What to Do When There Is No Design Leader on Your Board

In May 2018, Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry and the Japan Patent Office published a report called the "Design Management" Declaration, arguing that Japanese companies should treat design as a management resource.

The part I quote most often is not in the body. It is footnote one, on page one.

It draws on a METI survey sent to every manufacturer in Japan with more than 100 employees. Twenty five thousand companies, asked what made them successful at opening a market. For the domestic market, 38.3% credited high quality and high function. Design got 0.8%. For the American market, quality and function got 63.6%. Design got 0.0%.

That is not a rounding artefact. In a survey of twenty five thousand manufacturers, effectively nobody selected design as a reason they succeeded in the United States.

What the number is measuring

People read this as evidence that Japanese executives undervalue design. I do not think that is right. I have never worked with organisations that care more about craft than Japanese ones. The packaging, the store, the manual, the feel of opening the box. Anyone who has bought anything in this country knows the leadership is not indifferent to it.

The number measures something narrower and more fixable: what the word "design" referred to inside those companies at the moment someone filled in the form.

If design means the appearance of the finished object, it necessarily comes last, because by the time appearance is decided every expensive decision has been made. And the question asked about opening markets, which is a business outcome. If design in your company has never been allowed near a business outcome, answering honestly that it did not cause one is not a mistake. It is an accurate description of how the company is organised.

The two conditions

The most useful section of the report is the shortest. To call what you do design management, the declaration says two conditions must hold.

1. There is a design leader on the management team.
2. Design is involved from the most upstream point of business strategy.

Let me be practical. The first is a board appointment. Almost no company creates a CDO role the week after reading an article. If that is the entry requirement, the conversation ends there.

The second is about the order of your meetings. It does not depend on budget or on the org chart, so it is the one to move first.

Nearly every failed design engagement I have been asked to review failed on the second condition. Not on skill, not on money, not on taste. The work was correct and it arrived after the decisions it was meant to influence had already been taken.

Start with one meeting

The method is almost disappointingly simple.

Take the next project on the roadmap and insert one question before the budget is written. Who is this for, and what will they do differently once it exists?

Do not make it a workshop. One meeting is enough. Two conditions: the person who signs the budget is in the room, and the answer exists in writing at the end, where everyone saw it.

If nobody can answer, that is worth knowing. Starting in that state would have cost more than the design work.

Then keep that sentence visible for the length of the project. Most scope arguments six months in are not really about scope. They are two people discovering, late and loudly, that they never agreed on the first question.

This costs a morning. It is also close to word for word the second condition in a government policy paper from 2018, which suggests the barrier was never that the idea was hard to understand.

The return figures, with sources

The declaration cites overseas research on what design investment returns. Useful when you have to explain this upward, so here it is with attribution.

The UK Design Council's 2012 report found £1 invested in design returned £4 in operating profit, £20 in revenue and £5 in exports. The Design Management Institute's Design Value Index found design led companies outperforming the S&P 500 by 2.1x over ten years. A separate Design Council study of 166 UK listed companies that appear frequently in design awards found their share prices roughly doubling the FTSE index over a decade.

These are foreign numbers and they do not transfer automatically to a Japanese company. They are also the evidence that was put in front of Japanese executives in 2018.

What changed by 2025

Some things did. METI and IPA now publish a national digital skill standard defining five roles required to run a digital transformation, and one of them is designer, covering service, UX, UI and graphic work. The official position is no longer that design is decoration. It is that DX requires a designer, named in the standard.

Read the same agency's DX Trends 2025 and the picture is less comfortable. The role Japanese companies say they are most short of is business architect. In the United States and Germany it is data scientist. The standard defines a business architect as the person who carries an initiative from objective setting through implementation to verifying the result, coordinating everyone involved. In other words, the person who decides what is worth building and stays long enough to find out whether it worked.

And asked whether the quality of their DX people is adequate, 3.8% of Japanese companies said yes. The US answered 52.9%, Germany 25.1%.

3.8% is less a skills shortage than a missing brief. A company that cannot describe the person it needs cannot hire, train or commission them either.

The short version

If you can put a design leader on the board, do it. But you are not stuck until then.

The second condition, putting design one step before the decision instead of after it, requires no change to your org chart. It changes an order. In my experience that is where most of the difference in outcomes is decided.

References

• METI and Japan Patent Office, Study Group on Industrial Competitiveness and Design, 「デザイン経営」宣言, 23 May 2018. The 38.3% / 0.8% and 63.6% / 0.0% figures are in footnote 1 on page 1; the return figures are in section 5; the two conditions are in section 6
• Japan Patent Office, design management programme
• IPA, DX動向2025 and the full report PDF, figures 3-2, 3-3 and 3-4