The New Era of Design Leadership with Tony Bynum

Tony Bynum is bilingual. He can speak the language of both business and design, a skill that makes him a unique leader in our industry. 

Tony is the director of the Institute for Design’s new ID Academy, where he is also a professor of practice. Previously, he founded the Northwestern Mutual Design Thinking Center of Excellence in Milwaukee, WI where he was Principal Senior Director of Experience Design.

In this episode, Tony shares lessons from his unorthodox career path that are still applicable in today’s tumultuous job market. He also shares advice for leaders on how to use design thinking as a tool for resistance:

“I’ve had jobs where I left half of myself out in the parking lot every morning. And I wasn’t able to bring myself in. And I think if we really want to embrace inclusiveness without actually making it a policy, then I do think organizational cultures and leaders in particular, have to be humble about how we actually affect the conditions that we’re in,” Bynum says. “It’s about modeling the behavior and demonstrating what we expect within an organization that is going to move us forward. People will self-select out of those organizations that don’t align to their values. If we want the best, we have to model what we’re looking for.”

And Tony and Ellen attempt to give a name to the current era of design- hint: it’s all about designing WITH rather than designing FOR.

On this season of DB|BD, we are Designing for the Unknown. Host Ellen McGirt asks visionary designers how they navigate uncertainty- whether it be technological disruption, global crises, or shifting cultural norms.

Tony’s interview in The Reel Black List.

Design As Humanity episode featuring Susan Fabry

If you liked this episode, be sure to revisit DB|BD S10E11: Dori Tunstall

Follow The Design of Business | The Business of Design on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app. 

Transcript

Ellen McGirt Tony, how did you start your day? 

Tony Bynum So I’ve been, and I wanted to share this because in the spirit of improving one’s self in the spirit of growth, I’ve trying to take these 30 second cold showers every morning. So I have been doing this for the last, call it two weeks or so, three weeks. And it goes, I mean, it’s not easy. I am not at any way, shape or form saying, oh, go ahead and try this. You’ll get it. You’ll figure it out. It’s been hard. But today, and this is a UI problem, so it’s apropos to our design conversation. I hit stopwatch, not timer. And I was going and going and I’m thinking, God, I thought you were supposed to become more resilient, more able to tolerate this more. And I looked down and I am at a minute. I’m like, oh. So I can now do a minute cold shower. So I mean, it makes no sense to go backwards, right? I have to now. 

Ellen McGirt So let’s talk about that. It may make some sense to go backwards if you’re miserable and in pain. Like scale is not what we’re going for here. Refreshment is what we are going for. 

Tony Bynum Life is a prototype, life is a prototype. 

Ellen McGirt I love that for you. I will not be trying this. I do not like the cold, but I love that for your and I love that’s how you’re starting your day. Alright, Tony. So we just improvised our own cold open. I love it, but I do want to tell you a little story just to frame out the conversation. Here I go. Is design thinking dead or just going through some things? I ask because I came of age as a seasoned business reporter, just as design thinking was taking corporate life by storm. Of course, it had been around as a thinking point forever, but it came to life for me when I joined the writing staff of Fast Company Magazine in 2007. They’d just published their iconic Design Thinking issue the year before, focused on chronicling how Big D Design was poised to transform innovation, teams, companies, and entire industries, maybe even the world. Let me quote my former beloved colleague Linda Tischler, who led our design coverage and who first helped me understand the potential for design to transform systems at scale. Hint, it wasn’t just fancy packaging and austere interiors: “Design in its most effective form is a process, an action, a verb, not a noun.” And yet here we are in 2025, full circle again, facing a moment when design thinking and all its related tools: collaboration, stakeholderism, inclusive teams, rigorous analysis, and yes, observation have fallen dangerously out of favor, discarded in the dustbin of poorly understood management ideas. And design thinkers in the executive suite nearly disappeared. Now, there are many places to take this conversation, but for this moment, I’m curious about what’s next, and that’s why I’m so glad this guy, Tony Bynum, is here. Helping people find what’s next is quite literally his job. I’m going to say all the nice things about you now, Tony. Tony Bynum has been a leader in design and business for his entire professional life. He’s currently a professor of practice at the Institute for Design in Chicago and the director of their new ID Academy, which is specifically focused on just this problem. He’s a good person to lead this work. For one thing, he founded the Northwestern Mutual Design Thinking Center of Excellence at Northwestern mutual in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. And he’s ridiculously schooled up with degrees in business design and graduate studies in organizational psychology. and we’re going to talk about all of it. I’m Ellen McGirt. This is The Design of Business|The Business of Design, and this season, we’re designing for the unknown. So I have to ask, where are you on all of this? Like, what do you think is happening and what’s the right way forward? 

