IA is more apprenticeship than schooling

Intentional community building will allow us to train the next generation of information architects when corporate structures will not.

The main thing that separates a junior IA from a senior one is their ability to wrestle a good enough result from an ambiguous situation. Taming ambiguity is a muscle you build. Turning complicatedness into complexity.

As senior people, we can be a mirror. Share what you see that they’re good at, what they struggle with, what’s special about a situation. One of the most valuable pieces of advice I ever got wasn’t even advice, it was a boss observing “You two collaborate amazingly. That’s special.”

People further on in their careers like to help newer people. It makes them feel good. The catch, is that we usually like to help people who remind us of ourselves way back when. That is easily a force for the status quo and exclusion, and it’s good for all of us to remember to look across the usual lines of ethnic and gender affinities to decide who we can see ourselves in. Make sure you’re not doing white supremacy’s work for it.