Grit and Gratitude

Let’s be real. This has been a stressful year for everyone.

Stress is an unavoidable fact of life. One of the most frustrating features of stress is its tendency to build on its own momentum. I get stressed out about being stressed!

Reminding myself to work with stress, not against it helps reframe this problem-focus to a solution-focused and action-oriented approach. This is a real benefit of a Design Mindset: the ability to adapt, move positively forward towards a successful planned outcome.

Design is all about adapting. Adapting to the consumer’s needs to find relevant solutions, adapting prototypes to create the best results, adapting mindsets to build empathy. Adaptability is a powerful skill that drives success.

Excellence Expert and Phycology Professor Andres Ericsson, author of ‘Peak’ said that cognitive and psychological adaptations relate directly to expert performance. What some perceive as luck or talent in successful people, in reality, is the simple ability to cognitively and psychologically adapt. Practicing design is a great way to engage in cognitive adaptations because the iteration of convergent and divergent thinking requires an adaptive mind.

Design is adapting as well. Design has become conceptual.

Design is no longer perceived merely as a form of giving life to a product or visual. Design has been steadily expanding into the corporate strategy world. Today organizations are increasingly applying design methods to develop their competitive advantage.

That’s great news for designers and a lifeline for businesses affected by the ever-changing dynamic cause by the pandemic.

Why? Design methodology is driven by consumer insight; what they care about and what interests them. Design is focused on consumer empathy and emphasizes experimentation and collaboration. Design can change the way companies strategize by providing frameworks to solve the key questions of what do next and how to do it with the consumer in focus.

The process begins with understanding the challenge, connecting and engaging with consumers, then defining the findings, next ideation, then prototyping to test the viability of the ideas. This kind of experimental iteration allows designers to develop raw concepts into the final design that are viable, feasible, and desirable.

Design has also shifted; it’s no longer designing for people, but designing with people and soon will be designing by people.

This approach requires a change in mindset. Change creates stress. Working with stress builds grit.

Grit is a non-cognitive skill of perseverance and passion for working towards long-term goals. Grit appears to be a better indicator of success and happiness than either IQ or talent states Angela Duckworth, a leading researcher in the science of grit.

Grit and Design are like bread and butter — a yummy combination that I can’t resist. Here are four traits gritty people have in abundance as identified by Duckworth.

Curiosity

Applying a design mindset is not a job it’s a lifestyle. Design methodology exceeds working hours because it’s a holistic way of thinking that can be applied to designing a service, an entire business, or developing your cooking or gardening skills. Exploring novel ideas in a human-centered manner is one of the key characteristics of a great designer.

Practice

Practice is key to success and grit. Designers value practice and exploration. Practicing and feedback are the backbones of ideating and prototyping. As Anders Ericsson, states: “anytime you can focus your performance on improving one aspect, that is the most effective way of improving performance”.

Deliberate practice involves leaving your comfort zone and engaging in activities beyond your current abilities. What matters is the quality of the practice. Ericsson argues against the 10,000 hours rule — you can practice 10,000 hours and you’re still not guaranteed to master the skill.

Purpose

Designers are inspired by people’s behavior and work to design with them. This relationship is adapting; the main objective is not to gain insights into the people anymore. Instead, designers want to help people discover things about themselves. This is the shift from design with people to design by people. The main purpose of today’s design is to empower people to apply design principles themselves.

My goal is to promote the purpose of design as a means to positive change: globally and individually.

Hope

Hope is the belief that there is something you can do to find a solution to a problem. Hope needs to be present during the entire design process. Hope needs active, hands-on participation fueled by future-facing and an optimistic attitude.

The mindset of prototyping and failing until you find the relevant solution builds not only resilience to failure but develops grit. This mindset affirms that hope can be created.

When designers prototype they count on the possibility of failure and, just like children, they don’t believe failure is a permanent state, but an opportunity to develop and prototype the idea further. Iteration is helpful to develop a growth mindset. A design mindset is not problem-focused it is solution-focused and action-oriented.

Grit builds gratitude. If Grit and Design are bread and butter — then gratitude is the jam that makes life, business, and our world sweet.