Until the early 2020s, most creatives in architecture and design were relaxed, even optimistic, about the advance of AI. Robots had disrupted factory work in the 1980s, but the received wisdom was that the next wave would target white-collar jobs — lawyers, accountants — not us ‘no-collar’ creatives. What, after all, could be more innately human than creativity, innovation and taste?

That ambivalence evaporated in 2021-22. Image generators such as DALL·E, Midjourney and Stable Diffusion landed in 2021. Then, in November 2022, ChatGPT-3.5 shook even the sleepiest corners of designland awake. The pace of AI innovation – in what often seems like the only dynamic sector of the economy – has since provided regular aftershocks. The text-to-video tools like Google’s Veo and OpenAI’s Sora that put polished video production within reach of anyone who can write a sentence, being one of the latest.

AI, GenAI and AGI

First, some distinctions. AI terminology is riddled with anthropomorphism. Besides the slippery idea of ‘intelligence’, the leans heavily on human analogies — ‘neural’ networks, ‘learning’, ‘memory’, ‘reasoning’, even ‘hallucination’. These terms invite a false equivalence between silicon systems and our human ‘wetware’ (as some techies insist on calling our brains). Modern systems do not think as we do; they simulate some outputs of our thinking, but by very different means.

Crucially, this is done by probabilistic pattern-matching rather than any actual understanding

The field of Artificial Intelligence is roughly 70 years old. The term was coined at a workshop at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, USA, in 1956. Since then, researchers have cycled through different approaches: Rule-based systems (1960s), Expert systems (1980s), Machine learning (1990s–2000s), and today’s Deep learning. Each wave delivered breakthroughs and then hit hard limits, ushering in periods of disillusionment dubbed ‘AI winters’.

For many researchers, the ultimate aspiration is Artificial General Intelligence (AGI): systems that could match or surpass human intelligence across a range of domains. For decades, the Turing Test served as a benchmark — could a machine sustain a natural conversation across topics without a human judge realising they were talking to a machine? Current chatbots plainly pass this for some users, some of the time, for example, 1% of young Americans (18-40) already claim to ‘have an AI friend or are in an AI relationship’. Yet few experts consider them to be truly intelligent. Definitions of AGI remain contested: some researchers argue it could arrive within years; others place it decades away or doubt it is attainable at all. Critics also point out that inflated company valuations often depend on faith in ‘god-like AI’ being around the corner. Still, the present generation of systems is remarkably capable – within limits.

How do they work? First, models are ‘trained’ on vast amounts of largely human-created text, images and code to detect statistical patterns — for instance, which word is most likely to follow which, or which clusters of pixels usually co-occur in a coherent image. Second, during training they internalise patterns such as grammar and syntax for language, or composition and lighting for images. Third, users interact through natural-language prompts, and the model generates plausible text, images, video or software code by sampling from the patterns it has learned. Crucially, this is done by probabilistic pattern-matching rather than any actual understanding — which is why some sceptics argue that ‘computational statistics’ would be a less confusing name for the technology. So, GenAI is a branch of the latest generation of Deep Learning AI, but is unlikely to deliver AGI.

Impact on the creative process

GenAI has already reverberated through photography, illustration, graphic design, post-production, copywriting and content marketing. The work most vulnerable to disruption tends to be:

  • Well-defined: low ambiguity with clear briefs and outputs, often constrained by frameworks such as templates or guidelines.
  • Execution-focused: emphasis on producing artefacts, not on strategy, research or stakeholder engagement.
  • Training data availability: outputs are widely represented in public training data and legible to machines (e.g. portrait photography, product shots, marketing copy).
  • Siloed workflows: tasks are performed at arm’s length from teams or organisations (e.g. some freelance illustration).
  • High volume, low differentiation: repetitive, template-based outputs where speed and cost dominate.

As with earlier automation waves, it is easier to see which jobs get displaced than which new jobs get created – either by that technology or by adjacent developments. The desktop-publishing (DTP) revolution of the 1980s and 1990s initially hurt typesetters and paste-up artists, but then led to a net expansion in opportunities for graphic designers as creative demand exploded and the web appeared and needed designing.

Paradoxically, historically, automation has tended to coincide with employment growth, because productivity gains have driven economic growth. Some argue that ‘this time it’s different’, that AI is qualitatively different from previous general-purpose technologies, such as steam power, electricity and computing. While this is still a moot point, one reason why today is different is that the GenAI disruption is happening during a prolonged period of economic stagnation, which is generating few new jobs.

Outside the most exposed disciplines, GenAI is aiding Architects, Industrial and UX designers across the creative process:

  1. Discovery & research
    AI tools can conduct wider literature reviews, summarise markets, mine reviews, draft research plans and generate interview guides. They can also simulate ‘synthetic users’ to pressure-test early ideas when budgets are tight.
  2. Concept generation & development
    Depending on the domain and brief, GenAI can significantly accelerate brainstorming, producing hundreds of divergent – and often crazy – options in seconds. Today, we direct through text prompts, reference images, and rough sketches; these are blunt instruments for communicating precise intent. To provide greater control, tools are evolving to accept more ‘multi-modal’ inputs, like voice gestural sketching, spatial constraints, style locks and parametric levers that let designers steer with far finer granularity.
  3. Visualisation & prototyping
    Translating ideas into mock-ups and prototypes can often be done faster. High-fidelity visuals, storyboard frames and interface screens can be produced in minutes. Convincing apps and websites can now be scaffolded from natural language or ‘vibe coding’. Expect deeper integration with production tools, like 3D CAD and BIM-compatible models.
  4. Content creation & production
    GenAI shines at the grind. It resizes assets, localises copy, produces variants, and helps keep campaigns coherent across channels. As more tools add AI co-pilots, maintaining conceptual consistency across platforms, formats, products, and regions will become less tedious.
  5. Testing & iteration
    In packaging, interfaces and content, GenAI can simulate user feedback, uncover potential issues, and propose variations for A/B tests. Teams will increasingly test with ‘synthetic users’ first, then validate with real users.
  6. Presentation & communication
    From first-draft decks to theatrical ‘vision films’, GenAI expands how we sell our ideas. It can draft rationales, generate supporting visuals and help stitch them into fluent narratives.

All of this streamlines the toil, but also creates new work. Because models are fluent, their mistakes can be subtle: factual errors, misattributions, logical gaps or fabricated details can slip past a quick skim, so more time needs to be given to rigorous checks. Creative leaders remain accountable for truth, taste and fit, and need to protect time dedicated to creative reviews. Design operations must evolve too: prompt libraries, model and asset governance, decision logs, redesign of workflows, and clear guidance for when and how to use GenAI at each stage. Not a quick job, and as the technology evolves, these frameworks will need to be rapidly updated.

More compelling than efficiency gains are the early signs that GenAI can enable entirely new products and services — such as mass-personalised media. During the 2024 Paris Olympics, NBC and Peacock launched ‘Your Daily Olympic Recap’, a customised highlights service that let users select up to three of their favourite sports. Each day, they received a bespoke 10-minute video summarising the action, narrated by an AI-generated version of sportscaster Al Michaels — with human’s checking for accuracy and tone. NBC anticipated delivering over seven million unique variations of these personalised recaps during the Games — a scale that would have been impossible without AI.

The human role in creativity

Despite the hopes of some CEOs — and the fears of some designers — GenAI is unlikely to erase most creative jobs. It will automate some lower-level tasks and augment our capabilities – act as ‘a bicycle for our minds’ if you will.

A useful way to think about working with AI is to aim to interlace the strengths of machines with our own. This ‘augmentation’ view was first laid out by the psychologist and computer scientist JCR ‘Lick’ Licklider at the advent of AI in the late 1950s. Rather than speculate about computers achieving human-style intelligence, Licklider argued with remarkable prescience that humans and computers would develop a symbiotic relationship; the strengths of one would counterbalance the limitations of the other. Lick said: ‘men will set the goals, formulate the hypotheses, determine the criteria, and perform the evaluations. Computing machines will do the routinisable work that must be done to prepare the way for insights and decisions in technical and scientific thinking. … the resulting partnership will think as no human brain has ever thought and process data in a way not approached by the information-handling machines we know today’.

That frame still fits. Irrespective of technical developments in AI or the efficiency demands from management, we should insist on playing these eight fundamentally human roles in the creative process:

  1. Framing
    If we don’t define the problem, scope, context, and goals – GenAI will do it for you, quietly based on generic patterns that are unlikely to align with your brand, client, or strategy. AI productivity gains are useless if your team is racing in the wrong direction.
  2. Attunement
    AI can synthesise interviews or fabricate ‘synthetic users’, but nuanced insight is social and situational. Attunement is the human skill of sensing what is said and unsaid: noticing tensions, reading the room, spotting behaviours that do not fit the script, and reconciling conflicting stakeholder needs. It combines empathy with a holistic search for the truth.
  3. Critical thinking
    When AI can produce confident and fluent BS, being able to think critically is more important than ever. This includes interrogating sources, triangulating claims, looking for AI bias, an insistent push to get as close to the reality of a situation as possible, and evaluating both the objective and subjective elements of a concept.
  4. Direction
    Direction is the hard work of articulating a creative vision, then refining it until it is clear, coherent and appropriately ambitious. This requires a creative struggle to resolve competing requirements and constraints in a particular context. Humans author the vision and fight for it, AI can help expedite its execution – but possesses zero understanding or intent.
  5. Judgement
    Design judgement is partly explicit craft and partly tacit knowledge — ‘we can know more than we can tell’. It is the cultivated sense of what ‘good’ looks and feels like, why a proposal fits a brand, why a timing is right for a market, and how to strengthen the perception of quality. AI may catch technical flaws; only humans can decide whether the work sings.
  6. Agency
    Ideas do not move by themselves. Very little happens in the real world without human charm, guile, grit and hustle. As the tech sage, Kevin Kelly put it: ‘There are lots of very smart people who think that the most important thing in the universe is intelligence. (And let’s remember we don’t have a widely agreed-upon definition of intelligence). They vastly overrate the importance of intelligence. To get things done in the world, you need much more – including empathy, vision, persuasion, enthusiasm, determination, grit and many other things.’
  7. Storytelling
    Even stellar work needs selling. Storytelling is how ideas survive contact with organisations. We craft stories that grab the head and heart, and flex them to different audiences and situations. We read the room, sense resistance, and pivot the arc in real-time.
  8. Accountability
    Whatever the number of AI agents in a team, accountability remains human. Someone must own the rationale, the quality and the consequences — including legal and reputational risks. Systems do not have skin in the game; people do.

