Leading Design
It’s important to remind ourselves that CEOs don't hire design executives to be “general managers”. They hire a design executive for the same reason they hire a CTO, CFO, or a CMO; they want a person who can lead the practice and be an expert practitioner in the discipline.
However, all too often new design leaders, seeking to establish their creditability, focus on demonstrating their business acuity rather than their design leadership. Which commonly includes conforming to operational models optimized for other disciplines and governed by other teams. Design leaders who try to back design into these existing processes are failing in their charter before they have even begun.
Don’t get me wrong, I think every designer needs to have business literacy in order to understand and engage with their colleagues. The same is true for having technical literacy and marketing literacy. At the same time I think the other professions need to also be design literate. But to be clear I have no expectation that just because they are design literate that they could drive design value, never conflate speaking a language with being a native.
Leading a design team requires helping businesses gain the same understanding and appreciation for design that they have for engineering or marketing. As you move up in an organization, regardless of your functional area, you participate in more conversations about the state of the company, its business and investment trade-offs, again literacy is important if not critical But I have never meet a CEO who expects their CDO to do their CFO's job, or vice versa. Successful design leaders focus on manifesting a culture where design is on par with these other disciplines, with its own processes and timelines. Where designers are respected for their capacity to creatively apply their knowledges and skills. Design needs more leaders who have the confidence in both the profession and themselves, to work with their peers to build and environment that ensures the investment their company is making in design pays dividends.
To do that I think many design executives need to refocus on design. That is, the knowledge and skills necessary to generate novel ideas and then transform them into beautiful artifacts embodying grace, clarity, and simplicity; while expressing personality, wit, and cleverness. They also need to use that focus to encourage their peers to develop their own design literacy, to understand design, what is about and where it contributed the greatest value. All too frequently today's design is nothing more than simply arranging a set of prefabricated widgets using prescriptive patterns and calling it design. In the rush to adopt a business mind-set and operational efficiency, design leaders no longer value let alone champion the knowledge and skills that made our profession truly valuable: knowing how to actually design. It is quickly becoming a major problem that needs course correcting, or we risk losing our value altogether.
This urgency is driven by design’s transition from a functional necessity to a strategic differentiation in several leading companies—with more quickly following. Today’s c-level executives are looking for design leaders who can design differentiation, customer value, and user engagement. They are looking for design leaders who can synthesize a strategy for design and inspire the people on their team to deliver remarkable designs for products and services. They are looking for design leaders who can raise the collective design literacy of their entire organization. Each of these companies deserves its own design, and the design profession deserves leaders who can make that happen.
Are you that kind of leader?
