Fun fact: I’ve never made my living as a designer and I’ve never led a large organization. So how did I come to build a program called Designing Leadership?

It started with a career in strategy. I’ve worked with lots of organizations you’ve heard of: government (NASA, State Department), corporations (Coca-Cola, Starbucks), nonprofits (Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Ashoka), healthcare (Harvard Medical School, American Association of Critical-Care Nurses) and many more. You can learn more about all this on my other site if you’d like.

But the way I learned to be a strategist was from the start intertwined with design. My mentor in strategy, Jeff Leitner, founded the organization UX for Good with Jason Ulaszek in 2010. Every UX for Good project has as its foundation: “How can the discipline of design do the most good here?” As a principal of the related organization Insight Labs, it was my job to provide the research and strategic framing to help the designers address the right problem. I embedded with the designers as they did their thing helping musicians in New Orleans, genocide survivors in Rwanda, and pediatric cancer patients in Chicago.

When you do that kind of work for several years, design rubs off on you. In the course of another strategy project, I encountered a group of lawyers who admitted that they felt too creatively stuck to collaborate. “Can’t you take a moment to go back to being little kids coloring with crayons?” I asked them. “No, that was beaten out of us in law school,” one of them replied. They needed a more structured approach. That’s when I realized that I could extract lessons I had learned from top designers to guide educated professionals through the process of creativity in a way that doesn’t feel too chaotic for them. I’ve since used the same method with academics, social workers, nurses, teachers, physicians, and other professionals who want to get creative without setting aside everything they know.

I didn’t call what I was doing “design thinking,” but around the same time folks from universities like Stanford and firms like IDEO were taking a similar approach, using the principles of design to integrate clients’ thinking into their work. There was an explosion of interest in the approach called Human-Centered Design (HCD). By the time I was hired as an adjunct professor to teach designing thinking at the University of Southern California, HCD had become the standard approach, so I blended in aspects of my own approach. Crucially, this was a program Jeff and I had developed to cultivate great leaders in social innovation — the first doctoral degree of its kind. So at every step the question wasn’t, “How do we use design to create a new widget?” but instead “How do we use design to help these students become the leaders they need to be?”

After leaving USC, my career pivoted to a focus on nursing. I worked with Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to fight racism in the profession and with the American Association of Critical-Care Nurses to address its endemic staffing crisis. Both efforts were interlaced with the suffering nurses and patients experienced during the opening years of the COVID-19 pandemic. More than anything in my life, these years alerted me to the widespread failures of leadership in our institutions. As clinicians risked their lives every day and executives worked from home, the disconnect between the leaders and the workforce was more clear than ever, and that empathically wounded me. I saw that we can write brilliant policy documents all day, but they will not have the desired effect unless our leaders are prepared to boldly effect action at the institutional level. And America’s failure in the face of the pandemic and subsequent crises showed that they certainly are not! (End speech.)

In those years, I consoled myself by telling myself that I was working with the good guys: the nurses, social workers, and educators whose professional ethics consistently push them toward good decisions. But I also saw the way those same professionals struggled when they moved toward higher levels of leadership, often losing ground to executives whose education had acculturated them to act more decisively (even if those actions were often narrowly financial-minded). I also knew that many of these executives were good people who felt paralyzed in the face of the crisis before them. All this made me desire to disrupt the category of leadership, though I had no idea how.

Then one day while playing with my son (of course), Designing Leadership popped fully formed into my head. I spent the next few months beta testing with old friends and current clients, then building it out as an independent offering. Now I’m ready to develop this approach into a new standard for how people think about leadership. If you’ve read this far, I bet you are too. Book some time on my calendar and let’s get started. Or reached out on LinkedIn if you’d rather chat first.