The Merholz Agenda
Peter Merholz's semi-weekly newsletter on organization design, design leadership, and bringing humanism into the places we work.
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[TMA] Uncertainty is Opportunity
By Peter Merholz · · View online →
About a year and a half ago, Jesse and I discussed what we called The Phase Shift: this sense that the steady progress we'd been witnessing in Design for nearly 25 years had been disrupted, with deep uncertainty as to where things were going. Matters have only gotten more acute since then, particularly with the rise of technologies like LLMs and Generative AI.
As we witnessed many of our peers approach this with doubt (about their value) and fear (of their employability), we actively engaged this subject on Finding Our Way. 18 months later, we still haven't figured out whatever's next.
However, we do believe that capable, confident design leaders can see this uncertainty not as a threat, but as an opportunity: to redefine their role, their value, and, ultimately, their direction.
I see this as a kind of "Physician, heal thyself" moment, in that many of these folks are perfectly using the tools of design to help clients and companies managing ambiguity and uncertainty, but it somehow never occurs to them to apply these tools to themselves.
This will