e49 The power of stepping back

The best ideas and most creative solutions don’t just happen in the depth of work, but often in the between steps. By taking a step back from the work we often find new and better connections.

Photo by Katrina Wesencraft on Unsplash

☕ The power of stepping back

I love painting. The simple act of putting the brush to the canvas gets me easily into a flow, and I can get lost in the details. Getting lost in the details however can lead to an unbalanced painting, evoking a sight not quite right. When I learned to paint, our teacher forced us to stand up, take a step back, and take a look at the painting-in-progress from a different perspective. This simple practice allowed the students to the shift their view and focus back on the whole before diving back into the details.

This same practice applies to all creative work, and especially to design.

Stepping back is a cluster of techniques and psychological mechanisms that share a common principle: creating distance from the immediate problem to unlock more creative solutions.

The mechanism is simple. Distance removes details, and allows abstract structures to emerge. Construal level theory confirms this effect, psychological distance (temporal, spatial, social, or hypothetical) shifts thinking from concrete to abstract processing, activating broader conceptual networks and enabling novel associations.

At it’s core it’s a divergent move, and it only works in rhythm with convergence. You need focused work to step back from, and you need to step forward again after.

In design practice, stepping back manifests in several categories of activities:

• abstracting the problem to strip away surface details (overcoming functional fixedness),
• changing the resolution or zoom level at which you examine a design challenge,
• reframing through lateral thinking or extreme “what if” questions,
• brainstorming questions rather than solutions.

These share the same structural pattern, as they interrupt the default tendency to fixate on familiar framings and force the mind into unfamiliar territory where new connections become visible.

An additional challenge with digital design is that virtual constructs are too close. It’s hard to step away from a concept that lives in the computer and observe it from a different perspective. This is why this needs to be an intentional practice, embedded into the design process or the daily rituals. This way, we can avoid getting stuck on staying close to difficult problems.

There are a few exercises I’ve found are helpful as a way to step back:

• Getting feedback: When getting feedback, imagine you’re standing side by side looking at the work together, not presenting to an audience. This shared vantage point creates distance from the work and puts you on the same team as the reviewer.
• Narrate decisions: by articulating choices and tracing thinking during the design process, questions can arise more naturally.
• Journey view: what’s happening before and after the current experience, looking at screens from a broader, more holistic perspective helps to zoom out and see disconnects.
• Physical activity: focus on the body shifts perspective away from the immediate thinking and makes space for new ideas to emerge.
• Change context (work from cafe): changing the backdrop can lead to new connections forming between ideas and concepts, forces to re-evaluate existing links.
• Use forced perspective shifts: questions like “What if users scale up” or the Despicable Design technique of deliberately designing for evil outcomes manufactures a psychological distance.
• Change angle: As with a real painting, standing up and looking at the monitor from a different angle, zooming in and out in your tool helps to reset your focus.

All of these share one thing: they break the spell of proximity.

For leaders, these practices can be made intentional part of the design process. Practices like having weekly checkins, daily standup style meetings, mixing up environments or structure, alternating between pair and solo design, and asking for clearer collaboration steps all help in establishing a cadence of convergence and divergence.

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🍪 Things to snack on

Stepping Back from the Canvas by Myra Naito Gives three tips of changing perspectives to be able to look at your canvas in a different light. While these tips focus on more graphic things, they can be a good inspiration to apply to other types of work. Our strongest, clearest vision happens in the center of your eyes. Anything in your peripheral vision is not in focus. Your physical proximity to your canvas can often leave most of your work in your peripheral vision.

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Creative Cognition: The Construal Level Theory & Psychological Distance by Aditya Shukla Explains how construal level theory provides the scientific basis for the creative step back. Higher construal levels activate broader conceptual networks, enabling novel associations. Spatial distance (solving problems for a faraway university), temporal distance (reflecting on past events), and personal distance (solving problems for others) all measurably increase creative output. “High construals create a pathway to fetch creative ideas because the links between different ideas are more abstract & broad.”

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Zooming In and Out of UX Design Resolutions by Jared M. Spool Uses the Eames’ Powers of Ten film as a metaphor for how UX design operates at multiple resolutions, from screen-level to ecosystem-level. Each resolution reveals different problems and requires different tools, making the ability to zoom in and out a critical design leadership skill. “Each change in resolution requires a different set of skills. They are all still UX design skills, but because the problems and tools change, the skills necessary to solve those problems and operate those tools will change.”

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The importance of zooming out in the design process by Fabricio Telxeira Zooming in and zooming out are the two main components of the design process. The article shows a few ways to practice zooming out: forcing your brain to be idle, looking at designs from a different perspective, presenting designs aloud, show it around, writing summaries about concepts. Zooming in and focusing on a problem is relatively easy for us designers. The challenge resides in stepping back and judging the designs you are creating with fresh eyes and different perspectives.

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12 Powerful Creative Problem-Solving Techniques That Work by Scott Jeffrey Describes three stepping-back techniques: the 30,000-foot view (zooming out with a detached mindset), deliberate incubation (walking away to allow subconscious processing), and contextual reframing (examining underlying assumptions). All share the principle that mental distance from the immediate problem enables fresh insight. “Deliberate mind-wandering supports creativity.”