Design Leadership: Maria Giudice and Lisa Norton
Last week, on a call in a Writing Community group under the rubric of Seth Godin’s Akimbo Workshops, Seth summed up “design thinking” as asking “who and what’s it for.”
Such a heuristic is good for leaders who create services, products, and ideas.
Also last week, after participating in his fantastic book party, I began reading Jamie Wheal’s book Recapture the Rapture. In the Chapter titled “Designing Meaning 3.0” he relates the story of the global design firm IDEO. They use a model called “Human-Centered Design,” which is “all about building a deep empathy with the people you’re designing for, generating tons of ideas; building a bunch of prototypes; sharing what you’ve made with the people you’re designing for; and eventually putting your innovative new solutions out in the world.”
When doing the research on leadership for the launch of the Jazz Leadership Project (JLP) five years ago, I kept coming across IDEO and the importance of viewing leadership from the perspective of design. That’s when I came to realize that an intermediate school chum of mine, Maria Giudice, is a pioneer in that mode of thinking and leadership and how and why it intersects with business.
Maria Giudice
In 1997, twenty years after we graduated from I.S. 49 in Staten Island, Maria launched Hot Studio, an experience design firm so hot, apparently, that Facebook acquired its workforce, with Maria staying on as Director of Product Design. Now she uses her decades of leadership experience as an executive coach for leaders and teams.
The 2014 title she co-authored, The Rise of the DEO: Leadership By Design, influenced the design thinking of JLP. This graphic displays the creative modality akin to the way jazz artists think, play, and interact—on the DEO tip.
So, when I came to be in touch with Lisa Norton, professor of design leadership at Parsons’ School of Design Strategies (SDS), I was ready. In fact, Lisa was the very first person who hired the Jazz Leadership Project to engage students at The New School in a live workshop. Lisa is wicked smart and deeply soulful, communicating with heart and grace without fail. In her consulting practice she uses design thinking and leadership to help organizations, schools, and individual designers create frameworks and approaches for a more inclusive and adaptive designer ontology — one capable of confronting the challenges of the future.
Lisa Norton
On Wednesday, at 12 noon ET, you can see Maria Giudice and Lisa Norton in a conversation at The Stoa, hosted by yours truly. I have no doubt that it will be a fascinating dialogue between two women artists who support emerging leaders and teams in design and the creative industries. You can expect them to define design thinking and leadership based on such a mindset; the lessons they've learned in the design industry and academic settings (Marie as a founder and organizational designer, and Lisa as a transformative learning context designer working in several academic organizations); and how being a woman does or does not factor in their current career focus. Click to register for free.