I’m starting to think that being a ux design researcher is sometimes like being a tattle tale. You’re reporting up the chain that something is broken, or doesn’t work the way users would expect it to, or how they’d like it to and guess what? Mommy and Daddy don’t care.

There’s a certain comfort level to being The Risk Mitigator. You don’t have to say much, until you HAVE to say something. Like that old commercial for financier EF Hutton who spoke in a whisper, but everyone fell to a hush to hear him.

In some bizarre psychological research done somewhere, scientists shocked dogs in cages over prolonged periods of time, to monitor their behavior and reactions. Some dogs had escape hatches, some didn’t. (!)

Those that didn’t have escape hatches learned to accept their fate of shock – even when they weren’t being shocked. And, when they were later given escape hatches, they didn’t use them. It was like they had learned to remain helpless and powerless, to just take their shocks.

Getting past the cruelty of this study, (referenced in the What Happy People Know book) there was something super interesting to me about the dogs that did overcome the shocks, and escape – whether or not they were given escape hatches; these turned out to be, invariably, dogs that came from the pound. (what? are they testing with pure-breeds, mutts, et al? O.M.G., the animal rights activist within me is cringing, really…) My point is this: if you’ve had to be a survivor your whole life, overcoming all sorts of shortcomings in your foundational upbringing – if you were a runaway, or if you were an escape artist, these skills served you well. Even if you ended up in the pound, these skills, they kept you alive.

In the workplace, coming full circle to my tattletale rant, you have to trust that your organization will give you the runway you need to figure out how to stop the shocks. But you also have to figure out how to escape the shocks until you can figure out how to stop them. Talk about circular logic. All I know is that I am a pound dog, and I will escape whether or not you give me a hatch, but why are you shocking us is the question~