A politics of design leadership
As I continue the series of conversations I’m having with people working at the intersection of design, leadership, and intentional culture in organisations, I want to understand more about my own views about these things. My cunning plan is to hear from a diverse group of people thinking about and doing what it takes to build 21st Century organisations through practicing design and leadership and to build a model of what this looks like, with advice and recommendations on how new and emerging leaders can work this way for themselves and their teams.
Even in the small number of conversations I’ve had so far, several themes are emerging, and the preliminary and casual conversations I’ve had with future participants in my research suggests those themes will persist.
Here’s what I’m seeing.
Trust is fundamental
Trust and openness as elements of leadership run strongly through the conversations I’ve been having. It’s a key factor in the leadership styles of my interview subjects, their teams, and others they model themselves on. Ross Dawson, in particular, emphasises the networked nature of trust between individuals when he says:
“And so that trust shifts from individual to institution, as in, “I trust my manager or my employer,” or whatever. To saying, “I trust my colleague.” Or, “I trust my neighbour.” Or, “I trust the person who which I’m transacting across this platform.” Rather than necessarily trusting the institution. So that becomes then a frame: where do you design organisations or system as ones that are enablers of trust between peers. As opposed to trying to engineer that an increasingly difficult situation of trying to engender trust in an institution, when people are shifting away from that structure of belief.”
Many of the other people I‘m speaking with follow a similar model; trusting their people to do their jobs and be good at them and being trusted in return by their teams, being open in conversation about organisational and personal goals and vision, and particularly in giving people room to excel for themselves. Kara DeFrias says it most clearly:
“But who on your team, especially from underrepresented groups, who may not get those opportunities every day, how can you give them the opportunity to give the presentation, or to give an external talk, or to be the one who’s interviewed about the work? How are you lifting, actively, proactively, and often, others up to do that? So that’s one of them: give away the glory.”
You must have a clear vision
The second key factor at play is that of a very clear articulation of organisation and team vision. The leaders I’m speaking with and the literature I’m reading all emphasise that modern, design-led organisations and their leaders cannot achieve their goals without a team that’s on board with the vision and has an active hand in its co-design and development.
A vision for 21st Century leaders and their organisations needs to be achieved not by some hero leader declaring it — though they may have originated some or all of it — but by the entire team coming together as a collective to establish what it is they want the organisation to be.
In my interview with Kristin Alford, she describes the development of the vision for MOD. at UniSA in this way:
“… you can point to it and say this is what we’re building and people can get on board with that pretty early rather than kind of going, ‘I don’t understand what it is’. So those two things happened early and out of then articulating those two things. Several principles sort of fell out of … several words, I suppose they weren’t principles at the time, but several words or objectives kind of fell out and then when the team came on board especially when Annika as senior exhibitions manager was thinking about the design of exhibitions, those got solidified, I suppose into design principles for the organisation. So I’ve been thinking about them as sort of strategic values. Then Annika helped sort of drive them into design principles. So out of those two very long-term visions, we now have seven design principles that really guide everything we do and that makes decision making about what we are and aren’t going to do.”
At acidlabs, we’ve gone some way to doing that through things like the Employee Handbook, and the collaborative effort we undertook to achieve recognition as a Certified B Corporation. Neither of these things could have been done by me alone (or any other member of the team on their own).
Empathetic leaders understand human needs beyond the workplace (and in it)
These modern leaders are deeply empathetic. Their ability to connect to the needs and concerns of others forms a part of the fundamental framing of their worldview, both as individuals and leaders.
This empathy manifests in a range of ways including a desire for work to be “what you do, not who you are” and a balanced approach to life such that work is not allowed to have an unhealthy dominance. This even extends to very public declarations of the way an organisation works such as setting a company-wide policy of shorter work weeks, as Michael Honey has done at Icelab:
“After having worked for three or four years as regular five-day a week sort of company, not having to do any overnighters, which was appreciated by myself, we made a decision to go to a four day week and so that was a major decision. And when you talk about things that you can do when you own the company, one of the things that you can do is you can decide how many days a week you wanna work.
