Ross Dawson — Trust is the key
This essay was presented as a part of my work in the Design Leadership unit in the Master of Design Futures program at RMIT University.
As I do more of these interviews, I’m beginning to see some themes emerge. All of my interviewees so far (including those not yet published) express views on leadership that take a very open, collaborative, and trust-based perspective. There aren’t any micromanagers in this lot!
In this latest conversation — this time with futurist, Ross Dawson — we discuss the trends he is seeing in the organisations he works with as they prepare themselves for a rapidly changing, complex, more difficult business environment. More than any other factor, Ross is seeing a balancing act that allows for leadership outside the organisational structure and trust in people.
While Ross isn’t a designer, he’s in frequent conversation either as futurist or consultant with business leaders around the world, and through his work with Future Exploration Network. There, he’s finding a rich ecosystem of profound influences on leaders: complexity, wicked problems, uncertainty, acceleration of change, the shifting nature of work, and movement in what businesses need to focus on for success.
As another influential person participating in the series I am working on, Ross’ insights bring an additional dimension to my understanding, adding a more business-focussed lens to my more “designerly” perspective. As a business owner myself, I’m more than abundantly aware that factors like:
- rapidly shifting markets
- clients (and potential ones) facing productivity, capability, and capacity constraints
- increased competition in the market for design work, and
- people struggling to understand what we can do for them (and why we should do it)
all act as forces that make it harder for me to do my work. Let alone help a leader in a small enterprise in a sector like child services, disability, health research, legal services (all startups in the co-working space I use: Entry 29) understand what they might want to engage a service design specialist for.
Work is so complex now, with so many factors acting as either power-ups or energy drains, that sometimes leaders will struggle to know where to look. Trusting their people to help them manage complexity is key.
Leaders in all organisations need the capability (and capacity) to think on their feet, to synthesise the volumes of new daily data that floods them. Taking a more designerly approach to their work, empowering people through trust, and enabling the building of basic skills in design thinking across their workforces has the potential to act as a force multiplier.
This is all more food for thought; all of it acting to convince me more strongly that design and leadership go hand-in-hand to enhance each other. The sum of the whole is significantly greater than the component parts.