Today’s AI tools are remarkably capable. But humans are even more so. Our creative strengths are not just different from AI’s — they are also more consequential. In an age that routinely overestimates technology, underestimates humanity, and blurs the line between the two, we must not only uphold human values and capabilities, but also strengthen them to master this new technology to deploy it in ways that enhance our creativity.

We must master GenAI in both senses, to become proficient with it and be in the driving seat. Evidence is building that the early use of AI can ‘flatten’ our thinking and produce competent work that is uniform, clichéd and safe. This should not surprise us. GenAI is a technology of averages: it leans toward the mean, reinforces mainstream patterns, and smooths the edges off outlier ideas and perspectives. It raises the floor and lowers the ceiling of creative work.

GenAI is a technology of averages: it leans toward the mean, reinforces mainstream patterns, and smooths the edges off outlier ideas and perspectives. It raises the floor and lowers the ceiling of creative work

If we want to break out of echo chambers, counter prevailing trends, and resist the cultural impoverishment that could follow, it’s on us to think differently — and resist the path of least resistance – slipping into merely curating and editing bland AI output. Creative clarity happens while writing and re-writing, or sketching and re-sketching, before we get AI involved to pressure test and polish.

Our relationship with AI should not be one of symbiotic equals, but one of leadership. We must set the agenda, draw inspiration from diverse sources, and call the shots. More than that, we should push AI to create new things in new ways, rather than merely streamlining old processes.

GenAI can boost or blunt our creativity – it all depends on how we use it. Getting it right requires intentional, disciplined thinking about when, why, and how we wield it. To borrow a GenAI prompt phrase: it’s time to ‘Think harder.’

Work

As we kick off 2025, many design and innovation leaders will be making plans for their teams or functions or at least tweaking existing ones. Here are four examples of situations I’ve helped with regarding team strategy:

  • An engineering-led manufacturing company which realised that experience design was critical to its growth and had decided to set up an internal design function
  • A healthcare innovation team challenged by the executive team to become more influential on the company’s strategy, ways of working and products
  • Two design teams wishing to join forces and collaborate more effectively following an acquisition, and
  • A global R&D team aiming to widen its remit and work together in a more integrated way.

In each case, leaders aimed to increase their teams’ impact on the organisation – to help it win. Dedicating time to building the strategy and planning how to communicate it proved time well spent.If it’s more than making a few mid-course corrections to existing plans, some dedicated focused time pays off. It helps to hover up from the weeds and make an insightful and objective assessment of the team’s situation. It allows time to gather the perspectives of stakeholders and advisors. The process should also enable existing assumptions to be challenged and a thorough thinking through of what to stop, start and sustain. Finally, new strategies need better communication – up, down and sideways – to set or re-set expectations.So, crafting a new strategy is an intensive endeavour that’s hard to do just in the corners of a day. It should be grounded in a clear and candid assessment of the situation and centred on a motivating ambition or North Star. It then needs to be activated by a coordinated set of actions focused on addressing the opportunities and challenges.

Five steps to your team strategy

Here are five steps I use to formulate team strategies:

1. Assess the situation

Prepare a review of the overarching context surrounding your team, including a frank assessment of its strengths and weaknesses. Then look ahead to anticipate the external and internal dynamics you believe will shape your team’s future landscape and surface new openings and threats.

Involve senior leadership in this exercise. Listen to their insights and advice, and engage them in the process.

As you grapple with a complex and dynamic landscape, it’s OK for perspectives and opinions to differ at this early stage. These differences will also fuel more productive conversations than a premature consensus view of the situation. Also, encourage candid opinions on your challenges, their causes and how they might be addressed. As Richard Rumelt put it:


A good strategy honestly acknowledges the challenges being faced and provides an approach to overcoming them…. Bad strategy tends to skip over pesky details such as problems

The idea is to come away from this exercise with a sophisticated understanding of the stakeholders’ priorities, so that you can build a team strategy that really does help the organisation fulfil them.

You’re likely to discover that some of what your team does, which you take for granted, is highly valued. Equally, what you may think is truly impressive can be greeted with just a shrug. All helpful insights into where and how your team delivers value.

2. Define the team’s purpose and ambition

When you gather your leadership team together, clarifying the team’s purpose and ambition (or vision) is a good place to start. I find it helpful to distinguish between why your team exists (purpose) and what it aims to achieve in the future (ambition) while developing the strategy – even if I don’t always end up using both when communicating it. Obviously, both should align with the organisation’s strategy and priorities.

The team’s purpose (sometimes called ‘mission’) should crisply capture why the team exists, and be grounded in its values and scope of activities. To this end, if your team doesn’t have a set of core beliefs, spending time aligning on these often proves a valuable and cohering exercise.

An ambition should paint a vivid picture of the final destination and, ideally, a way to think about getting there – without providing a detailed map

A team ambition is a high-level inspirational and motivating goal or future state. While defining your team’s purpose involves clarifying the fundamentals of your team, defining its ambition is a much more creative process. The ambition should be grounded in a point of view on the future and how the team can best impact the company’s strategy. It should paint a vivid picture of the final destination and, ideally, a way to think about getting there without providing a detailed map – which is why it’s often referred to as a north star. A good ambition strikes a balance between being believable and making the team gulp! It should feel like an inspiring stretch goal.

Generate a range of options, then vote and align on a working ambition statement you can iterate on. A good initial test of the ambition is to break it down into 3-5 objectives. Think of them as steps to realising the ambition. These should be more concrete and measurable goals. Arriving at these five objectives usually prompts further clarification and crafting of the ambition statement.

3. Design the Team Value Proposition

With a clear direction in place, it’s time to define the team’s Value Proposition (TVP). That will articulate how it intends to deliver meaningful value to the organisation.

A Customer Value Proposition (CVP) defines the value a company creates for its customers and why they should choose its product or service over what its competitors offer. A TVP, by contrast, captures how a team will make more than a difference to the business. It defines the connection between the team and the rest of the organisation, and the benefits the team intends to supply to it.

Other internal teams, as well as external consultants, are available.  So, your TVP is also an opportunity to reframe and underline your team’s value. Make sure you can summarise how it will drive company growth and profitability in a memorable and easily articulated manner. Evidence with case studies, stakeholder testimonials and credible measures.

Map out with your team how you currently deliver value to your stakeholders and how you want this to change. Be prepared to make hard choices about ‘where to play’ – and where not to play. It’s vital to focus your resources on areas that will really add value and move your team toward achieving its ambition.

Next, break down the TVP into two or three clear, concise, compelling elements that resonate with your critical stakeholders’ business priorities. There are no golden formulas, but one to try is: ‘We help our organisation to (X) by doing (Y)’.

Finally, in this stage: map your TVP against your purpose, ambition and objectives, and edit the whole thing for better alignment. Remember to use language that will resonate with your stakeholders. Then, find ways to informally test and refine your TVP with some of them, tailoring your narrative to individual stakeholders.

4. Flesh out the strategy

Now that you have clarified your strategic foundations and goals, it’s time to work out how you will deliver on them with a coordinated set of actions. When deciding where to focus the team’s time and resources, try to distil the changes into two or three major initiatives. These might include changes to your budgeting, structures, ways of working, capabilities, resourcing and metrics.

Now summarise your strategic headlines in an overview canvas to ensure they are comprehensive and mutually coherent.

A Team Value Proposition defines the connection between the team and the rest of the organisation, and the benefits the team intends to deliver to it

 A pivotal question to start with is, who are your stakeholders, and how will you segment and prioritise them?  Remember, you may decide later in the process to reduce the support you give some of these, or stop it altogether. Another: your company’s executive team is not duty-bound to fund your team to continue with all activities it pursues. It is likely to consider alternative sources for at least some of what your team does.

5. Develop an action plan

In this final stage, plot out the workstreams that will turn your strategy into action. Your objectives should provide the main workstreams, which can then be broken down into separate activities that can then be given owners, deadlines and resources.

One of the first workstreams should include crafting a strategic narrative and an ‘up, down and sideways’ communication plan. One of the last workstreams should include scheduling regular audits to review progress and remove obstacles.

When developing the strategic narrative, start at the end: What’s in it for our stakeholders? Why should it matter to them? How can you bring the future you hope for to life in a vivid way for them?

After that, go back to framing the pertinent elements of the strategic context facing your team – the context you discussed in Stage 1. Clarifying how they fit in with and assist company strategy. Next, outline the golden thread running throughout the narrative. Hang it on a logical structure and pepper it with supporting examples, images and data. Use clear, concise and compelling language that avoids buzzwords and clichés. And finally, end with a clear and specific request or next step.

With any luck, your strategy will drive focus and impact for a year or two. But stuff happens, you will be buffeted by events and need to course correct, if not make significant changes sooner or later. The advantage of having a documented strategy is that it makes revising it much easier, as you can assess which elements still hold and which need an upgrade.

Generally, the further you go back up the five-stage ladder I have outlined, the less you should need to change. If you understood and expressed them correctly, your purpose and ambition will tend to have the greatest longevity.

May all your 2025 plans come true!

Work
Design is in the doldrums. Budgets have been squeezed, and for now, there are fewer jobs, projects, and career prospects. It’s a time to reflect and renew.

We need a clear-eyed diagnosis of how we got here. We need to be clear about the distinctive value design brings to business. But, if we have the grit to develop new know-how, design will flourish again.