Tony Bynum It’s a really big question, so let’s take it chunk by chunk, if you will. The first thing I’m going to tell you, first thing, I tell clients, students, whoever I’m in front of, I’m not a trained designer. I didn’t go to school to learn how to design. When I say design, I am referring to design the verb design. I have a business background and I’ve always been in some form of product development or or design from a consulting standpoint and even internally. And it was in 2005 that I really fell in love with the idea of the way many of the researchers I was working with and designers I was working with were solving problems through this process that they called design. So looking into it, that’s when I came across the Institute of Design. And I was working full time at the time. I was actually a director, I was in a PLM, Product Lifecycle Management consultancy here in Chicago. I was director of consulting and innovation. I took the first semester of this MDM program, Masters of Design Methods, here at Institute of Design, just that first fall. And I fell in love with it. I loved the challenge that it was giving me in terms of looking at things more generatively as opposed to purely analytical. But it was really clear, though, that I also am not a trained designer. And so part of my story is, When I- came into the program full-time, and I decided to actually do it full- time and quit my full- time job. That was the first crazy thing I’ve ever done in my life, is leave a perfectly good job to go back to school. I literally had an expense account one day and I was taking public transportation the next, with a backpack. 

Ellen McGirt That’s bold. 

Tony Bynum When I stepped in, when I really got into it, I think that first month I thought I made a mistake. I really, I was questioning it. My daughter was three at the time, had all the trappings of adulthood, house mortgage, insurance, everything. And here I am chasing this thing I know nothing about, which is design. And now I’m in this environment where I’m being exposed to people who have fine arts degree and master’s in different aspects of design and social psychology. And I remember speaking to my advisor at the time, who was also the dean of the school at the time, Patrick Whitney. I’m like, Patrick, I don’t know if this is I made the right, I made made the right decision here. A lot of the things I’m learning, I’m being exposed to are almost counter to what I learned in business school, in many ways. And he encouraged me to stick with it. And I’m really glad I did because it probably wasn’t in more than a week after that, that it really started to click out and what happened was I started to realize that business needs a structured, repeatable way to solve problems and design is a wonderful way to dive deeply into a problem space and solve it in a way that has a human-centered design focus to it. And so these worlds, these two worlds needed each other. And what I found… is that I was almost becoming bilingual. In fact, I would say I’m bilingual. I kind of speak both of those languages. And they’re not all that far apart. And what I find really interesting is that one is actually reflecting the other in a slightly different way. 

Ellen McGirt Here’s my follow-up. We’re in philosopher king territory here, and then I’m gonna ask more questions about you, about your life. But the other thing that I’ve learned in over 20 years plus years of business journalism is that companies don’t like innovation the way they say they like innovation. They like certainty. They like metrics. They like the numbers. But when there’s an emergency or perhaps an opportunity, they will put together a task force. People very different from each other will be gathered from all departments, all parts of the organization, perhaps the community. And they will be tasked with something to solve the problem. And that’s a very exciting, adrenaline-filled moment. And, for the most part, I’ve observed… they don’t get rewarded for that effort. That was an extra thing that they had to do on top of their already stressful lives and jobs. They go back to those stressful lives and jobs that product, that service, that innovation, that breakthrough goes where it goes. And the people who get picked for leadership positions and who grow in their careers are never the people who are in the task force, task forces, or do the innovation. They do something else that is more predictable that grows a business steadily. That is what I think is a fundamental problem, even with the opportunity reframe. And you’re a business guy. I’m talking to you as a business guys. I gotta believe you’ve seen the same thing. 

