How to Make Design Visible in a Numbers-First Organisation

So you have done incredible research. Real stories from real people. And your boss leans over, looks at you and says, "But what is the ROI of that?" Today I want to talk to you about what to do when your leaders only think in numbers. Welcome to This is HCD folks. I am Gerry Scullion, and this is your daily dose of human-centred design. Let us get into it. I try to keep these episodes under five minutes. Intentionally. Because I know we are all busy. The world is getting a little bit crazier by the day. But I want to try and give you something to lean into, to try and help inform that change. This is one of the most common challenges I hear from designers and change makers. Working with a leader who lives and breathes spreadsheets. KPIs, OKRs, ROI. Everything needs a number attached to it or it does not exist in their world. And honestly, I have a lot of empathy for that person. They are not really being difficult. They were trained this way. They were rewarded this way. Their entire career has reinforced the idea that if you cannot measure it, it really does not matter. They do not get anything else at the end of the day for doing anything different. They just want to make sure that they are going to bump those numbers. So when you walk in talking about empathy or lived experience or qualitative insight, you are speaking a language that does not register. It is not that they disagree with you folks, it is that they literally do not have a category for what you are saying. They just do not have it in the toolkit. So here is what I have seen work. First of all, stop asking them to care about empathy. I know that sounds really counterintuitive, but start with what empathy saves, not what empathy means. Connect your research findings to the metrics that they already track. Reduction in complaints, call volume, rework costs, time to resolution, et cetera. Even cost per transaction or cost to serve. If your research has really uncovered that users are confused by a particular step in a service, do not present it that users are frustrated. Present it as "this step generates 40% of our inbound calls, and each call costs the organisation 12 euro to handle." Same insight, but just a different framing. And that framing is something that they can actually act on. Second, learn their language before you expect them to learn yours. Sit in their meetings, read their reports, and understand what they are measured on. And when you can map your findings to their world, everything changes. And third, remember that this leader is not your enemy. They are actually your best translator once you have won them over. Because when a metrics-driven leader starts putting design outcomes into numbers, everyone else in the organisation listens. They carry the credibility that you as a designer might not have just yet in that context. The goal is not to make them care about design the way that we do. The goal is to make design visible in the language that they already trust. Now I wrote about the five leadership types that you will encounter in the newsletter. The Metrics Leader is just one of them, and the link is in the show notes if you want to learn more about the other four. And that is it for today. If you found it useful, share it with someone who needs to hear it. And if you are not subscribed to the newsletter, go over and check out that brand spanking new website at www.thisishcd.com and I will talk to you tomorrow.