Where Everyone's a Pupil
I have long thought that gatekeeping is necessary. Most industries have a set of healthy checks in place to maintain their integrity and set people up to do good work. Being challenged every now and then to broaden the limits of what we are capable of makes life enjoyable.
Nowadays, the term ‘gatekeeping’ has mostly negative connotations. I won’t play devil’s advocate to this view. I said gatekeeping is necessary; I meant ‘vetting’. When it’s done well, the person being vetted doesn’t even realise it, and might even enjoy it.
This was my experience in a recent job interview. It was obvious from the start that the role wasn’t the right fit. But not for a moment did the conversation with the product manager feel like an ’interview’; there was no sense of the PM being one-up and me being one-down. It was more like a dance between two people from different domains and with different abilities who respected what each did. In other words, the PM was great at vetting.
That’s not to say the art of vetting is widely understood. In the Monty Python satire, king Arthur really thinks he is king, floating above the mud and the people in it. Gatekeeping can be taken too far by those who don’t understand the art of vetting, identifying literally with the gatekeeper archetype. This can be common in multi-disciplinary fields like UX where there is ambiguity around how a discipline is defined.
I’ve been at the receiving end of gatekeeping, especially at the beginning of my transition from the non-profit sector to UX. What no one ever said aloud — I say jokingly but also not jokingly — but might as well have: Go back to being a khadi-wearing jhola-carrying NGO worker. (Not to boast, I am a khadi-wearing jhola-carrying UX designer.)
And there were times when I was the gatekeeper of my resources because I took for granted that that was how it was supposed to be in UX. Mistaking the dirty tricks of self doubt as truth, I held on to the belief that most gatekeeping was just and necessary, and cases of it going too far were rare.
It didn’t occur to me that when swimming in water is all we know, we forget what swimming is or water is.
A yummy provocation
I could go on a tangent detailing experiences of being a recipient of gatekeeping, a tiresome and endless initiation rite that leaves one feeling like a permanent outsider. More importantly, I could explore at length how it affected the way I showed up for others, sometimes in ways that left them feeling like outsiders too (one designer in particular with whom I’ve attempted to mend things, with moderate success).
And I could — thanks to the Indian wheel of power, adapted from Sylvia Duckworth’s wheel of power in 2022 and making an appearance in 2025's DesignUp conference — explore in depth the class-coded politics of gatekeeping, which in my view aren’t explored enough by the critics of gatekeeping.
The problem with talking about gatekeeping, though, is that gatekeeping is a symptom that distracts from the cause because it is compelling and stirs primal emotions. Picture a twix. The milk chocolate shell of the twix is all we see, but something scrumdiddlyumptious hides inside: a crunchy biscuit topped with caramel. So here's a provocation: Let's not be deceived by the shell; let's eat the entire twix!
Instead of gatekeeping, why not talk about mentoring?
Gatekeeping, after all, is a failure of mentoring.
And while the anti-gatekeeping content, the audacious manifestos and dopamine inducing hot-takes, isn't always uncompelling, I’ve felt a persistent interest in exploring content on mentoring, especially, how we define a mentor. This is important because how we define a concept says something vital about how we approach it. The omission to define a concept, then, means taking the concept for granted and being lax in our approach to it.
Then again, any attempt to define the subjective idea of mentorship through a prescriptive set of attributes would run into a caveat: human experience is too varied. As a result, mentoring takes many forms, each shaped by our own experiences.
With this in mind, I attempt to define mentorship with the help of a single core tenet, trusting that it holds enough thread to be woven where it can.
Enter the capability principle.
A mentor continuously seeks to recognise the diversity of capabilities that can exist in a person. Through that recognition, she discovers the breadth of her own competencies and with care and skill draws out her mentees' unique competencies, whether quiet or visible, familiar or entirely new.
Note: If you’re wondering if the capability principle was deliberately pulled from economic theory, it wasn’t. I like to think I am not so presumptuous as to claim to know more about economic theory than my limited exposure through a Masters in Gender Studies would allow. But with a vague appreciation for the beauty of economic theory, I don't claim that I wasn’t, in some shape or form, inspired by the core premise of Sen’s capability approach and Nussbaum’s central capabilities: To see people only as they are is to miss the point. What matters is what they can do.
I see the role of a mentor, as defined by the capability principle, as very similar to the role of a teacher. When we were young, good teachers, if we were lucky, weren’t necessarily those who whipped us for getting a C- in geography but who — cheesy as it sounds — were dedicated to nurturing our unique strengths. For the potterheads, they were the professors who understood that not every kid was meant to be a Hermione Granger. Some were Neville Longbottoms — awkward late-bloomers who excelled at Herbology and were far better ballroom dancers than anyone saw coming in The Goblet of Fire.
But this is where the similarity between the mentor-mentee and the teacher-child dynamic ends. The teacher-child dynamic is by definition one of power asymmetry. The mentor-mentee dynamic is the opposite: It troubles the mentor-mentee binary, rejecting hierarchies of the teacher-student type between two grown adults as natural. When done right, the mentor-mentee dynamic aspires to be as power equitable as possible. In this school, everyone's an enthusiastic pupil. The zeitgeist is gradually shifting to identify this kind of relational positioning as shared power.
