Designers at the board table

[Siobhan Toohill]

Why don’t designers have a seat at the boardroom table? It’s a question I keep hearing within the design community.

My sense is that designers have long had played a role at the board table – although typically not as the Chief Design Officer, but in fact, as a leader of strategy and even as an enlightened CEO – Lil Tydings at Triple Pundit highlights many candidates. And many designers, such as myself have had access to the board table either as a director in their own right or as a senior leader reporting to the executive committee with the capacity to significantly influence board decisions.

Let’s look at the composition of boards. Critical to building more effective, ‘design responsive’ boards is the role of diversity. We can all reel off the statistics regarding the woeful representation of women on listed boards here in Australia, although with increased scrutiny and the Australian Stock Exchange effectively mandating diversity reporting, there has been a lift over the past two years. Suffice to say, it’s only one small change. There also exists a lack of diversity in educational background (almost every director I know has trained as either a lawyer or an accountant) and ethnicity. So why is diversity of both background and work-style so key? It enables a greater understanding of, and empathy with the organisations’ stakeholders, most especially customers. And the more a company is tuned into its customers, the more likely it’s prepared to invest in designing better customer services.

Why do we want access to the board table? I suspect the real answer is around the capacity to effect control. I look at this differently. Designers and sustainability leaders typically lead through influence rather than through direct command. And isn’t this what we really want? Soft power through influence that then builds momentum for positive change. Perhaps we need to rebuild our image of the designer more as an ego-less leader, shaping the organisational culture, building capacity for enterprise-wide innovation. Indeed, IDEO’s Tim Brown reminds us that Thomas Edison was not a lone genius, and took a team-based approach to innovation.

Are we seeing designers adopting this role of cultural change agent? Yes, there are notable cases, such as John Elkington’s paper exploring the role of corporate social intra.... Design thinking can play a substantive role as companies address structural macro-economic change (think retailers adapting from bricks to clicks); a reputational calamity; or the arrival of a new CEO looking to make their mark. Yet designers continue to claim that their voices are not being heard. Why is this? I’d suggest that often this is not the fault of the CEO nor the Board, but reflects the expectations of the owners of the company – the investors – who are typically rewarded for short term financial results. It’s also about the sometimes over-zealous expectations of designers themselves, who are often not satisfied with the success of small yet cumulative changes, preferring more substantive, highly visible and big impact (and typically high risk) change

So let’s re-frame our original question. How do we more effectively create a culture of design thinking at Board and Executive Committee levels? How do we begin to integrate this kind of thinking into leadership teams to create a better future? Fast Co Design writer and Parsons Design Professor Bruce Nussbaum argues that CEO and managers must know design thinking to do their jobs, in fact, he goes as far as to say it is the new management methodology and argues that it is key to sustainability – as an opportunity to drive revenue expansion and profit generation. It’s an argument that I’ve always stood behind – it’s not about the designer or the sustainability leader for that matter – but it’s about how effectively we influence and the new thinking that we embed into organisations and communities leading to better ways – and creating shared value.

What do you think?

Cross-posted from Pure and Applied