By skyforbes 
Here are the books that I heard mentioned during the conference sessions:
In his talk The Evolving Design Leader: Embracing your new form as you advance in your career, Peter Merholz touched upon the shift in skills and mindset needed to become a good design leader. Peter suggested embracing the new roles and responsibilities that come with the transition toward design leadership. He highlighted how a leader’s time is divided between creative, business, operations, and people work. And how that division evolves over time.
Peter referenced Camille Fournier’s The Manager’s Path. In speaking of the division of responsibilities of a Design Executive (he paraphrases from the book): “First and foremost, a Chief Design Officer must care about and understand the business, and be able to shape business strategy through the lens of design and user experience. She is an executive first, and a designer second.”
Peter also introduced us to the idea of the “first team,” quoting from Patrick Lencioni’s The Advantage. He explained that, for design executives, those who have made their way past managerial levels, their peers (other executives, directors, and managers) within the organization, are their “first team.” And that direct reports who work below them (often designers and design managers) are seen as a “second team.”
Perhaps this concept explains why design leaders spend a lot of their time away from the design team doing work seemingly unrelated to design. Design leaders represent our practice in places where design doesn’t exist within the organization.
Patrick is also the author of a popular leadership book: The Five Dysfunctions of a Team.
In Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World, David Epstein wrote that “…a key to creative problem solving is tapping outsiders who use different approaches…” and that sometimes “a curious outsider is truly the only one who can see the solution.” During the conference, Hayley Hughes introduced us to an organizational model that encourages such outside-in thinking. She shared a concept from retired U.S. Army General Stanley McChrystal’s book Team of Teams.
The ‘Team of Teams’ structure, the very opposite of a ‘Command Structure’ that is archetypical of company organizational charts, is a setup that encourages cross-team collaboration. In simple terms, members of a team actively break out of their silos to get to know people from across the organization, improving the chances of solving complex challenges as a single unit.
We were reminded that a company, after all, is a community of people who have agreed to come together to solve a common problem or undertake a common mission. I understood the Team-of Teams model to be a setup that encouraged cross-pollination of ideas within a company to solve complex problems that are out of scope for a single, even multi-disciplinary, team.
As ethics claims more space in conversations about design, there is rarely a design conference that goes by without a reference to Victor Papanek’s Design for the Real World. Ovetta Sampson begins her talk: The Planck Value of Design — Collective Leadership, with Victor Papanek’s definition of design: “Design is the conscious and intuitive effort to impose meaningful order to chaos.”
Ovetta explained what this means to her as a design leader. She said, “as a design leader, this encompasses my world view about design being a catalyst for change and a catalyst for transformation, and not just a bystander.”
I found it refreshing to hear a design leader share her personal ethics statement, which she uses to lead her teams. Her ethics statement: “To amplify the beauty of humanity with design while avoiding practices that exploit its fragility.”
Ovetta got me thinking about what my ethics statement might be.
Lisa Welcham (Consultant & Author, Hildegard BV) offered some interesting perspectives on what designers can and should do within organisations besides designing products and services. Her book, Managing Chaos, although not explicitly referenced during the conference, came up during a discussion session held in-between the main conference talks. Lisa says that designers should “do what they do best” and apply design tools and methods to help companies re-align their people, processes, and technologies for better digital governance.
I have always tip-toed around conversations related to governance, policies, and standards. I ignore these topics until it’s administered to me as mandatory training sessions for ‘company quality assurance,’ further reinforcing my distaste for them. But as I work more with companies undergoing large-scale digital transformation, I find myself a spectator of conversations around digital governance more often. I understand very little about it, but I now see some sense in designers being more involved in the conversation.
In her talk Leading through ongoing ambiguity, Leslie Yang spoke about bringing out the best in ourselves and our teams in the midst of ambiguity and change. She gave practical tips to take care of 1. yourself, 2. your team, and 3. your business in tough situations.
In speaking of personal care, Leslie shared her takeaways from Emily Nagoski’s book Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle. With the experience of battling burnout herself, Leslie observes that “addressing the cause of stress doesn’t always help reduce the feeling of stress within us.” Adding that “your body continues to accumulate incomplete stress cycles, month after month, year after year, leading to burnout.” What it’s waiting for, she says, is “some cue that you’re safe from the potential threat, you can relax.”
It is said that “leadership is about making others better,” so paying attention to oneself can seem contradictory to mainstream leadership advice. I took away that by caring for yourself, you are in a better position to care for others — a piece of advice that is applicable even beyond the workplace.
Leslie touched upon many great topics, each of them worthy of a dedicated keynote. In speaking of ‘change’ and how we can deal with it, Leslie referred to Phil Jackson’s memoir Eleven Rings: The Soul of Success. Phil was the head coach of the Chicago Bulls and Los Angeles Lakers basketball teams, who, despite encountering “season after season of change,” won 11 NBA championships, earning the title of “zen master” among sportswriters.
Leslie spoke of how he accepted that “everything changes” and instilled in his teams that change is “ripe for danger and opportunity.” Leslie says that “when we are stressed and fearful, then everything seems dangerous, we go in circles, you know, falling into rabbit holes, and we worry about everything. But if we actually heal ourselves and help our teammates heal themselves and take care of each other — then we can guide the business through ongoing ambiguity.”
Tutti Taygerly, a design leader, turned leadership coach, spoke about “being versus doing.” She said, “In technology, we’re used to doing things all the time. Meetings, to-do lists, roadmaps, milestones… We often have no time for being, the white space that we need to breathe.” And so, how do we create that space? Tutti suggests using the North Star Leadership Framework, which focuses on four critical areas: Me, People, Projects, and Community. Here is Tutti’s North Star for 2022: https://tuttitaygerly.medium.com/creating-your-2022-north-star-446656faeb3b; that might give you a better idea of the framework.
If you would like to learn more about making space for yourself as a leader, check out her book: Make Space to Lead: Break Patterns to Find and Focus on What Matters.