Where we are

Design tends to be in a permanent state of flux. Designing today is barely recognisable compared to what it was when I entered the industry in the early 1990s. Back then, the only screens in our lives were TVs (and maybe a PC at work). And my presentation toolbox was full of markers, Conté crayons, lighter fluid and acetate! So, while the top-level design process hasn’t changed that much, what we design and how we design has changed massively. We’re currently in a state of high flux.

Over the years, we’ve adapted to economic shifts, such as globalisation, the 2008 crisis, the digitisation of business, and tech changes, such as digital modelling, visualisation and remote collaboration. We’ve integrated new approaches, such as Experience design, Business design, and Lean start-up methods. We’ve also adapted to social shifts, like sustainability and diversity agendas. In one way or another, all these changes brought design closer to business, which progressively brought its design activities in-house as its value was realised.

We’re now grappling with how to best use AI and adapt to a less forgiving business environment. To make headway, we must learn the lessons of the past and be creative about future opportunities.

How we got here

For two decades or more, we’ve been on a roll. By the late 1990s, design had moved from a cult to the mainstream, epitomised by the growth of IKEA and Target. In the new millennium, the phenomenal success of Steve Jobs and Jony Ive’s partnership at Apple turned the heads of boards towards design. By the 2010s, Design Thinking took the stage at Davos and was pitched as a magic five-step process, whether the challenge was a mobile app or a healthcare service. This coincided with the digitisation of the economy, as ‘software ate the world’ digital transformation work ballooned and corporations staffed up with huge UX teams.

The growth of design ground to a shuddering halt in late 2022, as swingeing layoffs made by Big Tech culled many designers. The big management consultancies soon followed; IDEO cut a third of its staff, while McKinsey shuttered its design team earlier this year.

It’s not just designers having a tough time, of course; the global economy is in the Doldrums, but some of design’s woes must be laid at its own door.

Design was often sold as a process centred on user research, journey mapping, ideation workshops, iterative prototyping and testing. This degraded definition of design was learned by enterprising non-designers.

To a certain extent, design is suffering from some of the unintended consequences of its success. The most obvious one is that most businesses now have a working knowledge of design, and by definition, it has lost its ‘shiny new thing’ status of the 2010s

More consequentially, design was often sold as a process centred on user research, journey mapping, ideation workshops, iterative prototyping and testing. This is all well and good, but not only is this a degraded definition of design, but much of this can be learned by enterprising non-designers. And it was. This, in turn, led to the blurring of boundaries between designers and consumer researchers, engineers and product managers – so when the cost-cutting began, designers found themselves on shaky ground.

The most damaging consequences flowed from senior management’s perception that too many design leaders had over-claimed and under-delivered. This less palatable truth came through loud and clear in the results of a survey I ran in August 2024. It asked: ‘Why is Design in the Doldrums?’. Here are a few of the shorter answers I received:

‘We haven’t delivered the expected value.’

‘Design leaders have failed to create the expected value for their function.’

‘Too much talking the talk and not enough walking the walk. Verbose justifications for samey designs.’

‘Disillusionment with design as a competitive advantage.’

‘Design Thinking packaged creativity as a repeatable, staged process with guaranteed results. The reality of design is much messier and unpredictable.’

Too many walked through the doors that Design Thinking opened. Too many were high on their own supply. Too few realised that design needed to up its game to deliver on the inflated expectations that underpinned their generous salaries.

Routes forward

Getting back on our front foot will mean acknowledging past missteps, reframing our core expertise, and extending our skills.

Realism

If we accept that many execs believe that design over-claimed and under-delivered, reconnecting with reality would be a good place to start. For example, let’s drop the idea that we have a special gift for creativity and empathy. This design exceptionalism is delusional, naive and frankly demeaning to our non-designer colleagues. There are plenty of creative problem solvers and user/customer-centric people across companies. Designers would be well advised to focus their empathy on their colleagues to better understand their challenges and figure out if design might be able to help. As well as harnessing their colleagues’ creativity and insights.

Reframe core expertise

If I were to point to the most fundamental thing that designers can change, it’s how we articulate our distinctive value. Sure, our processes and tools are important, but they’re not what we spent our 10,000 hours honing. What good designers excel at is vision, judgement, and craft – primarily in the realm of experiences.

Vision

Designers see the future in higher resolution than our colleagues. We spend a lot of time thinking in detail about how the future could be better. We immerse ourselves in the latest social trends and technological innovations, and we have the visualisation and prototyping skills to make concepts tangible.

Envisioning potential futures and bringing them to life helps colleagues in strategy and engineering to picture and assess them. Vision projects are best co-created with other parts of the business and situated in a future context of informed foresight assumptions that give the vision credibility. This gives them more chance of making an impact on the future of the business – beyond becoming PR collateral.

Judgement

We have a finely honed sense of what ‘good’ looks like and know how to achieve it. Others might recognise quality when they see it, but we better understand why that perception is formed and how it could be made even stronger. We also discern if a design fits with a company’s brand, and if it is likely to capture the moment with particular target markets. We are experience connoisseurs with an expert vocabulary to match.

Craft

Great user experiences with high-performing products and services are made still greater by finely crafted details. These can remove friction, imbue character and harmonise different parts of the user’s experience into a coherent whole. Designers understand and sharpen the refinement of details, while others tend just to form overall impressions from of the end product.

These are our fundamental skills and much more important than processes and tools – but they are less tangible, much harder to explain and less easy to point at. Positive and negative case studies and other well-honed stories help bring to life and demonstrate the business value of vision, judgement and craft.

This is not to say that designers should retreat into a back-to-basics bubble. Quite the opposite. Designers need to lean into developing new skills – while being crystal clear about the distinctive core capabilities they are building on.

Renew skillsets

Vision, judgement and craft are not the whole deal, of course. To succeed, designers must add technical, interpersonal and business skills.

In tough and turbulent times, acquiring new skills will be more vital than ever. Squeezed teams value adaptable members with broader expertise. Beyond the Generative AI tools, there are less obvious but more consequential skills that many

designers would benefit from, such as influencing, workshop facilitation, data fluency and organisational acumen. All are general business skills that colleagues share in other business functions, but add value to our role. Most importantly, stay close to the business, be proactive and opportunistic, and focus on delivering value efficiently.

Design diffusion

For the foreseeable future, the advances of AI, a tough economic climate, and a less receptive business environment for design will all amount to significant headwinds. We may even have passed the peak number of designers in employment – in the West, anyway.

Some business-savvy design leaders are branching out into design-adjacent roles such as innovation consulting, change management, product management, and head of innovation. They’re still using many of their design skills, but ‘design’ or ‘designer’ often doesn’t appear in their job titles. To some who see design as a vocation or calling, this may sound like a sell-out or betrayal, but those who have made these transitions talk of growth, more impact, and better career prospects.

Another way to see this development is that it’s the start of a wider diffusion of designers into business, which will only deepen design’s impact – and open up more career tracks for designers.

Design can thrive again, but now is a time for realism, clarity and conviction. Yes, design is a critical element of success, but it’s not magical or special. It’s part of the business mix. There will be no recapturing of a past golden adolescence. Design will continue to evolve, specialisms will blur, and new roles will emerge – including those without ‘designer’ in the title. It sounds grown-up, doesn’t it?

The start of a wider diffusion of designers into business, which will only deepen design’s impact

Some business-savvy design leaders are branching out into design-adjacent roles such as innovation consulting, change management, product management, and head of innovation. They’re still using many of their design skills, but ‘design’ or ‘designer’ often doesn’t appear in their job titles. To some who see design as a vocation or calling, this may sound like a sell-out or betrayal, but those who have made these transitions talk of growth, more impact, and better career prospects.

Another way to see this development is that it’s the start of a wider diffusion of designers into business, which will only deepen design’s impact – and open up more career tracks for designers.

Design can thrive again, but now is a time for realism, clarity and conviction. Yes, design is a critical element of success, but it’s not magical or special. It’s part of the business mix. There will be no recapturing of a past golden adolescence. Design will continue to evolve, specialisms will blur, and new roles will emerge – including those without ‘designer’ in the title. It sounds grown-up, doesn’t it?

Work

Workshops can be breakthrough events or soul-sapping time-sucks. The best ones bring people together with different knowledge and perspectives in the cause of a common goal and hatch new understandings, ideas and plans. Winning workshops help teams take vital steps forward, which would take months to do through other means. We leave these workshops feeling enlightened, effective and energised. Conversely, we leave the workshops we’d rather forget, shaking our heads with frustration and regret over the valuable time and energy wasted.

To increase the odds of your next workshop being fruitful, ask yourself whether it should even be a workshop. What is the goal? Is a workshop the best way to achieve it? Could it be achieved more quickly and cheaply?

The table below outlines some of the differences between workshops and other types of collaboration. A workshop is not a silver bullet for every tough problem, and to give it a good chance of succeeding, it needs careful planning, particularly on which activities are best done in the workshop and which by individuals or small groups before or after the workshop.

Brainstorming is broken

In design and innovation circles, workshops are often synonymous with brainstorming sessions. And while many enjoy getting together with colleagues to thrash out lots of ideas, the evidence of their effectiveness is shaky.

The most fundamental misconception is the ‘two heads are better than one’ fallacy. As the psychologist and creativity expert Dr. Keith Sawyer puts it, ‘Decades of research have consistently shown that brainstorming groups think of far fewer ideas than the same number of people who work alone and later pool their ideas.’

Then there’s the ‘there are no bad ideas’ fallacy’, where judgment is discouraged in the pursuit of lots of ideas. When research shows that debate and constructive dissent produce much better results. Indeed, this wonderful article makes a strong case that Wilbur and Orville Wright’s advanced abilities in arguing and listening gave them the edge over more experienced and educated competitors to achieve man’s oldest dream.

