Jose Coronado and Martin Dowson FRSA - Design’s Pendulum: Staying Relevant In Turbulent Times

What if design could move at the speed of AI without losing its soul? We sit down with two veteran leaders, Martin and Jose, to explore how teams can stay relevant when the pendulum swings from hype to hard results. From early usability labs to enterprise-scale delivery, they unpack how human-centred practice earns trust when it aligns with strategy, operations, and measurable business outcomes.

The conversation hits the big levers. 

We dig into AI fluency as a new material of production and how Agentic workflows turn a design brief into a working, branded prototype in an hour—connected to code and ready for stakeholder review. That speed matters if it creates space to think ahead, so we draw a sharp line between continuous improvement and bigger bets that demand deeper qualification. Ethics isn’t a slide at the end; it’s part of the operating model. We talk outcomes-based regulation in Europe, human responsibility for agents, and why “move fast” must come with transparent decisions, harm awareness, and consequence management.

We also get practical about enablement. Jose breaks down design ops as a context-driven function: securing compliant tools, fixing onboarding and engagement, standing up QBRs that show impact, and making portfolio health visible. 

Martin challenges leaders to spread core design skills beyond the team—journey thinking, customer exposure, and light research—so capability survives market cycles. Together they argue for blending product and design ops around discovery and delivery, and for investing in apprenticeships and entry-level growth so the next generation builds judgment, not just outputs.

If you’re a design, product, or engineering leader navigating AI, regulation, and quarterly pressure, this conversation offers a clear path: experiment with new materials, protect human values, and use the time saved by automation to design the future, not just ship the next ticket. Enjoy the episode, then subscribe, share with a peer, and drop us a note with your biggest leadership challenge—we’ll tackle it next.

Transcript

Host Welcome And Guest Intros

SPEAKER_01 0:18

And here we go. Welcome, welcome, welcome. We have. I'm gonna let you guys do your introductions. Thank you both so much. I've been waiting to do this for quite some time, and the delay is as usual, exclusively entirely on me. And I've also got a cold. So I'm I'm sounding a little bit more croaky and everything else, so please bear with. Martin, would you like to give a quick intro just to yourself?

Martin’s Origin: From Research To Leadership

SPEAKER_04 0:46

Okay. All right. So Martin Dyson. Um, I have been working in design, experience design, user center design, whatever you want to call that, uh, for uh 26 years now. Fell into it by accident. Um I always wanted to be a management consultant because they make lots of money and they know about business and entrepreneurship, so that's what I went to do. But I'd studied psychology um at university, having failed at completing anything around computer science and artificial intelligence because it was too hard. And when I got to Accenture, I discovered that I found management consulting quite boring. But found a bunch of people who were pretty cool and all had ologies, sociology and human factors. And we were stuck in a corner in of the Accenture offices um around about the 2000s um testing websites before Accenture launched them with people controversially.

SPEAKER_02 1:36

Humans.

SPEAKER_04 1:37

Wow. Real humans and asking them, you know, how's that going? You know, can you use this? Can you know what can you get done what you need to get done? And then, you know, we'd invariably find that it was hard for them to do that. It wasn't really easy for them to do that. I mean, we'd have to go back and tell delivery managers that I know you're launching in three weeks, but maybe you won't want to make some changes. And um, they got pretty tired of being told that three weeks before launch, and they said, what could we do differently? Which was the magic question. So um we were given the remit to design Sainsbury's online shopping from scratch. From the beginning. In six weeks, we went from blank sheet of paper with our creative partners, AKQA, um with a team of people who were doing research, information architecture, UX design, graphic design, as we called it then. And we had everybody in a war room together over six weeks, and we had customers in every other day from proposition through to final UI. And when we handed that over to the delivery team, they had 50% less change requests during their delivery than they'd ever seen before. Um, and we actually delivered the design that we had laid out. Um it was it was for Accenture to understand what it meant to actually do human-centred design and deliver that with business value, um, you know, on brand for the clients, quickly, rapidly, human-centered. And that that was it. That was my first big project in the first year and a half of my consulting life. And I've never looked back since. Psychology gave me the research background, research gave me the understanding of UX patterns, my natural curiosity towards all that, and then I built my career from there to well, UX doesn't answer everything. So some of it's in the business model and the operating model, went to service design. Helping people change that to get me into design leadership, and um, yeah, uh and that's where everything that came from there, that's where the where it's where it started.

SPEAKER_01 3:31

Crikey. I know that that's an incredibly concise summation. So thank you for that.

SPEAKER_04 3:39

Yeah, I just did the origin bit and then skipped over the next 20 years.

SPEAKER_01 3:44

Yeah, Jose.

Jose’s Path: Industrial To Software Design

SPEAKER_01 3:46

You're also joining us on this episode, and this is the first time um that I'm actually having two guests at once. So it's such an honor, genuinely, to have both of you to try and share a conversation with. Let me just get that in there before I get too wrapped up in some kind of rabbit hole. But Jose, over to you, sir.

SPEAKER_00 4:12

Thank you, Joel, and thank you to the audience for their engagement. We hope that you find some good golden nuggets in this conversation. Well, um, in contrast with Martin, my background is in industrial design. However, uh, when I went to grad school, I asked my advisor, what should I do? And my advisor said, What do you want to do? So I started doing what I knew what to do: packaging, furniture, and then consumer electronics. And then when I went into consumer electronics, I realized there was something inside of them that powered the interaction with the actual human, which was the software part, not just the hardware part. And then I never looked back. So my entire career has been in the software design part of things, even before industrial design recognized interface design as a design and as an industrial design discipline. So my background is uh in enterprise um technology and management consulting. So my mid-career, not my beginning of career, was with Accenture and McKinsey, in contrast with Martin. And uh and uh and then the the last uh third of my career has been with Fortune 50 organizations, basically building teams from zero to one, instilling some of the business rigor and discipline that the design teams need to be um taken seriously within organizations. Um and um uh in the last uh basically year and a half, I have uh rebooted my consulting practice, and I'm working directly as a strategic advisor to um and partnering with chief design officers and global heads of design, uh, primarily in financial services, but basically helping them solve critical problems in their organizations. And it's been it's been quite quite the journey across uh many different industries, many different um sizes of teams, many different climates from you know before remote work was a thing, working with distributed teams around the globe to the uh high growth and high compression of the pandemic, to the instability of economic uncertainty that we are now navigating under. So that kind of gives you a super high-level summary of my experience.

