Why judgement requires 10,000 hours of practice.
My team and I once presented five brand identities to a client and got every one of them wrong.
By every standard we understood at the time, the work was excellent. Clean. Precise. Methodically developed. The kind of work that demonstrated everything I had learned up to that time.
When we showed the concepts—proudly—to our client, she studied them, listened patiently to every rationale, and then said something I’ve never forgotten. “These are beautiful. All of them. And they have rigor. But none of them look like me.”
Our client was an architect. She had been educated at some of the world’s best universities. And she had been running her own practice for thirty years. She was fierce in spirit. Honest. Unflinchingly confident responding to options on a crit wall. And when she left, we were reeling.
I wanted, reflexively, to be angry, to dismiss her response as uneducated or close-minded. But I couldn’t. She was far too credentialed. I had to sit in the harder place—the despair of needing to understand what we had actually done wrong.
We had applied everything we knew. Swiss precision. Rigorous typographic systems. Carefully rationalized color theory. Detailed grid layouts. The work was correct in every way I knew to understand correctness. What it wasn’t was true. Not to her, not to her practice, not to the thirty years of exceptional, dramatic, sweeping architecture she had designed. We had brought our absolute best standards to her work. What we hadn’t done was find her.
That distinction—between applying the best available standards and identifying the essential truth of a person or organization—is the difference judgment makes. At that time, just over a decade into my career, I didn’t yet have it. I was still putting in the hours.
So we threw everything away and started again. This time we built from her essence. Not by imposing a highly crafted design vocabulary but by asking what was irreducibly true about her. When we presented the next round of work, she got teary-eyed. I knew, in that moment, what the difference felt like. And I have spent the twenty years since perfecting ways to find it without needing to fail first.
The ability to perceive what is genuinely true about an organization—and know with conviction when that truth has been found. Not opinion. Not instinct. The accumulated result of thousands of moments of being right and wrong, and developing the ability to tell the difference. It can’t be process-mapped or replicated without doing the long work. It develops over time, under pressure, in direct contact with the hardest available problems.
And it is often informed by knowing what not to do.