inkblurt

When I ran for the IA Institute board a couple of years ago, I’d never been on a board of anything before. I didn’t run because I wanted to be on a board at all, really. I ran because I had been telling board members stuff I thought they should focus on, and making pronouncements about what I thought the IA Institute should be, and realized I should either join in and help or shut up about it.

So I ran, and thanks to the membership of the Institute that voted for me, I was voted into a slot on the board.

It didn’t take long to realize that the organization I’d helped (in a very small way) get started back in 2002 had grown into a real non-profit with actual responsibilities, programs, infrastructure and staff. What had been an amorphous abstraction soon came into focus as a collection of real, concrete moving parts, powered mainly by volunteers, that were trying to get things done or keep things going.

Now, two years later, I’m rolling off of my term on the board. I chose not to run again this year for a second term only because of personal circumstance, not because I don’t want to be involved (in fact, I want to continue being involved as a volunteer, just in a more focused way).  I’m a big believer in the Institute — both what it’s doing and what it can accomplish in the future.

I keep turning over in my head: what sort of advice should I give to whoever is voted into the board this year? Then I realized: why wait to bring these things up … maybe this would be helpful input for those who are running and voting for the board? So here goes… in no particular order.

Perception rules

The Institute has been around for 8 years now. In “web time” that’s an eternity.  That gives the organization a certain patina of permanence and … well, institution-ness … that would lead folks to believe it’s a completely established, solidly funded, fully staffed organization with departments and stuff. But it’s actually still a very shoestring-like operation. The Institute is still driven 99% by volunteers, with only 2 half-time staff, paid on contract, who live in different cities, and who are very smart, capable people who could probably be making more money doing something else. (Shout-out to Tim & Noreen — and to Staff Emeritus Melissa… you guys  all rock).  But I don’t know that we did the best job of making that clear to the community. That has led at times to some misunderstandings about what people should expect from the org.

Less “Can-Do” and more “Jiu Jitsu”

Good intentions and willingness to work hard and make things happen isn’t enough. In fact it may be too much. A “can-do” attitude sounds great! But it results in creating things that can’t be sustained, or chasing ideals that people say they believe in but don’t actually have the motivation to support over time.

Jiu jitsu, on the other hand, takes the energy that’s available and channels it. It’s disciplined in its focus. Overall, I think the org needs to keep heading in that direction — picking the handful of things it can stand for and accomplish very well.

The Institute has a history of having very inventive, imaginative people involved in its board and volunteer efforts, and in its community at large. These are folks who think of great ideas all the time. But not every idea is one that should be followed up on and considered as an initiative. Here’s the thing: even most of the *good* ideas cannot be followed up on and considered an actual initiative. There just isn’t bandwidth.

I’d bet any organization that has a leadership team that changes out every 1-2 years probably has this challenge. Add the motivation to “make a mark” as a board member to the motivation to make members & community voices happy who are asking for (or demanding) things, and before you know it, you have a huge list of stuff going on that may or may not actually still have relevance or value commensurate with the effort it requires.

It’s easy in the heat of the moment of a new idea to say “yeah we love that, let’s make that happen” … but it’s an illusion created by the focus of novelty. I urge the community (members, board, volunteers, everyone) to keep this in mind when thinking “why doesn’t the Institute to X or Y? it seems so obvious!”  The response I’ve taken to having to those requests is: that sounds like a great idea… how’d you like to investigate making that happen for the Institute?

Anything that doesn’t have people interested enough to make it happen *outside the board* probably shouldn’t happen to begin with. The Board is there to sponsor things, make decisions about how money should be spent and what to support — but not do the legwork and heavy lifting. It’s just impossible to do that plus run the organization, for people who have paying, full-time jobs already.

Money & Membership

This is not a wealthy organization. The budget is pretty small. It only charges members $40 a year (still, after 8 years), and other than membership fees, makes a big chunk of its budget from its annual conference (IDEA — go register!). Where does the money go? Lots of it goes to the community — helping to fund conferences, events, grants, and initiatives aimed at helping grow the knowledge & skills of the whole community. It also goes to paying the part-time staff to keep the lights on, fix stuff & enable most of the work that goes on. The benefits are not just for paying members, by the way. Most of what the Institute does is pretty open-source type stuff. Frankly I’ve thought for a while now that we should move away from “membership” and call people “contributors” instead. Because that’s what you’re doing … you’re contributing a small amount of cash in support of the community, and you get access to a closed, relatively quiet mailing list of helpful colleagues as a “thank you” gift.

Whenever I hear somebody complaining about the Institute and “what I get for my forty dollars,” I get a little miffed. But then I realize to some degree the organization sets that expectation. It may be helpful for the next board to think about the membership model — which really may be more about semantics & expectations-setting than policy, who knows.

One thing the Institute has historically been afraid to do is spend money on itself. But then it tries to handle some tasks that would honestly be much better to pay others to handle. (Again, that can-do attitude getting us in trouble.) Historically, the board tried to handle a lot of the financial tasks through a treasurer (banking, recordkeeping, etc). It took a long line of dedicated people who gave a lot of their personal time to handling those tedious tasks. We finally hit a wall where we realized we just weren’t handling the tasks as well as we should as amateurs — we needed help. So we found an excellent 3rd party service provider (recommended by our excellent Board of Advisors) to take care of a lot of that stuff. (And it’s very cost-efficient — I won’t go into why and how here.)

