Journaling About Creativity, Design, and Collaboration: 16. Make Sense of Things Gently

Another page from the journal shown here.

Continuing this series, where I share one page and transcription of a handwritten journal entry.

Make Sense of Things Gently

Page 16.

We build upon the work of others

and encounter situations of people

who are in a situation also building

on the work of others.

It's a timeline that includes

the now,

the before,

and the next.

Be gentle and curious to learn

how things got to where they are.

Build your understanding of now

based on or at least including

what came before.

Through humility, curiosity,

inclusion, and creativity

you can build and teach so

others find a gentle path

forward building sensibly

and making sense.

Brief reaction to transcribing this page.

When you're consulting it's like you're on stage to perform magic. At least that's how it feels. The company who hired you wants you to open a door they never saw but was there the whole time and the answers to all problems are in the newness just beyond.

Yet the problems and the answers and the learning to connect to it all sit right in front of us. Whether you're building a connected smart product, making a web comic, mobile app, software as a service, anything I've encountered in my career, the constraints you need to work with are here in front of you.

I emphasize that point because of encountering the opposite. Let's blame this situation on some reason, throw a new idea at it, celebrate that idea, get frustrated when we don't see enough improvement and now repeat the pattern. The new becomes the old and the blamed.

One example, I was consulting with a UX client and examining past work that lead to the current designs. Off-handedly someone at the client said some disparaging things about the prior consultants work when I started asking questions to learn how things arrived to where they are. I used that as a teachable moment to honor the work that came before. There's no way I'd be setup to move the design forward if they hadn't done the work to bring it to this point.