I had always been interested in extending my weekends because I like to do outdoorsy things, and it seems to me that a five-day-two-day balance was just inappropriate. And I wanted to go to a three day weekend and so we decided to go to a four day week, and we decided not to work Fridays.
We realised that we weren’t getting a lot of extra value out of the couple of hours extra we were theoretically working. So we just stopped doing it, we just decided we’ll work four normal days and so yeah, the standard Icelab work week now is a four day week. There is no like, you’re a five-day person and you’ve got a pro-rata or something like that. It’s just a normal work week is four days.”
Recent industry research, heavily reported in mainstream media, as well as discussion of 4-day-week trials in a number of organisations, has brought the idea of a shorter work week into more public attention; though I suspect many employers will be wondering whether a shorter week and long weekend is worth it while paying their staff the same salaries. Perhaps they need to speak to more people like Michael?
21st Century leaders acknowledge ambiguity
These leaders all express a mindset that embraces ambiguity and complexity. They are at peace with the cognitive dissonance that occurs when one needs to hold and engage with two (or more) opposing ideas in their minds at once. They are living examples of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “first-rate intelligence”, first expressed in The Crack Up in the 1940s.
“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.”
This framing is a very designerly way of thinking and something about which I’ve had many conversations over time. This bigger picture skillset — the capacity and capability for systems thinking, and a desire to address wicked problems — is something many designers aspire to be better at.
Ross Dawson draws a parallel between this comfort with complexity and ambiguity and the ability to make critical business decisions when he says:
“It’s always been the case that would’ve had ambiguity and complexities in our world. But it is reaching the degree where leadership is largely framed around this idea of being as comfortable as you can be ambiguity. Understanding that we cannot make decisions where we know outcomes. We cannot control our world. And it’s extremely difficult to understand that world.”
These leaders don’t follow accepted wisdom
A willingness to try things that run against established norms, especially those of 20th Century capitalism, is the final key trait that emerges from this kind of designful leadership. For many of these leaders, running an organisation that is focussed on extracting shareholder value from the work of employees runs counter to their worldview. A detailed model for this view is expressed by umair haque in The New Capitalist Manifesto where he summarises this model as:
“[For these leaders and organisations t]he new cornerstones at its heart are what promise to revolutionise a rusting, fading industrial era: they reimagine profitability, reconceive value creation, and refresh advantage, toppling the centuries-old status quo of business has been, can be, and should be. Because they hold the possibility to heal, repair, and right — never completely, sometimes sparingly, but always conceivably — the age-old shortcomings, deficiencies, and flaws of capitalism, while strengthening its already formidable power to intensify the pace, magnitude, and potential of human accomplishment, their bedrock is deep-rooted, thick-set, and steadfastly unshakeable. On their shoulders, the future foundations or prosperity rest.”
For designerly leaders, and leaders in design-led organisations — people like Kristin Alford, Michael Honey, and Kara DeFrias — business success and leadership is not about treating people as an extractive resource and micromanaging work. Rather, it’s a far more progressive set of business politics that views people as the essence of success.
For leaders in this mould, building a place where success is defined by balance, compassion, empathy, and humanity is the hallmark.
I think perhaps Kara DeFrias puts it best when she talks about her leadership being about creating room for others to do and deliver the best work they can. It’s only when this happens — it shows strong parallels to ideas like servant leadership and Simon Sinek’s finding of your why — that great design leaders are made, great design leadership is shown, and cultures that create the necessary conditions for people to do and be their best are born.
As my thinking around these matters evolves, I’ve come to believe — at least for now, as I’m a believer in “strong views, loosely held” — that the root of design and leadership, and its manifestation in the building of intentional culture is best seen as a kind of politics of leadership.
In this politics leadership is recognised as not necessarily anything on an org chart, but rather lived and modelled as behaviours that are about giving and guiding to encourage the best work from people, about ensuring the organisation and the work done by people and for others is humane and ethical, and about ensuring that those who might be ignored because they represent a disenfranchised group or minority are given a voice.