One thing that comes up year after  year is that the board should have an annual retreat to ramp up new board members and spend concentrated face-to-face time bonding as a team, deciding on priorities & getting a shared vision. But there’s a lot of fear about spending the money (especially to fly international folks around) and the perception issue (see above) that the Board is blowing money on junkets or something.

But face time, especially if it’s moderated & structured, could go a long way toward building rapport & accountability and setting things up for success. This should be mandatory and written into the bylaws, and an explanation published on the site explaining why it is necessary. IMHO this may be the single biggest pitfall that’s gotten in the way of having a fully effective board, at least in my term.

Roads & Bridges

The infrastructure? It’s a hodgepodge of code & 3rd party services strung together through heroic efforts & ingenuity, over 8 years. A lot of it is pretty old & rickety. But honestly, it’s the 3rd party services that seem to be the biggest problem at times — for example the 3rd party membership system is messy and inflexible (though some excellent volunteer work is going on to switch systems to something that will integrate better with other web services).

I can’t tell you how many times over the last 3 years (1 as an advisor, 2 as a director) I’ve heard it said “we could totally do X better if we had the infrastructure” and just didn’t have the bandwidth or funding to move forward with that.

Progress is being made on several fronts, but the Institute needs an organized, passionate & well-led effort to deal with the infrastructure issue from the ground up. I do not mean that the Institute needs some kind of Moon Landing project. It needs to use a few easy-to-maintain mechanisms that take the least effort for maximum effect. One problem is that the infrastructure is supporting a lot of initiatives that have accrued over the last 8 years, some of which are still relevant, some of which may not be, and many of which should be reorganized or combined to better focus efforts (see the Can-do vs Jiu-jitsu bit above).

People will be people

This org, like any non-profit, volunteer-driven organization, is made up of people. And one constant among people is that we all have our flaws, and we all have complicated lives. We all have personalities that some folks like and some folks don’t. We all say things we wish we could take back, and we all do stuff that other people look at and say “WTF?”

While any organization like this is, indeed, made up of people … it’s a mistake to judge the organization as a whole by any handful of individuals involved in it. But it happens anyway.

So, since that’s inevitable, anyone running for a leadership position in an organization like this should be aware: being on the board is going to put you in a spotlight in a way that will probably surprise you. There are a lot of people who pay attention to who’s on such a list — and they look to you with a lot of expectations you wouldn’t dream other people would have of you. Just be aware that.

At the same time, remember to have some humility and openness about the people who came before you in your role, and their decisions and the hard work they did. Much of what I tried to do in the last 2 years turned out to be misplaced effort, or just the wrong idea … and some of the stuff that I think is valuable may end up being irrelevant in another year or two. That’s just how it goes. It’s tempting to go into a new role with the attitude of “I’m gonna clean this mess up” and “why the hell did they decide to do it like this?”  Just remember that somebody will likely be thinking that about some of your work & ideas a couple years from now, and give others the break you hope they may give you.

Signing Off

Speaking of people — it’s been an honor & privilege to serve with the folks I worked with over the last two years, and to have been entrusted with a board role by the Institute members. I hope I left the place at least a little better off than when I got there.

I had the privilege of hanging out with Allen Ginsberg for a few days back in a previous life when I wanted to be a full-time poet. At dinner one night, as he was working his way through some fresh fruit he’d had warmed for digestion (he was going macrobiotic because of his “diyabeetus”), he was talking about people he’d known in his past. He said something that stuck with me about his teachers & mentors through the years … I paraphrase: “You know, one thing I’ve learned … you don’t kick the people who came before you in the teeth.”  I think it’s important to keep that rule about the people who come after you as well.

I make this pledge to the incoming leaders & other volunteers: if I have an issue with the Institute, something it’s done or some decision it’s made, something that isn’t working right, or something a person said or did, I’ll strive to remember to avoid blurting an outburst or even grousing in private, because it’s best to communicate with you and ask “how can I help?” Otherwise, I have no room to complain.

A final note (finally!) … any good I and the other board members did was only building on the excellent efforts of the community members who went before … the previous boards, volunteers & staff. Thanks to all of you for the hard work you put in thus far … and thanks to those of you stepping up to offer your time, passion and ingenuity in the future.

So… here we are a year after the 2009 IA Summit in glorious Memphis. At the end of that conference, Jesse James Garrett, one of the more prominent and long-standing members of the community, (and, ironically, a co-founder of the IA Institute ;-), made a pronouncement in his closing plenary that “there are no Information Architects” and “there are no Interaction Designers” … “there are only User Experience Designers.”

There has since been some vocal expression of discontent with Jesse’s pronouncement.*

I held off — mostly because I was tired of the conversation about what to call people, and I’ve come to realize it doesn’t get anyone very far. More on that in a minute.

First I want to say: I am an information architect.

