Successful Innovators Design For Confrontation

David Adkin explains why it’s time to start having some uncomfortable conversations

- Kym Winters

As designers, innovators and entrepreneurs, our mission is always to make people’s lives better. Everything we create is pitched the same way – ‘Hey, what you’re currently doing is painful; here’s an easier way’. So when Steve Selzer, a designer manager at Airbnb, suggested at SXSW that ‘making things easier’ isn’t always a good idea, I did a double take.

To make his point – that there are unintended consequences to removing all effort from every experience – Steve brought up WALL•E, a movie where everyone’s strapped to a motorised chair and eventually unable to see past a screen in front of them. In our world, our desire for everything to be instantaneously easy has caused us to shy away from facing anything tough. But challenges are how we grow. Steve’s solution is to design for confrontation; not only with our customers but our colleagues and even ourselves.

It was a powerful message, made even more powerful by what followed. Next up was a talk by the billionaire hedge fund manager Ray Dalio. I figured that he would provide a totally fresh perspective on design. Well, I was wrong. He too focused on the importance of confrontation and the power of thoughtful disagreement. These concepts are so core to his organisation that they film every meeting so disagreements are public and confrontation is encouraged.

After hearing both of these talks, I was fired up! I was ready to confront anyone! But as my adrenaline lowered, I remembered a challenging (and confrontational) audience question from Steve’s talk: ‘It’s easy for you to confront others. You’re the boss. You don’t have to worry about getting fired. What about the rest of us?’