Tony Bynum 100%. So let’s let’s look at it this way. Um, in some ways, that’s not wrong. That’s actually quite responsible and pragmatic that we should be looking at the things that are keeping the lights on today. If that means driving out waste, creating greater efficiency in our process and our operations, we should absolutely be doing those things. Thinking about the next new thing becomes secondary to that priority. Let’s respect that as a fundamental way in which an organization stays alive. But that’s also a bottom-line approach. We sometimes forget there’s a top line, too. And so this top line approach is really about looking up and out into the future. And one of the things that I advocate is this idea of dexterity, being an ambidextrous organization. In other words, you can perform and transform. McKinsey has a very well-known horizon model. There’s three horizons of growth. And you often associate that first horizon of growth with really what you’re doing today in what’s keeping you a viable organization, viable business. And many of your design efforts in that zone, in that horizon, might really be focused more on aesthetics or feature upgrades, more incremental changes, things that are taking what’s already known and making small changes of improvement. McKinsey’s model also has two other layers and this second horizon is where we’re thinking about stretch, we’re think about taking what we’re maybe currently doing and get it to new folks or finding new folks and bringing them into what we’re currently doing, or altogether coming up with something new. And we have to also be looking at that because that first horizon reaches a diminishing point of return at some point. Margins shrink, competitors enter the market. So now the role of design is to be looking forward, to be predictive, if you will, of what that next horizon is asking for. What this is all, I can boil everything I just said in the last 15 seconds down to this. It’s about establishing a direction. It’s about establishing a point of view about the future and marching towards it. And I think, and I certainly was taught this, put together a business plan and that’s what we’re going to execute on. But one problem with that, the challenge is, is that, you know, as Mike Tyson would say, as soon as you get punched in the face, everybody’s got a plan, but as soon you get punch in the faced, you know, what happens next, right? What do you do next? 

Ellen McGirt Yeah, well, it made perfect sense. I’ll tell you the other thing Mike Tyson said, when I hit you, I’m aiming for a spot behind your head. 

Tony Bynum There you go, there you go! 

Ellen McGirt Like, leadership wisdom from Mike Tyson, that’s two in a row. I’ll take it. 

Tony Bynum There we go. 

Ellen McGirt So let me ask you this. We’ll get back to the philosopher king stuff because I feel like I could get continuing education credits just listening to you. Like, I can tell you’re an amazing teacher. So you’re a business guy, MBA, young family. You take a nonlinear path and you decide that you’re interested in design. You get a design credential. You join a design conversation. you become bilingual. What do you do next? Where do you go? 

Tony Bynum That’s a great question, and some of that has to do with the school that I went to, the Institute of Design. We like to say we help you set your aperture. Look at the world through a broader aperture. You see the world to a wide angle lens. And it doesn’t necessarily mean design doing. So going back to something I said earlier, I never learned design doing necessarily. I understand what a wire frame is. I have general understanding of graphic design and communication design layouts, but that’s not what I do. What I do is I identify non-obvious opportunities and insights and turn them into possibilities for future growth and innovation. And that’s what this school teaches. So to answer your question, coming out of this school combined with a business degree really kind of put me in the place of talking to organizations at a strategic level, or finding roles at a strategic level that were direction setting, roles where I could see above the dashboard, so to speak. This is a very long way of saying there was no role out there for me. 

Ellen McGirt Right, yeah. 

Tony Bynum There was no title that was specifically describing what I just described. What I had to do and what some of our students have to do is sometimes we have to ask, what’s going on with your business? What’s going with your organization? It might not just be a business. What’s on with with your foundation? And then I will tell you what I can do because we’re problem solvers. We see a lot of moving parts. We see the non-obvious. We make connections that sometimes don’t always float to the top, but they’re seeds of potential futures. 

Ellen McGirt That strikes me as a very interesting approach, and I know there’s a lot of people in and out of the business and design community that are in similar situations. They have an interesting background, lots of curiosity, have taken a non-linear path. Asking an organization or leader what do you need and let me design an approach to help you solve your problem is an interesting twist on applying for a job. How do you see that playing out today for designers and business people? 

