Book Pre-Launch Reflections

Design Leadership Chronicles

Hello all,

Last Tuesday, I had the pleasure of presenting my brand-new book, Design Leadership Chronicles, to the paying members of the Design Mavericks community. It was a joy to share this work, which is so important to me, with the people who have supported my work since the very beginning of Design Mavericks, which, by the way, turned one year old on 25th September! I have never been particularly good at remembering or celebrating anniversaries.

Anyhow, I used the pre-launch to share my work and to test a format for the webinar that I’d like to use for future public events. I began the webinar by explaining why I decided to write this book. In my journey, as both an academic and a practitioner, I’ve been fortunate to work with some outstanding leaders who have chosen to use design to bring about change in their organisational contexts. Many of these leaders were pioneers, struggling in environments that did not recognise design as a driver of change, often facing their challenges alone. I encountered leaders who felt isolated, navigating uncertain territory and battling to maintain belief in themselves, their abilities, and their ideas.

As I worked with many of them, I began to notice patterns in how people approached their work, as well as the types of successes and failures they experienced. They simply didn’t know about one another. These are people in the trenches, doing the work, and you rarely see them posting on LinkedIn or sharing their stories at conferences. That’s why I decided to write the book—to share stories of change through design so that leaders around the world can learn from each other and, perhaps, feel less alone. Maybe even gain a little more confidence that it can be done.

I chose the graphic novel format because these are inherently visual stories. On top of that, many designers and creatives experience ADHD and are sometimes on the spectrum. Visuals are more inclusive than words when it comes to learning new content. I went the extra mile to find a diverse cohort of leaders from around the world, with a focus on women and people of colour, who are so often underrepresented in the discourse around leadership and design.

We then role-played the introduction of the book as well as Chapter One, which tells the story of Courtney Martyn, Design Leader at Xero in Australia. I asked different members to role-play and read the lines of the characters in the story. It was incredibly powerful for me to see these stories come to life through the role-play. This proved to be the perfect way to start reflecting on shared experiences and similarities.

We discussed the contexts that most allow you to move the dial, how frequent leadership changes force you to constantly rebuild, and when enough is enough—when quitting becomes the best option. We also explored using these visual stories as a way to heal. We discussed how design is not a silver bullet. These are exactly the types of conversations I hoped to spark with this book, and they made me feel confident about the work and the opportunities I know it will open up for people.

For those of you who are not paying members of this blog, and for everyone else who would like to join, I will host a public virtual book launch in November. You can follow the updates on my website, and I will, of course, also share them here.

For paying members, at the bottom of this blog post, you can download a complimentary digital copy of the first part of the book, up to the end of Chapter One. You can also find the recording of the webinar.

If you are in Europe, you can now buy the book directly from the publisher, or you can pre-order from your local Amazon. Once you’ve read it, please leave a review on Amazon—it would help me tremendously!