Carney’s Value(s)—Read the Book & More

Over the past week, I published a blog post reflecting on Canada’s existential crossroads ahead of yesterday’s election, sharing my personal belief that now—more than ever—we need leadership grounded in experience, global credibility, and sound economic stewardship. Enough Canadians evidently agreed: Mark Carney, who had been serving as Prime Minister, has now been elected to the role with a democratic mandate.

In that post, I explained why I see Carney as the most trusted leader to guide Canada through this era of economic and geopolitical turbulence as well as to focus on economic value along with societal values—an opinion shaped not by headlines or hearsay, but by reading his book Value(s): Building a Better World for All.

While there were certainly many positive reactions and thoughtful comments, the extremely negative response was immediate, intense, and frankly, shocking. Almost all of it came from men who were not directly connected to me on LinkedIn—only 2nd-degree (friends of friends) or 3rd-degree (friends of friends of friends) connections.

I responded civilly to many of the negative commenters who seemed open to respectful dialogue. But I stopped replying to those who clearly just wanted to insult me, question my character or motivations—or simply toss in a drive-by insult and vanish, with no real interest in conversation or understanding.

Let’s take a closer look at three main themes that surfaced in those negative comments.

Three main themes

What stood out were three main themes:

1. Character attacks against Mark Carney, largely based on his book—Value(s): Building a Better World for All

2. Comments dismissing the threats posed by the U.S. and focusing solely on domestic issues

3. The tone of the comments themselves.

Let’s start with the criticisms of Carney based on his book.

Throughout both online and in-person conversations, I kept hearing the same criticisms of Carney’s book repeated over and over. But the comments simply didn’t align with my own reading of the book. I couldn’t reconcile what people were saying with what I had actually read.

It eventually became clear—thanks to one commenter who shared a link—that most of these criticisms weren’t based on firsthand reading of Value(s) at all. Instead, they were largely drawn from a single, highly biased review published in the Conservative-leaning National Post, written by none other than Jordan Peterson.

The Danger of Secondhand Criticism

Jordan Peterson was once a reasonable psychology professor at the University of Toronto—where I also studied—but he pivoted dramatically after fame found him, adopting a performative intellectualism that resonates particularly with disaffected young men. Based on the comments on my post, it seems his appeal extends to many older men as well.

While Peterson’s speech often sounds profound, much of it relies more on rhetorical flourish than substantive argument—designed more to impress than to rigorously persuade. Yet persuade he did: not only many of the older men who commented on my post, but, no doubt, many others beyond it.

Many of the angriest criticisms came from men who seemed less interested in a balanced examination of leadership and values, and more in seeking easy ammunition, which Peterson’s attack provided.

So, let’s take a closer look at Jordan Peterson’s so-called “review” of Value(s)—and where it misleads.

Projection and Misrepresentation:

Peterson accuses Carney of presenting himself as a "world redeemer". In fact, Carney repeatedly stresses the importance of collective action and acknowledges that solutions must be imperfect and iterative. He shows humility, not messianic ambition. Strange that Peterson being a psychologist himself exhibits the classic phenomenon of projective identification, where someone attributes one’s own traits, feelings, or intentions onto someone else without realizing it. While Peterson himself tends to think of himself in grandiose ways and acting like he is savior and all-knowing, he’s projected that on Carney who doesn’t have that psychological syndrome at all.

Values Must Be Religious?

One of the more startling arguments in Peterson’s review of Value(s) is his assertion—either explicit or strongly implied—that no one has the credibility to speak seriously about values unless they do so from within a religious framework. That’s not just an odd requirement for a discussion of public policy or economics—it’s exclusionary and intellectually limiting.

Peterson criticizes Carney for trying to articulate values like fairness, sustainability, responsibility, and compassion without grounding them in what he calls the “Judeo-Christian” tradition. He seems to argue that because Carney doesn’t position himself as a religious moralist, his attempt to align markets with values is not just flawed, but illegitimate.

Setting aside the philosophical overreach of that claim, it’s particularly ironic coming from Peterson, who once identified as a secular academic and clinical psychology practitioner—like me—and only more recently appears to have rediscovered religion. That’s his personal journey, and he’s entitled to it. But it doesn’t follow that only religious people—or only people who express values through a religious lens—are entitled to shape public discourse around ethics, leadership, or the future of our economy.

Carney’s framework is not religious because it doesn’t need to be. His values—articulated through both his book and his actions—are rooted in global stewardship, intergenerational responsibility, and empirical evidence. They’re the kinds of values that appeal across cultural and ideological boundaries, precisely because they’re not confined to any one faith.

And yet, Peterson dismisses them as empty or dangerous—simply because they don’t echo his own current religious convictions.

Distortion of Climate Action:

Peterson interprets Carney’s call for climate-conscious financial systems as an endorsement of totalitarianism. This is a complete misrepresentation. Carney, in fact, advocates for market-based incentives and greater transparency—tools that empower investors and consumers to make informed choices—not for heavy-handed government control.

While it has become fashionable in certain circles—thanks in large part to the unhinged proclamations of Donald Trump, who famously called climate change a hoax—to dismiss environmental concerns as a cover for authoritarianism, any reasonable person who has studied the science understands that climate change is real, and that we are in serious trouble if we fail to act.

Carney approaches the climate challenge with nuance. He fully acknowledges that the energy sector remains an extremely valuable economic asset for Canada. Rather than advocating for the abrupt abandonment of traditional energy, he argues for a strategic transition toward sustainability—protecting both the environment and Canada’s economic interests. He recognizes that adaptation, not denial, is the path to future prosperity.

Peterson’s portrayal is not just off the mark—it is profoundly irresponsible. His distortions, much like Trump’s, contribute to a dangerously polarized environment where reasonable dialogue and pragmatic solutions are drowned out by ideological noise.

False Framing on COVID Analogy:

Carney references the collective response to COVID not as a playbook for authoritarian control, as Peterson wrongly claims, but simply as evidence that society is capable of coming together under pressure to act for the common good. Once again, Peterson appears determined to distort Carney’s message, grabbing at anything he can to frame it negatively. It’s genuinely disheartening.

What Carney highlights—and what I also believe—is that during the pandemic, it was inspiring to see people setting aside individual interests to protect and support one another, much like the widespread Canadian outrage when Trump insulted Canada by calling it the United States’ “51st state.” Moments of collective solidarity should be celebrated, not cynically dismissed.

It’s deeply disappointing that Peterson would so readily cheapen such a positive and unifying idea. Although Peterson often speaks of his personal turmoil, it’s striking that he seems unable—even when discussing acts of compassion and mutual aid—to acknowledge the good that people are capable of when they come together.

Caricaturing Carney's Values:

Peterson dismisses values like sustainability, fairness, and responsibility as little more than “globalist slogans,” without seriously engaging with Carney’s thoughtful historical and ethical arguments about restoring a moral foundation to capitalism.

I’ve written a lot about this myself—about how modern capitalism, left unchecked, often becomes devoid of humanity, driven by bullies, careless executives, caught up in negative contagion tipping points. Like Carney, I think we should have the audacity to make a better world.

Reading Peterson’s review, its tone and distortion are so extreme that it almost feels less like a critique and more like an attempted character assassination. It’s deeply disheartening to see someone who once engaged seriously with science and intellectual inquiry descend into this kind of intellectual dishonesty. Peterson has long since abandoned principled fairness in favor of performance—and in doing so, he’s betrayed the very principles he once claimed to stand for.

Misleading Tone Throughout:

To be clear, Carney’s book isn’t perfect. It’s long, occasionally meandering, and often dense. It could have benefited from tighter editing. But it is nonetheless a deeply serious, thoughtful, and hopeful work—an earnest effort to explore how we might realign our markets and societies to better reflect the values that sustain them.

Peterson’s review, by contrast, is a partisan diatribe—one that, unfortunately, has been uncritically absorbed and repeated by many who claim to be independent thinkers. It’s the height of intellectual laziness to rely on someone else’s interpretation without reading the original work.

I say this with some authority: I used to review manuscript submissions for the types of academic journals Peterson once published in, and I prided myself on holding authors to account when they failed to engage directly with source material. I remember one article that was widely cited—until I finally read the original myself and discovered that nearly everyone had misrepresented it.

That same dynamic played out in the comments on my LinkedIn post. Many who criticized Carney’s book clearly hadn’t read it themselves. And frankly, after reading Peterson’s mischaracterizations, I can’t help but wonder whether he actually read the entire book either.

Further Reflections: Carney and His Vision

Beyond correcting mischaracterizations, it’s important to proactively highlight the leadership qualities and vision Carney presents in Value(s).

• He consistently emphasizes humility in leadership—recognizing that solutions are always imperfect, and that true leadership lies in building resilient institutions rather than in self-promotion. His focus is on earning trust and acting with transparency.

• Carney’s vision of a “better world” is not utopian. It’s grounded in practical steps to re-anchor markets in long-term thinking, sustainability, and fairness. As he reminds us, markets must serve society—not the other way around.

• Far from being the elitist his critics portray, Carney is deeply focused on inclusive prosperity. He argues that resilient economies must work for everyone, especially those most vulnerable to shocks. This isn’t trickle-down theory repackaged—it’s structural, systemic, and morally urgent.

• Unlike what some critics suggest, Value(s) presents a leader who understands that markets must be grounded in ethics, leadership in humility, and prosperity in shared opportunity. His vision is one of resilience, fairness, and integrity—exactly what Canada needs now.

Let’s step back for a moment. In a world where so many political and industry leaders remain narrowly focused on shareholder returns and power consolidation, here is a former central banker who not only understands the economic system more deeply than most—but who actively seeks to rebalance it with societal and environmental values. That’s rare.

And for someone like me—who has spent much of my career making the case for a more human-centered, ethical approach to leadership and systems change—I wholeheartedly embrace Carney’s message. It’s not just refreshing. It’s essential.

Leader versus party

Many critical commenters either ignored or outright dismissed the threats Canada currently faces from the United States. Some even argued that concerns about Canadian sovereignty were fabricated by media sympathetic to the Liberal Party. Really?

It’s far more likely that these threats are well understood, but deliberately downplayed—because acknowledging them would highlight a clear vulnerability: Pierre Poilievre was not viewed as strong or credible on this issue. Better to say nothing than to draw attention to it.

There’s also the uncomfortable truth that much of Poilievre’s base sees Donald Trump as an admirable figure, so criticizing Trump’s insults or isolationist policies could risk alienating supporters. Silence becomes a political strategy.

We also saw some Conservatives diminish the importance of leadership altogether—shifting the narrative to focus solely on party platforms or local issues. Why? Because polling consistently shows that Poilievre performs poorly on leadership metrics when compared to Carney.

In fact, a comprehensive Abacus Data survey asked Canadians to compare the two across a range of attributes. Carney scored higher on nearly every meaningful leadership quality—especially in managing economic challenges, representing Canada internationally, and standing up to U.S. President Donald Trump.

Poilievre did come out slightly ahead in more everyday, relatable tasks—like organizing a family gathering or putting up a shelf. Seriously, that’s what the survey found! But when it comes to navigating the existential and geopolitical challenges Canada now faces, those aren’t the skills that matter most.

Even Ontario Premier Doug Ford acknowledged this dynamic. When an interviewer stated “Poilievre never pivoted towards a Trump-centered election. He never recognized that once you lost Trudeau, you lost the carbon tax, and you had to make a switch.” Ford replied: “100 percent. I ran my whole election on Trump and protecting Ontarians—protecting communities, jobs, and businesses.”

And it worked. Ford was reelected largely on that very message. Which begs the question: if Ford could recognize the importance of positioning against Trump to defend Canadian interests, why couldn’t Poilievre?

the extreme negativity of the comments

There were also positive and constructive comments, which I truly appreciated. I spend my days working alongside young, energetic, and talented individuals from around the world—all striving to make the world better. I frequently write blog posts and share them on LinkedIn, and while I always receive a mix of feedback—mostly positive, sometimes critical—it has always been civil and constructive.

That’s why I was so shocked to encounter the viciousness that erupted in the comments on this particular post—the anger, the personal insults, and an all-out hostility style of disagreement. Comments like:

“What a joke!”,

“Is this post a joke, it sure reads like one.”,

“Are you living under a rock?”,

“You’re such a joke, Karel. This post just made you even more ridiculous. Great achievement!”,

“Your piece here reads more like you’re lining yourself up to benefit should he win.”,

“It’s just stunning to me that some people will just drink the koolaid”,

“Every single factual allegation in your post is false.”,

“This post is the definition of cognitive dissonance.”,

“If you don't see the dark side of Carney, after reading his book, I question a lot of things about you and what you do Karel Vredenburg.”,

“What would make anyone support the most incompetent and corrupt group of politicians in Canadian history is beyond me and concerns me that someone would actually rationalize a reason to do so. Truly disturbing actually.”,

“Carney the Communist.”

—and more.

It is a tone that has, sadly, become all too familiar in our political discourse—and it reflects the style of Pierre Poilievre himself: adversarial, dismissive, and more focused on tearing down than on building anything lasting or hopeful.

The Canadian people have thankfully elected a leader who can offer more than anger and grievance and instead competence, integrity, and optimism, plus one who has a vision for the future that inspires, not divides.

Mark Carney, for all his imperfections, has that hopeful vision. His approach is grounded in real experience, serious engagement with complex challenges, and a profound belief that Canada’s best days are still ahead—if we act wisely and act together.

Thank you for reading this longer reflection. My aim was not just to respond to the intense debate, but to reaffirm something larger: that Canadians have chosen a leader who combines competence, integrity, and vision at a moment when those qualities are urgently needed. In Mark Carney, we have someone willing to meet the challenges ahead with seriousness, empathy, and hope. I believe we are fortunate he has chosen to serve—and if we act wisely and together, Canada’s best days truly can still lie ahead.

Canadians’ Existential Choice

Canadians head to the polls in just a few days—on April 28, 2025. I mention the year because, if we operated like the U.S., our next federal election wouldn’t happen for nearly two more years. But Canada and the U.S. differ—dramatically—in this and so many other ways.

You might wonder why I’m bringing up the United States in a blog post about the Canadian election. The reason is simple: what the American president has recently said and done—challenging Canada’s independence, existence, and sovereignty—has had an outsized impact on Canadian politics and identity.

Many Canadians are offended, angry, and fed up with how we’ve been treated. That frustration has led to a staggering 85% of Canadians boycotting American products and a 70% drop in travel to the U.S. The president’s decision to abandon decades of trade norms—imposing tariffs that violate the very agreement he himself negotiated and signed—crossed a line for many of us.

That said, there’s also value in looking south—not for guidance, but for cautionary lessons. Federal elections, after all, are defining moments. And the U.S. just lived through one that most Americans—regardless of how they voted—now view as a profound mistake. A loyal minority remains in denial, but the consequences of that choice are now undeniable—and they’re rippling outward, reaching us and pretty well every other country too except Russia.

I believe the most important aspect of an election isn’t the party or even the policies—because policies can shift or evaporate. What doesn’t change is the leader: their character, their credentials, their experience, and their behavior. That’s what endures. And that’s where our focus should be.

Mark Carney, Prime Minister of Canada (left) and Pierre Poilievre, Conservative Party Leader (Right)

LESSONS FROM THE U.S. ELECTION

What can Canada learn from the U.S. election fiasco? Plenty. Chief among them is this sobering fact: 38% of eligible Americans didn’t vote—and many who stayed home did so not out of apathy, but because they were dissatisfied with the Democratic candidate.

That candidate, Kamala Harris, is—on paper and in practice—a highly qualified, accomplished leader. She holds a bachelor’s degree in political science and economics from Howard University and a Juris Doctor from the University of California UC Hastings College of Law. Her resume includes roles as District Attorney, Attorney General of California, U.S. Senator, and Vice President. She is intelligent, capable, and deeply experienced.

Yet, many voters—especially younger and progressive ones—couldn’t bring themselves to support her. That had consequences. Donald J. Trump won the election by a razor-thin margin of just 1.5%, far from the “landslide” he later claimed. So, what are Trump’s credentials? A bachelor’s degree from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, where he has falsely claimed to have graduated at the top of his class. In reality, he never made the Dean’s List, and one professor even described him as the worst student he ever taught—hinting he may have needed help to graduate at all.

Trump inherited over $400 million from his father, burned through it with failed ventures, and oversaw six corporate bankruptcies. He built his persona on reality TV and has since performed that version of himself—“successful businessman”—to the public. But the record tells a different story.

So why did many Americans vote for him? Because they bought into the promises: to reduce inflation, cut costs, and create jobs. But now, in office, he’s doing the opposite—increasing financial instability, increasing costs, slashing jobs. Voters were also drawn to his populist persona: the name-calling, the “America First” rhetoric, the war on the press, the false claims that only he could “make America great again.” He painted the country as broken and himself as the only one who could fix it.

Had more voters looked beyond the theatrics—and read books like The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, where 37 mental health professionals warn of his behavior and fitness for office—they might have seen the deeper risk. Not just policy disagreements, but profound concerns about character, credibility, and judgment.

how do Canada’s leaders compare?

Pierre Poilievre

Given that we were just talking about Trump, let’s begin with the candidate who, for much of the past two years, styled himself as a Canadian Trump-in-waiting—Pierre Poilievre, leader of the Conservative Party and head of the Official Opposition. Poilievre studied Trump’s 2016 rise closely and began adopting his playbook: name-calling, falsehoods about his opponents, branding himself a champion of the “common people” against “elites,” and pushing the slogan “Canada First.” He portrayed the country as being in crisis and presented himself as the only one who could make Canada great again. Like Trump, he repeatedly attacked the press, labeled criticism as “fake news,” and even vowed to defund the CBC.

This Trumpian approach initially worked well for Poilievre—until Trump turned on Canada. His hostile rhetoric, including talk of making Canada the 51st state and other inflammatory statements, provoked a near-universal backlash here. Canadians responded with overwhelming patriotism, proudly affirming our sovereignty and rejecting the type of politics and behavior Trump represents. Suddenly, Poilievre’s alignment with Trump looked not strategic, but toxic. And yet, he hasn’t—and perhaps can’t—fully distance himself from Trumpism, as a significant portion of his base still supports it.