Tony Bynum It has to do with letting go of some of our previous expectations and orthodoxies around job hunting. First of all, I don’t think that we’re necessarily going in to find a quote-unquote job, but we’re going in do something. It depends on what stage of life you’re in, of course, but I feel like one of the things that we can do is we can a little bit of work around: Where is a company or an organization at today? What challenges are they facing? What are some opportunities that you can actually glean from their current state and use that as a starting point for a conversation, not an interview? And therein lies the difference. Because I feel like once something is given a name, once it’s titled in the HR and you have a role associated with it, it’s pretty much baked. And you’re either going to back into it and be able to fulfill those tasks and duties and objectives perfectly or there’s an opportunity to find the right conversations to get involved in so that you can actually demonstrate how you think. That’s not going to work for every company and every industry. I recognize that. But when you can have those conversations and you can bring yourself into the actual work environment and try before you buy, that’s a great opportunity to not only understand that organization, but have that organization understand you. Last thing I’ll say on this is I think, given the times that we’re in, we’re all looking, we all want to be seen. We all wanna be felt. We all to be heard in our own unique and authentic way. And I think the knock on the door, especially for folks who are trained in design and strategic design, is the most authentic approach that you can bring to the table that demonstrates your willingness and understanding of how problems get solved and what opportunities, how to identify opportunities. You know, I hate to say it this way, and I say this with every bit of privilege, it’s not going to be every company. It’s not gonna be every interview. As a designer, you are already segmenting yourself from the masses. So really, the clarion call here is those organizations that are looking for that level of authenticity, that level of self-awareness, I’ll say that level of humility to come into the organization and help them solve problems. 

Ellen McGirt So speaking of which, let’s talk about your work at Northwestern, because that seems to be sort of a perfect case study of doing exactly that. How did you get that gig? 

Tony Bynum I was working, I was a director of client innovation at a brand experience design company here in Chicago working with very large brands and retailers. So I had an opportunity to actually start my own little business and become an independent contractor for Northwestern Mutual and I worked internally in their transformation office, deep in operations, which was a place that I actually didn’t have a lot of experience in from a design or strategy standpoint. I was more of a top-line person, not a process and streamlining of tasks and activities person. That role allowed me to do training and consulting and mentoring of transformation leaders within the organization, bringing some of the tools and methods of design into the transformation effort. And after doing that for a couple of years, I was then offered a role to lead a team, design team within the enterprise design group that was really tasked with almost being like a SWAT team, going out and working within the business to bring, bring these design tools and methods to life within the context of the work itself. I loved it. I felt like it was a great opportunity to see broad swaths of the organization, but also have a sort of a vision or an understanding of what the real problems were. I opened my mouth and I suggested, I think we need to create a center of excellence around design or design thinking. Well, why? Well, because as I’m working with different teams and groups around the organization I’m noticing that You know, some folks are calling some things insights and when they’re really facts. Some teams are using this tool this way and another team is using a different tool a different way. Some teams that are experimenting, some teams are not. We’re scattered because of our silos. No client, no guest cares about your silos. Your silos are your problem. They are expecting one experience, one unified experience. So the Center of Excellence was stood up. I started, I worked with the Institute of Design to actually build a in-house curriculum to train senior leaders as well as folks that were in the product and project teams on a select set of design tools and methods. We started with our leaders. We gave them a title, they were navigators, and they were learning the exact same curriculum that the program managers and product teams were learning, but they were learning from the standpoint of creating the conditions to allow design to live within the organization. They were learning it through the lens of coaching, through the lense of creating air cover for those who are actually doing the work. And so that’s what set up the top-down and bottom-up approach. I think you asked this question a little earlier. For change to stick, for transformation to move forward, there needs to be both the call and permission to change and think differently. But there also has to be the ability and the tools to do it. Absent one or the other, you have a bunch of pissed off senior leaders that are wondering why things aren’t moving forward. Or the opposite of that would be a bunch of rogue teams kind of off doing their own thing and hoping that what they’re doing is going to be acceptable. So by approaching it from the top and the bottom, we tried to create an ecosystem of understanding, sort of a collective consciousness about what this meant to the organization. 

Ellen McGirt Do you mind if I just jump in real quick here? It’s fascinating because this is, this is our point of view here on this podcast and across Design Observer is that big D design is a leadership power, super power in disguise. And that’s really what’s happening here. And it’s nothing. We’re not taking anything away from the very specific and excellent skills of designers who are designing all kinds of things and increasingly our, our world. So it’s very powerful what you’re saying that this has worked for you. We found this lovely interview with you from The Reel Black List, which we’re going to put in the show notes. And here’s a quote from an earlier part of your life: “I’ve always been an outsider looking in, observing, finding patterns, and making sense of the world’s complexity. Growing up as the only Black person in my community, I developed a superpower, the to detach, adapt, and see what others miss.” Tell us about young Tony, where did you grow up? 

