Leadership By Design 2017

Executive office has proven the hardest glass ceiling to break. Less than 5% of Fortune 1000 CEOs are women, just 18% of America’s mayors, 12% of governors and, of course, zero presidents. There’s a huge body of research that shows, whether it’s a legislature, a corporate board, a Navy ship, or an appellate court, when women reach between 20-30% of the leadership at any given organization it’s a tipping point and they begin to change how things are done – for the better. Jay shows where we’re reaching that tipping point – all three branches of the government – and the areas where we not – such as Silicon Valley and Wall Street, and why it’s important for us to get to critical mass across the board.

Design is now finding it has a seat at the leadership table, but is it/are you viewed as a practitioner of an arcane science that is called upon to facilitate business processes? Or, are you also routinely called upon to contribute to the overall business strategy at the company–wide or departmental level? Building strong, domain capability will maintain your status as a design expert, but it won’t lead to your being trusted as someone who can help build the overall business strategy. That requires a complementary set of skills.

Talk to any CEO in organizations small and large and she will tell you about the critical role technology—and design–play in that business’ success. Ask that same CEO to describe how the design functions contribute to the day-to-day operation and it’s likely she will describe an enabling or support role. Dr. Steve Julius will describe how you can contribute to significant value creation as a strategic business partner, while maintaining and even enhancing your status as a design expert.

Discovery, the first part of the design process, is crucial for aligning teams and leading them to design success. A well-aligned team works toward the same goal, and brings out the best in each other because they all understand what their trying to achieve.

Discovery can take many forms: a multi-month endeavor to prepare for a complex business application, or a four-day “sprint” to align the team around a vision for a new product. Whatever the form, however, teams are prepping and priming themselves to do detailed design and development work.

Discovery is complicated, chaotic, and messy. In discovery, teams gather information about the problem and then explore different ways to tackle it. Through critical thinking, they refine their understanding of the problem and zero-in on a concrete plan for execution. Discovery requires participants to shift attitudes and perspectives almost constantly. Team members go from “tell me more about” to “how about this idea” in the blink of an eye.

To pull this off successfully, team members need to embrace a discovery mindset. This attitude emphasizes learning. It relies on team members maintaining an open mind, questioning everything, and above all not taking themselves too seriously.

In this session, we’ll look at why this attitude is important, how it affects your team’s approach to discovery, and ways you can cultivate this mindset in yourself and those you lead.

Back in 2001, I quit a perfectly good job and founded a UX consulting firm in a garage (a cliché, I know, but it’s true). Sixteen years later, Centralis is a thriving research and design firm with a small but mighty staff of UXers dedicated to both our craft and the company. Along the way we’ve learned that designing a company isn’t so different from designing a product. In this talk, I’ll share some of the lessons we’ve learned through prototyping, gathering feedback, and iterating on our organization.

Congrats–you finally got promoted! You’ve gotten your seat at the table and now you’re learning that it’s no longer just about the work. It’s also about the politics within your own organization and the clients. These tips are what I have learned over the years–from Junior Art Director to Chief Creative Officer–and none of them involve kissing ass or sucking up. It’s all about empathy.

What happens when you’re asked to step-up and lead the work of the design team or to manage your fellow designers for the first time? Most of us envision ourselves sketching ideas, designing solutions, or prototyping our days away, forever in our happy place. And we’re no different–we had no idea what to expect, beyond knowing what we saw that we thought was good or… not so good. We became new design managers and had to learn how to navigate our new responsibilities–to our boss and to our former peers–while trying to lead others to be successful as designers.

We faced a lot of challenges, and learned a lot about ourselves, our teams, and our boss. We’re going to share some tools and techniques that have helped us become better at leading our teams, and delivering to those who count on all of us. And we’re still working on becoming the best bosses in the world.

The lack of diversity in design organizations is a fact that we can design for. We can drive innovation and increase creativity, but we have to be honest about what’s holding us back. Eli Silva will outline ways to design cultures that support design thinking, organizational growth, and diversity in the workplace.

Great design is the result of hard work and cultures that foster empathy, creativity, listening, and honest conversations. These happen to be the groundwork for diversity, so why is diversity still such a challenge in technology and in design organizations in particular?

In this talk you will learn practical steps toward designing for diversity—including quick tips on how to audit your processes and practices today. Learn how to effectively consider minorities and underrepresented groups in your approach to hiring, everyday work, and leadership development. The result of diverse design organizations is products that increasingly reflect actual people, across the age, gender, and income spectrum. That’s something worth working for.

Every seasoned designer has fallen into the trap. They see the bad design in front of them. They can’t help but see how bad it is. And they want to redesign it. Show the world how it could be done. How it should be done.

Well-intentioned as the desire to rid the world of this bad design is, their approach often is a disaster. It pushes their allies away, accidentally giving off the air of superiority filled with the smells of arrogance and contempt.

An alternative is a well-designed process for creating your designs. The secret sauce in that well-designed process is a realization and inclusiveness of everyone on the team. It’s infused with an understanding of how people contribute to the design process, even when they aren’t trained in design skills. And it opens up opportunities to give everyone—not just your trained designers—the superpowers necessary to rid your products and services of bad design.

This talk will inspire you and your team to:

Realize the reason everyone thinks they are a designer is they are a designer, however unskilled
Learn that our design processes need to be designed, with intention and thoughtfulness
Focus on helping every contributing influencer of your designs become a consciously competent designer themselves