Teaching Others Showed Me How Little I Actually Understood

I had been a UX designer in Philadelphia for five years when my firm introduced a formal mentoring programme and I was assigned two junior designers in their first year.

I took on the role with the mild confidence of someone who has done something for long enough to feel competent at it, and with very little anticipation of what explaining it to someone else from scratch was about to reveal.

The first real session went fine at a surface level and left me, driving home afterward, with an unease I could not locate precisely. One of the junior designers had asked me why I made a particular structural decision in a wireframe I was reviewing with them - a decision I made automatically and had made the same way hundreds of times - and I had given an answer that I recognised, even as I was saying it, as approximate rather than precise.

I had described a principle I was applying without being able to articulate where the principle had come from or how I would know if it was the right one for a different context.

The answer was not wrong but it was the answer of someone who knew how to do something and did not fully know why. This happened three more times in the following fortnight with different questions.

Each time I gave an answer that was functional and not fully grounded, and each time I noticed the gap between what I was saying and what I actually understood. I went back to foundational reading I had not done since my training.

I started writing down the principles I was applying implicitly, which forced me to make them explicit and then examine whether they held. I talked to senior colleagues about things I had been applying by feel for years and discovered that some of my intuitions were well-grounded and some were habits that had never been examined.

The mentoring was teaching me what I did not know in a way that five years of practice had not, because practice allows you to use knowledge without testing its foundations, whereas teaching requires the foundations to be articulate.

I am a significantly better designer now than I was before I started mentoring, which is the inverse of what I had expected the relationship to produce. The junior designers are also, I believe, doing well. But the primary beneficiary of the first six months of that mentoring arrangement was me.