Navigating C-Suite Ignorance: The Struggles of Design in Leadership

Show Notes

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Summary: Peter and Jesse are joined by design and business consultant John Gleason. Coming up through P&G’s famous design initiative, we get his perspective on design beyond digital products, such as consumer packaged goods, we explore some significant parallels across industries and design domains with important lessons on the pitfalls that lead to diminishing influence for design leaders, and share what they should advocate in order to break the downward spiral.

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Transcript

Jesse: I’m Jesse James Garrett,

Peter: and I’m Peter Merholz.

Jesse: And we’re finding our way,

Peter: Navigating the opportunities

Jesse: and challenges

Peter: of design and design leadership,

Jesse: On today’s show, is design dead? That’s the question strategy consultant John Gleason asked at a recent design conference panel. The ensuing discussion struck some familiar notes for digital product design leaders, but John Gleason doesn’t come from digital product design. Today, we’ll get his perspective on design beyond digital products, such as consumer packaged goods, the stuff you find on the shelves in grocery and drugstore. We’ll explore some significant parallels across industries and design domains with important lessons on the pitfalls that lead to diminishing influence for design leaders, what they should advocate for, and how to break the downward spiral.

Peter: Hi John. Thank you for joining us.

John: Delighted to be here, Peter. Thank you.

Peter: So you and I met on the internet, specifically LinkedIn, around a discussion that was happening based on an article written in Fast Company that was explaining what this journalist had witnessed at a panel of design leaders that you helped moderate. And the title of the article had the provocative statement: Is Design Dead? So that’s how I’d like to start this conversation with you. Maybe we’re starting at the end, and then this can be a very brief conversation…

John: What if I said the answer is yes, end of story?

Peter: Then, then, then we wrap up the podcast.

Jesse: Thanks everybody for listening. You can find us at findingourway.design.

Peter: But seriously, I do want to ask, it is meant to be a provocative, obviously there were discussions happening on that panel and in that room that led to this question. So when you’re faced with a question is design dead, how do you respond?

John: Well, we respond by creating a conference to talk about it. So my conference partners and I, David Butler, who was the first head of design at Coca-Cola and Fred Richards, who’s a long time ECD, CCO -type person in the brand design space at big agencies. The three of us came together just simply to talk about the industry itself.

And as we compared notes, I have started to see that design is in decline, particularly in the consumer facing space, probably starting eight or nine years ago, kind of as evidenced by shrinking budgets and shrinking organizations and diminishing the reporting structure of design into leadership in those companies.

And a lot of the people that I’ve talked to kind of chalk it up to, oh, well that’s the economy. Oh, we’re gonna cut budgets, it’s belt tightening, it’s these things. But I’ve had the chance to peek inside more than a hundred big corporations and a couple thousand design agencies. And so I see patterns that emerged.

Jesse: Mm-hmm.

John: And that led to the provocation of “Is design dead?” And I think we inherently knew that the answer was no, but I don’t think the rest of the room…so we had about a hundred people design leaders from various companies, mostly consumer facing corporations, but we had telecom, we had financial services, we had healthcare, we had core tech there in the room represented as well.

I don’t think most of the people in the room saw the patterns because they only see what’s happening in their company, or the one or two companies they may have been a part of. And so there was certainly evidence, as we started to unfold some of the things, people were, “Oh, just thought that was belt tightening. I just thought that was seasonal. I just thought that was post pandemic economy.” That started the conversation.

Jesse: So tell us a little bit about these design teams that you were studying and what was the change that you noticed over time? What was happening with these teams?

John: So a, few things that I’ve had the chance to see. I’ve tracked about 200, almost 250 companies since about 2016, 2017.

Jesse: Mm-hmm.

John: And it’s things like, what agencies do they work with? Have they built in-house teams? What’s the reporting structure of the organizations? And some of the patterns that I’ve seen, Jesse, are 39% of those companies, so 95 companies of the 243, have cut the top one or two levels of their design function…

Jesse: mm-hmm.

John: … or they’ve downgraded the title to some lower title in the company, or they’ve downgraded the boss, the reporting title of the boss of those organizations. Conversely, only 6%, only 15 of those companies have done the opposite, have elevated design with a higher title or a higher reporting status in the company. 9% of them, 22 companies have eliminated more than half of their entire design function in a single year.

Jesse: Wow.

John: 84% of them, this one shouldn’t be a surprise to people. 84% of the design leaders or the heads of design reports to a specific function in the company…

Jesse: hmm

John: Marketing, innovation product. To me, the troubling part of that is 75% of them don’t report to the head of that function.

Jesse: hmm.

John: They report to somebody lower in that functional hierarchy, which again, to me, signals a deemphasis of design, as a more of a service organization than a beacon for the future. Almost half, 47% of these companies, the head of design is at a senior director or lower.

Jesse: Hmm.

John: They’re not even in the executive community inside of those companies, nor do they have a career opportunity to grow beyond that director, senior director, some are even senior manager.

Jesse: That’s as far as the design ladder reaches in those organizations.

John: Right, right. Yeah.

Jesse: So I find myself curious about the mandates of these teams and what these teams are being asked to deliver, and whether those mandates are shrinking as the teams scale down and move downstream as you’re describing in these very large organizations.

