Design's Stance Toward Uncertainty

Show Notes

When the old ways no longer hold and the new hasn’t taken shape, you’re in a liminal moment. Peter and Jesse explore what it means to lead through that in-between space—navigating uncertainty without retreating to the past, letting go of what defined you, and finding opportunity in the chaos rather than being consumed by it.

More about Peter: https://petermerholz.com/
More about Jesse: https://jessejamesgarrett.com/

Transcript

Jesse: I’m Jesse James Garrett,

Peter: and I’m Peter Merholz.

Jesse: And we’re finding our way,

Peter: navigating the opportunities

Jesse: and challenges

Peter: of design and design leadership.

Jesse: This is Liminal.

When the old ways no longer hold sway, but the new have not yet taken shape, you find yourself in the Liminal Moment. On today’s show, Peter and I build on some of the themes in our recent conversations to ask, what do you do when you’re caught in between the past and the future, and how do you lead others through it?

Peter: So Jesse,

Jesse: Hello Peter.

Introducing “Liminal”

Peter: I wanted to have a conversation… and the conversation starts with an episode that we recorded about a year and a half ago now, maybe a little more called, The Phase Shift, where we recognized that changes are afoot in how design is showing up in businesses and how leaders are able to lead.

There had been this set of assumptions around design and it’s kind of steady growth for quite a while. And then a few years ago, those assumptions have been convulsed, even before AI. Things like layoffs and other discombobulation. AI has further exacerbated that, such that it’s not clear where things are headed.

I was just at an event last night with a bunch of design leaders and that’s still the conversation we’re having. It’s like, where is this all going?

And everybody has their own thoughts on what’s next for design. And then, you and I, three months ago, gave a keynote for the Service Design Global Conference that was drawing from our experiences on Finding Our Way, where we were exploring this thing that we had called “The Phase Shift.”

And we talked to a bunch of people and we distilled those conversations. And coming out of that, we had identified a set of, like, conditions that we’re moving from and heading to as design leaders: moving from kind of an over-reliance on craft and towards things like a business readiness, moving from being so rooted in our identity and towards, a multidisciplinary engagement.

And then this concept just kept not going away. And in fact, I had an insight.

I was teaching my masterclass where I have this idea of “mediate the membrane.” And the concept there is that design leaders sit in between these two spaces.

One of the design team that they’re leading, which is a very generative, creative, ambiguous, emotional, human-centered space. And then the rest of the organization that they’re operating in, which tends to be bureaucratic, tends to be very corporate, tends to be business-centered, tends to be data-driven and business-oriented.

And I realized there was a parallel in my mind between that kind of navigating this uncertainty between how design has been and where design is going, and then navigating these spaces as a design leader.

And I said to you, there’s something about this idea of “liminal” that feels right. We’re operating in a liminal moment, and we’ve then off-mic, but now on-mic, been unpacking that.

And I’m curious, I’ll stop my little monologue here, but hand it over to you to pick up, kind of as we’ve been having these conversations, what have you been picking up on in terms of these threads?

Jesse: Well, I think there’s the practical reality of the liminal moment that we find ourselves in now. And then there is the kind of the broader concept of how we approach liminality generally.

So if the liminal space is the space between contexts, it is the corner that we turn from one way of seeing things to a different way of seeing things, in a lot of ways, this hearkens back to some of the ideas in the book that you and I worked on many years ago for Adaptive Path called Subject to Change, where the subtitle was “creating great products and services for an uncertain world.”

And in a lot of ways the thesis of that book had to do with practical guidance for managing uncertainty when you don’t know what’s going to change and when.

And I think that this space that design leaders have found themselves in over the last couple of years has been this kind of lingering liminality, where it’s clear that the old paradigms are kind of falling away. That the ways of thinking about and structuring and approaching and valuing this work that used to hold sway, don’t hold sway anymore. And we are at a bit of a loss for what replaces that.

But in the meantime, we’re just kind of swimming toward the new together. And I think that one of the things that comes to mind for me in this is the particular stress, strain, burden that this places on leaders specifically.

Obviously you and I talk a lot about leaders and their needs and the challenges of that role, and I just notice how for the leaders that liminality is felt at an extra acute level because of the scale of their responsibility, because of the people under their stewardship, under their care that they need to take into account in their choices.

