How might we become relevant at the decision-making table—not just take up room? It's time to put a business case around empathy.
Not sure about you - but my life as a designer has seen me:
- Use empathetic language when describing research only to be asked, ‘so what?’ ‘What is the impact and why should I care’ about these issues or these people.
- Create various design artifacts intended to increase the detectability, usefulness, credibility, and impact of my practice - only to have leadership and other stakeholders congratulate me on making something ‘pretty’ and never look at it again.
- Present a desirability ranking of features derived from user data - only to have viability rankings appear from thin air and create an artificial reordering with no data attached.
It’s not all bad; these may be the quintessential obstacles of a career in design.
Designers, the question is how to become relevant at the decision-making table - not just take up room. To push your product further by answering ROI, rather than plead stakeholders on behalf of a user cohort.
How Might We do that?
To tell the right story that will drive behaviour change, I need to level up my impact to help stakeholders drive strategic business decisions. In an insightful course, Strategic Business Thinking for Designers, I’ve learned powerful and practical frameworks that develop strategic reasoning and empathy for stakeholders. The following frameworks have helped me clarify, frame, and execute my thinking and have already significantly improved interactions with colleagues and clients.
- SCR: Analytical storytelling (The ‘so what?’ of your work)
- Good partner maps: A way to uncover what part of your work will help you drive the most behaviour change (the end of unused design artifacts)
- POKRs: Using perspectives and OKR’s to map actions to results (and actual Viability requirements)
- Ecosystem maps: Highlighting the transfer of value throughout a company, team, or process (and highlight broken processes)
- And so much more...
You’ll get hands-on assignments, thoughtful peer critiques, insightful office hours, and countless conversations with an incredible global design community. The experience has left me feeling excited, driven, and in desperate need of coffee and reflection.
CDO School is a clever ruse — a weekly prompt that will change the way you’ll act going into work on Monday.
Along with 40 students worldwide, trying to navigate business beyond the double diamond - Ryan guides with his genuine openness and helpfulness to providing profound and actionable insights shared in several case studies.
Side note: ‘Feedback is mandatory, assignments are optional.’
Providing feedback to others and being exposed to how other students gave feedback improved the learning experience exponentially. The incredible community support I received enhanced the learning material that has fundamentally changed the way I work. The assignments allowed me to think critically, and peer feedback helped me grow.