Tony Bynum Young tony. Young Tony grew up on just outside of Milwaukee in a town of Sussex, Sussex, wisconsin and at the time in the early seventies, I was Iwas the only. I sort of represented a race from from age two all the way through high school. And, you know, asking Tony then and asking Tony now what that was like, you might get two different answers, but they are of the same coin. There was absolutely the feeling that I didn’t fit in. I was different. I was reminded of that every single day, all the time. And after a while, that just became part of my identity. I’m different. And there were good days and bad days that we don’t have to get into because I don’t enough tissues. But the real takeaway was it gave me an opportunity to observe in many ways from the outside in. And I could see how certain actions, behaviors, words had effects that, unfortunately, if you were in it, you wouldn’t necessarily be able to see. And now I would call that an anthropological point of view, where you’re observing, you’re in it and not of it, so to speak. And so I’ve always felt, good or bad, right or wrong, I’ve felt comfortable kind of being on the outside. And that’s when I started to learn how to do observational research, user research. And I started to recognize that I’m seeing things here that are sort of hidden relationships and patterns that are really important and there’s sort of an intuitiveness that I think comes from having that outsider looking in perspective. I could very easily flip this conversation and say, I’ve never fit in, I’m always alone, where are my people, blah, and that is true too. There’s a lot of that. But I think as it relates to my profession, my role in design, I’ve found that our ability to step outside of ourself and see others is really the superpower. I mentioned humility earlier. And again, it doesn’t mean you have to agree with what you are experiencing or studying, but you have a level of humility to allow yourself to experience the experience. with those subjects or those people that you’re with. And that all came from me growing up as sort of the only. 

Ellen McGirt Yeah, I hear that. Thank you for sharing that. I’m wondering if we can take that a step further. Clearly, we’re in a very tumultuous moment, both nationally and globally. And it’s affecting everything from politics to families to the price of eggs. What role do you think that design, but specifically what you just described, empathy, observational thinking can play in resistance, or in peacemaking, or in just finding some sort of equilibrium?

Tony Bynum One of the things I tell my students here at the graduate school, and I tell our clients as well, that this next horizon of design, I don’t think anyone’s actually put a name on it. It’s not about creating artifacts. It’s about designing things. It’s all about enabling outcomes. And so, when I think about designers working with organizations, yeah, the artifacts of design have to be created, the wireframes, the journey maps, whatever you’re using. But to some aim, to some outcome, let’s apply that a little bit more broadly. We might not even call it design, but we might call it the facilitation of collective emergence. 

Ellen McGirt Okay. 

Tony Bynum I’m making that up! 

Ellen McGirt No! Let’s let’s keep going. Let’s let’s name it now. Look, even if it’s just… 

Tony Bynum Let’s name it now. 

Ellen McGirt Let’s name it now.

Tony Bynum We are catalysts of sort of a collective empathy, if you will. And I feel like really, I have a tough time because we have no other language for it right now. But we call it design. I think that’s absolutely true. But I don’t think you have to be a designer to do it, if that makes sense. And the last, I guess, last point on this because we’ve often talked about design for, how about design with? 

Ellen McGirt Design with 

Tony Bynum And making the process and the ability to participate in the design process more transparent, more inclusive. That’s what we’re trying to do at the Academy, is we’re try to bring this way of thinking into organizations, role agnostic. 

Ellen McGirt Well, I mean, I appreciate you, just having spent time with you, I appreciate how hard it is to name this third wave, this current era, the language of all of it. The language of business has changed so dramatically. Really, it’s changing so quickly. And it’s hard for me, sort of my nature, not to go to emotion words, you know, “open-hearted” design, “empathy”, you know those kinds of things, like the sense that we’re opening something together. like a lotus, something that blossoms together. It feels very sort of overwrought and vaguely problematic in business. But you know what I mean? 

Tony Bynum Well let’s just say it, let’s call it what it is. It’s hard to measure. 