So what are Poilievre’s credentials to lead Canada? He holds a bachelor’s degree in international relations from the University of Calgary and has spent his entire career in politics. That alone would be a concern, but more troubling is his legislative record. Over two decades in Parliament, he’s consistently voted against transformative social programs—including the Canada Child Benefit, national $10-a-day childcare, dental care for low-income families, school food programs, and the First Home Savings Account. Environmentally, his record is even more stark: Poilievre has voted against nearly 400 climate protection measures and supported just 13. He’s blocked efforts to ensure clean drinking water for First Nations communities and opposed holding polluting corporations accountable. His voting pattern is not just regressive—it’s actively damaging to the future of this country.

Mark Carney

Contrast that with Mark Carney, who recently won the Liberal leadership race by a significant margin and, by virtue of the Liberals’ current governing position, is now serving as Prime Minister. His leadership arrives at a time of incredible global disruption, with Canada’s economic security and sovereignty directly threatened by a newly emboldened Trump administration. But Carney is perhaps the most uniquely qualified Canadian ever to step into the role at such a time. With an economics degree from Harvard (magna cum laude) and a doctorate in economics from Oxford, Carney combines world-class academic credentials with a lifetime of practical, international leadership. He held senior roles at Goldman Sachs across four global capitals before becoming Governor of both the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England—steering both countries through major financial crises: the 2008 crash and the fallout from Brexit.

Now, as Prime Minister, Carney is already demonstrating calm, intelligent leadership amid Trump’s aggressive tariffs and attacks on our sovereignty. He’s not only respected here in Canada—he’s deeply respected abroad. As the former UN Special Envoy for Climate Action and Finance and Vice Chair of ESG Investing at Brookfield Asset Management, Carney has built bridges with global decision-makers who matter most. While other leaders are retreating into nationalism, Carney is building global partnerships—anchored in innovation, sustainability, and long-term thinking.

In his timely book Value(s): Building a Better World for All, Carney makes a compelling case for integrating economic value with social and environmental values. As he puts it: we all know the value of Amazon—the company—but only know the value of amazon—the rainforest—when it’s destroyed for grazing land. We too often ignore the true value of things like the amazon until it’s gone. Carney is that rare leader who effectively speaks both the language of markets and the language of moral leadership. Under his leadership, Canada can become a global model for what responsible, future-ready governance looks like.

Your Ballot, Our Future

As you’ve seen from my past writing, I believe leadership is everything. I abhor bullies. I reject performative politics and careless leaders. And I celebrate courageous, even audacious, values-based leadership that dares to imagine and realize a better world. Yes, specific issues matter—but the character of the leader matters more. It’s what shapes everything else. To illustrate the difference between the two leaders, watch this interview with Pierre Poilievre and this one with Mark Carney. I think the choice is clear.

I’ve heard many of my Conservative friends echo what I heard from my Republican friends south of the border before their last election—words that many of them now regret. So I want to speak directly to those of you who are still undecided ahead of Canada’s election on April 28. Please: don’t vote based on promises or what your friends are saying. Vote based on your trust in character. Vote for leadership you believe will make this country stronger, fairer, and more resilient in an increasingly dangerous world. I agree that it’s time for a change in Canada—and Mark Carney is the change we need!

If more Americans had done that, the entire world would be in a better place right now.

Thank you for reading—and if you’d like to talk about any of this, I’d be happy to chat.

UX at a Crossroads

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the state of the design discipline—UX Design and UX Research—especially in light of recent trends.

In coaching conversations, I’ve heard from many talented people who are either out of work or worried about their job security. And they’re not alone.

Over the past few decades, our field made a remarkable journey—from the margins to the heart of innovation. But now, in many ways, we’re being pushed back again.

So I’m taking a different lens: the medical metaphor. In my latest blog post, I treat our discipline like a patient—checking its vital signs, diagnosing the issues, and prescribing a path not just for survival, but for renewed health and growth.

I recently spoke on this theme at the BLEND: DESIGN+BUSINESS CONFERENCE and the TorCHI speaker series—and this post pulls together and expands those ideas.

If you’re feeling uncertain about your role, or know someone who is, I hope this offers clarity—and maybe even some hope.

Assessment: The Vital Signs of UX

The data are stark:

• UX Design job openings are down 71% since 2022

• UX Research roles have dropped by 73% in the same period

• 4,000+ UX professionals have been laid off at major companies like Meta, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet, and IBM and they’re not stopping

Even those still employed report fewer promotions, more stress, and growing uncertainty. The patient—our profession—is showing signs of distress.

Diagnosis: What’s Making Us Sick?

This isn’t a single-issue condition. It’s a syndrome, made up of several interrelated factors that have combined to create the conditions for the situation we now find ourselves in.

Undisciplined Financial Planning & EMPLOYEE DEHUMANIZATION

Companies like Meta grew rapidly, only to reverse course and cut deeply—hiring 20% more one year and laying off 22% the next. This volatility undermines long-term investment in design. This is largely due to careless people in leadership, and what I’ve previously characterized as bullies. Rather than laying off staff as the last resort—executives in companies appear increasingly to be considering it as the first option to deal with financial issues. Of course, this also dehumanizes employees—communicating that they’re dispensable—both to the employees who are told to leave and also to those who remain who now worry that they may be next.

The Up-Skilling of Non-UX Roles

Many educators—including me—began training adjacent disciplines in Design Thinking. That made sense; after all, the entire multidisciplinary team benefits from thinking like designers. But I’ve always emphasized a critical distinction: learning design thinking does not make you a designer.

Unfortunately, not everyone has made that point clearly—or loudly—enough. And even if they had, careless executives looking to cut costs have seized on this blurred line. They justify reductions in design and research roles by claiming their teams now “know enough” to get by without dedicated professionals—or at least not as many.

Over the years, I’ve taught design thinking to thousands of people: executives, EMBA cohorts, and board directors. And each time, I’ve been explicit: adopting a designer’s mindset is not the same as having the expertise of a trained designer.

Still, we’re seeing a troubling shift. Leaders are now asking, “Do we still need designers?” Some mistakenly believe that a few introductory workshops can replace the depth and breadth of what professional design teams bring.

In trying to democratize our methods, we’ve perhaps gone too far without setting the right safeguards—and in the process, we’ve risked diluting the perceived value of our craft.

The Questioning of UX’s Value

At IBM, we hired nearly 3,000 designers and researchers—largely, I believe, on faith. If there was any explicit justification, it was probably Apple’s meteoric rise to become the world’s most valuable company, widely attributed to their superior design. Many other companies followed suit, hoping to replicate that success. But few organizations took the time to gather concrete business impact data. That lack of hard evidence is now catching up with us.

There’s also growing impatience with our pace, often expressed through comments like, “Designers and researchers just take too long.” These complaints typically come from those who don’t fully understand what UX professionals actually do. Beyond vague notions of “making things look nice” or “doing a user study,” there’s limited recognition in leadership circles of the deeper, strategic value we bring.

Even when we’ve explained it—clearly and repeatedly—too often, they simply don’t care.

The Shifting Overton Window

The Overton window is a powerful concept in political theory. It refers to the range of ideas considered acceptable or mainstream at any given moment. Ideas inside the window are seen as reasonable, “normal,” and safe to support. Those outside it are viewed as extreme, fringe, or even dangerous. And importantly, ideas don’t stay fixed—they move.

Take the legalization of cannabis. It was once unthinkable, then radical, then debatable, and now? It’s legal in places like Canada, which has become a global leader in the space.

But ideas can also fall out of the Overton window. Smoking, once widely accepted and even glamorized, is now largely socially unacceptable. Abortion, long considered a settled right, is moving out of the window in many jurisdictions—especially in increasingly regressive countries like the United States. The same shift is happening with trans rights. After years of progress toward inclusion and protection, we’re now witnessing a disturbing backlash.

Climate change awareness, diversity education, and DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) were recently considered mainstream. Today, they’re being actively pushed out—by corporations, governments, and cultural movements. Major tech firms have walked back their DEI commitments. A few years ago, that would have been unthinkable. Now, it’s a sign of a broader cultural retrenchment.

Even something as startling as the idea of Canada becoming the 51st U.S. state is being floated. And that’s the danger: once an idea enters public discourse—even satirically—it starts to gain traction. That’s how cultural shifts happen. And today, even once-sacred principles like workplace flexibility, immigration, and even democracy itself are teetering on the edge of the Overton window.

Which brings us to design. Yes, even design—once hailed as a strategic imperative, as essential to business and innovation—is now at risk of sliding out of favor. The data speak for themselves: we’re losing ground. If we care about the values design brings—empathy, clarity, inclusivity, human-centered thinking—we need to act to bring them back inside the window. Before they’re dismissed as “nice to have,” or worse, irrelevant.

Lack of a “House in Which to Practice”

One diagnostic idea I often return to is something I call “the house in which to practice.” It’s not a widely known concept—I discovered it years ago during my time as a clinical psychology intern. A supervisor said something then that’s stayed with me ever since.

We were working in a hospital, and I was growing frustrated by how little autonomy psychologists seemed to have. My supervisor turned to me and said, “You have to understand—psychologists and social workers don’t have a house in which to practice in a hospital. We’re guests. The house belongs to physicians and business leaders. Physicians always make the call. If you want to be effective in that environment, you need to know your role. Sometimes you’ll be central and valued, sometimes not—but doctors will always be core to the organization.”

That metaphor stuck with me—and I’ve carried it into my work in tech. Because I’d argue the dynamic is similar: in most technology companies, the house belongs to business leaders and engineers. Look at the data we’ve discussed earlier—engineering and business are the core disciplines. Designers and researchers? We’re guests in someone else’s house. We’re sometimes essential, even at the center of the action—but it’s not our house. And that means we can be asked to leave.

Some might suggest that design agencies offer a kind of independent house, but even there, you’re still beholden to whoever’s paying the bills. Ownership remains external.

Understanding who owns the house is key to understanding why design and research often feel precarious inside organizations. There was a time at IBM, for instance, when designers and researchers could seemingly do no wrong. Under Ginny Rometty’s leadership, we had strong executive sponsorship—we were almost put on a pedestal. It felt like we didn’t have to play by the usual rules. But that was a honeymoon period, not the norm.

Even at Apple—long regarded as the gold standard of design-driven companies—the reality has shifted. They once had a Chief Design Officer, and design was undeniably at the heart of the company. That’s not as true today.

And so this metaphor of the house helps explain a lot: why design and research can feel fragile, sometimes even dispensable. And that awareness should shape how we operate—how we build influence, how we communicate value, and how we fight for our place in the house.

GLADWELL’S REVENGE OF THE TIPPING POINT

Malcolm Gladwell describes this phenomenon as a kind of negative contagion in his most recent book, Revenge of the Tipping Point. Once one CEO or senior executive takes a certain action—especially one that yields short-term financial gain—others rapidly follow suit. It spreads quickly, almost reflexively, across the executive class. I explored this dynamic in more detail in a previous post—feel free to check it out if you haven’t already.

Prognosis: At a Crossroads

Let’s consider what all of this means for the prognosis of our discipline.

If we do nothing, I believe the outlook is grim. We might see minor recoveries here and there, but they’ll be marginal at best. It would be the professional equivalent of palliative care—managing decline rather than reversing it.

But if we take the right medicine and commit to aggressive, intentional treatment, we have a real opportunity—not just to restore the health of our profession, but to make it stronger, more resilient, and more valued than ever before.

Prescription: For Healing and Growth

Use Research to Design Your Own Career

One thing I’ve consistently seen—both in my own experience and across the industry—is that designers and researchers rarely apply their own methods to themselves. We expect others to understand and appreciate our work, yet we don’t use the same practices we champion to guide our own careers. But we should. We need to start thinking of ourselves as the product.

Think about the people who own the “house” we work in: business leaders, engineers, product managers. Use your research skills—the very ones you’ve honed professionally—to understand them. What do they care about? How do they make decisions? What motivates them? How can we present our work in a way that aligns with their goals and integrates naturally into their workflows?

In my coaching sessions, I’m often surprised by how many designers and researchers craft their résumés entirely from their own point of view. Ironically, they fall into the very trap we so often critique engineers for: designing based on what they think the solution should be, not on who will use it. How often do we truly consider the reader of our résumé or portfolio? Does it really help to send a 50-page portfolio just because you’ve worked on that many projects? Or would it be more effective to distill those experiences—highlighting key themes, outcomes, and impact—so it’s easy and compelling for someone scanning it under time pressure?

The same applies to interviews. In mock sessions I’ve run with coaching clients, many focus solely on what they want to say—what they’re most proud of—without considering what the interviewer is really asking or what they need to hear. We need to shift our mindset. Every touchpoint of your career—your résumé, portfolio, interview, even how you advocate for design within your organization—should be grounded in user-centered thinking.

We preach this approach every day. It’s time we practice it on ourselves. Your career assets should be the best-designed work you’ve ever done—in service of the most important product you’ll ever ship: YOU.

Learn the Language of Business and Engineering

We also need to deepen our understanding of business and engineering. As we’ve discussed, we’re often guests in houses run by these two disciplines—and if we want to thrive there, we need to understand the hosts. A Chief Design Officer in the C-suite shouldn’t just be an advocate for design—they should also be fluent in business and engineering, contributing meaningfully to all strategic conversations.

Do you need an MBA or an engineering degree? Absolutely not. That kind of knowledge is now widely accessible—and you should take advantage of it. You should be able to read a balance sheet, grasp the basics of the core technologies your team is using, and understand what’s required to bring your design ideas to life in real-world systems.

Don’t silo yourself within design and research. Broaden your lens. A deeper understanding of business and engineering won’t just make you a better collaborator—it will make you a more effective, strategic designer who earns trust, drives impact, and helps bring design back into the center of the house.

Demonstrate Clear Business Impact

Focus on business impact. One of the last things I did at IBM was help develop metrics we could actually track across teams. I told researchers: your job isn’t done when the study ends—it’s done when your insights are implemented, integrated into a product, and making a difference.

This mindset is especially critical for senior researchers. It’s not enough to surface insights—you need to follow through. Ensure your findings are understood, championed, acted on, and ultimately tied to measurable outcomes. That’s how you demonstrate impact.

At the end of the day, companies care about return on investment. If you can’t show how your work contributes to business goals—whether that’s increased adoption, reduced defects, improved conversion, or faster time to market—you risk being seen as non-essential. And in times like these, that’s a dangerous place to be.

Increase the Speed of Your Work

Speed matters. One of the most common complaints I’ve heard from leadership is that they don’t understand why design or research takes so long. And in today’s fast-moving environment, that explanation just doesn’t fly anymore.

We need to adapt. Look for faster methods when appropriate. If a deeper study is essential, run it in parallel with quicker approaches that can inform near-term decisions. Draft into the speed of the organization. Meet your stakeholders where they are—not where you wish they were.

Before I took on my role as head of research, I heard about months-long studies whose findings were irrelevant by the time they were delivered. That cannot happen. If we want our work to have influence, we need to stay in sync with the pace and priorities of the business.

Work Out Regularly with Other Disciplines

Get close to engineering, product, and business. Learn their language. Build trust. Too often, design programs silo their students—separating them from the very disciplines they’ll need to collaborate with in the real world. That has to stop. We should be learning to work across disciplines before we enter the workplace, not after.

At IBM, we created over 100 design studios around the world—spaces primarily filled with designers and researchers. Business and engineering colleagues had to enter our space. That setup made sense at the time. We were rebooting the design program and needed to elevate the role of design across the company. But today, I think it’s time we reverse that flow. Designers and researchers should spend more time in their spaces—the product team’s space. That’s how we build meaningful relationships, shared vocabularies, and mutual respect.

The disconnect starts early. In academia, design schools teach design. Engineering schools teach engineering. Business schools teach business. Students graduate having spent little or no time learning how to collaborate across disciplines—and they enter the workforce ill-prepared to do so.

I’ve long advocated for cross-disciplinary education and have actively supported programs that foster it. Designers need to understand others—and just as importantly, others need to understand us. That kind of mutual understanding is what creates strong, high-performing teams—and it’s how we bring design back to the center of decision-making.

Implant a Prosthesis—GenAI

This brings us to the next step in our medical metaphor: implanting a prosthesis. Think of an exoskeleton—it enhances your strength, but it doesn’t replace you. Generative AI is like that. The question isn’t “Will AI replace your job?” It’s how you choose to use it. In fact, those who fail to embrace AI wisely may be at greater risk than those who do.

We should be using AI to augment our work—not replace it. And we should also be designing AI thoughtfully into the products and services we help create. That’s not how it’s often done today. Too often, AI is bolted on as a gimmick—haphazardly, without clear purpose. That approach is not only ineffective, it’s often harmful.

At IBM, I worked with Carlos Rosemberg on frameworks for integrating AI into UX research workflows. If you’re assessing whether AI fits in a particular context, start by looking at the tasks involved. For example, synthesizing interview transcripts can take up to 30% of a researcher’s time—and it’s often a task researchers dislike. That makes it a strong candidate for AI support. But every implementation must be assessed for suitability, ethics, and environmental impact.

We should be designing responsible workflows—ones that boost productivity without destroying the planet. When you design with AI, your stakeholder map should include both users and the Earth. Build scenario maps that clearly define what humans will do, what AI will do, and what the outcomes should be.

For example, when producing the Life Habits Podcast, we use AI to generate questions, edit audio, and draft show notes—but I still use my own voice to keep the human element intact. We could fully automate the show, but we choose not to. It wouldn’t feel right. And that’s the point: just because you can automate something doesn’t mean you should.

Every AI implementation should pass an ethical review. Is it necessary? Is it helpful? Is it sustainable? Responsible designers must ask these questions. Because the real opportunity isn’t in handing off our work to AI—it’s in amplifying our humanity through it.

Use Strategic Foresight

One emerging trend I’ve been watching closely is the rise of “design engineers”—engineers who are also capable of designing. Companies like Anthropic and Perplexity are already exploring and investing in this hybrid role. On the surface, it sounds efficient: fewer handoffs, faster execution. But it also raises a critical question for traditional design roles.

If companies believe engineers can “do design,” it could lead to fewer dedicated design positions. That’s why we need to stay ahead of this trend—not just to protect our roles, but to evolve them.

