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 believe in it. Over the next four weeks, I will be exploring why buy-in fails, the types of leaders who create obstacles, what actually works when you break through, and a practical tool I am building to help you navigate it all. This series feeds directly into the final module of my upcoming book, This is Human Centered Design, and I am actively looking for real stories from real practitioners to include in it. If you know someone who has wrestled with this, please forward this email to them.

The more perspectives I can gather, the more useful this will be for everyone.

If you have been doing this work for any length of time, you already know the feeling.

You have done the research.

You have the insights.

You know what needs to change. And yet nothing moves.

This is so bloody frustrating for you and your team.

I wrote about this back in July last year in When They Don't Know What HCD Is, and honestly, the responses I got to that piece told me everything.

Hundreds of you are facing the same blockers across different organisations, countries, and job titles.

But the patterns are remarkably consistent. So I wanted to share these with you.

From conversations with practitioners over the past few years, and from guests on the podcast like Kate Tarling (who talked about building collaboration and leading change) and Marc Stickdorn (who was brilliantly honest about leading change in chaotic times), I keep seeing the same five blockers come up:

1. The Language Gap. You say "user research", and they hear "delay." You say "co-design", and they hear "design by committee." The terminology of HCD actively works against you in rooms where speed, efficiency and cost reduction are the currency.

And it gets worse when you realise what you are actually competing against.

When executives who do not value or fully understand the argument for design-led before tech-led are weighing up their options, this is what the comparison looks like in their heads:

Tech: Here is the bottom line. Here is what it costs. Here is what gets delivered. It is shiny. It is new. And in their eyes, it is "innovation." It comes with a roadmap, a timeline, and a vendor who will take the blame if it goes wrong.

Design: Slow. Stories about people complaining. More questions than answers. Takes longer to show results. Does not put out any of the fires that are burning right now. And the person pitching it wants more time and more budget before they can even tell you what the solution is.

When you lay it out like that, you can see why design loses that conversation almost every time.

So here is my advice: do not have that conversation. Not yet.

If you are trying to pitch HCD against a large tech investment, you have already lost. You are playing on their pitch, with their rules, in a language built for their world. The framing is wrong before you even open your mouth.

Instead, start much smaller. Marc Stickdorn from Smaply refers to these as stealth projects. I love that term because it captures exactly what needs to happen. These projects should not be on anyone's radar. No fanfare. No big proposal. No asking permission to do things differently.

The rest of the organisation can do what they do. Let the tech projects run. Let the roadmaps get built. That is their world and you are not going to change it by arguing with it.

What you do is different. You find a small, real problem that nobody else is paying attention to. Something that is causing pain for users or frontline staff. Something that has been sitting in a backlog or falling between teams. And you quietly fix it.

You do the research. You prototype a solution. You test it. You deliver a tangible improvement that people can see and feel.

Then you do it again.

And again.

What you are doing is building a track record. You are creating evidence that did not exist before. Evidence that lives inside the organisation, not in a case study from someone else's company. Evidence that has names and faces attached to it. Evidence that is very hard to argue with.

Only then, once you have runs on the board, are you in a position to have the bigger conversation. Because now you are not pitching theory against a tech vendor's proposal. You are pointing at results. Your results. In this organisation. With these people.

That is how you change the language. Not by winning the argument, but by making the argument unnecessary.

2. The Proof Problem. Leadership wants evidence that HCD works before they invest in it. But you cannot produce that evidence without the investment. It is a catch-22 that keeps teams stuck in pilot purgatory. I touched on this in "Seeing no ROI on your training? Here's why?" and the responses confirmed how widespread this is.

This one is maddening because it sounds so reasonable from their side. "Show me the evidence and I will fund it." Hard to argue with that, right?

Except that the evidence they want is the outcome of the very work they will not fund.

You cannot prove that user research would have caught the problem if you were never given time to conduct it. You cannot demonstrate the value of co-design if the project is handed straight to a vendor. You cannot show ROI on a capability the organisation has never actually invested in.

So what happens instead is pilot purgatory. You get a small, underfunded project. A "let us try this design thinking thing and see what happens" exercise. It gets squeezed into existing timelines with no dedicated resource, and when the results are modest (because, of course, they are, you were set up to fail), leadership points at it and says, "See, it did not really deliver."

The way out of this is to stop trying to prove HCD in the abstract and start documenting what is already going wrong without it.

Every organisation has evidence that the current approach is not working. Failed product launches. Services that get redesigned every eighteen months. Call centres are drowning in complaints about the same three issues. Projects that went live on time and on budget, but that nobody uses.

That is your evidence. It already exists. You do not need a pilot to find it. You need to reframe the conversation from "here is what design could do" to "here is what it is costing you not to listen to the people you are building for."

The proof is in the failures they have already paid for. Your job is to make that cost visible.

3. The Ownership Vacuum. Nobody owns the end-to-end customer experience. So your insights land in one department and get absorbed without action because the fix belongs to someone else's budget.

This is possibly the most demoralising one on the list because you can do everything right and still get nowhere.

You do the research. You map the journey. You identify exactly where things break down for people. You present it clearly. The room nods. Everyone agrees it is a problem.

