Leading Design 2022: Live Notes

I’m in NYC for Leading Design 2022, and I’m livebloging the event (taking notes in real time, updated for each talk). You can alos see my notes from the 2021 and 2016 events.

Comments in brackets [] are mine.

1. Kat Vellos – Better Than Small Talk

Vellos is the author of the excellent book, We Should Get Together. In addition to being a design leader she’s a facilitator and community builder. Conversations are a key part of this. But we live in a world starved of meaningful connection, even before the pandemic.

She created better than small talk, a simple system for better conversations, and some cards from this system were given out at the event. The core idea was to get beyond the basic, cliche conversations we’ve learned to have but that don’t really work. Generous curiosity isn’t hard to cultivate. Questions are a doorway to connection. A connection creates relationships that define the quality of our lives.

2. Peter Merholz – The Evolving Design Leader

The Peter Principle: how people get promoted into their level of incompetence. Five years ago Merholz gave a talk on design leadership of Coach, Diplomat, Champion and Architect.

Coach: Your job is to get the most out of your team. Diplomat: Creating a space for design to do well across functionsChampion: Managing up and out. Engaging with stakeholders and executives.Architect: Putting things in place so good design can scale

Design staffing continues to grow very fast. And that means that leaders and managers need to grow and we need more of them. We are putting people into management and leadership without preparing them. He wants us to get out in front of this incompetence.

“She went too deep too fast” – about a new design director, from a VP of Design. New directors tend to focus on what they are already good at (classic Peter Principle).

He described the path of becoming a design leader: leader, to manager (front line manager), to director (middle management), to VP of design (executive). In each of these stages, you are evolving into a new form.

Design leader’s area of attention:

Creative: vision, direction, practice, standards (goal is quality)Business: design work aligns with business, cross function and planning (goal is business sucess)People: recruiting and hiring, performance and career development, culture (goal is team health)Operations: Program management, communication, budgets (goal is effectiveness)

How the focus of design leader’s shifts as you rise:

Lead -> Manager: mostly creative leadership and people managementManager -> Director: shift to cross functional relationships – less time managing down – sideways and up. Bad middle managers are a black hole, since they are such a pivot point.Director to VP: You are not recieving strategy, you are informing strategy. You define what quality means and how it can be achieved. You are responsible for defining and delivering on value. As you rise your attention shifts to more and more managing up and away from your own team

The org looks to the design leader as their figurehead – the designers want this person to be an inspiration. And they are expected to do everything (design savior). How can we shape design leadership teams so that the burden of leadership is shared?

3. Hayley Hughes – Trust Between Teams

She opened her talk sharing a story about her Mom, who is ill, and needs an entire team of people to give her support. Over years silos have formed and individual experts have their own systems, that don’t work very well in aggregate. She has spent most of her career working on design systems at big organizations.

Team of teamsunderstanding a team of teamsWhat holds us backRemoving the blockers

Four archetypes for teams:

Command – hieracy is efficient, but least resilientCommand of teams: teams work well, until they hit a siloTeam of teams: each individual knows one other person on another team [image error]

She used to study food systems, how people obtain and are provided with sources for food. She was in Austin during the big storm in 2021, when the power went out and they lost all of their food. Soon they learned through neighbors and text messages who had surplus food. Sometimes systems that are organic and informal have more resilience than the formalized ones.

messy relationships and messy cities are the most resilient

– Erin White

What if we redesigned teamwork to be more collaborative? IBM had a tool called Radar that allowed teams to switch perspectives, changing their view to be less siloed.

Org charts are hierarchical, but there are many other ways to map the relationships between people and teams.

What holds us back?

Common false beliefes:

“it will slow us down.” – a fear that if we aren’t sprinting, we must be falling behind. Leads to burnout. “We’ll give you visibility.” – giving visibility can just be theater – if it’s not tied to planning and restructuring.“Management won’t buy in.” – suggests that you need permission to try somerthing new. But often bosses care about the results more than the means.“Our roadmap is already planned.” – this is a fear of ambiguity and change. It is safe to hafe a plan, the reality is that most things don’t go as planned. There must be room for emerging opportunities. “We own this.” – ownership can be the kiss of death for collaboration. Stewardship is a better model.

Eventually we need to redesign organizations to better afford the real goals, instead of what traditional organizational design tends to be good for.

FInal aspiration: she encouraged us during times of uncertainty, crisis and growth to choose collaboration over silos.

4. Ovetta Sampson – The Planck Value of Design

She grew up in Chicago and is an amateur physicist Planck value (or constant) is a fundamental law of how atoms work and it doesn’t stay in the normal bounds of how we think the world works. She started as a designer, went to design lead, then design director and now is a VP. She says Merholz is right in how unprepared people are to be in these roles, and as you rise more time is spent with other roles than with designers.

We can’t keep our insular preciousness about our craft – we have to be collective if our goal of human-centered design is to get good design into the products and services.

Her statement for what she does: “To amplify the beauty of humanity with design while avoiding practices that exploit its fragility.”

