Architecting the Invisible

In the AI era, the most important thing you design isn't the product—it's the culture that builds it.

Are we so focused on the customer's journey that we've forgotten our own?

What happens when a perfect user interface is built by a broken culture? When the frontstage experience is seamless, but the backstage is a chaotic mess of burnout, misaligned incentives, and wasted effort? Can you truly design a great product if you haven't first designed a great company?

This is the central problem for leaders in the AI-first world. Our teams can execute faster than ever, but this speed has created a "Productivity Paradox." We're shipping more features, running more tests, and closing more tickets, but we feel less strategic impact. It’s not just a workflow issue; it’s a clash of mindsets. Many companies are stuck in an old "more is better" model, chasing efficiency as the ultimate prize. But the modern world demands a smarter, more systemic approach. We're caught in an arms race with our own tools, stuck on a feature treadmill that goes faster but leads nowhere new.

We’re producing more stuff, but are we creating more meaning? This forces us to ask a deeply uncomfortable question: What if the most important thing we design isn't the product at all?

The Blueprint is the Message

To answer that, we have to revisit Marshall McLuhan’s famous insight: "the medium is the message". The real impact of a new technology isn't just what it does, but how it fundamentally changes our patterns and assumptions.

So, what is the "message" of AI? The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, in his book Creativity, gives us a powerful answer: the message is carried in memes.

A meme is a unit of culture—an idea, a value, a way of working—that gets learned and passed on. But these memes are never just simple ideas. They come packaged with hidden cultural beliefs. A meme celebrating "hustle culture," for instance, does more than praise hard work; it pushes a myth of endless growth and suggests that individual well-being is secondary to output.

The message of AI, then, isn’t just the chatbot. It’s the new memes it programs into our companies: the meme that all decisions must be data-driven, which can quietly sideline years of hard-won experience. The meme that human intuition is flawed, which can create a culture of risk-aversion where no one is willing to make a bold leap. The meme of unseen algorithmic bias, which can embed old prejudices into new, automated systems. These memes create an invisible blueprint that shapes how your company thinks and acts, often without anyone's conscious consent.

This changes our job entirely. It gives rise to a new practice: Memetic Design.

Memetic Design is the art of intentionally shaping the cultural DNA of your organization. It’s about moving beyond designing the artifact to consciously designing the system’s underlying assumptions. Our role shifts from being a maker of things to a cultivator of resilient, self-organizing teams. We stop being managers of output and start becoming architects of culture.

From Automated Chaos to Intentional Evolution

How do we put this into practice? We can use the tools of service design to fix our own "backstage"—the messy internal reality that creates the customer-facing "frontstage." An organization's memes are its unwritten rules, default rituals, and core beliefs. They are the invisible systems that dictate everything we build.

Here is how a Memetic Designer solves the Productivity Paradox:

1. Make the Invisible Visible Through a Memetic Audit

First, you have to diagnose the system like a detective. You need to uncover the unwritten rules and accidental habits that are really running your company. You do this with a memetic audit: map a recent project, but instead of customer touchpoints, focus on the internal beliefs and behaviors that drove it.

• What Happened: The team shipped a new feature in a two-week sprint.
• What Really Happened (The Memes): Was the launch driven by a "bias for speed over certainty"? By a culture where "success is just a completed ticket," ignoring long-term impact? Was it enabled by the "don't bring me problems, bring me solutions" meme, which punishes early feedback? Or by a fear that "disagreement is inefficiency," which kills critical thinking?

By exposing these hidden forces, you give leaders a blueprint of their culture and the power to change it. That moment of clarity is transformative. You’ve shifted the focus from the surface problem ("we need to ship faster") to the real one ("our definition of value is flawed").

2. Prototype New Memes Through Rituals

You can't change a belief with a PowerPoint slide; you have to change behavior. The best way to do this is with new rituals that act as "Trojan horses for better memes." These new rituals should be designed to bridge the gap between today's worldview and a better one, making the new way of thinking feel like a natural evolution, not a radical disruption.

• Old Ritual: A project kickoff focused on scope and timeline, where the goal is alignment.
• New Ritual: An "Assumption Audit." The first hour of every project is now dedicated to one thing: identifying and challenging the riskiest assumptions. The team asks questions like, "What must be true for this project to be a massive success?" and "What is the single belief that, if wrong, would cause this entire effort to fail?"

This small change introduces a powerful new meme: "Our value is in the quality of our questions, not just the speed of our answers." It doesn't fight the company's need for speed; it redefines it as the speed of learning. It’s a low-risk experiment for building a smarter, more intellectually honest culture.

3. Orchestrate a Resilient System

A true catalyst doesn’t micromanage; they change the rules of the game. Once a new meme starts to work, your job is to create an environment where it can thrive. This means changing how success is measured and challenging the invisible power of things like spreadsheets and dashboards that often force teams to focus on the wrong metrics—the easy-to-measure proxies for value, not value itself.

You start celebrating teams for the critical insights that prevented a bad launch. You protect people who are brave enough to kill a project when they learn it's the wrong thing to build. You redefine success, shifting from "shipping on time" to the far more valuable goal of "preventing the wrong thing from being built."

This is the real work of a design leader: shaping the backstage of your organization to create better outcomes for everyone.

Your Legacy Is Not a Product

A leader's true measure of success isn't the product they launch, but the lasting culture they build.

Shipping a product creates temporary value. But shipping a new way of thinking—a meme of intellectual honesty, of smart inquiry, of resilience—fundamentally rewrites your organization's cultural code. Your legacy is not an artifact; it’s a resilient, self-organizing system that is built to last.

In an age where AI can generate infinite products, our most important human role is to design the cultures that can use that power wisely.

The question for every leader is no longer just what are we building, but who are we designing ourselves to become?