Once in a while, someone appears in our social media feeds and breaks the spell of our echo chambers. One such human said the purest form of mentorship he experienced was from people who weren’t mentors, since they lacked the experience required to be called mentors. This touched a nerve. Mentorship comes from unexpected places. It flows in unexpected directions.
To allow this type of bidirectional mentorship, the mentor must have some literacy around or interest in understanding institutional power structures within which they work. For the mentor to live by the capability principle, this is absolutely necessary.
Sublimato
Roberto Assagioli, the founder of psychosynthesis, in his book The Act of Will questions the idea of a Victorian will based on guilt or emotional repression and argues that true will is a process integral to the Self. True assertion of consciousness, then, can only come from true will, not the Victorian idea of the will. He also describes sublimation as one of the processes for the will to find expression.
For Assagioli, sublimation is a process in which instinctual energies are transformed at a higher level of organisation, into a more life-affirming expression. Guided by the will, these raw energies are reorganised so their vitality is preserved while their form and function change, much like a chemical reaction in which the same elements, when combined differently, produce an entirely new compound.
With this in mind, to build literacy around institutional power is to take one’s experience of navigating systems and sublimate it into insights on navigating systems with fluency and maturity. The mentor and mentee then compare notes, further sublimating their insights to build strategies and pursue opportunities within the constraints of their systems. Or they may use that knowledge to tweak the constraints, or even rethink the constraints entirely.
This prevents the mentor-mentee dynamic from mirroring the disorder and chaos of the systems they work within. More importantly, it cushions mentees from cynicism, an attitude that can otherwise be easy to fall back on. To a gatekeeper who has eschewed true power in favour of the safety of being a cynic, gatekeeping is common sense. I know because I almost became one.
Cynicism is the gatekeeper's last defence. Becoming more capability-oriented, on the other hand, nudges mentors/mentees towards thinking bigger and becoming systems-oriented.
The long game
Picture a moment in a designer’s day: A designer is unable to persuade a client to adopt a design process change and says so to his mentor. The mentor, who thinks the designer is ‘too nice’ and lacks the ability to push design, tells him to toughen up and push design with nothing further to add.
Although there may be some truth in the strident advice, impact isn’t its point. Because it’s based on a Victorian faith in the stern and spontaneous will over the skillful will, the advice does little to foster self-trust or self-efficacy in the mentee. It overvalues or undervalues his limitations and strengths, and doesn’t help him gain a realistic awareness of his sphere of possibility. What it does instead is put the mentor one-up and the mentee one-down.
In her book Growing Yourself Up, Dr. Jenny Brown, an expert on Murray Bowen’s systems theory, describes one-up one-down manoeuvres as relational patterns where one person “becomes the expert and rescuer while the other calms themself and satisfies the other’s need to feel in control by giving up their thinking and problem-solving.”
What’s more, the advice in the above vignette passes as a kind of proto-sublimation. Without attempting to elaborate how, why or when to push UX, it frames the principle of pushing UX as more important than actual stakeholder buy-in. Per our Italian friend, Assagioli:
It is important to realize, however, that there are pseudosublimations, which should be recognized and guarded against. They are a substitute, a counterfeit of the real thing.
But actor Timothée Chalamet, by saying it most simply, said it best:
Be careful of people who are more thrilled to give you advice than the actual advice they are giving you.
A better approach might be: The mentor, who keenly recognises the mentee's competency to be a pattern-oriented deep thinker, beams at him in encouragement and tells him to be an advocate, without sounding altogether convinced.
This still isn’t quite enough: The advice falls short of being capability-oriented as it ignores the system in which the mentor and mentee work. It runs into the same issue as the previous advice. It reaches for quick, linear fixes instead of taking a broader systems view (see image).
Instead, we might consider a pragmatic approach aligned with the capability principle: The mentor creates an opening for a conversation on advocacy, framing it as a long game, and together the mentor and mentee come to see that short-term losses are sometimes the price of long-term gains.
A dialogue like this can be a small but significant step forward, an invitation to acknowledge a hard truth: change, of any kind, disturbs the equilibrium of the system, in turn disturbing our own equilibrium within the system. A system is like a bowl of soup on a stove. Individual designers might think of ourselves as just one ingredient, but ingredients don’t sit untouched when the soup is stirred.
Are we ready to be the changed ingredient just yet?
Trying something other than what we’re used to requires seeing that we’ve been playing a role in the system. If we’ve spent a lot of time ‘pushing’ design, it can be hard to see how that role also helped maintain the system’s equilibrium, even when the equilibrium wasn’t particularly sustainable.
Pushing design without awareness of systems in which design operates is an end. Design advocacy, on the other hand, is a state of mind. It’s a paradigm shift, away from chasing instant results and towards setting non-grandiose and attainable goals. It asks us to stay with our goals and gradually get used to achieving them, however we define them.
If anything calls for care and shared responsibility, minus the gatekeeping, it’s this.