They’re not choosing for themselves the way that an individual practitioner might be, in the face of changing expectations, changing value propositions, changing tool sets, and so forth.

Hunkering Down

Peter: Well, I mean on that front I’ve actually heard from a few folks recently, the conversations with design leaders where one of their primary objectives right now is to quote, protect their team, save their team. Primarily in the face of potential layoffs or other things, right?

And they’re losing sight of whatever it is that the business they are part of is trying to achieve, which might be why layoffs are happening, right? There might be some broader business challenges or a different strategy or whatever. And they’re finding themselves almost like hunkering down and like, how do I protect this group, you know, that they feel some responsibility to, they’ve hired them up, they’ve been working with them.

It’s their team. It’s their it’s guys and gals or whatever, which is, as I think about it, not a healthy kind of approach to this. You start to sacrifice yourself. You start to twist yourself in knots, often around forces larger than your control.

Jesse: Martyrdom complexes.

Peter: Exactly. You’re kind of taking on your team member’s burden as your own or something in this martyrdom way. None of which is healthy.

I think one of the things, as I’ve been poking at this concept of liminality, it evidently causes anxiety, right? There’s a lot of people we talk to, there’s a lot of dialogue out there that folks are…

Jesse: Stressed.

Uncertainty is Opportunity

Peter: Stressed. Upset. Angry. Whether they are responding directly to the circumstances, or you can read it into however they’re talking about whatever it is they’re talking about, whether it’s AI or the job market or other things. And understandably so.

But, you know, you mentioned the Adaptive Path book, And, where the thesis of that book is, Hey, when you’re in these moments of uncertainty, there’s a set of tools that you can use that we in design have developed to help navigate, make sense of, even perhaps take advantage of or thrive in this uncertain space, right?

Design tools are great for de-fuzzing uncertainty and bringing clarity and navigating ambiguity. Like, sit with that ambiguity, but don’t just wallow in it.

And one of the themes of that talk that you and I gave in Dallas, right in the middle, was “uncertainty is opportunity,” right?

We often feel as uncertainty is a negative, is this thing that… A lot of people retreat from uncertainty. Like, when they approach that liminal moment, when they realize liminality is happening, they try to go back to the way things were and they’re hunkered down and try to not move forward.

Whereas the opportunity in this liminal moment is to figure out how to use the tools you have at your disposal, how to be resourceful, and how to make sense of this uncertainty that’s coming.

Because, I guess the other thing is, it’s not just designers, right? Many… Everybody seems to be in a moment like this.

And again, I think designers, when they’re not operating from that stance of fear or anxiety, can actually be leaders, can be facilitators. I don’t wanna say guiders, I don’t wanna suggest we know the answer, but we can bring people along towards whatever that new reality is.

Jesse: Well, design ideally has a different stance, a different relationship to uncertainty than a lot of other functions, because design’s role in many ways is to drive clarity and to drive cross-functional understanding of what’s actually going on with users and what actually constitutes the patterns that lead to product success.

One thing that I find interesting within this is the way in which for design leaders, you know, it’s kind of like the shoe is on the other foot now, because, you know, you and I have had a lot of conversations with design leaders on this show over the last several years in which they talked about the need to advocate for change and the need to push organizations beyond their current ways of thinking, beyond their current ways of doing things to introduce new paradigms, to create liminality for their coworkers and for their stakeholders and for their cross-functional partners.

And now when that liminality is coming from outside, suddenly it’s a leadership challenge. So I mean, there are some ways in which, yeah, what we’re talking about is kind of change management, but it’s also change management from the perspective of someone who maybe doesn’t have as much direct control over the change as designers are used to having in terms of what they advocate for inside organizations.

Transformation Management != Change Management

Peter: Yeah, we’ve talked at length about change management in the past and something that helped me understand perhaps a bit about what’s going on now and what mindset to bring actually comes from work I did a number of years ago at Kaiser Permanente and, a colleague, I had Sami Packard who studied change management.

And something she pointed out to me is there’s a difference between change management and transformation management that I think is perhaps relevant here, right?

Change management is when an organization goes from one way of being or working to a new way of being or working, that is pretty well understood, right?

They call it agile transformation, but it’s really agile change because we know how agile works. We know that structure of the teams and the processes and rituals and behaviors and the tooling and all that. And it’s a matter of kind of getting everyone off of one way of doing things and into a new way of doing things.