SPEAKER_01 6:30

Again, incredibly concise summation. Because I've admired both of you from afar. I think, and keep me honest here, I think I actually met both of you firsthand, face to face. At some kind of tech circus event.

SPEAKER_00 6:47

Yeah.

unknown 6:48

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 6:49

Leaning Business by Design, the now defunct conference, unfortunately.

SPEAKER_04 6:55

Well, it's a business by business business by design was um the um was a collaboration between myself and and and Luke and the team at um at uh Tech Circus. And um it was a response to everything that Jose had has um has said about that um

Why Business By Design Emerged

SPEAKER_04 7:15

that need to grow the the the business commercial lens of of design and understand organization. So it it that conference was a was was born out of frustration with design not being able to articulate its impact and value in place within the business, and wanting to help design leaders level up beyond craft leadership and into executive and business leadership, and that was the point of that conference. And uh I felt so energized and excited to be able to meet with Jose and as well, and also when we got the chance to meet at some of the other yeah, some of the events that happened, um Joel, your stories that you were sharing of your leadership were just uh absolutely spot on. I was so, so happy with who we managed to bring to those conferences to share their stories. They were really important stories to share.

SPEAKER_01 8:05

No, I mean well done those folks who put those together because I think those are sadly lacking right now. I've seen recently that, yeah, one of them's being resurrected, which is fantastic, you know, which I'm which I'm so looking forward to as well. But then let me just try and frame this one a little bit better. I think we've trodden similar

Design’s Relevance And The Pendulum

SPEAKER_01 8:36

paths. We've tried to do the right thing by design because we understand the value of it, the importance of it, not just from nurturing practitioner communities, but also understanding that business, commercial realities are impacted by what we do for a living. And we've been popular, we've been the core kids, right? Lots of megacorps, etc. Investing a lot of money, putting a lot of focus on on what we call design. And now we're in a situation where it's I wouldn't say come full circle, but it's another set of challenges. We deal with challenges, that's our bread and butter every single day is okay. Here's a challenge. Here's a challenge. So Jose, what do you feel right now? What would you suggest are the three biggest challenges that design? That's a huge question. So forgive me for that, right? Straight out of the gate. But three big biggest challenges from from your perspective that the whole community of design is facing right now.

SPEAKER_00 10:05

Well, I think um one of the biggest ones deals with uh relevance. How do we maintain our discipline relevant to what the business strategy and objectives are? And unfortunately, you know, I've been thinking a lot about this from like the Phoenix uh uh fable perspective. We rise from the ashes, as you mentioned, we're the cool kids in the block, and then the circumstances pull us down and burn again. And now we see in 2025 Samsung naming Mauro Porcini Chief Design Officer for the first time. Revolute also choosing their first chief design officer, Itaú a couple of years ago, picked uh also another amazing design leader, Fabrizio Dore, Banco Santander in Spain, choosing Rob Brown as their chief design officer, well actually chief experience officer with a little bit of bigger remit than just design, but more about customer experience uh perspective. So, more than a full circle is like a pendulum. The pendulum goes back and forth. And how do we maintain balance? And um, I would argue keep away our own personal fears to ensure that we elevate our groups, our teams, um, and thinking about a positive uh leadership perspective. How do we surround ourselves with leaders that are going to make us better? We're not the people who have all the answers, but we have to surround us with people who have different perspectives and will help us, will teach us things to maintain the relevance of our teams. And I think the perennial question is like, you know, it used to be should designers code, and now it's like should designers AI, you know, kind of a perspective. It's like we have to have some level of uh technology and AI fluency to be able to have informed conversations about strategy and places where it makes sense to

Designers, Purpose, And Production Reality

SPEAKER_00 12:10

inject AI into the products and services that we're building. It's not just building, then they will come. It's like what should we build and then build that with that perspective. As Martin uh jokingly mentioned, let's test it with the users before we actually build it so we can determine whether it's relevant or not. What a novel concept. And now, and now we're talking about, now since we're talking about people, they're talking also about the um it's not artificial personas, it's um, oh my goodness, uh the term is escaping my mind right now. Synthetic humans? Synthetic persona. Synthetic humans. Exactly. Synthetic personas. So it's like we're asking a machine whether the the product that we'll build in with the machine is relevant for actual humans. So anyway, I think those are some of the challenges that we have to face straight on and have some conviction of where we should push our organizations on. And then the last thing is whether we like it or not, we have to pick our battles. Uh, we should not fight every single battle because then we're going to deplete ourselves and our teams to a point where we will be exhausted. So uh think about what are the battles that are more meaningful, both for yourself, for your team, and for your organization. And then other things that you should just simply let go, even if you don't agree with, but but make sure that you put your energy and your perspective on those things that are the most value and most important to you and your organization.

SPEAKER_01 13:49

I mean, that's huge. Already I'm thinking, right, we need like maybe half a dozen podcasts to explore them properly, but don't worry, we're not going to do that. Um there's a lot of parallels there, particularly I think for the synthetic persona. Right? Because once upon a time, and not that long ago, I would be in projects, even as a jobbing consultant, let alone uh you know, somebody who's looking after people. Yeah, what is what do the devs think? And so it was it was a technical reflection that the business was looking toward, not in a human or end user reflection that the business was looking to. But anyway, more of that later. Martin, same to you, sir.

SPEAKER_04 14:38

Yeah, so um um so I would uh echo a lot of what uh uh uh Jose said. One of the perennial challenges for design as a community of people with that craft um is some of the intrinsic motivation and orientation that we have as designers to the kind of problems that we want to try to solve. And the problems that we want to try to solve are inherently human problems. And it is the value that we bring. It's part of the value that we bring to an organization, is that orientation. Because there has been, and uh there has been this theory of business that goes if you solve a customer's needs, then you have a business to run. But we are also very systems-level viewing people, and we see the connections between things a lot more. We see and feel beyond the rational decisions that orient a lot of um the way that business works, whether that's real or not. We can talk about economies and economics and whether it is actually rational or not, but we have this connection to what it means to be human. And so we feel way beyond the mechanics of the business model. And I think that for the last um 10 years, there has been a definite move where a lot of design teams have felt like, well, what is it that we're actually doing and the impact that we're actually having? Um, and in the pr in the 2000 to 2015, there was a lot more orientation towards I love what design do because they're trying to help me understand how to connect with humans with these great new ideas, because everything was new ideas that were building, building, building. And design had a great opportunity to help with that, and it did. Um, as business began to rationalise down more to well, okay, that was all fun and games, but actually it's costing quite a lot, and the economies are really hurting me. And I actually need to have a much

