To manage is to design

We often forget that leadership is above all about design. Not in the aesthetic sense of the word, but in the sense of giving shape to an intention. Before being an organizational chart or an information system, a business is a way of imagining how work should be done, how decisions are made, how employees collaborate. It is a system of relationships, constraints, dependencies, even interdependencies and room for maneuver, sometimes carefully thought out, sometimes emerging spontaneously from the needs of the field.

This is why, whether they are aware of it or not, leaders are enterprise designers. The question, however, is not whether they do design, but whether they do it voluntarily and consciously.

In short:

• Leadership is first and foremost about designing the organization: defining working methods, decision-making processes, and collaboration rather than simply managing structures or tools.
• Leaders have gradually delegated the design of their business to technology; information systems and digital tools have imposed their own organizational logic.
• Artificial intelligence does not create new problems but reveals and amplifies existing dysfunctions, testing the strength of management and the consistency of processes.
• Taking back control of the design of the business means thinking before setting parameters: defining what should be human or automated, ensuring consistency between identity, experience, strategy, and operations.
• Management regains its meaning when it designs the framework in which people and tools interact effectively; taking back control of the design means taking back control of the business itself.

Leaders have stopped designing their businesses

For a long time, enterprise design was a matter of common sense. Structures, functions, and roles were defined, and then everything was developed according to needs. But as technology became more prevalent in the workplace, responsibility for design shifted to those who mastered the tools. Executives believed they were driving digital transformation, but it was often technology that redesigned the way they worked. Without really realizing it, they entrusted the design of their business to their information systems through a series of technical decisions that were perceived as insignificant but which, when taken together, shaped the way work was organized.

An ERP, CRM, or HR tool is never neutral. Each one embodies an implicit vision of work: a way of doing things, articulating roles, measuring performance, and deciding what matters and what is optional. By adopting tools without questioning the model they convey, many businesses have ended up importing the designs of others. Code has become the designer of everyday life, setting workflows and behaviors. CIOs have not taken power, but have simply filled the void left by executives focused on strategy and performance, while others decided how information would flow, how approvals would be linked, and how responsibilities would be distributed. In a way, the business is configured rather than designed, and management has begun to administer a system that it does not fully understand and, in any case, does not control.

To mock certain IT projects, people often talk about “solutions in search of a problem” or “solutions that create problems that didn’t exist before,” which is quite symptomatic of the situation. And how many times, when I questioned a way of working, was I told that “we’d like to do it differently, but the tool doesn’t allow it“. QED.

Nicholas Carr already sensed this twenty years ago and said it well in his book “Does IT Matter”. At the time, we were talking about ERPs, today we’re talking about AI, but the issue remains the same, perhaps even worse. He told us that the more accessible technology becomes, the more it pushes businesses towards standardization. What makes the difference is no longer the tool, but the way it fits into a unique design, and that is exactly what leaders are facing today with artificial intelligence: the temptation to believe that modernity lies in technology, when in fact it depends on how we use it to rethink work (AI will not create a competitive advantage).

Technology becomes management

Artificial intelligence now makes this situation impossible to ignore. It does not disrupt the business or transform it on its own, but it does put the organization under stress and, in doing so, reveals what has long been held together only by a miracle or thanks to the hidden efforts of employees (Work about work: when the reality of work consists of making things that don’t work work). By automating and accelerating often imperfect processes, it exposes everything in the organization that relies on the implicit, the unspoken, and managerial tinkering. It does not fundamentally create new problems, but reveals those that already existed by amplifying them.

As I like to repeat, technology brings two things: speed and scale. Applying technology to a dysfunctional organization will only make it dysfunctional faster and on a larger scale, and I think that in this regard, with AI, we have reached the ultimate stage.

AI therefore does not transform management, but rather tests its robustness (Automation is done with people, not against them.). It therefore forces executives and managers to redefine their place, rethink processes and operating methods, decide what should be entrusted to machines and what should remain in human hands, and above all, how the two should coexist in a coherent system. What is at stake here, even before productivity, is the design of the business. In a programmable world, anything that is not intentionally designed is, by default, subject to the machine’s settings, and if executives do not take back this responsibility, others, integrators, publishers, and even algorithms, will continue to design for them how their business thinks, learns, and acts.

Design before managing

Taking control of your business’s design does not mean learning to code, but rather designing before managing and thinking before setting parameters. It also means reaffirming that a manager’s responsibility is first and foremost to define how things should be done and what should remain human, what can be automated, and what will make the whole thing coherent both in terms of operating procedures and the business’s identity, values, and promise. Before any project, we must ask ourselves what experience we want to provide to customers and employees, how we should operate to achieve it, and finally, what the respective roles of humans and machines will be in this system.

This design work also requires a common language. As long as managers, business lines, and technicians continue to speak in their own jargon, they will continue to misunderstand each other. Enterprise design is the ability to connect promise, experience, strategy, structure, vision, and execution in a way that is consistent with your identities and values (EDGY: a common language for aligning identity, experience, and operations). This is not a quest for originality but a search for consistency. A well-designed business does not seek an ideal or perfection that does not exist, but rather seeks consistency between what it wants to be, what it does, and how it does it.

Bottom Line

Management is not the art of supervision but that of design. A leader or manager does not manufacture products but creates a context. It is the quality of this context that determines the quality of the work. It is important to bear in mind today that, at a time when technology claims to model everything, management still has the responsibility to design what machines cannot do or anticipate, namely how women and men work together, coordinate, why they trust each other, and translate a common intention into action.

Taking back control of design therefore means restoring coherence and returning management to its primary mission: bringing together ambitions, systems, and people. The quality of a leader is not measured by the speed with which they adopt new tools, but by the precision with which they design the framework in which these tools find their place. A business is not a fixed entity; it is redesigned a little every day through the decisions we make about how things work. As long as this concept eludes those who run it, their business will elude them altogether. Taking back control of design means taking back control of your business.

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How management let systems do the thinking for them EDGY: a common language to align identity, experience, and operations AI will not create a competitive advantage The future of work will be designed for humans Can we turn the pyramid upside down without the customer? The minimalist manager: a promising model, but one that needs clarification