Design fables: Bird in hand principle

Who you are, what you know, who you know.

The Bird in Hand Principle, part of Saras Sarasvathy’s effectuation theory, emphasises leveraging one’s traits, knowledge, and networks to create opportunities. Success in design and entrepreneurship often arises from collaboration and utilising immediate resources, as shown by the founders of Airbnb and Pinterest.

There are three categories of means made available to anyone:

1. Who you are — your traits, tastes, and abilities

Ask yourself: What is something worth pursuing because of your personal belief? That’s who you are.

2. What you know — your education, training, expertise, and experience

Ask yourself: what competency do I have, such that I am able to harness them as strengths? That’s what you know.

3. Who you know — your social and professional networks.

Ask yourself: Who do I have as my current connections, and who do my connections know? That’s who you know.

Not sparrows, but falcons

The Bird in Hand Principle combines an individual’s personal calling with their capabilities and existing connections to allow immediate action to take place. However, it is often mistaken that the bird in one’s hand is a small sparrow.

In fact, according to some sources, the origins of the expression are associated with falconry used for hunting. UNESCO, on the other hand, recognised the practice as an intangible cultural heritage of humanity, with a focus on camaraderie and sharing rather than subsistence. The birds in many hands with common interests become a powerful yet tangible force.

Strong design teams are not functional silos of lone design geniuses. Regardless of how a design is organised, whether as a centralised centre of excellence or as a decentralised chapter, having a critical mass of bird-in-hand designers propels further actions across organisations. They have the ability to influence their unique perspectives to create future Pinterest grids or self-supervised encoders. More importantly, they do so with a highly collaborative yet realistic goal in mind. Wasn’t there another saying, “Birds of the same feather flock together?”

In an interview, Pinterest’s former Chief Design Officer Evan Sharp made an unusual comment when an interviewer tried to credit him for designing the grid that has now become an Internet standard.

This was the transcript that followed:

Interviewer: You say “we” a lot, but you’re really the guiding force behind the decision to make it a grid, right?

We, as the next set of design innovators and entrepreneurs, are on the hunt to discover our next falcons.

Read on: The original version of this article is on UX Collective.

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