The thing designers don't design: process

tl;dr As design leaders we have something other leaders lack: the skills to design. We should be designing the way our teams work, like we might have designed a product or experience in the past.

How many times have you sat in a meeting room at work and thought "this is a colossal waste of time"?

If you work in a large, complex organization, chances are, you think that frequently.

Unproductive processes are everywhere in modern companies. Unnecessary meetings. Pointless conversations. Duplicative tasks. Here's some data if you don't believe me (although I'm sure you do).

And sure, AI is going to fix some of this problem. But if you believe that humans are going to continue to have a role in productive creativity (and I really think you should), there's always going to be this challenge — this frustration — of getting folks to work effectively, together.

I'm not talking about collaboration. That's different. There are tried and true ways of driving collaboration and designers are very good at it. I'm not talking about the broader world of business process either, where there are significant and impressive best practices (I don't want the Six Sigma fan club coming after me).

The processes I'm talking about are the ones we deal with all the time as design leaders. The process of kicking off a project. Getting from brief to concept. The process of approval — particularly in complex organizations — where my launch might affect your launch, and your launch might affect mine. I'm talking about the integration of important process steps that sometimes get missed, like localization and accessibility. It's these processes. The ones we use every day. It's these processes that I seldom see anyone design.

It's easy to understand why. Process improvements are put in place to correct issues or prevent disaster. If design is all about focusing on a human and understanding how they experience something, process is the opposite. Process often ignores the humans who use it. Instead, process focuses on potential disaster, and how to avoid it (often at the cost of the human experience).

As design leaders, we can fix that. We can design processes that will improve the overall experiences of our people. We can empathize with their frustrations, seek to understand their deeper needs. We can use our creativity to solve their problems, whist building enough safety into the system.

We can do all this, because before we were leading large teams of designers, we were designers ourselves. Where design process is concerned, it's time to get back to fundamental questions: Who is this for? What do they need? How can we help?

It's not easy. Process for design teams, particularly in big, unwieldy organizations, is a wicked problem. But we all know, wicked problems are the most fun to solve.