The Art of Deselection: Mindfully Fit by Design

The legal profession has entered a hyperactive era and is experiencing a tsunami of stimuli: technology, mental health, new mega business challenges to advise on, change of geographical references, new ways of working, included the redefinition of the importance of leadership and management in legal teams. Some days the headlines are about a silent mental health pandemic in the legal profession. Other days we are told how much we underestimate our replaceability by generative AI. Not easy to keep cool as the summer heat is approaching.

Eastern and Western contemplative traditions advocate that when everything goes too fast and we experience a sense of being overwhelmed, the best thing to keep up is not to accelerate and run. No, it is to slow down and retreat a moment.

May and June are the peaks of legal conferences season, with a rain of social media postings capable of activating our conscious or unconscious fear of missing out, experiencing the famous FOMO syndrome. What about pausing and practicing ‘deselection’ to inhibit our drive for unreasonable busy-ness which may not bring much business? What about growing our mental fitness and focus on the essential and what matters to empower ourselves with what we can truly change here and now?

Five years down the legal technology revolution blast, thought leaders start to affirm that with the dust settling, we can now be more rational and realise that yes technologies will structurally transform the profession in ways we may not even imagined. Yet, here and now, legal professionals are still fighting with many issues that need human embodied solutions. Roadmaps to encourage high rate of adoption of legal technologies invite ecosystems to evaluate the digital maturity of their processes and skill profiles. Many agree on the need to provoke a shift in the working culture of legal teams to make best use of technological revolution while being ever more life centric and appreciative of the incredible human potential.

These trends are welcome and necessary. The challenge is to avoid paralysis feeling overwhelmed not knowing where to start or spin in fruitless hyper activism. The goal is to walk the golden middle of awareness and proactivity while steering away from excessive confusion and pain.

This is why we promote the art of deselection as a special way of looking at the world. The idea is to develop a grounded approach to transform our presence to our environments, augmenting ourselves with technologies (digital and social ones) and exercising deep discernment to select and even better deselect what does not contribute to the deep transformations we aspire to.

Two toolboxes come handy to help legal professionals in this respect: legal design thinking and mindful working. This is what this short article endeavours to bring forth. It highlights challenges we have experienced as counterproductive. It also bring forth practices that are efficient mitigators and even possibly highways to structural and deep rEVOLution we so much need.

When combining legal design thinking and mindfulness practices in a legal team, many challenges become more manageable and overcome with grace and contentment by the teams. More than often, legal design thinking is viewed as focused on legal deliverables and legal services for users and clients. In the present article, we do not explain legal design thinking process, tools and deliverables but more on how it can help legal teams to improve their own daily lives (1). We continue by zooming into how mindfulness bring another dimension to the conversation in terms of mindset and attitudes it fosters and directly synergize with legal design thinking to slow down the process and fast-forward the impact (2).

Over the two + decades of using both (legal) design thinking and mindfulness at work in different departments, including legal, we could experience four perspectives that need dedicated attention to not stand in the way of teams.

A. Less silos, more pluridisciplinarity

Legal design thinking enhances the interactive, collaborative, and iterative nature of the design process, boosting access to information and the flow of ideas based on participants’ expertise and capabilities. Everyone within the legal ecosystem is encouraged to join the design process following the ‘no tie no title’ principle. This significantly amplifies the cognitive resources tapped by team members as they work together to solve problems, create new ideas, refine processes, or make data-driven decisions. Sharing the challenges across several brains, hearts and bodies by design naturally make the burden less heavy for each team member. Equally, involving stakeholders from across legal teams or departments with different skill set help with increase the importance given to pluridisciplinarity as a major asset to nurture and mobilise.

B. Less complexity, more user centricity

Improving legal processes without applying legal design thinking is not highly challenging but also a missed chance to evolve culture and mindsets.

Legal processes often involve strict deadlines, specialized terminology, and an understanding of legal procedures. If legal professionals use the opportunity of rethinking their working mobilizing themselves the methodology (not delegating it to ‘designers’), they start to see how design thinking can be put to the service of hardcore legal output. It reduces the number of rounds of comments and increases the mobilization of business intelligence and know-how. In turn, it significantly increases the acceptance of the final output.

Legal design thinking prioritizes the end user’s needs from the start of the creation process. In our mind, the end user can also very much be the lawyers and all within the team. By having these reflexes, developed when practicing legal design, legal professionals can let the mindsets and key characteristics be transferred to other legal output. Learning to reduce complexity without simplifying reality is a very meaningful skill to master for a legal professional. The efficiency achieved results in substantial time savings for everyone involved, leading to a high return on time invested.

C. Less knowhow loss, more upskilling

Legal design thinking is highly effective for managing legal knowledge as it helps legal professionals to think more 3D and less linear. The more legal professionals get comfortable to deconstruct and rebuild their work in a more multimodal way, the more the increase they impact of their work with clients, peers or judges. Legal design thinking can help with big picture thinking so important to provide comprehensive overviews of available legal assets. Legal design acts as a catalyst for efficient knowledge retrievable because it helps to store it in a more intuitive and memorable way and downstream it helps with the dissemination and accessibility avoiding reinventing the wheel on the same topic again. Additionally, legal design thinking encourages to present legal information in more engaging ways for both lawyers and non-lawyers. This approach promotes active recycling of legal knowledge and leads to saving significant efforts and precious resources.

D. Less risk adversity, more innovation

Mastering legal drafting and public speaking is no longer sufficient. Lawyers must approach communication from a broader perspective. Legal design thinking and legal knowledge visualization do not replace text-based outputs but rather complement them. Yet, such methods enhance the cognition of legal professionals and improve the understanding and retention of information for their audience.