Play, Experiment, And Learn The Materials

SPEAKER_04 16:44

better margin ratio going on here. Business moved away from believing that if you just design for customers, you will be profitable. And shareholders and the venture capital market and the private equity market have been driving business towards growth, growth, growth, growth at all costs. And we had this moment where we thought sustainability might help everybody orient back round again, but the world is topsy-turvy around that right now. So designers have been fluctuating along this journey, and they go, I really feel like I want to have this connection with purpose for what I do and trying trying to hold that alongside the purpose of the companies that I work for and what we're being asked to do. So you will find yourself as a designer in one of a few different spaces. If your early career is, I'm going to put you to one side for a second because it's the beginning of your journey. But mid-career, you will most likely find yourself somewhere in production. That what you're doing is production for the company. And if you're very lucky, you'll be in a team who are producing new growth areas, or the company that you're working for is a lot more aligned around that sense of purpose. But the vast majority of corporate work, company work, even startup work and VC, VC-backed work, is about that commercial identity grow. And I think we really struggle with that right now. Now, so how do you navigate that? And I think that's the challenge for designers in this world right now. How do you navigate that? Understanding where you are in your career and what you can learn the most from that. There's huge amounts to learn from being in production. Get close to what the business is trying to do and achieve and why and how design adds value to that. You will not save the world in your production job. But please don't ever let go of that connection to that purpose. Because when you get into some of the leadership roles, we need as a design industry and design leaders to help companies find their way back to there is a connection between your role as a company in society and the impact that has, and our need as a society to develop a more sustainable future. And design has a role to play inside that. Jose was mentioning technology. Do design as dev, do you design as AI? That, Jose, like that's that's industrial design 101. Understand the materials of production. Do you need to, as a designer, if you're in that production world, you should be designing with AI, you should be using all the tech that's going on. This is this is table stakes now for you to be able to have the conversation that Jose was saying was that when do we do that and where do we use it? Right? And because these are the materials of production, rightly or wrongly, in business right now. Um you can rail against it, but unless you are literally given a remit by a company that says should we, shouldn't we? It's not your job. So get in and use it and understand it so that you can be ready for those conversations about when the right time to use something is. So yeah, I mean I'm just building on a lot of what Jose said, I think. But from a slightly acknowledging the space we feel in as designers, you

AI Fluency And Career Consequences

SPEAKER_04 20:00

know.

SPEAKER_01 20:00

The thing is, I can see both of you. Right? When this ep episode shortly, I hope, gets distributed, it's gonna be audio only for now. But I I'm looking at both of you, and you are both uh beaming, you are both uh smiling. This is such an exciting space. Yeah. Because it's it's playing, it's experimenting, it's you know, whether you played with Lego, whether you played with Plastocine, whether whatever it was, the you got somebody, somebody in your class got a new toy. Show me. And as kids you do. And then everyone goes and everyone plays, and everyone kind of learns. And you have your ups and downs, and you know, give it over here, give it over there, blah, blah. But for me, there's a parallel there with it was the same when 8-bit computing got domesticized. And if you were lucky, you had a spectrum or a Commodore, whatever, a Vic 20, a BBC, whatever, whatever, whatever, right? And so we have gone through that because we were fortunate. Then the internet came and we went through that because we were fortunate.

SPEAKER_02 21:16

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 21:18

And now we've got this new toy to play with. And what I'm seeing, there's an awful lot of binary observations, particularly in the usual online side, echo chambers, right? We all know which ones. Um and it's either AI is going to eat you, or AI is going to be your next best friend. Um, but there's I'm not seeing, and maybe I'm looking in the wrong places, which is hugely probable. But conversations like this, which are more positive, which are more nurturing, which are more about just echo. And play, engage, find out what this new toy does, what are its limits? Can we break it? Yeah. Right? Um that I think is is missing a lot.

SPEAKER_04 22:15

You think that's missing, or am I just So I think I'm gonna say I'm gonna just back um rein reinforce the same thing about playing and so not just about the about this new material of production and new way of of um of uh making things happen in the world, but also um a positive note about that sense of disconnect that some designers have with their purpose and the purpose of the role and the job of the company that they're working with. Again, I would say live it, experience it. Definitely because because we're in cycles. So if you jump if you jump out of the uncomfortable space, um trying to find to always be in the comfortable space or the always be in the inspiring space, you will have no learning about understanding when these cycles change and how they change and how you might have influence. And then in terms of your ability to have impact later as a leader, if that's what you want to do and lead and lead through impact, you need to experience some of these cycles. I've worked for all sorts of companies doing all sorts of things. Um, and it helps me have a far better conversation with a company about what do you really want to do and when design help? Then there is the materials of production conversation about you must experiment with all of that and understand that because it keeps you keeps you relevant and thinking and you know. So one of the examples that I have for designers is like if you know, depending on what the challenge is, depends what the materials of production are. So sometimes the materials of production are people and processes and policies, right? Because you're designing uh organizations and ways of working and things like that. There's all sorts of levels and of of design. Um so I think that's that's always my thing, is like whatever you see as new materials of production or materials of production that you haven't used before, go play and experiment with them. Because your design skills are really transferable, and your design mindset is really transferable to how does that work? Oh, that's interesting. What happens if we do this? Or what if the world was upside down? What if, you know, how would that work then? What we do is we're really uncomfortable, we're comfortable with the the idea of the nature of change and changing things and work walking through thresholds of change and imagining that in a way

Managed Growth And Proving Impact Fast

SPEAKER_04 24:35

that actually some of our stakeholders and businesses aren't. They want to know for certain for sure that this is what will happen next and that the next five steps will result in why. And that's a really fixed way to see the world, and we're not like that. But you have to keep pushing that muscle by experimenting.

SPEAKER_00 24:50

Yeah, I think um, go ahead.

SPEAKER_01 24:53

No, no, no. I was I was just taking that in. Please, please continue.