Workshops are often more effective before or after ideas have been generated by individuals or small groups to assess, refine, prioritise and select them

On top are the all-too-familiar personal and power dynamics, such as the boss and two extroverts dominating the airtime, while the introverts listen – and generate little. Then there is the tendency to rehash old or existing ideas, instead of generating new ones, or for the group to rally around an early idea in their desire for team harmony. For an entertaining and personal take on the pitfalls of brainstorming, see Russell Beard’s acerbic post here.

There are techniques to mitigate these issues, but workshops are often more effective before or after ideas have been generated by individuals or small groups to assess, refine, prioritise and select them.

This is not to say that generative workshops are not worth it; there can be good reasons to get people together, but if the quality of ideas is critical, I would complement the workshop with some individual concept generation.

Workshop purposes

So, if workshops are overused for brainstorming, they are underused elsewhere in the innovation process. The graphic below outlines six different purposes of the workshops I lead. Sometimes, more than one purpose can be combined into one workshop, for example, Understand + Frame or Generate + Refine. Equally, some purposes may be worthy of several workshops.

That said, it is often more effective to have a series of shorter workshops with a core group preparing inputs and synthesising outputs in between.

The different purposes drive different modes of workshop:

1. Understand

These aim to gather, consolidate, map and make sense of information, insights or feedback. The main challenge is how to make sense of a large and disparate range of input data. So, the emphasis is on preparing inputs around a common framework to aid rapid synthesis, with discussion focused on clarification and logging potential implications.

Example workshops:

  • User insight workshop
  • Customer feedback workshop
2. Frame

These workshops aim to scope the landscape, assess the situation and define the problem. The challenge is often how to make, align on and articulate decisions on scope, priorities and goals in a relatively short time frame. To streamline proceedings, it usually makes sense to draft options in advance, iterate in pairs or small groups, and focus the discussion on critical decisions.

Example workshops:

  • Framing workshop
3. Anticipate

These workshops aim to identify and assess relevant trends and build a point of view on possible, plausible and probable futures. The challenge here is how to bring the trends to life quickly, have expansive discussions, and outline a point of view on the future in the time available. So, the emphasis is on preparing vivid inputs, group discussions and gathering a range of perspectives before pushing for alignment.

Example workshops:

  • Foresight workshop
  • Future scenarios workshop
  • Foresight-driven opportunities workshop
4. Generate

These aim to create opportunity, vision, value proposition, and strategy ideas. The challenge is often balancing generative thinking with constructive discussion – while keeping it focused on the goal. The trick here is to provide plenty of structure, with a clear briefing on the goal and scope to keep ideation on track, inspirational inputs, idea templates, and discussion focused on idea iteration.

Example workshops:

  • Opportunity workshop
  • Envision workshop
  • Value proposition workshop
  • Positioning workshop
5. Formulate

The purpose of these workshops is to filter, assess, select, prioritise and structure ideas into concepts, strategies or plans. The challenge usually revolves around focusing the group on building high-calibre outputs while gaining alignment on the strategic direction. Preparing the input ideas to make them easy for the group to imbibe and iterate on is a critical success factor here, as well as splitting some of the ideas into optional variants.

Example workshops:

  • Value proposition workshop
  • Positioning workshop
  • Design identity strategy workshop
  • Road mapping workshop
  • Team strategy workshop
6. Engage

These workshops aim to bring plans to life for a wider audience and gather their feedback. The challenge is often about telling a nuanced story in a compelling way, encouraging open debate, and airing any concerns. Here, the emphasis is on delivering the story with impact (eg. video and posters) and ensuring enough time for discussion and listening.

Example workshops:

  • Strategy feedback workshop
  • New ways of working workshop
  • New system workshop

When wielded wisely, workshops can be an incredibly powerful way to unlock collective insight, problem solving and planning. To help ensure yours hits the mark, it really helps to begin by clarifying its ultimate purpose. The rest should flow from there.

Assuming a workshop is the right way to tackle your challenge and you’re clear on its purpose, my next post will outline five workshop must-haves. In the meantime, let me know if you have a challenge that a workshop might unlock.

Work

My previous post looked at when and why to wield workshops. In this one, I outline five ways to make your workshop fly. Although each workshop is unique and tailored to specific goals, teams and timelines, focusing on these five factors will set you up for success.

1. Clear goal

A prerequisite for success is that the workshop team is focused on a clear and realistic set of workshop goals. Setting crisp objectives, outcomes, and outputsis about getting to the core of the challenge and communicating it concisely and cogently.

Ensuring the goals are realistic to achieve in a workshop (or two) requires a softer assessment of the knowledge and know-how in the room, and the time available.

Often, you may not be familiar with all of the workshop team or all the topics up for discussion. In that case you’d be well advised to meet with some of the key individuals to talk through the workshop’s goals, participants, hot topics and potential issues to help with this assessment.

2. Prepared team

Teams with a variety of experience, expertise, and opinions tend to be best at solving complex problems. This is what the writer Matthew Syed calls cognitive diversity, as opposed to demographically diverse teams – who could all share the same ‘echo chamber’ perspectives. To harness these highly creative teams, it is especially important to prepare them with not only a clear goal, but also to get them thinking about the challenge a few days before coming together.

Workshops get off to a much better start if the right people are in the room and have engaged with the topic in advance. The workshop’s goals and logistical details must be communicated before the workshop. In addition, some of the team should be briefed to prepare inputs, and all should be asked to do a pre-task that gets them thinking about the topic beforehand and produces more stimulus for the workshop.

3. Coherent flow

The team should clearly understand the goal and see a clear path to achieving it. The workshop agenda should orchestrate a logical flow of activities that deliver the objectives, outcomes, and outputs.

The activities should build on each other and follow a clear arc towards the ultimate goal. Designing the agenda is always a delicate interplay between inputs, discussion, tools and timings, and always benefits from plenty of reviews and iterations.

4. Priority conversations

The most pivotal factor of the five is ensuring that the right conversations happen while everyone is in the room. There will usually be too many issues to cover, so prioritisation is vital. Figuring out what these should be, happens in the preparation for and in the thick of the workshop. For the topics you identify beforehand, prepare relevant and inspirational stimuli for people to refer to and help make discussions more concrete and tangible.

As the team is likely to include a range of expertise, experience and opinions, the workshop is likely to prompt unexpected discussions, which should be welcomed as long as they are within scope. Polarised views often generate more insight and ideas, so encourage positive conduct and make time for the debate – even if that means dropping items from the agenda.

5. Punchy summary

One of the most underrated elements of a successful workshop happens in its immediate follow-up. The output of even the most productive workshop is usually incomplete and incoherent. There are usually some gaps, overlaps and contradictions, which often only become apparent when summarising the output. Resolving these with the project leader – and often adding additional thinking –  adds significant value to the workshop and usually moves things forward significantly.

The next job is to boil it down into a snappy few slides. Sharing a clear, concise, action-oriented and swift summary with the workshop team is an invaluable way of maintaining the momentum created in the workshop.

There are no guarantees in life, and unexpected developments can disrupt and even derail workshops. But if you get these five factors right, you will improve the odds of your workshop flying.

Work

I posted a poll in late August titled ‘Why is Design in the Doldrums?’ It was prompted by discussions over the past six months and by many of the comments on my recent article, in which I referred to those Doldrums in passing. That the poll racked up 100+ responses in the first 48 hours, while many were still on the beach, suggests the topic is also on the minds of many.

Symptoms of the Doldrums include:

  • Layoffs
  • Squeezed design budgets
  • Pay stagnation or deflation
  • Fewer Chief Design Officers
  • Design leaders reporting to more highly regarded functions
  • Lack of growth opportunities for senior designers and leaders

In my poll, I asked people to rate the significance of the six suggested factors and suggest any I’d missed. As you can see above, most thought that all but AI anxiety were significant factors. Many are, of course, interrelated; for example, the adoption of design methods and tools by other corporate functions makes Design’s offer to senior managers less distinctive and contributes to their focus shifting elsewhere.

Before I get to what I think is the dominant driver of Design’s discontents, here are some of the other factors people posited:

  • Political and economic uncertainty
  • A current low point in the technology-driven economic cycle
  • Global competition from low-cost economies
  • Decentralisation of design functions into business units
  • The impact of remote working on creativity and culture

None of these were mentioned more than two or three times, however.

Design has not delivered

Even though today’s downturn came out on top, I was most struck by the volume of comments relating to what I called ‘Peaked: Boardroom interest in design has waned’. There were three times as many comments on this than any other factor. Here is a selection:

‘We haven’t delivered the expected value.’

‘Design leaders have failed to create the expected value for their function within the companies they joined over the past 10 years.’

‘Too much talking the talk and not enough walking the walk. Verbose justifications for samey designs were only ever going to go so far, both in the boardroom and the marketplace.’

‘Disillusionment with Design as a competitive advantage.’

‘Design thinking packaged creativity as a repeatable, staged process with guaranteed results. The reality of Design is much messier and unpredictable. From a management point of view, Design has promised a lot and often delivered relatively little.’

‘There was an over-investment in Design over the past decade and especially in the UX kind. This resulted in the devaluation of creativity and a focus on rigid processes. That led to a lack of “bigger picture” thinking and a focus on using design tools for incremental improvement – “we have to AB test it”. As companies failed to achieve a return on their design investment, they’ve laid off teams and pivoted to the shiny new toy of AI. Design needs to get back to creativity and to systems-wide approaches rather than rote processes and incremental changes in order to get back to having the impact that designers promised.’

‘A lot of Design just hasn’t delivered any meaningful impact for the cost organisations have had to shell out for it. There is a rife lack of competence in a vastly scaled sector that has largely failed to deliver. It’s more a question of where to put the $ than if Design as a competence is waning. Our impact waned. We are paying the price for this.’

‘Design has always confused itself between “styling, aesthetics & craft” with “Superior problem solving” aka Design Thinking. Until it resolves its purpose in business, it is not surprising that the boardroom isn’t interested. MBA students are taught a similar helicopter view across all areas of business management, but they maintain their value by using that as diverse inputs to multifaceted leadership. Rather than reverting to focusing on the craft of any one specific area.’