Transformation management is more applicable though because it’s what we’re dealing with when you’re dealing with liminality, which is you don’t know what’s coming, right? When you’re transforming, you don’t know into what, necessarily.

You might have some idea of the kind of impact you want to have or something, but the shape, the behaviors, how it works, that’s what you’re needing to discover.

Which again, is one of those areas where design should be a great practice to lead through that because design is about making sense of that opportunity space.

Something else that’s occurring to me when you talked about the shoe is on the other foot. I was hanging out with a bunch of design leaders last night and one of them used to be very active in leading sprints at Google 20 years ago. And something he pointed out in his current experience that he’s witnessed is the degree to which designers have trouble diverging before they converge. Like we have to remind ourselves.

So when we think of the double diamond, right, people have been in the last year or two, to my taste, a little too willing to throw out the double diamond. “Process is over, we’re… new ways of working.”

And to me that was a misread of the double diamond. ‘Cause the double diamond’s very simple. And it basically states before you decide what to do, you give yourself an opportunity to think about a lot of options, and you choose from them as opposed to whatever that first idea you had you ram through.

That’s all the double diamond is about, is make sure that you provide your own optionality. And I think, maybe as a reaction to velocity, as a reaction to pressures, or whatever, we’re losing sight of that divergent step. But when you don’t know what your future holds, you want to give yourself a as many potential futures as possible that you can start trying to choose from. And then identify which seems to be the most enabling, productive, helpful way forward.

Jesse: That’s an interesting perspective because if I reflect back to when we were back in Adaptive Path and we were offering a lot of these things into the market for the first time as consultants…

So, I was the head of our strategy practice, and one of the things that really came to mind for me was that we had to have a way of demonstrating why you would hire a designer to do strategy work.

And for me it always came back to that designers can imagine possibilities to a different degree, to a different depth potentially, across a broader range of possibilities than you might get from somebody who has a different kind of a background.

And as I think about how that applies here, it suggests that design strategy may have more to offer now than it has in recent years because we’re moving beyond the most recent batch of best practices into new territory that requires a return to that kind of exploration.

You know, when I think about the pressure that’s put on these teams to just kind of, like, skip that first half of the diamond and just power through the convergent thinking toward a solution, what that suggests to me is that somebody’s already decided that the front half of that diamond is already a solved problem. That you’re operating in a problem space where you feel like the constraints are relatively known.

And now that we’re moving into these deeper unknowns, especially with AI technology, but also with the evolution of business models and other kinds of things that are going on all around us, design might have a value proposition now that is much closer to what design had to offer in 2005 than it had in 2020.

Is the Time for Vision Over?

Peter: So this puts me in mind of the conversation we had with Peter Skillman, who is the chief design officer at Philips Design, and who in some ways said the opposite, right? And we had this conversation with him about a year ago. It was January of, 2025.

And something he believed is like the time for vision, and you could infer the time for strategy, is maybe… not over, but is diminished. To paraphrase what he said, we’ve done a lot of work developing visions. Now we need to start executing against them and with this new set of AI tools, and the access to execution that is just more prevalent, like, let’s lean in and make and create and, not quite define the future, but deliver the future almost directly.

But, where I’m coming to this now is, and I think it holds with liminality in some way…

What you’re saying about strategy, you know, is in some ways, I don’t wanna say in conflict, but in some opposition to what Peter was arguing around the work of design right now.

And I wonder if we’re in like a bifurcated moment to a degree that we’re not quite recognizing, right?

Because design, and this has been true, you mentioned back at Adaptive Path and people didn’t know that design could be a lever for helping you with strategy or whatever.

But design maybe being a slippery word, a slippery concept that you are always having to define it, because when you say the word design, people have different thoughts in their heads, and perhaps people are talking past each other, where there’s a group of people who are like, yes, it’s about designers working in code, skipping Figma and LLMing their ways to prototypes with live data, and that’s design.

But I think what you’re saying is, well, wait a moment, we don’t know where this is heading. There’s an opportunity for design to be even earlier than maybe we had thought design needed to be, in making sense of the space that we’re operating in, at a much higher altitude.

And these maybe are just two very different things that we happen to label design.

Jesse: Well, I think you’re absolutely right that the digital design field is more heterogeneous than it ever has been in our entire careers. There is a greater diversity of design challenges. There’s a greater diversity of design mandates. There’s a greater diversity of design staffing and process models. It’s just a wider field out there than ever before.

