Financial Services Group, 58k employees

“Help us frame and build Design Leadership capabilities in our teams across the group. Enable leaders to work more collaboratively and strategically.”

Approach

  1. Assess current design leadership capabilities using the Design Management Competencies framework (Baars, 2016)

  2. Articulate what success looks like

  3. Define Design Management roles

  4. Review existing Design Culture building rituals and compare them with external best-in-class examples

  5. Develop a roll-out plan for Design Management roles

  6. Prioritise actions for building Design Culture

Current vs. Future

The leadership team initially needed to understand the current state of design leadership in their organisation. The Design Management Competency framework (Baars, 2016) provided a mapping device to make sense of it. Is resulted in a visual artefact that highlighted where design leaders spent most of their time and resources, while revealing which areas did not receive adequate attention in order to build effective design teams and realise value from design.

Through discussions about what activities would lift the value generated by design, the team shifted resources and attention to create a more balanced coverage across the Design Management competency areas.

Design Management roles

The organisation had emphasised delivery roles of design – the creation of artefacts, interfaces, customer journeys, user experience etc., plus the management, tools, processes and culture. However, the mapping revealed that by doing so they lost significant value created due to the lack of engagement with the wider organisation and stakeholders.

The roles framework (Baars, 2016) is a double click into the Design Management Competencies. It articulates the skills and activities needed to succeed in all four competencies. The leadership team was able to use this roles framework to create job descriptions and revised responsibilities and expectations for design leaders in the organisation. As a result design leaders spent more time honing the skills to mediate business value and connecting cross-functionally and across hierarchies. This increased the awareness of design within the organisation and provided the design function with more reach, influence and accountability, making their efforts more valuable for the business.

Keywords: change, transformation, organisation design, design leadership, capability development

Design Leadership & Design Management

The book Leading Design by Jan-Erik Baars (incidentally my former professor at Uni) is an excellent resource to wrap one’s head around leveraging the value of design in organisations. It is an inherently difficult subject as design is difficult to define, morphs depending on sector and industry, and is by nature cross-functional, so does not sit well in a corporate silo. Baars uses the Danish Design Ladder to illustrate that different definitions of design can coexist in an organisation all at the same time – design as form-giving, as a process and as a strategy. Richard Buchanan has also famously contextualised design and shown its prism-like nature in his Four Orders of Design.

Needless to say, the book provides a comprehensive starting point and plenty of illustrative examples on how to leverage the value of design and make the case for good design leadership and management.

Business Value of Design

I have lectured about the value of design (for business, economically and socioculturally) at a University in Munich, and had the advantage that influential allies have contributed research to making the case for design in business. The McKinsey Design practice has produced The Business Value of Design report putting a monetary value on design (management) in organisations, plus reported on how do build an effective Design Function – you’ve guessed it, it’s cross-functional, nurtures talent, and uses effective tools and infrastructure. Yes, for those of you bearing with me until here, this sounds a lot like the Design Management Capability Quadrants used in the leadership programme on this page.

InVision has also published The New Design Frontier research report on the relationship between design practices and business performance. Echoing the Danish Design Ladder with its analysis of roles in design mature (and effective) businesses. It also shows that most companies are not harnessing the value of more systemic (Buchanan’s Fourth Order) design and thereby leave unrealised value and money on the table.

Important vs. Urgent framework

An underlying dichotomy design leaders (and any leader, manager or entrepreneur) have to grapple with is how they’re going to spend their time across urgent and non-urgent tasks as per Eisenhower’s Box. The Design Management Capabilities framework helps put urgent and non-urgent tasks into context and highlights non-urgent but important activities.

Do you want to realise the value of design? Do you have a design team you want to become design leaders?

Get in touch to get your Design Leadership Programme started.

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