SPEAKER_00 24:58

I think uh I'm going to share this anecdote. Exactly a year ago, I had a conversation with a good friend of mine uh who's leading a particular area of design inside an organization, an enterprise tech organization. There were about four or five design leaders with him. They get the mandate from the CEO. We are an AI first company. One of his peers says, it's not going to impact me or my team. On the other hand, he says, What tools do we need? What kind of training do we need? What kind of learning do we need? And he started embarking in the learning and experimentation process. Six months later, his team was presenting real use cases to the board and to the CEO, while the other leader, the one who said there's no impact on me, got basically eliminated from the role. So we have two clear choices. It's almost like the blue pill or the red pill. We can choose and choose to see what's ahead and learn, or we can resist and become irrelevant. Going back to my first point, the relevance of our roles and the relevance of our practice. And the situation is very clear. Martin just mentioned we have to understand the materials that are in front of us. Highly regulated organizations have a little bit more restrictions, but they have, in turn, either developed their own tools or built heavily secured environments for people inside their organizations to learn and experiment and use their own models and use their own data. So our excuses to not learn, get out of our comfort zone, and embrace experimentation in these environments are becoming less plausible. And I'm going to connect it with one thing that you mentioned at the top of the episode, Joel, about the high investment in design. Historically, we have been given some runway. But when we have faced cycles of hypergrowth, many times those cycles of hypergrowth have been faced with less runway, lower time runways to demonstrate impact. We are in a similar situation right now, and even worse, because now the expectation is not in six months you're going to show me something. The leeway for demonstration of impact is much, much smaller. So one of the things that I have been working on over the last three years with uh within in-house teams and with my consulting practice is manage growth. Let's make sure that we have a controlled growth of our teams because we don't want to be caught up in the in-between that we have to hire 100 people and then we have to cut 30 or 40 because we couldn't demonstrate the impact that our team would have. So, how do we control our growth while at the same time demonstrating the impact that we have to have in these in these new conditions with these new materials that are facing uh our practice right now?

SPEAKER_04 28:18

For sure. I I agree. That's

Spread Design Skills Beyond The Team

SPEAKER_04 28:20

I mean, the other thing that goes alongside with that, I say I think with managed growth is um is uh understanding, and this is a repeated kind of theme from like five or six years ago, which is what is it that you need a team with role titles called design to do? And what is it that you need to change about how you work inside an organization that you could learn from design? Um, so I feel like we need um a bunch of skills to be spread across an organization. Like right now, people need to understand a lot more about how to use AI across an organization. I've always felt like people should have a far better understanding of things like what it means to take a customer-oriented view of a journey, for example. Journey mapping to me is a skill that should be widely democratized with inside an organization, not held on tightly to by service designers. Um, having exposure to customers and understanding the users and their needs is something that should be widely done by lots of people, which is not the same as having the skill to do a really good depth interview with somebody to uncover deep insights and needs. But the hard the harder you hold on to these things that you think define design, right, then when those periods of hyper-growth come, you go, I need people that do just that. You hire lots of them, right? But what you haven't done is spread any of that skill out there, and you you get these peaks and troughs all over the place, versus an organization that understands the value of these very design-oriented type approaches and therefore the depth of value in the people that have those specific disciplines. And so that kind of peak that the cycles are much more the peaks and troughs are smoothed out a lot more. Um, and I think there's something in in that as well. So, right now, um, I I feel like at a leadership level and also at a middling level, there just isn't enough spread out of the different types of skills within an organization. So I what kind of popped up for me as you talked about managed growth, is just um design's design's role needs to not hang on too tightly to its own specific definition of it and think about how it can share its mindset and approach. One of the interesting things I've been talking to a lot of people who are who I mentor within um uh design is what they might do that doesn't involve design in their title.

SPEAKER_02 30:49

Next.

SPEAKER_04 30:50

So some of the um CPOs who've engaged me over the last couple of years to come and help them with their teams were designers and then became chief product officers. Yep. Awesome. Awesome combination there. And I find that like super interesting. Um and there are examples of that in the past. I mean, IBM's chief design officer Phil Gilbert was a is a technology person, not designer, um, and having a massive impact because of the appreciation of design, but then the other skills he brought in. So there's there's all sorts of that's an interesting set of conversations having with people is how do you take your design skills outside of the job title called design and have impact inside an organization? And I'm seeing I'm seeing designers do that at all levels of career right now, and it's a very interesting move to

Design Ops As Context-Driven Enablement

SPEAKER_04 31:38

make.

SPEAKER_01 31:39

I couldn't agree more with both of you. It's interesting you mentioned Mr. Gilbert IBM Fame. Yeah, he recently came out with yeah, all of you lovely people who are disregarding design right now, oh dear. Yeah, think again. Yeah I'm paraphrasing.

SPEAKER_02 31:58

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 31:59

But when someone of his undeniable stature makes those comments, I I think they're incredibly important. But then it's up to the rest of us to figure out a way. And one thing that I'm really appreciating from listening to both of you first hand now is the importance of understanding the ecosystem that you are in. Right? Because you you you can't go to the village or to the city and you know start selling stuff without understanding how that village or city functions, how it operates. Otherwise, yeah, you're you're on a on a a very, very quick journey to finding somewhere else. Right, which is kind of I think a a nice segue to one thing I know, Jose, that you are particularly focusing um from my perspective, right? Forgive me if I'm marginalizing your your breadth here, it's not my intention. Um design ops right, and I think to institutionalize a design ops framework, my limited experience of it, I mean, okay, so I did that at Shell eventually, and it was brilliant, it was fantastic, but it was so hard right at the beginning for a multitude of different reasons. Would you would you like to share your perspective on number one, why design ops and how design ops is actually going to enable, I won't say accelerate, but enable adoption for this wonderful thing called AI, beyond large language models. Because we've got this beautiful thing, apparently, called the GENTIC, which is just on the horizon. So I know again, that's a huge question, forgive me, but yeah, I got two huge brains in the room with me, so I'm I'm taking advantage of it.

