The room where nothing was allowed to change

Fuel from Mary Carns and Halftank Studio

If you do any type of creative work, you’ve probably heard the phrase “trust the process” over and over again. I learned the hard way that in order to trust the process, you also need to trust the people involved in that process. Most of the time, people’s intentions are good, but once in a while you will encounter someone participating in a process in bad faith: they have zero intention of learning anything. They just want to confirm that their way is the best way, at any cost.

This is a story about a workshop. Not the great ones you may have heard about before, like the ABC Nightline report from years ago that went through IDEO’s process of reimagining a physical shopping cart. This workshop was a real disaster, with cameras off and egos on, and a CEO who thought "make a billion dollars" was a sufficient answer to the question of what they were trying to accomplish.

I was brought in as an assistant facilitator for a product suite design consultation and reimagining project. The client was an AI startup out of Silicon Valley. I'll call them Immondizia — it means "garbage" in Italian, which felt appropriate by the end. They had an MVP that looked like someone had taken an old version of Microsoft Access and made it even less user-friendly. Their customer list for this particular product could fit on two hands. Even though their product was swirling further and further into a product black hole, they still wanted confirmation that their way was the right way.

They and this product needed a serious rethink. What they wanted instead was a mirror.

The night before the first session, our lead facilitator sent the Immondizia team the Miro template for the Goal Alignment workshop — standard practice, just so they'd know what to expect the next day.

The next morning, the executives arrived on Zoom. None of them turned their cameras on. Then the CEO spoke.

"We already filled out your template."

The facilitator paused.

"You... what?"

They had filled it out. The entire thing, not with single points on individual sticky notes — the ground rule for that kind of activity — but on sticky notes full of bloated, overstuffed essays. The whole point of sticky notes in that exercise is to group them together, to find where thinking clusters, where there's consensus, where there's friction. You can't cluster an essay.

"What do you think of our work?" the CEO asked.

What I thought was: you just told us everything we need to know, and none of it is about your product.

After the facilitator gently explained that the sticky notes weren't usable, the executive team proceeded to spend the next three hours arguing with each other about the contents of their own essays. We sat there. Watching. Because there was no room for us to contribute anything.

I eventually asked the CEO directly: what is the goal of our work together?

"To make a billion dollars," he said.

I didn't say what I was thinking out loud. I should have. What I was thinking was: congratulations, you have the same goal as every other company in Silicon Valley. T

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his pattern continued across every session. When we brought user interview evidence showing flaws in their product, they demanded to know who said it. We couldn't name names — we weren't going to get anyone we'd interviewed in trouble — so the feedback got dismissed. They could only talk to pre-approved customers, ones they'd specifically identified as friendly. Any research our team did independently was waved away: "we know our customers."
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They had their solution fully formed before they defined their customers, before they defined the problem and before they walked into a single workshop.

The junior engineers Immondizia eventually brought in to one session, in an answer to our pleas to hear from people who actually used the product, said absolutely nothing. I could hear it in their hesitations — they weren't free to speak in front of their executive team. I tried moving their contributions to writing to give them some cover. It helped a little, but not enough. The hierarchy didn't disappear because we were in a workshop, it just got quieter.

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Here's what I had believed going in: that the process was the point. That if you ran the activities correctly, if you created the right conditions for honest input, something real would emerge. I was certified. I had done the training. I believed the framework could hold.

What I didn't fully understand yet was that design thinking has a flaw baked in: it has no mechanism for addressing hierarchy. It assumes that putting people in a room with sticky notes and a facilitator temporarily suspends the org chart. It doesn't, not even a little.

The workshops weren't failing because of bad facilitation. They were failing because the executives who commissioned them never actually wanted new ideas — they wanted their existing ideas confirmed by a process that looked like collaboration. Autocratic decision-making in a democratic outfit.

Immondizia ultimately refused to pay for our months of work. The CEO had told his accounts payable team they deserved a discount for the "exposure." This is the most common way a disreputable company asks for free creative work.

I'm not telling you this to complain about a bad client. I'm telling you because that experience — that specific crack in my faith — is where I started asking better questions. Not "how do I run a better workshop?" but "what does it actually take for people to collaborate honestly, and what do we do when those conditions don't exist?"

Those questions didn't have easy answers, and they still don't. But they're the questions this newsletter is going to keep asking.

More next time.

— Mary

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This newsletter is drawn from Bad Fit, my memoir-in-progress about being a creative professional in environments that weren't built for creative professionals.

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