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.

That line is in my book This is Human Centred Design. And Leisa's experience is part of why I believe it so strongly. But there's a piece that sits underneath it that I haven't written about yet - and it's been nagging at me.

What happens when the principles get broken?

We're good at writing principles down. We're good at putting them on posters. Research is a team sport. Show the thing. Start with user needs. The GDS era gave us a generation of these - clear, simple, designed to be nicked. And they worked. Russell Davies would have a quiet chuckle every time someone said "show the thing" without knowing where it came from. That was the whole point.

But here's the question nobody puts on a poster.

What happens when someone skips the research and ships anyway? What happens when a leader circumvents the process because it's inconvenient? What happens when the behaviour in the room is the antithesis of the principles on the wall?

How we handle those moments is one of the most important things to design. And most organisations haven't designed for it at all.

The drift

Leisa described something at GDS that stuck with me. When the original leadership moved on - when Sir Francis Maude left, when the founding team dispersed - a new generation came in. And some of them kept doing the motions without understanding the why.

She called it drift. The same activities, the same rituals, the same language - but a quiet disconnection from the purpose underneath. Not a rejection of the principles. Something worse. A hollowing out.

That's the version most organisations experience. Not someone standing up and saying "I don't believe in this." But a slow fade where the posters stay on the wall, and the behaviour gradually stops matching.

The handbrake

At Atlassian, Leisa faced the opposite problem. A mature design culture. People who were proud of how they worked. Research happening everywhere. But when she looked closely, a lot of it was producing false positives - work that looked rigorous but wasn't leading anywhere useful.

She had a choice. Stay popular, or do the job properly.

She pulled the handbrake. And it cost her friendships.

She said something that I think every practitioner needs to hear: "I did not approach this like a popularity contest." She connected the work to business metrics. She made her recommendations concrete and debatable. She had her top three priorities ready at all times - not the top three things she was working on, but the top three things the organisation should be working on.

And still, people crossed the street to avoid her.

That is the cost of holding the line on principles when the organisation doesn't want to hear it.

Three kinds of breach

I've been thinking about this a lot, and I think we need to separate out what's actually happening when principles get broken. Because not all violations are the same, and treating them the same is part of why organisations get stuck.

There's the person who skips the process because they genuinely don't know better. They're under pressure, they fall back on old habits, they've never been shown why it matters. That's a training and culture problem.

There's the person who believes in the principles but goes around them because the system makes it easier to bypass than to follow. That's a systems design problem.

And there's the person who actively undermines the work - who plays politics, protects their turf, or bullies people into compliance. That's a leadership problem.

Each one requires a completely different response. But most organisations either ignore all three or punish all three equally. Neither works.

The real test

Leisa made an observation that I keep coming back to. She's seen people in her career who chose to be popular instead of impactful. Who sugarcoated the research. Who told stakeholders what they wanted to hear. Who got fantastic feedback and got invited to all the parties.

And the impact was in the toilet.

You can tell more about an organisation's commitment to being human-centred by watching what happens when someone breaks the principles than by reading the principles themselves. When a senior person skips research, and nobody says anything, you've just told the entire organisation that the principles are optional. When someone pulls the handbrake and gets punished for it, you've told everyone to keep their mouth shut.

How leadership responds to these moments - that is the design work. That is what determines whether the posters on the wall mean anything.

When I was the one in the room

I've lived this too. Not just observed it.

At one point in my career I took a role in a consultancy. And fairly quickly I could see that there was toxicity permeating the organisation. Not the subtle kind. The kind that people talked about in corridors but never in meetings.

So I challenged it.

And it became a tete-a-tete. Me and the person doing the harm, head-to-head. And when the organisation had to choose, they chose to support the person doing the harm.

That was the moment I understood something I now believe deeply. You can tell everything you need to know about an organisation's values by watching what they do when those values are tested. Not what they say. Not what's in the handbook. What they actually do when someone stands up and says, "This isn't right."

Sometimes the system isn't ready. Sometimes the power structures are so entrenched that the challenge itself becomes the problem - not the behaviour that triggered it. And in that moment, I realised the gap between where the organisation was and where it would need to be was too big for me to close from where I sat.

So I left.

And I don't say that as a failure. I say this because I think we need to be honest that not every fight is winnable from the inside. Sometimes the most human-centred thing you can do is recognise that the conditions for change don't exist yet - and protect yourself.

That experience is part of why I care so much about how organisations handle conflict. Because I've been the person who raised the flag and watched the organisation shoot the messenger.

I don't have all the answers on this one.

I know that the politics is the work. I know that principles without accountability are decoration. I know that the hardest version of this isn't the bully or the underminer - it's the person who bypasses the process, gets a good result, and gets rewarded for it. Because that moment tells the whole organisation what actually matters.

But I'm still working through what good looks like when it comes to designing for these failures. And I'd love to hear from you if you've seen it done well - or if you've been the one pulling the handbrake.

The full conversation with Leisa Reichelt is out everywhere you listen to the podcast now. It's one of the most important conversations I've had on the podcast.

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Talk soon,
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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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