How I yearn to hear these simple words when I ask a question from a designer, engineer, or manager. Most Indians are trained to provide an answer regardless of whether they actually know the answer or not. And this is more harmful than helpful.

If you ask for directions while driving, 9 out of 10 people will point you somewhere. And after following the directions, you have a 10% chance of actually reaching to your final destination without having to ask someone else. If you ask a restaurant if they know how to make a specific dish, they’ll tell you “yes, sure”. But when you get the the food, you most likely will get a dish that doesn’t’ taste, smell, or look like what you asked for.

In the IT space, it’s not much different. People always are willing to provide an answer other than “I don’t know”. So what you get back is unrealistic timelines, badly constructed code, or a user interface that makes no sense. Though it might be apart of the culture to try to help others, giving a wrong answer is actually detrimental (the opposite of helpful). Why?

Because we act on the assumption that what you said is correct.

India is a land of distinctive, rich culture and colorful spirit. Art and artifacts are based on floral and animal motifs, striking paisley designs, intricate geometrical patterns, with many border elements, spot illustrations and more. So it has a noticeable legacy. Globalization is based primarily on an exchange of knowledge and information, it opens up the opportunity to connect knowledge businesses worldwide. The word Design, has become synonymous with good design.

The question is how do we go about creating a design that has global appeal?

The main mantra is to ‘DE-ELABORATE’

Go beyond styles – Innovate and prepare platform for original thoughts.
Keen eye for detail – usage of font types, that builds up brand’s character and identity.
Leave them clean – continuously thrive to create simple layouts instead of putting everything on the page.
Test, re-test and then again test – write a user story or two and test the design. You may find new solutions!

This may require special preparations here to move on to help establish India as a leading player in design.

Conclusion

Here’s the exercise: start with any decision above and start working on the project at hand, then another, and another. Make notes and observe how frequently you can reach to one of the above tests. Notice which steps of decisions actually make sense.

What we found is that our customers got faster results, usable products and many of them scaled really well.

Of course, the title of this blog post is misleading, because the problem with most teams is that there is too much “following” going on: too many programmers saying yes even though they disagree with a major architectural decision, designers who go with the client’s wishes even though they see apparent flaws, and mid-level managers failing to report project problems out of fear.

Until you learn to speak up, you can’t just blame your manager for the way your team is working. If you can’t contribute as a team member, you will be a poor follower. Calmly embracing disagreement and tough discussion is the key to learning how to really follow, especially in Indian IT.

Is speaking up risky? Sure. You could even lose your job because your manager or client themselves are scared of true collaboration. What’s more, many of us need to learn to communicate more professionally: clearly and without anger.

However, the cost of not speaking up is much higher. A career full of mediocrity, anyone?

Our IT stars should be rewarded for being the best, not punished. But we tend to punish our best for being the best because they’re the only ones who can get us out of a tight situation or see us through the hardest project. We do things like ask them to take on more work over the weekend, do work in less time than everyone else, and/or solve the impossible without team support. And when it gets really close to our deadline, we grill them and add even more pressure.

In the sports industry, the stars get rewarded = salary increases, trophies/rings, model girlfriends. In the finance and pharmaceutical industry – your top sales stars get hefty bonuses and extra perks like company cars, business class travel, and extra vacation time. But in the IT industry – there’s no such rewards for our expert programmer, our rockstar designer, or our Sherlock Holmes detective-level QA engineer. All we give them is a pat on the back, an extra samosa during lunch, and a ‘can you write up some documentation for what you just did and put it in my inbox, thx’.

We want to have more Rancchoddas Chanchad’s on our team, not the Chatur Ramalingam’s. The “Silencers” are made from workers being consistently abused. The “Rachos” arise from team mates being supported and rewarded.

The problem is that two people who don’t get it are much worse than one person that does. Adding another person to check over the first person’s work doesn’t always help and most of the times it slows down the overall project.  Redundancy is not the solution to the first person not knowing their responsibilities.