40: Beyond the Process: The Human Work of Design Maturity
Why Culture, Curiosity, and Courage Matter More Than Headcount
Four individuals in vibrant hues face a cracked digital screen, confronting pixelated reflections of themselves. The image explores identity, fragmentation, and collective perception in a tech-saturated world. Created by author using OpenAI’s DALL·E
"Design doesn’t just imagine the future—it holds a mirror to the present. And in that reflection, we find both the resistance to change and the invitation to grow."
In today’s volatile political and social climate, many search for clarity, often turning to history as a mirror to understand how we arrived at this moment. What becomes evident is a recurring pattern: change, whether technological, cultural, or ideological, is almost always met with resistance. That same dynamic plays out in our organizations. Design, in particular, is caught in the tension between reflection and reinvention.
Design has always held a dual role: defining the future while reflecting on what is. We hold up the mirror to the systems people live within—surfacing contradictions, gaps, and unmet needs. At the same time, we sketch the outlines of new possibilities, nudging people and businesses toward more human futures. But that act of imagination demands something uncomfortable: a breaking from efficiency-optimized structures and a willingness to disrupt familiar metrics.
In many companies, design is mid-level maturity—respected in theory yet still constrained by the scaffolding of legacy business logic. Growth roles are proliferating, and designers are being hired in greater numbers. Yet true transformation isn’t about headcount; it’s about mindset. It requires dismantling silos and moving from hierarchical, efficiency-driven operating models to dynamic ecosystems rooted in collaboration, learning, and adaptability.
Design leadership isn’t about scaling teams or refining processes alone. It’s about cultivating the conditions for change—re-architecting the cultural norms that shape decisions, how problems are framed, and whose voices are included. That’s a profoundly political act. It challenges the dominant models of success and asks us to measure value not just by speed or revenue, but by resilience, inclusion, and long-term relevance.
So we find ourselves here: designing better products and redesigning the organizations that build them. If history teaches us anything, moments of upheaval are also moments of possibility. Design can be the mirror and the blueprint—but only if we’re brave enough to lead not from certainty but from curiosity, context, and care.
The Cycle of Resistance: A Historical Lens
History reminds us that progress is rarely a straight line. From the Industrial Revolution to the dawn of the Internet, and now the age of AI, each seismic shift follows a familiar human script—less about technology and more about our relationship with power, identity, and the fear of becoming obsolete.
Nowhere is this tension more visible than in design. Design is inherently bespoke, unlike other disciplines that scale through repetition and standardization. It is contextual, often intangible, and deeply rooted in human experience. That makes it harder to measure—and easier to marginalize. While engineering solves for feasibility and business solves for viability, design asks the messier question: Is this desirable? Is this meaningful?
That question threatens established ways of working. True design transformation isn’t about installing tools or hiring more designers. It’s about reimagining how value is defined, decisions are made, and power is distributed across an organization.
The Provocation: Design introduces something unfamiliar—whether it’s a new way of framing a problem, a more inclusive research method, or a speculative prototype that challenges current assumptions. This provocation doesn’t just ask for feedback—it asks for change, and change rarely feels comfortable to those invested in the status quo. In organizations, this might involve bringing ethnographic insights into a quantitative culture or pushing for accessibility in an environment optimized for speed. The provocation seems small, but its implications are system-wide.
The Pushback: Resistance follows, not always in direct opposition, but often through subtle undermining: ROI skepticism, deprioritized roadmaps, or the quiet sidelining of design leadership. It’s rarely about the work or the threat to authority, legacy, and control. This is when design maturity reveals whether the organization embraces friction as a sign of progress or treats it as a signal to retreat.
The Drift: Without clear resolve, things stall. Design rituals continue, but the intent behind them erodes. Personas are created but never referenced. Workshops are held, but they are never acted on. Strategy becomes theater. Design is present, but not trusted—seen more as a service than a partner. Talented designers start to disengage or leave. This is the most dangerous phase—not because nothing’s happening, but because the illusion of progress masks cultural decay.
The Reset (or Rupture). Eventually, the tension reaches a breaking point. The organization either recommits—realigning around new values, new ways of working, and design-led sensemaking—or it fractures—key talent exits. Teams dissolve. Trust evaporates. But when the reset happens with intention, driven by humility, listening, and systems thinking, design doesn’t just recover. It leads. And the organization emerges more adaptive, coherent, and human-centered than before.
Design Maturity Isn’t Just About Process—It’s About People
Many companies now recognize the value of design. They invest in hiring, roll out design systems, run workshops, and implement research protocols. But these efforts, while necessary, are not sufficient. True design maturity isn’t about better processes but more profound organizational change. And that change begins with people.
