Leadership By Design 2019

Announcements and gratitude, schedule for the day, and general information about the event.

In this powerful talk, STEM advocate and tech leader, Jamila Parham shares her story to inspire audiences to seize their maximum potential, champion tech equity and move beyond inspiration to actionable change.

To be effective, to be inspiring, to drive results, leaders need a strategy for building and maintaining relationships. As practitioners, we spend our careers perfecting our craft. Until the day we’re promoted to a “leadership position,” and suddenly craft expertise isn’t enough to get things done.

Of course we still need our skills. And we need organizational influence just as much. Good work alone doesn’t speak for itself, as rarely does speaking for yourself alone.

It’s that right balance of craft and influence that is the difference between becoming Paul Revere and becoming William Dawes.

Who was William Dawes?

Exactly.

15 minute break.

It can be a struggle to make the practice of design truly influential. Between engaging with engineering methodologies, negotiating the boundaries of design ownership with product management, and arguing for the value of design-led business decisions (not to mention managing their own people), design leaders find it difficult to gain ground for their team.

There are approaches you can learn from and/or use to train your team to detect and leverage underlying organizational systems by tuning in to competing goals and process nuances. Armed with this—and a healthy sense of collaboration and allyship with other groups—your sharks can achieve influence in their own right and magnify yours.

1 hour and 5 minute break.

This January, I challenged myself to go the entire year without purchasing clothes. If I wanted some new pants or shirt, I had to make it myself. The kicker? I did not know how to sew. That’s right, I needed to start from scratch in a new field, or the only new clothes I would have would be the emperor’s.

I’ve been a designer for over 15 years and sometimes it’s easy to forget how it feels to be a beginner. It’s both unnerving and exciting at the same time. Learn about my successes, failures, and unexpected learnings making my own clothes for the past year.

This is not a threat. It’s an informative reminder. Join us for a reading of the book by the author and illustrator, who will likely be wearing bird hats in spite of the fact that this is a grown up event. We’ll touch on the importance of resilience and the gift of being able to control our reactions to things we have no control over.

Should I stay or should I go? When chaos reigns supreme in our organizations and the layers of systems that exist within them, it can negatively impact our own experience and the experience of the people we manage. When that happens, we start to question whether we’re in the right place, even when we love our teammates and our work. But is the grass necessarily greener elsewhere?

There are plenty of reasons for organizational chaos: bureaucratic structures and politics, limited vision, guidance and clarity, and poor processes are some of the biggest challenges we face. Trying to navigate organizations when chaos abounds is stressful, and often leads to burnout.

Fortunately, there are ways to manage through this before burnout happens—to you or your team. I’ve spent over 20 years researching and working with all types of organizations—from publicly traded companies to nonprofits to governments and everything in between to uncover four key methods to analyze your experience, disrupt it, and make empowered choices moving forward.

30 minute break.

Stepping into leadership positions heralds a change in our roles and responsibilities, and often includes a shift from hands-on design to more strategic and operational management. At this level our success depends on a thorough understanding of the business and partnering with departments across the organization. But what does design look like when we’re no longer designing products and services? What are we designing?

As we navigate these new realms it can be hard to find the language to bridge the logic of business with the sensemaking of design. How can we be good business partners and designers? Faced with a lack of intelligibility between the two realms it can feel like we have to choose one or the other. Together we’ll explore the relationship between business and design, examine ways to resolve tensions between the two realms, and check out a new lens through which to understand the value of design.

Even with a grand seat at the table, big decisions hinge on two overlooked factors 1) who at the table has the most power? and 2) how can they be influenced? Designers notoriously overlook how their lack of political acumen cripples their ability to make good design happen. But fear not: this fast paced talk based on the critical situations that impact designers teaches a situational playbook for turning things around.

Wrapping up the day.

Everyone wants to hire great talent. But how do we define great? Does that change over time? How do you know you’re recruiting and hiring the right people? How do you retain and develop talent, giving your team meaning, purpose, and ownership?

In the Design Career Journey, we’ll explore a framework for recruiting, retaining, and developing top talent—including the common question of “Should I go into management?”

Everyone wants everything, and they want it their way. Sometimes, it feels like you’re choosing your battles on a daily basis–from working with humans who have different motivations to trying to meet seemingly impossible goals with even more impossible deadlines.

I’m not going to tell you I’ve seen it all, however, I am going to tell you that as a political fundraiser, I’ve seen a lot, I’ve been underestimated a lot, and I’ve exceeded a lot of expectations. I’ve even stood my ground when it could have been easier to take a different path!

