Radical Transparency
Mar 28th, 2007 by Aaron Louie
I’ve been pondering lately the apparent contradiction between collegial collaboration and corporate competition. This issue became all the more relevant when I attended the IA Summit this past week. Surrounded by my fellow user experience designers and information architects, many of whom work for my employer’s direct competitors, I suddenly felt the familiar twinge of cognitive dissonance (which I’ve come to think of as my “Spidey sense”). There we were, trading best practices, tips and tricks, research findings, processes, and design patterns — with people who were representatives of our rivals in the marketplace.
We’re competing for recruits. We’re competing for clients. We’re competing for market share. So why the heck should we be sharing our companies’ secret sauce with each other? Shouldn’t we be hiding our knowledge from each other in order to gain a competitive advantage?
Well, no. Obviously, we aren’t breaking our non-disclosure agreements with our clients. We aren’t showing screenshots of unreleased products or sensitive data. We’re not that stupid. But we share the lessons we’ve learned for the mutual benefit of our colleagues. By making our processes and patterns available to each other, we hone our craft for the benefit of all, with the expectation that others will reciprocate in time. Design patterns, heuristics, and processes that are grounded in research and verified by colleagues across the industry can be reused with confidence, saving everyone time and money. This leads to better (and less expensive) design, since we don’t need to reinvent the wheel for every project. Better design raises the standards of the entire industry, leading customers to demand better user experiences, leading to increased demand for better research and better design. And the virtuous circle (spiral?) begins another turn.
There’s an article in this month’s Wired on the concept of “radical transparency” — gaining a competitive advantage by being completely (or mostly) open. The author posits that doing so is beneficial for a company’s reputation in the marketplace, since customers will trust a company that bears all over a competitor who hides behind a PR smokescreen. A company’s reputation amongst its competitors could serve as a marketing tool as well — for example, get your colleagues talking about your company by having them cite your research, or send a large contingent of designers to a conference to create buzz that your company is a leader in the design community.
Our employers have little to gain from guarding their designers from each other. In fact, they run the risk of falling behind their competitors. Professional development conferences ensure that designers keep abreast of their counterparts in competing companies and provide an opportunity to poach the best talent from competitors. This is the nature of capitalism. In the IA/UX community, this free market also happens to benefit customers and end users.