So what kind of design are we talking about here?

John: They certainly are diminishing in the scope of influence inside of those companies. So many of them, the design organization in a lot of consumer goods companies is really a packaging function.

And it ends up being a decoration function for packaging.

Jesse: Okay.

John: In some cases, they might be able to influence a better consumer experience, but, in many cases, especially in the, present economic circumstance, it’s cost cut, diminished, streamlined.

Jesse: Right. We’re basically talking about boxes and bottles on retail shelves.

John: Yeah. Yeah. And, there are some where design sits in an R and D or innovation organization…

Jesse: mm-hmm.

John: … where design influences, again, the structural component of packaging.

Occasionally they’ll influence the juice and the powders and the things that are inside the boxes and bottles. But mostly more powerful R and D organization says, Hey, design, we’ve got that. We’ll take care of that.

Jesse: Right.

John: And they tend to be looking at very narrow components inside the company. The other interesting thing, particularly as it relates to a more digital component, is many of these companies have assigned a chief digital officer in charge of the digital transformation and digital pathway for those big companies, building their own design teams, largely UX, UI and some development, although development tends to be outsourced and offshored. And they’re not connected to the other design capabilities inside the company.

Jesse: Right. Yeah.

John: And in fact they sometimes compete. I did some consulting work for a couple of companies where there was somewhat of a bitter, antagonistic relationship between the head of design and the head of digital.

Jesse: Yeah. Well this is, I laugh because this is a regular pattern that we saw in our consulting work going back 20 years. That if the digital product design team was more closely aligned with digital than with design, sometimes that created a conflict and that created friction internally in terms of how things got done.

I’m curious about the evolution that you’ve seen in these mandates. So in what ways have these design teams had to refocus their efforts as they’ve scaled down?

John: I spent 20 years at Procter and Gamble. I was a part of the very earliest portions of P and G’s journey to elevate design.

Jesse: Hmm.

John: When I joined the design function, there were 60 people in the design function at P and G. When I left, about five years later, there were 350. It was all around strategic design, leadership, the head of design, Claudia Kotchka at the time, and the CEO AG Lafley had a vision for design. So, why I believe design is in decline is most of the design responsibilities that I see today are nowhere close to what I experienced at P and G.

Peter: Hmm.

Jesse: Hmm

John: That’s the decline part, but you know, there are one or two work generations that have come in and out of the workforce since the early two thousands. I’m often brought into corporate organizations either by the head of design who wants to try to figure out how to articulate up to the C-suite about how design is more important, how it should be invited earlier, how it should be organized and not just touching an artifact, you know, a package or a website or a banner or something, but influence the entire enterprise.

Jesse: Mm-hmm.

John: The C-suite often has no clue what design would do with the rest of the enterprise other than the thing that they had been doing…

Jesse: mm-hmm.

John: … in the company. And so there’s often that disconnect.

Jesse: right

John: One of the things that I often see, first of all, there is no school largely for design leaders to step in and talk business.

Jesse: Right.

John: Very, very few programs. IIT does a nice job. SCAD is beginning to do things like that by building a business innovation component. But largely it’s teaching the tools of the industry. So when somebody lands in one of these important jobs, they speak the language that they know, whatever it is: UX, UI, digital, color theory, communication theory, whatever those things are. And the thing that I have seen is, when they are under duress, when the business pressures start to pile up, most design leaders recess back into becoming uber project managers for the design activities, rather than leaning into the organizational component of influencing structure in humans and leadership.

Jesse: Mm-hmm.

John: If it gets to that, it begins to spiral. And within two years, that person is often gone because they’re micromanaging their team, and they’re trying to deliver great outputs, but not really influencing…

Jesse: Right.

John: …where design can influence. Design has a superpower of seeing things that other people can’t see, but often can’t articulate that in the context of the business language.

Jesse: It almost suggests that, there’s, like, this gravitational force that pulls leaders down toward this sort of operational value proposition, as opposed to a more strategic value proposition for design as a function, for themselves as leaders, that takes active, ongoing energy to resist for leaders, yeah?

John: One of the things I observed at P and G was when design was added as this new strategic capability for the company at the request of the CEO AG Lafley, the other functions felt like they had to defend themselves against design taking the fun stuff away from them. And part of it was, it isn’t trying to take things away. There was a component of let’s make sure the right people are with the right skills, are working on the right things at the right time. The influence of design was intended to try to make everything else better.

Jesse: Mm-hmm.

John: The ability to step back and really advocate for the user, in our case, the consumer. You know, P&G was pretty well known for consumer research and brand management and marketing, a lot of other things. So the idea that design could step in and knew better than these things that have been in place for 50 or a hundred years, some people kind of took it personally.

I earn a lot of enemies in the design space when I say this. I say if a company really wants to elevate design in a truly strategic way for the entire enterprise, it’s my opinion, the first head of design probably should not be somebody with a portfolio.

Jesse: Hmm. Who should they be instead?

John: It should be somebody that might have come out of the business, might have been a marketer, might have been an innovator, might have been a strategist, but has a high IQ for design because those people know how to have the battles with other people with more stripes.

They know how to, play the political game. They know how to influence. And I’m gonna be horrendously unfair and I’m probably gonna get a lot of mail from your listeners. Designers index introvert.

