The Seat at the Table

And why I think designers should stop demanding one.

Closeup of an artwork by Refik Anadol, Kunsthal, Rotterdam, 2024.

How many times have you heard this sentence? “Until we have a seat at the table, it is impossible for us to generate impact.” In my consulting and coaching role, I have heard it many, many times. Today, I will write about why I think this statement is utter bullshit.

Before I start, let me make something clear to avoid any confusion. When I talk about ‘Design,’ I do not refer to the American-centric view of the term that relegates this ancient and beautiful discipline to the definition and shipment of digital products. What I refer to when I talk about ‘Design’ is a specific mindset to approach change that is more than human-centred¹, holistic, experimental, collaborative, transformative.

As I have argued in a previous blog post about Designing Change, the design mindset can be used to design products, services, organisations, leadership, change, and many other objects or constructs. Virtually anything can be an object of design. Digital products are a tiny subset. Therefore, when I talk about ‘Design,’ I do not mean UX or UI, friend. I mean the mindset that allows us to change the world around us intentionally and strategically in concert with those affected by it² and for a better state of things.

Oh, and when I mention design tools, I don’t mean Figma. I mean paper and pen, instruments like lifecycles, experience maps, and blueprints, service architectures. These are the tools of design in my world. I was keen to clarify this point to allow you to wear the right pair of glasses when reading this post.

Now, back to our table story. In the last 15 years, I have worked with many design leaders in very large corporations globally who have been trying to instil the design mindset in the ways their organisations go about change, prioritising initiatives, and driving transformation at large. It is hard work. It is hard work because of three very foundational reasons:

1. Our organisations are designed to respond to the needs of a 19th-century world.

Contemporary organisations are still designed around an archaic industrial model, that was invented to respond to the needs of a very, very different world than what we are dealing with today. Imagine, it’s the early 1800s. The world is shifting from an agrarian economy to mass production and industrialisation. The primary need in this early stage of industrialisation is increased efficiency and scale in production. Manufacturing goods on a large scale required a systematic approach to manage large numbers of workers and complex production processes. Key characteristics of the emerging organisation are:

• Centralised Control and Hierarchy: The resulting organisational design was characterised by a hierarchical structure with centralised control. Decisions were made at the top and flowed down through multiple layers of management. This approach was aimed at ensuring consistency and control over the production process.

• Division of Labour: Another key feature is the division of labour. Tasks were broken down into simple, repetitive steps, with workers specialising in specific tasks. This specialisation was intended to increase efficiency and productivity.

• Standardisation and Predictability: Standardisation of processes and a focus on predictability are central to this model. The aim is to produce uniform products at a high volume, with minimal variation and waste.

The mastermind behind this model was Frederick Winslow Taylor. He is known for his work on scientific management, focusing on analysing and synthesising workflows to improve economic efficiency and labour productivity. The main metaphor of the organisation becomes that of a ‘machine.’

It could be argued that since then, a lot has changed. There are some marvellous examples of organisations that have managed to break free from this paradigm, rising to new levels of human consciousness and organisational models, where the main metaphor is that of a living being, where the structure is designed to be horizontal, networked, and centred around principles of quality and harmony with the ecosystem. Frederic Laloux wrote a marvellous book on the topic, providing plenty of examples of such new forms of organisations (this book is a must-read)³.

Unfortunately, these examples are the mere minority. Today, after more than 200 years, most organisations are hierarchical, siloed, and centred around standardisation and efficiency. So we could also argue that since Taylor, not much has changed at all.

2. Design is end-to-end and front-to-back, and that requires collaboration.

Design is holistic. A good designer has to look at the entire customer experience (end-to-end) while also understanding in detail the way that experience is delivered (front-to-back). Changing anything in that system requires deep collaboration across different departments. Unfortunately, as I have previously pointed out, those departments are siloed. As a result, they are not used to deep collaborative work that requires releasing people and budget for something that cannot be fully owned and managed by the silo.

When running the interviews for my PhD, exploring barriers for design adoption in organisations, one of the interviewees, Thomas Foster, articulated the challenge particularly well:

“When you’re doing service design work, you’re very rarely saying to one person, one team, ‘Can you make this?’ Nearly all the time you find that what you’re saying is: ‘We need to bring product managers from a few different groups in the business together because we need to create this new missing piece,’ or ‘You changing this piece requires bits of all the different IT systems to come together in a new way and to create a new interface.’ And it’s very difficult to get people collaborating like that from different bits of the business because they don’t have to work like that. They’ve got their silos and they work within those. So, getting those people together is tough, to get them to release resources is quite tough because it’s through an initiative that’s not solely owned by that part of the business.” Thomas Foster, Executive Director Design at Goldman Sachs

Therefore, the second challenge is related to the lack of collaboration between different teams across functions. The lack of collaboration makes working end-to-end and front-to-back next to impossible.

3. Designers in these organisations have been very busy trying to fit in rather than showing an alternative.

This is a realisation I got by talking to Harriet Wakelam, Executive Director of Design at DBS Bank in Singapore. In one of our conversations, Harriet told me, “We have been waiting to get permission rather than telling: This is what I see.” She is so right.

Design teams in many large firms have been very busy trying to fit in, being liked, proving their value, showing their arguments with numbers, understanding how the current business works, the language, the rituals, the routines. While doing so, they often have lost contact with one of their superpowers, which is the ability to envision alternative futures.

It’s hard to envision alternative futures while trying to fit into a structure that is fundamentally archaic and unfit to respond to current needs.

A seat at the table = The creation of a new silo

Asking for a seat at the table means embracing the current structure, asking for a new silo to be created, and positioned equally to other functions, such as marketing or finance. The problem with that stream of thought is that design cannot strategically operate within a silo. It’s against its very nature. Because design is end-to-end and front-to-back, it needs to work within and with the different functions in order to succeed.

It is a practice that needs to be at the service of other people and teams. Don’t get me wrong, ‘being at the service’ doesn’t mean to blindly do what others think right. On the contrary, it means to support a journey that allows these different teams and people to operate and lead holistically, and experimentally.

Design reaches its full potential when it’s able to get people out of their myopic functional silo and see the world holistically, connecting the dots between apparently unrelated things, showing patterns, and envisioning alternative futures. I’m afraid design cannot do that from another silo, and that’s why I think the whole ‘needing a seat at the table’ story is utter bullshit.

I’m sure many of you will have some sharp opinions to share on the topic, and I can’t wait to read them all.

1. Wakkary, R. (2021) Things We Could Design: For More Than Human-Centered Worlds, The MIT Press.

2. Giudice., M & Ireland, C. (2023) Changemakers, Rosenfeld Media

3. Frederic Laloux, F. (2014) Reinventing Organizations, Self-Published.