Keep:

1. Putting the value of design on a stage, ensuring it’s seen as a strategic force to drive the business forward.

2. Focusing on improved efficiency and effectiveness.

3. Nurturing a strong design culture – ensuring we’re doing the right things with the best talent, and processes aren’t getting in the way.

4. Being tightly integrated with cross-functional business and agency partners for deep understanding, collaboration and agility.

5. Staying human-centered, putting customers and human language first.

6. Synthesizing emerging insights to solve complex problems, create clear frameworks, and put new and innovative ideas forward.

7. Building trust through diplomacy and politics to move design forward.

8. Ensuring the entire end-to-end customer journey creates the brand.

9. Infusing design with AI, as a tool in service to humanity.

Stop:

1. Being a victim, complaining; lacking empathy for business leaders.

2. Tearing each other down instead of lifting each other up.

3. Giving no/little feedback, or failing to give feedback in an empowering way.

4. Using dated terminology that diminishes the value of design.

5. Trying to do too much with fewer people – a recipe for mediocrity.

Start:

1. Recharting the mandate for design in your organisation to reflect the need today.

2. Being a constructive change agent within your organisation, expert at bringing people with you.

3. Pausing to think beyond daily demands – you’ve got to collect the dots to connect the dots.

4. Being involved in building the business strategy, speaking the language of business with expert fluency.

5. Defining skill sets for the future of design and training for them.

6. Building clear metrics into every brief to reinforce the value design will bring.

7. Having and reporting qualitative and quantitative ways to measure design impact.

8. Rewarding people for winning behaviors, those that will help the organisation achieve its growth strategy.

9. Choosing where to put our time and energy – where can we bring an elite level of excellence? Where can we be world-class? Where are we not really qualified?

The Future Of… conference was created to inspire conversation and dialogue on the present path and trajectory of design. Where are we now? How did we get here? What might we learn with, and from others? What might we do together to reshape The Future Of… Design.

Speakers at the conference included the DBA’s Chief Executive, Deborah Dawton, GE Healthcare’s Chuck Jones, 3M’s Brian Rice, Whirlpool’s Ken Musgrave, Newell’s Kris Malkoski, and current and former heads of Design from Verizon, PepsiCo, Duracell, J.M. Smucker, Colgate-Palmolive, Procter & Gamble, Burger King, McKinsey, BP, and more.

The conference took place in Chicago, USA on 12 and 13 March 2025 and was hosted by David Butler, Fred Richards and DBA Board Director, John Gleason.

Reinforce the value design brings

The DBA champions the role of effective design in the creation of business growth.

If you want to convincingly demonstrate and prove the effectiveness and impact of the design work you and your team produce, the unique accreditation of winning a DBA Design Effectiveness Award gives you the ability to do this.

Download an Entry Pack and enter by 5pm BST Monday 14 July 2025.

We currently have no vacancies at the DBA. Please keep an eye on our website for future roles. 

• Measuring productivity in the creative industries is complex, while traditional KPIs and OKRs are useful to see how we’re doing, over-monitoring can stifle creativity and make people feel they are under surveillance.
• There’s no need to reinvent how you measure productivity – simple tools like weekly surveys with just two key questions can provide valuable insights without overcomplicating matters.
• Creativity thrives on both structured and unstructured time. Routines matter, and Alex highlighted the importance of layering deep work sessions (90-mins to 2-hours) with 30-minute breaks whether a walk or a bit of gardening – to allow for reflection. This balance increases the chances of generating fresh ideas.
• As leaders, we need to strike the right balance between where we do our best creative work and be more thoughtful about how we design good routines that enable individuals to thrive.
• Creating an environment that gets the best from people means balancing individual agency with clear expectations. Setting core in-office times for collaboration – rather than scheduling unnecessary meetings – helps teams work more effectively together.
• Efficiency gains, through automation or AI tools, should create space for deeper thinking rather than simply making room for more tasks.
• Meetings should have a clear purpose and an agenda and while AI tools like Otter or Fathom can capture notes, writing things down remains a powerful way to follow through. 
• Rest is critical – don’t wait until it’s forced upon you. Make time for breaks, use your holidays fully, and properly switch off. Investing in rest now will pay off in the long run.
• Alex’s book Work Less, Do More, explores how companies and individuals can better integrate rest, creativity, and focus into their work and lives – well worth a read if this resonates with you.

Coming up

There was much, much more covered in the hour. Our next meeting will be on Monday 7 April, 4-5pm BST where we’ll be joined by Mark Curtis, Head of Innovation and Thought Leadership at Accenture Song. Mark will take us through their latest Accenture Life Trends 2025 Report which highlights how people’s behaviours and attitudes are shifting in relation to the world around them and how these shifts are impacting our businesses.