There are few successful brands and businesses today that don’t preach about the need to be ‘design led’. It seems to be a response to the worry that cold, hard financially biased processes and evaluations are not the complete solution to guide the future of their businesses.  But overarching consensus about what this actually means is still undecided.  It is not really about adding emotive heart to the logical head in decision making as design can be just as analytical as accountancy if needs be. So what does being ‘design led’ mean to me? It  means two things; adaptability and empathy.

Business along the way to industrialisation and the growth of mass markets forgot that ultimately they trade with individuals. But now the digital age is upon us every individual has a voice and can easily network together to create formidable effects in a moment.  The Arab Spring has shown how collective individuals have global implications. The same is true of the business world- their staff, suppliers and customers are increasingly vocal, volatile and demanding.

So businesses have to adapt to this more human and progressive future. Designers by their very nature embrace this world with their love of the personal, the new and that careful balance of aspiration and pragmatism require to move forward for the better for all. Never before has human understanding been so critical to brand and business success. Technology has enabled businesses to connect to people as individuals. Design allows businesses to understand, empathise and respond to those people’s needs in multiplicity of situations and times.

So changes are happening: nervous management consultants are buying up design agencies to shore up their futures and design agncies are migrating out of the marketing and technical departments into the board rooms of the more progressive businesses.

However, writing as head of a design agency, one thing is also clear. To be a design led organisation, where principles of design are engrained into the culture and ethos of a business you also need to work with a certain kind of design agency. To be a design led business, you need a business focused design agency.

Firstly that means an agency that can speak the language of the boardroom, understanding the needs of marketing, sales, technical, financial and management because at that level design can help form human focused strategies. Design will help bring people together in understanding, it can put people in the shoes of others, it can stimulate ideas and bring them to life for evaluation. It can build strategies by imagining, prototyping and testing. And it can do all those quickly and intuitively, but only if it can empathise with leadership communities and use design as a strategic tool as well as a practical one.

Secondly you need and agency that hasn't been forced into a pigeon hole by the accountants for the sake of accountability, efficiency and profit. After the grand days of the multidisciplinary megaliths of the 80s the design industry has been segmented into increasingly specialised channels.  But you need and agency that is eclectic, networked and inquisitive so that they can tackle any and every new challenge. In this new world order who knows what will come next, and it will happen fast.

We find that all rather exciting. 

To quote Beth Comstock, Vice Chair of Business Innovations at General Electric, “What business needs now is design. What design needs now is making it about business”.