Design is so critical it should be on the agenda of every meeting in every single department. — Tom Peters

Design is so critical it should be on the agenda of every meeting in every single department.

Author: Tom Peters

Insight: Most of us think design is what happens in a specialized team somewhere—the people who make things look pretty before they get handed off to "real work." But this quote suggests something more unsettling: every single decision your company makes is already a design decision, whether anyone's thinking about it that way or not. The email template your HR team sends, the process for approving expense reports, the way your website loads on a phone—these are all designs shaping how people experience your organization. The reason this matters now more than ever is that customers have become ruthlessly unforgiving about friction. When something feels awkward or confusing or slow, they don't blame the department that built it—they blame you. They're experiencing the whole thing as one thing. Yet most organizations still treat design as an afterthought, something to fix up after the "real decisions" have been made. By then, you're polishing a broken system. The non-obvious angle here is that inviting design thinking into every meeting doesn't mean hiring more designers. It means asking one simple question before you decide anything: "What will this actually feel like for the person on the receiving end?" When that becomes normal, you stop having departments working at cross purposes and start having an organization that actually makes sense to live inside.