…Are you Ghanaian?

I grew up afraid to take up space and be seen as difficult. Like many young girls in the 90’s, the less visible I was, the better the outcome, or so I was taught - and thought. This made me shut up most of the time, especially when it came to defending my own interests.

I’m glad those days are over.

The reason why I broke free from that system as a teenager is the same reason that has opened every door of my career since then: stating what I wanted. Even today, stating what I want still carries the sweet taste of when I was 17: rebellion.

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Not long ago, during a negotiation workshop, I learned that a lot of negotiations fail simply because they did not even start. The reason: one side hadn’t explicitly stated what they wanted.

Humans are wired to go the route of least resistance, and unless we understand what the other side wants, we will make the easiest, most (subjectively) logical offer, misinterpreting the other side’s motivation. And unless both sides explicitly state what they want, the deal will either feel imposed, turn into a conflict, or a cut in communication. It’s basic, and yet it completely changed the way I communicate my work now.

But building negotiation skills takes time, and practice, and god do I wish that I had started earlier on.

My practice in Ghana had been the catalyst of a learning phase that is still ongoing. Vulgarly simplified, negotiation is the construction of an argument that shows both sides have a win of an equal perceived value and thus a fair outcome.

And my observation throughout my whole career has been that designers are, in fact, quite terrible at that.

Strong opinions, yes. Great storytellers, yes. Remarkable craft, sometimes. Good negotiators? No.

As part of a discussion within the Swiss Design Advisory Board this year, I had a realization about who currently benefits from the value designers bring to businesses. And it’s appalling to say that the last ones to benefit from it are the designers themselves.

Some of the biggest business schools in the world are teaching their students “design thinking”, taught by academics who rarely come from a creative background. The result is that MBA graduates understand it, take it up in their jargon, apply it to their businesses and career, and ultimately benefit from design generating value. On the other side, most designers still really suck at articulating the value their own work brings to the table. Why?

Negotiation skills, central in business studies, simply aren’t taught at design schools.

Imagine if this were different!

So next year, I’ll be partnering with the ECAL to cover the topic of exactly that: what value can my work as a designer bring to a business, and how do I communicate it?

My main point: Trying to articulate the worth of design by valuing the craft does not work. This is a language that most people outside design don’t speak, let alone people in decision making positions in, say, marketing teams.

Until business studies start teaching applied design as a tool to increase company value at every level, the designers who will thrive in business environments are the ones who flip the script of negotiation.

If you are a designer and you’re stuck, here’s a very simple place to start:

Do not talk about design.

• Get curious about the value of your work. Do the thinking. The process of finding this out will bring clarity already.

• Ask questions, then LISTEN. This is where you’ll learn what really matters to the other party. No assumptions.

• Articulate how you understand the problem, then play it back.

Not talking about design is the first most useful step that you can take to position both parties for success.

If the argumentation falls on design, my experience is that the best thing you can do is redirect it to are we solving the right problem in the right way? You’d be surprised at how often a judgement on design is actually a symptom of either the wrong problem solved in the right way, or the right problem solved in the wrong way. And that question is the whole point.

Leading creative teams over the years, I've often been asked which negotiation resources I recommend. As a good, basic start, Never split the difference1 is useful. I also enjoy (re)reading Obvious Adams2, and cinema, always, for instance Anatomie d’une chute3, Bugonia4, La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc5, Marty Supreme6, through the negotiation lens.

However, nothing beats a good bargaining session with a taxi driver in Kumasi.

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I talk about this, and more, on Jimmy Gordon’s Months in Motion podcast:

Youtube link here

Spotify link here

When it comes to outdoor photography I’ve always been a fan of images that are taken in the action by the smallest team actually doing the outdoor-ing.

So much of outdoor communication is trying hard to convey the product or the “feeling” and misses the point that most outdoor freaks don’t care about the subjective beauty of something being put into scene, actually it’s quite the opposite. Like skateboarding or snowboarding, ultra running, climbing, backcountry skiing and mountaineering are very much about the love for the practice, especially the slight absurdity that comes with it.

A few years ago I stumbled across a book from mountaineering legend Reinhold Messner at the bar of a wonderful hotel in the Dolomites. I spent all my evenings that week there, with the bartender until closing time, going through that book over and over again. It’s one specific edition from 19751 about vie ferrate. I have never found any better outdoor imagery.

What made me lose my mind is relatively basic, yet hard to reproduce.

To start, Messner is a mountain guide. His technical level is off the charts which means he’s been taking clients on very challenging routes. That tension is not fakeable and any person who has had their hearts beat ever so slightly faster on a very slim ridge or an arm shake at an inconvenient time of a climb will instantly know that moment is real.

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Second, Messner started photographing in the 60’s and the colors and grain aren’t harming the story. Obviously shot on analog makes everything feel real-er. But also the slight (now) obsolescence of their gear combined with the (then) technical difficulty of the routes is a friction that cannot be unseen and would theoretically be impossible the re-do today.

Then, I find Reinhold Messner did one of the best framing jobs in sports photography history, and in this book specifically. Because he is climbing too, he is photographing his guiding. That is very different from going on a climb with the intention to shoot great images.

It means we have a certain access to his mind, see where he puts his focus on, what moment he thinks is relevant, and obviously where he chooses to shoot from. At his level, just putting a foot more to the left or to the right on a climb to get that specific angle might be impossible for most of the rest of humanity, simply due to technical capacity. That is exactly what makes it different from a photographer hanging on a rope, who, in theory, would have access to every angle but wouldn’t know why the angle mattered.

That mindset and constraint specifically combined with Messner’s surprising creative talent gives us angles that don’t happen elsewhere.

At a time where most outdoor brands are fighting for authenticity through influencer marketing, Messner was already in creator economy 50 years ago, shooting the images of his own books during his climbs.

Great choices are only available to people who are extremely good at what they do. Choosing to move a foot left or right on a climb is the equivalent to design craft.

Not that creatives need to be living what they are working on. But we need to have a precise understanding of our field to make the right choices, out of which this is the one I think gets neglected first:

Curate (extremely well), then get the hell out of the way.

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