Expert Spotlight - Debbie Millman

A Q&A with Debbie Millman, designer, author, educator, curator, and host of the pioneering podcast Design Matters.
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Short Bio

For two decades, Debbie led Sterling Brands as President, growing it from a 15-person boutique into a global consultancy acquired by Omnicom, while shaping campaigns for Burger King, Hershey's, and Gillette. She is also the founder and host of Design Matters, one of the first and longest-running podcasts, where she has interviewed 700+ of the world's most creative thinkers and makers. In 2010, she co-founded the internationally acclaimed SVA Masters in Branding program, now in its 16th year. And she is the author of eight books, including the award-winning Why Design Matters: Conversations with the World's Most Creative People.

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Full Q&A

Q: You connect AI readiness to needing to have suffered through “the agony of the blank page.” Businesses are heading the opposite direction right now, removing friction everywhere they can. What do you think disappears when the friction is removed?

Debbie: What disappears first is the opportunity to discover what you actually think. The blank page forces a person to make decisions before they have any assurance that they are good ones. They have to choose a direction, follow it, recognize when it is failing, go back, reconsider, try again, and then try again! Over time, that process develops judgment and they begin to recognize the difference between something that is merely competent and something that has a soul and a genuine point
of view.

I understand why businesses want to remove friction. Some of it is indeed genuinely wasteful. But creative friction has value because it slows us down at precisely the moment when we are tempted to settle for a first plausible answer. When that experience disappears entirely, I worry that we lose some of our capacity to tolerate uncertainty, and uncertainty is often where an original idea begins.

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‍Q: Is there a version of that agony that belongs to a team, not just a person? What would it look like to build it in intentionally?

Debbie: I think teams experience their own version of the blank page whenever there is no immediate consensus about what an answer should be. Those moments can be uncomfortable, particularly inside organizations that place high value on speed. Someone may want to resolve the disagreement, pick a direction and keep moving.

I would protect some of that disagreement, and give people a chance to think independently before the group begins synthesizing. I would ask that everyone articulate what they believe the problem actually is before deciding how to solve it. Then allow competing ideas to remain alive long enough to reveal their strengths and weaknesses. And then, leave enough time between rounds for people to reconsider what they thought they knew.

Some of the most important thinking in a room occurs before everyone agrees. A team needs enough space for somebody to say, “I don’t think we have it yet,” and for that sentence to be regarded as part of the work rather than an obstacle to completing it.

Q: Your students called using AI “augmenting” but they risk skipping the hardest part of developing original thinking. Do you see that same self-deception happening inside businesses?

Debbie: Yes. Businesses are exceptionally good at renaming avoidance as efficiency. “Augmenting” is an appealing word because it allows us to believe that we remain fully in control of the thinking while the technology simply helps us execute it. Sometimes that is exactly what is happening. Sometimes it isn’t.

The distinction I care about is when the machine enters the process. If people have wrestled with the problem, developed a position and made some intellectual commitments, AI can be an extraordinary tool for extending the work. When it arrives before those things have happened, it begins supplying the premises as well as the possibilities. You may still edit the language, rearrange the ideas and reject half of what it gives you, but you have already allowed it to determine a considerable amount of the territory you are exploring. This is where I see the self-deception. We can convince ourselves that editing an answer is equivalent to having arrived at the answer ourselves. Those are very different cognitive experiences.

Q: If you were advising a marketing team instead of a graduate student, what’s the one thing you’d tell them to protect?

Debbie: I would tell them to protect the formation of a point of view.

Before the deck, the campaign and the endless rounds of optimization, a group of people has to decide what they believe about the brand, the audience, the culture and the opportunity in front of them. That requires attention, debate, curiosity and enough time to notice something that may not have been obvious at the beginning.

Once that point of view exists, I would use every useful tool available. AI can help interrogate it, expand it, challenge it and execute against it. But I would be very careful about outsourcing the part where you decide what you believe. This is still the most valuable thing a creative team has.

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