Colin Burns has been around the proverbial block.

The designer first took us through his professional journey. Burns initially got a touch for physical interface design back in the 90s when he helped design an early PDA system.  

Since then, he’s worked across UK mobile phone providers and manufacturers to develop phone designs, worked with the BBC to design and streamline their online content across news and iPlayer, and finally ended up at Apple in Cupertino as senior director of design at Apple while the tech firm further revolutionised the mobile phone industry. 

During his work, Burns identified five patterns he noticed that made all the difference in company design journeys, as well as their journey as a thriving business overall. 

First and foremost, Burns explained that design is actually rather simple. 

“There’s really not that much to design,” he playfully noted.

“All design does is help you look at the world in new ways. That helps make ideas visible and tangible. And it helps you manage risk by trying stuff out in simple ways.”

While summing up design in three sentences may make it seem simple, good design takes a lot of practice, and is perhaps the most concrete confluence of human adaptations and skills. 

Accountability and Art 

Burns has worked across a number of mobile phone companies in the UK, including those that have long since been absorbed or disappeared, as well as the remaining few providers. 

During his design process, he noticed a number of companies playing it relatively safe, driven by practical, data-driven methods – even if this was driving the companies into the ground. 

Others put creativity and art at the heart of their experimentation, leading to futuristic-looking phone designs, despite a call back to practicality and an urge towards newer systems rather than fancy features.

Speaking in generalities, Burns could place most companies in either the accountable sphere, or the artistic sphere, with few able to place themselves in the sliver of their intersection. 

“A very large part of my career I’ve spent helping clients find some kind of balance between those two things,” Burns explained. Throughout his career working for multiple companies, from Prada to Procter and Gamble, Burns noticed a continual pattern. 

Much like people leaning more on their right or left brain, Burns found that most businesses struggled to find a balance between accountability and art on their own. 

“What’s really amazing to me is actually how few businesses seem to naturally be able to inhabit that middle spot,” he said. 

And while, in data-driven, results-oriented tech, many may think it is more dependable to be overly accountable, this runs a real risk. 

“I think that so many of us are working in businesses where what’s valued is what could be measured and the almost like kind of the risk of a measure of dive to the bottom is somehow more palatable than the risk of using a creative or intuitive approach to what we’re doing.” 

A calculated crash is still a crash, afterall. 

While Burns has spent his career pulling organisations into the sweet spot, he found it when he went to Cupertino to work for Apple. 

“I got to Cupertino and realised that that was actually at the very core of what performance is” – the overlap between accountability and art, that is – “And I think that this is such a fundamental part that determines if something is able to be successful. 

“I think Steve Jobs personified that balance. He insisted. He demanded that balance from his team and that’s still very much a part of the controls of the company.”

Tribes and Tribulations 

“If culture eats strategy for breakfast, then tribalism eats culture before it’s out of bed,” Burns said. 

Essentially, the human nature to form little packs, or tribes, can get the better of a business. Over-compartmentalisation of business and technical units in a team can lead to tribalism, where company culture and ultimately business goals are lost. 

“I think that managing or leading to try and get people to put their tribal things to one side and to realise the goals of the company is a real challenge,” Burns said. 

Tribalism in itself is not all a bad thing – small teams exist for a reason, and a DevOps team will have very different functions, priorities, and structures than say, a marketing team. 

But tribalism in companies is more than that, and boils down to product groups – a “they have more than us” mentality, and discipline groups – an “our way or the highway” mentality. 

Burns presented solutions to each type of tribalism quandary. 

Starting off with the most radical, he reflected in Apple’s structural transformation under Steve Jobs. 

“Back in 1997, when Steve Jobs came back [to Apple], the business was organised in business units, each with its own profit loss.” This profit loss tended to exacerbate tribalistic tendencies. 

“Steve Jobs came back and he fired all the general managers in a single day and put the whole business under a single profit and loss model and only had functional departments.”

A complete structural change, much more similar to a startup than to an expansive company Apple would one day become. 

“I still believe this is a fundamental thing that Apple does that makes it the success it is.”

Further, this organisational framework means that communication is oriented around central business goals. 

“The communication between people has to be about joining the products together in an ecosystem rather than one product group trying to somehow play our game. And I think that’s something that’s wonderful.”

For more discipline-based tribes, Burns recommended a less radical approach, looking back on his time at the BBC. 

“We decided that we needed to print out the BBC Online,” he said. 

This project culminated into about 50 feet of almost every page of BBC Online, every different format and design that the team had developed and published. 

Burns and his team took these pages on a travelling roadshow of sorts, around four different cities in the UK, and showed it to the top 200 people in the business at each location. 

“An extraordinary thing happened when we actually pulled all the tribal leaders together,” he said. 

The various teams were able to see where their designs had varied for no reason, causing them to have a different look and feel despite the need for cohesion. 

Actually presenting and discussing the ways tribalistic units keep important design elements from forming cohesion. 

