5.3. Design for Everyone

“Everything that needs to be created needs to be designed—not just products and marketing, but processes, experiences, organizations, forms, materials. At its core, designing simply means thinking through a problem and finding an elegant solution. Anyone can do that. Everyone should.

Being a good designer is more a way of thinking than a way of drawing. It’s not just about making things pretty—it’s about making them work better.

Vocabulary gets in the way sometimes.

Design is not just a profession.

A customer is not only a person who buys something.

A product is not just a physical object or software that you sell.

You can employ design thinking for everything you do.

Awareness is key to life design, and this is true especially when you are designing your career. If you are aware of the process involved in hiring, in writing job descriptions, in reading résumés, in interviewing (from the employer’s perspective), your success rate in getting a job offer goes way up. Empathy is a crucial element in design thinking, and having empathy—and understanding—for the poor hiring manager buried under a sea of résumés will help you know how to design a more effective job hunt. Effectiveness in getting hired involves a simple yet important design reframe.

Job design is mostly about designing tasks so that they match a typical employee's attitude and aptitude. Performance management is about creating incentives to do a job well — and disincentives to do it poorly. These are the carrots and sticks that keep your employees on track, but they can also include controls such as scripts and checklists that make it difficult for employees to stray too far.

Job design is mostly about designing tasks so that they match a typical employee's attitude and aptitude. Performance management is about creating incentives to do a job well — and disincentives to do it poorly. These are the carrots and sticks that keep your employees on track, but they can also include controls such as scripts and checklists that make it difficult for employees to stray too far.