing else from this book—never walk by a mistake, or you just set a new lower standard!

Putting this high standard into practice means not walking by a mistake without correcting it — at Automattic we call this “trash pickup.”

He taught me to never walk by a mistake. Far too often we let little things slide. But just turn on the news and listen as the anchors lament an auto-part defect leading to deaths and multibillion-dollar recalls or a small leak in a gas pipeline causing an explosion that endangers wildlife. Recognizing when something is wrong, big or small, and holding people accountable can save industries billions and citizens their lives. Sergeant Bowen instilled in me instantly that if you do walk by a mistake, then you just set a new, lower standard.

In my world I also think this task falls to people acting as “chief quality officers” for products and services — see my recent post on the topic of product leadership.

On energy and balance; see also my recent thoughts, On Self-Management and Energy:

…working longer hours doesn’t necessarily equal better performance. Working harder doesn’t mean working smarter. Longer hours mean less sleep, fatigue, ulcers, compromised decisions, and a lack of balance in one’s life.

On developing other leaders — what I would call “training the trainer” — finding your successor is another essential aspect of leadership.

The job of senior leaders is to develop other leaders. It requires senior leaders to weigh in on key decisions. Leaders who don’t weigh in lose their vote.

One of most important jobs a senior leader has is to develop leaders or to “build the bench.”

When leaders help subordinates overcome weaknesses or mistakes, they help the subordinate, they help the organization, and they help themselves become better leaders.

…as a lifelong skill, I have worked on developing the skill of giving people chances to improve their performance after a failure.

On diversity and inclusion:

Although the power of diversity is sometimes hard to quantify, Childs definitely got my attention. His success revealed a few points: (1) diversity wasn’t about numbers or quotas—having one of these and one of those—it was about diversity of thought, and not just anyone’s thought but the best-of-the-best thoughts; and (2) these folks had to have a platform from which their ideas could be heard and implemented.

I believe the strength in diversity comes from being able to leverage diversity of thought.

View the A Higher Standard: Leadership Strategies from America’s First Female Four-Star General book on Amazon and Goodreads.

Why Isn’t Open Source A Gateway For Coders Of Color?

Food for thought: Why Isn’t Open Source A Gateway For Coders Of Color?. (Via my wife, Erin.)