Jesse: Mm-hmm.

Peter: Yeah. You’re not gonna get any pushback on that.

John: Which means I don’t want conflict. I’m gonna run away from conflict and I’m not gonna address it.

Whereas Claudia was an accountant by education and a marketer by training. And she had no fear walking into people that had more stripes than her to say, you’re not doing it right. I mean, she threatened a few business unit presidents to say, I’m taking your whole design team because you haven’t treated them well. You don’t respect them, and they all wanna quit, so I’m gonna take them.

And of course, you can’t do that. And, you know, then the tete-a-tete occurred, and those are extreme examples, but part of this is, unless a business leader, whatever function you’re in, and I’ll highlight design in particular, unless you’re willing to fall on the sword for some things…

Jesse: mm.

John: … then, you can expect that the pressures of the business environment and the politics has the risk of crumbling your status in the enterprise.

Peter: A couple of thoughts. The first, it’s interesting to hear you say that about that idea of your first head of design not necessarily being someone who came up through the practice. It sounds like Claudia was like that. Jesse and I have had that experience, him more directly than I, with the head of design at Capital One, which was the company that acquired Adaptive Path, was Scott Zimmer, who… his background was in brand and marketing.

But he was design mature. He understood the opportunity that design delivered, and this was, you know, over a decade ago, better than almost any design executive I ever met, he knew how to communicate up. He knew how to get senior leadership excited about what designers could do in a way that designers often struggle articulating their own value.

So I’ve seen that. I wanna go back though to the design in decline conversation. ‘Cause in order to decline it had to have risen…

John: yep.

Peter: …before then. And you explain the P and G story where a very savvy CEO invests in this function, makes it strategic.

Like AG Lafley clearly had a plan. With Claudia had a kind of lieutenant who could realize that plan. But that’s likely an outlier, Right. Whereas in these other organizations where design was elevated, I’m curious what you see. ‘Cause you know, you’re, coming at us from a consumer packaged goods, maybe more in the advertising, marketing side compared to where Jesse and I live.

But my concern for those design leaders who were elevated is that they had not been set up for success by their leadership. Their leadership didn’t know what they were doing, elevating them into those roles. Say we’ve taken a director or senior director of packaging design, we promoted that person into a VP role that had broader design mandate.

But this person with a packaging design background knows packaging design. They don’t understand design for innovation, design for new product experience, all of those things. Maybe they tried, maybe they didn’t, doesn’t matter.

But at some point, like, because this person hadn’t been set up for success, it would almost be inevitable that there would be a decline, regardless of broader economic conditions. I’m seeing you nod your head.

So I’m curious how this could have been handled better by everybody, you know 10 to 15 years ago instead of like, oh, you have a title with the word design in it, so we’re gonna give you more authority, but we’re not gonna necessarily understand the implications of what it means for you to be an executive. We’re just gonna all of a sudden give you that title. it just feels like, this was bound to happen.

John: You’re exactly right that it is in fact bound to happen because the vast majority of the companies that I’ve worked with and or studied, where the company chose to make a deliberate attempt to elevate design with a higher title, a new person that they perhaps brought from outside. The first observation I’ve made is most of the senior leaders, the C-suite leaders in those companies they don’t think somebody at a VP, SVP, EVP or Chief title needs to have somebody around them to protect them.

Jesse: Mm.

John: No other chief or SVP in the company, you know, they’re navigating the politics themselves. The head of R&D, the head of finance, the head of marketing. The most successful of those, where it was elevated, Proctor is one where AG Lafley was, in essence, the protector for Claudia.

When Indra Nooyi at PepsiCo, she also was the inventor that design was gonna make a difference at PepsiCo. First elevated somebody internally. Didn’t work so well. There was a big packaging fiasco with Tropicana. But, I give her a lot of credit by not walking away from it after that fiasco and she continued to lean into it. Ultimately hired Mauro Porcini.

Peter: Mm.

John: David Butler, when he was brought into Coke, there was an influencer behind him that planted the seed that design could be more strategic. Mark Mathieu, who went on to Unilever, then Samsung but in those organizations there were people that were aligned with and connected to those people to help provide some business interference.

Jesse: Mm-hmm.

John: And in those organizations, they had a longer run and a more strategic run for design.

Where the newly appointed head of design steps in, I’ve seen 10 or 15 of these where they were promised access to the CEO and the CMO but that access turned into, oh, I need to prepare three weeks ahead of time and send the deck one week ahead of time in order to have a meeting with the CEO.

Whereas the example, and again, I’m super spoiled by this AG Lafley role model. Claudia had a design board on which Ivy Ross was on the board at the time. She was at the Gap or Old Navy. She’s now at Google. Tim Brown was on that board. AG never missed a board meeting. So the relationship that design had with the CEO at P and G was a casual one.

Jesse: Right.

John: It wasn’t surrounded by formalities and PowerPoint decks and, you know, six weeks lead time. McKinsey did an amazing study on the business value of design in 2018. DMI did something where they created a design value index with 16 or 18 companies, although I think they cherry picked 16 companies that were performing well so that they could track the commercial value. The UK Design Council did it before DMI and then my own observations, I’ve kind of developed this notion of six attributes of what I call design engaged companies, one of which is advocacy. That the senior most people in the company see that design is a critical component of the company and they support it appropriately. There’s access, there’s meetings, there’s, you know, public recognition you know, titles and all those other things that come with advocacy.