We need to master AI, improve our speed and quality, and—most importantly—demonstrate the unique value we bring when design is done well. Especially as AI becomes more deeply embedded in products, our role in designing AI thoughtfully, ethically, and inclusively is more vital than ever.

Consider a Pivot to an Adjacent Discipline

This may feel radical or even drastic, but it’s worth seriously considering: pivoting to an adjacent discipline.

The truth is, the core skills of designers and researchers—empathy, problem framing, systems thinking, insight synthesis—are in high demand in fields like product management. And unlike more traditional professions, you won’t find many universities offering degrees in product management. Most product leaders learn on the job or through accessible online resources—and so can you.

There are similar overlaps between UX research and data science, where curiosity, analytical rigor, and pattern recognition are equally essential. Whatever adjacent discipline you explore, make sure you’re also leaning into generative AI. It’s not just about staying relevant—it’s about expanding your influence.

Your career isn’t limited to the title you hold today. You have more transferable value than you may realize. Stay adaptable. Stay curious. Stay in the game.

Run Pre-Mortems Regularly

Another concept I love—and one that’s especially relevant in uncertain times—is the premortem. In startup culture, there’s often so much excitement around an idea that teams forget to consider what could go wrong. A premortem flips the perspective: you imagine the project has already failed, and then ask, why?

We should apply the same thinking to our careers.

Imagine it’s five years from now and your career plan has completely failed. What went wrong? What did you overlook? What did you avoid addressing? And—most importantly—what can you do today to mitigate those risks?

Just like in design, anticipating failure isn’t pessimism—it’s strategic foresight. A career premortem helps us confront blind spots, build resilience, and make intentional choices that set us up not just to survive, but to thrive.

Practice Patience

Finally, a word about patience. Yes, we must act—but we also need to be patient. I truly believe companies will come to realize they need us. I’m now often on the other side, using products as a customer—and frankly, many of them are poorly designed. The need for skilled designers and researchers hasn’t disappeared. If anything, it’s becoming more obvious. The pendulum will swing back.

But while you wait, don’t just wait. Don’t just send out job applications and hope. Use this time to grow. If you’re out of work, invest in yourself. If you’re in a role that doesn’t fulfill you, build your skills, expand your influence, and prepare for what’s next. Especially if you’re a leader, focus on growth—for yourself and your team.

Good things come to those who wait—but only if they do more than wait. So lean into this moment. Sharpen your abilities. Strengthen your voice. Show your value. Take action where you can.

Let’s give our discipline the kick it needs to rise again—wiser, stronger, and more essential than ever.

⸻

A Final Note

It may feel dire right now. But we are not powerless. Much of what we’re facing is beyond our control—but what is within our control is what matters most.

So let’s lean in. Let’s push forward. Let’s design a better future—for our discipline, for ourselves, and for the people we serve.

Let’s get to work.

The Audacity to Make a Better World

People often ask me where I get the confidence—and even the audacity—to take on, launch, and lead large-scale, global “design for good” initiatives aimed at making the world a better place. It was one project that started it all: the Covid-19 Design Challenge.

It was the approach to that project—and the impact it had—that was transformative. It gave me not just the confidence, but also the blueprint for every initiative that followed—including the use of IBM’s powerful Enterprise Design Thinking framework. Each initiative began with a deeply held personal commitment, grew through the formation of the right partnerships, and came to life by inspiring and leading large groups of passionate professionals who volunteered their time and talent to make a difference.

PERSONAL COMMITMENT

I’ve always believed that the skills of designers and researchers shouldn’t be used solely to boost the bottom line of companies—what I refer to as feeding your wallet. I believe we also have a moral responsibility to apply those same skills in the service of humanity and the planet—to feed the soul. And those designers and researchers need to use the powerful framework of design thinking to have maximum impact. I had for several years been helping to transform IBM with our version—Enterprise Design Thinking—and many other organizations, as well as teaching the framework as an Industry Professor. I’d also used it to address small scale “design for good” projects with hackathons and university design challenges. So I knew that our form of design thinking worked.

DESIGN FOR AMERICA KEYNOTE

I shared these views in my closing keynote at the Design for America Conference in Chicago in the fall of 2019, where I issued a call to action: for designers and researchers to feed their souls by applying their skills to the world’s most urgent challenges. Just four months later, the world was plunged into the COVID-19 pandemic—and I saw that as our moment. The time had come to turn words into action.

COVID-19 DESIGN CHALLENGE

LIKE-MINDED PARTNERS

As the world began to reel from the emerging pandemic, I connected with Srini Srinivasan, then President of the World Design Organization, who was already thinking along similar lines. I also reached out to Rebecca Breuer, then Executive Director of Design for America who had experience with design-for-good initiatives but nothing on this scale. Fortunately, both were all in. The momentum has begun.

LIKE-MINDED VOLUNTEERS

I rallied the design community at IBM, and more than 100 incredible colleagues stepped up. Srini and Rebecca brought in another 125 volunteers from their networks. Together, we co-led a powerful initiative, powered by IBM’s Enterprise Design Thinking Coaches and supported by equally dedicated professionals from around the world. It became a masterclass in rapid, creative, collaborative problem-solving on a global scale.

DOING THE WORK

In just three weeks, we delivered. We launched social media campaigns, created tools, and activated community-driven solutions that had immediate, meaningful, real-world impact.

A HUGE THANK YOU

I want to express my deepest gratitude and a huge thank you to each and every member of our Covid-19 Design Challenge team! Your belief in the vision—and your willingness to act—proved what’s possible when design and research are harnessed not just for commerce, but for compassion and positive global impact.

If you’re not aware of the initiative, please take a moment to explore the remarkable people behind the effort, and see examples of the solutions they brought to life on our Covid-19 Design Challenge website. You an also read personal stories from the participants for whom the experience was a personal and professional life changing one, as it was for me.

confidence to do other audacious things

IBM SPARK DESIGN FESTIVAL

One of participants in the Covid-19 Design Challenge—Felix Portnoy—was so moved by the spirit of collaboration and purpose that he proposed a bold idea: a design festival to celebrate and build on that momentum inside IBM. With my guidance and support, the IBM Spark Design Festival was born—and quickly became an annual global event, bringing together IBM’s 3,000-strong design community around creativity, inspiration, and impact.

FUTURE OF DESIGN EDUCATION

As I spent time working with design schools and design faculty within universities, it became clear to me that design education needed to significantly change—to better prepare graduates for today’s workplace, but also to equip them take responsibility for having positive impact on the world.

That idea crystallized during a weekend in San Diego when I spoke with design visionary Don Norman, who shared my concerns and had already done some thinking and writing on the subject. I asked Don if he’d like to join forces to take on this challenge. He replied, without hesitation: “Let’s do it.” That’s how the Future of Design Education initiative was born.

Three weeks later, over a dinner in Toronto, Don and I selected the people we wanted to have on our Steering Committee, half from academia and half from practice. We spent most of a year structuring the initiative, identifying the challenges to be addressed, and clarifying what we wanted it to achieve together with the members of the steering committee.

It was the successful experience with the Covid-19 Design Challenge that led us to issue a call for volunteers that 697 people responded to. We used the responses from the applications to form working groups and while we didn’t use the full playbook, we did use the whole group of volunteers to provide input and feedback.

All that work resulted in the creation of curricular guidance for design education which was published in a special issue of the She Ji, TheJournal of Design, Economics, and Innovation.

HABITS FOR A BETTER WORLD

I was contacted by a Garret Chan, an executive at Tealeaves, a fascinating, high-end, sustainability-focused tea company based in Vancouver, Canada. Like me, Garret and his organization had collaborated with both the United Nations and Design for America. He proposed we do something together on a project focused on biodiversity loss, and exploring further development a design toolkit that his team had created.

We had several calls, but the direction hadn’t quite crystallized. During one of those calls, I offered to travel to Vancouver to meet in person. That’s when one of the team members on the call spoke up and said, “Karel, I’m actually based in Toronto.”

That person was Carly Williams, a phenomenal filmmaker and producer known for crafting beautiful, informative, and deeply impactful documentaries for Tealeaves and beyond.

Carly and I met for lunch, then continued the conversation in my office all afternoon. We quickly realized we were kindred spirits—aligned on a shared deep desire to address the world’s most pressing challenges: climate change, human and animal suffering, illness, food insecurity, and more with our combined skills of design, research, and filmmaking. We started by co-leading a small-scale Biodiversity Toolkit workshop at OCAD University as part of the DesignTO Conference, while quietly laying the groundwork for something far more ambitious.

Following the same playbook I had used for previous initiatives, I posted a call for volunteers on LinkedIn. The response was overwhelming: 60,000 impressions, 600 reactions, and 450 applications. From that, we formed a core team of 300 volunteers, and Habits for a Better World was born.

Since then, the team has conducted multiple research studies, generated and storyboarded inspiring solutions, and we are now entering the production phase—bringing these ideas to life to spark meaningful, global behavior change.

See more about the project and our progress on our website.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Each of these projects was made possible because of one extraordinary experience: the Covid-19 Design Challenge. That initiative didn’t just prove that large-scale, volunteer-driven impact was possible—it became the blueprint for how design, research, and now filmmaking can be harnessed to help build a better world guided by properly executed design thinking.

It showed what’s possible when committed individuals come together with intention, skills, and impact.

So once again—to everyone who contributed to that first bold step: a huge thank you! You helped light the path for everything that followed.

Tipping Point V2: Layoffs, RTO, & AI

I just finished reading Malcolm Gladwell’s latest book—Revenge of the Tipping Point. I’ve been struck by how clearly the ideas in the book can be used to explain what’s happening in the corporate world right now—particularly in how businesses are handling layoffs, return-to-office mandates, and AI adoption.

Gladwell reprises his initial seminal best-seller—The Tipping Point—25 years after its publication. The concept of a “tipping point” in that first book was used to explain how good ideas, innovations, and behaviors can suddenly go viral and transform entire systems. But in Revenge of the Tipping Point, he shows how the same mechanics can work in reverse—how harmful, short-sighted, or destructive practices can spread just as fast, and with just as much force.

He shows how destructive behaviors—such as bank robberies, vaccine hesitancy, school shootings, hoarding during crises, bullying, and even distrust in institutions—can spread through social contagion, reaching tipping points where they become normalized and self-reinforcing across communities and cultures.

RESEARCH, CASE STUDIES, AND MODELS TO UNDERSTAND THE WORLD

If you’ve read any of my previous work, you’ll know I’m drawn to research, case studies, and frameworks that help us make sense of the world—so we can understand it more deeply and develop strategies to drive meaningful, positive change.

I used Game Theory to understand the current U.S. defection from globalization, differences in brain structures to understand people leaning more politically conservative versus liberal, brain hemispheric specialization to understand individuals, civilizations, and even my own neurologic journey, bully behavior to understand the actions of corporate leaders and leaders of governments, free markets, competition, and capitalism to understand how far current corporate leaders and leaders of governments are straying in their actions from the systems they otherwise champion, and careless leaders to understand how leaders can stray from even basic ethics and integrity.

UNDERSTANDING THE ACTIONS OF CORPORATIONS

Let’s explore three phenomena in the corporate world that I think illustrate the central thesis of and the framework expressed in Gladwell’s Revenge of the Tipping Point.

LAYOFFS

A few major players—Meta, Amazon, Google—cut tens of thousands of roles. Then others followed. Not because they had to, but because it had become normalized. Even profitable companies jumped on board. What began as a targeted response to market uncertainty quickly morphed into a trend, then into a reflex. It became a narrative: cutting staff is the expected first move for leadership facing short-term financial pressures. Boards rewarded it. Shareholders applauded it. Companies that didn’t follow suit worried they’d appear inefficient or complacent. The fear was contagious—and shared by boards and investors alike. What was largely missing from the equation was the human cost: careers disrupted, lives upended, futures destabilized. That reality was quietly reframed as acceptable collateral damage in the relentless pursuit of efficiency.

RETURN TO THE OFFICE MANDATES

The same pattern holds true for return-to-office mandates. One or two influential companies announced they were bringing everyone back, justifying the decision with familiar language around collaboration, innovation, and culture. Others quickly followed—not because the data supported it, but because it projected decisiveness and control. This, despite a growing body of evidence showing that remote and hybrid work not only sustain productivity but often enhance it. Employees had found new rhythms, rebalanced their lives, and continued to deliver. Yet many are now being pulled back under rigid office policies that feel arbitrary and out of sync with reality. What we’re witnessing isn’t a strategic shift grounded in what’s best for organizations or their people—it’s a reassertion of old norms, fueled by hierarchy and habit. Once again, it’s Gladwell’s contagion effect at play: if others are doing it, it becomes the default move—even when it erodes trust, morale, and the very culture it’s supposed to protect.

AI ADOPTION

Now, we’re seeing the same tipping point forming with AI. Shopify’s CEO recently instructed employees that they must prove AI can’t do a job before requesting to hire a new person. It’s a striking reversal of the traditional hiring mindset—assuming a machine can do the work unless proven otherwise. And Shopify isn’t alone. Across industries, companies are rapidly adopting generative AI not just to augment human work, but to eliminate roles entirely. In many cases, these decisions are made without deep consideration of the longer-term consequences like the erosion of workplace culture, the suppression of creativity, the displacement of skilled professionals, and the broader societal impacts. Once again, it’s Gladwell’s concept of contagion. When influential players normalize a behavior—even one as drastic as replacing humans with machines—others feel compelled to follow suit. It becomes less about strategic transformation and more about keeping up with other leaders. And just like the layoff wave, it’s being driven as much by perception and peer pressure as by necessity or ethics.

IMPACT OF THESE CONTAGIONS

These three trends—layoffs, forced return-to-office mandates, and AI replacing workers—have something important in common: They’ve tipped in a Gladwell sense. Not because they’re wise, but because they’ve been imitated, amplified, and normalized.

They also share another quality: they all devalue employees. They treat humans as manipulatable and expendable. And they create a work culture where fear, control, and short-term metrics override trust, autonomy, and long-term wellbeing.

As I wrote previously, over 220 million LinkedIn users—more than 21% of the platform—have marked themselves as "Open to Work." That’s not just a data point. That’s a disastrous result of contagion inspired corporate leader actions.

The persona of a corporate leader that has been normalized is one who somewhat mechanistically focusses on productivity, cost reduction, and shareholder value while ignoring human qualities of empathy with employees, fostering a good corporate culture, and having people leadership skills. Interestingly, some have argued that leaders like this could easily be replaced by AI robots.

We need some countervailing initiatives to inspire positive contagion.

HOW CAN WE IMMUNIZE AGAINST THESE CONTAGIONS

As mass layoffs, rigid return-to-office mandates, and the unchecked replacement of human workers with AI continue to accelerate, the need for a countervailing force has never been more urgent. That’s why I’m forming a new volunteer group—focused on inspiring a more just, employee-centered, and equitable world of work. Rather than accepting these trends as inevitable, we’ll use research, design, and storytelling to challenge harmful norms and spark meaningful change. This new initiative will join our existing Habits for a Better World teams—a global collective of over 300 researchers, designers, and filmmakers already working to drive large-scale impact.

I’m deeply grateful to those who have already reached out to be part of this growing movement. If this resonates with you, I invite you to DM me on LinkedIn. Let’s lean into the power of agency, collective action, and creativity—and help shape a future that truly puts people first.

A Case Study in Taking on Exec Bullies

I just finished reading Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams, and I can’t stop thinking about its resonance with the themes I’ve explored in previous posts—especially around toxic and unethical executive leadership and my advocating for people to realize that they have individual agency to fight back against those in positions of power. Sarah Wynn-Williams did that. And wow, did she ever!

ZUCK WANTED the book BANNED

Interestingly, it’s the book that Mark Zuckerberg tried to ban—automatically making it a #1 New York Time Bestseller. And once you read it, you’ll know why. It’s shocking and way worse than even I could imagine leaders to be—and I’ve witnessed some pretty troubling behavior in my time. What’s laid out in Careless People isn’t just disappointing—it’s disturbing, systemic, and a wake-up call for anyone who still believes these tech giants are guided by integrity and any semblance of decency and ethics.

In Careless People, Wynn-Williams offers a rare inside view of how some of the most powerful executives in tech weaponize their influence—often behind closed doors, but sometimes right out in the open. She outlines her time at Facebook (now Meta) in her role as Director of Public Policy. She names names and shares the most intimate details of the daily workings, discussions, and decision-making. Wynn-Williams particularly calls out key executives like Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, and Joel Kaplan—for what they did and for what they allowed to happen—in truly despicable, inhumane, and likely illegal ways. I can’t look at these people again without experiencing deep distain.

A TOXIC OPERATOR AND PREDATOR PROTECTED AND PROMOTED

Joel Kaplan, the former VP of Global Public Policy, is portrayed as a politically motivated operator who wielded immense influence to push corporate decisions in directions that served political interests over ethical responsibility. Wynn-Williams shows how his alignment with conservative causes—often at odds with the company’s stated values—shaped internal policy and culture in ways that undermined trust and transparency. According to the book, Facebook staff embedded with Trump’s team, for example, to craft targeted ad strategies, using tools like “Custom Audiences” and “Lookalike Audiences,” which contributed to Trump’s substantial ad spending on Facebook and in turn ascendancy to the White House.

In her memoir, Sarah Wynn-Williams details instances of alleged misconduct by Kaplan. She recounts that Kaplan regularly made inappropriate comments and inappropriate behavior. She recounts that during her maternity leave, following severe childbirth complications that led to a coma and emergency surgery, she received a performance review criticizing her for not being “responsive” enough to work communications—while off work and largely unconscious! What Kaplan did also happens to be illegal but none of this mattered at Facebook because an apparent internal investigation cleared Kaplan of all accusations—and of course they did—a company this devoid of any moral compass. Instead, they promoted him.

“LEAN IN” WAS DISINGENUOUS AND PERFORMATIVE

Sandberg’s portrayal is, perhaps, the most striking. The woman who authored Lean In, a manifesto urging women to assert their voices in male-dominated spaces, is revealed to have actively undermined those who did exactly that within her own organization. Wynn-Williams shares how women—herself included—who raised concerns about unethical behavior, disinformation, and a toxic internal environment were not championed by Sandberg, but instead ignored, dismissed, and quietly discredited. According to Wynn-Williams, Sandberg prioritized internal loyalty and public image over morality and support for those risking their careers to do the right thing.

