designers as in-house innovation consultants

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 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.

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.

luxury products speaker bowl

 

The rules luxury brands live by to create and maintain their lustre

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:

Brand history, attention to product detail, a charismatic leader and outstanding durability all help to set luxury brands apart

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
As Leibowitz showed with her portrait of Mikhail Gorbachev by the Berlin Wall, the tale told speaks volumes, but with few words.

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
Halo products and sub-brands illuminate the portfolio below them, bathing them in reflected glory.

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
B&O, like most luxury brands, use mass production techniques, but the touch of the skilled hand on certain elements is often foregrounded.

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.

B&O, a Danish luxury audio company, launched its Ferrari Collection at the iconic sports car brand’s showroom in Milan in 2023.

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.
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
In a perfect match, B&O’s aluminium headphones complement Rimowa’s case.

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
The top-drawer pack for Patek Philippe reinforce the owner’s sense of luxury.

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 Audemars Piguet brand captures the consumer not just through its wristwear but also through the company’s private lounge for meetings and entertainment.

 

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.

frames and goals

Why mastery in Framing problems and setting clear project Goals will remain key skills for innovation leaders

‘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’.

Design managers had a good 10 years between 1997-2007. The challenges in the good times were the result of positive developments such as design’s elevation up the management agenda, the expansion of its remit, and the resulting complexity that came with more responsibility and exposure. A harsher business climate will lead to a different set of demands.

In hindsight, two events in 1997 set the scene for design’s rise. In the UK Tony Blair’s New Labour were elected with a mandate to modernise Britain, and quickly elevated its Creative Industries to the forefront of economic policy. This was a strategy that was replicated around the world in the form of countless policies in the creative sector. Creativity and innovation were set to become buzzwords amongst political and business leaders. 

In the same year Steve Jobs returned to Apple, which soon became the totemic case study of how to out-innovate the competition through smart design. As a design strategy consultant in this period, I lost count of how many brand directors’ strategy amounted to little more than aspiring to be the ‘Apple of our category’. The days of putting the case for the importance of design were replaced by fighting off calls from different parts of the business wanting to join the design party.

‘Design thinking’, the hazily defined notion that designers are well equipped to tackle a wide range of business problems, can be seen as a high water mark of this euphoria.

A critique began to surface in 2007, with questions raised about design’s sustainability credentials and its obsession with superficial novelty. Business Week magazine also reported an ‘innovation backlash’ in the same year. The recession has only served to sharpen the questions for design managers.

The idea of design as a silver bullet has lost currency. As one design manager put it to me recently, ‘Even Turkeys can fly in a tornado’; but when the tailwind dropped many design managers were left gliding. Greater exposure to senior management had left many… well… exposed.

The concern is that too much time has been spent trying to outsmart the MBAs, and that design managers have lost their focus on delivering great design. The most common response to this feeling of corporate over-stretch is to regroup and go back-to-basics, with many managers pining to just roll up their sleeves and get down to designing.

While this reaction to a sense of mission creep is understandable, it risks jettisoning some important gains. It is vital that design does not become viewed as part of the froth of the go-go years. While design is not a replacement for business strategy, it also has more to offer than experience aesthetics. One of the big challenges in the next period will be to define the boundaries of what design departments can and can’t usefully contribute to with more rigour and precision. 

Design and innovation have undoubtedly become emptied of much of their meaning through over use (and abuse), but we should also resist the flight to new buzzwords. There is no alternative to explaining – in longhand – how design can contribute to business success as specifically as we can. We should also not shy away from explaining how difficult it is to deliver great design; and while there is a design process it is not a general purpose business methodology, but a specialist one that must be executed by experienced and talented designers.

‘What the hell is Design Leadership anyway?’ is what I keep hearing people mutter under their breath these days. It has become one of those subjects that any player in design now has to have an opinion on, but debating it usually generates more heat than light, as self-anointed design leaders rehearse their personal or company agendas. Self-importance, not clarity, seems to be the main concern.

At one level this isn’t surprising. Leadership is a slippery topic these days: there are more books on Amazon attempting to define the mojo of leadership than that other holy grail, innovation. The 21st century is dogged by crises of authority: whether they are presidents, CEOs or premier league soccer managers, today’s leaders are less respected and less certain of their position than the self-assured chiefs of yesteryear: Margaret Thatcher. Jack Welch. Bill Shankly. Having become a live topic in designland, leadership is now an even harder subject to get your arms around. Unlike business leadership, which is about leading organisations, the remit of design leadership is fuzzier. It is often used interchangeably with design management, but is also liberally applied to any big personality around the industry.

Faced with such confusion, it is worth stepping back to ask a few simple questions. What makes a design leader? Do they have to be designers? Who is leading whom? And to where exactly? I have recently been forced to grapple with these questions while producing a Design Leadership programme for senior designers from a range of companies and disciplines.

Leaders as pathfinders

First, it is useful to reflect on why Design Leadership has become such a hot topic. It began as a more specific ‘grey hair’ discussion within design management circles in the early noughties. But unlike other such debates this one captured the imagination ofconsultants, academia and the blogosphere. What is driving this widely felt need for leadership? One answer is that designland is feeling a collective sense of both disorientation and opportunity- have designers ever felt so simultaneously highly valued and uncertain about their future? As I have previously argued in these pages the design industry is living through ‘seismic times’ and ‘as the ground shifts under our feet, we scramble for a clearer view of the emerging landscape.’ To push this geological metaphor further, the industry is looking for pathfinders to guide us through unfamiliar new territory to the land of opportunity.

Many new paths are being cleared in numerous directions-from selling one-offs in art galleries to facilitating co-creation processes-by very different types of pioneers with their own perspectives and tool sets. For me it is useful to think of design leaders as trailblazers taking design forward in different ways. They break new ground by envisaging and then helping to create the future shape of the profession.

