7 Dimensions of Design Leadership

Lightning Lessons

Practical skills & tools to accelerate your career

7 Dimensions of Design Leadership

Hosted by Kevin Bethune

227 students

What you'll learn

Build empathy for shifting societal composition and needs

Learn how to track your team's evolution to ensure it mirrors target audience intersectionalities and lived experiences

Evaluate your leadership tact in shaping team evolution

Learn the key differences between gatekeeping (i.e., keep the status quo) and servant leadership (i.e., embrace change)

Lead design team evolution as a holistic transformation

Understand how to rationalize people, processes and tools as you build, scale and deploy your design team's capabilities

Why this topic matters

Have you encountered leaders that are stuck in their ways as they build and scale their teams? For design, our discipline needs to represent "people in love with people" (to quote my friend Mauro Porcini, CDO of PepsiCo). We must recognize our changing world and ensure our teams are always adapting to it. This lightning talk will give you key framings on how to think about leading differently.

You'll learn from

Kevin Bethune

Design & Innovation Leader | Bestselling Author, Reimagining Design + Nonlinear

Kevin Bethune is the Founder & Chief Creative Officer of dreams • design + life, a think tank that delivers design & innovation services using a human-centered approach. Kevin's background spans engineering, business and design in equal proportion over his 25+ year career (BCG, Nike, Westinghouse Nuclear), positioning him to help brands deliver meaningful innovations to enrich people's lives.

His work represents creative problem-solving that brings multidisciplinary teams together to see the future through an open aperture, and a deep industrial design approach to inform and influence desirable, feasible and business-viable design outcomes.

His first book, Reimagining Design: Unlocking Strategic Innovation (The MIT Press) released with notable acclaim under the Simplicity: Design, Business, Technology, Life Series in March 2022. His second book, Nonlinear: Navigating Design with Curiosity and Conviction (The MIT Press), will be coming out February 4, 2025.

Kevin also serves as a Trustee for ArtCenter College of Design and a Board member for the Design Management Institute (DMI).

25+ years of multidisciplinary leaps ...