Forecasting the frontiers of design

Measures of design effectiveness have become more and more subjective. It’s time to call a halt

The criteria experts use to assess design effectiveness have, in recent years, become more subjective. I question this trend, advocating instead that the measures of design leadership be genuine improvements in how people live and work, developing vast and as-yet-untapped energy resources that do not degrade the environment, and promoting automation to reduce toil and expand opportunities for all.

Search Amazon.com for books on leadership and you will find no fewer than 17,296 results. Could the West have a problem with leadership, by any chance? Apparently, one can lead like a servant, or like Attila the Hun. And like everything nowadays, leaders can also be toxic.(1) But for design managers, as for others interested in leadership, there are two books worth a special look.

Accenture’s Robert Thomas, along with University of California professor Warren Bennis, the world doyen of leadership studies, published Geeks and Geezers in 2002.(2) Thomas and Bennis went looking for, and found, the influence of different formative eras on today’s young and old generations of leaders. But they also found crucibles of leadership – intense, often traumatic, always unplanned experiences that transformed people into leaders. In such crucibles, people had faced

• Estrangement and sexism (as an American woman working in Japan, for example)
• Anti-Semitism and racism at work
• Solitary confinement in Communist China.

In sum,the key skill leaders developed was an almost magical ability to get through adversity. Also boosting the chances of leaders, Bennis and Thomas maintained, was something called neoteny – the retention of juvenile characteristics in the adult of a species. For corporate leaders, neoteny included:

• A fondness for lifelong learning
• Spending weekends at play, doing far-out sports

In the same year that Bennis and Thomas came out with all this, Daniel Goleman ventured some similar conclusions. With two co-authors, Goleman, pioneer of the idea of emotional intelligence, wrote about primal leadership – something that meant realizing the power of emotional intelligence. Many babyboomer American managers, he noted, now had aging parents that needed caring for. After September 11, 2001, they also had a desire to take stock. In these circumstances, if they felt trapped or bored by their work, they should reawaken their passion for it by taking a sabbatical, going to a leadership development seminar, finding an executive coach or a meaningful cause, and keeping sacred a few hours a week, or a day or two a month, for self-examination.(3)

What a load of tosh! In fact, leadership does not emerge from trauma, abuse, juvenile conduct, bunking off work, or navel-gazing. For design managers, as for others, it comes out of tough projects, repeated experiment, criticism, reading, and writing. As a journalist, I have interviewed Saul Bass, Mario Bellini, James Dyson, Lou Dorfsman, Milton Glaser, Shiro Kuramata, Raymond Loewy, George Nelson, Gordon Russell, Dieter Rams, Paul Rand, and Yuri Soloviev. They taught me that leadership in design, as elsewhere, is about rising above one’s own experience and reaching for a higher sense of purpose. A leader is someone with the strength both to embody the times and transcend them.

How much the two books I’ve cited embody, and how little they transcend! Yet even if today’s typical design manager hasn’t read either book, he or she is still very likely to have been influenced by the broad therapy culture they both implicitly support.(4) That becomes clear when we look at three issues: quality, climate change, and services.

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