‘By definition, Design is a team sport involving multiple disciplines. As we’ve evolved our thinking to broaden our impact and influence across multiple touchpoints in pursuit of holistic experiences, we need to be willing to embrace the responsibilities and ownership that come with this. The challenge can be that other functions have already staked a solid claim (CMO. CXO, CIO etc.) It may be OK to be seen as simply enabling or defining the desired experiences. But we should be explicit about our intentions and ensure that we are clearly held accountable for driving the desired outcomes and business impact. Let’s not forget our roots; we need to maintain our optimism, or relentless desire to make things better, and our belief in a humane and inclusive approach, that respects the needs of the planet. We can’t achieve this if we act as consultants, we need to be in the dance, inside organisations and businesses, showing how and where we can add value. Finally, lets not be afraid to hold our heads up and be proud of what we stand for. Now more than ever, we need to have confidence in our ability to fuse deep system thinking, with informed intuition built on the back of creative foresight.’

‘Designers had a chance to show serious business impact, but their strengths have never been able to quantify their effect on ROI. So they flubbed it, and others took their tools. Design was a cool band, whose demo tape got blagged by a major label.’

Long story short: we haven’t focused enough on business value. Design has been devalued through oversimplification, and partly, as a result, business is unclear about how its competence is distinct from that of parallel functions. Finally, there has been too much emphasis on incremental improvement, over big-picture thinking and leadership.

Overreach

The Downturn is real. Most economies are slowing, if not in recession, and R&D budgets have been squeezed as many companies focus on cost-cutting and efficiency. However, those with any hint of grey hair will remember that Design boomed in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. Apple had just launched the iPhone and was riding high on the Jobs-Ive double act. Design Thinking was in the ascendancy when Tim Brown first spoke at the World Economic Forum in Davos in 2009.  In 2010, The Economist held a conference in London called The Big Rethink: Redesigning Business. Its premise was that after the economic crisis, ‘Business leaders were casting around for new ideas…design thinking is offering itself up as one of the new ideas’. So, if Design still had a compelling commercial offer, we could be faring better against the economic headwinds.

At the time, along with Don Norman, Roberto Verganti, Gadi Amit and James Woudhuysen, I added some concerns of my own. As businesses raised their expectations of Design, I cautioned that:  ‘design thinkers run the risk of overstretching – not having the knowledge or capabilities to deliver at this new level. To win and consolidate a more strategic role for Design, we need more than good stories. We need to raise our game.’

In addition, too many were complicit in devaluing Design under the flag of ‘democratising’ it, by framing design as a simple process that anyone could be quickly trained in. Design and design thinking were often used interchangeably. Indeed, everyone can cook and design, but chefs and professional designers tend to do it at levels that delight – or at least improve people’s experience or the performance of the business.

As I put it in 2010, ‘while explaining Design as an algorithm goes down well with managers, this pitch skips over the pivotal importance of talent and craft’ – and, I might have added judgement too.

Design gained more exposure to business leaders over the past 10 years; but, too often, it was sold as a simple mindset, process or set of tools. The more difficult task of explaining how Design delivers value across organisations – was neglected. Some designers also underestimated how creative and empathetic their colleagues in other functions were,  as well as being quick studies. As a result, fairly straightforward methods, such as user research and journey mapping, were adopted widely outside Design – including by management consultancies. That was great for users and organisations, but many designers kicked themselves for putting these methods front and centre in how they communicated Design’s value.

Designers pride themselves on their empathy and curiosity, but are we always better at these things than non-designers? And have they been empathic enough with our colleagues in other functions and curious enough about how our organisations actually work and grow – and about what role your product and experience play in driving that growth?

As the comments from the poll above testify, too many designers drank the Kool-Aid and gladly dipped into the new bountiful design budgets and growth opportunities that followed. But, few paused to work out what was required to operate at this level, and to take the necessary steps to meet or at least manage expectations.

Seize the moment

Design evolves in fits and starts. In the 1990s, it adapted to global markets, digital tools and the mainstreaming of Design with the public. The 2000s brought experience design and mass internet use. Sustainability and designing with data came to the fore in the 2010s. Now, AI fluency is the latest skill designers are adding to their stack of capabilities as we adapt to new developments. Design has grown from an artisan cottage industry to an established business function over the last few decades by gradually integrating itself with business. I hope the current period of introspection will result in a new era of Designers with a more based understanding of their distinctive strengths and role in business.

Now is the time to reflect on and renew Design. The world has moved on; it’s the job of Design Leaders to develop and articulate Design’s new value proposition for the 2030s.

Work

Design is in the doldrums and needs a reboot. Last year, it was Big Tech layoffs; this year, it’s the management consultancies cutting back, with designers disproportionately affected. Beyond the economic cycle, there are also concerns that business is breaking up with design. Some design leaders regret that design grew in the 2010s at the expense of devaluing it to a set of quickly learned tools and frameworks – while downplaying well-honed sensibility, judgement and craft. Add the dark cloud of generative AI hovering over everyone’s future, and the sense of malaise is palpable.

One way proactive leaders are experimenting with reframing and adding value to their teams’ value proposition is to train their senior colleagues to play a wider role in their organisations as in-house innovation consultants.

To be clear, this is not about being an internal design consultant. These consulting projects do not involve designers designing products and services for customers, but collaborating with colleagues in cross-functional teams to tackle complex internal operational and change challenges, such as:

  • Testing and learning how to best introduce GAI into innovation and product development across the organisation
  • Improving the staff onboarding experience
  • Developing and bringing to life a new vision for part of the company
  • Developing an architectural brief for the design of a new office space for the company
  • Exploring how suppliers can be better involved in the innovation process
  • Planning how a company anniversary might be marked and celebrated across the company and its customer and supplier base

The types of projects to which these designers add the most value are not highly technical. Instead, they cut across departments and involve a subjective human experience, as opposed to drilling into narrow financial or engineering problems.

What really distinguishes consulting projects from traditional design work is the shift from the designer mindset of ‘owning the problem’ to the consultant mindset of ‘owning the process’. The consultant’s job is not to solve the client’s problem but to help the client and cross-functional team get to a solution.

These experiments with designers acting as in-house consultants reflect a broader shift away from an overreliance on external consultants. Since the 2008 financial crisis, companies have used in-house consultants to reduce spending on pricey management consultancy firms. It makes sense to add the right kind of designers who have gained skills in consulting principles, processes and tools to the professional mix. If done well, it delivers more effective solutions, raises the design team’s visibility and impact, and develops and retains top design talent.

The case for in-house consultants in general

Before we get into the case for designers as in-house consultants, let’s first look at the pros and cons of in-house consultants in general, along the eight dimensions:

  1. Knowledge: External consultants can bring more cross-sector knowledge, but internal consultants tend to have deeper sector and organisational knowledge. Also, externals usually have limited time to fully understand the problem space or explore and develop innovative solutions.
  2. Relationships: Internal consultants are much more likely to have trusted relationships with at least some of the managers who will need to create and own the change. External consultants can easily overlook the hard-won relationships and shared values – often unwittingly.
  3. Confidentiality:  Senior management may be more comfortable entrusting the project to trusted insiders.
  4. Credibility: Recommendations made by an external firm tend to be given more weight, as they are backed by the firm’s brand status and tried-and-tested processes and perceived to be more objective.
  5. Resource: External firms can usually access more consultants faster than their internal counterparts. They can also focus on one project, whereas internals tend to be stretched across many.
  6. Follow-through: Internal consultants are well placed to stay in contact with an initiative over its duration. By contrast, externals are expected to make an impact quickly… and then move on.
  7. Cost: Internals are seen as more accessible and cost-effective, whereas externals are ‘on the clock’, expensive and rationed.
  8. Motivation: Internals are more likely to have the organisation’s best interests at heart, whereas externals are incentivised to maximise fee income.

It all boils down to what works best for a project – using your team, hiring external help, or doing a bit of both. It depends on the project’s needs, available resources, and how much you can spend.

The case for designers as in-house innovation consultants

Not all senior corporate designers are well-suited to the somewhat different business of innovation consulting. A great designer will not always make a great innovation advisor, and vice versa. The types of designers most likely to make great consultants are:

  • Experienced: They have proved to be effective problem solvers across a wide range of challenges.
  • Strategic: They see the bigger picture and have good commercial and organisational awareness.
  • Personable: They are good at listening, asking questions and building relationships.
  • Collaborative: They are team players and good at working with colleagues in other functions.
  • Persuasive: They are confident, articulate and good at influencing others, especially senior managers.

Clive Grinyer, a design leader who led cross-functional teams at Cisco and Barclays, reflects that the designers who succeeded in these roles were ‘motivated by long-term impact, had guile and resilience, and were opinionated and confident enough to lead’.

Designers’ soft skills count in consulting – much more than their tangible craft talents. A former head of a design-led consulting team at a leading tech firm underlines the point:

‘I began by recruiting designers, but it quickly became apparent that many internal designers didn’t have all the capabilities. They didn’t have the facilitation skills or know-how to conduct themselves, for example, debating and challenging professionally. So I hired design strategy consultants from some established firms and supplemented teams with external consultancies.’

That said, the right kind of designers often possess highly under-valued strengths that make them effective innovation consultants.

strategic strengths designers

These powerful capabilities can be welded far beyond traditional product and service design projects. However, many designers are only partially aware of possessing them and tend to focus on their more tangible craft skills.

The skills designers need to become credible consultants

While some designers will take to internal consulting, they still need to acquire some core consulting skills to become credible alternatives to external firms.

designers upskill credible consultants

Client centricity

The biggest shift for new consultants is moving from designing for users to solving operational problems for internal clients who expect a professional service. From college, designers have long been encouraged to emphasise working with users. By contrast, consultants emphasise working with their internal clients. Professional services firms, such as management consultancies, school their junior consultants in the concept of client service, the name given to building trusted relationships and providing a professional experience.

