Design Leadership Ignited: Elevating Design at Scale

Drawn from interviews with Fortune 500 design leaders, a guide to running design at scale — and to holding the contradictory pulls that leadership creates. Its central move, embracing complexity rather than flattening it, echoes the SDF's distinction between the merely complicated and the genuinely complex. Based on in-depth interviews with design leaders at Fortune 500 companies, the authors set out a pathway to design excellence: building a forward-looking strategy and the right organisational structure for the design function, empowering the design team, and scaling design's impact across the whole organisation. The book's central argument is that design leaders must recognise and hold the often-contradictory objectives they face rather than resolve them away. Published by Stanford University Press in 2022, it draws on the authors' own backgrounds leading design at companies including 3M and Philips, and teaching at the University of Melbourne and Delft University of Technology.