Wracked with doubt? Good
Commentary from AKQA's CEO and Harvard Business School's Linda Hill
Credit: Juno Jo via Unsplash
I’m not sure about much of anything right now. The world is <waves arms around> a lot. How about you?
Here’s something that might help.
I recently caught up with Linda Hill, the Wallace Brett Donham Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and chair of the Leadership Initiative. We were together to record an episode for the upcoming season of the Design of Business | Business of Design podcast, talk about her wonderful new book, Genius at Scale: How Great Leaders Drive Innovation (co-authored with Emily Tedards and Jason Wild), and in general try to make sense of the world.
We were talking about innovation — what it is, how to get good at it, how to make it rain down on command — which always turns into a conversation about just how hard it is to be human, especially alongside other humans.
“Innovation [is] not about an individual coming up with a new idea,” she says. “Instead, innovation is the result of the collaboration of people with diverse expertise and diverse perspectives coming together, being able to collaborate, being able to experiment together and learn.” And the kicker: “This is actually hard.”
The world feels especially hard lately.
I was reminded of my conversation with Hill when I first read this opinion piece from AKQA CEO Helder Santo. In it, he offers a unique perspective on the human impulse to cling to reassurance and certainty, currently manifesting in the now ubiquitous quest to have LLMs confidently dispatch all our problems and mine for unknown opportunities.
That impulse to remove all doubt, when indulged, all but guarantees a worse outcome.
“Given the choice, people take the easy path. Less friction, less effort, less discomfort,” he says. But the tech we build to remove barriers also removes the one thing that we need to build something great: Uncertainty.
“That uncertainty isn’t weakness. It’s the invitation,” he says. “Doubt is the moment you turn to the person next to you, because you can’t close the gap alone. It’s the single most reliable trigger for collaboration we have. And we are quietly engineering it out of existence.”
He makes the hard work of not (yet) knowing feel less lonely. Please click through, read, and share with the people you enjoy turning to the most.
Speaking of not yet knowing, the Observatory is going on hiatus until August 17. We’ll be working on some things, updating our vibe, and coming back to you with some new ideas.
Until then, stay doubtful, stay open, and keep waving your arms at the world. It helps us find each other.
Ellen McGirt
Editor-in-Chief
Ellen@designobserver.com
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This edition of The Observatory was edited by Rachel Paese.
Youtube
Want to hear more from AKQA CEO Helder Santo? Check out our Youtube channel.
Draw the Line
Episode one of Draw the Line out now.
The Supreme Court case Louisiana v. Callais gutted the Voting Rights Act and rewrote the rules of American democracy. Design Observer’s brand new audio documentary, Draw the Line, is telling the inside story of Louisiana’s fight over power, maps, and who gets left off them.
Every district line is a design decision — and every decision is about who gets power.
Episode 1 launched on July 4 at the 2026 Essence Festival of Culture in New Orleans. Listen now.
The Odyssey Observed, in a seven-verse poem
Sing to me, Muse, of the man who came home to a hundred-plus millions,
wily Odysseus, taker of records from Nolan’s own canon. Spare, then, a thought for the ones who have loved him through decades of silence: theirs was the vigil; the multiplex only just noticed the poem. 1/7
Seventeen classicists gathered to argue, and none of them cared much
who had been cast — it was spectacle crowding the morals they mourned for. (“We had a really robust debate,” in Variety.) 2/7
Globe went and asked the professors: the myth has been mutable always,
plastic and pliant, revised in the mouth of whoever retells it. (Chill, says the Boston Globe.) 3/7
Wilson of Penn heard the news of the film as the crews were departing;
now a full million she’s sold, the pentameter English she hammered. (Classicist is shook, says the Philadelphia Inquirer) 4/7
Bloomberg reports on the classrooms: the British bought forty-odd thousand,
Waterloo’s IMAX is booked through the autumn, Nolan brought sexy back. (Bloomberg Opinion) 5/7
Publishers Weekly recorded the climb from announcement: original version
up seventy-six starting before there was a frame to be looked at. (Publishers Weekly) 6/7
Greece took him home to herself with a record of ticketed thousands. (Greek Reporter) 7/7
Read more at designobserver.com or in your Substack feed.
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Furniture & Lighting Designer at Windsor Smith Homes Inc, Montecito, CA.
Intern, Industrial Design at bould design, llc, San Mateo, CA.
Sr. Industrial Designer at Outward Hound, Centennial, CO.
End marks
Convinced the best work never gets made alone? Collaborate or Die by Adrian Shaughnessy is a designer’s case for abandoning the lone-genius myth: in an age of complex problems, design has become an almost wholly collaborative act.
“Many graphic designers function collaboratively—it comes naturally to them and they are untroubled with the idea of shared authorship. But, what is often described as collaboration, is really a sort of cooperation between similarly minded people…This can be useful—productive even—but it is unlikely to produce the sort of ground tilting ideas that are needed for an ever more complex world.”