Design is emotional work. It requires vulnerability, curiosity, and the courage to ask questions no one else asks. Organizations must foster conditions beyond tools and templates to happen consistently and at scale. Specifically, they must invest in four cultural foundations:
Psychological Safety: Great design challenges the status quo. It surfaces friction points in customer journeys, reveals systemic exclusion, and questions long-standing assumptions. However, none of that is possible if teams prioritize harmony over honesty. In mature design cultures, designers aren’t afraid to raise difficult questions in executive meetings. Researchers feel confident presenting uncomfortable truths. Product managers welcome critical feedback—not because it’s easy, but because it’s valued. Without psychological safety, design becomes decorative. With it, it becomes transformative.
Leadership Buy-In (Not Just Approval) True design maturity is visible in work and leadership behavior. When executives model user-centric decision-making—when they ask for insights, show up to research readouts, or pause to reconsider assumptions—design becomes part of the organization’s strategic rhythm.
This goes beyond funding or headcount. It means using design as a lens for value creation, measurement, and communication. In immature organizations, design reports up. In mature ones, design informs direction.
Cross-Functional Collaboration: Silos kill creativity. When design is relegated to the “service lane,” teams may deliver outputs, not outcomes. Design maturity means designers, engineers, researchers, and business leaders working in tandem from problem framing to solution deployment.
This isn’t just about working together—it’s about thinking together. Shared goals, shared metrics, and shared ownership of success. When design is embedded early, it helps shape the right questions. It’s forced to fix the wrong problems when it’s bolted on late. Mid-maturity organizations often struggle here. They’ve moved beyond the “agency model” of outsourcing design but haven’t yet embedded it into their DNA. The result? Tension between “the way we’ve always done things” and the future they claim to want.
Growth Pathways for Veteran Designers: It’s easy for a new design leader to enter an organization and quickly spot skill gaps. What’s harder—and more meaningful—is resisting the urge to rebuild from scratch. Don’t replace institutional wisdom—renew it. Invest in legacy team members, not just to upskill them, but to reorient them as champions of what’s next.
Many senior ICs and mid-career designers have built the scaffolding that makes current growth possible. They may not yet speak the language of systems thinking or AI ethics, but they’ve mastered stakeholder relationships, organizational history, and the often-invisible scaffolding that makes progress possible.
The goal isn’t just to upskill; it’s to shift mindsets, to help people adopt new ways of thinking, and ultimately advocate for them. When these team members feel seen, supported, and stretched—not left behind—they become the very catalysts of transformation others thought they would resist.
Moving from Resistance to Reinvention
If history teaches us anything, resistance is not a failure of strategy—it’s a feature of change. But we can interrupt the cycle. We can design new responses. And it starts by shifting from reaction to reflection.
Name the Resistance: Change doesn’t fail because the idea is bad. It fails when people feel blindsided or unheard. As design leaders, our job isn’t to bulldoze over objections but to get curious about them. Why are people resisting? Is it fear of becoming obsolete? Loss of status? A threat to how they’ve always defined success? Name the resistance without judgment. When we acknowledge the emotional weight of change, we create space for trust to grow. This is how transformation starts: not with blueprints, but with empathy.
Reframe the Narrative. Too often, design is framed as a disruptor—as the “new” that must replace the “old.” But this binary framing breeds defensiveness. What if, instead, we positioned design as a bridge? A way to honor what has worked while evolving what no longer serves us. Design is not here to replace—it’s here to reconnect people to systems, teams to purpose, and organizations to their future relevance. Evolution, not disruption. Progress, not erasure. That’s the story people will rally behind.
Invest in Culture, Not Just Talent: Workshops, toolkits, and design sprints are only as powerful as the cultural soil they’re planted in. You can’t seed design thinking in an organization clinging to top-down decision-making and fear-based performance cultures. Hiring great designers is not enough. If leaders don’t walk the walk and create the conditions for autonomy, experimentation, and cross-functional trust, then even the most talented team will wither. Culture is what sustains design when the projects end. Invest there.
Build Adaptive Capacity, Not Just Efficiency. Resilient organizations don’t resist change—they metabolize it. They don’t cling to efficiency at the expense of learning; instead, they design for adaptability. That means creating honest, fast, and inclusive feedback loops. It means resourcing learning and reflection as real work. It means elevating long-tenured team members and new voices, not as competitors but as collaborators in transformation. Adaptation isn’t a one-time pivot—it’s a muscle. And like any muscle, it grows with repeated, intentional use.
Embracing the Discomfort
The most resilient organizations—and societies—are not those that avoid discomfort. They’re the ones who move through it with curiosity, transparency, and courage. The same applies to us as design leaders. Our job isn’t just to advocate for better products. It’s to foster cultures where change is met not with fear, but with possibility.
History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes. And each time it does, we’re offered a choice: to react or to redesign. The question isn’t whether resistance will happen—it’s how we’ll meet it when it does.
Will we default to protectionism? Or will we choose the more challenging, braver path of building teams, cultures, and systems that grow not despite but through resistance?