You and I tend to gravitate toward the needs of large enterprises because those have been our clients historically. Those tend to be the spaces that you and I work in. One thing I’ll say about what came out of the Peter Skillman discussion is that I think he’s describing a particular kind of vision work that I agree is behind us, because it is this idea of design as spearhead of a singular vision for a product.

And you know, these C-levels will come down to the head of design and say, show me what my product looks like in five years and give us that North Star and then we’ll build our whole big machine toward that as an outcome.

Whereas the strategic need for design right now is less about, tell me what you know is gonna be true in five years time, but rather help me explore what none of us knows about what’s gonna happen in the next five years. And be a facilitator, a partner, a participant in that creative exploration of possible futures that is going to be necessary for these organizations to be able to make strategic bets.

Because ultimately the change that’s happening is not just happening to design, and it’s not just happening to digital. It’s happening to entire business models and entire competitive spaces.

And that’s gonna continue. It’s gonna get worse. And we’re gonna see some big names go down unexpectedly because somebody got caught off guard by a scenario that they didn’t see coming.

The Work of Strategic Design

Peter: What do you see, though, because you mentioned design strategy, strategic design as a thing we’re tacking back to, but if strategic design is not about articulating a vision of our offering five years from now, which is how it’s often been considered, what do you see as the work of strategic design?

Jesse: I come back to that notion of driving clarity, of answering the answerable, and identifying that which needs deeper exploration.

And, you know, some people would call that product strategy, some people would call that user research. In lots of organizations, design simply doesn’t have permission to even ask these kinds of questions that I’m talking about.

But I do believe that it is within Design’s skillset, within design’s purview to have a point of view on these kinds of questions.

Peter: Well that actually reminds me of a different thing that Peter said that turned into a little, I dunno about argument, but back and forth on LinkedIn, which is whether or not design belongs in the C-suite.

‘Cause something he said on our show, and then he’s reiterated it in LinkedIn is that he thinks design doesn’t belong reporting directly into the C-suite, because that ends up getting design involved in a lot of conversations where design doesn’t belong, around strategic investment decisions. You know, we’ve got billions of dollars to spend, what are we spending it on?

Whereas I thought, and I think maybe what you’re suggesting is, why isn’t design involved in that conversation?

Or rather, why isn’t someone with a design background, a human-centered comfort in ambiguity, exploratory, generative point of view, don’t we want someone with that point of view in that room? When if they’re not in that room, literally everyone else in that room is, going to have a very narrow point of view on how to approach solving that problem.

Which suggests maybe, I dunno if this is liminal, but I guess it’s part of the liminality of a potential path forward for design is to be not quite, you know, the CFO, the CPO, something like that, but closer to it.

Where your, at least, certain design leaders or, very senior design teams helping companies figure out how to expend their resources, right?

Which is kind of the fundamental thing that the C-Suite does, right?

The C-suite has a bunch of resources at hand, and they’re placing bets on what makes sense for them in terms of their future.

And that would be a different role for design, and the designers in that room would need to augment their skillset so that they could be credible.

But I also think their point of view, given all the confusion and discombobulation, I would hope that it would be welcome because they can help that other group of people make better decisions with the toolkit that they can bring into that discussion.

The Value Proposition of Design

Jesse: Yeah, so what that brings me back around to is where the liminality is actually happening in the digital design space. And honestly, I think this applies in the product space as well.

The areas that we’re talking about, what you and I would define as design strategy, a lot of people would call product strategy. And a lot of people would say, this stuff should live in a product organization, and product people should be driving these kinds of processes.

That aspect of it is much less interesting to me than the forces that these teams find themselves subjected to now.

So one of the big shifts that has happened is we went through this massive wave of layoffs following the pandemic. As interest rates changed, as corporate priorities changed, as the ways of measuring the value of this work changed in a lot of organizations, design became seen as a time sink, a cost center, a friction point in a development process that needed to move more fluidly than that.

In those contexts, you’re looking at one way of evaluating what design is and what design has to offer that may be entirely valid and relevant within that context. You’ve got people thinking about these other parts of the challenge.

But then I think it does become about the value proposition of design as a function itself and what design is there to do.