SPEAKER_00 34:08

Well, I'm going to I'm going to start with um the leadership perspective first, and then I'll dig into the operations point of view. And and Martin, I think you, I think the three of us have had exchanges about design leadership. But if you're a design, if you're a design executive and you're coming to an organization with a preconceived version of what is needed without understanding what is really needed, you're going to have an opportunity to inflict pain and insert chaos into an already chaotic organization. And unfortunately, some executives think what works in A place will work in the B place. The conditions and the context are so critical. So that is that is the first thing. So your perspective about leadership as a whole and how we need to understand the context in which we are operating in. And bulldozering through is not exactly it. Anyway, so now going back to design operations, I have had the opportunity to build design operations practices from zero to one in multiple organizations, primarily Fortune 50 orgs. But in every situation, I have had to come in with a curiosity and open mind perspective. What are the signals? What are the pains? What are the opportunities? And then think about okay, what should the approach be? I'm going to give you three quick couple of liner cases. So one, management consulting. The approach was growth through temporary staff. So what do we need to do? Develop the relationships with purchasing, with legal, with uh compliance to make sure that we have the partnerships and the structures in place to rapidly be able to engage staffing firms to give us the talent that we need. Approach number one contracts, purchasing, staffing partnerships. Situation number two, come into the large financial services organization,

Agentic Chains And Prototype In An Hour

SPEAKER_00 36:20

and the people problems are like popping up left and right. One of them was onboarding. I called the onboarding week one Technology Hazing Week. So it was clear that there was a lot of friction in that situation. So we needed to create a quote-unquote onboarding program. So it was a people-focused perspective. The engagement from a culture perspective was really low in comparison to the rest of the organization. So we needed to create a lot of programs that engage people, a lot of, for example, engaging leadership updates and QAs with the leaders to make sure that we were able to get the bulk of the team engaged with understanding what we're doing, what impact we're creating, and things like that. And then the third case, also another Fortune 50 organization, I come in and I ask the question do we know where designers are? And the way I jokingly said, do you know where your children are? I don't know if you had that ad in the UK where it's 10 p.m. Do you know where your children are? Well, it's 10 a.m. Do we know where our designers are? And the answer is like, well, we kind of know. We have an idea, we have a spreadsheet that may tell us where they are, but we in reality didn't know where they are. So you see external relationships and contracts, people operations programs, clear business operations perspectives. And each one of those gave us different value to instilling the rigor and the discipline and the engagement that we needed to create in each of those organizations. So the answer to the question is where does design operations make sense? It really depends on the conditions on the ground in your particular organization. And as you create the different foundational elements that are needed, then you realize opportunities, for example, on creating what I call the design QBRs, the design quarterly business reviews. If there's no a quarterly business review that already happens where you can insert design into it, you have to create the space for you to periodically promote the impact, the achievements, share the headwinds, the tailwinds, uh, what are the challenges? Where do you need the engagement from your product and technology partners to help you with so you can actually push the organization forward? And um, the last comment about this: if you are not periodically communicating and sharing this with your business partners, when it comes to yearly planning and forecasting, and you extend your hand saying, I need money to hire more designers, they're going to ask you, Who are you? What have you done for me? And they shouldn't have to ask you those questions. They should know who you are. They should know what your team has done for them. They should be top of mind in terms of one of those critical business partners. And that's basically in a super summarized way the the value of design ops. Uh as I call it, uh I call it this week, the right-hand person for the design executive in an organization.

SPEAKER_02 39:25

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 39:26

I mean, it's really the chief of staff function. You know, if you if you want to borrow from some other thing, you know, if you if you've got that size of scale of organization, then a design ops and its capability is it can be like your chief of staff, although that extends a little bit more beyond that. You mentioned, um, Joel, about uh where design ops um um can be helping, especially in relation to AI. Um, I think you were asking about that as well. And uh that stage, there's a lot that um design ops, or I I wish we could get back to kind of design management as a term, frankly. We've design ops came from because somebody started doing DevOps. DevOps was helping tech get really enabled, and so design ops came in next. And then Product Ops borrowed it. Product ops went, oh, if they've got design ops, then we'll have product ops, you know. But at the end of the day, design management. Um, so the what are the things that enable, also enable design? So the very, very first place that every design team should be looking at to be understanding AI is um is

Speed, Validation, And Bigger Bets

SPEAKER_04 40:30

around around their design systems. Anything that can automate the process from idea to code in more ways and make that smoother can be great. You talked earlier about the timescales of like when people want things by. I am aware of, um I won't say too much, so I'm not divulging like where it's come from, but I'm aware of a design leader who um has managed to get their design system connected in both directions to code and to idea through an agentic chain. And to the extent now that he had a conversation with a stakeholder who said, Look, new client opportunity, so we really need to like build up a prototype to show them how our thing works in their industry. And I know this kind of normally takes a couple of weeks, but this is the brief, it's this client, this is what they want. I want to show them this functionality, that functionality, but we need to show it in these ways and everything. Took that down and wrote that into a prompt and his agent and sent the prototype to the chat an hour later. Working prototype with URL that you could take to the clients or branded up. Using their design system, fully right. And the devs are ready to take that and the code is appropriate to be taken and reused from a front-end perspective. That's brilliant. That's absolutely brilliant. I mean, that's how fast it's got. And that was a large-scale SaaS platform software. That's not just some small startup type thing.

SPEAKER_01 41:54

I think the opportunity for ideation, right? And I'm using very broad terms deliberately here, because I don't want to get bogged down in naming conventions because we're terrible with naming conventions. I haven't demonstrated that on this call already. But that and I read this, oh my goodness me. Probably 15 years ago, some futurist and they drawn a really, really simple flow, and they were talking about this thing called AI. I'm just like, what was this a typo? Literally, I had no clue. But now it's it's becoming incredibly relevant. And it was like a a conical funnel, right? And the broader aspect of it was that was the ideation space. That's the opportunity where you can have beyond large language models, you know, providing the neural networks and the machine learning and everything else is all synced up appropriately, right? But there wasn't anything there for validation. It was all about create these hypotheses, get them built, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, get them out there. So I'm still kind of thinking, uh, is validation is that still relevant? Where where does validation occur? So that I guess Does it occur when a product is live and in the hands of humans?

SPEAKER_04 43:18

So validation of what, though, I guess.

SPEAKER_01 43:21

So um, a feature or a take take a pick, a feature or a product.

SPEAKER_04 43:29

A feature or a product. I mean, I think if you have a fast enough dev cycle, if you have a fast enough delivery cycle, and you are careful that there are no harms in just delivering out. So um, you know, we can come to that separately, but there are in regulated industries, you know, you should not be experimenting with live customers if you know you've got an A B test of, you know, is this better or not for the customer? That's a real gray area. I think, yeah, the more contact you have with real world use, the faster you're going to. Get an understanding. Having said that, I think what's a really interesting opportunity about this speed with which we can work now is the time it gives us to think ahead. And I think there is value in design in collaboration with others within the business, genuinely doing look-ahead thinking, where they are really using all of our the comfort we have with uncertainty and volatility and ambiguity to really kind of push out ideas and concepts and really deeply explore them. Not everything needs to be a feature release out to a real live user at some kind of scale and then get some quant reason back. Now, our ability to do that on continuous improvement to the product and service that we have right now gives us the free time freer time to think about where are we going next year, or depending how fast your cycles are, next half of year or next two years, and and give us more time to do that. So there's a different level of I think we've lost the art of qualifying, if I can use that instead of validating the bigger bets. Um because everybody believes that if I've got an idea, I have to get it out in six months and validate it and get it out to the market and either it works or it doesn't work. And I'm just like, not everything. That's continuous improvement.

