Writing

Newsletter: The Merholz Agenda

I publish a (semi-)weekly newsletter called The Merholz Agenda, delivering my thoughts on Design Leadership and Organization Design straight to your inbox or RSS feed. It’s less formal than the blog here. 

Most recent issues:

[TMA] AI Will Widen the Design Chasm
[TMA] AI Will Widen the Design Chasm

From the sofa of Peter Merholz… Design, AI, and The Widening Gap between Savvy and Clueless My ~10 minute take combining the technology adoption curve (think “Crossing the Chasm”) with UX maturity models has surprised me for its popularity (nearly 48,000 impressions). What I didn’t share was what lead me [...]

[TMA] Design Leadership Themes, and upcoming event
[TMA] Design Leadership Themes, and upcoming event

I spent this past week in London, England, attending the the “Design Leaders+” conference and teaching my Design Leadership Fundamentals masterclass. On stage at Design Leaders+. Photos by Jason Mesut A few themes emerged across some conference presentations, which provide some common wisdom about design leadership. The meta-work is the [...]

[TMA] Design maturity and the laziness of 'best practices'
[TMA] Design maturity and the laziness of 'best practices'

From the sofa of Peter Merholz— We start with Andy Budd’s understandable frustration with “design maturity” as an objective in an of itself, instead tasking UX/Design types to appreciate how organizations decide to invest resources in order to realize gain. We continue with the latest 99 Percent Invisible podcast, about [...]

[TMA] Design Thinking Isn't Dead
[TMA] Design Thinking Isn't Dead

From The Sofa of Peter Merholz— This past week, I spoke at Re:Imagine Retail, an “immersive experience creation” event internal to Sam’s Club. The proceedings took place at Clubhouse, a new building designed from the ground up to enable innovation practices. To my surprise, the conceptual metaphor for the building [...]

Blog

I maintain a semi-regular blog with postings on organization design, design leadership, and other relevant matters. 

Critique is not review, and many other thoughts on an overlooked practice

TL; DR: Critique and review are different. 🗣️Critique is simply about making the work better. Review is about assessing readiness for the next stage in the process. Healthy critique requires ✨psychological safety✨. To make the work better means being able to discuss it openly, and frankly, warts and all. To do so in a constructive fashion requires that everyone involved know there will be no retribution for their

Read More

Org Design for Design Orgs

In 2015, Kristin Skinner (with whom I worked at Adaptive Path, and who had stayed on and joined Capital One) and I realized that there was hunger for guidance on how to build in-house design teams, and almost no resources for design leaders to support them in this effort. 

So, we banded together and wrote Org Design for Design Orgs, which came out in 2016, and is still the only book focused on this subject. 

We built a website for the book, that includes a blog with new thinking since the book came out. I stopped writing there in 2019 in favor of this site,

 

Readers have a habit of reading the book in detail.