But it’s just not the two humans. It’s just not a CEO and the head of design. it’s advocating that design needs to touch other parts of the company.

Jesse: Mm.

John: You know, when I step into a C-suite conversation, I often say, so, you know, how does design play a role in your company? Oh, you know, packaging or product or innovation. and I often touch on things, well, do you have any design talent looking after employee engagement, trying to create a place that more and more people have a passion for wanting to work here?

Oh, well, that’s our HR organization. It’s like, you know, with all due respect to the talented human resources people, most of human resources is built to protect the corporation.

Peter: Right.

Jesse: Indeed.

Yeah.

John: … to inspire more loyalty to the enterprise.

Jesse: So I find myself curious about this notion that there’s a skillset that is needed in order to really drive design at this executive level, that these design leaders have not been able to cultivate within themselves. I work as a coach with lots of design leaders at different stages in this process. And for some folks, they get to that executive level and they realize that like, oh, everything that I’ve learned up to this point is almost completely irrelevant now.

John: Right.

Jesse: And so I’m curious about like, what are the corners that you’ve seen leaders have to turn as they kind of ascend out of simply overseeing design as a function to actually being an active participant in executive level leadership?

John: Well, design leaders recognize that virtually everything they do is part of a team sport.

Jesse: Hmm.

John: And, it inhibits their ability to articulate what it is we’ve contributed to the enterprise…

Jesse: mm-hmm.

John: … because it involves so many other people to get a product to market or to create a new experience or whatever those things are. And in most cases, rather than trying to step up and say, we had this impact, they often acquiesce and say nothing.

Jesse: Mm.

John: And so somebody else often steps in, you know, the ad agency is notorious for stepping in to say, Hey, we, completely repositioned this brand and we did this. We created new experiences, but it was the ad campaign that helped drive a 40% lift in sales.

And part of it is, he or she who has data, has power.

And design, there’s so much that design does that isn’t measured by data. And so it’s super hard…

Jesse: yeah.

John: … and to me one of the abilities is, how do I talk about impact? It doesn’t have to be a mathematical calculation or effectiveness.

And then the other is, creating a vision. As much as one of design’s superpowers, in my opinion, is creating the future for a product or service or experience. We do a terrible job doing it for ourself and our own organization and how we’re gonna fit in, in an organizational context.

Jesse: Mm-hmm.

Peter: Yeah. In my coaching and in my masterclass I stress the importance of, I call it having an agenda, just because the word vision can mean multiple things. And so I call it having an agenda, and it’s something that so many design leaders, yeah, lack, like, they don’t realize they need to have their own point of view.

Jesse: Point of view, right.

Peter: Their own perspective, their own change that they seek, or if they don’t, they end up just getting in a reactive mode. They end up simply responding to whatever’s coming at them because there’s nothing that they’re trying to drive. One of the reasons Jesse and I were interested in having you join us is your background is consumer packaged goods, P and G, more on the marketing, brand, quote unquote consumer side.

Our experience is more on the digital side. And I think it’s interesting to consider what’s different, what’s the same.

Something that you’ve been touching on,

A designer’s and design leader’s ability to connect their work with value and feeling like they need to have every link in the chain specified or they can’t commit to any ownership of it. But I think related to that, you’ve touched on this, but I’m curious what you see in your world, Jesse and I have talked a lot about the primary value of design is in facilitating or multiplying other functions’ ability to succeed as opposed to design delivering direct value.

Jesse: Yeah.

Peter: You’re nodding your head. So it sounds like you’ve seen something similar, but how do you counsel those leaders to navigate that conversation when their leadership is like, well, what has design done for me lately, and design can’t say I shipped this thing. ‘Cause they didn’t, but they worked with these groups, and through that work, they helped those groups improve what it is they’re doing. What is your approach to telling those stories better?

John: I think you’ve struck a nerve on one of the big opportunities for design, because design often is a curious source of questions. What if, how might we, did we look into that,who said that? You know, who are we trying to reach for what purpose?

And the business is about, let’s go, I don’t have time for these questions. You know, we gotta get something out the door.

And especially in tough economic circumstances, the planning horizon becomes this quarter, next quarter, which isn’t a boundary space that design is very good at. Design is much better… they want to talk about the future of the brand, the consumer, the experience. And somebody at the conference used this rubric of the now, the near, and the far. Design tends to want to talk about the far. The capacity of the business leaders and the business, especially, the more dire the circumstance, the more they want to talk about the now.

Jesse: Right.

John: And so a CEO might only have capacity for 1% of their time on the far, even though that should be a part of what he or she is really thinking about for the corporation.

But design wants to spend their time beyond the near and into the far, and so there’s, a misalignment of planning horizons.

Jesse: Well, it’s a tricky place that design leaders find themselves in, too, because I think that often they feel like they are like standing on the dock with a stack of life preservers, watching these executives flail in the water, going, “Hey, I can, I can throw you this thing at any time. And you’ll be good.” And they’re like, “No, no. Focus on your current work.”

Right? And so like, how do, how do you strike that balance of actually activating the real value proposition of design as a function, actually, you know, maybe rescuing some of these C-levels out of the water before they drown, while also making them feel like they’re getting what they want from you.

