More thoughts on Savoring Our Design Mistakes

After my last post on Savoring our Design Mistakes, someone sent me this response:

So, you want to reward bad behavior in such a way that it further promotes it? Taken to a slight extreme, I can envision a handful of developers all trying to earn the greatest number of “Monkeys” by helping the company “learn” more.

Positive reward of a negative behavior just seems really wrong.

Since I believe that developers really want to produce great designs, I don’t think this is the scenario that would play out in most organizations.

Someone once said “Good judgement comes from experience. And experience comes from bad judgements.”

If you don’t create a safe environment for people to “fail” and, subsequently, learn from those failures, then people are going to be risk adverse. However, if you give team members a chance to learn in a positive and creative way, I believe they’ll quickly rise to the challenge and exceed your wildest expectations. Every environment where I’ve managed to swing things in that direction has proven this to be true.

Teams often are rewarded for things that work against building great user experiences: being on budget or shipping on time. Designing for great experiences takes time and resources. Coming up with ways to reward developers for exploring what it takes to make great experiences work sounds like a winning idea to me.