Is there room for designers in Singapore boardrooms?

Chief Design Officer, Chief Creative Officer, Chief Inspiration Officer…the emergence of these job titles shows designers are making their way into the boardrooms or at least, taking lead positions alongside other functions such as marketing, finance, IT, research and development etc., in organisation’s top echelon.

This however, is currently more common with large global organisations and less with local companies.
It has been quite a journey since the design fraternity first mooted the notion, for design to be well and truly be represented in a company organisation, it needs to occupy a seat in the boardroom.

The proven argument that design benefits business has also worked favorably to position more designers at leadership roles; organisations today are also more ready to form top management members based on depth of cognitive influence rather than the traditional quantitative span of control.

The belief is, design if left to build from ground up will take too long and due to its inherent subjective and ‘provocative’ nature will face too much resistance to let it see the light of day! But to see the CDO at the CEO’s table will be a very powerful and exemplary way to tell the rest of organisation…’this company values design and totally supports it!’

So what is the value of investing another Eames chair in the boardroom?

Companies today require more than logic, analysis, number crunching and rational reasoning to be competitively relevant.

Imagination, non-linear thinking, articulation skills, co-creation, dealing with fuzziness, people research, rapid-modeling, experimentation etc. are emerging skills and mindset that will shape the new global landscape and to permeate these capabilities and behavior to the rest of the company, it is most effective to start at the source!

In essence, besides inspiration and creativity design also provides the much needed right brain thinking to balance dominant left brain power of most management teams in strategic discussions and decision making.

The designer in that top seat must always maintain the qualities and traits of a designer…creative, challenging, have empathy and most of all, be courageous to offer a different view if needed. Because to get into the boardroom does require corporate savvyness and especially in large corporations, the designer may have unconsciously traded in his black turtleneck for a pin-stripe suit!

Having design at the table also ensures a direct accountability of the design function’s performance and value contribution back to the management and company. This line-of-sight will generate valuable traction for the rest of design team towards the organisation.

However, this top down influence and representation must be complemented by real practice and involvement at all other levels through appropriate design capability investments, or else design will remain only as a box in the org-chart.

There will be many companies, like local SMEs that may not have the organisation scale to accommodate a sizable management team to include design, however they can appoint an in-house design lead and actively engage him in all key topic discussions even if not involved in management decision making.

Another effective approach is to partner an external design team for strategic consultancy and also act as an extended design function to the company; we see many such partnerships in Singapore.

Besides pushing to break the glass ceiling, it is equally if not more important for design and designers to break the glass walls that may exist between departments and individuals in the company.

The nature of design’s role to push, question, challenge convention and work with fuzziness can create discomfort and anxiety with other disciplines, resistance and mind barrier in the form of glass walls are erected and designers will find themselves bumping into it.

There is still a lot for design to make themselves be understood in what they do, their role and how they do it…also, it does not always help that design offices are usually differently decorated and that adds to the curiosity at best and suspicion at worst!

Constant communication, contact, taking a collaborative approach especially between design and other departments can help lower and eventually break the invisible barrier; design can only thrive in a fluid environment and creativity, with a free mind.

So, go on to break that ceiling but do not leave the rest of the house barricaded in glass walls.
To all CEOs…’in case of design, break glass!’

Low Cheaw Hwei is among the speakers who will be sharing their expertise at the Singapore Design Business Summit 2014.

Singapore Design Business Summit 2014
Joyden Hall, Bugis+, National Design Centre and Lasalle, Singapore
12 - 14 March 2014

Click here to register.