A very partial history of roles

In 2000, Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point had people abuzz, trying to figure out which “personality type” they were in a social epidemic — “maven,” “connector,” or “guru?”

In 2005, IDEO’s Tom Kelley and Jonathan Littman put out The 10 Faces of Innovation, highlighting the roles and approaches of “The Anthropologist,” “The Experimenter,” “The Cross-Pollinator,” “The Hurdler,” “The Collaborator,” “The Director,” “The Experience Architect,” “The Set Designer,” “The Storyteller,” and “The Caregiver.” (Yes, I just had to list them all.)

At LIFT 2008, Bill Cockayne identified four common roles that come into play at various stages of the design process: “expert,” “breadth + depth” (also known as the “t-shaped individual”), “breakout,” and “innovator.” [someone’s notes on Bill’s talk]

Reading these various roles always had me asking “which am I?” Are these typologies “right?” I find that all typologies can be tools for self-reflection, even if they’re random. I’ve always, for example, vaguely believed that my horoscope sign, Virgo, was right in many ways, but I also felt well described by Leo. One night, I read every astrological sign description and found myself matching five of the twelve signs. Maybe the horoscope doesn’t really describe me, but in going through the process, I thought about my own combination of strengths, weaknesses, passions, and boredoms.

How might these roles inspire our reflections on design?

While Gladwell, Kelley, and Cockayne are all creating typologies, they’re meant to solve different problems. Gladwell is trying to break meme epidemics down into something professional and recreational readers can hold onto. His idea has to be sticky and thus not too complex. And he seems pretty committed to selling the types as descriptions of individuals. Sociology’s existence as a field dedicated to the idea that many things we consider “individual personality” emerge out of interactions between individuals and structure of society, but that would be too complicated. In my experience, I found acquaintances thinking about their tipping point roles as a way of thinking about their value in visioning, developing, and spreading ideas in their organization.

Kelley’s and Cockayne’s are loosely descriptive, but they don’t commit to the idea that people fit one of those roles. The roles are also things that they encourage you to grow into — they acknowledge people can change over time. Kelley poses them as tools: “We’ve found that adopting one or more of these roles can help teams express a different point of view and create a broader range of innovative solutions” (emphasis ours, not his). But he acknowledges that people might have “talents” that swing one way or another. [source]

Cockayne focuses on the temporality of roles, connecting different approaches to different phases of the design process. The slide below maps ambiguity in the design problem over time, depicting the balance of innovator, breadth + depth, breakout, and expert players likely appropriate at each phase:

Cockayne’s roles seem less dynamic. They’re more about someone’s very general approaches to problems, one’s lust for ambiguity and depth, and disciplinary training. It’s helpful for thinking about picking collaborators and selecting the kinds of work best suited to us. But you probably wouldn’t say “well, I feel like an innovator most of the time, but let me try the expert role on for size as our team goes into the next phase.” Someone might be able to be both, but it doesn’t seem like a framework for experimentation. Kelley’s roles, on the other hand, are so specific that most of us can probably identify with several in part and very few completely. But those specificities are evocative as approaches to try out and I can imagine it as equally useful for the young designer trying to imagine a career as the experienced designer who wants to create new mental connections by trying on the eyes of a different role.

Tower of babel?

What all these typologies share is an appreciation for myriad approaches working together towards a shared goal. But diversity doesn’t come without challenges of its own. Well-cited management researchers from MIT studied 47 product teams, where each both conceptualized and implemented, and found that functional diversity correlated with less team cohesion and lower overall performance [source].
They suggest that the diversity which brings creativity might need to be modulated, perhaps with changes to team membership, as the project moves into implementation stages. Cockayne makes a similar suggestion, saturating the team with experts and a few breadth+depth people as the project goes into implementation. Kelley’s typology might also offer the tools to help team members switch gears into execute mode when the time is right.

This is such a complex topic that a blog post can’t possibly do it justice. But what we can say for sure is that typologies don’t necessarily describe how things are, but in painting a picture of how things might be, they provide tools for critically reflecting on our practices and lenses as we move through the design process.