I say that for a couple of reasons:

1. My interests and skills in the universe that is Design tack heavily toward using information to create structured systems for human experience. I’m obsessed with the design challenges that come from linking things that couldn’t be linked before the Internet — creating habitats out of digital raw material. That, to me, is the heart of information architecture.

2. I use the term Information Architect because that’s the term that emerged in the community I discovered over 10 years ago where people were discussing the concerns I mention in (1) above. That’s the community where I forged my identity as a practitioner. In the same way that if I ever moved to another country, I would always be “American” there’s a part of my history I can’t shake. Nobody “decided” to call it that — it just happened. And that, after all, is how language works.

Now that I’ve gotten that out of the way, back to Jesse’s talk. I appreciated his attempt to sort of cut the Gordian knot. I can see how, from a left-brain analytical sort of impulse, it looks like a nice, neat solution to the complications and tensions we’ve seen in the UX space — by which I mean the general field in which various related communities and disciplines seem to overlap & intersect. Although, frankly, I think the tensions and political intrigue he mentioned were pretty well contained and already starting to die off by attrition on their own … 99.9% of the people in the room and those who read/heard his talk later had no idea what he was talking about. (Later that year I met some terrific practitioners in Brazil who call themselves information architects and were genuinely concerned, because the term had already become accepted among government and professional organizations — and that if the Americans decide to stop using the term, what will they be called? I told them not to sweat it.)

So like I said — I get the desire to just cut the Gordian knot and say “these differences are illusions! let’s band together and be more formidable as one!” But unfortunately, this particular knot just won’t cut. It probably won’t untangle either. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

When I heard Jesse’s pronouncement about “there are no” and “there are only,” I thought it was too bad it would probably end up muddying the effect of his talk … people would hyper-fixate on those statements and miss a lot of the other equally provocative (but probably more useful) comments he made that afternoon.

Why would I say that? Because over the years I’ve come to realize that telling someone what or who they are is counterproductive. Telling people who call themselves X that they should actually call themselves Y — and that a role named X doesn’t actually exist — is like telling someone named Sally that her name is Maude. Or telling a citizen of a country (e.g. USA, Germany, Australia) he’s not a “real” American, German or Australian.

Saying such a thing pushes deep emotional buttons about our identities. Buttons we aren’t even fully aware we have.

There are some kinds of language that our brains treat as special. If you show me a fork and tell me it’s a spoon, my brain will just say “you’re confused, really just look this up in the dictionary, you’ll see you’re wrong.” No sense of being threatened there, little emotional reaction other than amusement and slight concern for your mental health.

But language about our identities is different. That sort of language often reaches right past our frontal cortex and heads straight for the more ancient parts of our brains. The parts that felt fear when our parents left the room when we were infants, or the parts that make us eat whatever is in front of us if we’ve skipped a meal or two, even if we’re really trying to eat healthier that day. It’s the part that translates sensory data into basic emotions about our very existence and survival. Telling someone they aren’t something that they really think they are is like threatening to chop off a limb — or better, a portion of their face, so they won’t quite recognize themselves in the mirror.

Like I said — counterproductive.

Why would I go into such a dissertation on our brains and identity? Because it helps us understand why practitioner communities can get into such a bind over the semantics of their work.

A couple of years ago, I did the closing talk at IA Summit in Miami. The last section of that talk covered professional identity, and explains it better there than I could here. I also posted later about the Title vs Role issue in particular. So I won’t repeat all that here.

In particular — my own analytical side wanted to believe it was possible to separate the “role/practice” of information architecture from the need we have to call ourselves something. But I should’ve added another layer between “Title” and “Role” and called it something like “what we call ourselves to our friends.” It turns out that’s an important layer, and the one that causes us the most grief.

Since I did that talk, I’ve learned it’s a messier issue than I was making of it at the time. It’s helpful, I think, to have some models and shared language for helping us more dispassionately discuss the distinctions between various communities, roles and names. But they only go so far — most of this is going to happen under the surface, in the organic, emergent fog that roils beneath the parts of our professional culture that we can see and rationalize about.

It’s also worth noting that no professional practice that is still living and thriving has finally, completely sorted these issues out. Sure, there are some professions that have definitions for the purpose of licensure or certification — but those are only good for licensure and certification. Just listen to architects arguing over what it means to be an architect (form vs function, etc) or medical practitioners arguing over what it means to be a doctor (holistic vs western, or Nurse Practitioner vs MD).

I’m looking forward to the 2010 IA Summit in Phoenix, and the conversations that we’ll undoubtedly have on these issues. I realize these topics frustrate some (though I suspect the frustration comes mainly from the discomfort I explained above). But these are important, relevant conversations, even if people don’t realize it at the time. They mark the vibrancy of a field of practice, and they’re the natural vehicle for keeping that field on its toes, evolving and doing great work.

* Note: Thanks to Andrea Resmini, Dan Saffer and Dan Klyn for “going there” in their earlier posts, and making me think. If there are any other reactions that I missed, kindly add links in the comments below? Also, thanks Jesse for saying something that’s making us think, talk and debate.