Consulting process

The consulting process has many similarities with the design process. Still, the key difference is that instead of the designer solving the problem, the emphasis is on the consultant guiding a cross-functional team step-by-step to solve it themselves – and usually owning the implementation of the solution or change. This is a big shift for designers who are used to thinking of themselves as problem solvers in the room; now, they guide a team through a problem-solving process.

Data analysis

Designers tend to have relatively informal and less robust ways of sourcing, collecting and organising information relevant to their projects. When working with a cross-functional team, their colleagues will likely expect higher standards. This does not mean that the consultants must become data analysts. However, they need to know how to frame the right questions to ask of data, discuss and interpret data, and weave data into stories that support their recommendations.

Workshop facilitation

Many designers are familiar with creative workshops, which often amount to extended brainstorming or ideation sessions. Innovation consultants use a wider range of workshop types, emphasising collaborative learning, problem-solving and ownership throughout the project journey.

Influencing

Even company insiders find it tough to get the organisation’s gears to turn enough to deliver real change. Success requires a canny mix of charm, guile, planning, and persistence. Of course, coordinating this campaign does not rest solely on the shoulders of the consultant, but they do need to marshal the team to do it effectively.

These skills are critical to consulting success, and the right kind of designer can develop them through training and on-the-job coaching.

Christine Ruf moved from being a design leader to what she calls a business partner at Philips, focusing on long-term transformation. She reflects on her journey:

‘I realised that design on its own had limited impact and that designers can’t solve complex problems on their own. I learned to celebrate designers’ strengths in integrating multiple perspectives and visualising complex challenges, but also recognise the creativity and capabilities of other functions. I also learned that the most important focus of my creativity was how best to design the process so stakeholders across the business would fully own the solution and deliver the change.’

Addressing two challenges

The case for in-house consultants being more cost-effective, confidential, knowledgeable, and having continuity and networks to support implementation is clear. So, let’s focus on mitigating two critical challenges – credibility and objectivity.

Credibility

The most significant and intangible barrier to the success of an in-house consulting group is the risk of not being taken seriously by senior management, compared to bigger management consultancies, and therefore only being considered for relatively low-priority projects.

The critical job here is to clearly articulate to senior management the consulting team’s purpose, focus, expertise, process, and clients—which parts of the organisation it will work for. For example, it might be to focus on urgent and complex cross-functional problems that have a significant human experience element (i.e., not narrowly technical or financial). This consulting proposition, which should be clearly linked to the company’s strategy, can be used to recruit internal sponsors, which are vital to the consulting team’s success. ‘You need aircover, as the value of the internal team is not immediately perceivable’, stresses Sean Carney, former Chief Design Officer of Philips.

Another way to bolster the team’s credibility is to include professional consultants, by hiring them onto the consulting team or including external consultants in project teams. This blended approach adds three benefits. First, the designers have been trained in consulting skills, processes and tools, which are more comprehensive and tried and tested than Design thinking. Second, it does not rely on the limited toolbox of user research, brainstorming and prototyping but leverages a cross-functional team’s collective knowledge, capabilities and creativity.

Depending on the organisation’s experience with Design Thinking, another potential issue to address is the question – isn’t this just Design Thinking repackaged? While innovation consulting does involve designers tackling non-traditional challenges, there are two significant differences. First, the designers have been trained in consulting skills, processes and tools, which are more comprehensive and tried and tested than Design thinking. Second, it does not depend on the limited toolbox of user research, brainstorming, and prototyping but rather harnesses a cross-functional team’s collective knowledge, capabilities, and creativity.

Objectivity

A reason often given for hiring external consultants is to gain an outsider’s perspective. Rightly or wrongly, senior management often believes that in-house consultants have been captured by groupthink and internal politics.

This perception can be hard to shift but can be mitigated. Any consultancy training should highlight the principle of professional integrity and the skill of tactfully pushing back or giving frank feedback. A good consultant does not always give clients what they want!

Cross-functional teams containing multiple perspectives and data points from around the organisation also reinforce the perception of objectivity. Sean Carney underlines their importance:

‘One other key learning for me is that any Innovation team has to be truly multi-disciplinary. Design can certainly host the team, but it needs to be staffed with a good cross-section of experiences and capabilities if the output is going to have impact.’

A third way of bolstering the team’s perceived objectivity is to build compelling cases supported by data. Internal consultants have an advantage over external consultants because they usually find it easier to access internal data sources.

Benefits and dilemmas

Moving from an internal designer to an in-house consultant is as much a change of mindset as the acquisition of new skills. However, the upside for the organisation, the design team, and the individuals involved is considerable.

The organisation acquires a new cross-functional resource with the potential to be more capable and cost-effective than externals. The design team is adding value across the organisation beyond its core competence of experience design. Individual consultants get to enhance their talents, step up to higher-level challenges and open up more career options.

Jean-Jacques L’Henaff, Leader at Lixil Global Design Americas, puts it well:

‘Designers are trained to think holistically, and their position within an organization gives them a deep connection to both the brand purpose and the operational side of the business. With proper training on client-oriented techniques, they can become a powerful tool to unlock value far beyond conventional design-related issues.’

Establishing an in-house innovation consulting team involves resolving many implementation questions, such as:

Where in the organisation should it sit? Should it be owned by design or a more central function?
Should the designers involved be part-time or full-time consultants?
How should projects be identified and resourced?
How should the consulting team manage its limited resource of consultants?
Should projects be billed internally, and if so, how?
How should success be assessed and consultants incentivised?

All will depend on the specifics of your organisation and your design vision, but will further integrate design into the business.

Design needs a reboot

The days of insisting that design is central to business success and pointing at Apple are long gone. So is evangelising empathy, journey maps, and user testing, which are now well understood and integrated. As Carney puts it, ‘We need to be optimistic about our future, but we need new thinking – we need to pull our socks up!’ Expanding the design team’s internal offer to include in-house innovation consulting could provide one part of design’s new value proposition.

Work

Whenever I work on luxury products, I’m always struck by how different they are from the premium or mass markets. And, as a consequence, how differently companies extending into luxury have to act from their business-as-usual.

The Luxe sector has its own dynamic

With dark economic clouds overhead, it might seem like an odd time to consider the luxury market, but it runs by different rules to the wider economy. Over the last three years, while others struggled with soaring inflation and interest rates, the luxury sector chalked up 20 per cent growth rates. During Covid the rich get a lot richer and the merely well-off piled up their savings, then when lockdowns were lifted many of the well-heeled indulged in a prolonged bout of ‘revenge shopping’. One result of this boom is that  Bernard Arnault, CEO of LVMH, the largest luxury group in the world. He now jostles with Elon Musk for the title of richest man in the world.

While the 20% annual growth rates the industry has enjoyed over the last three years are unlikely to return anytime soon, the market is still growing at around the rate of inflation. Growing wealth inequalities also mean that there will continue to be a substantial affluent market to target.

Two critical shifts are also underway. First, the US has overtaken China as the biggest luxury market. For the last decade, roughly a third of luxury spending came from Chinese consumers, and their tastes drove the market. But as this growth engine of the global economy has faulted, so has its lavish consumption. In 2023, the US accounted for 30% of luxury sales, with China and Europe making up just over 20% each.

Luxury sector growth

The second shift is towards Quiet luxury –formerly known as Stealth wealth. The last two decades have been defined by the tastes of aspirational Chinese and Millennial consumers in search of bling and bold logos. But since Covid, economic woes and the rising sophistication of newer luxury consumers, there is more demand for less dominant logos and a greater emphasis on quality and longevity.

So, in a sluggish economy, you can see what many companies find attractive about the luxury market’s glamour, perceived high margins and decent growth rates.

Luxury is different

On the face of it, luxury products and services sit on the top price tier for many categories, with ‘premium’ in the middle and budget or ‘mass’ at the bottom. But there’s more to entering the luxury market than using higher quality materials and charging top dollar.

So, what do we mean by luxury? Let’s start with the key categories, with cars, personal goods (handbags, watches and clothes) and hospitality (including hotels) being the biggest.

breakdown luxury market

Luxury is subjective. Its meaning varies over time, place, product category and person, but it always involves high-value purchases wrapped in an alluring experience that confers social prestige. With cars and personal goods in mind, the table below presents some useful generalisations about how luxury differs from the premium business.

Premium vs Luxury characteristics

Premium vs Luxury characteristics

Exclusivity, retail and personal service mark luxe brands apart.

Nine rules

How do luxury brands achieve and maintain their lustre? Here are nine rules they live by:

1. Manufacture meaning

Create an authentic and alluring brand essence

The foundational rule is about how luxury brands manufacture meaning for people. Much more than premium brands, luxury ones devote enormous efforts to polishing and re-polishing their brand essence, underlining its authenticity and enigmatic allure. This evocative ambience of glamour provides consumers with a reason to believe in the brand and the critical justification to pay sometimes 20 or 30 times more than the mass market alternative. All the other rules are founded on and guided by this essence.

Luxury brands often combine two or more of these sources of meaning:

2. Tell evocative stories

Reinforce the brand essence with captivating narratives

Luxury brands ‘show’ and don’t ‘tell’ in their communications. They build highly evocative brand worlds to reinforce their core brand meaning – with minimal mention of features or benefits.

Take LVMH. In 2007, it ran a campaign shot by the celebrity photographer Annie Leibovitz featuring historical, cultural and sports icons, including Mikhail Gorbachev, Catherine Deneuve, Sean Connery, Keith Richards, Francis Ford Coppola, Buzz Aldrin, Diego Maradona, Pelé and Zinedine Zidane, reflecting on what travel meant to them. In 2014, it opened a €790 million art museum and cultural centre in Paris called Louis Vuitton Foundation, designed by the ‘starchitect’ Frank Gehry. It is currently showing one of the biggest retrospectives of Mark Rothko ever staged. Luxury marketing on a different level.

Mikhail Gorbachev in Leibowitz Louis Vuitton ad

3. Create halo products

Embody the brand’s essence in a flagship product that bathes the whole portfolio in its halo.