10 faces of design leadership

To illustrate the point here are 10 types of design leader who have pushed the boundaries of the profession over the past few decades – for good or bad. The categories are neither exhaustive, nor mutually exclusive… but hey, everyone loves (to hate) a list.

The Maestros

Design craft leaders who have raised the bar in design practice. Exemplar practitioners who have set new standards in their own fields include Jonathan Ive, Naoto Fukasawa, Masamichi Udagawa and Sigi Moeslinger, Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec, and Thomas Heatherwick.

The Visionaries

Discipline leaders who have pioneered new fields of practice, like Bill Moggridge in product interaction design; Ron Arad in design art; Larry Keeley in design strategy; and Live|Work in adapting product and interaction design methods to the design of services.

The Managers

Corporate leaders who have led design to the top table in their companies and in turn elevated the design function, like J Mays as VP of design & Chief Creative Officer at Ford group, Chris Bangle at BMW, and Tom Ford at Gucci.

The Entrepreneurs

Business leaders who have explored new ways of doing business in design, like Terence Conran as design consultant and retailer; David Kelly in the foundation of Ideo; and Tom Dixon with his unique combination of roles as designer, manufacturer and director of Artek.

The Ambassadors

Communication leaders adept at accessing public, business and government forums to convey the benefits of design, like Richard Seymour and Dick Powell with their TV programmes; Clive Grinyer  in various private and public sector roles; and Tim Brown, most notably at the World Economic Forum in Davos.

The Entertainers

PR leaders who have captured the imagination of the non-design press and re-positioned what design means in the public consciousness – for better or for worse – like Philippe Starck, Karim Rashid, and Marcel Wanders.

The Scholars

Education leaders who have pioneered new forms of design education, like Michael and Katherine McCoy at the Cranbrook Institute in the Nineties; Gillian Crampton-Smith, the founder of both the Computer Related Design course at the RCA and the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea; Lidewij Edelkoort in her role as chairwoman at the Design Academy Eindhoven; and Patrick Whitney, Director of the Institute of Design at IIT. And let us not forget the unsung leaders of great courses, such as those at the Universities of Cincinnati and Northumbria.

The Provocateurs

Thought leaders from outside designland who challenge its navel-gazing tendencies and cajole designers into reflecting on the context in which we work, like the ever polemical James Woudhuysen with his exposes of design’s muddled thinking and low expectations; John Thackara in his eclectic dispatches from the fringes of design, art and environmentalism; Rick Poynor with his well aimed broadsides; and Roger Martin with his home truths on how designers are perceived by business people.

The Scribes

Editorial leaders who have pioneered new forms of design journalism, like Deyan Sudjic with Blueprint; Jeremy Myerson with Design Week; Tyler Brule with Wallpaper and Monocle; Bruce Nussbaum at Business Week; the teams behind Core 77 and Design Observer.

The Curators

Influential museum and gallery directors who have presented design in new ways to new audiences, like Stephen Bayley at the V&A Boilerhouse and the Design Museum; Paola Antonelli at MoMA; Alice Rawsthorn at the Design Museum; Murray Moss at his Moss store; and Carla Sozzani at her 10 Corso Como store.

This is obviously a partial list – and some leaders could feature in several categories. For example, Steve Jobs is in a class of his own as not only a business but also a pivotal design leader for his sophisticated understanding of design and the exacting standards he holds Apple designers to. No matter. My point is to illustrate that there are many different types of design leaders – and no common template. A corporate design manager helping to steer a company into an emerging market requires a very different skill set and approach from the head of a start-up consultancy pioneering new methods in the design of public services.

Common qualities

However, design leaders do tend to share three general qualities: they are good at envisioning the future, thinking strategically and leading others. They tend to have mastered their professional craft and understand their field well, but are driven by a restless feeling in their gut that ‘it doesn’t have to be this way’. They have the ability to hover above the detail, see the big picture and think abstractly to imagine a different direction. Roger Martin unpicks this quality well in his book ‘The Opposable Mind: How Successful Leaders Win Through Integrative Thinking’.

Having glimpsed a new horizon, the best leaders articulate a vision of how things should be. One of my all time favourites is the admirably audacious goal Steve Jobs set out for Apple back in 1980:

‘To make a contribution to the world by making tools for the human mind that advance humankind.’

Having defined the aspiration, leaders set about working out how to get there. The way they develop their strategy differs enormously depending on the leader’s goal, field and position. However, four useful questions to ask are:

– what is changing and what opportunities flow from this change?

– what core competencies do we have and which do we need to build?

– how are we going to set ourselves apart from the competition?

– where’s the money?

Finally, to really make things happen, leaders have to get things done through others, by designing, inspiring and maintaining teams. They also often need to get people outside their team to buy into them, their idea or their business. This calls for both inspiration and tenacity. Let’s close by nailing two myths. The first is that leaders have to have big personalities; some do have larger-than-life egos, but many do not. Steve Jobs and Jonathan Ive occupy opposite ends of this ego spectrum.

The second myth is that leaders are born and not made. While it is true that not everyone has the potential to lead, all of the above traits can be developed and honed: even Steve Jobs rehearses his presentations to make them appear effortless. However, they are not skills that can be learned on a one-off course; they must be nurtured over years. Most top CEOs have coaches to help them become better leaders, they just tend to keep their coaching sessions quiet – often entering them into their diary as a ‘haircut’!

So what the hell is a Design Leader? From Maestros to Scholars, there is no singular formula. While they are all visionary, tenacious and resourceful, ultimately what separates them from the smart talkers and false prophets is who follows them to change the world of design.