John: Well, let me, continue your metaphor of the executives flailing in the bay.

Jesse: Mm-hmm.

John: When an an executive is in that circumstance, who are the likely people or the likely functions they are likely to go to first…

Jesse: mm-hmm.

John: … in the attempt of trying to save the ship or save themselves? Design is often the last one,

Peter: They will go to marketing, they’ll go to sales, they’ll go to whomever.

Yeah.

John: They’ll go finance, they’ll go to supply chain, they’ll go to regulatory, you know, depending on the business and where the stress is. and that’s where I think design needs to learn how to lean in to show that they’re a business solver, not a creator of an artifact…

Jesse: mm-hmm.

John: …you know, code or a device or something. One of the best examples, and I use this example all over the place, is Logitech. Bracken Darrell, the former CEO hires Alistair Curtis. And everywhere Bracken went internally and externally, he said, I hired Alistair to help create Logitech 3.0. And so advocacy. Bracken set the vision for Alistair, and much of that continues now under Haneke Faber and Molin.

Peter: Hmm.

John: And, to me, part of it is, how do you empower the design lead so that the rest of the business expects you to be invited to the important business stuff.

Jesse: Right.

John: And in fact, lead some of the important business stuff. If the senior most people continue to see design as a creator of artifacts and implementer of execution, then it’s super hard for that person leading that function to elevate beyond.

Peter: Well, this begs a question that I have been asked for 25 years,

So we know that design seems to need executive sponsors. You’ve stated that your research has shown it, in a way that other functions don’t need executive sponsors, right? You mentioned that advocacy role is one of your six indicators of a kind of a design mature, design ready environment.

That begs a question, how do you realize that executive sponsorship, someone like Bracken, someone like AG Lafley, someone like Ginny Rometti at IBM, someone like Carl Bass at Autodesk, these CEOs knew that design could help solve their problems, so they didn’t need anyone to educate or evangelize.

Jesse and I, and I’m sure you do as well, but Jesse and I, the vast majority of the design leaders we talk to or work with, their leadership are not advocates. They might not be hostile…

Jesse: yeah.

Peter: … right? They might be even curious, but they’re not advocates. And so the challenge that, so many design leaders face is how do they turn those executives into advocates?

Can you even do that, right? There’s some commentary over the last 15 or so years that, like, if an executive doesn’t get it, there’s very little you can do to help them get it. Like, it’s not like it’s a hidden mystery. It’s not that no one knows that design can help business.

McKinsey’s written about it. HBR has written about it. Roger Martin wrote about it like AG Lafley proved it through the P and G success. And so is it a fool’s errand to try to convince or persuade that executive to advocate for you? Or is that worthwhile?

And if it is, what have you seen, at least in the organizations that you’re looking at, that starts turning that tide so that executives who may have been, again, not hostile– if they’re against design, there’s almost nothing you can do–but, are you aware of mechanisms that, have helped turn that corner.

John: There are some things that I’ve seen. There are some things I recommend. One of the underlying reasons that I believe design is being dismantled and diminishing, is what I call C-Suite ignorance. Part of that is there are new C-suite members being minted every week. Many of them have never been exposed to the idea that design could be anything but…

Jesse: right.

John: …a decoration station. So they just don’t know. And, the other reality that often occurs is the genetic makeup of people that reach C-suite status or senior executive status, they get to a point where they can no longer admit they don’t know something. So they can’t admit that they don’t know that design is or isn’t something. So they lean in to whatever they believe or perceive or have experienced design to be in their past.

Jesse: Yeah.

John: I mentioned earlier that I’m often hired by heads of design trying to articulate up.

The other group that hires me are the C-Suite people who want a discreet advisor who’s gonna whisper in their ear about, tell me the things I should know about design.

Jesse: Mm-hmm.

John: They’re not gonna publicize broadly that they don’t know, then, and, you know, they ask me to be discreet about the relationship.

And it’s a Cyrano de Bergerac kind of thing. I try to tell them what they ought to know, and how they ought to play that out to their organization. And some of it is just purely an exploration. Why should I care? I keep reading that design is something I should know about, you know, why don’t I know more about it? Why isn’t it more prevalent?

And I think part of it is, nobody questions the existence of a chief marketing officer. No one questions the existence of a chief financial officer.

But design is a confusing word. It’s a confusing concept. It’s a noun, it’s a verb, it’s an outcome. It’s an organization. And most people in the business context see it as the participation or creation of an artifact, not necessarily a way of thinking or a mindset so to your question, Peter, small wins is a big successful pathway.

But oftentimes, if you read marketing publications, the typical CMO has an 18 to 22 month time window of their credibility and existence in a company.

Jesse: Mm-hmm. Right.

Peter: That’s it. Not even two years.

Jesse: Yeah.

John: Not even two years. So they’re not looking at things that are gonna be three years from now. They need to go prove and deliver now…

Jesse: mm-hmm.

John: … which again impacts the ability for design to help influence and be a partner in that, delivery. Something we did at P and G, Claudia Kotchka, in the very early stages, brought in IDEO to run a hands-on work session for the top 50 executives in the company.