We’ll explore approaches to making choices based on the right reasons and for the right causes; maximizing your resources; and how to ultimately hold that chosen hill when it’s time to dig in. I’ll share my approach to isolating the factors worth considering and negotiating the best outcomes based upon the constraints you’ve been dealt–and how to make everyone feel like they’re winning something, even when it requires both sides giving up a little.

30 minute break.

Sometimes you ask for something for so long that you’re not quite sure what to do with it once you get it. Many design leaders now find themselves with more responsibility, greater influence, and improved autonomy to lead their practices as they see best–and all while under the watchful eye of people who were willing to take the risk (and who also might not be willing to see it fail even the slightest). It’s a lot–there are relationships to manage across teams and departments, leadership to manage and keep informed of progress, and then the Human Resources obligations that frequently feel less-than-human and that take more time than anyone every thought.

When we understand how to scale our teams (up AND down), how to elevate our design maturity within our practices and within the organization, we can set ourselves up to better succeed as design leaders. These aren’t new challenges–they’re only new to us, and there are approaches to explore from successes and failures within the design industry and from those who came before us, as well as those who are alongside us now.

The Things We Don’t Say workshop is a program designed to teach individuals how to understand self-care and be supportive to proactive mental health care for others. We press the discussion about stigma, its impact on individuals and communities, and teach practical skills for early recognition of mental health challenges that often go unaddressed due to the silence of stigma, building to a crisis stage. Through Peer-to-peer Proactive Prevention, we can disrupt the highest risk factors before the crisis stage.

When we interview for a new role, design leaders frequently are not screened and evaluated the way other leaders in a company might be. In my most recent search, I tapped into a vast network of other design leaders and solicited their best advice. I leveraged their advice so effectively that well-known companies fought for me based on my skills as a leader, not a maker.

When design leaders search for new opportunities we are confronted with a market that doesn’t know where to place us internally or how to hire us. We face well-intentioned yet naïve requests for artifacts and exercises, all while being evaluated by people who don’t know what good design leadership looks like. I’ll regale you with tales from my experiences so we can all learn to elevate the design leadership hiring process!

Years of 80+ hour weeks finally took their toll on me, and I lost complete control of my bipolar, and subsequently who I was. I forgot that my good fortune as the son of a 15-year-old Italian immigrant exposed me to a connection with food and the earth seldom found in this country. I knew that I needed to get back to having my hands in the dirt and growing my food. Fast forward to farming 35+ hours a week while still holding down a VP level position at a leading start-up, and six years later running a farm with my wife and son.

Ham Sweet Farm is now a 30 member meat CSA, which stands for Community-Supported Agriculture, and one of a handful of small farms across the country working to preserve and save the American Guinea Hog, a heritage hog breed considered “threatened” by The Livestock Conservancy. In addition to the CSA, you’ll find Ham Sweet Farm pork on menus from anywhere from mid-Michigan to Chicago.

The foundation for good work is established by creating an environment that sets people up for success. We all need to be held accountable while being creatively stimulated and having strong guidelines around our work ethics and habits, and how we work together, regardless of our location.

As leaders, we’re responsible for establishing this foundational bedrock. We’ll explore a series of thoughtfully designed pillars that you can use as your foundation to enable the full potential of your teams to be realized.

30 minute break.

When confronted with challenges, whether professional or personal, we often ask some variation of this question: “How do I do [this scary, difficult, yet necessary thing] without actually having to experience any discomfort or take any risks?” As a speaker and design leader, I get asked some version of this question every time I give a talk or work with new team struggling to change.

Obviously, the answer is: you can’t. There is plenty of discussion right now of the necessity of getting comfortable with discomfort, but very little actual guidance on how that process works. Instead, we hear tales of transformation that follow a vague formula of initiating events, challenges faced, victories won. These stories can be inspiring, but beyond that, they don’t provide much help for people struggling to take the leap out of their comfort zone. Without any practical guidance, many people hesitate and wait, static and stagnant, choosing to be careful instead curious.

I’ll outline a step-by-step approach for pushing outside our comfort zones and expanding our experiences. I’ll start by contrasting the perception of how our comfort zones serve us with the very different reality of how they work against us. I’ll blast through the most common excuses we have for staying put versus moving forward. We’ll explore simple, tactical ways to push through our resistance, move past our fears, and nurture the courage to design better relationships and make more authentic choices, in our careers, and our lives.

Changing times require new kinds of leadership. This talk will explore “Facilitating Structures”, a different lens for all we do—especially as designers and design leaders, where our role increasingly resembles that of an educator, as we work through and with cross-disciplinary teams. Stephen P. Anderson will share the learning journey he’s been on and why it’s time to reboot how we think about shaping organizations.