Informal Leadership in Design: How UX and Service Designers Influence Decision-Making Without Authority

Abstract

This master’s thesis examines how UX and service designers influence organisational decision-making and enact leadership without formal authority in technology-intensive environments. The work is motivated by a persistent paradox in contemporary design practice: although design is recognised as a driver of digital transformation and cross-functional collaboration, designers rarely hold positional power in strategic hierarchies. Organisations frequently expect design to guide change, yet this influence is typically exercised through credibility, trust-building, facilitation and sensemaking rather than through command. This tension defines the research problem: how can designers shape strategic direction in contexts that do not provide them with formal decision rights? The theoretical framework integrates relational, distributed and practice-based leadership with research on power, trust, facilitation, framing and socio-technical collaboration. While prior scholarship conceptualises leadership as distributed and relational, it rarely shows how these dynamics materialise in design work. Addressing this gap, the thesis investigates how designers influence decision-making; what contextual factors enable or constrain their influence; how credibility, trust and shared understanding are constructed in practice; and how these interactions contribute to organisational alignment and sensemaking. A secondary question examines how designers understand strategy and how their expertise could be more effectively integrated into strategic work. Methodologically, the study follows an abductive, qualitative case-study strategy that iterates between theory and field data. Six semi-structured interviews were conducted with experienced designers in Finnish software and service organisations representing varying levels of design maturity. Data were analysed using grounded-theory principles and complemented with persona synthesis to integrate cross-case patterns and illustrate different modes of informal leadership. The analysis reveals a cyclical process of trust-based sensemaking through which designers convert expertise into organisational influence. The cycle consists of five linked stages, competence, credibility, trust, shared understanding and alignment, connected through transitions enacted by visible outputs, consistency and openness, facilitation and reframing, and collective sensemaking. Ethical reflection and integrity renew credibility for subsequent cycles. A six-persona typology, Facilitating Networker, Ethical Facilitator, Bold Storyteller, Bridge Builder, Reflective Change Agent and Analytical Materialiser, illustrates how designers enact these transitions in different organisational conditions, design maturity influences which personas thrive and where influence stalls. The study contributes to Human–Technology Interaction by providing an empirically grounded framework linking relational and practice-based leadership with design practice. It shows that informal design leadership functions as a learning system rather than a hierarchy: influence emerges through dialogue, evidence and boundary-spanning artefacts. Practically, organisations can strengthen design’s strategic impact by legitimising facilitation, sensemaking and translation as leadership work, recognising trust as leadership capital, and investing in design maturity to support psychological safety, cross-functional collaboration and reflective practice. The findings highlight the ethical dimension of design leadership, suggesting that moral awareness and reflexivity sustain credibility over time. Ultimately, the thesis reframes design leadership as a cultural capability, a way of organising through empathy, inquiry and shared learning that enables change.