Luxury brands embody the essence of their brand meaning in one or two hero products, such as the Porsche 911 or the IWC Portugieser. These feature heavily in communications and take pride of place in their retail stores. Often bought by a select few, they may not even make much of a return, but they lift the value to the rest of the portfolio – where the real money is made.

To position themselves clearly from the outset, new luxury brands usually launch with their halo product. Then, tier down the price brackets with later releases. When new or old, luxury brands tend to curate relatively small portfolios of classic products that they refresh with occasional updates and special editions.

In France, the luxury sector sometimes uses the concept of the ‘Griffe’ to denote the pinnacle of a luxury brand. These products are at least presented to be touched by the brand creator, and while desired by all, can only be consumed by the elite few.

Giorgio Armani, one of the richest men in Italy, works this model astutely. While the 89-year-old still signs-off every design, he is hands-on with the design of his signature Giorgio Armani haute couture collection. He makes his real money through his diffusion lines of Emporio Armani and Armani Exchange brands. Ralph Lauren structures its business in a similar and even more profitable way. His one-off pieces are sold under Ralph Lauren, and then he tiers down through Polo and Lauren to price-friendly Chaps.

Halo products and sub-brands

4. Craft flawless and distinctive objects

Create beautiful products from the highest-quality materials

Luxury brands differentiate their products through materials and craftsmanship. They use high-quality materials, often supported by a provenance story that adds romance about where those materials come from. While few luxury products are fully handmade, most have some handcrafted elements. Many brands will also offer some level of customisation of their high-end products. Crafted elements of products are often emphasised in communications and by retail staff in the connoisseurship stories they tell.

Few brands can make Hermès’ claim to have been ‘contemporary artisans since 1837’ and that it takes an artisan 48 hours to make a single Birkin bag. B&O get close for a tech brand, with its Craft stories that underline its commitment to ‘Superior craft since 1925’ in aluminium, fabric and wood.

B&O luxury brand

5. Launch with panache

Create a buzz with invite-only events in high-cachet locations that reinforce the brand story

Most luxury brands outside fashion launch products infrequently, but aim to make a splash when they do. Prime venues and glittering guest lists are critical to the mix. As well as nurturing relationships with key customers, the primary aim is to gain coverage by the right kind of press and influencers. For example, even if the primary target consumers are in Asia, brands will often precede launches in Asia with events in Europe, aiming for coverage in Italian Vogue, Monocle or the FT’s How to Spend It.

Few can match the coups LVMH regularly pulls off, such as the Men’s Spring-Summer 2024 Show by Pharrell Williams last summer, which was held on Paris’ historic Pont Neuf bridge with Rihanna and Kim Kardashian on the guest list and closed with a concert by Jay-Z.

6. Distribute globally but selectively

Project prestige in international luxury centres and control scarcity through exclusive stores

Luxury brands have a global presence, but in global cities and billionaire playgrounds through their own, or carefully selected, independent stores – but increasingly not through upmarket department stores, which are in decline. Store location is not just about being in the right city but also about being in the right neighbourhood, on the right road, and in the right place on that road – ideally near brands of a similar ilk. Staff are highly trained in product knowledge, customer service, and relationship management.

Luxury brands are also highly selective about online channels, often limiting sales to their own branded websites and select few online retailers, such as Net a Porter or Mr Porter, who offer a high-quality user experience and customer service, as well as controlled pricing to avoid overt discounting, which tend to dilute brand prestige.

Retail is also pivotal in managing (or at least the perception) scarcity, a critical component of luxury lust. Access to limited editions and releases is offered to valued customers through invite-only events or by-appointment-only showings – and often managed through waiting lists. Hermès’ management of access to its iconic Birkin bag is the quintessential exemplar of this tactic.

Miami’s Design District has become a luxury brand retail mecca.

7. Orchestrate the brand context

Associate with like-minded brands to strengthen positioning and reach new markets

Luxury brands are known by their associates. They carefully consider which events they sponsor, which brands to partner with, where they place their shops and advertising, and which PR firms, photographers and models to work with. All should add to a lucid brand world, elaborating on the brand’s essence.

Brand collaborations have become a popular way of widening and deepening the web of associations around a brand. These associations can include celebrities or influencers, artists or designers, and adjacent or same-category product brands.

In 2019, B&O and the luxury luggage brand Rimowa launched limited-edition Beoplay H9i headphones packaged in a signature RIMOWA aluminium case. The collaboration concept was to ‘celebrate the unique link between sound and travel’. Both brands emphasised their shared appreciation for aluminium, and partnered with Swedish composer and record producer Ludwig Göransso to produce a short campaign film. As well as reinforcing the sheer class of the equipment and its container, the collaboration also enabled each company to reach the other brand’s customers.

B&O’s aluminium headphones

8. Package the aura

Reinforce the brand essence and exceptional product quality throughout the packaging experience

Luxury brands encapsulate their prestige and essence in their packaging. Particularly in categories like watches and jewellery, they invest in exquisite packaging that enhances the allure of the brand and the perceived quality of the product. The packaging also serves a significant functional role in categories highly reliant on gifting, especially in Asia, heightening the unwrapping experience. Luxury consumers own many watches and jewellery items – which spend most of their lives stored in their boxes in a safe. Legend has it that a big chunk of Vertu phones, which were often bought as gifts, were never activated and presumably sat in safes next to boxes of jewellery and watches.

High-quality packaging that stands the test of time underlines the ‘it’s not a purchase, it’s an investment’ mantra many luxury consumers whisper to themselves. The Swiss watch brand, Patek Philippe, embodies this attitude with its ‘Begin your own tradition’ and ‘You never actually own a Patek Philippe. You merely look after it for the next generation.’ tagline. When opened the packaging displays the product in a way that enhances its preciousness. The box also stores certificates of authenticity, guarantee certificates and other paperwork that adds value to the product as a heirloom (or for resale).

Patek Philippe products

9. Care for every customer

Invest in an intimate understanding and service of customers

Luxury brands take customer service very seriously. Retail staff are trained to develop personal relationships with regular customers over years – often, over generations. They are regularly invited to events or by-appointment-only showings to make them feel like luxury insiders. Staff don’t follow scripts, instead they go the extra mile to meet their customers’ needs. More recently, brands have developed incredibly granular Customer Relationship Management systems to help them scale their ability to gather and act on customer insights. The purpose of these databases is always to empower a more tailored human interaction. As opposed to mass and premium brands that are doing all they can to automate customer service. In an age of AI, quality human interactions will underline a luxury experience.

Audemars Piguet, the Swiss luxury watch brand best known for the highly sought-after Royal Oak ( average price $55,000), is known for its customer attention. In 2023, it launched a new service in response to a luxury watch-related crime wave, it will guarantee to replace, refund or repair any stolen or damaged watch bought in 2022 or 2023 for two years.

Audemars Piguet brand

The line between luxury and premium is sometimes blurred, Apple has certainly shown how premium brands can play by many of the nine Rules outlined above. But the Rules remain a good framework for success when crafting a luxury proposition for your category, consumer and context.

That said, a final watch out. Entering the luxury sector from below is tough. There is something like a law of gravity when it comes to market tiering strategy. It’s so much easier to tier downmarket than to trade up. From Armani Exchange to B&O Play, luxury brands leverage their prestige to offer access to their lustre at lower price points. But it’s much tougher to move in the opposite direction and convince consumers to pay a luxury premium for a brand they are used to looking down on. That’s why Nokia created the luxury mobile phone category with a separate Vertu brand, why Toyota traded up from mass to premium with Lexus, and why Nestle went upmarket under the Nespresso brand. Each company created separate business units and cultures from the core business to better focus on the distinct demands of the premium or luxury tier they entered.

This brings us back to the exception of Apple. While it is more of a mass premium brand, it exhibits many luxury traits – including its retail, communications and emphasis on crafting products from quality materials. From the mid-1990s, when it was a commodity personal computer brand on the edge of bankruptcy, it has managed to trade up to the edge of luxury – all under one master brand.  It’s done this by executing its own take on these rules – but at a mass-market scale.

The luxury market has unique dynamics, consumer expectations, and competitive codes. Entering it requires a very thoughtful and deliberate approach. So, tread carefully, plan decisively, and definitely don’t treat your luxury market entry strategy as an extension of your business as usual.

Act like a prestige player.

Work

‘A problem well-defined is a problem half solved’

Charles Kettering, (1876-1958), father of seven major American inventions


‘The greatest challenge to any thinker is stating the problem in a way that will allow a solution.’

Bertrand Russell (1872-1970), British philosopher


‘If I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on the solution, I would spend the first 55 minutes determining the proper question to ask, for once I know the proper question, I could solve the problem in less than 5 minutes.’

Albert Einstein (1879-1955), scientist

Every design and innovation leader I know is talking about how AI might raise productivity. This concern is understandable when so many projects misfire, and even those that make it to market often involve much wasted effort. The good news is that AI will accelerate many parts of the process, from project research to concept visualisation. However, one of the most significant efficiency gains leaders can make is the very human job of ensuring their teams focus on the right problems, and tackle them in the right way.

A Framing of the problem and a set of Goals for the project form the core of any good innovation brief. Done well, these two things focus each project team member on the right challenge, provide a clear understanding of the problem, and offer a perspective that can guide the whole team to the solution. Done badly, they waste time and resources, fuel frustration and drain energy.

As well as providing a touchstone for the project team, a well-defined brief also helps other interested parties to understand what you aim to achieve and why – building support for the project. Good Framing and Goals are especially critical in new, ambiguous and multifaceted problem areas, as well as early in the process when the cognitive ‘fog’ can be especially dense.

Framing

The importance of a well-diagnosed problem has long been established, but it was only during the 2010s craze for Design Thinking that the term ‘problem framing’ really gained prominence. It made designers sound more strategic, sure, but what does it actually mean? And what makes me so certain that AI will never be able to take over the framing done by human beings.

