What's Next for Design Leaders

A theme for my work for the back half of this year is “what’s next” for design leaders. It started with podcast episode The Phase Shift, where Jesse and I worked through our reactions to the discourse around the design leader ‘freak-out’ and the research ‘reckoning,’ and where I posited that the anxiety we’re seeing is because of the uncertainty of what’s to come for many design leaders.

And as I continue to poke at ‘what’s next,’ I return to something I said in that episode, which is that UX/Design types need to focus specifically on the impact they seek. And if that impact is to evolve businesses to do a better job of putting humans at the center of decision-making, this may entail letting go of their their identity as UX/Designers, because it may be other jobs that have more authority to make that happen.

As I pursued this reasoning, I found myself going Galaxy Brain, thinking about how we’re so wedded to Mercantile and Industrial Age notions of jobs/careers/trades, and how often I’m involved in discussions that UX/Design does these things, and Product Management does those things and Engineering does other things, and then Data and Marketing and Accessibility and and and… And I come away thinking we need to figure out a proper Networked/Digital age approach to roles, where the work isn’t pre-defined by your job title, and focus is shifted to skills and capabilities, and assembling teams of people with complementary and necessary breadth.

I suppose a job-title-free world is not “what’s next,” but on the way there we shouldn’t be so territorial about titles/functions and the work to be done, instead recognizing, and even embracing, this positional fuzziness.

The Rise of Design: A function of ZIRP?

Reading designer hand-wringing (as reflected in articles like this about Design in the Doldrums), something that doesn’t get enough play is that the Rise of Design—IDEO’s mindshare, “Design Thinking”, massively scaling design organizations, design as an executive function, wholesale acquiring of design consultancies, Maeda’s Design In Tech report—is timed almost perfectly to ZIRP, or Zero Interest Rate Policy, which basically meant that from 2008-2021, corporates had access to nearly-free money. Which also coincided with the ascension of the most successful consumer product ever, iPhone. And that most companies likely had no idea what they were doing when it came to design, but it seemed like the thing to do, and the risk, if it didn’t work out, was low.

I actually think smart, evidence-based, human-centered Design is very well-suited to a post-ZIRP world, when companies have to actually run a functioning business (and not just serve as a financial instrument for executives and investors). We’re definitely experiencing bumps along the way, but in a few years, the field of Design may very well be better for it.

Parting thought: My Weird (?) Metaphor

About a month ago, in a comment on LinkedIn, in response to whether Design should be a c-suite function, I wrote:

Forgive the analogy, but design is like salt or butter: [applied appropriately,] it enhances everything else, but is not interesting on its own. Design doesn’t ‘own’ anything. Unfortunately, our current corporate contexts don’t know what to make of a function whose value is realized through making everyone/everything else better.

Though dashed off in haste on my phone, I basically still believe what I wrote. I’m curious your thoughts on this—share them in the comment section of the Web version.