It’s surprisingly easy to be busy without being clear about what you’re trying to achieve.

Most organisations have plenty of work underway, but ask what all that activity is supposed to add up to, and the answer can be vague. That’s where strategy is important. What are we trying to change? Why does it matter? And what choices do we need to make to get there?

You don’t need every detail and project worked out in advance. Plans will change as you learn. But you do need a clear enough outcome to judge whether the work you’re doing is helping, and a plan that gives you somewhere to start. Without that, how do you decide what deserves attention, what can wait, or what you should stop doing altogether?

If we can’t explain what we’re trying to achieve, we probably need to spend a little more time on that before starting the next project.

One of the more interesting things AI is exposing in design is how possessive we can become about our work.

We spend years developing a craft and, naturally, start to see the production of that work as ours. It becomes part of our professional identity. Then AI arrives and starts taking on parts of that production, often quickly and increasingly well. That can feel threatening, even when the outcome itself is perfectly good.

I suspect this human response sits behind a lot of the AI versus designer debate. We focus on whether AI can really design, whether craft is being lost, or whether designers need to change roles. But some of the resistance is probably much simpler: we don’t like giving up something we’ve always considered ours.

And that’s the change we’re going through. AI isn’t only changing how design gets produced. It’s forcing us to rethink our relationship with producing it, and how much of our identity we’ve attached to being the person doing the making.

Does design have an ego problem?

Design is supposed to be about solving problems. Better outcomes for people and businesses. Empathy and inclusion. Innovation. Making things work better.

But spend enough time reading design discourse and you could be forgiven for thinking it’s mostly about designers – MY tools. MY process. MY methodology. MY role. What I should own. What I shouldn’t be responsible for. What other disciplines are apparently doing wrong.

We talk a lot about being human-centred, while sometimes being remarkably designer-centred. Maybe good design starts with a little less ego and a little more focus on the problems we’re trying to solve?