Rethinking design leadership with swarms and flocks
How structured emergence solves manager burnout, team bottlenecks, and systemic design debtObserving the flock based on how individual biological behaviors aggregate into structured group intelligence (image source: Asa Leonard)Molly Graham wrote an essay a week ago that ruined the traditional management approach for me. In it, she asked what would happen if we stopped long-term systematic planning like a set of stairs and started treating them like starling murmurations.It hit a nerve because design leadership is currently suffering from a bad case of mechanical thinking. We talk endlessly about cross-functional alignment, product development and operations, and predicting roadmaps. But mechanical systems are brittle. They crack the second an executive stakeholder pivots strategy, a competitor drops a new AI feature out of nowhere, or a team loses a seasoned designer in a...
Topics: UX ResearchDesign SystemsAccessibilityWeb Interfaces
Entities: Web InterfacesUX ResearchAccessibilityDesign Systems