Dave, if you’re up for it, you may want to try and combine these activities with being a senior designer on medium-term projects/programs. I have found that being on the floor in the capacity of a temporary team member helps with understanding the challenges and opportunities that the design team has.

It would mean finding temporary employers who have two needs (improve level of sophistication of design as a whole AND a senior designer to help one or more teams) which means there are less opportunities. But it also means you can vary the amount of mentoring vs. doing, which means there are more opportunities.

Before the start of every assignment, you would have to define and roughly plan the activities related to each track, with peaks of the change-agent type activities at the start (analysis) and end (plan for improvement) but hopefully with a little bit of time every week for reflection, experiments, discussion, mentoring, training, etc.

I have been told that it’s a Jewish curse to wish people many customers, but in this case it is meant well :-)