The Quiet Ways Care Gets Designed Out
Editor's Note: This post was originally published on May 20, 2025. As I migrate my work to this new platform, I've updated it to better reflect my current frameworks and sharpened my thinking from the original piece. The core ideas remain the same.
Photo by Juan Rojas on Unsplash
A few weeks ago, I wrote about Careless People – a memoir about the slow erosion of care inside Facebook and what it revealed about the systems we build.
That piece circled the big questions. This one is about the small, quiet moments where care gets designed out. These are the patterns I've learned to watch for, in my own work and in the rooms where big decisions get made.
Here are five ways I’ve seen care get designed out, and the design principles required to build systems that hold.
1. Care gets lost when feedback is performative.
The Pattern: We ask for input without creating the structural space to act on it. Harmony gets prioritized over honesty, and “consultation” turns into a formality. We’ve all seen projects where the right questions were asked, but the timing or power dynamics made it impossible for the answers to matter. That’s where care breaks down.
The Principle: Feedback should be designed into the system, not treated as a sentiment. Be explicit about where input can actually shape direction, and where constraints are already fixed. Naming those lines up front makes feedback meaningful, not just performative.
The So What: If feedback can’t influence decisions, and the system learns less, not more.
2. Care gets edged out by speed.
The Pattern: Urgency rewards decisiveness, not deliberation. We skip steps, defer trade-offs, and assume we’ll circle back later. But there’s always a cost to moving fast. Sometimes invisible up front, but someone always pays for it – whether it’s a user, a partner, or your future team.
The Principle: Slow moments are a design choice. Even a 30-minute pause to ask “what are we not talking about yet?” can prevent a much bigger repair later.
The So What: When you trade care for speed, you’re not moving faster, you’re just building fragility into the system.
3. Care disappears when values don’t shape decisions.
The Pattern: We name values, post them on the wall, and stop there. If they don’t live inside decisions, they’re just aesthetics.
The Principle: Translate values into action. That can mean one constraint, one decision principle, and one team norm for each value — something that actually guides trade-offs instead of decorating the “About” page.
The So What: Values without teeth don’t just fade into the background — they quietly hollow out trust in the system you’re building.
4. Care gets sidelined when dissent feels risky.
The Pattern: If there’s no space to say “this doesn’t feel right,” silence becomes the safer option, and care gets traded for comfort. I’ve been in rooms where dissent came at a cost, and I’ve also caught myself swallowing it, too.
The Principle: Friction isn’t failure. Build rhythms where pushback is expected, not punished. It keeps the system honest.
The So What: If people can’t challenge the work, you don’t just lose their voice, you lose the system’s ability to see around corners.
5. Care gets postponed.
The Pattern: We say we’ll build in accountability later – after scale, after the next milestone. And we mean it… until it’s too late. Most systems that collapse under pressure were built with good intentions, just never pressure-tested early.
The Principle: Ask care questions at the start: Who might this harm? What assumptions are we making? What are we deferring, and why?
The So What: Skip care now and you’ll spend twice as long patching later.
I believe care is infrastructure, and I believe the design I’m not writing this from a place of mastery; I’m sharing what I’ve learned from experience.
But my perspective is clear: care isn’t a soft skill; it's infrastructure. The design choices we make early are what separate resilient systems from those that break under pressure.
This is how we build businesses that can scale with spine.