Making things visible across different tribes is key in getting separate units to work together. But this also ties into another point from Burns. 

Hide and Seek (Or: A Sneak Peak)

“Businesses are really sort of set up to hide things,” Burns said. “It’s just something that is very very natural.” 

Digitisation, and the compartmentalisation and separation of the workforce, have contributed to a culture that enables and even encourages hiding. 

“I think that hiding is the flight response,” Burns said, referring to fight or flight tendencies. “It’s what people do if they think that someone’s going to object to what they’re doing or going to argue with them or create a problem.”

Hiding things can create a transparency problem, a productivity problem, and ultimately, even a business crisis. 

Key to this in design is the creation of prototypes. 

Burns discussed the various types of prototypes designers can create to essentially not hide their work, ambitions, and skills. 

First, are look-and-feel prototypes. These are essentially taking ideas and creating something that can be, in simplest terms, felt. 

It’s not necessarily about functionality, but about outward design. Think how a phone might fit in the hand rather than the software used in the actual phone itself. 

Next, and more commonly, are implementation prototypes. Typically employed by engineers, these prototypes are all substance, no frills. 

An important distinction here is that this prototype is about what the technology may be capable of, not necessarily connected to a specific use case. 

Next, are role prototypes. These are prototypes focused on the use value of a potential product or service. 

“I think what lots of organisations do is that they try to create the perfect post type by integrating the look-and-feel, implementation, and the role [prototypes] right from the beginning.

“On the whole, I find that that doesn’t allow ideas to be explored as fully.”

The integration of different prototypes is an essential part of the process, allowing the technical, role, and look-and-feel to all be explored to their full potential before being put together. 

While the prospects of integrated prototypes are important, Burns said these should wait until at least the second round. 

But for Burns, prototypes are just one method of no longer hiding in the design process. 

It’s about giving people the room to not hide their processes, so better decisions can be made in the future. 

He made a distinction between “smart” failure and “dumb” failure. 

Failure does not necessarily mean that an idea was bad, and does not necessarily mean that the person who instigated it is a poor leader. 

Providing people the room to explain their reasoning, ensuring transparency so that processes are tracked, can ensure that workers and leaders have room to fail, grow, and eventually succeed. 

“Our workplaces are hunting grounds. We’ve still got these primitive instincts. People Get scared. People want to hide things because they think that if anyone finds out that it’s not quite right, they can be in trouble. 

Burns instead encourages practising grace, presenting clear expectations, and managing to create a culture where workers can be open and honest about their failures, however smart or dumb they may be. 

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The Four (Not Two) Types of Projects 

Burns does not abide by the traditional split between agile and waterfall projects, instead opting for a four pronged categorisation. 

To discern between these four types of projects, you first need to answer two questions: Do we know what we want? Do we know how to do it? 

Two Yeses

Projects with yeses are essentially a dream. Burns calls these paint-by-numbers projects, where the objectives and materials are clear. You want to put someone on the moon, and you know how to do it. Processes are well documented, with clear objectives, deadlines, and organisation. 

Yes! No. 

You want to put someone on the moon, and do not know how to go about it. These are called Quest projects, according to Burns. The goal is clear, but currently, the process of achieving this goal is not quite clear. Experimentation, trial and error, are essential to this project process, and are especially pertinent for marketers, where consumer data can inform market demand. 

No. Yes! 

These are the most common types of projects in the tech sector, according to Burns. He dubs these zig-zag, or movie projects. Essentially, the technology exists, but we are not sure how it meets consumer needs or demands. This requires a lot of pivoting, market research, and a number of role prototypes. 

No. No. 

No idea what we want. No idea how to do it. This is the fog, and is perhaps the most important project area to master, or at least, be comfortable in. 

The fog can lead to the most conflict in an organisation amongst even the most regularly effective teams. A lack of clear goals or solid technology can leave project teams lost in a muddled mist of conflicting priorities, but through this haze of uncertainty, Burns believes the biggest innovations can be thrust through obscurity. 

“In my experience, the organisations that are able to go into that quadrant” – the fog – “and trust their hunch, trust their intuition, are the ones that will do the breakthrough thinking we need.”

What is also important for leaders is understanding what quadrant their team falls under, and being able to lead them through the zig-zags, the quests, and even the fog – not just the paint-by-numbers. 

Personal Practices 

Throughout his explanations of business patterns, Burns regularly turns to thematic allegories of human nature – the juxtaposition and eventual confluence of the left and right brain, the primitive tendencies towards tribalism, the fight or flight response when things go wrong. 

Burns urges companies to not necessarily go against their better nature, but to embrace these differences in human nature, understand where intuition serves us and instinct hinders us, showing a path where very human traits – learning, agility, compassion, inventiveness, and disruption – are key to success. 

His main advice ultimately culminates in how to lead, how to collaborate, and essentially boils down to the most essential components of being human – mastering your craft, being able to collaborate, communicate, learn, and maintain a playfulness throughout it all.