SPEAKER_01 45:20

That's not border development. I'm with you.

SPEAKER_00 45:27

Yeah, I I have I have many thoughts. Let me start with um the answer of the question that I didn't uh touch on before, which is where does design up fill fit in the AI picture? Please.

Merging Design And Product Ops

SPEAKER_00 45:39

I think um our job in that perspective is to ensure that we can enable our teams, and I'm not just saying design, but design product and tech with the tools and the learning that they need to embrace these new technologies and materials. And that means, in turn, working with compliance, working with purchasing, working with uh the legal team to make sure that we have inside the organization the technology that we need and that we bring the training. And it's not just for design. You mentioned a while ago, you know, the service blueprints, those are not just my toys. These are the materials and the elements of the entire organization. So it's not just the AI tools and technology and learning for design, but for the entire cross-functional product team. That's the first part. So, how do we enable that to happen within organizations? That is a big investment of time and priority for our roles as operators. And then the perspective on um experimentation and validation. We have had uh, you know, just in December, I had a few conversations with peers of mine in more specialized on the research side of things. And we were joking about the fact that 10 years ago, research cycle was very typical, you know, four to eight weeks a research cycle. Today, the expectations in the organizations are like uh 24 hours, 48 hours, maybe a week is the longest research cycle that you might be able to have. So, how do we enable that validation cycle or constant learning that we could have with uh unmoderated research as an example? We just have it out there and we are collecting data in a more consistent, constant basis. And the learning cycles are much more compressed. And right now they're being enabled by the fact that we can have, as you describe, working prototype within hours. Okay, let's put it in front of people, potential users or proxy users, not synthetic users. And uh and what can we learn? And then the other thing is especially this is more critical in startups or or small to medium-sized companies, is like a speed to revenue. Because if you don't get to that revenue breakpoint, you're going to go down under. So, how do we enable that to happen? And that is a critical path of, as I mentioned, not just design, but cross-functional product team to make sure that we can advance the organization forward. So validate quickly, learn quickly, get to revenue as quickly as you can to highlight and demonstrate that impact.

SPEAKER_04 48:27

So, and the leadership, the leadership challenge is to uh going back to that point, but what is that, what does that speed free you up to do? So if you respond to that challenge and speed everything up, um is of value in continuous improvement. It is of value in market testing, will somebody pay money for this? But there is like the journey from startup to scale up to legacy is equivalent in a way, I guess, to um the scale of challenge between um, you know, fixed feature release, um, you know, um re-architecting a journey, totally new proposition delivered, right? Um I would not want to be doing um, you know, uh proxy users, unmoderated testing, you know, rapid one-day turnaround um as uh as the only thing that I've done if I'm launching a big bet. Of course not, right? So the a lot of design teams are getting stuck in the production cycle and not elevating their work beyond the production cycle. And that is the challenge for leadership. So as you free up this capacity, make sure that you're giving your teams the headspace to then go and think what's next and where do we get. And and that should be of value to product leadership. Um I was just you know, that we talked about design ops, DevOps, and there's all this thing called product ops. A product organization designs products and delivers them or services, I don't mind what you want to call it. So there should only really be design ops and delivery ops, product design ops, product delivery ops. That's really interesting because then what you're talking about is product is the overarching theme behind what you're designing and delivering. So now we're talking about actually one of the melded skill sets around product and design leadership, right? Product leadership and design leadership, or product design leadership. So I think there's an interesting melding of skill sets there that we should be looking at. Because what Jose was talking about there was, you know, I as you were talking about the role design ops could play there, I said that is of use to everybody. You know, you're actually that's actually enabling everybody, but people don't see design as the thing that enables everybody. So there's depending on what your organization is, you might be able to find that you lean some of this stuff into actually I maybe we need to merge our product and design ops together because actually what we're really doing here is Well, let me merge a bit of your product ops into delivery ops and a bit into your design ops. This is the discovery part of product, this is the delivery part of product and and and ops going in there.

SPEAKER_01 51:14

From

What AI Delivers Versus Hype

SPEAKER_01 51:15

my perspective, I mean this is squarely leading into organizational design. Right, because you've got so many consolidations. Right, and and and I think that's a good good thing. Where the ambiguity for me still exists is about how artificial intelligence is actually being utilized to deliver that commercial revenue. Sure it's quicker, it does things quicker, fine. Which things?

SPEAKER_04 51:51

And how I think this is really Yeah, I think it's a really interesting one. Because the overarching promise of the industry around um this machine learning technology that they are calling AI is some kind of like massive problem solving, solving the world's, you know, everything, and or some huge automation theme, right? Whereas if you really dig into a lot of the conversations, you're finding the most the value that coders and developers are getting out of it as is as a co co-development companion, right? So there's human in the loop all the way along, and I suspect it's the same for most of my design colleagues would say the same thing as well, that it's a companion tool there. Then everybody else in the world is using it to speed up and automate some of the things that they, you know, the processed, more driven approaches that they have to things. So I think what GPT has released into the world is uh is a productivity tool at an individual level. I do know CPOs who have got their entire product method in agentic form and can take an idea from a team member, run it through their agentic framework, and come back out and go, yeah, you should probably go after that. Go for it. Right? Because they've had their agent product team like filter it. And and they I I know I know seriously senior people who have freed up 50% of their week by doing that. Now using 25% to play more golf, and 25% to do more ideation in their companies. Um that is true, but I think it's a there's a productivity thing there. Um but um your question was like, how much is AI actually delivering on this? I think we are yet untested as to how much you can leave to an automated process, right? And have truly automated. And the next question is how much you would you want to? Because there's still a lot of hype over the um fire and forget accuracy. Right. I mean and that's what I'm seeing in practice. I'm actually actively working with automations around AI in both product and design.

SPEAKER_02 54:08

I'm actively working on this stuff, and honestly, it's hit and miss.

