Design Burnout

I love your idea of a Law of Reflection Albert Shum. To reflect - meaningfully and often - increases a design team's overall capability for impact. It also supports the nurturing environment essential for individuals to thrive at all stages of their career. In my experience, it succeeds when there is sustained advocacy from leadership for treating reflection as integral, rather than peripheral, to 'the work'. In practice, this usually means: 1. Protecting part of the team's overall capacity for the purpose of reflection. Without this, reflection will always be the first thing to de-prioritise when, inevitably, time pressures arise. 2. Establishing rituals & channels to prompt regular sharing of reflections. Any reflection needs tangible form to survive & contribute value. The greater the visibility/importance of these rituals & channels, the more they fuel the engine of reflection. 3. Celebrating the outcomes of these reflections. Sometimes those are obvious connections to improvements in the team's day-to-day work. Often they are less obvious (but no less meaningful) contributions to culture/long-term capability. At its best, a Law of Reflection exists as a halo, illuminating how design teams create impact in organisations.

It's interesting living and working in Northern Europe again (Amsterdam). It fundamentally feels different. My wife and I only have bicycles, we walk to stores every few days to buy fresh food. People at street level often leave their blinds open. There is high psychological safety where I work and a mission that has transcendent purpose. People take a lot of vacation and care for their families well. While every culture has their moments of prejudice and marginalization, I feel a visceral lack of the gnawing gap in opportunities and huge differences in compensation that exist in the USA. The government book for naturalization that we are studying (for indefinite right to remain) has generous descriptions of the rights to support LGBTQ communities, openly suggests that religion isn't for everyone and that if you become Dutch you should support same sex marriage. Everyone has decent health care and nearly free education through college. On the other side, performance is generally lower (at least short term), as is compensation, taxes are way higher etc. My point? I think burnout comes from the collective conditions of society, work life balance, fairness in ADDITION to expectations in a work culture etc. A perspective!

I've mostly seen/experienced this type of design burnout in teams working across massive scale. The amount of alignment needed is mind boggling, which introduces lots of task switching and potentially only surface level engagements with the design work. Working at the scale of any big company is a truly different skill you need to learn alongside your designer toolbox and for lots of folks it's just not fun. Meanwhile, designers working 50-60+ hour weeks for innovative clients at an agency can feel energised because they're given the space to focus and obsess and perfect.

It's a bit too simple to say simplicity is the answer, because simplicity takes more time and more work. I would say that as powerful as the collaboration tools are today, working together in the same space IMHO is more productive, and generally, less stressful due to the lack of devices mediating between people. Less stress can contribute to less burnout. Systems are great, but just like Mike Tyson said " Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth". More flexibility as to how problems are solved can potentially reduce stress and, therefore burn-out. Most of all, the best way to prevent burn-out is to simply say no. i.e " No, we can't do that effectively in the time you are proposing". All the other good stuff, like outings with co-workers, shared lunches are great as long as folks don't have other stressors challenging their time at home or elsewhere outside work. We've made it a luxury to be able to allow people to engage in their non-work lives. That increases burn-out. Pie in the sky? Maybe, but managing a group of creatives is a delicate balance between freedom and constraints - encouragement and discipline. Less rigid rules, and more autonomy for responsible designers is best.