This glaring contradiction between Sandberg’s public advocacy for female empowerment and her private participation in silencing dissent highlights a deeper issue I’ve explored often in my writing: performative leadership. When values are reduced to marketing slogans, and ethics are only considered when they serve reputation management, the damage isn’t just internal—it ripples outward across the tech industry and society at large. Sandberg, whose personal brand is built on empowering women to speak truth to power, becomes in Wynn-Williams’ account an example of what happens when the pursuit of personal influence outweighs the commitment to integrity.

Wynn-Williams alleges that Sandberg not only failed to support her and other women who raised concerns about inappropriate behavior by male executives—but that Sandberg herself engaged in similar inappropriate behavior with staff and colleagues. Once again, Facebook’s internal investigation cleared her of all allegations. There’s a painfully familiar pattern here, and with each page I read, my respect for the company eroded even further.

GROWTH AND PROFIT AT ANY COST THAT BROKE THE WORLD

At the center of all of this is Mark Zuckerberg himself, portrayed as a leader so wedded to growth and control that ethical guardrails were seen as optional. According to Wynn-Williams, dissent was not simply not an option—it was actively suppressed. A culture of bullying, gaslighting, and quiet retaliation thrived under the public image of innovation and progress.

Wynn-Williams describes Zuckerberg as obsessed with dominance—of markets, narratives, and even in playing board games—with staff always letting him win. He is depicted as creating a workplace where loyalty was measured not by integrity or results, but by silence and obedience. Leadership meetings, she writes, weren’t about open discussion; they were performances, with Zuckerberg making decisions behind closed doors and expecting those around him to obediently fall in line. Staff who raised ethical concerns or dared to question Facebook’s impact on democracy, misinformation, or even public safety were marginalized or pushed out.

What I found the most troubling was the sense that Zuckerberg understood the harm Facebook could cause or was causing—but he chose not to act. Growth, profit, and control of the narrative were his only priorities. Whether dealing with foreign interference, hate speech, or executive misconduct, he consistently prioritized Facebook’s power and profitability over the well-being of users, employees, or society itself. Of all of the executives described in the book, Zuckerberg stands out as the most despicable and he had some serious competition considering Kaplan and Sandberg.

The CEO often sets the example—and Zuckerberg certainly did at Facebook—driving remarkable growth and financial success for the company, but at the cost of trust, accountability, employee well-being, the integrity of the platform, and, most critically, real harm to the world itself: undermining democracies, fueling misinformation, deepening polarization, and eroding the social fabric across countries and communities.

MORE THAN A DISGRUNTLED EMPLOYEE’S STORY

It’s easy to discount the book as just the bitter recollections of someone who was fired—but I think that would be a mistake. The level of detail in her account is phenomenal, and what makes it even more compelling is how closely her experiences align with years of reporting, leaks, and whistleblower accounts from inside the company. This isn’t a single voice in isolation—it’s a deeply informed, insider perspective from someone who was there at the top of the company that adds context, depth, and a personal perspective to what we’ve only seen from the outside. It doesn’t read as vengeance, but as a call to understand what actually goes on in companies like this and how they’ve been allowed to exist unchecked for so long.

THE POWER OF INDIVIDUAL AGENCY

What makes Careless People so compelling—and so deeply aligned with the themes I’ve written about—is that it’s not just an account of leadership gone wrong. It’s also a case study in individual agency done right. Sarah Wynn-Williams could have stayed quiet. She could have protected her career, maintained her network, and moved on like so many others have. Instead, she chose to write. To name. To expose. To take on these executives in the most public of ways. That decision, made being fully aware of the personal and professional risks, is the very definition of agency.

Her story reinforces a message I’ve returned to again and again: change comes from courageous individuals choosing principle and doing the right thing over comfort. From people refusing to let toxic behavior go unchallenged. From speaking out, even when the cost is high.

In the world today—where power is often concentrated in the hands of the few, and the stories that reach the public are carefully curated—voices like Wynn-Williams’ matter more than ever. Careless People isn’t just a behind-the-scenes exposé of the deep executive dysfunction in much of the tech sector in particular, it’s a reminder of the power of individual agency in speaking truth to power.

CALL TO ACTION

As I finished Careless People, I found myself thinking not just about what Wynn-Williams endured and so many other women and others do every day, but about what she represents—a growing number of people who are no longer willing to stay silent in the face of power’s misuse. Her story is a reminder that we each have a role to play in shaping the cultures we work and live in.

I invite you to reflect on your own spheres of influence. Where might you speak up? What might you challenge? And how might we collectively build systems where values aren’t just words—but lived practices in our worlds? While it’s always wise to be mindful of any agreements you’ve signed when joining or leaving a company, don’t let caution eclipse your voice. There are often still powerful ways to speak up, advocate for change, and stand in alignment with your values.

And that’s the call to action I hope we all take seriously.

Don't Layoff Employees or Impose Tariffs: Make Better Products

I find it odd that the same people who champion free markets, competition, and capitalism are often the ones who, as corporate leaders, lay off employees to artificially boost short-term profits—and who, as national leaders, manipulate the market with tariffs to make foreign products more expensive in order to prop up domestic financials. I think it’s worth stepping back and looking at all of this through the lens of simple, first principles.

RAMIFICATIONS

These bizarre practices have not only been normalized in the way many companies are run—they’re now creeping into how some countries, particularly the United States, are being governed. While they may seem beneficial to some on the surface, they carry several serious and far-reaching negative consequences.

For companies, I believe that these practices lead to the following:

• Morale sinks for those who remain—knowing they could be next, and that employees are seen as ultimately dispensable. They understand being let go for sustained poor performance, but it’s the unsettling reality that even those doing good work can lose their jobs at any moment due to a workforce reduction. That constant uncertainty is what makes it so deeply stressful.

• The companies’ financials no longer reflect true financial health, making it difficult for investors to assess actual performance.

• Laid-off employees are often devastated and demoralized, left worrying about how they’ll support themselves—and their families, if they have them. For U.S. workers in particular, the anxiety is compounded by the loss of healthcare, since the United States remains the only major developed country without universal, government-supported coverage.

For countries—most notably the U.S., or more specifically, Donald J. Trump in this case—tariffs result in the following:

• These actions have eroded trust among nations—particularly those that once considered the U.S. a close ally—leaving many to conclude that the country can no longer be relied upon as a stable and dependable partner.

• In response, countries around the world are actively working to diversify their economies and reduce their dependence on the U.S., forging new international trade relationships that sideline American involvement.

• American consumers are paying the price, with higher costs for imported goods due to tariffs, while investors are seeing their portfolios shrink as market uncertainty drives down stock values.

AN ALTERNATIVE APPROACH

Instead of manipulating financials and markets through artificial means, I’d like to propose that we return to celebrating the true spirit of a market economy—one grounded in free trade, fair competition, and stakeholder capitalism.

For Companies

Rather than laying off employees to artificially inflate short-term financials, companies should recommit to their people. Support their growth, invest in their development, and build cultures rooted in trust, care, and purpose. When employees feel secure and valued, they’re more creative, more productive, and more willing to go the extra mile.

Rather than taking shortcuts, focus on creating better products to achieve authentic, sustainable profitability. Researchers and designers play a critical role in making that happen. UX researchers use rigorous methods to uncover unmet user needs, evaluate early solutions, and reduce the risk of expensive missteps. Designers translate those insights into user experiences that address real challenges, differentiate offerings, and continuously improve through iterative feedback.

It honestly baffles me that so many companies are laying off researchers and designers—the very people who help ensure products succeed. Since retiring from IBM, I’ve been co-leading a nonprofit, Habits for a Better World, and now find myself on the receiving end—a user of the very products built by the companies making these cuts. And I have to say: the decline in quality is obvious. The design and user experience in many products are suffering. In my view, no company can thrive long-term with a hollowed-out design and research team.

For Countries—Particularly the U.S.

Instead of manipulating the market with tariffs to make foreign products artificially expensive—and thereby give domestic products an unfair advantage—I believe the U.S. should do the harder, more honest work: build better products and compete on merit.

Take EVs, for example. While Tesla initially led the global EV movement, it has since lost its way. China’s EV makers—especially BYD—have surpassed Tesla, both in technology and design. Meanwhile, Tesla’s CEO has become more of a distracted social media influencer and de facto political figure than a focused business leader. The whimsical launch of the Cybertruck, absent real research or user validation, is one glaring example of how far the company has strayed.

Contrast that with BYD: no flashy celebrity CEO, just steady, focused progress on technology, innovation, and design. They now outsell Tesla, proving that disciplined design and product excellence still win.

Frankly, if Tesla hopes to recover, the CEO should step aside so new leadership can re-center the company on what matters: innovation, design, and quality.

And Tesla isn’t alone. In sector after sector—from AI, drones, and aircraft to high-speed rail, solar panels, semiconductors, biotechnology, and green energy—other countries have taken the lead.

So instead of trying to reshape the competitive landscape through tariffs, if the U.S. expects to be relevant in the future, it should focus on doing what it used to do best: building world-class products that speak for themselves.

Conclusion

This isn’t a criticism of hardworking Americans. Quite the opposite. It’s a critique of the leaders—those at the helm of companies and of the country. If they truly believe in capitalism, they should honor free markets, fair competition, and the principles of stakeholder capitalism—not game the system at the expense of people, progress, and product quality.

Fighting Back Against the Bullies of the World

I’ve been reflecting on the state of the world and how it’s changed over the course of my life—both personally and geopolitically—and I conclude with some recommendations for dealing with the world as we experience it today.

BULLIES IN THE SCHOOLYARD

When I was in elementary school, there was a group of boys who would taunt and bully other students in the schoolyard at recess or after school. They particularly liked to taunt kids who were different from them—like me—given that I was a recent immigrant. I usually just avoided them because even at that age, I was a pacifist and abhorred violence. One day the lead bully pushed me too far, literally. Even though I was a pacifist, I still believed in defending myself from physical harm. So, I hit back. Hard. Really hard. Then another of his friends went after me and I gave him the same treatment. It was my pent-up anger at what they’d done to me and also to all the other kids—I was doing it for me and them. I was big for my age so I did some damage. The bully and his friends were shocked, cleaned the blood off their faces, and walked away. They never bothered me—or my friends—ever again.

BULLIES IN HOCKEY

I played hockey when I was a teenager. I loved the choreography of plays, the incredible pace of the game, and the teamwork required for winning. I started later than most kids but learned quickly and earned a scholarship to a hockey camp. There, they taught and drilled us on the fundamentals—like being able to stick handle an egg down the ice, starting and stopping with incredible agility, and being able to skate at phenomenal speed. However, one NHL star who was an instructor also taught us some dirty tricks—like how to pull your stick up into your opponent player’s face when coming out of a check or trip someone when the referee wasn’t looking. While I loved honing my skills, I was appalled at the dirty tricks.

At the time, international tournaments between Canada and the Soviet Union were played on larger rinks with more graceful, skill-based rules. That style of play aligned with my pacifist character. But the NHL—especially as expansion teams emerged in the U.S.—grew rougher and more violent. Instead of retaliating with checks or fists, I channeled my frustration into fast skillful skating and fierce slapshots. I played the game the way I believed it should be played—and those slapshots won us many games.

BULLIES IN BUSINESS

When I began my career at IBM nearly four decades ago, the company stood out not only for its technological leadership but for its deeply human-centered culture. At the heart of that culture was a core value: “respect for the individual.” This wasn’t just a slogan—it was embodied in policies like the Full Employment Commitment, also known as the “No Layoff Policy.” IBM pledged not to lay off employees due to economic downturns or financial challenges. Instead, it committed to finding ways to reassign staff or support their transition into new roles. When a job became obsolete—often due to evolving technology—IBM didn’t show people the door; it invested in reskilling and retraining them for new opportunities within the company. Employees were frequently relocated to other departments or regions, and during that transition, their salaries and benefits were protected. It was a model built on loyalty, trust, and the belief that people were a company’s greatest asset.

Why did IBM have this policy? The company believed that loyalty to employees fostered loyalty in return, leading to a stronger, more committed workforce. They valued expertise and experience, so rather than firing people, they aimed to retain and retrain them. And this “family-like” culture led to employees feeling secure, valued, and passionately committed to the company. It is also credited with establishing IBM as the trend-setting and most successful computer company in the world at the time.

Five years after I started at the company, the layoffs started and, as a manager, I had to handle many of the layoff communications. The reason for letting employees go that we were told to communicate to employees was that it was their poor performance. We went through three waves of layoffs, with the third one being the most difficult. I was being asked to let my top performer go for performance reasons. I told my manager that I thought that would be unethical and that I decided to step down from my role as manager so as not to have to do something that I felt was unethical. A few years later, I was required to become a manager again given a new rule that required all technical leaders to also be managers. While I enjoyed being a manager, I still refused to do things that I considered to be unethical.

While IBM was no longer the same company I joined, it remained, for most of my career, a truly great place to work—one where I felt proud of the work I did and the people I did it with. In the final year or so of my tenure, I felt a noticeable cultural shift that echoed some of the same ethical concerns I’d experienced earlier in my career. It was one of several factors that led me to retire earlier than I had initially planned. In addition, one of the most disheartening signs of what I consider to be IBM’s departure from its long-standing culture of “respect for the individual” was a quiet but unmistakable embrace of ageism that I experienced. Despite my decades of service, the last six years—my highest-earning years—were excluded from my pension calculation, and I wasn’t granted extended employee health benefits. I challenged the decision but ultimately had to accept it. The experience left me feeling that older employees were no longer being valued in the way they once were. I challenged the decision, but the company’s response made something sadly clear: the respect that once defined IBM’s culture was gone. They no longer care.

But I do mourn what I consider to be the loss of a culture that once put people first. From my perspective, the shift in leadership tone and priorities during my final years at IBM signaled a departure from the values that once made it such a remarkable place to work. At the same time, I’ve found renewed purpose in co-founding and leading Habits for a Better World—a nonprofit committed to countering the damage done by the bullies of our time.

And it isn’t just IBM, all tech companies and even beyond tech now have bullies in their executive ranks who have virtually no respect for the individual—their employees—in the many ways of dealing with their staff. I think that’s unconscionable. Many people who seek me out for career coaching are casualties of this macho leadership culture. If firing a few thousand employees will improve the company’s bottom line for a quarter, these executives will do that.

The model used to be that a company’s success depended on three equally important stakeholders—employees, customers, and shareholders. I believe that that model is all but gone with most companies, especially those in the tech sector, given that they have shifted to a shareholder-first mentality often at the expense of employees and even customers. This shift is evidenced by mass layoffs despite profitability (e.g., Google, Meta, Amazon, Tesla, etc.), declining innovation and risk-taking, compromising customer satisfaction (e.g., focus on monetization through ads and disregarding data privacy concerns, and laying off designers and researchers), and the erosion of employee trust and morale.

However, if you’re in one of those companies as an employee, manager, or executive, you don’t have to act the way that the bully executives do, you can still be yourself, care for others, authentically support those around you, and be an all-around positive influence. I’ve always tried to do that throughout my career and I largely tried to shield my staff from the bullies. And after leaving IBM, I now provide career coaching to help to undo the damage to people’s careers and livelihoods that these leaders of companies are causing and provide strategies to bounce back.

BULLIES IN GOVERNMENT

Around the world, an increasing number of governments are being led by bullies and shifting from progressive to regressive policies. They’re attacking reproductive rights, LGBTQ+ rights, voting rights, climate policy, workers’ rights, healthcare programs, DEI initiatives, women’s rights, and more. Empathy, compassion, and care for the vulnerable are being ridiculed—"woke" used as a slur.

While disarmament, detente, and nuclear disarmament used to be in vogue, countries around the world are now arming themselves like never before to protect themselves from the states led by bullies. Several brutal wars are being waged by bullies killing and injuring countless innocent people. That too is unconscionable in my view. I never thought that in 2025 we’d still be so barbaric as a species and not to have evolved at all in this regard. What’s particularly troubling is that these horrific wars, despite seeing the deeply troubling images and videos of the damage they are doing, seem to be increasingly being normalized. If you murder someone on the street in your own country, you’re arrested, charged, and dealt with in the justice system. If you murder someone in one of these wars, it’s perfectly fine because you’re in a war to take over a piece of land that the bully that heads up your government has gotten into their head to annex.

Add to that the increasing power of oligarchs, and the celebration of dictators, and emergence of new dictatorships all vying for more power, money, and, as mentioned above, even taking over sovereign countries or parts of countries.

REFLECTION

Over the course of my life I’ve lamented the influence bullies have had on my experience and the experience of others—as reflected in my time in elementary school, hockey camp, the workplace, and with regard to happenings in the world.

Many people will feel deep despair at the current state of the world. And they have reason to. I too have my moments.

However, I’m a positive person by nature and I always look for ways to improve the state of the world. As I mentioned in a previous post, I believe that people have more power than they think they have to improve the world. There are more of us—individuals—than there are bullies. So, what can we do?

INDIVIDUALS HAVE POWER

ECONOMIC POWER

Let’s explore some of the actions individuals can take starting with the economic power individuals have, at scale.

The U.S. President is currently imposing tariffs on other countries like mine—Canada—while also using insulting and belligerent language against Canada and Canadians. In response, Canada has implemented reciprocal tariffs.

Individual Canadians though have decided that they will take action themselves by boycotting U.S. products and not traveling to the U.S. I stopped buying American products, cancelled a U.S. destination holiday, and turned down paid speaking engagements in the U.S.

That’s way more powerful than a tariff—shutting down commerce entirely. Canadians traveling to the U.S. is down by a full 75% and 85% of Canadians are replacing American products with Canadian ones. That’s individual action at scale.

When the U.S. President required companies to eliminate DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) programs, Target complied but customers let them know what they thought of that by boycotting the company and causing it to lose $12.4 billion in sales and $27.27 per share. A competitor, Costco, reaffirmed its support for DEI and was rewarded by its current and lots of new customers with a $5 billion increase in sales and 7 million additional shoppers in a four week period.

