Change, Change, Change.

Welcome to another installment of Inside Ideas, the newsletter that brings insights from our InsideOut design leadership community right to your inbox.

Though it's only February 9, we've already facilitated 11 sessions and learned a lot about what senior design leaders and creative operations leaders at high profile brands are facing as they enter 2024. Ready? Let's go!

First, a quick update on our community. We build to order, adjusting based on the needs and interests of our members. In fact, we have one key measure of success: How much InsideOut members value our community.

This year leaders are seeking more ways to connect directly between sessions and access to even more leadership challenges. So we're introducing two new learning formats, both suggested by our advisory board (Insider Club) and chosen by InsideOut leaders:

• Lightning Sessions - In these 60-minute virtual sessions, small groups of leaders share brief overviews of real-world problems with peers. We facilitate, capture insights, and enable direct connections afterwards to explore.
• Inside Connections - Through this opt-in program, we make one-on-one leader introductions based on common and complementary interests. Each month leaders meet a new member for networking and learning.

We're also exploring new ways to support our members by gathering insights from peers that help calibrate their efforts and educate stakeholders and partners. To do so, we need your help.

HELP US HELP YOU! We've just launched an anonymous In-House Creative Project Benchmark Survey , which we co-created with our Seattle Creative Operations Leader group (they're super smart!). Through this survey we will capture real project volume and speed, staff ratios, and more to help in-house creative ops leaders get the data they need to advocate for resources.

Please complete and share with any in-house ops leaders you know. We'll be compiling and distributing our findings broadly after the survey closes in March.

It's a new year, but one thing is NOT new: Change. As you'll soon see, leaders are embracing this new rate of change and seeking ways to achieve balance, for themselves and their teams. Let's take a look at some highlights from January.

During introductions, we use simple icebreakers to help leaders find kindred spirits and share interesting facts. Since we always kick off the year by having leaders share their Top Priorities, we decided to ask leaders what one word best describes the year they hope to have.

Word of the Year for 2024: BALANCE

Gotta love a good word cloud! Though balance is a clear winner, you'll notice what they hope to achieve (transformation, resilience, growth, joy!) and how they hope to achieve it (simplify, trust, efficiency, focus). With leaders like these, we feel confident this will be a year of progress–delivered with empathy!

We have two distinct types of leaders in our community: Design / Creative Leaders and Creative Operations Leaders, both leading in-house teams at high profile brands. Each set meets with peers in regional roundtables, giving them commonality of focus and topics of interest.

While there's definitely some overlap, we think you'll note the subtle differences that make both these groups extremely valuable to the organizations (and teams!) they serve based on their priorities below. And like most leaders everywhere, they are exploring AI with a mix of optimism and overwhelm.

In the spirit of that interest, we took completely blinded notes from each group's January sessions, generated by humans, and asked an AI tool to summarize three key themes. Below are those results, with minor edits for context or clarification.

DESIGN / CREATIVE LEADER PRIORITIES

Following are themes drawn from our design leader roundtables:

1. Organizational Change and Innovation: Leaders aim to drive org change through various means, such as leveraging design principles, encouraging collaboration, and adopting new tools and processes. Also by innovating workflows, implementing design systems, and exploring the intersection of design with emerging technologies. There's also a focus on achieving consistency across platforms, driving growth in design maturity, and delivering quality work despite recent reductions in staff and budgets.
2. Professional Development and Skill Enhancement: Many leaders are prioritizing skill development and career growth for their teams. They aim to elevate their teams by providing training in design principles and processes, and supporting exploration of new technologies like AI. Additionally, there's a focus on building deeper business acumen, and recovering from burnout to bounce back stronger. Efforts to build trust, establish shared accountability, and create unified purpose within teams are also evident.
3. Transition and Adaptation: Many leaders are navigating transitions in their roles, teams, or organizations. This includes adapting to new leadership, organizational structures, or industry trends. They aim to build relationships, establish credibility, and define expectations while integrating new team members or leaders. Additionally, they are seeking balance, resilience, and healthy work practices amidst ongoing change and new ways of working.

CREATIVE OPERATIONS LEADER PRIORITIES

From our ops leader sessions, we drew the following trends:

1. Process Optimization and Efficiency: Leaders aim to streamline processes, optimize workflows, and achieve consistency in output and quality across teams. This includes efforts to implement new tools, deploy automation, identify and address friction points, and refine existing tools and processes. Leaders are also looking for ways to manage workload and throughput effectively, coordinate across departments to prioritize tasks, and leverage technology like AI and automation for efficiency gains. There's a strong emphasis on capacity planning, resource management, and building operations team capacity to support growth and scale.
2. Change Management and Adaptation: Most leaders are navigating changes within their teams or organizations, such as new leadership, reorganizations, or shifting priorities. They are focused on managing expectations, minimizing disruption, and facilitating smooth transitions. This includes efforts to educate new leaders on existing culture, drive change through training and adaptation, and build consensus around new strategies or operating models. Additionally, ops leaders are focused on addressing challenges resulting from budget cuts or layoffs while still delivering high-quality outcomes.
3. Professional Development and Skill Enhancement: Leaders are prioritizing continuous learning and growth, both personally and professionally. This includes strong interest in attending conferences, speaking at events, and exploring certificate programs or courses. They are also focused on building deeper expertise in areas such as data analytics. There's a strong emphasis on personal branding, community engagement, and giving back to the industry through mentoring or side projects.

Fascinating, right?! And we're just getting started. We'll be tackling many of the top priorities shared during our recent sessions in our next roundtables, so look out for more detailed (human-summarized) learnings as we go.

Below are links to content and resources shared during our live discussions in response to current leader challenges during this round of sessions:

• How to Lead Across a Siloed Organization (HBR)
• A spectrum of perspectives: Design, Product, and Business (Medium)
• macOS Sonoma: How to control reaction effects with hand gestures (9to5Mac) We had FUN with this one and you should, too!
• Henry Stewart Creative Operations Conference in NYC (May 16)
• Building a UX Department from Scratch (Talk from UXDX with Muriel Naim )
• The Creative Ops Podcast (with Nish Patel )

Over the past four years, we've generated lots of content, with trends and insights on real-world challenges for leaders of in-house design teams. ICYMI, check out our most recent articles with high level learnings from InsideOut roundtables.

• Elevating your Design Team's Business Acumen
• We Launched a Podcast!
• Boosting Team Morale
• Design Leadership is Vital. Here's How to Explain Why.
• Automating for Efficiency

We've got more on the way, so stick around.

As always, our InsideOut overview page includes dates and topics for our upcoming sessions , links to articles , and our member profile , alongside a handy form to express interest or refer a friend. Enjoy!

And there you have it. We are thrilled to continue to hold space for senior leaders to explore new ideas and will keep sharing them through this Inside Ideas newsletter. There's so much more to come in 2024. We can hardly wait!

Our mission is to connect leaders to find solutions. If you’re a senior design, experience, or creative operations leader of an in-house team at a high profile brand and want to connect with others who share your unique challenges, let’s talk. Our InsideOut community hosts virtual and in-person roundtables to support the learning and growth of our members, and we're honored to facilitate those discussions.

If you stumbled upon this newsletter and liked it, please share. We aim to help as many leaders as possible. And if you haven't subscribed yet, what are you waiting for? Let’s keep learning together!