Ellen McGirt That’s right. We talk about this internally at Design Observer all the time. We care about big D design and we’re focused on small F faith. 

Tony Bynum Hmm. Wow. 

Ellen McGirt Right? 

Tony Bynum Wow. Wow, that’s deep. I love that. 

Ellen McGirt Because the longer we spend in the big D design and the hard part of sitting across the table, even metaphorically with someone who is profoundly different from you, the small F faith is that this work will yield fruit, that you will get an outcome. And the outcome will be bigger than just the one that you’ve been tasked to do, is that you’ll grow as a human. 

Tony Bynum 100%. Ellen, I love that, and it brings me to the idea of, you know, we talk about boundary objects in the world of design. And essentially, just for definition, a boundary object is any object, tool, or artifact that’s actually used to focus the conversation. So if you and I were maybe in person or even virtually working on a whiteboard together, the boundary object is the whiteboard. It’s reflecting back to both of us our conversation and a really well intended and well used boundary object actually takes focus off of the individuals and puts the focus on “the thing” the whiteboard or whatever whatever the boundary object is. Where i’m going with this is, it goes back to something I said earlier as designers it’s about designing the settings and the conditions for these kinds of boundary objects to be used in conversation. And so it isn’t about sitting on the opposite side of the table, it’s about sitting at the same side of table and looking at this, using this tool as a way to reflect back to all parties what’s happening. And just as an example, I was part of a design sprint at Northwestern Mutual. There’s always a little bit of a tension between the home office and the field agents. The field agents are their own independent businesses. They’re not employees of the home, home office company. And in talking to the folks in the field and talking to folks in home office, you keep hearing this we/them sort of mantra, you know, they don’t get this or we do this, you know, back and forth. Someone came up with, there was a design challenge and a team of folks from the home office actually came up a game that would allow you to see and feel what it’s like to be an agent. You know, day in the life of an agent, and it was absolutely incredible because given and assuming that the realities of what you experience are true realities, it brought it home how difficult the challenges are and were that these agents had to face on a day-to-day basis. Which gave some clarity to why we saw certain behaviors and heard certain things. And that’s an example to me of using a boundary object to bring together points of view in a non-biased, non-threatening way. 

Ellen McGirt I’m a little discouraged that empathy and compassion still is an untested concept in corporate American life, right? And we have to give people a mechanism to activate it. But I hear what you’re saying. It is easy in the day-to-day and the unusual stresses of business to forget that there’s actual people on the other side of every equation, whether it’s a customer or a colleague. I hear you. And that’s wonderful. You know, you’re at at the heart of what you do, you’re a teacher, you’re teaching students, you are also teaching leaders. What do people, what do senior leaders need to know right now how to make an impact within their organizations? 

Tony Bynum The answers are already in front of them. That’s one thing. It’s our job as leaders to identify those skills, those traits, those gifts, those talents that move the organization forward. How someone is treated within an organization, regardless of their role, at some point it’s gonna show up on the outside in the brand, in the brand experience, in some way, shape, or form. You can’t treat, to be frank, you can’t people like shit and expect them to provide white-glove service on the outside to your customers and clients. So I think the answer is in front of all of us. That doesn’t mean that everyone is going to be ideal for your mission or your objective, but I do think it’s incumbent upon us to figure that out. And what I believe that does is it allows employees and allows folks that are in project teams. to come to work in their fullest self. I’ve had jobs where I left half of myself out in the parking lot every morning, and I wasn’t able to bring myself in. I think if we really want to embrace an inclusiveness without actually making it a policy, then I do think the organizational cultures and leaders in particular, we have to be humble about. how we actually affect the conditions that we’re in. It’s about modeling the behavior and demonstrating what we expect for activities and behaviors within an organization that are gonna move us forward. And I think we’ve reached a time in our society where, and again, said with all kinds of privilege, people will self-select out of those organizations that don’t align to their values. People are already doing that. And so, you know, if we want the best, we have to model with that which we’re looking for. 

Ellen McGirt So speaking of that, my follow-up question is for young folks, for people who are new in the job market, whether they’re designers or not, whether they want to be leaders or not. They are really picky about where they’re spending their life energy. What is your best advice for them as they navigate the world? 

