Collaboration vs. Confrontation

There are some instances when collaboration works best while some other instances when you just need to confront, defending your design –either of the 2 extremes hurt. Extreme confrontation "alienates" the design team from rest of the product team while extreme collaboration may lead to “design-by-committee”. Most occasions call for a blend of the two with some needing more of one than the other. So the tough question is when should you use what?

While involving (collaboration) most of your product team in design is helpful to align them to your design vision, it turns out to be highly expensive, since it calls for driving consensus. And it is not the responsibility of the design team alone to get everyone aligned. Crucial items like product branding, dashboards, critical workflows, etc. need involvement of the larger team and thus make collaboration an important tool. However, it is not the designers' sole responsibility to drive consensus.

In such situations, a clear decision making model plays an important role -the decision making board (which includes the design team) should make the final calls (after doing the needful, perhaps consulting other stakeholders outside the board from time-to-time). It should be the board's responsibility to convince rest of the product team about the decisions made and thus drive consensus. Now, if the design team strongly feels that a decision strongly violates the design vision of the product, they have to use confrontation but in a collaborative way, to convince the audience, making them feel heard and after having carefully thought through the other possible options laid out. This strategy works well for non-crucial design items as well but you need to decide how much time and effort you can afford to spend on these (involving the board vs. design team handling it alone).

Confrontation by itself has never won any battle but tactical collaboration can go a long way and is a great tool for designers.

Bryan @ZURB has similar thoughts on this –read his blog post on building design consensus