And it was very much a hands-on exercise, that had nothing to do with P&G products, but more about how do you rethink and re-see, and how do you stay focused on the user and the consumer, and how do you build better experiences?

It was a half day workshop and, you know, imagine 50 high performing type A’s sitting in a room being led through a workshop, but there were varying degrees of impatience, I would imagine.

But a part of it was, then they translated it to a business opportunity for each of the businesses that were in the room. So, okay, we did this generic thing altogether. Here’s how we do this. Focus on the consumer, how might you create something.

Now, and they literally handed things out to say, we’ve looked into most of your other businesses, and here are some things that could be, as we look at consumer behavior, things you might be interested in looking at. Now it probably was a great commercial for IDEO, too, inside of this group to say we’ve already thought about some opportunities.

But, the economic circumstances were more positive. They weren’t belt tightening times like they are now or 2009. Capital was very cheap to acquire. So there were circumstances that I think accelerated our ability to do things like that.

Jesse: Right. I feel like all of this connects to a question that I often ask my leadership coaching clients when they are stepping into a role for the first time, which is, what are you inheriting? And yes, you’re inheriting a team and you’re, yes, you’re inheriting a product and you’re, yes, you’re inheriting a legacy, but you’re also inheriting a whole bunch of expectations.

Expectations that maybe were set by the leader before you, maybe were set by leaders that these executives, to your point, had other exposure to, that may have nothing to do with what you think the value proposition of you and your team and design as a function actually is.

And so it then becomes this game of resetting expectations, and in a lot of ways listening. Just simply listening for what these executives think you’re there to provide and figuring out how to start to lay out the stones on the path that will take them to the value proposition that you actually feel like your team has to offer. But that’s a time consuming process. It is not something that happens overnight.

And to your point, in a lot of these cases, 21 months is the horizon. So how do you balance those things?

John: I think you touched on something really important, Jesse, is the idea of, a design leader that might be interviewing for a gig inside of a company, are they asking the right questions about what does it look like today…

Jesse: mm-hmm.

John: …because one of the things that I’ve seen is most internal talent acquisition teams inside of companies have no clue how to hire for this role or even for the whole function.

Jesse: Mm-hmm.

John: They think they need a portfolio, they think they need, you know, these things. And if they’re not getting help from a recruiter who knows this space, especially for a critically important role like the head of design or a VP of design.

One of the things that I coach the design leaders is, every meeting you have with your colleagues and counterparts in the company, you should be planting the “what if” seed somewhere in the organization to say, What if it looked different? What if it could be here?

It’s a super inexpensive way to try to get them to bite, you know, to lean in and say, you know, why would you say that that’s something we should look at? Then you can lean in with consumer data, or you can lean in with trend data, or you can lean in with economic circumstances.

The other thing that I advise every design leader I coach with is, put a gigantic bogey in the ears and the minds of your senior leaders. You know, hey, I think I could help get us a billion dollars of incremental revenue if, you know, and then lay out, have your hostage list there.

I need a team of this size. I need budgets. I need, you know, advice, I need your advocacy. I need these things, but I think I could help lead us toward an incremental billion dollars in revenue. And, almost none of them actually do it because they’re scared to death to be accountable for a number that they don’t have full responsibility of, How do you go deliver it?

Jesse: The big, hairy, audacious goal.

John: Yeah, exactly. Part of it, Jesse, to your question, keep planting seeds, keep leaning in, keep pushing, keep challenging, keep questioning, so that the business eventually sees… One of the things I often see, especially in consumer goods, is the business leader saying, we don’t have the time and we don’t have the budget to go do that ethnography study.

Jesse: Right.

John: We already know what we need to know about the consumer. And, here’s the idea that we’re gonna launch. And oftentimes it’s not a bad idea, but it’s not gonna be the disruptive category-changing domain-creating idea.

It’s gonna be a conservative… in most cases, consumer goods companies are notorious for calling flavored line extensions, a massive new innovation.

Jesse: Hmm.

John: And it’s like, I don’t think the consumer thinks cinnamon is particularly innovative.

Peter: The time dimension’s an interesting one. And I had a realization as you were talking about the 21 months, as you’re talking about how design often succeeds when it’s able to look far, and the results of truly impactful design take more than 21 months to be realized.

But on the flip side, what I also see with design leaders is an impatience that things aren’t as they should be now. Like, they know what that change should be. They know we should be doing more ethnographic interviews. They know we should be running projects in this different way. They have a sense of, it’s evident how this should be all operating, why aren’t we just doing it that way?

And so in some areas there’s this impatience that gets in their own way. You know, you’re talking about every conversation, move things a little bit, a little bit, a little bit. Design leaders are like, why? We know what we should be doing. Why aren’t we just doing the thing?

And so I’m curious your thoughts on squaring that designerly impatience and frustration that we’re not doing the thing that is evidently the right thing to do now, with this kind of two- to three- or however many -year time horizon for design to actually be realizing an impact and what you see in your world.

John: Well, if I use the concept of A/B testing

Peter: Sure.

John: out of the UX/UI space…

Jesse: hm.

John: … if a courageous, and maybe insane, design leader would say, okay, we’ll do it your way and not do this research, but I’m gonna secretly go figure out a way to get the funding to go do the research and I’m gonna create a parallel project and then compare the outcomes of what it is that is created, or envisioned, from it, to begin to show the business.

