Passion doesn't equal power

Hey friend,

Two weeks ago, I had the honor of giving the opening keynote at UX Scotland—an incredibly friendly event, in one of the most gorgeous countries I’ve ever visited. (You should go if you ever get the chance.) 

My talk was on something Jen and I have written about before, more than once: Burnout. Not the peppiest topic to start the conference with, but… maybe the most honest one. 

If you’re familiar with my work, you probably already know that I didn’t tell the audience to do more self-care. I didn’t suggest yoga or bath bombs or, god forbid, “more resilience.” 

I told them the number-one thing I know to be true: if we want to solve a problem, we need to name that problem with our full throat. 

And the problem isn’t that designers just aren’t good enough at getting massages. It’s that many of us are attempting to do human-centered design in utterly dehumanizing conditions. 

It’s that we’re living and working within a fundamental rift between the good things we came to UX to do, and the often heartless conditions we find ourselves trying to do them in. 

We’ve been told to prove our value—that we have to explain why we deserve to do the jobs we’ve been hired to do. 

We’ve been reorged to death—shuffled around like objects in a filing cabinet, instead of whole humans who need to grieve our lost relationships and trust and context, and then rebuild them again from scratch, every time the organizational winds shift. 

We’ve been told that AI slop is just as good as our work—and that if we’re not actively spending every living second using AI to work ourselves out of a job, we’re now “low performers.” 

And we’ve been told that we’re changing the world—building tech that will make people happier, healthier, more productive, better… Only to see that mission drift toward something a lot less meaningful—or even downright sinister. 

But see, this is where a lot of conversations about burnout also stop. If they admit that self-care won’t fix it, they leave us here: It’s the capitalism, babe. What did you expect?  

And it is the capitalism, babe! Specifically, the crushingly extractive version of capitalism known as “shareholder primacy” that’s been turned into gospel over the past 50 years. 

But this message isn’t very useful, either. If you still have bills to pay and life to live, and I’ll assume you do, you need more than something to be angry at. 

So what I explored in my UX Scotland talk is what I’ve seen actually work for people: Building a sense of identity outside of work. No longer looking to your company to define your value—and instead reconnecting with your values. Becoming so connected to who you are and what you care about that all those executive whims and difficult stakeholders and unwinnable fights at work stop feeling like referendums on your personal worth as a human being… or problems that you’re personally obligated to fix… but instead, circumstances you can approach through a lens of choice. Is this where I want to spend my energy today? Is this a good use of my time?  

And perhaps most importantly: Does my passion match my power here? 

Many of us got into UX because we had a passion for it. Not just the designing or researching or writing parts, either—but passion for understanding people and making their lives easier. For making things more inclusive, more usable, and more humane. And that passion is great—it gives us energy and purpose. It fuels us to keep doing our best to create the world we want to live in. 

But passion alone doesn’t make things change. You also need power for that. And one of the biggest risks for burnout I see is people expending all their passion in places where they have very little power—places where their fiery arguments about what’s good and just and right are simply not going to make a difference, because they fly in the face of what the organization is incentivized to care about. 

It comes up a lot in coaching conversations and workshops: 

The answer to all of these is the same. You don’t. You can’t make anyone do anything. 

That might sound defeatist, but I swear it’s the opposite. It’s freeing. Because when you stop seeing it as your duty to make people change, you start to have a little distance. And with distance, you start to see where change is actually possible. 

And not doing this? Continuing to put all your energy into trying to change something outside of your power? What I’ve found is that this can actually wind up reinforcing the status quo, instead of shifting it. Because what happens is that even though you’re trying to make the organization more user-centered, what you wind up actually doing is turning yourself into a user-centered human band-aid—stretching and straining yourself in an attempt to protect users from the harms of your organization’s choices. Which exhausts you… while actually enabling your organization to keep doing exactly what it’s been doing. Because you wind up protecting the organization from feeling any consequences. So what should be organizational pain—the pain of losing customers, of bad PR, of increased customer service inquiries because the product is hard to understand and use—becomes your personal pain. 

And you know what? Your organization won’t break if it feels that pain. But you just might.   

