The design leadership revolution
How can business leaders implement a design-led approach within their organisation?
investigates
Design is hot right now. And broken. Executives are being tasked with being design-driven, but don’t have the tools, processes or design systems to sustain this effort. Leaders are embracing design thinking, yet they have not established how their companies will implement their ideas. VCs are telling founders to hire a design leader, but it’s not clear who this mythical, unicorn person is. Designers, it’s your time to step into these problems.
Companies are going to continue to embrace more design methodologies because design-conscious firms continue to outperform the market. Designers have two choices: try to solve each problem in isolation, or drive the necessary change with their organisations. Both are doable, but only one solution is sustainable and capable of helping an organisation become design-centric.
So what does is it mean to be design-centric? And why must designers lead this change? Here are the three important problems that designers can tackle to start making a difference in their organisations.
Continuous deployment
Users have become an integral part of design, often contributing to the creation process as bits fly through the internet. For example, Amazon deploys to a production server every 11.6 seconds. To put this in perspective, if the average visit time on Amazon is over 11 minutes, the site will have changed 57 times in one user’s visit — and that doesn’t even include the learned preferences Amazon is applying in real time!
Disney understands the power of connected experiences. It invested in technology to make the experience of using their park amazing with the MyMagic+ plan. Not only did Disney face the daunting task of creating a digital infrastructure that would serve 150k people a day in the park, but it also aimed to present the MagicBand, which guests would use 24/7, throughout the park, as a form of currency. The constraints would constantly change and require real-time updates via the internet. The design work required to pull this off would require heavy cross-disciplinary work between many groups within the organisation.
Designers must be a partners with the business to solve these intense problems; it’s not enough to just whip up a design. There are so many moving pieces. Technology will handle a lot of issues, but it’s not enough to
introduce new ideas into systems without building patterns to enable flexible outcomes. And speaking of technology — it’s moving faster than users can adapt, so we need to be designing for a technical system as much as we are for the user needs and business goals.
Collaborative methodologies
If design is the rendering of intent, then feedback helps us understand if we have hit the goal. Feedback can come from anywhere. Now collaborative systems like Facebook are so ubiquitous, designers who build them are continuously bringing in feedback based directly on the users that are adding content. Taking it a step further, the customisation of these systems can make the consumer themselves a designer. They morph the interface in real time, often unconsciously, based on their own behaviours.
When product teams open themselves up to feedback and extend the circle of influence in the design feedback loop, amazing discoveries can be made. Slack embraced this customer-centric approach in the early development of its product, and it has paid off immensely. Potential customers become integral to the building process and designers get more opportunity to connect the dots.
Managers must help their teams embrace processes that can handle this flow of feedback. In order to establish a continuous cycle of improvement, designers must be in the middle of this feedback loop; it can’t be left to decision-makers who may not be able to synthesise ideas. And it’s not OK to just inject ideas into a complex system, because there are too many business requirements and user needs that will be affected.
Team psychology
Industrialised, rigid production processes aim to remove failure and create a consistent result. Errors in thinking are minimised by taking much of the human element out of the equation. However, this ultimately harms a designer’s development and stifles creativity. The best design happens when we harness the power of empathy and work through failure to propel ourselves forward. Far from being the enemy, failure (and the ability to overcome it) is what fuels great design. It pushes us to solve huge problems, but it must be regulated.
Psychologically, too much failure can crush people. Instead of taking on huge failures all at once, we can break them into smaller, digestible chunks. Let’s call that iteration. Teams can further help individuals overcome their own demons by responding to failure with structured debate. This regulates the pressure, stopping it from growing too strong. By keeping failures small and building up confidence by overcoming them as both individuals and teams, we create unstoppable momentum and get into a flow.
So where does one start to find momentum in a design process? Sport is a great place to pull from. Psychological momentum is defined as a state of mind where an individual or team feels like things are going unstoppably their way. Success breeds success. Studies have even shown that, after even one successful play early on in a game, sports coaches often change their behaviour in favour of a more aggressive strategy.
Successful coaches are willing to accept small failures to gain this momentum. They understand how to make these bets based on their players’ skill limitations and team abilities. Knowing they can’t completely control every outcome, designers — like coaches — must capitalise on small wins to create a favourable environment. This in turn creates a more positive mood within their teams and produces better results. Science backs this up through the ‘As If principle’.
Step up and lead
Creating design value is more complicated than just throwing designers at problems. Growing design-centric organisations requires leaders, but we don’t see enough business structure in place to help companies and designers thrive together. Design leaders need tools and methodologies that overlap with the entire organisation. But they also need to step up and place the burdens on themselves to transform organisations for the benefit of people they serve. They must lead by design and take on more ownership of the business outcomes.
Since 1998, we at ZURB have been inspiring people and teams to approach design problems in a different way. We’ve seen the problems facing both designers and organisations and developed a system called Progressive Design. We believe this will help bring design into organisations and train design leaders to create value for their users and business. We’re even writing a book about the insights we’ve learned.
With all of the opportunities that stand before us, there’s been no better or more exciting time to be a designer. But in order to have the impact we crave, we must tackle these problems head-on, transform our organisations, and lead by design.
Bryan is chief instigator at ZURB, a product design company in California. He has advised over 300 successful startups and companies
This article originally appeared in issue 281 of net magazine