“Design is the conscious and intuitive effort to impose meaning order to chaos” – Papanek

“Without design leadership you dob’t know where you are going.

She referenced this paper (Core Responsibilities of Design Leaders in Commercially Challenging Environment):

Design is a verb:

how a produt is developedHow it worksHow it is experiencedHow it is improved

Her definition of a good manager: My job as a leader is to have you operate in your jam 90% of the time. 10% is unavoidable BS.

She told a story about working with young children and teaching them a design thinking method. She didn’t use any of the formal language we do. The task was to redesign the classroom. They emerged into a natural and shared approach to problem-solving (collective leadership tenets):

They treated the class like an ecosystemShare and rotating decision makingPeople are trustedSuccess comes from diverse perspectiveTransparent and effective communication

4. Alice Quan – Designing Your Dream Job(s): The Art of IKIGAI

In this short tlak, Quan offered that she is in her 6th dream job. She grew up in a small town in Illinois and her parents immigrated from China and Hong Kong (they are “asian tiger parents”). They didn’t have much (his family pooled their money to send her father to America) so she learned to make things scratch, and the idea of working with teams in organizations to make things means much to her.

Her father explained that she had three career choices they’d support: doctor, accountant or lawyer. But her best friend from high school studied design and she was intrigued. On her own, she built a portfolio and applied to design school but was rejected. But she persisted and asked for feedback and eventually got in and got a full scholarship. Only then did she tell her parents. (She joked that she catches herself doing the same things to her kids, telling them that e-sports is not a real career).

This was her Ikigai origin story. She was slowly learning how to apply the framework in her own life (she references Karate Kid, and how it takes commitment and patience to find your way. IK = ALIVE / GAI = BENEFIT).

5. Dianne Que – “I got you”: A Meditation on Radical Inclusion

The first step in inclhsive leadership is to see people as people. She shared some of her personal history (child of imigrants).

Meditation: a practice of cultivating understanding, love and compassion by looking deeply, first for ourselves and then for others.

Incluion: the practice of building the culture of belonging by actively inviting the contriubtion and participation of all people.

Practice is something you need to do regularly and often in order to get better at it.

Story: May 26, 2020. Day after George Floyd was murdered. She was on a work call created to create space for people to discuss their feelings about what happened, but there wasn’t a single person of color on the call. With the support of her manager they created a series of conversations for their creative managers. They started with managers and hiring managers (there was a lot of open head count on the team).

First question from management was: “What outcomes can we expect from these conversations?”

We have a culture that emphasizes:

doing over reflectingquantity over qualityefficiency over relatonshipsUrgency over Empathy

It’s common to hear people say things like, “I’m all for giving people a chance. but I don’t want ot hold anyone’s hand” which creates a paradox.

The process and the conversations that can often have the most value and creates the possibility for the desired outcomes.

Start to build empathyStart to identify WHYStart an ongoing conversationStart to develop a shared DEI vocabulary

The business why / The moral Why (source Michelle Kim, 2021)

DEI is good for business / it’s the right thing to doDEI leads to innovation / I want to help othersDEI leads to profitability / People are suffering

“I trust you and will back you up” Is a rare thing to hear from a (hiring) manager. Which leads to a culture of “I got you. We got us.”

In summer of 2020 there was blackout Tuesday. It was supposed to be an act of solidarity. It had an unitended effect of making actual BLM content harder to find. We will make mistakes, but the question is what will we do next. Commit to a life of stumbling forward (Contradictions for while people in racial justice work).

Why: our liberation is bound togetherEmbrace the process and the outcomeCommit to a lifetime of stumbling forwardHold multiple truths. Embrace the status quo.

She closed referencing many of the books and sources she has learned from.

[image error]6. Samantha Warren, Designing creative collaboration in a virtual world

[Warren is an excellent speaker and I confess i didn’t take great notes because I was enjoying her talk so much].

She wanted to be a designer when she was growing up (which other speakers mentioned was not their path). She observed her father visiting design studios and observed their creative spaces and was inspired by them. And she felt like she was observing unicorns work – and that these were her people.

She had a creative career and worked for a long time, until the pandemic happened. It changed how she felt about work. In March 2021, she wondered about how there might not be a return to design studios. Staring at a box, with little boxes in it, didn’t feel creative. She used to love planning offsites and thinking about how to cultivate safe and fun environments.

The key to workplace creativity is buildng psychological safety. But the nature of work psychology has changed because we are all remote.

She took time off and traveled. And talked to her friends and family. And tried to reframe the problem shw was trying to solve.

“You can take the worst feeling in the world and reframe it so that that terrible feeling becomes its own solution.” – Milton Erickson

It is design’s responsibility to lead broad concept making (low fidelity) to specific execution (high fidelity).

When you don’t have a whiteboard in the hallway, how do you replace that persistent team level open space? They use Canvas, but there are other tools. She explained the design process she used (and how the diagrams for design processes aren’t realistic).

She wasn’t sure in the pandemic that she wanted to continue in design. But in reframing the problem she has found new ways to collaborate and is optimistic about the possibility of connection.