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Mentorship is IMPORTANT

From when I was 15 to 21, I worked at a summer camp. Most of our campers were middle and elementary aged. One summer, I had a cabin of 8 year old boys. They were insane. I couldn’t even get them to do things like stand in a straight line for dinner. It was brutal.

We talked a lot about respect and openness, but I couldn’t get through to them. So, after a couple of days of dawn to dusk exhaustion I scheduled us for a team building session. We did all kinds of things—three-legged races, the weeping willow, whale watching.

And none of those things really seemed to work. So I pulled the the ultimate, iconic team building activity—which everybody that’s ever worked at a summer camp knows is the trust fall.

So we stand beside the trust fall log which is about 3-4 feet off of the ground, and I explain the activity.

I’ll explain it now too in case you’re not familiar.

@byjoebond

In a trust fall you stand on top of something—like a log or a ladder—and your team stands behind you with their arms outstretched to catch you. So essentially you fall backwards with your eyes closed into the arms of a group of people that you may or may not know very well.

Alright, back to the story.

We’re all standing beside this log and I finish explaining the activity, and I ask “alright who wants to go first?”

It’s total silence. They’re all terrified by the prospect of falling with their eyes closed into their friends arms. That’s understandable, it’s why it’s such a great team building activity.

After about 8 seconds of silence, somebody in my head other than myself makes me say “ok, I’ll go first.”

I have no idea why I said that, and I immediately became very sweaty. But you know, you’re only as good as your word, so I step onto the log after I’ve made sure they’re arranged to catch a person twice their size. This is still insane to me 6 years later.

I close my eyes, and yell the start command, “ready to fall!” And they yell back “fall on!”

I fall for what’s feel like forever, I may have even blacked out for a few milliseconds. But when I opened my eyes they had caught me.

After that activity, things were different. It’s like they had been listening to everything I had been saying before about respect, openness, and standing in line for dinner.

Image Source

Trust fall.

@byjoebond

The Trial

Learning Curve

Moment of Truth

Disappointment

Excitement

You can’t tell if you’re learning anything or

getting better.

You feel like you’ve arrived.

Original Graph Source @byjoebond

One way vs two way mentorship

So mentorship, and this is cliche, but mentorship is important. It’s a huge part of how we pull new designers into the fold. And because I think we all understand that this traditional mentorship model of a seasoned designer mentoring a new designer is important, I want to focus on a slightly different aspect of mentorship that rarely gets talked about when we’re telling stories, and that’s after your moment of truth when your relationship with your mentor is important, but they’ve taught you 80%ish of what they’re going to be able to teach you.

This is where I really struggled after I got a job. How do I keep learning and getting better as a designer—to solve the new and more complex problems that are going to come my way in the future? My relationships with my mentors were still important to me in many different ways, but they had done their best to give me as much knowledge as possible. So, I valued their mentorship, but I wanted to learn more.

What happens after the moment of truth?

@byjoebond

This is where the idea of peer-to-peer mentorship comes in. Peer-to-peer mentorship means we’re all constantly looking for opportunities to learn new things from other people and teach other people about new things. Essentially, we’re saying that everybody is mentor and everybody is mentee—we’re the teacher and the student.

And all that’s important because it’s only by growing as individuals and taking the time to help other designers grow that we’re going to close the brainpower gap between the problems we can solve and the problems we need to solve to make the world a better place.

We’re all constantly looking for opportunities

to learn and to teach.

@byjoebond

So here’s a visualization of what I’m thinking. We’re a community of smart people. We all know different things, we all have different experiences. Essentially we’re this GIANT distributed knowledge network. Peer-to-peer mentorship takes all that knowledge and activates it.

This is similar to how Napster worked, but less illegal, of course. There were a bunch of people with a bunch of files. When you wanted to listen to some new music, you would search for that song and download it from a bunch of people. When somebody wanted to listen to a song that you had, they would download it from you and a bunch of other people.

In a peer-to-peer mentorship it’s similar when you want to learn more about accessibility, better understand how Android differs iOS, or how to give a talk at a conference you simply find a peer in your community that can help you learn about those things, and download it from them. And vice versa when somebody wants to learn something from you.

We’re all working to the same goal, but we’re not all connected. That’s inefficient.

If we believe that design can make the world a better place then I think we also have to believe in constant learning and teaching through these distributed knowledge networks.

Interaction Design

Content Strategy

Information Architecture

Development

Visual Design@byjoebond

Of course, these peer-to-peer mentorship communities don’t just appear, something like this might not even exist in your community right now. Communities are tough to build, but to solve the world’s important problems we have to intentionally seek out opportunities to pull all sorts of designers into our communities and learning circles.

Building a sustainable community requires us to understand network effects—the effect that one user of a product has on the value of that product to other people. When a network effect is present, the value of a product or service is dependent on the number of others using it.

The classic example is the telephone. The more people who own telephones, the more valuable the telephone is to each owner. This creates another positive effect because a user may purchase a telephone without intending to create value for other users, but they create the value in any case. Online social networks work in the same way, with sites like Twitter and Facebook becoming more attractive as more users join.

So at certain point, your peer-to-peer mentorship community becomes so valuable that it just makes sense to join. The early adopters are key. The people that you meet at conferences or the people that already get really excited about local events are the people you want to go after.

A peer-to-peer mentorship has to be useful place to learn and teach for everybody, so you have to be intentional when you cast a vision for building your community.

2 Users 1 Connection

4 Users 6 Connections

@byjoebond

8 Users 28 Connections

If you’re in a city like Raleigh—where I live—our community doesn’t just include designers. We regularly have developers and PMs attend our events. As more of those people join, it makes the community more attractive for designers, developers, and PMs.

So if you’re in New York, maybe you can just build a peer-to-peer mentorship community with just UX designers. If you’re in a smaller city, consider casting a wider net to get more people involved.

One big key to success is regularity—pick a time and place for people to get together every so often. Hold an event with a local expert once a month. Do something consistently and passionately and people will join your cause. Oh, and if you’re starting from scratch, consider starting small—it’s easier to to test out different ideas with less people.

There are lots of ways to get started. You can steal this talk, or parts of it and give it yourself at a local event. Let me know and I’ll send you the script and slides.

Some things that I’ve seen work well are:• starting a slack channel• hosting a mentorship meet and greet at your company • starting a monthly coffee club• putting out a weekly learning email through your local professional association or company

1. start small. 2. regular intervals. 3. be inclusive.

@byjoebond

So, quick recap, before we jump into a short activity. Traditional mentorship is great—it’s really important. But it’s not the most efficient knowledge sharing model after you’ve hit your “moment of truth” or when you’re mentor’s taught you 80%ish of what they’re going to be able to teach you. Peer-to-peer mentorship encourages everybody to be a student and teacher to close the brainpower gap between the problems we can solve now and the more complex problems of the future. Network effects give us a way to think about creating valuable, sustainable communities.

But because I want everybody to walk away with a way to immediately start building a peer-to-peer mentorship community, I want to try a really small, low-stakes activity.

Quick recap

@byjoebond

I’m gonna put 5-6 minutes on the clock and I want everybody to try and talk to one or two people about something that they’re interested in learning about and something that they’d be willing to teach. If you don’t have anything that you can teach that person, then think about if there’s somebody you’d could connect them with. If you’re comfortable with sharing your information then definitely share it so you can follow up!

Teach one thing and learn one thing.

@byjoebond

Thanks!

@byjoebond