Again, so what we’re looking at is reduced team sizes, reduced budgets for professional development, reduced tolerance for exploration and experimentation within design process. Fewer opportunities for design leaders to move up in organizations, and ceilings over them that previously weren’t there or weren’t apparent.

Where you have… head of design is not gonna ever be higher than a director level at certain organizations, so there’s a cap on that power.

And then on top of all of this stuff, we’ve now got AI.

And as you know, for the last year, I’ve been doing a lot of work around AI transformation and supporting teams with understanding how to make sense of this new tooling and how to bring it into their processes in ways that are meaningful.

And this is what it comes back to, meaningful to the value that they see themselves delivering to the larger organization.

So the liminal moment then becomes much more than a moment. It becomes a process. It becomes a journey of exploration, reexamination, and potentially reeducation of your cross-functional partners, your executive leadership, your stakeholders about what design actually is and can bring to the table.

Because if they continue to put you in that delivery box, that is increasingly looking like a commoditized offering that doesn’t, to your point, have a lot of strategic traction.

Peter: Two thoughts based on what you were just talking about.

Which actually touches on something we discussed when we had the Phase Shift episode.

Which is, people in design will inhibit their ability to navigate this liminal moment if they are unwilling to let go of their identity as a designer.

And so when you were talking about the ceilings that some folks are hitting, which is happening, it’s not universal.

In some places there’s new VPs of design and in other places where they had chief design officers, now all they have is like three directors reporting into product people. It’s a mixed bag.

But let’s talk about those three directors now reporting into product people. If that design director is willing to sacrifice their identity as a designer in order to advance… Okay, you can’t advance as a designer, but perhaps like Leslie Witt at Headspace when we interviewed her, right? You start showing up as a product person and designer, you start demonstrating that you belong…

Jesse: Claim a larger scope.

Peter: …in a certain set of conversationsm and you’re okay letting go of that designer background.

Does that let you grow? Right? I think that’s key.

How is your relationship to your identity potentially tethering your ability to navigate this liminality and come out the other side?

Better, faster, stronger.

But when you were talking about big organizations, it struck me that there’s another aspect to the liminality that these leaders are facing that’s similar to mediate the membrane, but different, which is that designers, design leaders in particular, have to be able to function both horizontally and vertically in these large organizations.

And there’s a liminality there. I just literally this morning on a Slack with a design leader who’s new in their organization was having this conversation because, and it’s one I’ve been having recently, a lot of companies, I think in an effort to embrace this velocity moment, are getting rid of the head of design and having design directors report up through product teams and having those product leaders have more direct control…

Jesse: Yes.

Where Peter says, “Integument”

Peter: …in some effort to, like, keep the decision making closer.

Some organizations are doing that, but keeping design centralized which I think leans into the power of design, right?

Design is great for thinking through a coherent experience across a bunch of organizational silos.

But, and I faced this problem myself as a design leader, right, when literally every other part of your organization is thinking vertically, but you’re this thin layer trying to create an an integument that coordinates and organizes all this effort, even with encouragement from your leadership that this is what it’s about, you run up against heads of product and heads of engineering, and even your own designers who are IC designers who are all thinking very vertically, and they’re incentivized vertically, and they’ve got these blinders on.

But one of these liminal challenges that we’re navigating is, particularly in scaled organizations, navigating between this recognition that end-to-end experience matters, right?

There’s a reason that a company has built out these silos or acquired other companies or whatever, they think that there’s a whole greater than the sum of the parts. That’s the only logic behind it.

But there’s these practices in place that thwart that, and design finds itself square in the middle of trying to make sense of that and getting pulled in all these directions.

Which I think if you don’t have a certain resolve, you’re just gonna get drawn and quartered, right?

Jesse: Yeah, yeah. Knowing what you stand for.

You know, when I talk about the evolving value proposition of design, there was a time in which you could have framed design purely in terms of asset delivery. You could have said the way that I measure the success of a design team is in terms of the volume of PSDs shipped for slicing and, you know, rendering out to production.

And that’s not to say that that was ever wrong because in some organizations that was exactly the right thing that was needed.

But if the tooling is changing under your feet, you can’t define your value in terms of your tools. You have to define the value that the team is delivering against some larger influence that it’s having on the organization.

And I think part of that does have to do with value delivery, but part of it also has to do with values and the values that a team advocates for, or that a leader advocates for within the process that creates guidance through uncertainty for a group of people.