Because the astonishing thing that I see from more and more big consumer goods companies is they spend a lot of time doing what I call the CYA research. “I’m gonna do a test of the package just before I launch it. Not to say we’re gonna kill the project or change the project, but I just wanna make sure I don’t get fired if it goes south.”

Whereas if they just spent half that money on the upfront curiosity side, the impatience of the business to go deliver something this quarter, next quarter, now, doesn’t provide the ability for design to go do the alternative explorations.

Which is why, the safe flavored line extension and those things become kind of the standard fare of consumer goods companies, and not terribly different than the software digital space where, you know, I’m gonna do a live A/B test. And the user of this travel website’s not gonna know that this set of people are gonna have these buttons in this place and this set are gonna have this button.

But part of that gets to, how do you truly affect change? And I, think there needs to be a, if we do it this way, here’s the outcome, here’s the likely outcome.

If we do it this way, it can be a bigger payout. The challenge is, if I’m a marketing director or a CMO, am I really gonna fund something that isn’t gonna launch for three years?

Jesse: Mm-hmm.

John: It might cost me $5 million between now and then to launch it and have no results and it could die along the way.

Or am I safer delivering that line extension that is good. It, you know, it’s gonna, it’s gonna drive something…

Peter: 10% improvement is better than zero.

John: Correct.

Jesse: You mentioned affecting change and change is something that we talk a lot about over here on the digital side and design’s responsibility for and toward change, and I’m curious about your point of view on design and its relationship to change.

John: I believe design should be a catalyst for change.

I believe that design should be an arbiter of culture inside of companies. One of the other of the six attributes I talk about is, Is the enterprise people-centered?

Because one of the things I often see is most designers and, even UXers talk about being centered around the user…

Jesse: mm-hmm.

John: …and having an empathy for the people that are gonna buy my product, use my product, you know, use my service, experience the thing I’m creating. But then they say, oh man, but John over in supply chain, that guy’s a jerk. He’s a barrier to me. He’s always getting in the way. So the idea of empathy only seems to apply to the work you’re doing for the thing you’re creating.

Peter: Right. Yep.

Jesse: Right, right. Right.

John: One of the big opportunities for design is having empathy for the senior most leaders in the company. Do I understand the pressure they’re under, and what they have to deliver? As opposed to feeling like they don’t understand me and they’re just laying unreasonable mandates on me.

So a part of it is, this idea of change, this idea of culture, I think a lot of designers, when they’re creating that vision for the future and, potentially that next big thing, they’re not really thinking about what has to change to drive it.

Jesse: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. It puts the design leader in such an interesting place too, because especially if you’re fortunate enough to be at an executive level, at a C level or a VP level, when you’re closely engaged with a larger executive team around the executive level decisions that drive an organization, it can often feel like your job is to create alignment, right?

Your job is to align and be aligned, and find the alignment somehow in the room to create the harmony and the unity across the executive team, to genuinely deliver on a strategy for the organization. But if your mandate is to be the one person in the room who is like, ” Hmm. The way that we’re doing things is not good enough,” your strategy needs something more. It can feel like it really puts you in an awkward position, right?

As an executive level leader, how do these leaders deal with that?

John: Using the life raft example of the executives flailing in the harbor: is design the voice in that room that people are gonna listen to and believe?

Jesse: Right, right, right, right.

John: When they say something has to change.

Jesse: Mm-hmm.

John: You know, there’s a gentleman that I count as a friend in the design industry, Chuck Jones, who is a multiple-time chief design officer.

And he’s very candid about the things that design doesn’t do very well, but he’s also very candid about, you know, when you walk into that new job as the head of design, you need to walk in with a point of view and a vision.

And he told a story at the conference where he walked into one of his roles and he said, within some short period of time, four, six weeks, he said, I think I’m reporting to the wrong place.

Jesse: Mm. Mm-hmm.

John: And he made the case to say, this is the outcome if design continues to report as current, here’s the opportunity by changing it. And of course he had to have a few other meetings with important people to go make that change. The challenge is, if you can state the need for the change in the context of the business, not, not just an opinion, critically helps your case.

If you can bring a champion or an advocate along with you, ideally a peer that’s in another function,

Jesse: Yeah.

John: ” Hey, I agree because this needs to change.”

Otherwise people are gonna take the path of least resistance. I mean, human nature is to avoid conflict, avoid change, complain about change, especially if it’s difficult. It’s like the old adage. Practice how you play. And if you can’t practice in difficult circumstances when it’s game time, you’re not gonna play in them.

Jesse: Right, right.

Peter: So Jesse and I, and it sounds like you as well, John, think about this idea of design as an organizational function.

it provides clarity into the real role of design. Not to make things, not to artifact, whatever, but, like, it is a function that engages in a set of activities to realize some value to the business.

The challenge is design, as the three of us would like it to be understood, conflicts with the quarterly culture, quarterly requirements, needing to report to Wall Street, all the things we’ve been saying, right? That quarterly mindset that so many companies embrace constricts design, so that it’s no longer design, it’s basically production. Someone else has told you what to do and you’re executing on it.

That makes me wonder, is that true of other functions as well, or are other functions perfectly happy operating in a quarterly mode, and design is different?

