How to talk to your CEO about design thinking (without making them cry).

You can have the power of suggestion or the power of veto. Unfortunately, most design leaders opted for the wrong one.

Your CEO didn't decide design was overhead. You did.

Whenever an exec hears “design thinking”, they don’t picture the massive ROI that IBM got out of implementing it, or the weekend Airbnb’s founders spent saving the company with a rented camera on a hunch. Instead, they picture walls of sticky notes, and teams “ideating” for days without shipping anything. And it’s not a picture that fell out of the sky, but one we painted, one empathy-map workshop at a time.

We in the design community just love describing our work in the language of feelings – empathy, delight, human-centeredness. They’re all true, and every single one of them land in a CEO’s ear as a spend with absolutely zero line back to revenue. So what we really built was a vocabulary where we priced our own work as overhead, and then we go and act surprised when finance treats it that way.

That’s the surface problem, and it’s one we can actually fix. The deeper one sitting below that is that we happily got in that seat in the first place.

Your exec is rational – and that’s your whole problem.

I personally love the way Rory Sutherland always has a habit of pointing out things so incredibly obvious that nobody has bothered to say them: Creative people present ideas to rational people for validation, but the opposite never happens.

No CFO has ever walked into a design department holding a spreadsheet and asked for a creative look at it (and if he did, that’s a pretty big red flag). The traffic goes one way, and it has done so for as long as any of us have been working, and our grandparents too. Creative functions get the power of suggestion while finance, analytics and legal get the power of veto.

That asymmetry is the deciding factor for more product outcomes than any other methodology. Any idea that can’t be justified in advance dies in advance. This means the only survivors are the ones that walk and talk like the things already proven to work.

One of Sutherland’s go-to notions is that if an idea isn’t a bit absurd at first, then there’s no hope for it, because anything immediately sensible is already being done by your competitors. He’s borrowing the phrasing from Einstein, but he’s spot on about the business consequence. Sensible ideas are commodities, and they pass review precisely because everyone recognizes them, which is the same reason everyone – and definitely your competitor – is already shipping them.

So we have to accept that the vocabulary problem and the veto problem aren’t the same problem after all. Better words might get your budget approved, but they still don’t get you the right to be wrong.

Evidence is what gets you in the room.

You can’t just walk in the room and ask for things just on faith alone. You start with the translation, which is how you buy standing, and standing is then what you can spend later.

McKinsey scored 300 public companies on design over five years and matched the scores to the financials. The top quartile grew revenue 32 percentage points faster than their industry rivals and returned 56 points more to shareholders. That gap held up across medical technology, consumer goods and retail banking, so it isn’t a quirk of just one sector.

IBM sold design thinking internally as operational efficiency, which is why executives signed off. This way it spoke to margins rather than mood. (Most consultants still confuse operational excellence with process excellence. They’re wrong, and overpaid.) A study of IBM’s practice found a massive ROI and millions of dollars in net value gained over just a couple of years.

Intuit ran the same play under a different name, where Scott Cook came up with Design for Delight (D4D) as a way to find revenue by watching customers, and what eventually convinced the company came from a two-day sprint testing a hunch about QuickBooks licensing, showing that customers wanted single-seat licenses rather than their current five-packs, and by changing the packaging, they added $10 million in sales in the first year.

None of these companies or people found a better methodology than yours – they just found better words for the same one. And numbers. And every one of those numbers is a key to a door.

Nobody would have approved Airbnb’s Hail Mary.

In 2009 Airbnb’s revenue was flat and the founders were living on credit cards. They rented a camera, flew to New York, knocked on hosts’ doors and replaced the grainy listing photos with professional shots. Revenue roughly doubled that week.

Now try running that through a rational review, and you’ll find it doesn’t scale at all. The sample is a few dozen listings in one city, you’ve got no control group, no projection, and no claim you could make in advance for why better photography would move bookings. Any competent senior stakeholder would kill it in the meeting, and they’d be doing the right thing according to the books.

Co-founder Joe Gebbia put it like this:

"We had this Silicon Valley mentality that you had to solve problems in a scalable way... the first time someone gave us permission to do things that don't scale... it changed the trajectory of the business."

Permission is the word to notice there. The rare thing was never the idea, but the agency to run it without proving it first.

This is the asymmetry of creative ↔ rational doing its thing, and it’s why just learning the lingo on its own leaves you stuck. A design function that can only fund what it can pre-justify will produce competent, defensible and thoroughly forgettable work forever. It also gets to keep its budget, which is how the cycle survives.

Ask for a budget you can’t justify.

It’s not 4D chess, but it’s got a little bit of the flavor: First, you earn the credibility in their currency, and then you spend it buying back some veto-free ground.

Start by trading the vocabulary: User research is market validation, a prototype is risk reduction, and a journey map is a conversion analysis. Use the words your execs already think in and most of the initial hesitance goes away before you’ve even made your case fully.

Chop it down to size, and run one pilot rather than a whole program. Take a single high-visibility feature and give it a week of interviews and rough prototypes, tracking what you learn, what it moves, and what it would have cost to learn the same thing after launch.

Lead with other people’s numbers when you present. Finding relevant examples from your industry, like the ones I started with, because specific outcomes from named companies persuade in a way that theoretical benefits can’t.

Get your exec in the room while you’re at it. Invite them to sit in on a user session, since nothing changes an executive’s mind faster than watching a customer fail to buy the thing they’re trying to sell.

And then float what you’re really asking for. Once you’ve gotten the agreement, request a small budget with no business case attached, on the explicit understanding that most of what it funds will fail. You can frame it as portfolio logic, which is a concept every executive already accepts everywhere except when your work is involved. Ten percent of your capacity, spent on things nobody can justify in advance, is a really cheap insurance against a competitor finding the absurd idea first.

That last one is the actual ask – the four before that just make it sound like it came from an adult.

Where good ideas live.

Logic is a starting point that most companies also mistake for the finish line. All the interesting work that you should actually be doing sits where three things overlap: an economic insight that holds up, a solution that technically works, and a psychological framing of how someone then “experiences the thing”.

Most orgs are only staffed for the first two, leaving the third with no natural owner, no dashboard for it, and nobody in the room to speak for it when the decisions get made. And that gap is what design needs to be claiming, and it’s a considerably better pitch than asking to be included earlier in the process. (You’ve asked that a hundred times, haven’t you?)

AI is changing the price of being wrong.

The obvious objection is whether AI makes all of this moot, but it actually does the exact opposite.

When building gets cheap the cost of a failed experiment collapses, and the entire rational case for demanding proof up front weakens along with it. Veto power was always justified by how expensive it was to be wrong, and that expense is falling fast.

The risk now is that designers meet this moment the way they met the last one, talking about craft and taste while the business talks about outcomes and impact.

So, if once again, you go about describing the work that way, you’ll be overhead again inside a year. Instead, describe it as the discipline that decides where all the cheap, fast building gets aimed, and you become the constraint that matters, because everything else has stopped being scarce.

The most human companies will win.

The work was never the problem, it was the words we used, and the words are entirely yours to change.

So take one project this quarter, run it as market validation, and put the money it saves in front of your exec. Then use the credit to ask for something you can’t defend. If the answer comes back no, you’ve learned what your seat is actually worth, which is worth knowing before you spend another five years negotiating for a slightly bigger one.

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Hi, I’m Oscar - Founding designer at momondo, I’ve won a Material Design Award for Innovation, and I help design leaders succeed.