People all over the world take issue with the words and actions of Elon Musk and have been taking action selling their Tesla vehicles, boycotting Tesla dealerships, and even vandalizing anything with Tesla on it—while I don’t condone the latter, I do understand it. Current Tesla owners have also put stickers on their cars with “I bought this before we knew that Elon was crazy” trying to distance themselves from the CEO. Sales are plummeting globally—76% in Germany, 66% in Australia, 49% in China—and the stock has lost fully half of it’s value, all the while the EV market is growing and Chinese EV maker BYD is now the top EV maker in the world. All of this by individuals exercising their economic power at scale.

All of this demonstrates the economic power individuals have when they take action together.

BALLOT BOX POWER

The U.S. is currently experiencing the power of individuals at scale at the ballot box. The majority of Americans thought they had no power and didn’t vote. However, their inaction led to the election of Donald J. Trump by a very slim margin. It’s reported that many of those who didn’t vote were in fact Democrats who had some issue with their candidate and/or their party. However, the U.S. is now experiencing the consequences of their inaction, and the rest of the world is too.

Canada is currently in a federal election, and I’m hearing similar doubts from voters, talking about the Liberal government’s performance in the past despite the country having a new pretty impressive Prime Minister who is charting a new course. Failure to vote—or voting without understanding the stakes—could plunge Canada into the same MAGA-style crisis the U.S. is experiencing. Voting is individual action at scale, and it matters.

Americans are also protesting in large numbers. Harvard political scientist Erica Chenoweth found that peaceful protest by just 3.5% of the population can bring down a regime. With an estimated 5 million Americans already participating in anti-government protests, the U.S. is nearly halfway there. International protests amplify the message too and are happening. And if elections proceed in the future, change is definitely coming due in large part to individuals and individual action.

DESIGN, SOCIAL MEDIA, AND FILMMAKING POWER

Most people don’t realize that 77.8% of Google’s revenue comes from advertising. Why is that? Because researchers and designers creating targeted ads works in selling people stuff. It’s also often said that social media platforms have become the front lines of influence. So, if online advertising and social media platforms are so influential and impactful, it would only make sense that individuals should leverage their power to effect change in a positive direction. After all, the bullies of the world are doing that to effect change in the opposite direction.

I partnered with the World Design Organization and Design for America at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in leading the COVID-19 Design Challenge. Some 225 designers and researchers used their craft and talent to create social media campaigns and other impactful deliverables to promote such things as safe behaviors and appreciation for front-line professionals. Close to 100,000 people visited the website and many millions saw the social media campaign and were influenced by it.

Carly Williams and I launched the Habits for a Better World initiative last year to inspire individuals at scale to adopt habits that will reduce climate change, biodiversity loss, human illness, animal and human suffering, hate and polarization, and more. Not only are the 300 volunteer researchers, designers, and filmmakers working to have a huge impact on inspiring individual action at scale to improve the world, the individuals involved are improving their own worlds by working with others who are kindred spirits—all wanting to do good in a world that seems to be going in the opposite direction. I absolutely love working with my Habits for a Better World teammates and they with one another.

FINAL THOUGHTS AND RECOMMENDATIONS

Having lived a long life, I know that bullies can be defeated. Good can prevail—if we act. I mourn what the world has become, but I remain confident that if individuals take action together, we can change its course. That’s the belief that powers my work with Habits for a Better World, and it’s the call I extend to you: fight back against the bullies, for your own sake and for the sake of the world.

Brain Specialization: Science and My Story

My Academic bias

With my academic background in Cognitive Science and Clinical Psychology, I’ve always focused more on observed behavior, lived experience, and psychological explanations and interventions. In fact, my PhD supervisor actively discouraged physiological or brain-based explanations, often invoking what he called the “nominal fallacy”—the mistake of thinking that simply naming a phenomenon explains it. He applied this critique especially to treatments for depression. I remember sitting in on sessions where a psychiatrist would tell a patient that their medication was effective because of some specific change in the brain—when, in fact, there was no direct evidence to support that claim. Understandably, I became somewhat jaded. At the time, neuroscience was still in its early stages compared to what we know today. That’s why I’ve recently begun diving deeply into current brain research and applying it to the real world. I did that in my last post, exploring differences in brain structure and political leanings. In this post, I’ll look at emerging insights on hemispheric differences—and relate them to my own personal experience, which I’ll get to shortly.

A Great conversation

On a Zoom call with a wonderful Habits for a Better World colleague, Nazli Eve Usta, we got onto the topic of hemispheric specialization and cultural differences. I shared a story about a conference I attended in Nanjing, China in 2010. I delivered a keynote (as did Don Norman) and served on a panel exploring cultural differences that designers should be aware of in their work. One of the other panelists shared research by Takashi Masuda and Richard Nisbett.

Participants were shown images featuring a central figure in front of a group. American (Western) participants tended to make judgments—such as whether the person was happy or sad—based on the central figure alone, largely ignoring the background. Japanese (Eastern) participants were more influenced by context—they considered the expressions or behavior of the group in the background before deciding on the emotional state of the person in front.

Nazli then mentioned that she was reading a fascinating book that discussed exactly this kind of brain hemisphere specialization: The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World by Iain McGilchrist. I immediately bought and read it.

Key insights from the book

The book begins by pointing out how, for decades, popular culture has oversimplified brain hemisphere specialization into simple stereotypes: left-brained people are logical and analytical, right-brained people are creative and emotional. This reductive dichotomy became so widespread that it nearly discredited the entire field.

McGilchrist makes the case that the body of research from the past twenty years not only deserves renewed legitimacy—it may hold the key to understanding how we perceive, think, and live.

As both a psychiatrist and a literary scholar, McGilchrist synthesizes decades of neuroscience to show just how differently the left and right hemispheres engage with the world. The left hemisphere favors abstraction, categorization, and control. It isolates and defines. The right hemisphere, in contrast, is focused on context, nuance, connection, and the living whole. It doesn’t just process information—it experiences it.

What’s particularly eye-opening is McGilchrist’s argument that we now live in a civilization dominated by left-hemisphere thinking—prioritizing efficiency over empathy, predictability over depth, and systems over relationships. In doing so, we may be sidelining the very capacities that make life meaningful and sustainable. And yet, he argues, it’s the right hemisphere that should be leading, with the left as its capable “emissary”—not the other way around. There’s much more to the book—it can be a dense read at times—but I highly recommend it.

My story and experience

While reading the book, I couldn’t help but reflect on my own recent neurological journey. I was diagnosed with a benign brain tumor—a vestibular schwannoma or acoustic neuroma—on the right side of my brain, affecting the auditory nerve. This tumor has gradually diminished the hearing in my right ear. But what’s fascinating is that I’ve recently noticed significantly increased acuity in my left ear. At first, I thought I might be imagining it. But upon further reflection—and with the insights from McGilchrist’s work—I began to see it as another example of the brain’s remarkable plasticity.

Neuroscience has shown that when one sense or function is compromised, the brain doesn’t simply accept the loss. It adapts, amplifying other capacities to maintain equilibrium. In my case, it seems likely that the right hemisphere (which processes input from the left ear) has increased its auditory sensitivity to compensate. The signals coming from the ear haven’t improved—it’s the brain’s processing of information from my left ear that has.

The tumor also affects the vestibular nerve, which controls balance. I’ve been experiencing some slight instability, but vestibular rehabilitation exercises are helping. Again, the brain’s plasticity is at work—strengthening my left vestibular system to reduce the imbalance. It’s a powerful, personal reminder of the brain’s adaptability—and of the intricate interplay between biology, experience, and perception.

To further support my brain’s neuroplastic response to the hearing loss in my right ear, I’ve been consciously engaging both hemispheres through a variety of activities. I focus on language, reading aloud, planning, and problem-solving to stimulate left-hemisphere functions, and I engage my right hemisphere through listening to music, walking in nature, and practicing mindfulness. I also incorporate cross-body movement—such as balance exercises and VR workouts using Supernatural on my Meta Quest—which helps strengthen coordination between hemispheres. I regularly switch between focusing on details and stepping back to see the big picture. These small but intentional practices are helping me optimize how my brain adapts and maintains overall balance.

a broadened view of the brain including my own

The Master and His Emissary has opened up a far more nuanced and inspiring view of the brain than I’d imagined. It’s not just a book about neuroscience—it’s a call to rethink how we live, learn, lead, and relate. And for those of us navigating unexpected neurological challenges, it offers something even more valuable: insight into the deeply intelligent systems that support us, often without our awareness.

Are Conservatives & Liberals Wired Differently?

Have you ever listened to someone whose political views differ sharply from your own and felt stunned, wondering how they could possibly believe what they’re saying? Even when looking at exactly the same information, people often interpret it in radically different ways. This has puzzled me for a long time and I’ve tried to find answers in the scientific literature.

We all like to think our political beliefs are shaped purely by reason, personal experiences, and deeply-held values. But have you ever considered that biological and psychological differences might also play a role? Over the years, I’ve come across research hinting at these kinds of influences on political views. Intrigued, I decided to take a deeper dive to explore this fascinating topic further, especially given the extent of political polarization we’re witnessing at the moment.

It turns out that over the past two decades researchers have uncovered striking neurological, genetic, physiological, and psychological differences between people who lean conservative compared with those who lean liberal. While our environments shape our views, science suggests that how we process information in our world—how we handle uncertainty, respond to threats, and weigh moral choices in particular—may be influenced by the way we’re built.

Brain Structure and Political Orientation

Brain imaging research by Kanai et al. (2011) found evidence of structural differences between conservatives and liberals. The research found that conservatives typically have a larger and more active amygdala, a region responsible for processing fear and threats, which could possibly explaining their strong emphasis on security, law enforcement, and national defense. Liberals, on the other hand, were found to have a larger anterior cingulate cortex, a brain region involved in managing uncertainty and adapting to change, which could explain their greater openness to new ideas and social change.

The Genetics of Political Beliefs

Genetics also appears to play a role. Twin studies suggest that about 30-60% of political ideology may be inherited (Hatemi & McDermott, 2012). For example, individuals with a specific variant of the dopamine receptor D4 (DRD4) gene, related to dopamine regulation and novelty-seeking behavior, are more likely to identify as liberal and this was particularly true if they've had diverse social experiences. So clearly, genetics sets the stage, but environment appears to influence the expression in behavior.

Physiological Responses to Threat

Beyond brain structure and genetics, conservatives and liberals also appear to differ in how their bodies react to the world.

An interesting 2008 study by Oxley et al. found that conservatives exhibited stronger physiological responses to sudden loud noises and disturbing images. Their heightened sensitivity to threat correlates with a preference for policies that emphasize stability and protection.

Moral Foundations and Political Differences

Jonathan Haidt’s Moral Foundations Theory proposes that political beliefs are deeply intertwined with fundamental moral instincts. Research conducted to examine this theory (Haidt & Graham, 2007; Graham, Haidt, & Nosek, 2009) found that Liberals prioritize care/harm and fairness/reciprocity, strongly aligning with social justice, while conservatives value these foundations too, but they also emphasize loyalty, authority, and sanctity, supporting patriotism, tradition, and religious values. These differences in moral orientations, shaped by both biology and experience, provide additional insight into why political disagreements often feel more like deep moral divides than purely policy debates.

affective polarization and cognitive biases

Recent research has expanded these insights considerably. Dannagal Young and colleagues (2024) highlight how "epistemological identity"—our sense of belonging to groups based on shared ways of understanding truth—drives political polarization. This concept of expressive epistemology suggests people adopt beliefs aligned with their group's values, further entrenching divisions. Druckman and Levy (2021) emphasize that affective polarization, the growing emotional hostility between opposing political groups, profoundly impacts how facts are interpreted, causing individuals to dismiss or distort information that challenges their group's identity or values.

Studies exploring biases toward specific groups provide additional insights. Jones et al. (2018) found that ideological predispositions significantly influence public attitudes toward transgender individuals, with conservatives often less supportive due to underlying psychological factors like traditionalism and discomfort with ambiguity. Stern et al. (2013) revealed ideological differences even in subconscious processes, showing conservatives rely more heavily on traditional gender cues when categorizing sexual orientation, highlighting deep-rooted cognitive differences tied to ideological beliefs.

Research on cognitive style also underscores these divisions. Ostrofsky and Shobe (2015) discovered that individuals with a higher "need for cognitive closure"—a desire for certainty and aversion to ambiguity—tend to prefer realism in art, hinting that this psychological trait may similarly affect political orientation, with conservatives often exhibiting a greater need for certainty and clear structure. Cacioppo and Petty’s classic work (1982) on the "need for cognition"—an individual’s enjoyment of thinking and problem-solving—suggests liberals may enjoy more complex, nuanced analyses, whereas conservatives might prefer clear, straightforward solutions.

What This Means

It’s important to point out that none of this suggests that political beliefs are biologically predetermined. Clearly, your upbringing, the people you associate with, the news sources you rely on all make some contribution too. In fact, the direction of causality could even be reversed. However created, it is clear that biology influences the processing of information so differently. If our brains, genes, and bodies influence to a certain degree how we see the world, recognizing these differences can foster better dialogue and understanding.

Next time you’re in a political debate, consider that the other person might not just think differently—they might actually be wired differently. Keeping this in mind can help you communicate more effectively by framing your arguments and understanding their perspective through the insights offered by the fascinating research summarized in this post. Approaching discussions with empathy and awareness of these underlying differences can lead to more meaningful and productive exchanges.

references

Given that this blog post relies so heavily on research findings, I’ve decided to include references to the sources that it is based on.

Kanai, R., Feilden, T., Firth, C., & Rees, G. (2011). Political orientations are correlated with brain structure in young adults. Current Biology, 21(8), 677-680.

Oxley, D. R., Smith, K. B., Alford, J. R., Hibbing, M. V., Miller, J. L., Scalora, M., … & Hibbing, J. R. (2008). Political attitudes vary with physiological traits. Science, 321(5896), 1667-1670.

Hatemi, P. K., & McDermott, R. (2012). The genetics of politics: discovery, challenges, and progress. Trends in Genetics, 28(10), 525-533.

Haidt, J., & Graham, J. (2007). When morality opposes justice: Conservatives have moral intuitions that liberals may not recognize. Social Justice Research, 20(1), 98-116.

Graham, J., Haidt, J., & Nosek, B. A. (2009). Liberals and conservatives rely on different sets of moral foundations. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 96(5), 1029-1046.

Young, D. G., Molokach, B., & Oittinen, E. M. (2024). Lay epistemology and the populist’s playbook: The roles of epistemological identity and expressive epistemology. Current Opinion in Psychology.

Druckman, J. N., & Levy, J. (2021). Affective polarization in the American public. Northwestern Institute for Policy Research.

Jones, P. E., Brewer, P. R., Young, D. G., Lambe, J. L., & Hoffman, L. H. (2018). Explaining public opinion toward transgender people, rights, and candidates. Public Opinion Quarterly, 82(2), 252-278.

Stern, C., West, T. V., Jost, J. T., & Rule, N. O. (2013). The politics of gaydar: Ideological differences in the use of gendered cues in categorizing sexual orientation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 104(3), 520-541.

Ostrofsky, J., & Shobe, E. R. (2015). The relationship between need for cognitive closure and the appreciation, understanding, and viewing times of realistic and nonrealistic figurative paintings. Empirical Studies of the Arts, 33(1), 106-113.

Cacioppo, J. T., & Petty, R. E. (1982). The need for cognition. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 42(1), 116-131.

Globalization and the U.S. Defection

I see the world through a psychological lens. Politics, economics, and global trade are no exceptions. Over the past 43 days, I’ve been reflecting on the shifts unfolding on the world stage, trying to make sense of them. The best framework I’ve found is game theory—specifically, the Prisoner’s Dilemma. Globalization, at its core, has long been a delicate game of trust and cooperation, where nations weigh the risks of working together against the temptation to put their own interests first. But when one player defects, the entire system begins to unravel. And in my view, that’s exactly what we’re witnessing now.

The Prisoner’s dilemma explained

The Prisoner’s Dilemma, first developed in the 1950s, illustrates a fundamental challenge in cooperation. Two individuals, when acting in their own self-interest, often make decisions that leave both worse off. In its classic form, two prisoners are interrogated separately and must decide whether to betray the other or stay silent. If both cooperate, they receive a lighter sentence. But if the fear of betrayal pushes them toward defection—it results in an outcome that ultimately harms them both.

Globalization has functioned much like an iterated version of Prisoner’s Dilemma, where repeated interactions built trust and reinforced long-term cooperation. Countries engaged in trade agreements, built integrated supply chains, and relied on global institutions to ensure stability. Defection—through protectionism, tariffs, or isolationism—was costly and avoided at all costs because it would invite retaliation and economic instability.

The defection of Donald J. Trump

The current U.S. President Donald J. Trump disrupted that equilibrium by defecting from the globalization game. His administration withdrew from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) during his first term, imposed tariffs that set off trade wars, undermined trust in institutions like the WTO, and weakened alliances that underpinned global economic stability. It was a shift toward short-term, zero-sum thinking in a game where long-term mutual benefit had been the dominant strategy.

Now, we’re seeing an even more aggressive and dangerous iteration of this approach. Early this morning, March 4, 2025, the U.S. government implemented sweeping new tariffs—25% on imports from Canada and Mexico and an increased 20% tariff on Chinese goods—under the bizarre pretense of pressuring these countries to take a harder stance against fentanyl production which they had already done. The impact was immediate. Markets have reacted sharply—the S&P 500, the Dow, and the Nasdaq tumbled—while global partners moved swiftly to retaliate. Canada announced a counter-tariff of 25% on $30 billion worth of U.S. goods, with more to come, and Mexico is expected to announce its response soon too. China has imposed new tariffs of 10-15% on U.S. agricultural products, a move that will severely impact American farmers who are already struggling from Trump’s previous trade disruptions.

Many argue that the U.S. President should have learned from the Smoot-Hawley Tariff in 1930 and the economic devastation it caused, leading to a reduction of about 60% of world trade and a deepening of the Great Depression.

Economists from around the world have unanimously warned about the dangerous consequences of these actions and even Warren Buffett finally broke his silence to say that all of this will be disastrous for the U.S. because tariffs are a tax on goods which will raise the price for consumers. And to quote him, "The Tooth Fairy doesn’t pay ‘em!” And this isn’t all about country leaders taking action, the U.S. President’s belittling, name-calling, and insulting countries like Canada has had a direct effect on its citizens. I’ve written previously about the power that the individual has, especially when done at scale across a whole country. A boycott of American products within Canada and in fact around the world is having an impact beyond tariffs, and these actions will live on.