For somebody to go, you know what, we should lay low when the sun is high in the sky, and we’ll wait until late afternoon to cross the desert because we don’t wanna, you know, give the whole team heat exhaustion. Somebody’s gotta be thinking about that kind of stuff.

And that is actually what I think of as being more of the liminal skillset, as it were, for a leader, is to see the opportunity in the chaos, to be able to assess alternatives and choose a direction and advocate for a direction and advocate for that according to some kind of underlying principles that are gonna guide ongoing action that will eventually turn into best practices.

Design Beyond Figma

Peter: Thoughts here resonate with a different conversation I had last night with a different design leader whose design team, which is about, I wanna say, 30 some people, has, in the last four months, basically gotten off of Figma and all into their design system is basically baked into some tool, some LLM-y tool.

And they just kind of build designs directly through the tool. They don’t need Figma. To the degree, if they use Figma, it’s to do some like wireframing, sketching, but they’re not doing the detailed design work anymore in Figma. There’s no value in that.

And one of the things that I asked about, because I’ve gone to Config and there are a lot of designers whose identities aren’t just as a designer, but as a Figma user. They wear Figma swag ’cause that’s who they are. And as we were talking about this, I asked like, what was that like getting these designers to adopt this new approach?

And she’s like, oh, it was miserable. they fought it every step of the way.

But there had been an executive mandate, as many companies have, in terms of embracing AI tooling. So, they needed to demonstrate it.

And I wonder though, because the person who I was talking to, the person who led this organization through it, was not a typical design leader, was not a designer, but was the head of design operations.

And I wonder, someone having a slightly removed point of view, someone who can see the process, see how it all works together, isn’t invested in the practice through a tool, was able to bring, maybe, a clarity to this change that would’ve been hard for someone steeped in the tools to bring, stuck with it, wasn’t thrown by the pushback that they received, but also as an ops leader, knew how to guide people through this.

So made sure everyone got the training, like, created a space for the team to get to the other side, such that now the way this person was talking about it, the designers in their org would never go back.

But had to go, you know, you talk about the desert. Like this was not quite a death march, but no one died, but there was months of uncertainty and misery where they don’t quite know where this is going to lead, that someone needed to shepherd this group through to get to that other side.

And I find myself wondering if, all of my connection to the design ops community notwithstanding, not that ops will be the ones to necessarily see us through, but being able to approach this with some degree of remove, as opposed to woven investment in how things currently operate.

Jesse: That’s interesting to think about. We’ve talked a lot on this show over the years about how one’s craft background can influence prejudice, sometimes put blinders on you as a leader and cause you not to be able to see possibilities that might be right in front of you, because you’re so steeped in your own craft that you had to hone in order to get to that leadership place that you’re bringing your own sense of what design is there to do and what design delivering value at its highest level looks like.

Again, like if you had defined your team’s value in terms of Photoshop files shipped, you need to really rethink things.

Peter: Definitely. Yeah.

Another conversation I’ve been having, and it came up a little bit last night, but is a general theme in the last, I don’t know, few weeks of discussions I’ve been having with folks, is how, in many organizations, design has been reduced to production, to, you know, if not Photoshop files shipped Figma files maybe not even shipped, right? Collaborated on.

And you know, we primarily operate in digital product design, but both of us are old enough to have worked in a kind of design, in a before times.

And I remember my first job at a design agency. I was a web developer there. This was an agency that still did a lot of traditional graphic design, print and packaging and that kind of stuff.

There were the designers, but then there were the production artists. And these were two different roles. In an architecture firm, you’ll have the architects and you’ll have the draftspeople, where you distinguish between the more conceptual thinky systems-y work of solving the design problem, and then there’s another role that’s like, how do I take that solution and make it work in detail. That’s the production artist, right?

And so production artists would take the designs that a graphic designer created and figure out how are we going to get printers and Pantone and all that to ship, to produce what the designer intended.

The designers were not the ones having to do that. That was a different function.

And I think what we lost, in digital product design particularly, you know, in the years say, between like 2005-ish and 2020-something-ish, is the concept of those two roles. And instead we’re assuming all the designers are going to be producing their final assets in order for people to build those.

And then what’s happened is the work just kind of kept moving farther and farther right, ’cause that was the obvious output. And all the left work, you know, was getting lost.

Left, as in shifting left or first diamond or whatever type of work, was getting lost.

