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 Storms: Silos, Politics, and Organisational Drift. It is the chapter I kept coming back to. Probably because it is the one I have lived the most and where my particular area of interest lies within design. In order to do this work, I believe we need the part of the human centered design mindset that really requires us to be optimistic.

The storm you already know

I have heard this story a hundred times. Same script, different organisation. They walk in with genuine intent, only to realise that the beautiful picture painted in the interview was done in crayon.

They manage to do good work anyway. They show what is possible. And then the budget gets cut. The sponsor moves on. The project gets shelved in favour of something shinier.

That is the storm. And if you do this work long enough, you will sail into it.

Sometimes the storm is not dramatic at all. It is a slow drift. Poor prioritisation becomes gut-based decisions. Gut decisions stretch teams. Stretched teams trigger isolated projects. Isolated projects push problems back onto the people being served. And the drift accelerates.

The politics are the work

The politics you encounter are not a distraction from the work. They are the work. The road to implementation runs directly through them.

Leisa Reichelt (who is appearing on the podcast very shortly!) puts it plainly. It is "getting into the organisation’s corporate DNA". Spending at least as much time understanding how the business operates as you spend on the design. Making the boring, decisive things like how budgets get set feel easy rather than mysterious.

The craft is understanding the executive’s currency. Risk reduction. Cost savings. Regulatory compliance. Frame the work in those terms. Not because you are selling out. Because you are navigating the forcefield that keeps the current problem in place.

The crown prosecutor who had never seen what came before

I was asked to evaluate the prosecution model in New South Wales, Australia - an organisation that has operated the same way for centuries. I mapped a thirty-foot journey along the office walls and ran sessions with people from across the organisation.

One afternoon, a crown prosecutor was studying the map. He said something that stopped me. He had never realised what came before his role. A career expert in the justice system who had never seen the full journey that brought a case to his desk.

His response was not defensiveness. It was fascination.

That taught me something. Silos are not always the enemy. They are only a problem when they stop people seeing the whole. In the book I go deeper into how to find the seams, how drift from purpose is more dangerous than any missed deadline, and why the personal storm is the one nobody talks about.

Three questions to sit with

1. Has your organisation forgotten why it exists? What would happen if you asked the question out loud?
2. Who in your organisation is like the crown prosecutor - an expert who has never seen the full journey?
3. When was the last time you checked in on your own wellbeing as a practitioner? Not the project’s health. Yours.

Gerry

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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I've been reading this newsletter over the last few weeks, and it's been awesome. If you're looking at staying across all things AI, then this is a pretty good option :-)