The lingering effects

In game theory, trust and stability are essential for cooperation. Once that trust is broken which has just happened, the game shifts from cooperation to retaliation. Countries are planning for a world where the U.S. is no longer a reliable partner. Global supply chains adopt new routes, new trade alliances are formed, and businesses and investors avoid the volatility by putting their money elsewhere. It’s important to note that these shifts don’t just happen overnight—they create long-term structural changes that make cooperation in the future harder, and even if a new administration tries to restore the cooperation.

What we’re witnessing right now isn’t just another round of tariffs or tough trade negotiations—it’s a fundamental breakdown of the rules that once governed global economic stability. While Trump’s approach may score short-term political points, it has thrown globalization into a game-theory spiral of defection and retaliation, with consequences that will outlast any one administration. The world is adapting to a new reality—one where globalization, as we knew it, may never fully be realized again. Unless, as we’re seeing happening now, that the rest of the world continues to cooperate and collaborate globally but explicitly excludes the U.S. The diversification of the world economy, especially with an unreliable actor like the U.S., is best for the countries of the world even it isn’t best for the U.S. itself, the country that started all of this.

the psychology of the perpetrator

So why is all this happening? And why now? To answer that question we need to look for a moment at the psychology of the perpetrator, Donald J. Trump. All the books written about him and everyone who has worked with him say that he is incapable of seeing any situation as other than a win-lose one. He has to win and someone else has to lose. And he even attempts to degrade the other party with childish name-calling, and even threatening them (as in taking over your country). He’s done that his entire life and it brought disaster to his business ventures (declaring bankruptcy six times!).

He also has to always be the smartest person in the room. This leads him to not read and not rely on or even consult experts. All branches of the U.S. government—the executive, legislative, and judicial—are seemingly powerless to stop him, thus giving him virtual dictatorial power. All of this spells disaster for the U.S. and the rest of the world.

final thoughts

I had thought, or perhaps wished, that the world would move toward being more cooperative and collaborative, something we badly need in order to tackle our actual existential challenges together like climate change, economic disparity, and geopolitical conflicts. I worry that the world is going in the opposite direction, all thanks to just one man and the people who voted for him, admittedly not knowing what they were actually voting for thanks to his lies, in my view. I truly hope that this can be turned around because if not, this is a sad day for the world.

You Have More Power Than You Think

I’ve always been fascinated by the tendency for people to discount their individual power and agency and for being followers rather than leaders. People often express the view that “somebody should do something about that”, or “what I say or do doesn’t matter” thus lacking any appreciation of their own power and efficacy.

My Experience

The idea of not feeling like I don’t have agency is completely foreign to me when I think through my approach to things and what I’ve done throughout my life. My mother always told me to not be an audience member but instead to be on stage and she also expected me to take action and to make a difference in whatever I chose to do.

Those lessons inspired me my whole life. There are many examples of how my mother’s inspiration gave me the power of agency to taken action: Dealing with being bullied as a foreigner when I was eight but learning the English language fluently and then excelling academically and socially; working hard to realize my musical talent and then being on stage throughout my high school years playing the lead in musicals and concerts; realizing that a musical career wouldn’t be optimal for me and then pivoting my education to cognitive science and clinical psychology with academic distinction; seizing the opportunity to transforming IBM globally with User-Centered Design and then again with Enterprise Design Thinking working with each division of the company with significant financial impact; noticing that Apple introduced podcasts in iTunes and then being among the very first to start a podcast and seeing it rise to Number 1; and wanting to make a major impact on key global challenges like climate change, biodiversity loss, and human illness and then co-founding the Habits for a Better World project with Carly Williams after I retired from IBM. I wouldn’t have done any of these things had I not known the power of agency and taking action.

Political Power

I’d like to make the case for people to appreciate and use the power that they have in their lives.

Think about this for a moment. More people did not vote in the recent U.S. election than did vote for the current President. They thought their vote wouldn’t count. If only 2.3 percent of them realized that they had power and used it, the outcome for the country and the world would have been totally different. While many now complain about the President and what he’d doing, which is often having a personal negative impact on their lives, they probably still don’t appreciate that their non-action contributed to the current situation in the U.S. These non-voters didn’t believe that they had agency in their lives.

Power to Improve the World

The same goes for having an impact on other things in the world, like climate change, biodiversity loss, and even your health. Most people say that governments, companies, and institutions need to address these challenges. They don’t believe that they have any agency in making an impact on these challenges themselves.

Yet the amazing volunteer researchers, designers, and filmmakers on Carly Williams and my Habits for a Better World project reviewed the existing scientific and medical research literature and learned that individual action is able to have upwards of 73% impact on climate change, upwards of 94% on biodiversity loss, and upwards of 80% on avoiding chronic illnesses. So why are people not doing it? They don’t believe they have the agency to do so.

Interestingly, even the volunteers on our project themselves often don’t believe they have the agency to do what we’re aiming to do on the project. Cary and I have said from the very start of the project that we want to use research to inform the deliverables from the project. We’ve mentioned one of the deliverables we plan to produce is a documentary film but we’ve constantly said that everyone on the team should also look beyond the film to identify whatever will work best to inspire people to adopt habits that will make for a better world. We’re open to anything the teams may propose. I’m concerned that researchers and designers have learned in their day jobs that research and design often don’t have the influence and impact that they should and this has made them question their agency for having impact even on this project where they actually have full agency.

Reasons for a lack of agency

Recent studies report significant mental health issues among young adults aged 18 to 25 with about 36% experiencing anxiety and 29% depression. Mental health issues often result in a perceived lack of agency. Also, factors like financial stress, lack of meaningful work, and social isolation may also contribute to a reduced sense of control over people’s lives. However, there are ways to improve this situation to increase an individual’s appreciation of and taking action on their power of agency.  

The seven Key Skills for Agency

I recently came across and read the book “The Power of Agency: The 7 principles to conquer obstacles, make effective decisions, and create a life on your own terms”.

The following are the seven skills the authors suggest are key to activating your power of agency:

1. Control Stimuli – Be careful about what you allow into your life (media, people, information). Manage distractions and reduce noise will improve focus and decision-making.

2. Associate Selectively – Surround yourself with supportive, positive, and growth-oriented people. Relationships strongly influence agency and mental clarity.

3. Move – Physical movement (exercise, walking, stretching) has been shown to boost cognitive function, reduces stress, and enhance self-control.

4. Position Yourself as a Learner – Adopt a growth mindset. Be open to learning and curiosity because these fosters adaptability and better decision-making.

5. Manage Your Emotions and Beliefs – Self-awareness and emotional regulation help you to respond thoughtfully rather than react impulsively.

6. Check Your Intuition – Trust your instincts, but verify them with facts and rational analysis. Balanced decision-making involves both logic and intuition.

7. Deliberate, Then Act – Take thoughtful action after assessing options. Avoid overthinking or impulsiveness; agency requires both reflection and decisive action.

These skills collectively enhance mental clarity, confidence, and resilience, allowing people to take control of their circumstances rather than feeling overwhelmed by them.

Final reflection

Even though we’re living in a turbulent world at the moment that may make you feel like you can’t do anything to have impact on it, you can. As an example, at the time I’m writing this many Canadians are individually boycotting U.S. products, services, and companies in response to the words and actions of the current U.S. President. Americans are also scheduling boycotts of particular companies and protesting. When individuals, together with other individuals take an action like this, they amplify their impact at scale. As I just heard U.S. Senator Cory Booker say, “the power of the people is stronger than the people in power”.

So, I recommend you read the book and/or decide to take action on something important to you, encourage others to do the same, and you’ll be exercising your power of agency and thereby having impact on the world.

Creating a Great MRI Experience

I’ve taught what I call a patient-centered design mindset to pre-med students, medical students, early career physicians, and leaders of healthcare systems. I’ve often used this photograph when discussing what true patient-centeredness is all about in focusing on the patient experience.

The GE Doug Dietz Story

The story I would tell about this picture is all about Doug Dietz, a designer at GE Healthcare, who was deeply moved after witnessing a young child’s fear and distress when preparing for an MRI scan. He learned first hand seeing a young girl being so intimidated by the machine. Children would often need to be sedated in order to have the test. Dietz though decided to do what he could do to solve the problem at the source.

He partnered with the Stanford d.school and used user research and design thinking to reimagine the MRI environment. He visited daycare centers and kindergartens—places that are designed specifically for children. Instead of redesigning the very expensive machine itself, he and his team created immersive decals and a storytelling approach that turned the MRI scan into an adventure. One adventure, the one in the picture, involved transforming the MRI room into a pirate ship, where children were told they were on an exciting journey and had to stay still to avoid “rocking the boat” and if they were really still they would be able to get some of the pirate treasure. Hospital staff also dressed up and played along, making the experience fun and engaging. Patient satisfaction scores skyrocketed, sedation rates dropped, and children who once feared the MRI machine were now eager for their “adventure.”

I told that story as an inspirational example of what could be possible in transforming what is often an intimidating and sometimes outright scary experience into a positive one. The students in my classes, inspired by this and similar stories and learning to think like a designer, subsequently redesigned doctors office waiting rooms, emergency rooms, clinics, and more to make the patient experience as good as they could make it.

My own story

I needed to have an MRI done last year and it was an absolutely horrendous experience even as an adult. I needed to have my head imaged which required me to have a cage of sorts placed over my head. However, the cage was too small and my head could only fit by moving my nose into one of the holes in the cage. That itself caused me some serious claustrophobia and that was worsened when I was moved into the MRI machine itself with it’s deafening sounds. I had no idea how long it would last, nor when it was finished. At one point, it seemed to stop and I was partially moved out of the machine but my hopes that the procedure was over were dashed when I realized that they simply needed to inject a contrast dye, and I was moved back into the machine. When it was finally finished, I was exhausted but so relieved that it was over.

So you can imagine my concern about needing to have an other MRI done this year. I was dreading the day. However, this time, I had a Radiologic Technologist who was amazing. I told him about my previous experience with the cage so he adjusted the setup so that my nose wasn’t right up against the cage. He also told me how long the procedure would take and, over the headphones that I had on, he talked me through the entire thing, telling me that the next “picture” as he called it would take ten seconds, then the next one would take two minutes, and that I had three more pictures to go and I’d be done. He also frequently asked me how it was going and that I was going great.

I honestly got so relaxed that I truly enjoyed the experience—the fascinating wildly different frequencies of sound, the vibration, etc. I was in a rock band when I was young and I used to love the sound and feeling of loud sound on my body. This MRI reminded me of that. That fact that I could even entertain that thought was due to me being in such relaxed state entirely thanks to the wonderful support I received from that amazing healthcare professional who made the patient experience a major focus.

It’s so rare in healthcare to have a positive experience like that so I wanted to share it here to celebrate it and encourage healthcare professionals to double-down on creating a supportive and engaging patient experience.

Imagine that—a great MRI experience. While I didn’t get to go into a pirate ship, I did get to experience the adult version thanks so the stellar work of a healthcare professional.

Transitions, Imagining, & Making a Better World

This is my 2024 year-end post reflecting on the major events that had significance to me, my perspective on them, and the things for which I am most grateful.

End of an era

I spent the first part of this year traveling to each of our IBM design studios globally, at least most of the big ones that I could fit in, for me to personally say goodbye prior to retiring from the company after 36 years and to share my insights, advice, and recommendations. I’d like to thank Justin Youngblood for allowing me to take the farewell tour, Lauren Swanson and Renee Albert for arranging it and traveling with me on these last trips together, and all of my former staff and colleagues for making it a fitting end to a wonderful IBM career. I thank you, miss you, and appreciate you all!

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Imagining

John Lennon playing Imagine with Yoko Ono who co-wrote the song sitting next to him.

This was also another hard year of dealing with devastating happenings in the world and I frequently had to rely on a coping mechanism I’ve used for decades which involves my singing a very special song.

I remember hearing John Lennon singing “Imagine” in the early 1970s when I was an undergraduate. I was blown away by the song and loved it. It’s the soundtrack of my life in a way. I just recently learned that the lyrics to the song were written collaboratively by John and Yono. And whenever the world gets too crazy, I sing Imagine to myself as my personal anthem.

It’s 2024, soon to be 2025, and it seems to me that we’re going backwards rather than forwards regarding each of the themes mentioned in the song. We have wars inspired by religions and traditions, we have the obscene acquisition of wealth by a few, and we have leaders working to close or extend borders of countries who espouse extreme nationalistic and isolationist beliefs, and who have myopic, short-term, and regressive views regarding women’s rights and so many other critical challenges like climate change, human illness, animal and human suffering, food insecurity, and biodiversity loss.

I ask you to do a thought exercise for a moment—read through the lyrics of Imagine and actually visualize the world moving in this direction rather than the opposite as is happening today. Just imagine the world without wars, the reasons for wars, the negative effects of extreme religious adherence, out of control nationalism, massive income disparity, and the total lack of caring about women’s rights, human rights, animal rights, climate change, and making this world better for everyone. Just imagine.

Imagine

Imagine there's no heaven
It's easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us, only sky
Imagine all the people
Livin' for today

Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion, too
Imagine all the people
Livin' life in peace

You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will be as one

Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world

You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will live as one

I truly believe that if our species is to evolve and our planet is to survive we can’t only be dreamers, we need to make a real difference by working together to counter the current trends and to take positive steps to address the problems of the world.

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Making a better World

Some will despair but I’m a firm believer in our individual power to effect change and I subscribe to this re-written version of Reinhold Niebuhr’s words:

I am no longer accepting the things I cannot change. I am changing the things I cannot accept.

Too many of us “accept the things I cannot change.” I think that is at heart of many of the problems we see in the world, that we just unquestioningly accept things as being out of our control.

I did my small part this past year to make a positive change with my podcast and with the nonprofit that I co-founded.

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Life Habits Podcast episodes

I recorded several episodes this year on my Life Habits Podcast that provide practical advice for making change and dealing with a changing world. These include the following:

LH156 — Reconnecting in a Polarized World: Better Questions for Fostering our Shared Humanity.

LH154 — Future Proofing Your Career

LH149 — Feeding Your Soul with Purpose and Meaning

LH143 — Dealing with Divisiveness and Polarization

LH137 — Hungry for Action: Food, Climate, and our Food

LH130 — Harnessing the Power of AI

LH128 — Cracking the Cortisol Code: From Stress Response to Stress Management

LH127 — Disconnect to Reconnect: A Guide to Digital Detox

LH120 — Be Kind, Age Well

LH116 — Resilience with Mandy Kloppers

You can access the podcast on any of the podcast apps but also conveniently on my Linktree.

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Habits for a better world

Carly Williams, Filmmaker and Producer

I think the best thing I did this year was to team up with my friend and co-founder, filmmaker Carly Williams. We’re kindred spirits in believing that individuals at scale can make huge improvements in the world by combining research, design, and filmmaking to help mitigate global challenges like climate change, animal and human suffering, food insecurity, human illness, biodiversity loss, and more.

We launched our Habits for a Better World initiative, now nonprofit, with an announcement on LinkedIn that had more than 55K impressions which led to 450 people applying to join us as volunteers on the project. We ended up with 300 researchers, designers, and filmmakers and they’re not only talented but also so committed to our cause that they contribute their craft and time so freely. They too have adopted Carly and my tagline, when people say “someone should do something about that… we say why not us!” I’m so incredibly thankful to each and every one of our incredible volunteers.

We hosted a couple of kickoff calls involving some workshopping to get organized and then the teams got to work to read the existing scientific literature to explore what individual behaviors could mitigate the challenges mentioned above, to introspect in order to determine their personal alignment with those behaviors, which they then did in small groups, and following that they carried out extensive new research to understand where people are at in order to meet them where they are in order to inspire the requisite behavior changes.

That generative research was recently completed and we held an all-day online Habits for a Better World Conference featuring some insightful guest speakers and each of our teams presenting the results of their research.

Carly and I have given our teams the month of December off except for a handful of Enablement Team members who are still working with us to carry out the cross-team synthesis of insights from the research so that we can kick off in January with the exciting workshopping, design, and filmmaking phase.

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Gratitude

I’d also like to express my gratitude for several of the other things I continued to do or did for the first time this year. I enjoyed continuing to work with Michael Hartmann in my role of Industry Professor in the EMBA, Directors College, and National Health Fellows programs. It was wonderful to work with Paige Heron this year on my Life Habits Podcast and interview so many interesting and inspiring guests. I’d like to thank the many people who I had the honor of coaching this year and I think it’s pretty cool that our Guys Night Out group of friends will be celebrating 20 years together this coming year. It was also great to reconnect with Don Norman at his Design for a Better World Summit in San Diego.

Last but certainly not least the most important to me are the members of my family — Erin, Elliot, Emma, Rowan, Noah, Val, Xeena, and Ares. In fact, I’ll be with them in Los Angeles over the holidays celebrating our 10-year anniversary of being totally plant-based, and 40+ years of being meat free for Erin and me.

Books

Lastly, I’d like share some of the books that I read this year in case you haven’t read some of them but would like to. Some of them I read the pre-release galley copies of in order to interview the authors, others I thought I should read, a couple I re-read, and yet others, I just read out of sheer interest. I thank the authors and especially those who were kind enough to be on my podcast.

I hope to share at this time next year the second book I’m currently writing, and maybe even a third too in collaboration with some friends.

Here’s to making 2025 the best that it can be through collective passion, innovation, and love.

Thanks so all of you who I had the honor of spending time with this year and have a wonderful holiday.

Elon Musk — What Happened?

My personal experience

I first saw a Tesla (the Roadster) at the 2013 Toronto Auto Show (top left pic) and later that year in a parking garage (the Model S to the right of the Roadster pic) when I was in LA with my eldest son when he was starting graduate school there. I remember being so impressed that Tesla was leading with design when all other cars and anything else for that matter that was leaning into environmentalism was incredibly ugly.

