Why Design Matters More Than Managers Realise

Editorial Note
This essay is part of the Cultivated canon — a body of work exploring how value is created through systems, behaviour, and managerial intent. It focuses on a recurring theme in this library: that many organisational problems are not performance failures, but design failures.

Design Matters

When most people hear the word design, they think of surfaces.

Cars. Buildings. Books. Products. The visible things we admire, critique, and consume. Design is often associated with taste, aesthetics, and style.

Managers tend to think this way too.

When design enters management conversations, it is usually framed around the end product or service: how it looks, how it feels, whether it meets requirements, whether customers like it.

All of that matters. But it is only half the picture.

The other half — the one that quietly shapes results every day — is the design of how work actually gets done.

Every process in a business is designed, whether consciously or by accident. Work flows in certain ways. Decisions are made at certain points. Delays, handoffs, approvals, and rework all exist because someone, somewhere, designed a system that allows them to exist.

Or didn’t design one at all.

Managers spend significant time and money hiring designers to craft products and services, yet often neglect the design of the processes that bring those offerings to life. The result is a familiar pattern: good people working hard inside poorly designed systems.

Consider something as simple as hiring.

Six months to hear back about an application. Weeks to provide essential equipment. Inductions that leave new starters confused, idle, or sent home. These are not people problems. They are design problems.

Someone designed — or allowed — a system that produces those outcomes.

Design, in this sense, is about flow. Does work move smoothly from idea to value? Or does it stall, queue, loop, and fragment across boundaries? Are processes shaped to help people do good work, or to control them, measure them, and slow them down?

Many organisations are perfectly designed to frustrate their own employees.

An effective test for managers is deceptively simple:
If your customers could see how your work flows within the business, what would they say?

Would they be impressed by clarity, simplicity, and momentum? Or shocked by delays, confusion, and waste?

The uncomfortable truth is that internal design always leaks outward. Poorly designed systems show up as missed commitments, inconsistent service, and rising costs. They drain energy, attention, and trust.

Good design does the opposite. It adds value faster than it adds cost. It makes intelligence visible. It allows people to focus on what matters, rather than fighting the system meant to support them.

This does not require complexity. In fact, the best-designed processes are often the simplest. Simple enough to explain. Simple enough to improve. Simple enough to see where things break.

Simplicity, however, is hard. It requires managers to confront silos, competing goals, political incentives, and legacy rules. It requires choosing flow over control, learning over blame, and improvement over inertia.

Designing work is a managerial act.

It starts with purpose. Why does this process exist? Who does it serve? How does it add value? From there, measures can be chosen, experiments run, and improvements made. Not once, but continuously.

This is where design meets leadership. Managers hold the levers — goals, budgets, rules, incentives, and structure. Pulling them deliberately is the work.

Everything in your organisation has been designed in some way. The question is not whether design is happening, but whether it is happening well.

Good people working as part of a badly designed system will always struggle. Thoughtful managers recognise this and act accordingly. They treat design not as a specialist activity, but as a core responsibility.

Design is not what work looks like.

Design is how work works.

And when it works well, everything else becomes easier.

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Editor’s note: This essay grows from an earlier exploration in another medium. The thinking remains central, even as the format has changed.