Don't be The Split Man

01 Jun 2024

If you make a trip south of Dublin, towards the village of Roundwood, Co. Wicklow, you are sure to be told about the wonderful and most unusual sculpture park, Victor's Way. As you walk through the journey of life depicted in Indian and spiritual figures, you may come across The Split Man.

To describe what's going on here, here's a paraphrase of Victor's description:

The Split Man sculpture symbolizes the awful mental and physical state of the dysfunctional because undecided human (here represented as a 30 year old male).
 
They are in bits because unable or unwilling to decide how to dedicate, indeed sacrifice their life completely to one goal, consequently unable to create and experience their true self.
 
Failure to make that goal an actual reality, thereby failing to increase one’s survival capacity, results in unhappiness, indeed depression.

I think anyone from their thirties onwards can relate to this from the perspective of self-actualisation in the face of time, but I also see another archetype here: that of a designer.

As designers, we're used to dealing in ambiguity, and there is no greater example than an effective categorisation of what we do. At times, this gives us boundless freedom to tap into many disciplines, as design is problem solving, and everyone can use their problems being solved.

How this often manifests is in how others see and engage with our role. Designers are quintessential 'integrators', filling the invisible cracks between teams and departments, simultaneously working from up the clouds and deep in the trenches. Unfortunately, quantifying integrator work is difficult in traditional organisation structures where 'roles and responsibilities' are codified in concrete terms, and this creates invisible stresses:

"...we don't discuss connecting, caring, and cohering nearly as much. Part of that is that integration often falls on underrepresented and marginalized groups. These individuals know that organizations are not an idealized Venn diagram of "aligned incentives" glued together by meritocracy. They sense the cracks and the edges and want to help and support, and know if they don't, no one will.
[John Cutler - The Integrator Burden]

Designers know this space all too well. We care about our work, particularly when we are aware of the responsibilities we have to deliver not only profit, but betterment to people who interface with products and services we architect. We are far too often placed as a 'magic' entity in organisations where departments have teams, defined tracks, mature hierarchies. It doesn't help that design as an industry struggles to define itself at the best of times, leading to superficial struggles over the naming of job titles themselves.

"Doing the design" becomes a daunting when you are playing the stategiser and executor, the translator of departments, the mediator of ideas good and bad, the supporter of downtrodden colleagues while no-one else has your back. It's tempting to play the Split Man role, but when you do, you're not only putting your work at risk - you're putting yourself under deep, personal stress.

What can we do as designers to combat this?

A skill you will rarely hear in a bootcamp is that of delegation. The first trap designers find themselves in, particularly when they are in small or solo teams, is that of trying to control and own everything they touch, even if it offers a poor effort to benefit ratio for the business they are working for.

The negative outcome of this extreme external ownership is the diminishing capacity of designers to provide value in their specialised domain. If you're resizing every image, playing pseudo-PM, starting every request with a "Sure I can...", that's hours of research, strategy, and deep design work that is lost - ask yourself, could someone else have taken those screenshots, edited those files, provided those summaries?

Being able to pragmatically organise your work based on the worth to you and the relevance to your court is key when you are ready to mature your practice and demonstrate confident guardianship of what matters to you and to the business who can benefit from your expertise.

Of course, nicely saying "No" is a whole skillset of its own. Regardless of how you say it, the important north star for you the designer, is always...

• Is this task uniquely posed for me to address?
• Does me doing this task provide the maximal value to a business goal/objective?
• Does it provide personal value?

The last criterion is tricky - we'll always do work that is not always personally valuable, but you must create space for you to be able to personally develop

It is an almost certain inevitability that you're going to get the 'death by thousand cuts' tasks - the kind of work that you're perfectly able to do, but has a cumulatively negative effect on your professional self; Convert the PNG, remove the background, turn this PowerPoint into a PDF.

In an ideal world, you could get these out of the way and still have time for high-value, specialised tasks. However, human brains are tricky, and that low-value task can add significant blockage, if we're to take the science at face value.

If you're finding that you're getting repeated requests for low bar work, why not help people figure it out for themselves? There are many online tools which will perform these tasks automatically (provided, you're allowed to use them in your workplace for non-sensitive work). If you commit time out to record a short how-to video or Confluence, you're providing an asynchronous copy of yourself that can continue to deliver value, even if you're busy on something else. If the work is indeed something specialised, you're back to justifying your value, but you're sending a message that you only have capacity for this kind of high-value work.

You owe it to yourself to not only provide the highest value you can in your work, but save yourself from burnout and the dread of a portfolio that can't be built from unquantifiable glue work. Be deliberate in your daily practice, manage your work accordingly, and always try to factor in for the occasional unplanned moment. Being The Split Man isn't good for anyone.