I was fascinated by the company and the person of Elon Musk and I read everything I could about him (most notably the book shown at right in the pic). I was intrigued. I first experienced riding in a Tesla Model S (pic below the Roadster) in an Uber while in Madrid with IBM colleagues running a large design activation session with our top European sales leaders there. Then in 2019 I actually drove a Model 3 and was hooked and when they made it all vegan (pic below the Model S), I bought one (bottom left pic).

maintenance

I’ve absolutely loved the car and have never had a problem with it. Oh wait, there was a little piece of rubber on the passenger seat adjustment that I needed to replace. But, that was it. Four years of no visits to the dealer or anywhere else for maintenance. Because I live in Canada, all I do is have my summer wheels replaced by winters around now and then the opposite in the late Spring. That’s absolutely it! I’ve never owned a vehicle that was this reliable and maintenance free. I also haven’t had to buy gas for four years. All I do is plug the car into the charger in my garage, a financial savings of 86% compared with paying for gas for my previous BMW 5 Series. And that’s just financial savings. The Tesla Model 3 also provides carbon savings compared with my BMW 5 Series, 97% carbon savings in fact!

unlocking and starting

I used to have to carry a key to unlock my BMW. With my Tesla, I just have to walk up to the car and it unlocks the doors automatically and turns on sufficient lights to see what I’m doing to get in the car. I also don’t need to carry a key, in fact, there isn’t one. There’s only a credit car piece of plastic that I keep permanently in my wallet in case my iPhone is stolen because my phone is the key. You can buy a fob but I don’t see why you would.

I used to have to push a button to start my BMW but I don’t have to in order to start the Tesla. I just need to indicate by moving a stalk on the steering column whether i want to go forward or backward and the motors are engaged automatically.

power

Of course, there was a massive difference in the two vehicles when comes to power and acceleration. The BMW had a pretty powerful engine but because it was an internal combustion engine, there was a delay in using its full power. And even then, the power paled in comparison to the Tesla.

Self-Driving

It probably goes without saying but let me mention it nonetheless that I often don’t actually have to drive the Tesla. It drives itself and does a pretty good job of it, about 98% of the time. With the latest software update, I also don’t need to hold onto the steering wheel. As long as I’m attentive and looking at the road, the car drives itself. I particularly appreciate it in rush hour traffic, driving boring repetitive routes, and long highway trips. The car is so fun to drive though that despite its self-driving prowess, I often prefer to drive myself especially given its acceleration and handling.

Locking & Walking Away

When I get to my destination with the Tesla, I just stop the car and get out and walk away. When I’m in another country and driving a rental car, I often forget that I have to turn the car off and lock it when I get out. Its not uncommon for someone to point out to me that my rental car is still running when I’m walking into a building.

frustrations

The car isn’t without its frustrations though mostly caused by frivolous and gratuitous design changes on the screen. It’s one thing when designers at Meta move the buttons around on the Instagram mobile app to try to trick you into using a part of the product or one of their other products. I think that’s company-driven design that I’ve talked about previously. Those design changes aren’t dangerous. When designers make frivolous and gratuitous changes to a car interface, it can be dangerous.

Tesla is impressive

As you’ve probably gathered by now, I’ve been pretty impressed with my Tesla Model 3, the fact that I get a new car of sorts too when regular over the air operating system updates, and my dealings with the company itself.

what happened to elon

I was impressed with the car, the company, and the amazing charging infrastructure they put in place that is the envy of every other car company going electric. So much so that they’re now partnering with Tesla. I’m impressed too by SpaceX revolutionizing travel to space and the amazing reusable rocket technology, SolarCity like the Tesla, making solar roofs and electric storage beautiful.

I initially viewed Musk as an visionary leading groundbreaking companies like Tesla and SpaceX. However, his image has been irreversibly tarnished the last few years in my mind and also I think in most people’s minds. Things like the following sadly took him down and continue to do so:

• A post calling a British cave diver involved in the Thai cave rescue mission in 2018 a "pedo guy”.

• The circumstances of his acquisition of Twitter which he renamed to X, his bizarre management actions involving mass layoffs including getting rid of the community standards assessment team, and his own erratic posts on the platform.

• His increasing involvement in politics and use of his platform irresponsibly including his engagement in culture wars and inappropriate public statements about his own children online.

• His handling of labor relations, safety issues, and dismissive attitude regarding his staff and shareholders.

• I could go on but his promises off the top of his head about when certain technologies would be available and his over ambitious timelines for Mars colonization have made him unbelievable, unreliable, and even laughable.

I don’t know if he experienced some psychological trauma, whether all those billions of dollars just got to his head, or that he was always a jerk but he now has a larger platform to share his every bizarre thought, but I now find him annoying and embarrassing rather than being an admired visionary. That doesn’t take away what he’s accomplished. It just takes away my respect for him as a person.

ChatGPT: Wonder & Dread

I first wrote about being impressed by and also concerned about ChatGPT in January 2023. I also shared my shock in December that ChatGPT 3.0 reported that my brother had died. It was a response to a prompt to tell me about my brother and while it got most of his bio pretty well right, the entire text was in the past tense indicating that he had passed away. However, my brother was and still is very much alive, healthy, and running major races.

While I had seen inaccuracies before, it was this egregious error that made me very cautious about relying too readily on output from Generative AI tools and especially ChatGPT. This of course is called a hallucination and can be expected when you understand how Generative AI actually works.

wonder

A lot of time has passed and Generative AI tools have improved drastically. I rely on the them several times a day now and am truly in awe of and full of wonder when using them most of the time. It’s truly impressive what they can do. The confidence with which they provide responses engenders confidence in the user, even trusting reliance which of course makes the errors it makes even more troublesome because we don’t expect them. As a result, I’m also vigilant about checking sources.

I even take ChatGPT along with me on my phone in my pocket on daily run/walks during which I have a lengthy verbal conversation with what I consider to be a highly intelligent friend.

dread

I was having a verbal conversation the other evening and asked ChatGPT 4o to tell me about the initiative called Habits for a Better World that Carly Williams and I co-founded. I wanted to see what it would say when someone asked it a question about our project. The image shows what it came back with.

View fullsize

ChatGPT 4o verbal conversation. Click/tap to enlarge.

Step 1

It’s basically saying that I had nothing to do with the initiative and that it was Lauren Swanson and not me who co-founded it with Carly Williams. Lauren Swanson is amazing and was my Chief of Staff when I was at IBM. However, she’s had nothing to do with the Habits for a Better World project and has never met Carly Williams.

Step 2

I tried to correct ChatGPT but it doubles-down on insisting that it was Lauren that co-led the project and if I had anything to do with Carly Williams, it must have been on an unrelated project.

Step 3

I provided the link to our organization’s website and, finally, ChatGPT was convinced to honor me with my rightful position as a co-founder alongside Carly.

In a subsequent conversation, it referred to me as Lauren Swanson and conflated our bios. I again had to correct it in this case using the web browser version to indicate that it was incorrect and to then correct it.

persistence

I had assumed that all was good but I just asked ChatGPT to tell me about Lauren Swanson and this is what it said.

ChatGPT response to the prompt, "tell me about Lauren Swanson", which conflates Lauren and my bio information.

reflection

Lauren and I had a chuckle about it and this was a bit of fun for us but there’s a more serious issue here. I had assumed that ChatGPT getting the information about my brother being alive or dead wrong was due to it being version 3.0. However, the fail I’m sharing here came from the latest 4o version.

When I’m prompting ChatGPT for information, it’s usually things that I don’t know which is of course is why I’m asking. When it gets things this wrong when I’m asking it about something I know a lot about, I’m now more concerned about how much of what I’m getting from it is seriously wrong and a hallucination which of course I wouldn’t know. My usual practice is to ask for sources and when it says that it is generalizing across many sources, I simply don’t believe what it just gave me. When it gives me sources, I go and check them.

Interestingly, when I just asked it to give me the source of information it gave me about Lauren Swanson, it said that it was based on details I had shared with it in previous conversations. That of course makes me wonder about what other information I’ve given it that it is now conflating into other conversations I’m having with it. The bottom line on all of this is—user beware!

Co-Lab: UXR Insights & Trends

I just got back from the Co-Lab Conference held in Chicago this week. It was my second year attending and speaking at the conference. And I honestly think that it’s the very best in the field because the attendees are practitioners who are doing the actual work and leaders who are truly driving innovation in research, design, and technology. It’s sponsored and put on by dscout, the research platform company. The conference is the brainchild of Michael Winneck, dscout’s CEO. I’ve been impressed by Michael from the time I met him as a professor at Northwestern University as we co-led a capstone project during my year working with design schools and universities. He's a creative thinker and a major force in the UX research field.

Organization

The organization of the conference was refreshingly different with only few insightful keynotes and mostly thought-provoking three to five eight-minute lightening talks in the main conference space followed by moderated table-group discussions in another space.

I was asked to do the final keynote summarizing and wrapping up the conference together with the amazing Katie Johnson. Like we did in that keynote, I’ll reflect on and share the key insights and trends that we heard as well as share my own perspectives on them as well.

Business focus

I had presented at last year’s conference my view that we as researchers should “open the aperture” to focus on the entire client experience, to “follow the money” to understand how our research could contribute optimally to the businesses we work for, and to be laser-focused on making sure that our research measurably adds value to the business. I was absolutely delighted to hear these themes during the conference so much so that they appear to now be going mainstream. I of course wasn’t the only one advocating for these changes early on but it was heartening nonetheless to see how central they were in this conference.

Julie Norvaisas kicked off the keynotes in a segment titled “Owning (Y)our Future”. She talked about focussing on yourself, your team, your organization, our discipline, and on humankind. She also encouraged attendees to own leadership possibilities, to be an emergent leader if you're not an official one and to be successful by focusing on doing what’s needed to make the organization successful. You don’t need permission. She argued against taking an “us vs them” mentality and victim attitude.

Judd Antin gave a captivating talk encouraging attendees to own their business’s success and in doing that stop focusing on what our discipline has been focussed on for the past 15 years including user-centered empathy, including user's voices in the design space, methodological rigor, etc. Those are necessary but they’re “inside baseball”, to use an American phrase. Our discipline experienced a reckoning, a change brought about by macro-level sifts, technological changes, and our own mistakes. The ideas from the past won't work for the next phase. We need to be driving successful businesses. A particularly salient part of his talk involved the showing of a visual that initially showed looking through a keyhole and seeing two people but when you open the door, we see a burning city. He advocated for getting out of the building, literally, to see the full picture. He also advised that researchers should use their research methods to understand their colleagues, especially in meetings, to determine who sits with whom, what their body language is, in order to know how to best integrate research work into the company. User and business goals need to be one and the same with everyone aligned.

I’ve used the phrase “the entire client experience” as the focus for my teams for years and I reiterated at this conference that I used to tell the researchers on my team to consider our organization inside IBM to be like a startup with funding from an investor, our SVP, and that we needed to show impact before I could ask for next year’s funding. I also told my staff that their purpose was to make the lives of our users more enjoyable and productive and simply completing a study barely did half the job. They needed to see the insights through to the implementation and delivery. For the Habits for a Better World project that I’m running right now with Carly Williams, we regularly remind our researchers to keep our nonprofit’s end objective in mind which is a documentary inspiring behavior change to make the world a better place. We also need to conduct responsible research, be conscious of how much the research costs, and what outcome for the business it will yield.

Sara Wachter-Boettcher talked about owning our power (even if it feels like we don't have any). She shared a case study of a person who worked all the time and felt powerless. And that person isn’t alone with 50% of design managers struggling mentally. Many are pessimistic about the state of the field. They believe that we're in turmoil and that businesses don't know if they want or need us. Sara took a refleshingly positive view that I’m completely aligned with that we can't afford to lead with fear. She shared the Karpman Drama Triangle with the villain, the hero, and the victim and made the case that our teams need us to break this cycle. We got into UX to do good but we’re over-rely on UX to affirm that we're good. Sara made the case that we are good and that we are powerful. And our teams need us to own that power. She also made the case that having strong identities outside work makes stronger leaders inside. As many know, I've done that my entire career with my keynoting, teaching, writing, and change making. It built my confidence and ego even if my day job didn’t.

redesigning our UXR Product

I also found it heartening to hear several presenters mentioning the need to consider our research deliverables as products that need to be designed, something I too have been a broken record on for some time. I told the story of watching playback recordings of research presentations when I took on the role of VP of Global UX Research at IBM. I had to sit through most of the presentation talking about methods, participants, etc. before I got to hearing the key findings and recommendations right at the end of the presentation. We researchers admonish teams that adopt a “build it and they will come” approach to product development but that’s exactly the approach we often take to our own work. I mentioned that we changed that at IBM by starting with the most important takeaways from the work and then optimizing and even technically facilitating getting recommendations directly into the product roadmap and into the product. A couple of visuals to keep in mind about focusing on what you did versus what you found out. We’re not in grade-school math class; you don’t have to show your work. And underwear is important but you don’t have to show it.

Several presenters made the point that researchers aren't asking good questions and that they’re not considering whether the learning objectives are understood and in alignment. What hypothesis/assumptions are already on the table? What decisions are we influencing? Turning our skills on our selves. Set the stage, gain a baseline understanding, and future-state ideation. We collect rich information but distill it into slides and expect the people watching them to have the same empathy as we observed. Translate insights to product outcomes together with our partners. They're bought in and understand the value of research better. Partners have to be more hands-on because it makes research accessible and inclusive.

generalist vs specialist

Another major theme was that of the generalist versus specialist. It was argued that we are the catalysts and that specialists should be moving to resourcefull generalists. The argument for this was the trends that human-centered culture is no longer owned by UX. Largely due to design thinking and powerful playbooks that will only get better. Generalists use these and with even newer new tools like GenAI, anyone will able to be do this work. And roles and duties will continue to consolidate. The argument is that UXers need to support and cultivate these resourceful generalist professionals through teaching, supporting, and reinforcing adaptation. This is an example of leaning in, understanding how an organization is working, and adapting to it. Another is broadening our view that the customer isn’t always king, they’re one of several stakeholders all of whom are important.

I thought that this was an interesting discussion and it made me reflect back to a keynote that I gave to a cross-discipline meeting at a university. When I talked about design thinking, one of the business faculty members asked me, “with everyone doing design thinking, do we still need designers and researchers?”. I answered emphatically “yes!”. Everyone thinking like a designer doesn’t mean they’re doing design and the same goes for research. I use the T-shaped person to explain this. I characterize design thinking as one of the key skills to acquire that is representative of the horizontal stroke of the T but you still need to have a long vertical stroke for your superpower or main discipline whether design or research. While I totally agree that it is designers and researchers who are the catalysts for change and should be doing the teaching and supporting, I don’t believe this at all minimizes the need for design and research specialists. I do encourage designers and researchers to widen the vertical stroke of their T to include business, engineering, etc. skills as well. I do believe that we need to democratize UX research skills across disciplines but also, very importantly, within UX reseachers themselves. The wide range of educational backgrounds of researchers leads to some professing to only be qual researchers and others quant. I believe that any researcher should have both sets of skills.

Gen Ai

We had some incredibly insightful presentations and discussions on building Generative AI technology itself, evaluating it, and where it may go in the future. We got a glimpse into how dscout is building GenAI into it’s tooling and how they’re using research foundationally in that process. Others made the point that we need to develop metrics for evaluating GenAI tools and it was suggested that we should move from the focus on the human to the equivalent measurement of the computer. And an example of building a healthcare GenAI app reinforced the importance of the framework I presented at the IxDC Conference in Beijing.

final thoughts

I can’t do justice to capturing everything important that was discussed in a two-day conference like this. I also decided to not call out each presenter and what they presented, other than the keynote presenters. If I had, it would have been a book and not a blog post. So if I failed to mention great work you shared at the conference or acknowledge your work, I do apologize.

The conference was a positive, uplifting, discipline affirming event. Attendees reinforced the value of the feeling that “we’re not alone”, that there are some great things happening to the discipline and the field that are becoming mainstream, and that the best way to navigate the future is together with our colleagues.

A huge thanks to Michael and the dscout team for putting on such an amazing conference and research platform, for inviting me, and thanks to the presenters, attendees, and most of all my keynote partner, Katie Johnson.

Company-Centered Design

No User-Centered Design

I've written previously about how some companies are not focused enough on making sure that the designs of their products are user-centered. They're simply not paying attention to the user and as a result end up creating bad designs. Users then suffer through confusing, unintuitive, and frustrating experiences. For companies like these the solution is pretty simple — hire UX researchers and designers — and support them in doing their work using well-known user-centered design practices. I’ve spent my entire career and my writing focussed on getting companies to adopt user-centered design practices.

Company-centered design

Somewhat shockingly, there are other companies that appear to intentionally do the opposite of user-centered design and instead practice what I’m calling company-centered design. Please don’t take from the image on the right that I’ve revised my book and endorse this practice. I didn’t and I don’t. I abhor it.

These companies purposely make designs more difficult to use to trick or otherwise force users to do what the company wants them to do.

I’m sure you experience the results of company-centered design everyday because the products the companies that practice it develop are used by pretty well everyone everyday. You may just consider these annoyances but when you look at the motivation that the company has to design things the way they do, you’ll realize that it isn’t simply bad design, its insidiously intentional company-centered design to further the strategic intent and bottom line corporate objectives.

Intentional bad designs are often called dark patterns. However, these are typically applied during the purchase, upgrade, or cancellation parts of the user experience. However, company-centered design is more pervasive, intentionally focussed on the day-to-day use of the product.

Motivation

Let’s explore some examples of company-centered design. The company that takes company-centered design to olympic levels is Meta with their Facebook and Instagram properties. Meta is so afraid of TikTok that it has been doing everything it can to change the platform to be just like TikTok with short-form video content. Meta has also tried to take advantage of Elon Musk’s destruction of Twitter, now X, that it launched Threads and have been doing everything they can to get users on Instagram and Facebook to use it.

User experiences

What do users want from social media companies? Simply to connect with their friends and to reach other connections to broaden their network of friends. So, people don’t come to social media apps for the apps; they come for the people on them. You would naturally think that social media companies would want to satisfy those users’ desires but they often do the opposite.

Post Analytics

Instagram started out as just a photo sharing service and Facebook a way to update friends on what you’re up to with text and the occasional photo. However, with Meta wanting it’s two properties to compete with TikTok, it forces users to move from text and photos to videos.

