Why copying what works elsewhere rarely works here.

A practical guide to building good design practice across a large organisation, drawn from Rich’s work across NSW Government. Most organisations try to embed design by importing best practice and rolling it out. Rich argues for a different approach: find what already works, help people do more of it, and keep everyone focused on progress.

• Enabling over embedding.
  Embedding is something you do to people. Enabling clears the paths they already want to follow and guides them towards a better way of working.

• Effective practice over best practice.
  Best practice is what someone documented somewhere else. Effective practice is what works around here, spread across the organisation.

• Progress over practice.
  Keep the goal in view, not the activities. People are smart and adapt as they go. Moving forward matters more than following the process.

How to get from where you are to where you want to be.

Design is the work of closing the gap between where we are and where we want to be. That’s hard, and it’s where most people stall.

This talk gives designers, and anyone steering their own work or career, three ways of thinking that make the path clearer.

• Collect constraints early.
  Go looking for them instead of waiting for them to appear. Each one narrows the field until only the solution that works is left, so you get there faster.

• Steer by outcomes, not outputs.
  Outputs define success on paper. Outcomes are the change you want to make in the world. Measure yourself against those, not against your industry.

• Slice your experience like a layer cake.
  Your career isn’t a straight line. It’s layers of experience you can cut in different ways, depending on what you’re facing.

AI doesn’t get fired. We do.

AI now does many of the tasks designers once learned from: summarising research, running competitive analysis, sorting what matters from what doesn’t. That saves time. It also skips the work that builds design instinct, the ability to sense what’s going on, make sense of it and act in a moment.

This isn’t a case against AI. It’s a case for using it in a way that keeps your judgement sharp, because you stay accountable for every decision, even the ones AI helped make. And when the work moves into territory nobody has mapped yet, instinct is what you’ll rely on.

• Form your view first, then ask AI.
  Make sense of the work yourself, then use AI for alternatives, second opinions and stress tests.

• Treat AI as a co-pilot, not an autopilot.
  You carry the accountability, so make the call and know why you made it.

• Make bets and learn from them.
  Back a decision, check the outcome, and feed what you learn back into your instinct.

Good design starts with simple human questions.

Designers often get lost in detail and permutations. Rich strips design back to a few questions about people. How can I ease their mental load? How can I help them feel safe? How can I give them a sense of control? Simple questions lead to things people find easier to use.

• Ease the mental load.
  Remove the thinking people shouldn’t have to do.

• Help people feel safe.
  Make it clear what will happen and that they can recover from mistakes.

• Give people control.
  Let them see where they are, choose what’s next and change their mind.