How Design Can Change a CEO’s Life

I serve on a task force for the World Economic Forum called the “Global Agenda Council on New Models of Leadership,” and much of our work focuses on the urgent need for leaders to be agile in what are increasingly volatile and complex times. As someone running an organization myself, I am personally made aware of these challenges on a daily basis.

The neatly ordered organizational hierarchy we were all accustomed to has become disrupted by the flattening effect of social media. Today, anyone can “friend” the CEO, be it a line worker or even a mid-level manager from a rival competitor. With new modes of communication have also come new expectations for responsiveness.

I don’t think any of us truly feels that we have control of our inbox, not to mention all of the tweets and posts that are directed at us, industry news to keep up with, and global trends that threaten to disrupt. What this new world doesn’t come with is a manual on how leaders should nurture their networks, sustain vast numbers of relationships, gain support for their agendas or manage their own time. The disruptive transition from a hierarchy to a heterarchy makes leading more and more difficult to manage.

I have increasingly become a believer that design can be used to aid leaders in navigating today’s complex landscape. Design gives us the ability to see data visually and spatially, and governed by systematic principles. It cuts through information overload that provides a path to see “the whole”. After all, the word “design” comes from the German word gestaltung, meaning “shape” or “form” – in essence, how we see the big picture and can make sense of aspects of our world. Design affords a toolkit of core principles that straddles the line between beauty and functionality and that goes well beyond “making something pretty”.

Consider the selection of the color red for stop signs – it quickly gets your attention and tells you what to do even before you can read the letters on the sign. Or the decision to have only one button to go to the home screen on your iPhone so that when you get lost you know exactly how to get back home. In the exact same way, thoughtful design can be used to help leaders better comprehend the complexity of all the competing priorities, agendas and relationships that surround them.

My own background is in experimenting with the intersections between classical design and the computer, culminating in work that is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, as well as designs for corporate clients. But, it was only after I earned my MBA and later became president of the preeminent college of art and design – and began to lead myself – that I started to imagine how design and technology could combine to help someone in my position. I expanded on this idea in a recent TED Talk last summer.

I once read how Howard Schultz, CEO of Starbucks, uses a pie chart to visualize how he spends his days. These simple visualizations are one thing, but when technology and big data are combined with design, true insight can happen – leaders can start to see where they’ve been spending their time versus where they should be spending their time. After all, our time – and our relationships – are our most important assets.

Tools like Gmail Meter and the many social CRM systems directed at small businesses give a hint of what these kinds of new platforms could look like. Design is what will help reveal the insights embedded in the data. It is my belief that in the future, the emergence of new tools directed straight at the CEO will effectively combine design, data and technology to lend some sanity to leading today.

Photo: Argijale/Flickr/Getty Images

A version of this article was originally posted in November 2012 on the World Economic Forum’s blog.