SPEAKER_00 54:18

I think the the blending of roles is going to happen, the same cycle or the same uh pendulum of uh design specialists versus design generalists. And when I say design, I mean capital D. So encompassing of all the different functions. But I think uh at the end of the day, the heart of uh what we're doing right now will be a direct result or strengthening collaborations and partnerships across all of us. It is not us versus them, meaning us versus the silly product manager that doesn't get it or the technologies that do not implement what we give them. It is about how can we partner and collaborate more effectively so each of us can bring our own strengths to the table and deliver on the either the promise or the expectation from the business. And it is much less about safeguarding

Invite Partners, Not Protect Turf

SPEAKER_00 55:20

our turf rather than inviting people to play in our same sandbox, whether it's an AI sandbox or design systems or service design and research, it doesn't matter what the term we use in which we invite others is going to be absolutely critical. The other thing, and I also talk a lot about this over the last few years, is not about building um, I'm going to do another AI metrics um comparison. It's not about hiring a whole bunch of Mr. Smiths, you know, people that look like you, that have the same background, that come from the same organizations that you have been working with or studying with. It's about bringing people from totally different perspectives, maybe unexpected path to design or unexpected path to technology to enrich the perspective of why, you know, that are more reflective of the reality of the world than anything we could we could create on our own or create with partners and people that look like us, that have education like us, that have the same background that like us. And just to close this out, I would only say one of my biggest learnings as a design leader, as an executive, have been when I have challenged myself to actually hire people that would challenge me, that would teach me things, that would show me different perspectives. And those have become now the leaders in place when I have left organizations. So I think those are the perspectives that we need to be more open to embracing as we continue forging our path. And what is probably more important, forging the path for other people to follow.

SPEAKER_02 57:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 57:07

I see that's it's just it's like this eternal truth, right?

SPEAKER_04 57:12

A lot of what you just said there is an eternal, is an eternal truth. And it but it's so important right now at a point in time where people are feeling like or being told that technology could do instead, or technology could replace or could automate. What I love about what you've just said is just how uh those are things that only humans can do. What you just said. Those are those are the human only aspects. And um that is a thing we've absolutely got to hang on to as we go through all of this change, for sure.

SPEAKER_01 57:45

That's a brilliant, brilliant segue. Because I wanted to touch on this and I'm just conscious of time as well. Ethics.

SPEAKER_03 57:54

Back to purpose I was saying before as well.

SPEAKER_01 57:57

Absolutely, absolutely. I'm as yet, but ever hopeful that sooner or later a governance wrapper will arrive and that will include a very, very strong focus on the efficacy of technology's utilization. Because right now I I simply I don't have visibility of that. And it could be because it's just a little old Joel, or hmm, maybe I'm looking in the wrong places. I'm sure the ethics quotient of this new paradigm is hugely important to both of you, right? Yeah, who who wants to take that one, first of all? Any volunteers?

SPEAKER_00 58:47

I'll take it from just uh a quick perspective. And you mentioned agents. The both of you have mentioned Agentic AI and the fact that our teams are going to be, in some organizations, composed sort of human and agents. So I go through the regulatory perspective. The European Union has already put uh a strong regulation around the fact that if you have agents working in your company, there has to be a human responsible for those agents. You cannot just argue it was just the machine, it wasn't me. So at least some of the burden, and I say some because it's not a full burden perspective, will go into a human and an organization. So I think the fact that we can do it doesn't mean we have to do it. Yes, we can build it, yeah, but that doesn't mean you should build it. And we see what's happening right now with AI taking pictures of women and children and doing some weird stuff in it. That doesn't mean it's the fact that it can do it doesn't mean it should do it. So there has to be a lot of responsibility on our own side as the people using the technology to build these products and these platforms that enable us to do that, what we can do. The one thing that I say, it doesn't matter how good, quote, or successful, probably more. That's probably the better statement. How successful a product is if we have built it on top of um shady pathways where we may have not held our own values to the test in those experiences.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:25

So um I agree.

SPEAKER_04 1:00:27

Um my perspective on ethics comes from a um or my my thought about ethics in this conversation comes leads me towards regulations um and regulatory bodies and I and the value that they have. And I think that um despite the narrative that comes from Silicon Valley

Ethics, Regulation, And Accountability

SPEAKER_04 1:00:45

that regulation is a hindrance, um, and that you Europeans are so far behind um in your innovation because um you don't have such a free space as us in Silicon Valley, um uh I I think is a false flag narrative. Um and it's a false flag narrative driven by VC and private equity quest for hypergrowth at all costs with no ethics. I'll be that bold and say I don't see ethics in Silicon Valley. I don't see it. I see profit motive only, and in fact, not even profit. Well, profit from the deal, not necessarily building profitable companies, but profit from the deal from a VC perspective and from the PE perspective. And I think we must remember that that is the narrative that is driving um most of the things that are coming out of that Silicon Valley um space. So uh focus to Europe and the rest of the world, although California has some great privacy laws, um, but focus to Europe on uh on where regulation is coming in to look after the harms that can come from business, not just from technology, from business, because business has a motive that is not inherently inherently ethical in and of itself. So this is the challenge. Business doesn't have to be ethical unless it's regulated to be ethical. Um at the moment. Um so the origins the origins of business, businesses were to solve needs for people. But uh since the 70s have become to serve the needs of shareholders and regulation keeps them in check. What's interesting about the way that regulation is changing now is it's very outcomes driven, right? And it's very principles-based now. Consequently. This becomes super interesting because I uh if I can't show you that a decision was made with customer outcome in mind and prevention of harm in mind, then I am at fault. It doesn't matter what the outcome was. I am not compliant if I can't show you that approach in that way. So that means you need to build up all these mechanisms inside to be able to do that. That means you have to work on your technology being transparent and the decisions happening within inside it to be transparent. And there is there is not as much stopping us doing that as we think, except for the narrative about I need to move faster and get my returns more quickly. It is possible. It is a matter of collaboration and alignment around what those goals and outcomes are. Um so I watch for principles-based, outcomes-based regulation. I think financial services are doing a great job. Health is trying to quite a bit. Um, the energy industry from a consumer market perspective, in the UK at least, has done. And then privacy and consumer rights are making moves in the right direction. And I think all of these things will force companies. I do a lot of work personally in the consumer duty space within financial services, and I've been in the depths of this for the last uh couple of years, and it is going to be transformative of how um organisations, financial services organizations, at least in the UK, Ireland, and Europe, actually operate.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:10

If I can just add to that, I mean I agree with both of you. Right? Obviously, but if I put a traditional CX lens on this, awareness, number one. How do you move from awareness to engagement? And then from engagement into operability, and then you've got all of the support cycles in between those. So for me, the brilliant advantage of uh this new technology paradigm is it is accelerating everything. But then surely the consequence management has to be accelerated as well. Which I think echoes basically what both of you um have said. Unless you want to disagree.