By being more prototype oriented, also in the realm of ideas and legal reasoning – not limiting legal design thinking to documents or interfaces redesign – legal professionals can associate a more diverse number of stakeholders. This directly influences the possibility to be more innovative as teaming up with others lower risk adversity.

More people with more diverse backgrounds can grow disproportionately more confidence in trying new ways of solving problems as more minds and hearts can think and feel how reasoning could take new avenues.

Let’s remember that the present piece is about promoting the Art of Deselection.

In this respect, mindfulness (the ability to pay attention in the present moment non-judgmentally) can play a significant role in legal design thinking as it does in agile and other creative processes.

A. More attention, less infobesity

Focusing one’s attention is a direct experience and lasting benefit of practicing mindfulness. With a concrete sense for our ability to direct our attention, we can usefully regain agency to steer away from being victim of the infobesity times we live in. Mindfulness helps team members maintain focus on the task at hand, reducing distractions and improving productivity.

During creative rounds, openness in the here and now is needed to understand and solve complex problems. This openness translates in not being caught up in past solutions and certainties and being able to hold a blank canvas to allow new solutions to emerge and be designed. This sense of openness is crucial in design thinking sprints and the more it becomes a concrete and shared experience, the more it also can mature to become an unconscious competence applicable across the board.

B. More creativity, less auto-pilot

Mindfulness practices encourage to create distance between stimuli and the reaction we oppose to these stimuli. Mindfulness reduces our cognitive rigidity and fosters our creative reaction to life events. This flexibility is key for creativity and innovation. This is essential in design thinking where innovative approaches can lead to better outcomes by generating more creative solutions. Taking a step back, breathing in and out, not jumping to judgement and conclusion too early is powerful beyond words. When we just not turn to our auto-pilot, we give ourselves the chance to revisit our past certainties and freely choose a brand new course of action. We break the pattern of being prisoner of the past and allow to choose new options in the present moment.

C. More empathy, less conflicts

Mindfulness promotes better communication, empathy, and understanding among team members. By training the ability to be self- aware and resourceful, mindfulness creates a space where diverse views can be shared and appreciated. This directly helps in the design thinking process to improve collaboration when brainstorming and prototyping. It helps depersonalize conflicts and bring the focus on the process and the ideas and less on the authors of the ideas. Resolving conflicts quickly and amicably becomes a natural mindset.

Without mindfulness and design thinking, discussions tend to be happening in our mental clouds and be disembodied.

They possibly become dramatized specially among legal professionals who are quick at producing ideas and vigorously plead for their convictions. When slowing down and being more mindful, the natural propensity to instigate drama drops and a space for more mutual appreciation opens.

D. More resilience, less overload

The iterative nature of design thinking can be stressful either by self-imposed pressure, by the discomfort of the deconstruction phase or by the misunderstanding one would need to be creative. Mindfulness helps manage stress and maintain emotional balance. Just inviting to a moment of silent reflection several times during the process can help team members to remain calm and effective under pressure. The more these qualities are practiced in the context of design thinking related activities, the higher the chances they get transferred to other parts of the legal work where legal design thinking may not be central. With less stress spilling in the team, setbacks and failures become less taboo. This is important in design thinking, where iterations often include learning from failures. As an outcome, a sense of confidence to face whatever challenge come our way grows and we become more resilient and responsible.

Mindfulness encourages present-moment awareness and reduces impulsivity, leading to more thoughtful and informed decision-making. This is beneficial in design thinking, where decisions need to be made based on user insights and feedback. By growing the sense of effectiveness and efficiency dear to legal professionals and knowledge worker generally, there is a growing appreciation for pooling assets to serve the decision that needs to be made.

By integrating mindfulness practices into design thinking, teams can enhance their overall effectiveness, creativity, and well-being. We speak of this approach as an art because it is a nonlinear process, not easy to reproduce and before being a recognized artist it takes 10’000 hours of trials and errors. We need to deselect our auto-pilot mode; we need to deselect our beliefs and prejudices; we need to deselect attending every opportunity. Then we need to select contentment with what we achieve, small or big.

Promoting mindfulness and (legal) design thinking at work for 20 + years, it is our first- hand experience that one needs to stick long enough with both to benefit from them and grow the art of deselection. In the face of a technological revolution of the size of the one we are going through, this is even more essential to sort the short-lived from the transformational, the fads from the trends that have come to stay. The goal is not to deny or withdraw. The goal is to mobilize resources as smartly as possible, so actions are timely and impactful versus scattered and self-exhausting, creating a lot of distress for limited to no impact.

FURTHER READINGS

For those interested in a deeper understanding and evidence, you can use the following keywords in Google Scholar for more in-depth exploration of deep trends and extensive research: #mindfulness and #designthinking; #mindfulness and #projectmanagement; #mindfulness and #agile; #mindfulness and #creativity. For more management-oriented literature, a search in Google combining #mindfulness and #designthinking also show how these toolboxes have been teamed up across the board.

Henriksen D, Richardson C, Shack K. (2020) Mindfulness and creativity: Implications for thinking and learning. Elsevier, Thinking Skills Creat. doi: 10.1016/j.tsc.2020.100689.

Lulić, F., Saintot, V.M. (2022) The big why of legal design and legal knowledge ECB Legal Conference 2022, DOI:10.2866/20386

Saintot, V.M., Di Matteo, G. (2022). Helping Lawyers to Better Visualize Their Knowledge: A Formula and Four Scenarios. In Liquid Legal – Humanization and the Law. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-14240-6_10

Wagner, A. and Sherwin, R.K. (2014), Law, Culture and Visual Studies, Springer; Corrales Compagnucci, M., Haapio, H., Hagan, M., and Doherty, M. (2021), Legal Design, Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd.; Tafur, K. and Martins, M. (2022), Legal Design, Thomson Reuters Aranzadi.