The Season 3 finale of our design leadership podcast Finding Our Way is here, and it’s one of our richest episodes yet, as we look back at what we’ve learned from our recent conversations with design executives. Peter called it jampacked, and he’s not kidding!
If you’ve ever been curious about the nature of my coaching practice, this episode is the one for you. One concept from my work that we touch on in the show merits highlighting: I call it “the three trajectories”, and it’s a way of thinking about maturity and opportunity that my clients have found useful.
The opportunity space for any design leader—the potential for what they can achieve in their role—is defined by the intersection between three trajectories, unfolding over time:
First is the organizational maturity trajectory. Every org evolves as it grows, investing in new capabilities and making those capabilities more sophisticated and better suited to their needs. Those investments are different in different areas, so parts of the organization are inevitably more mature than others.
Second is the design maturity trajectory. The design function, meanwhile, is on its own evolutionary path, based on the investment that’s been made in it and the ensuing outcomes. The team’s culture, processes, and quality standards are ideally ever-improving, but leadership failures can lead to backslides.
Third is your own leadership trajectory. Your past experiences plus the areas where you are motivated to grow in the future define the shape of a problem that you are particularly well-suited to address as a leader.
The first two trajectories define a problem space. The third defines a space within which a leader can optimally drive outcomes. The intersection between these defines the shape of the leadership challenge you’re facing—and the smaller the intersection, the bigger the challenge.
Design maturity way ahead of org maturity? You’ll need to be a leader who can keep making the case for an investment that execs don’t fully understand, while also persuading your team to stick around in an environment where their value won’t always be seen.
Org maturity way ahead of design maturity? You’ll need to be a leader who can recruit talent, structure a team, and mentor your leads to develop the team’s capabilities.
As Peter rightly notes on the show, the sweet spot is where your leadership maturity is just slightly ahead—but not too far ahead—of the organization and/or the design team’s. Because that’s where you can deliver on the mandate to drive maturity effectively as a leader.
Jesse James Garrett 