I’ve been married for 23 years, exactly half of my life. I have two daughters. At times they have asked my wife and me how we’ve pulled it off. My answer has been: don’t try to avoid fights; learn to fight well. Not only is avoiding fights  impossible — fighting may very well be the point of marriage.

My design career began around the same time. And in many ways it has followed a parallel path — especially with respect to fighting. That’s not surprising really. Marriage and design are all about human relationships, and a key part of relationships is fighting.

But learning to fight well has been a long process, and part of the process was revising the very goal of fighting. I will relate the process as it played out with design, but if you reflect the lessons are more general. In fact the lessons are universal.

Early in my design career I believed fighting was an obstacle doing my design work. I had worked hard to develop good design skills and judgment and I was hired to exercise them — so get out of my way and let me work. Fighting well meant taking a stand and defending Good Design. Who knew what Good Design was? “Trust me!”

These fights were no fun, mainly because they were not winnable. The customer is always right.

So, a little later in my career, I came to see fighting as a fact of design work. Learning to fight well was a basic job requirement. It wasn’t enough to design something good, you had to convince others it was good, or it would be shot down. Fighting well meant learning to articulate reasons: why a proposed plan is the best one, why a particular design approach is likely to produce superior results, why a particular design ought to be approved. Fights became civil arguments. “Trust my arguments!”

But in the end, no matter how rational people were, decisions often came down to speculations — especially speculations on other people and their likely perceptions and responses and all the consequences that follow. And, it turns out, people are passionate about their beliefs about other people, rooted as they are in fundamental conceptions of human nature and reality itself… So often competing justifications would end up clashing and become once again, disputes about whose judgement was better.

Usability testing — when you could get the client to buy it — changed everything. Usability did not end fighting, but it dramatically changed the character of fights.  Speculations were now presented as guesses, not as precious convictions to defend against doubters, enemies of progress or taste, etc.  Fighting well meant allowing reality to play referee. Testing was what settled disagreements. “Trust the process!”

But in the last decade or so, I arrived where I am now. I started noticing something new — a new kind of fighting that happens, not despite research, but because of it. (This is due largely to a shift to research methods designed to drive innovation, as opposed to research designed to remove usability flaws.)

Here’s what I noticed. This kind of research was most valuable to teams not when it helps us learn new things, but when it helps us unlearn old things we thought we knew. When a team is stripped of the concepts that help it make sense of and navigate a problem space and it does not have any ready concepts to replace it, the result is a state of perplexity and a distictive existential pain. This pain makes people fight. They are intensely anxious to eliminate the perplexity. Anything that makes the escape from perplexity more difficult must be removed or suppressed, and unfortunately, this is other people and their incompatible ideas. But if you fight through this pain, and stay focused and faithful to your problem and the individuals on your team, something good always happens.

It reminds me of birth classes my wife and I took with our first pregancy. We were taught “Labor is what the term implies: hard work.” If you stay with the process and see the labor for what it really is — not the symptoms of something going wrong, but what naturally happens when things are going right — you can labor through the discomfort and give birth.

So this is where I am now: Fighting well means laboring through the birth of a truly new idea. “Trust the labor pains of creativity!”

I have found that when I am in the throes of conflict with teammates this idea helps me stay in the right idea-birthing state of mind.

And when you labor this way, design becomes more than a process for making ideas and things. It makes relationships.