Why now?

Why we need TO ADVANCE design leadership now more than ever

In 2020, Design continues to demonstrate its ability to help create sustainable competitive advantages and superior market performance for organisations (Muenjohn 2013). Organisations that display higher levels design maturity have exhibited greater performance in key measures such as competitiveness, market share, sales and employment (Westcott, et. al. 2013), and higher revenue growth and total return to shareholders when compared with their counterparts (McKinsey & Company 2018).

As the value of Design continues to be understood and recognised in business contexts, we have seen a growing number of organisations adopt, support and invest in their Design functions. These design functions continue to mature, moving from acting as a producer, where the focus is placed on the visible and tangible outputs of design, through to being a visionary function that helps to define organisational strategy and solve increasingly complex customer and business needs in different sectors. However, there is still an overwhelming percentage of organisations that have not effectively activated their Design capabilities to capture this return on investment (Buley 2019)

While the current dominant models used to describe design maturity, such as the Design Ladder (Danish Design Centre, 2001), The Business Value of Design (McKinsey, 2018), and The New Design Frontier report (Buley 2019) illustrate how design practices are adopted to create value within organisations at various levels of scale, they do not go into detail on the activities that design leadership undertakes to support organisations in their maturity journey.  

Design leadership, which can been defined as ‘to lead design, and to lead business by design’ (Design Management Institute, 2006) has been identified as the key catalyst for businesses which aim increase their design maturity and capture the full business value of Design (McKinsey 2020). An organisation’s ability to find success in current and future markets depends heavily upon their leaderships ability to activate effective design capabilities (Gloppen 2009; Muenjohn 2013), and so if organisations are to mature in their Design practices, the acts of leadership that support those Design functions must develop to be able to enable this.