This is why I believe that if we want to break the burnout cycle and change the system, we have to start with the personal. Not with the self-care of bubble baths or long walks in the woods—though both are great, and you deserve more of them!—but with the work of separating our identity and sense of self-worth from our work. Because it allows you to step out of that human band-aid role. 

It allows you to become an observer—to gaze upon the organization you’re in, and see it clearly. Without reflexively jumping into savior mode. Without telling yourself that if you just worked harder it’d be different. But simply seeing it for what it is. And then asking yourself, now what? 

So I’ve talked a lot about burnout, and about creating more distance between ourselves and our jobs. But the other thing I’ve spent a lot of my time working with clients on recently—both in private coaching sessions and in the workshops I run with companies—is how designers can gain cross-functional leverage and show up as leaders on their teams. 

At first blush, these things might seem like they’re in opposition. You just told me to care less about my job, Sara. Now you’re telling me I should go try to “build influence”? What gives? 

Hear me out: they’re actually the same thing. 

Because fundamentally, what I want for design isn’t for us all to stop caring. Cynicism helps no one. And I don’t think everyone needs to quit their tech jobs tomorrow, either (though some of you do, and you’ll be so much happier on the other side). 

No, more than anything, what I want is for us to get comfortable seeing, talking about, and working with power. 

I want us to claim our power—to know that what we do is meaningful, even if not every organization knows how to value it. And to see ourselves as people with agency and creativity—people who get to decide how much to give, and when to say no, and when walking away is actually a better tradeoff than staying in the fight. 

And I also want us to more fully unpack the power structures around us. I want us to look at our companies, and ask ourselves how things really work. Not just who sits where in the org chart, but also: How does power flow? Whose voice is being listened to most right now? Who’s influencing whom? And also: What incentives are driving those other people’s choices? What’s hard about their jobs? Who are they trying to impress or appease? What’s going to get them a good review next quarter—or a bad one? 

This is how we actually build influence for design. 

Not by making 700 more slide decks. 

Not by overworking and people-pleasing and delivering more and more half-baked design work faster and faster. 

And definitely not by showing up defensive and condescending, treating partners who have different pressures and perspectives as idiots who just don’t get it. 

But by actually mapping out the invisible power dynamics, relationships, and incentives that shape our organizations and how they function—and using that knowledge to decide where to invest, what messages will actually resonate with whom, and where we can most effectively advocate for change. 

Because after all, most of the people on your map are not cartoon villains. It’s not a bunch of Mark Zuckerbergs surrounding you on the org chart. It’s people who are more like you than not: people who want to keep their jobs, who are also feeling intense pressure, who are worried about the future. 

They’re not dummies or monsters. They’re simply people with different expertise, different stressors, different lenses. If you can take just an ounce of your skill and compassion for users and apply it to them, you’ll find out what’s actually possible. 

That’s real influence—the kind that’s effective, not exhausting. The kind that keeps you connected to the work you care about—without turning you into a human band-aid. 

In fact, at UX Scotland I even ran into someone who’d also been at a power-mapping workshop I facilitated back in April, at the Hatch Leadership Atelier in Barcelona (and that I’ll be running it again here in Philly on July 31, as part of our Influence by Design retreat with Pavel Samsonov). When we caught up after my talk, she told me that ever since April’s workshop, she’d been applying what she learned from me at her organization—mapping out forward paths for the initiatives she cared about. Building relationships with new allies. Getting herself onto a committee that was working on things she cared about. It doesn’t mean all the changes she’d like to see in her organization have happened. It doesn’t mean she’s now invited into every room she’d like to be in, or that she agrees with every decision her company makes. 

But she feels like she’s having an impact on things that matter to her. She feels less stuck. She’s found a space where her passion and her power intersect, and she’s making the most of it. 

That’s influence. And it’s also the best protection from burnout I’ve ever seen. 

So if you want to feel better about your work—more effective at making change, less drained by fighting fruitless battles—this is where to start. By breaking out of the vocational awe that has trapped so many people in UX, and replacing it with a bit of distance—the distance to see what’s under the surface, and to use your energy wisely.

– Sara