And now, in a world of generative AI, that production work is the first to go, right? That just evaporates. As it probably should, right? In the same way that desktop publishing meant we didn’t need certain professions anymore. And that’s okay.

Jesse: Yeah. I mean, you shouldn’t have an army of people solving crossword puzzles with your design system all day, you know?

Peter: One of the things it does is it shines a light on how, for many teams, many in-house teams, because their value was seen as their ability to produce comps, when that value is now captured by machines, many of these teams don’t have the understanding, wherewithal, the muscles, in terms of how to do, I think what you were referring to earlier when you were talking about kind of the more design strategy, strategic design, that different kind of thinking to help an organization navigate that ambiguity.

They just don’t even know where to begin.

What AI Transformation Reveals

Jesse: Yeah, and one of the big things that has come up in the AI transformation work I’ve been doing over the last year is there’s this dimension to it that has nothing to do with process, has nothing to do with tooling, and has everything to do with what people think their value is in the process.

And I think it’s going to be a period of evolution, especially for these larger scale teams, to reframe what a designer does, and what the voice of the designer means in here.

I think that in a lot of these situations where you’re built on layers of internet best practices, you’ve got layers of industry best practices, you’ve got layers of some of these companies have had live apps in the field for 20-plus years now at this point, right? They’ve got their own internal best practices to draw on.

And it feels like the problems are pretty well solved in a lot of ways. And so then the value that you deliver as a designer, it necessarily is about how you work within those layered sets of constraints that define the problem that you’re there to solve.

This shift means that that value proposition no longer really applies because a great deal of that mapping the constraints and working within them is going to be able to be done programmatically. So then, kind of by necessity, the designer’s role in the process has to be to address the ambiguity that the system can’t, that the larger processes and organizational systems that you’re a part of can’t address, and the pieces that the new tooling can’t address, and to be the one to kind of fill in the gaps that make it all still human somehow.

Peter: interesting. As you were talking about the value that you deliver what it made me think of is the book Team of Teams by General Stanley McChrystal, which is, have you read this, Jesse? Are you familiar with this?

Jesse: I’m familiar with the ideas, but I haven’t read the book.

Peter: Okay. So I can’t say I’ve read every word in the book, but I did read it early on in my kind of organization design journey, and it’s actually an appropriate book for thinking about the liminal moment because the insight that the book addresses is McChrystal being a general at the beginning of the global war on terror, and realizing that the command and control, top-down ways of the American military were not working in the face of a essentially networked resistance, where it’s a lot of small cells and pockets doing very small focused attacks. It wasn’t one coordinated army operating against another coordinated army.

But the rules of engagement had changed.

And what he talks about in the book is this recognition, the reason it’s called Team of Teams, is that instead of having one superstructure that just operates, you’ve got a bunch of little nodes. I mean, it’s, a book that’s very much a source of inspiration for things like Scrum in the Agile community and Spotify squad models and all that kind of stuff in terms of how do you create wholly self-sustained teams that are able to be effective on their own. Two-pizza teams at Amazon.

But to the point that you were making about the value you deliver, one of the key issues, and it was a journey that he had to go on, is, he’s like, but my value as a general for however many years, 20 years or 30 years, was to be a decision maker and was to know, and now that can’t be how it works anymore.

And he had to reframe his value is that of a connector, of an informer, of a motivator, of someone who made sure that everyone had what they needed in order to succeed, but that the decisions are gonna need to be made by people closer to the problem than someone back at command.

And so, you know, this questioning of your value, given the moment we’re in, is probably a healthy sign, right?

Like, again, it’s another one of those things like, don’t fight it. That’s not going to do you any good. But instead wrestle with it, and think really hard about what is it, what is that distinct thing that you bring in the environment you’re operating in to address the challenges that you and your team are facing?

And it might not be what it has been for the last however many years.

Jesse: Right. And you know, for years we’ve seen people in design circles on social media who’ve been adamantly advocating for an old value proposition, a classical view of user experience design that they’re all out there going, you know, we have to go back, we have to go back to the ways that we were doing things 10, 15, 20 years ago, to reclaim something that, in their view, has been lost.

But at the same time, every liminal moment represents moving towards something new, which also necessitates letting something old fall away.