Tony Bynum Keep doing that. Look, we’re all only given a certain amount of time. And there’s definitely a time for watching, observing, learning, then ultimately directing and controlling and, at some point, leading, mentoring and coaching, and inspiring, and you’re never going to find who you really are, find out who you are, until you’re in a place where you can fully exercise and experiment with your talents and gifts. And so that means, if you can, be selective about the places in which you’re trying to apply for. I’ll tell a lot of our graduate students, go into it with, intentionality to learn something because at least that way you have a filter, you have an North Star to help you weed out noise and signal during this time spent. And I think being truthful to yourself is the best thing that you can do. You never want to sell yourself out because it’s something you’ll never get back. And and I do think that through design, we’re able to actually bring authenticity to the surface and make that the thing, the value that organizations are looking for in their talent. Someone told me the other day, you seem like you’re the product. I’m like, yeah, I kind of am. I’m the product in many ways. And so just like a product, who’s my market? Who am I targeting? Who do I best serve? Who can I create greatest value for? These are things that I have to decide on in order to bring my full self into a role. I hope that makes sense. 

Ellen McGirt That was perfect. That was just perfect. And I am going to tell everybody that I have all but the degree and a Master’s in Design Thinking now. Because I talk to you, Tony. Thank you so much. And you know, I’m just down the road here in St. Louis, drive through. I married into a Packer family. So I drive through on the way to Wisconsin all the time. So I’d love to say hi. 

Tony Bynum We have a lot in common. 

Ellen McGirt We do. 

Tony Bynum I married into a Packer family as well. My wife’s family is from Appleton, Wisconsin. So I’m from Wisconsin anyhow, but she’s from Appleton. I mean, they had green and gold popcorn. So there’s some other conversations that we could and should dig into together. 

Ellen McGirt Yes! 

Ellen McGirt This season, we’re ending every episode with a new segment we’re calling The Business of Design. It will feature either a short interview with or a story about a designer or creative who exemplifies design’s power to shape the world for good. After my amazing conversation with Tony, I started thinking about other design teams embedded in corporate life. There are still some out there, and recalled this exchange between Susan Fabry, the Vice President of Design Research and Experience at the Fidelity Center for Applied Technology and my Design Observer colleague and fellow podcast host, Lee Moreau. In this recent episode of Design As, the two discuss the role of financial products and other systems in real people’s lives. Susan, who leads a design team of about 25 people, works with a wide array of other experts to develop products that better support financial well-being. However, she also sees design’s role as that of an anticipator and protector. Here is Susan in conversation with Lee. 

Susan Fabry Yeah, it’s always the human element that I wanna bring in. You can talk about these crazy systems and never talk about the impact on people. And bringing that human element in is, it opens everyone’s minds, it makes people think about things differently. I was just working with one of our data scientists who has a background in neuroscience and we’re working on what the underpinnings of the structure are for the generative AI to make sure that it’s not hallucinating and giving made-up financial information, because… 

Lee Moreau That would be bad.

Susan Fabry That would be very bad. The nature of generative AI is that it will hallucinate. Just like you and I, when we’re talking, we’re actually hallucinating. We’re making things up, but hopefully we’re building it on context. 

Lee Moreau Right. 

Susan Fabry So if you can bring the context and you can make those hallucinations and quotes not be fake information. So we’re working with him on understanding how the structure is, and that’s bringing in all of these different facets, and he’ll bring something to the table, and then we’ll bring new, and it’s those cross-connections, it’s cross-verbalization, it’s those conversations that bring everybody’s work further. And it’s incredibly exciting because it’s not done yet. It’s not there yet, and there’s a lot of badness around AI in general. but there’s a whole lot of positivity that’s gonna happen from it if we do it right. 

Ellen McGirt The Design of Business| The Business of Design, is a podcast from Design Observer. Design Observer was co-founded by Jessica Helfand. Our show is written and produced by Alexis Haut. Our theme music is by Warner Meadows. Justin D. Wright of Seaplane Armada mixed and mastered this episode. Thanks to Sheena Medina, Sarah Gephardt, Rachel Paese, Richard Fields, Adina Karp, and the entire Design Observer team. And for more long-form content about the people redesigning our world, please consider subscribing to our newsletters, The Design of Business  and The Observatory, at designobserver.com.