And, I think it very well could be. But then, in that quarterly culture, things become more acute depending on the health of that business.

And so the next thought is, is design only available as a kind of luxury function for those businesses that have already realized some success and some stability and don’t have to be as quarterly minded, and can have a longer term point of view? Are they the only organizations that are really able to embrace design, ’cause they’re the ones who can allow design the space it needs to succeed.

But then that kind of conflicts with, again, what the three of us know that design could be doing to help struggling companies, right? Like it’s a set of tools that can be useful in a lot of different contexts.

The interesting story is how can design help a company that’s struggling, succeed? But those companies aren’t willing to spend the time to allow design to have that change. So the only companies that are really embracing design as fully as they could are those that were probably doing okay already.

Jesse: You need to be successful to have design, and you need to have design to be successful.

John: Well, you’ve got it, podcast over. Thank you, Pete. Thank you, Jesse.

Peter: As someone who’s, you know, more of a business background than Jesse or I, operating perhaps at an altitude or with a set of companies that are different than the ones that Jesse and I, more traditional organizations say, how do we change the conversation then, so that design is not simply seen as a luxury?

Jesse: Where is the traction for design leaders within this context?

John: One of the interesting corollaries to what you laid out, Peter, is a design community inside a corporation, if they can create a cadence of a longer term pipeline, then it makes it easier to accelerate things inside the quarterly dynamic.

Jesse: Mm-hmm.

John: So, if I do have the luxury of having a very small portion of my portfolio that’s a five or 10 year lighthouse project to say, you know, where could this company go in the future and have a, you know, a slightly larger one that’s five years and a slightly larger one that’s three.

And then the majority of the things we’re working on are inside of two years, then it becomes, you can play to the acceleration needs of the business to play the quarterly game. The challenge is there isn’t often appetite at the C level to suddenly create that pipeline if it didn’t exist..

Jesse: Mm-hmm.

John: …before and the monthly, quarterly, you know, this quarter, this year, kind of dynamic. If that becomes the exclusive of the portfolio I’m working on, you can almost never get to that longer term. ‘Cause somebody above you has to approve the budget and the time and the resources to focus on this thing.

I’ve taught a four-day design thinking class in an MBA program in a university. And I bring a brand partner in. I get the students into a consumer’s home based on the product. And the dynamic when I’m selling this to potential brand partners, the way I sell it is, I want the project that you think is important, but you haven’t been able to fund it for the last three years. The company hasn’t seen it important enough to put official funding behind it. And I’m gonna show you how design thinking can help you accelerate an opportunity.

And of course, they’re, you know, what can you do in four days and, you know, all these other things. We show them that, hey, two consumer visits can be better than none. And two consumer visits can be better than all of the quantitative survey data that you might collect that isn’t watching a human do something or not do something.

Jesse: Right. So, you know, I feel like there’s a lot within the stories that you’ve shared with us and the research that you’ve done that suggests diminishing opportunity for design and for design leaders, in a lot of ways, and increasing obstacles. And I find myself wondering, where is the bright spark within all of this, and where is the opportunity that maybe design leaders ought to be giving more attention to right now?

John: Coming out of the conference event that we held, we had three kind of principles that founded. The first was the question, Is design dead? The second was, you’re not alone and you don’t have to do this alone. The third was, “so what.” We wanted to have a “so what” component to every session.

You don’t have to do it alone is an observation that I’ve had, and no doubt you all have seen it as you’ve poked into different companies and met with a myriad of leaders. Everybody thinks they’re fighting a historically unique battle because they don’t get out and talk to their peers. As a result, they end up fighting it themselves without a roadmap.

And almost everybody that attended the conference used the term therapy. This was great. I realized I’m not alone.

But then the, “so what” thing kicked in? And we said, okay, so what are we gonna do about this? And so I do think that letting people learn from each other, not just from people like the two of you and I that might drop in for a period of time, and then we drop out, and get people comfortable with: What have you done? What have you tried? And use the massive community of design as a way of trying to help revive and resuscitate the opportunity to carry it forward.

I’ve got a great deal of passion for trying to see design change the trajectory and try to help drive that. And I do think that we need more examples of where design created an unexpected outcome.

Jesse: Fantastic. I love that vision. I love the call to design leaders to be those examples and provide those examples that inspire the community. John Gleason, thank you so much for being with us.

John: Jesse, Peter, thank you so much for the invitation. A amazing conversation, and obviously we could talk for three or four more days.

Jesse: Yeah, absolutely.

Peter: Yes. Thank you so much.

Jesse: Where can people find you on the internet if they want to track you down and learn more about what you’re up to?

John: Well, my LinkedIn profile is there to find me or John at GetaBetterView.com.

Jesse: Fantastic. John, thank you so much.

John: I enjoyed this. Thank you.

Jesse: For more Finding Our Way, visit findingourway.design for past episodes and transcripts. You can now follow Finding Our Way on LinkedIn as well. For more about your hosts, visit our websites, petermerholz.com and jessejamesgarrett.com. If you’re curious about working with me as your coach, book your free introductory session at JesseJamesGarrett.com slash free coaching. If you’ve found value in something you’ve heard here today, we hope you’ll pass this episode along to someone else who can use it. Thanks for everything you do for others, and thanks so much for listening.