And that difficulty that we have releasing old ways of framing our challenges, old ways of framing our value, old ways of framing the nature of the work that we do itself can be limiting our ability to engage the liminal.

We Can’t Go Back

Peter: It is funny because I’m sympathetic to some of that intent of going back, because I think there are valuable practices that for no good reason have been, if not lost, at least, again, kind of atrophied or, downplayed, that would be relevant today.

I think about this in terms of some strategic design and ways of vision setting or whatever, but I think you’re right, it’s not about doing things the way we used to do them in the grand old days when, well, I don’t want to get into that.

There’s a lot of people our age who liked it better when they had a full head of hair and you know, didn’t have the mortgages or whatever hanging over their heads. And they think that life was better then.

But I think some of those practices warrant being brought forward. Probably, I don’t wanna say repackaged, but, integrated in new ways, right?

Like, some of those ways of working are perfectly fine. We don’t have to abandon them, but the overarching assumption of how to do things, you’re right, is probably worth calling into question in favor of adopt, adapt and improve. Adopting and adapting to whatever that context is you’re operating in.

And I mean, this was something we used to think about a lot at Adaptive Path, which… we never had a, a process. We never started at the same place and ended at the same place from a process standpoint.

We had a big methodological toolkit.

You were a director of strategy or whatever. I was kind of the director of practice and I thought a lot about all the kit of parts that we used to do the work and how do you assemble them in this context to solve that problem, which would be different for a different client and different in a third way for another client.

Actually this is reminding me of something that has been burning my britches, which is some talks I’ve seen where people are like, we’re throwing out the design process and doing things the new way. As if there is one design process.

And what I realized is, I think, for many people, again, who’ve maybe been doing this 10, 15 years, there was an orthodoxy of how to do design that they were taught that they are now having to free themselves of in order to be more relevant to current context.

But, and this is gonna sound, I don’t know, self-aggrandizing or something, but I think for folks who’ve been doing this for a longer period of time, in the pre-orthodoxy, before we knew what we were doing and we were figuring it out, I never assumed there was one way to do design.

And it always surprised me when I would hear that people thought there was one way, and I think maybe we’re, just revisiting some of that kind of late nineties, early two thousands vibe of…

Jesse: Nobody knows anything.

Peter: Nobody knows anything. We know little things. We know a lot of little things.

We don’t know how they add up. So we’re gonna try combining these processes together or those two things together, how about that? And that’s fine. Like, that’s healthy.

Jesse: Well and I think that’s the skillset. If we think about what a designer, what a product manager, what a design or product leader might take away from this conversation, I think one of the big things is that ability to assess and make choices. And not to assume that the whole process has been laid out for you already, but to embrace the experimentation and embrace the improvisation that’s necessary here.

You know, one thing that’s been coming up for me a lot in this conversation, you know, I grew up on the Atlantic coast. I spent every summer out at the beach surfing and a lot of time out on the water. And one of the things about surfing is there’s nothing about surfing that is set it and forget it.

You know, it requires total presence, total attention, constant awareness of what’s going on, and constant adaptation to all of those signals in order to stay on top of the board.

And I think that for leaders as well as for the members of their teams, it’s that kind of ability to stay flexible and not get too attached to any particular course that ends up serving them in these liminal moments.

Peter: Well, I think this is a good place to hit pause in our conversation because I do want to explore broadly the skill sets that can allow you to navigate liminality, but I think that that’s a can of worms, that will take us into another episode.

But I like your talking about surfing, because I think a way to think about it is as you are approaching this ambiguity and operating in this liminal space, how can you be riding the wave instead of being kind of overtaken by it or have it crash upon you? And let that be the tease for the next episode of this little liminal… I’m trying to think of the…

Jesse: exploration…

Peter: …liminal exploration, liminal side path, liminal mission.

It’s like a side mission, side quest

The liminal side quest within Finding Our Way.

Jesse: I love it. Peter, thank you so much.

Peter: Thank you, Jesse.

Jesse: For more Finding Our Way, visit findingourway.design for past episodes and transcripts, or follow the show on LinkedIn. Visit petermerholz.com to find Peter’s newsletter, The Merholz Agenda, as well as Design Org Dimensions featuring his latest thinking and the actual tools he uses with clients.

If you’re looking for help with AI transformation or you just need a private advisor to help you solve your hardest leadership problems, visit my website at jessejamesgarrett.com to book your free one hour consultation.

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