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I’m the founder of the Human Centered Design Network and the creator of This is HCD, the leading human-centered design podcast with over 1.5 million downloads. We empower organisations worldwide with expert design training and coaching for executives, designers and teams.
The politics is the work
Hey Reader, I had a conversation recently with Leisa Reichelt that I can't stop thinking about. Leisa built the research practice at GDS. She scaled research at the Australian Digital Transformation Agency. She spent seven years heading up research and insights at Atlassian. Three very different organisations. Three very different systems. And the thread running through all of them was the same. The politics is not a distraction from the work. It is the work. That line is in my book This is...
Your organisation forgot why it exists
Hey Reader, I finished writing the book last week. 22 chapters, 4 modules, 10 foundational principles. It has been an absolute slog, but it is done, and I am so bloody proud of it. The thing that surprised me most was how much I realised I knew well and how much I still need to figure out. Writing forces you to be honest about that in a way that talking never does. More on the book soon. But right now I want to share something from it. This newsletter is adapted from Chapter 16 - Navigating...
The quiet crisis inside your organisation
Hey Reader, Before I jump in, I wanted to mention that I will be speaking in Barcelona in October 2026 at the brand new and incredibly awesome Service Design Disrupted Conference. This event was created BY the community FOR the community. Wouldn't it be so cool if many of my readers could attend and we could all hang out in person? I have 20 tickets at the early-bird price. Use 'SDD-X-GERRY' to get that deal :-) Ok, let's get into this week's newsletter. I have heard this story a hundred...
Which 10 podcasts shaped how you work?
Vote for your favourite Design podcasts Hey Reader, I've been thinking about this for a while now. There are so many good podcasts in our space. HCD, service design, UX, design research, leadership - the list keeps growing. But there's never been a proper community vote to surface the ones that actually matter to practitioners. So I built one. The Top 100 HCD Podcasts - Community Vote is live now. Here's how it works. I've put together a shortlist of 100 podcasts across nine categories -...
What actually do we mean by saying DESIGN DOING?
Hey Reader, What is DESIGN DOING? Not the brilliant textbook version (hat tip to the team at This is Service Design Doing!). Not the conference talk version. Not the version with the perfectly curated Miro board and the journey map that looks like it belongs in a gallery. I mean the real version. The one that happens on a Tuesday afternoon in a government building with bad coffee and a room full of people who have never heard the phrase "double diamond" and honestly could not care less. I...
The age of Design Punk
Hey Reader, I am not going to pretend things are easy right now. The world is noisy. Everything feels like it is shifting. Budgets are being cut. Teams are being restructured. AI is being positioned as the answer to questions nobody asked. And in the middle of all of it, the people doing the actual work of designing better services for real humans are being asked to do more with less, justify their existence, and somehow stay optimistic. I hear it every week. In emails. On calls. In DMs from...
Actual moves you can make on Monday morning.
https://www.thisishcd.com Hey Reader, This is part 4 of 4 in our series on getting buy-in for human-centred design. You can catch up on the five walls and the leader archetypes and What actually works if you missed them. Over the past number of weeks, I have written about the blockers, the leader types, and the tactics. Today I want to tell you what I am doing with all of it. The final module of This is Human Centered Design is not going to be a chapter you read and put down. It is going to...
What actually works (from people who have done it)
https://www.thisishcd.com Hey Reader, This is part 3 of 4 in our series on getting buy-in for human-centred design. You can catch up on the five walls and the leader archetypes if you missed them. For the past two weeks, I have been asking you to share your experiences of getting buy-in for HCD. And the replies have been brilliant. Painful, funny, familiar, and full of the kind of hard-won wisdom that never makes it into conference talks. I cannot share specifics yet. I will be in touch...
Which leader are you dealing with?
https://beta.thisishcd.com Hey Reader, This is part 2 of 4 in our series on getting buy-in for human-centred design. I will be honest, this one has taken me much, much longer to write. If you missed last week's email on the five walls practitioners hit, you can catch up here. The response to last week's email was incredible. So many of you replied with your stories. I am reading every single one of them, and I will be in touch individually over the coming weeks. What struck me most was how...
Building Belief: The five walls you'll hit when selling HCD internally
https://www.thisishcd.com Hey Reader, Firstly, I am writing this from my home in Dublin, and watching the news of mass destruction in the Middle East. We have a large readership and listenership in this part of the world, and please be assured, many of us are thinking of you all, and here's hoping for a quick resolution to the end of this (and all) war(s). This is the first in a short 4-part series about one of the hardest parts of human-centred design: getting the people around you to...
I’m the founder of the Human Centered Design Network and the creator of This is HCD, the leading human-centered design podcast with over 1.5 million downloads. We empower organisations worldwide with expert design training and coaching for executives, designers and teams.