How Leaders Can Design Change in an Insanely Complex World
Today’s radically complex problems require people to lead with design. Changemakers is an essential playbook for designers and nondesigners who want to drive change at work, at home, and in their communities. Groundbreaking designers Maria Giudice and Christopher Ireland—armed with insights from some of today’s top minds in business, tech, and social justice—offer a pragmatic, people-centered approach to change.
Innovator, artist, protagonist, activist, and positive provocateur, Maria Giudice has pursued a vision of intelligent, elegant, people-centered design throughout her professional life. Her grasp of the pragmatic, the authentic, and the essential have kept her at the forefront of design and business for over 30 years.
When Facebook acquired Hot Studio, a design agency, founder Maria Giudice felt some sense of validation. For some, design is an after-thought. The acquisition sent a message to companies all over, “Design is strategic. It’s not just execution.”
Her expertise lies in fostering a vision and bringing people together to execute it. She knows how to overcome team silos and lead with influence instead of authority.
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Researcher, strategist, idea generator, and alliance builder—Christopher Ireland started her career with the notion that businesses could benefit from a better understanding of people and culture. Her ability to create simple explanations of complex human behavior and to translate those insights into effective design and development strategies attracted clients from both technology and consumer goods companies, including Microsoft, Apple, Pepsi, Levis, GM and more.
As co-founder and CEO of Cheskin, a firm that pioneered design research in Silicon Valley, Christopher and her partners had ringside seats to unrivaled feats of creation, innovation, and reinvention. Beginning in the 1990’s, she led teams exploring topics like how trends move through the teen population, how music relates to mood, the history of residential architectural styles, the power of play, the cultural and behavioral differences of girls and boys, the emerging culture of “cool” in China, the development of trust online, and the meaning of color around the globe—to name just a few. She and her partners sold Cheskin in 2007, and walked away with their sanity mostly intact.
Christopher is a co-author of Rise of the DEO: Leadership by Design and China’s New Culture of Cool. She received an MBA from UCLA and currently teaches leadership and design strategy courses for Stanford University’s Continuing Studies Program.
Read MoreChangemakers is a revelation. Maria Giudice and Christopher Ireland have written a breathtaking book on what it really takes to create meaningful, sustainable innovation in today’s world. They have deftly created a brave and brilliant manifesto on how to create change that makes a difference and makes perfect sense.
—Debbie Millman
Host, Design Matters
Maria Giudice and Christopher Ireland provide an expert guide for leaders who are encountering resistance in their ongoing change efforts. Whether that is in the work they lead, the teams they manage, or the competitive space they are charged to define against all odds. Changemakers has been crafted by two extremely gifted ‘changemakers’ — their combined gifts are certain to nourish, protect, and heal.
—John Maeda
Technologist
In backing startups as an investor, I increasingly see founders identifying design as the key for realizing the better future they are envisioning. This book offers an actionable framework to be intentional, inclusive, iterative, and effective by using design as a superpower in affecting change.
—Anne Dwane
Co-founder and Partner, Village Global
Chapter 1: The Imperfect Future
Chapter 2: Becoming a Changemaker
Chapter 3: Finding a Fit
Chapter 4: Foundations of Success
Chapter 5: Co-Creating Change
Chapter 6: Following a Map
Chapter 7: Shaping the Narrative
Chapter 8: Building Support
Chapter 9: Discover What’s Possible
Chapter 10: Envisioning the Outcome
Chapter 11: Learning What Works
Chapter 12: When Things Go Wrong
Chapter 13: When Things Go Right
Chapter 14: Evolving by Design
The idea of making a difference has a powerful allure. At an early age, I hoped to make the world kinder, safer, and healthier. If you’re reading this book, you’re likely also drawn to making positive changes. Many of us seek out high-complexity roles and careers in pursuit of bigger challenges that we hope will lead to a bigger impact. And many changes grow from simple beginnings, rooted in our daily experiences.
Yet, changemaking isn’t a skill we apprenticed or studied. Often, it happens through experimentation. What works in one situation will fail in another. Even the most iconic changemakers in human history didn’t have a clear roadmap for making these skills ubiquitous in people’s lives.
In Changemakers, Christopher and Maria offer a powerful set of qualities for what it means to be a changemaking leader. Candid insights from a diversity of leaders make this book deeply relatable and widely applicable. Christopher and Maria interweave these voices with their own decades of hard-won lessons. Their pioneering work as systems thinkers, as women in tech, and as design-minded CEOs has eased a path for many of us to follow.
One of the greatest challenges I faced in writing Mismatch: How Inclusion Shapes Design was a haunting resistance to change. What makes systemic change so incredibly challenging is the human factor. It transcends multiple stakeholders and lifetimes. And let’s face it, we have a lot of room to improve how humans communicate, collaborate, and build relationships. Heraclitus’s eternal words “change is the only constant in life” ring true now more than ever. But change itself isn’t what defeats us. It’s the predictable aftershock that accompanies change: fear.
Even the mere mention of change can trigger anger, disbelief, and despair. This makes changemaking a precarious endeavor. It can be lonely and heartbreaking. But the ruthless optimism of Changemakers reminds us that we’re never alone in our work. Fear is an expected reaction that we can equip ourselves to face. Rather than being caught on our heels, can we prepare ourselves to respond proactively to change when it’s upon us?
Christopher and Maria invite us to embrace change through a human-centered perspective—one that is led by compassion and creativity. They built upon their previous book, The Rise of the DEO, with a deeper look at how to approach any problem and opportunity as a design challenge.
The complexity that we face in the 21st century demands that we do better. The work of change must be more like a dance and less like leading an army. More like gardening and less like architecting. We must give up the urge to command and control our way through change. We must embrace progress over perfection. We must let go of pushing for the right answers and open up to asking better questions.
As Christopher and Maria say, “No one hires a design team in hopes of maintaining the status quo.” And “Modern changemakers are those who would no longer treat problems as if they were fixed in time, but rather seek solutions suitable to evolving and complex circumstances.”
I wish you all the best in doing this work with great hope, audacity, and care for one another.
—Kat Holmes
Seattle, Washington
July 2022
