Notes from the Design Room | Edition 02
Fair distribution isn’t always equal distribution.
Twenty minutes to air a breaking-news request landed on the screen in front of me. It needed graphics, and whatever we produced had to be ready for the next broadcast.
The phone rang almost immediately.
“Can we get this ready?” he asked.
“We’ll handle it. Don’t worry,” I replied.
I put the phone down and looked around the room. One designer was available. He was good, he was sitting only a few metres away, and under normal circumstances he would have been the obvious choice.
I began typing his name under the request.
Then I stopped.
I knew him well enough to hesitate. An unexpected request, breaking news, almost no preparation time, and a clock already running down, this wasn’t the kind of situation in which he did his best work.
Giving him the job might simply have transferred my pressure to him without getting us any closer to delivering it on time.
I deleted his name.
Another designer was working from home. He already had something else in progress, but I knew something about him too. When time became part of the problem, he tended to become faster and more focused rather than more anxious.
I called him.
“I need you to stop what you’re doing,” I said. “We’ll move that job to somebody else. I need you on this.”
There was a brief pause.
“Okay,” he replied.
I typed his name under the request, added a smiley face and pressed Enter.
A moment later, he liked the message.
And then there was the clock.
The phone rang again.
“How’s it going?” the requester asked.
“We’re on it. We’re doing everything we can,” I replied.
I tried to sound calm because the person on the other end needed me to sound calm. They had their own pressure to manage, and passing mine back to them wasn’t going to help anyone.
But I was watching the minutes disappear.
Fifteen.
I opened Teams, hoping to see the familiar sign that he was typing.
Nothing.
For a moment, I thought about asking for an update. Then I stopped myself. He knew the deadline. Another message from me would only take a few seconds of his attention away from the work.
Ten minutes.
The requester called again.
“We’re still working on it,” I said.
Then a message appeared on Teams.
“I’m on it. Don’t worry.”
That helped.
But it wasn’t finished.
The live broadcast was moving towards us whether the graphic was ready or not.
Five minutes.
Then three.
I checked the request again.
The status had changed.
Done.
The graphic was ready.
A few minutes later, it went to air.
And then something very familiar happened. All that pressure disappeared almost instantly. The broadcast moved on, another request arrived, somebody asked another question, and the twenty minutes that had felt enormous while I was inside them simply dissolved into the rest of the working day.
The graphic itself has almost completely disappeared from my memory.
The decision hasn’t.
THE ASSIGNMENT IS PART OF THE DESIGN
Looking back, what interests me is not what we produced but the question I had to answer before anybody began producing it:
Who should do this job?
The obvious answer might be the designer who is free. Or perhaps the person you consider the strongest designer in the team.
But neither question is enough.
A more useful question is:
Who is the right designer for this job, under these conditions, right now?
That distinction became increasingly important to me while leading a design team because people do not work in interchangeable ways.
One designer may be exceptionally fast under pressure. Another may need more time but notice details everybody else misses. Someone may understand a subject almost immediately, while somebody else has the technical experience to recognise a production problem before it happens.
There is rarely one person who is simply “the best.”
There is usually somebody better suited to a particular situation.
FAIRNESS IS HARD TO MEASURE
This is where fairness becomes complicated.
Equality is easy to see. Five designers, five jobs, one each. On paper, that looks fair.
Creative work doesn’t behave like arithmetic.
One job may take twenty minutes; another may take half a day. One may require conceptual thinking, another technical precision. Somebody may already have spent the entire morning dealing with revisions that nobody else has seen.
Counting jobs tells you very little.
Fair allocation requires knowing the people behind the job titles, understanding not only what they can do, but how they work, where they are strongest, what they are already carrying, and what a particular situation is likely to demand from them.
WHEN A STRENGTH BECOMES A LIMIT
But there is another side to this.
Once somebody proves particularly good at something, it becomes very easy to keep giving them exactly that kind of work.
The fast designer gets the urgent jobs. The technically strong designer gets the complicated production work. The conceptual designer gets the projects that need a new idea.
At first, it feels efficient.
And sometimes it is.
But efficiency can quietly become a trap.
Strengths turn into roles, and if we are not careful, those roles turn into limits.
The person who is always trusted with urgent work may never get the time to develop something slower and more conceptual. Someone who is excellent technically may gradually become known only for solving technical problems. And other members of the team may never get the opportunity to develop abilities we have already decided belong to somebody else.
Balancing that is never straightforward.
Sometimes the deadline has to win. Sometimes quality has to win. And sometimes, when there is enough space, development has to win.
WHAT STAYED WITH ME
What I remember most clearly from that day is the clock.
Twenty minutes. Fifteen. Ten. Three.
But over the years, I began to recognise another clock inside the Design Room.
It moves much more slowly.
Skills stretch. Confidence grows. Someone gradually becomes capable of taking on a job you might not have trusted them with six months earlier.
Leadership means watching both clocks.
You have to deliver what is needed today without permanently defining people by what they were best at yesterday.
That is why choosing the right designer for the right job isn’t simply resource management. It is part of the creative process itself.
Every assignment produces something more than the work in front of us.
Little by little, it also helps shape the person who will take on the next one.
If you’ve worked in a design room, as a designer, collaborator or team lead, I’d be interested to know: What makes the distribution of work feel genuinely fair?
Farhad
Previous edition:
The Design Room Is Never Just About Design
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/design-room-never-just-farhad-nadi-tkgoe