Adam Zeiner

"Design" means one thing to a graphic designer, another thing to an engineer, and something else to a business consultant. Even within the design discipline, a Silicon Valley manager and a Danish joiner are unlikely to be imagining the same thing as they both talk about design.

Recognises the importance of the ‘invisible activities’ that sit around the design process: orientation and value setting, continuing the journey, collaboration and connection, and leadership and storytelling. These activities are rarely recognised, and therefore rarely resourced, and rarely done.

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And though it's useful to be able to tell them apart, design is about strategic and tactical work happening together. At the heart of many stubborn design projects and unimpressive outcomes are people coming in with an incompatible mental models; overplaying strategy or tactics, and neglecting the other.

The modern organization is rooted in military history—at the time, the most efficient model for coordinating large groups of people to achieve strategic objectives.

This explains a good deal of what works and doesn't work for teams, especially when it comes to their mission. For highly capable knowledge-work teams (marketing teams, software teams, research team, etc.), low-leverage missions tend to be uninspiring.

I was personally struck by the uniformity of this thinking across time and discipline – in general, there are six different levels of escalating complexity, each interdependent, each with an important role.Important to note here that in my table, "Leverage" is not the same thing as "Time to complete something."