SPEAKER_04 1:04:57

No, no, I agree, I agree. I think it is that con you and interesting, you talked about awareness. So I think it's um Kenneth Bowles, who wrote Early Doors, actually, wrote, did some great work and wrote a book about ethics. He's a kind of um technology and design ethicist who I follow a lot. You know, there's he's got some really great perspectives on this, and actually it was a debate between him and then an

Consequence Management And Harm Awareness

SPEAKER_04 1:05:20

optimization expert that I was referencing on that A-B testing and harms. I was chairing once with him. He's like, he basically said A B testing is unethical. Because if you're thinking which one's better or worse, and you know one is worse, and you're putting something worse out into the world. So how do you deal with that from an ethics perspective? And the optimization person said, but we're just we're trying to optimize for what the best outcome is. Yeah, but in the meantime, you're harming people. And if I was in a medical profession and I had a pill that made you worse and a pill that made you better, I wouldn't be allowed to put the pill that made you worse out there as the test. So, you know, how far do your ethics go? So, awareness that there might be a harm is a really interesting first step. Once you're aware, if you Then decide to still do something, then you're really in dodgy grind. Um, I think what a lot of companies do right now is feigning lack of awareness or not going far enough to be aware. Because once they were aware, it's a really hard decision. Um there's a lot of information out there that that should be.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:21

I don't think we're that far away from this consolidated collective of disparate disciplines, product design, technology, broad, I know, reaching a point where they just have to get decisions and they have to stick to those decisions. And I think AI will accelerate that, and then we get into the realms of consequence management. But look, we're getting close to the time that I've I've put in here, and it would be incredibly remiss of me, first of all, not that I mean this so sincerely, because both of you guys I've admired you from afar for such a long time. Thank you so much for coming and joining and having this conversation. But Jose, is there anything you'd like to shout about? Anything you like, what you're doing, where you're heading, what's important to you right now, where you'd like your audience, your fan club, let's put it that way. What does everyone need to know about what's important to you right now?

SPEAKER_00 1:07:36

Well, I I think um one one thing that has been in the back of my mind is that as our different paths have taken us to the levels of executive leadership where we are right now, or where we have been navigating in, we have a responsibility to create the conditions for the next generation of designers to thrive in our industry, even with the challenging conditions of economic uncertainty and technology pressures. If we don't create opportunities for new designers to gain the skills and the experience, we're going to harm and create a huge gap in terms of the next generation of senior designers and design leaders for the years to come. That is something that I have been very passionate about for basically the last decade, decade and a half, in terms of every opportunity I get. And if there's a gap in terms of internship programs, apprenticeship programs, I lobby very hard in the organizations that I have been a part of. And I think that is something that we, especially now, since we were just talking about AI and uh its capabilities, is like the human capability is not going to be replaced. And the next generation of leaders are not going to be created by themselves. We have to create those opportunities for them. And that's that I'm very passionate about.

SPEAKER_01 1:09:00

Very, very, very well said. Thank you. Thank you. Awesome.

SPEAKER_04 1:09:05

Martin, you love what Jose said. Big passion of mine. Um I'm going to go to the other end of the spectrum and I'm going to say that if you are an executive out there and you are looking at, you're looking ahead, and you're going, I I I imagine most of them are going, I don't know what a year, two-year ahead is going to look like. I'm under intense pressure to deliver this quarter. My thing

Create Paths For The Next Generation

SPEAKER_04 1:09:30

that I want to help people shift and understand is twofold. One is that design has a production and a strategic value to add. And your production value, yes, will be in that quarter. But you're missing a trick if you don't understand how it can help you from a strategic perspective. And secondly, the thing is that actually that space beyond this financial year, it is incredibly important in times of volatility, uncertainty that we're going through right now. It is incredibly important to have a look ahead at that. And that isn't innovation. That is a space that, you know, I that I try to work in my clients with, I call the liminal space. It's this threshold of change where things haven't changed fully yet, but they're going to, but you've definitely left the old world behind, but you haven't got the new world. That space is a space that designers are incredibly comfortable in. And they have skills and mindsets that they can share with you as an executive team, they can build your skills up as an executive team to be able to cope with that liminal space. And I think that's where execs and leadership teams inside organizations are missing the value of design because they're looking at what it does for production and not understanding how it can help them strategically. And that's the thing I most want to help people with. Because I believe that if we can shift that mindset at an executive level inside organizations, all the other things that we were talking about are going to start to line up. Because they're going to start to see the connection to long-term purpose in an organization, long-term strategy, and the difference between production level and strategic level work and how they can mix their skill sets across people, where the depths are of value. And that's what I'd like to try and encourage and see more of. But of course, it's only going to be possible to have all of that if we also create the spaces that Jose talked about. So these things come together.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:10

It's everyone's responsibility. Okay. That that is very, very clear. We're entering a phase of consolidation and simplification, huge automation, huge personalization.

SPEAKER_02 1:11:25

All of those things design helps with and design can enable. Right.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:33

And my last observation on this if leaders of organizations are not considering the fundamentals of design leadership and design practice now, you really are missing a trick when you're considering what your advised market cap is gonna be in a year's time.

SPEAKER_02 1:12:01

And it is going to be that quickly. Anyway.

SPEAKER_01 1:12:15

At the beginning, um, we could spend weeks, months, but yeah, we're we're we're very kind people. We're not going to do that to one another, and I'm very grateful. And that's wonderful. This has been fantastic. Thank you both for being so generous with your time and your observations and your candidness. I think it's gonna add an a huge boost to the Commonwealth Garden design community. Whether you've you're at school and you're thinking, Crikey, hmm, should I be switching my course? Whether you've just qualified and you've got tremendous debt, and you're thinking, okay, hmm, what do I do now? Or if you're switching careers, or whether you're whatever the definition is of you now, of a design leader, and I think we're all in agreement. We all have so much value that we can

Design’s Strategic Value In The Liminal Space

SPEAKER_01 1:13:20

contribute to. And from that, I think that's just super cool. Exciting times. Definitely exciting times, and we need to embrace them.

SPEAKER_04 1:13:34

Indeed.