Reel Analytics

How does it influence users to change what they want to do on their platforms? They limit the reach of what a user posts if the user just does what they themselves want to do, which is usually posting photos. They encourage users to post reels by providing greater reach to their followers and beyond. See the post analytics versus the reel analytics to the right showing that the reel leads to 56% more views and a dramatic increase in reach to non-followers.

A post as a reel with Instagram's advertisement "Watch more reels" obscuring the post.  

This encouragement to use reels leads users to do unnatural things just to satisfy the company’s desire to have users use reels including simply sharing posts and photos as reels. However, that also makes some of the resulting reels unusable and unreadable, as shown in this image with Instagram’s encouragement to watch more reels obscuring the actual post.

Threads injected into the Instagram feed

Meta also encourages the use of Threads by intentionally embedding Thread posts in the Instagram and Facebook feeds. I’ve tried Threads but don’t want Threads yet Meta insists on subjecting me to Threads posts in my Instagram feed. This is of course Meta’s own advertising but they add that to the rest of the ads that earn them money. A random sampling of my Instagram feed shows that out of 10 posts, 4 are ads. The frequency of ads in the feed has also been going up steadily. A similar random sampling of my Facebook feed indicates that fully 6 out of 10 posts are either external advertisers’s ads or Meta’s own Threads, reels, and connecting with other people ads. Only 4 out of the 10 are actually what I want to see. Meta only allows you to reach a small proportion of your followers unless you pay them for you to reach more by boosting a post which is in essence turning them into a sponsored ad. And of course, ads are another example of company-centered design.

Feedback from other users

I mentioned to my followers on Instagram that I was writing this blog post and asked them for their examples of Meta/Instagram not being user-centered.

Here’s a sampling of their comments:

Constant ads, reels are out of hand, no customer support for bugs n issues with the app - ive sent reports so many times nothing happens .. also they take down silly posts for provocative content but when actual provocative content is reported they do nothing. It's so longer a personal space anymore also, all business and it’s no longer a personal space.

The top issue should be the censorship and suspending accounts without reason and having no one to dispute it with. They need to knock off censorship of all kinds…..especially ones they claim are misinformation which has since come out as truth.

Also urls should be clickable links.

Not being able to see who unfollows you.

I miss the photos only days - could live without reels/videos.

I follow accounts that I interact with….like, comment, save etc but then they just disappear from my feed. Sometimes something will make me remember them and I’ll look up their account and they’ll have been posting regularly!

My complaint is always one that I share with a lot of people, I think - it’s that you can’t rearrange your posts.

I can go on for a whole month.

ADS. SO OVER ALL THE DAMN ADS.

Too many ads. No way to filter so I am sure to see posts by my actual friends. Almost no engagement anymore (I have 1700 followers and get less than 20 interactions usually)

It’s annoying that when you write a URL it doesn’t become a live link.

My complaint is that when I try to tag animal rescues to save a dog from euthanasia or pledge money to save that animal they flag my account for tagging others and frequently remove comments with pledges in them. All of this hurts the animals we are trying to save.

If you’ve got a problem with your account there’s no one to talk to!!

I also gave up on increasing followers. Years ago. Followed all the “tips” and never increased enough to notice. The little guy is just a cog in this big wheel now, of “influencers”, ads, and click bait.

They allow accounts that want followers and views by showing severe animal torture. Even if it is in the rules that animal cruelty is forbidden, they do nothing when you report them. They even temporarily block the whistle blower's account.

I would like to know “fact checkers” credentials and evidence. It’s all so vague.

Too much stuff in my feed from pages I don’t follow, and especially I feel like the mysterious algorithm is not showing my posts to my actual followers…ie lack of engagement even though I’ve tried some new things to try and improve this.

The only recent complaint is their lack of community standards when it comes to antisemitic posts, or posts deemed deliberately offensive to the Jewish race. I made a recent complaint, and they twice said it didn't go against their community standards. The post involved a very poor use of the swastika on an Israeli flag.

Honestly, I haven't got any complaints. Which is weird, as I am a natural born cynic!

Concluding thoughts

I thought we should end on a positive note with someone who is actually happy. All these comments reinforce to me that Instagram is listening more to their Meta bosses than it’s users. I didn’t ask a similar question on Facebook because I’m now rarely on it but I am on Instagram a lot. And I acknowledge that it’s a business but I truly believe that they’ve gone overboard on company-centered versus user-centered design.

Just a quick comparison before we finish up with LinkedIn, my preferred social media platform. Out of 10 posts, only one was an ad, my followers regularly grow with whatever content I post, and they don’t force me to do anything unnatural in order to connect with and grow my followers.

We continue to use these platforms because we want to connect with our friends despite the company-centered design practices which of course further encourages the company to do even more of it.

Let me point out that Meta isn’t the only company practicing company-centered design. They’re just in my view that the most pervasive users of it.

I Now Just Laugh at Bad Design

I’m reading a book right now, The Humor Habit: Rewire Your Brain to Stress Less, Laugh More, and Achieve More'er, because I’ll be interviewing the author for next week’s Life Habits Podcast episode. I’m loving the book and it made me look at the situation I’m in at the moment in a totally different, and humorous, light.

My reframing inspiration

The Context

As many of you know, Carly Williams and I are working with 300 volunteer researchers, designers, and filmmakers on the Habits for a Better World project. I’ve spent my entire career in design and research trying to make products that are well-designed so that users will minimally be able to use them and optimally love using them. That’s why I’ve found it fascinating to be on the other side, evaluating, buying, and rolling out products to our 300 person team. I’ve mentioned previously on LinkedIn the challenges we’ve been having with a number of products. However, there is one that is laughably badly designed—both the ux design and the service design. That product is Google Workspace. I get the sense that while it is in Google’s product portfolio, it appears to have received very little research and design attention.

Our Use Cases

We’d like to use it to schedule meetings with our 300 volunteers and our various leadership, enablement, fundraising, marketing, and filmmaking teams and to store our documents and other artifacts. The latter capability is fine but the former is not. Let me explain.

Our Laughable Experience #1

I bought Google Workspace because I initially used my personal free Gmail account to send meeting invites but most were blocked and I was told that the problem was the free email account. The remedy I was told would be to pay for a Google Workspace account. However, I had the same experience with the paid account. Then I was told that you can’t use distribution lists in Google Contacts, you need to use Google Groups. The only way to access Google Groups is through the administrator dashboard and even then Groups is way down the page with a small link. So I put the lists in Groups but now I was blocked from sending any calendar invites. One of the perks of the paid Google Workspace account though is support. So I asked the support chatbot, which turned out to be entirely useless. I then asked to be connected with a human. This window then appeared. OK, I suppose that I should contact them by email as they suggest, right? Well, do you see a link or an email address? This is an incredibly bad user experience.

Laughable fail #1

Our Laughable Experience #2

I then kept trying to get a human on chat and finally did. However, things got even worse and, in retrospect, even funnier. I was told that my “account reputation” was too low. The reason given for this was that I hadn’t paid enough money yet, either for the particularly license or cumulatively over time.

Laughable fail #2

Our Laughable Experience #3

In case it was the former, I upped my paid account to a higher level one so that it was above the threshold mentioned. However, that didn’t help. I was next told that I would need to wait for 60 days to be able to use it!!!

Laughable fail #3

Our Laughable Experience #4

Because I bought the Google Workspace account through the website hosting company we use for our website, Squarespace, I was redirected to them to further resolve the issue by increasing the “reputation of the account”. I’ve been with Squarespace for all of my websites for more than ten years and have been extremely pleased with their product and their support. However, support regarding this issue has been laughably nonexistent. I’ve tried to get a human on the Squarespace support site for nine days now and I get the following message each time and hitting the “View Queue Status” simply returns to this view.

Laughable fail #4

I did initially take the option of sending the support team an email and I’ve followed up several times in email asking for a resolution but no response.

A Reflection

I have to see the humor in this situation given how amazingly each company has failed our Habits for a Better World project. We’re 300 volunteers trying to make the world a better place and I’ve been paying for these various products out of my own pocket. Right now, there is no way for me to send a meeting invite to the 300 members of our team. I’m expected to wait 60 days to do that!!! Who in their right mind would design systems like this? Imagine a for-profit startup that has their first 300 clients but Google prevents that startup from contacting their own clients for 60 days! They’d go broke! I would expect better ux design and service design by first year undergraduate design students.

What allows me to see levity in the situation is the book I mentioned and the fact that Carly Williams and I get to work with our amazing 300 volunteer team of researchers, designers, and filmmakers focused on inspiring habits for a better world. It’s unfortunate that the companies that we’re using to do the most basic tasks are laughably inept.

People, Practices, & Impact on the World

My whole professional career has been about three things: people, practices, and impact to make the world a better place. These are the themes that inspired me to work with people at IBM for 36 years to develop and use new practices to make the work lives of our users and clients more enjoyable and productive. It's what guided the work I did in collaboration with Srini Srinivasan of the World Design Organization and our 225 global volunteers to drive behavior change in the Covid19 Design Challenge project and the same for working with Don Norman and the volunteers on the Future of Design Education project to improve how designers are taught so that they include the impact of their design on all people and the planet. It also guides my teaching, coaching, mentoring, and board work.

Origins

When I knew that I would be leaving IBM, I got together with someone I had only met a year previous to that who was truly a kindred spirit, someone who held the same worldview as me, and also had a passion to use our skills and practices to make the world a better place. We both had a dream to create the missing documentary, one that would meet people where they are and inspire individual behavior change that when carried out at scale would generate systems change. It was fortunate that our skills complemented each others perfectly for this project with mine in research and design and hers in filmmaking and production. That amazing person is Carly Williams. You know, people often say, “somebody should”. Carly and I say, “why not us!”.

Founding

We founded the Habits for a Better World project just two months ago. I announced it in a post on LinkedIn that received 55K impressions, almost 600 reactions, more than 100 comments, and greater than 50 reposts! It clearly struck a chord. We’re focused on addressing climate change, animal and human suffering, food insecurity, human illness, and biodiversity loss with a foundational focus on adopting more plant-based practices given the predominance of scientific evidence for their outsized efficacy in ameliorating these challenges. We also realize that Generative AI, as a new technology that is rapidly emerging, is drastically compromising most climate goals given its much heavier use of energy so we’re focused on it too. Inspiring people to go more plant-based will offset some of the increased climate risk of Generative AI but we are also examining additional ways of improving various aspects of Generative AI itself for a better world, including promoting behaviors that will reduce its energy consumption, make it more inclusive, mitigate bias, increase transparency, and more.

We were absolutely overwhelmed by and so appreciative of the strong response to our request for volunteers to work on the project. We now have some 300 researchers, designers, and filmmakers from all over the world working in multiple teams focused on those challenges. We formed an Enablement Team that has gone well beyond my expectations. They helped in the selection, education, and rollout of tools for teams to use, creating processes and guidelines, and will focus soon on fundraising too.

Execution

We’re now in execution mode with teams familiarizing themselves with the prior scientific research literature and will next be carrying out our own research. That research will lead to ideation on how best to inspire the desired behavior changes and those ideas will then form the content of the documentary film and mini-documentaries in the form of social media reels. We’re also open to whatever other communication deliverable will lead to the desired behavior change.

Experiences

While we’re just getting started, I’ve been absolutely blown away by the passion, enthusiasm, commitment, hard work, and teamwork I’ve seen already from the phenomenal volunteers who are part of this project. And I’d like to acknowledge and celebrate that. When so much of what we see, hear, and read is negative, this project and the amazing people in it are incredibly positive. And I love it.

I asked them what they would like to share about why they joined this project and what their experience on it has been like thus far. As with anything on this project, I received an incredible number of contributions. Here’s a sampling.

• “Coming from a small town in Pakistan, problem-solving has always been a passion of mine, but opportunities to work on projects with a significant impact have been hard to come by. When I first heard Don Norman say that designers are here to solve real-world problems, it really resonated with me. So when I discovered UXR for Good, I instantly knew I wanted to be part of this diverse and talented group of people who are going to change the world. I am so happy to be part of it!” — Ahsan Abbas

• “I am really excited to be part of this project with the optimism of a designer—by understanding the unique challenges of different communities, we can make a real difference. It's incredibly inspiring to know I'm not alone in this journey.” — Banu Akman

• “No way could I let an opportunity pass by to work with an amazing leader in design thinking who shares a passion for improving life for all life on the only planet we have. The caliber of volunteers is inspiring. It has been great navigating initial setup and planning and seeing how well everyone collaborates. The vision is clear, and success appears to be the only possible outcome for this dedicated group of individuals.” — Drew Givens

• “Change doesn’t always need to come from big organizations. It starts with us. I see 'Habits for a Better World' as a milestone in my climate journey. I believe that small, intentional habits can significantly reduce the impact. Every individual has the power to make a difference.” — Jay

• “Transitioning from Aeronautical Engineering to UX Design self-explains my passion for problem-solving, design and human interaction. Yet, applying UX Research methods to change the world one behavior at a time is just too much, sounds like avarice. I truly believe that those indifferent to our planet are disconnected from their own humanity. Combining UXD/R with a meaningful purpose like this is a dream job for me.” — Marcela

• “I volunteered because I’m deeply committed to addressing the environmental challenges our world faces. I believe that by combining our expertise in research, design, and storytelling, we can inspire real, sustainable change. This project is a powerful opportunity to not only raise awareness but to drive action that will protect our planet for future generations.” — Meri Shahzadeyan

• “A small stick cut from its tree to be planted again makes the world greener! This is the time we spend making small changes to build a better world. This is the first habit to adopt work for yourself and for those who come after you.” — Nashwa Nassar

• “Looking at the way nature is falling down each and every day in bits, one day when it reaches its saturation it will be really disheartening to see and think of everything we could have done as designers and still decided not to……I just don’t want to feel that way”. — Nidhi Kothari

• “I believe we are all here on this Earth for a reason beyond just living. For me, that reason is the opportunity to help, to impact, and to make a difference. Over the years, I’ve volunteered for various smaller initiatives and programs, many of which didn’t require my professional skills, but each one has deepened my desire to contribute in a meaningful way. When this opportunity came my way, the very thought of being part of something on this scale was exhilarating. The chance to apply my research skills, to work alongside and learn from others, and to step out of my daily bubble truly excited me. The journey so far has been incredible. Meeting Karel and Carly, seeing them set up the infrastructure to bring everyone together, and witnessing the ease with which everyone collaborates has been both inspiring and humbling. I’m grateful for this opportunity to be a part of something that aligns so closely with my values and aspirations. It reaffirms my belief that we can all make a difference -'make a dent in the universe' when we come together with a shared purpose.” — Panna

• “I believe in the power of collective effort to create meaningful change. This project is a unique opportunity to merge creativity with purpose, and I’m thrilled to be part of a team so dedicated to making a difference. Collaborating with such incredible impact-makers, all driven by a shared vision for global change, is truly inspiring. Together, we’re not just working on a project—we’re building a better future.” — Shakshi Shah

• “I am right now in the path of finding better of myself and shift my life and career to what is my calling in the life journey. And I was lucky enough that LinkedIn shared your project and , well, when you ask the universe, the path will be lightened up.Thank you for this great opportunity to learn, do something that means a lot to me and find fantastic people ( including you) that without this project I may never had a chance to meet.” — Shiva Farzanepour

• “My dream is using my UX skills for the benefit of humanity, to work on meaningful projects that have a social impact, and that help people. It gives me hope that so many of us designers, researchers, filmmakers have gathered to look into these “wicked problems”, driven by the same goal towards a better world. Looking forward to seeing our end results and learning from everyone involved.” — Simina Harla

• “I see problems in the world but don't always feel confident to go on the journey to solve them alone. That's why a collective effort like this motivates and inspires me. By combining our diverse skills and perspectives, we can tackle complex challenges that seem daunting individually."I’m excited about the impact we’re making with this project!” — Swapnil Raj

• “To be completely candid, I volunteered because I feel disillusioned about the role of the designer in my recent work experiences and wanted to be a part of something that tackled complex social problems that had meaning and purpose to renew my sense of purpose as a designer. I didn't know when I volunteered that the project would have a focus on plant-based benefits and I'm excited by that. In my own life, I've had to be aggressively plant-based to heal my autoimmune condition, so I know first hand the tradeoffs and issues people need to sort out on a personal level. I also know about the social pressures, challenges brought about by the food industry, lifestyle mindsets, food addiction and how food choices can alienate people or cause people to judge one another. I'm excited to work with people all over the world on this project; it gives me the opportunity to learn on a monumental scale and see what we can do together to create positive change. We have the opportunity to be very creative, empathetic and impactful.” — Tracee Vetting Wolf

• “To move on in life, change is obvious. To continue the journey one should focus on changing himself to leave a positive footprint on earth rather than expecting the shift to happen automatically. That's where research plays the pivotal role.” — Susmita Chakrabarty

• “Let's design our environment the way we envision and deserve it. United, we can harness our collective power and knowledge to create meaningful change.” — Meri Shahzadeyan

• “Together to use their skills and experience in research, design, and filmmaking" with the intention to leverage existing AI opportunities as we think about ways to influence behaviour change.” — Eno Oduor

• “We've known for decades about the existential threat from climate change but carried on as usual. We've waited for system change from the top down for long enough. It's time we all take action to push through the changes to create a better world for everyone.” — Chris

• “If not now, when? If what we are doing isn't working, we need to try again, not continue to pursue the trodden path.” — Christine Chastain

• “When this opportunity arose—to join other like-minded individuals in applying human-centered practices to create a better world, something that aligns with my values and desire to give back—I knew I didn’t want to miss out.” — Dawn Ta

• “I joined this project because I believe in the power of passionate people working together to inspire change. As a designer and digital citizen, I know how storytelling through film can touch hearts and inspire minds. Our mission to encourage sustainable habits, as good habits leads to long-term positive impact which resonates with me deeply. It’s a privilege to be part of something that has the potential to create lasting, positive impact.” — Val p

Final Thoughts

I’m absolutely thrilled to be working with Carly and so many passionate, committed, hardworking, and collaborative volunteers. The fact that many of them share their enthusiasm with this project on LinkedIn is also heartwarming. But now it’s time to get doing the hard work. I’ll give periodic updates on the Habits for a Better World website but I wanted in this post to share my deep appreciation for the amazing people I’m working with. Truly a dream team! Thank you!