Like using a camera, Framing provides both perspective and focus. With a camera, we decide what angle to approach the subject and choose what to exclude from the shot. Similarly, a helpful Frame provides a meaningful and action-orientated point of view on the problem at hand and, at the same time, crystallises, clarifies and organises its critical aspects. And, while always guided by insights gained in the past, good Framing ideally provides the team with a fresh lens on the problem.

There are both hard and soft sides to Framing. The rational side often consists of distilling a complex set of issues down to a few critical variables or dimensions, such as a 2×2 matrix or a mental model. The emotive side can be trickier, as it often involves articulating critical but uncomfortable personal or political issues. So, when conversations begin to get near the ‘elephant in the room’, it’s best to name and claim the animal with care. Opening sentences such as ‘It’s probably just me, but…,’ or ‘You’ve probably thought of this already, but…’ may be best here.

Framing is an innate human ability. It relies heavily on capabilities that AI will never have: our experience, affinity, judgement and perspective-taking. Capabilities computers are inherently weak at.

AI is getting better and better at answering our questions, but it will remain our job to pose the right questions.

That said, when we Frame a problem, the resources we can marshal to tackle it influence how we approach it. As I’ve written elsewhere, as AI develops, it will take on more tasks in the innovation process and shape how we approach problems.

‘Most work, after all, is comprised of a mix of tasks: some of which are better suited to us and some of which could one day be done better by machines. As the capabilities of these grow, managers will redesign work to take advantage of the strengths of both their human workers and their automated assistants.’

Kevin McCullagh ‘Human machine interlace’, Perspective 05, July 2018

How human beings Frame projects will change as teams use more AI-assisted tools. For example, if they enable the rapid generation of many options, you may decide to explore a broader range of concepts than before.

See the box at the foot of this article for further discussion on Framing.

A structure for Frames and Goals

Once the problem has been accurately diagnosed and an ambition and angle of attack agreed upon, the next job is to outline some endpoints to the project in the form of Goals. It’s these Goals that define the size and shape of the project and are often heavily influenced by budget and time frame considerations.

Discussing Goals is central to driving clarity at the start of a project, but this is best done around some clearly articulated draft Goals. If the discussion is too free-flowing, and is only recorded on a few quickly scrawled Post-its, the risk of blindspots and misunderstandings is high – even when everyone leaves the room nodding in agreement and raring to go.

Over three decades and hundreds of projects, I’ve developed the following way of structuring Frames and Goals.

I organise this under the following headings:

Context

Written out in a few paragraphs, this is where most of the framing happens. The paragraphs should outline the key elements of the challenge’s background. They should cover the broad business context, important drivers, why the project is being initiated and the assumptions, mental models and metaphors you consider helpful.

Those few summary paragraphs should be pithy and to the point, enabling the team and stakeholders to quickly grasp the project’s ‘why’. This is why using paragraphs is important here. Bullet points just don’t cut it when building a coherent narrative on your point of view on the challenge and how best to approach it.

Ambition

It’s always useful to distil the purpose of the project down into a single sentence. It should be concise and concrete without sounding like a vague wish. To find the right balance between brevity and detail, I typically generate a bunch of variants and, through discussion and iteration, narrow them down to the best statement of ambition.

Scope

This is where we break down different aspects of the challenge into various dimensions, such as: target market segments and geographies, product categories, use domains, touchpoints, business units, and time horizon etc. Often, it’s enough to outline what is in-scope, but sometimes, it’s necessary to clarify which elements of each dimension are out-of-scope.

Objectives

Written statements on each Objective break down the Ambition into the more specific Goals that, when achieved, will see that Ambition fulfilled. We find it helpful to start each Objective statement with a verb such as: Frame, Discover, Generate, Develop, Recommend, and to align these objectives with process steps. The statements should describe what you aim to achieve – not what you will do. For example, ‘Identify three potential disruptions in our market landscape’, not ‘Analyse market trends’. Finally, try to keep the number of Objectives down to between three and five – teams glaze over at the sight of a shopping list of Objectives.

The very act of writing what we think is clear in our heads usually highlights a few holes – then discussing them tends to highlight a few more.

Outcomes

If Objectives are the hard project Goals, Outcomes are the softer, often more important ones. Written statements of Outcomes highlight the desired consequence or impact of the project, and often describe the shifts in attitudes, mindsets and behaviour that will hopefully drive business results. Sometimes known as success criteria, they portray what success will look and feel like.

A good question to ask a client or senior manager is to imagine you’re sitting together in two years’ time: they’re happy, and you’re reminiscing about the project. What changed as a result of the project? What happened along the way to bring about these changes? Encourage them to think about the impacts on themselves, on their team, and on the business.

Three examples of Outcome statements:

  • The executive team have had their eyes opened and their assumptions positively challenged
  • The leadership team has developed and aligned around a point of view on which categories to play in
  • The team feels confident that it has at least one compelling proposition which has the potential to generate high-margin growth
Outputs

These are the specific and tangible ‘deliverables’ the project will produce, as either intermediate or final outputs. They should be as specific as possible to help you clarify with your client or your manager that these Outputs match their expectations. Clear Outputs help you plan the time, resources and budget required to produce them. Examples may include:

  • One slide of recommendations
  • Agenda for a two-day workshop, including facilitation and summary
  • 40-slide Foresight presentation
  • Presentation and half-day workshop in Seoul
  • Three digital prototypes as stimuli for consumer feedback

Iterate and align

Writing down and aligning teams and stakeholders on project Frames and Goals is time well spent. After all, writing is God’s way of telling us how muddled our thinking is! So, the very act of writing what we think is clear in our heads usually highlights a few holes – then discussing them tends to highlight a few more.

It’s the discussion of goals and their collective crafting that brings clarity, rather than the Goals themselves. Talking it through a few times with the team and stakeholders also helps hone a project’s narrative and iron out inconsistencies.

Once aligned at project kick-off, the Goals should be made accessible in the team’s workspace so that they can easily be referred to as a touchstone for the rest of the project. Whenever I suspect the team is getting stuck in the weeds, I refer to the Goals and ask if and how the current debate is helping us achieve them.

Mid-course correction

Often, the process of reflecting on the Goals mid-way through a project highlights subtle shifts in the team’s understanding of them. As the management thinker, Jon Kay put it:

‘Our objectives are typically imprecise, multifaceted and change as we progress towards them – and properly so’

John Kay, ‘Decision-making, John Kay’s way’, Financial Times, 20 March 2010

If you don’t have the original statement of your Frame and Goals to hand, changes in Objectives often morph without acknowledgement, leading to confusion. As well as helping to clarify mid-course corrections, logging revisions to project Goals also helps with storytelling as you explain to stakeholders how the team progressively homed in on the nub of the problem.

Conclusion

Defining a project’s Frame and Goals is ultimately about providing your team with a useful perspective and focus. Rather than encouraging them to ‘think outside the box’, it channels their creative energies into a productive box to think within. This all requires the profoundly human abilities of judgement and leadership – skills I’m certain will remain a country mile ahead of what any AI bot will ever be able to muster.

Three dimensions of Framing

Framing is a high-level and abstract topic, the nature of which is often hard to articulate. The book Framers: Human Advantage in an Age of Technology and Turmoil does a good job of explaining the process in more depth. I found the authors’ three dimensions of Causality, Counterfactuals, and Constraints particularly insightful.

Causality – thinking about cause and effect

This first dimension of Framing is the most unconscious. We understand the world through cause and effect. Some of those understandings are better than others. For example, some might put a product’s success down to being launched on a lucky date. In contrast, others might locate its fortune in how it anticipated a crucial shift in consumer expectations. Generalising across different situations, we use this causal thinking to make sense of the world and predict the consequences of actions, whether human or performed by technology.

Good leaders have a firm grasp of causality and how things work. They can identify the fundamental forces acting on the problem at hand.

So, how we approach any project challenge is highly informed by our understanding of the forces acting on it. Leaders often express their perspective on a problem with a mental model, metaphor or analogy to make some critical aspects of the problem more relatable. For example, ‘We should try to become the Nespresso of our category’.

Coupled to human agency, causal thinking separates us from AI. We act on the world and experience the effects of those actions – for ourselves, our team, our company, our professional peer group or wider society. So, when we select a Frame, we choose with a sense of responsibility about how we want to reshape things – By contrast, AI has no sense of responsibility and therefore no skin in the project game.

Counterfactuals – alternative solutions

When planning a project, we start to run through a range of possibilities and alternative futures. These we judge in terms of their potential. While project Goals should not suggest a particular solution, consciously framing out – excluding – certain solutions may prove sensible. Considering which directions to Frame in and out helps to bound the project space.

To imagine a range of counterfactuals is a good way to tap into tacit knowledge of how our part of the world works. It helps to surface extra insights from our experience. By integrating alternative routes into our Frame, we encourage the team to remain open-minded, and feel more of a sense of agency as the range of possibilities becomes clearer.

Again, AI is little match for humans when the task is to envision scenarios that do not exist. Reliable training data, the essential basis for AI, is very patchy about the future!

Constraints – creative guide rails

As every designer knows, a blank canvas with unlimited possibilities is the opposite of inspiring. Complete creative freedom is neither feasible, realistic, nor desirable. Charles Eames once said, ‘Design depends largely on constraints’. These cognitive curbs (or kerbs for stateside readers) help guide and focus exploration. Some will be externally imposed, for example, by the laws of physics or our manager’s budget, while others might be self-imposed to avoid well-worn grooves and stimulate new thinking.

One way to make constraints more concrete is to identify different dimensions of the challenge, for example, target markets, and then outline which are in and out of scope. However you define your constraints, one check to run is that they are internally consistent and do not conflict.

Like causal thinking and generating counterfactuals, defining constraints is another very human skill – and one that is much more of an art than science. Doing it well requires a mix of rigorous and creative thinking and experience in framing and solving related problems. Algorithms will not be able to impose discerning constraints any time soon. ‘Computers calculate, but minds imagine’.

Work