Pedro Couto e Santos

I caught this paragraph in a LinkedIn Post recently:

“Why does it feel like the design community has become addicted to certainty and allergic to risk?” — Christian Almurr (original post)

I left a reply, at the time, but this has been eating at me for a while now, and I thought I’d put some thoughts together and share my view.

For years we were told to be predictable, measurable, present results in KPI and OKR formats. We were told design needed to conform to business practices, to be accepted, to get that proverbial “seat at the table”.

Design is valuable precisely because it doesn’t mimic the rest of the org.

Divergent vs Convergent, Why the Mis-match Is The Point

• Business & engineering thrive on convergent logic. Deduce, optimize, find the single best answer.
• Design’s contribution lies in its divergent logic. “What if…?” “Why not…?” It’s exploratory, occasionally irrational, often uncomfortable, and that friction is where fresh value shows up.

Trying to cram those two modes into the same OKR sheet is like measuring a jazz solo in “keystrokes per minute.”

“Show Me the Numbers”

• Quantify everything. I keep reading that I need to say how many units of the scanner I designed were shipped, how much faster did my team mates deliver thanks to the design system I put together. In numbers, put up the numbers!
• Missing the point. You can measure everything by any business framework you use, but you can’t tie the design team down to it, otherwise you’ll kill the very thing they bring to the table.

If your designers are working to hit a KPI instead of improving the user’s life, helping them do something faster or delighting them in some way, you’ve lost.

What Companies Actually Need from Designers

1. Creative instinct numbers can’t yet justify.
2. Experimentation that makes a fuzzy future tangible.
3. Stories that inspire teams, and makes the org want to try something different.
4. Design leadership that understands this but also that a company is still a business, and “herds the cats” towards the desired outcomes.

Breaking the Risk-Aversion Cycle

• Embrace imperfection: Allow for rapid prototyping and testing without demanding perfection from the start.
• Create safe spaces for failure: Designate projects or sprints where experimental approaches are encouraged with no performance penalties.
• Balance your portfolio: Aim for 70% proven approaches, 20% evolutionary ideas, and 10% revolutionary concepts.

Remember that every revolutionary design we now take for granted started as someone’s risky proposition that metrics couldn’t initially justify.

The most valuable innovations often come from asking “what if” instead of “what’s the ROI.”

Great design requires courage, the courage to present ideas that might fail, to champion the user when business metrics push elsewhere, and to occasionally fight for vision over validation.

What do you think? Is there still space for designers to daydream and explore unpopular ideas that can become exceptional products, or are we so obsessed with a culture of growth and predictability that the space for creativity has been replaced with systems and metrics?