And then nothing happens.

Not because people do not care. Because the fix sits across three departments, two budgets, and a governance structure that was never designed to handle cross-cutting issues. The person who owns the front end does not control the back end. The team responsible for onboarding has no authority over the billing system that creates the confusion. Everyone can see the problem. Nobody can act on it alone. And nobody has the mandate to bring it all together.

Your beautifully crafted journey map becomes a piece of wall art that people point to with sympathy.

My advice here is blunt. Stop mapping the whole journey if no one owns it. I know that goes against everything we have been taught. But presenting a systemic problem to a fragmented organisation just creates paralysis.

Instead, find the one part of the journey where a single person has enough authority to make a change. It might be a small part. That is fine. Work with that person to deliver an improvement they can own and be recognised for. Make them look good.

Then use that result to open a conversation with the next person along the chain. And the next.

You are not going to fix the ownership vacuum overnight. But you can work within it by stitching together a series of owned improvements rather than presenting an un-ownable masterpiece.

Lucy Kimbell talked about something similar when we discussed public design and the realities of power. The structures are the problem, yes. But waiting for the structures to change before you act means nothing ever moves.

4. The Urgency Trap. There is always something more pressing. A restructure. A compliance deadline. A new strategy. HCD is positioned as a "nice to have" rather than as the thing that prevents you from repeating expensive mistakes.

You have heard this one before. "We totally agree this is important, but right now we just need to get through [insert crisis]."

The implication is that there will be a better time. A quieter time. A time when the organisation is not firefighting and can finally focus on doing things properly.

That time never comes. There is always another restructure. Another leadership change. Another burning platform that demands all the oxygen.

And here is the thing that nobody says out loud: the urgency is often self-inflicted. The reason there are so many fires is that things were built without understanding the people who would use them. The rework, the complaints, the workarounds, the failed launches that need rescuing. A huge amount of the "urgent" work exists because the upfront work was skipped last time.

But you cannot say that in a room full of people who are exhausted from firefighting.

It sounds smug. It sounds like "I told you so."

And it does not help them with what is on fire right now.

So what do you do? You join the firefight. Not permanently, but strategically. Pick one of those urgent problems and show how a design lens makes the response better, not slower. Run a quick research piece alongside the fix.

Talk to five users in two days. Bring those insights into the room while the decisions are still being made.

If you can demonstrate that HCD makes firefighting more effective rather than competing with it, you start to shift the framing. You stop being the person who asks them to slow down and become the person who helps them get it right the first time.

That is how you escape the urgency trap. Not by arguing against it, but by proving you can operate inside it.

5. The Culture Ceiling. The organisation says it values people, but its incentive structures reward output rather than outcomes. You are fighting the org chart, not the individuals.

This is the hardest wall of the five because it is the least visible and the most deeply embedded.

Most organisations will tell you they are customer-centric. It will be in the strategy document. It will be on the wall in reception. The CEO will say it in the all-hands.

But then you look at how people are actually measured. How promotions are decided. How budgets are allocated. And you see a completely different set of priorities.

Project managers are rewarded for delivering on time, not for delivering the right thing. Product teams are measured on features shipped, not on whether anyone needed those features. Leaders are assessed on headcount managed and budget controlled, not on the quality of experience their team creates.

In that environment, HCD is not just unsupported. It is actively disincentivised. Doing the right thing takes longer. It surfaces uncomfortable truths. It challenges decisions that have already been made. And none of that helps anyone's performance review.

This is where a lot of good practitioners quietly give up. Not because they stop caring, but because the system grinds them down. I explored this in "Navigating the what's the f#cking point stage of Design" and the response to that piece was overwhelming. So many of you have felt it.

My honest take on the culture ceiling is that you cannot break through it from the bottom. You can push. You can influence. You can win hearts and minds one person at a time. But if the incentive structures do not change, the culture will not change. And changing incentive structures requires senior leadership commitment that goes beyond words on a strategy slide.

What you can do is find the pockets where the culture already aligns. Every organisation has them. A team leader who genuinely cares about user outcomes. A department that has been burned badly enough to try something different. A new hire in a senior role who came from somewhere that did this well.

Those pockets are where your energy is best spent. Not trying to convert the whole organisation at once, but deepening the practice in the places where the soil is already fertile.

Grow those pockets. Connect them to each other. Let them become visible proof that a different way of working is possible.

Culture does not change through arguments. It changes through examples that people cannot ignore.

To make that module as useful as possible, I need your stories.

Which of these five walls have you hit?

What happened?

Just reply to this email with a few lines.

I am collecting real practitioner experiences, and the best ones will shape the book (with your permission).

Next week: the leader archetypes that make or break your chances. Yes, this is a BIG one!

Gerry

P.S You might have noticed we are rebuilding our website. The links take you to beta.thisishcd.com - please feel free to sign in and enjoy richer searching through our archive, and the ability to bookmark episodes and ask questions about episodes. Think of it like a LinkedIn for people like us, and just us.

Gerry Scullion​ Founder & Designer ​ We are building a global network of people doing human-centred work. Come add your name, learn, listen, connect and network - it's free!→ thisishcd.com/directory​

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