Why aren't designers getting invited into big fun meeting where all the imagineering happens?

Throughout the 20 odd years that I’ve been designing products and designing organisations, I’ve repeatedly heard designers lamenting their lack of access to long-term strategy-making and vision-setting circles. I feel like this was even a core part of the whole ‘seat at the table’ meme which spent a good five years at the top of the designer gripes charts. The truth of it is that almost no-one gets invited into a room where the big long-term decisions are being made, mostly because the room doesn’t exist, and also because there is no one in it. It is both Schrödinger's strategy, and his meeting room.

This is not a slight which is being exacted on design. Long-term strategic thinking is almost never written down and referred back to like scripture, it is instead an awkward, ongoing, messy, reactive, poorly documented process of way-finding which hopefully leads to a place where organisations build things people want to use.

This conspiratorial conceit naively misdiagnoses the reality of how organisations set direction and it also robs designers of the extraordinary potential they have to inform this process - their unique ability to hypothesise, conceptualise and visualise a version of the future which people can understand, buy into and work collectively and excitedly towards.

So how do designers take a ‘seat’ at ‘the table’, and start working on this long-term vision stuff? Well, the designers who best understand organisational dynamics and have built the relationships required to be invited into these conversations, are already invited into these conversations. These are the practitioners who have shown themselves to be both pragmatic and ambitious, marrying current reality with potential trajectory in a way which can widen the aperture of what is possible over the long-term. They are the designers who reliably produce high quality design work and where the ambiguity involved never means they are scrambling in the weeds trying to figure out how to design something. They are the designers who can see the depth of work required to get from A to K, and can show the intermediary steps required to get there, bringing users and colleagues along for the journey. Skilled, but humble, reflective, but proactive, opinionated, but well informed.

What designers often try to do is to skip all of that messy stuff and go straight to producing beautiful artefacts which go up on walls and stay there rotting away as monuments to short-term thinking dressed up as long-term R&D. Without the relationships, the context, and the communication skills required to do this work properly, designers instead create volumes of vanity work which not only fails to inform or guide strategy, it also exacerbates the commonly held belief amongst peer disciplines that the role of design is ‘to make pretty stuff, and make stuff pretty’. Whilst deep, meaningful involvement in this process can help establish the role of design as a strategic asset, it can absolutely do the opposite, and that is almost always our fault. If there were a table, the seats by now would have been tucked away in the storeroom.

For design leaders, the challenge therefore is in building maturity in the organisation such that it is well placed to work right across the tactical-strategic spectrum, where investments in long-term vision work have positive ROI both for the product, and for the perceived value of design in the business. And whilst not every designer in a team needs to have this skill, they almost all want to do this kind of work, so it is worth considering how you build this capability through formal training and sandboxes in which small scale and low stakes versions of this kind of work can be explored.

There is no secret WhatsApp group where executives, product leaders and investors are trying to work out how to keep designers away from setting long-term strategy and creating ambitious visions of the future. We are doing that to ourselves.

Stuart.