The Discipline of Change
Munich, Germany
October 2025
Design, Transformation, and the Discipline of Coherence
TL;DR: Change has become constant — and therefore meaningless. This essay questions whether design’s obsession with coherence actually enables transformation, or simply organizes it into something palatable. Between speed and structure lies the real work: learning when to resist momentum.
The Myth of Transformation
Transformation has become the most over-used word in the modern business lexicon—an industry in itself, complete with frameworks, keynote decks, and subscription toolkits. We speak about it as though it were evidence of progress. Yet behind the glossy language lies a quieter truth: most transformation doesn’t transform anything. It simply reorganizes the same behaviors inside new systems.
Design helped build this illusion. For two decades we promised reinvention through better interfaces, smoother journeys, faster sprints. The world moved quickly because design made moving feel frictionless. But efficiency isn’t evolution; it’s repetition at scale.
Every enterprise now lives in a state of declared reinvention. Banks become platforms. Manufacturers become ecosystems. Start-ups become laboratories of perpetual beta. The structure changes weekly, the strategy quarterly, and the vocabulary daily. “Change management” has become a permanent department—a symptom of its own failure.
In 2025, the language of progress sounds strangely uniform: agile, adaptive, responsive, disruptive. These are not strategies; they are moods. They describe how organizations wish to feel about the future, not how they intend to build it. When transformation becomes perpetual, it stops being transformation at all—it becomes maintenance disguised as motion.
The deeper issue isn’t speed or technology; it’s attention. Leadership teams no longer ask, Should we change? They ask, How fast can we pivot? The question has lost its moral dimension. Few pause to ask what deserves continuity—or whether the churn itself has become a form of denial.
Design is complicit here. It gives transformation a language of optimism: new color palettes, frictionless flows, animated proof of momentum. We aestheticized progress. In doing so, we helped mask its absence.
“Every transformation is also a translation—something is always lost.”
What’s lost is coherence. The ability to understand how decisions connect across time. The ability to see the consequences of change before they compound. When everything updates constantly, nothing has the chance to mature.
This is not an argument against evolution. It’s an argument for discipline—the capacity to differentiate necessary change from habitual motion. Discipline is not control; it’s care applied over time. It is what prevents innovation from collapsing into novelty.
As a studio, we’ve begun to notice a shift. The most forward-looking organizations no longer ask for reinvention. They ask for structure: how to hold complexity together without slowing down. They’re less interested in speed and more concerned with understanding. In a world saturated with transformation, coherence has become radical.
Still, discipline carries its own risk. Too much order becomes orthodoxy; too much coherence becomes control. The question is not whether design can organize change, but whether it can do so without suffocating the imagination that made change necessary in the first place.
This essay begins there—with the uncomfortable recognition that design has been both the accelerant and the antidote of transformation. The task now is not to invent the next method, but to practice a new form of restraint: to decide when not to redesign.
The Machinery of Motion
Speed has become the default posture of modern enterprise. Boards celebrate it, investors demand it, and design has learned to aestheticize it. We measure progress in sprints completed, prototypes shipped, roadmaps shortened. The assumption is simple: if you are moving, you must be advancing.
But velocity is not value. It is a metric of activity that often disguises strategic paralysis. When motion becomes the only measure, organizations lose the ability to distinguish learning from looping. They build beautifully efficient systems for doing the wrong thing faster.
This cult of speed has an infrastructure. Agile frameworks, OKRs, and quarterly reporting rituals all promise accountability while quietly compressing the space where reflection should live. The language of iteration—fail fast, ship often, pivot hard—was born from design culture. It once meant curiosity and experimentation; now it mostly means exhaustion disguised as productivity.
In a McKinsey study spanning more than 1,500 executives across multiple industries, fewer than 30 percent of digital transformations succeeded in meeting their stated goals—a figure that has barely changed in a decade of follow-up research [1]. The report framed this as a management challenge. It isn’t. It’s a systems problem. When the rhythm of work becomes perpetual acceleration, organizations stop asking why a thing should exist at all.
Design has rarely challenged this logic because it benefits from it. Every acceleration creates new surfaces to redesign: new interfaces, new artifacts, new moments of “delight.” We have become artisans of iteration, polishing the evidence of progress. Our clients rarely ask for pause; they ask for proof. And design delivers proof beautifully—mock-ups, dashboards, motion graphics of movement. The surface communicates progress even when the system beneath it stands still. Speed promises certainty because it leaves no time for doubt.
That is its seduction. In meetings, the faster team sounds smarter. In press releases, the faster company looks visionary. Momentum reads as mastery. But the organizations which actually endure tend to move differently: slower, quieter, with a cadence that allows doubt to surface before it calcifies into error.
In one of our field studies, a client proudly described a twelve-week transformation sprint that produced multiple prototypes. Only one survived testing—and it solved a problem no one still had. The lesson wasn’t failure; it was tempo. They had moved at a pace that precluded coherence. By the time insight emerged, the project calendar had already expired.
The uncomfortable truth is that design helped industrialize this machinery of motion. We converted imagination into workflow. We taught teams to measure creativity in velocity, not consequence. The rituals of design—post-its, stand-ups, retros—became managerial theatre: visible proof that thinking was happening. And maybe it was. Just not long enough to matter.
Discipline, in this context, is a form of resistance. It is not anti-speed; it is speed with intent. It asks whether acceleration still serves purpose, or whether it has become an aesthetic—another brand of efficiency culture.
If the first revolution of design was about making, the next must be about pacing: teaching organizations how to move at the speed of understanding.
That shift—from movement to meaning—marks where the discipline begins. The following five moves outline not a process, but a practice: how design learns to hold its own acceleration accountable.
Reference
Between Motion and Meaning
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![People working at a shared desk in a structured, geometric interior with vertical beams and soft overhead light — a visual study of order, focus, and spatial rhythm.]()
System
The structures we inhabit — physical, digital, cultural — shape how we think and act. Every system reveals its logic through space: how people move, pause, and belong within it. Discipline begins with noticing those invisible architectures.
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![A group of colleagues meeting inside a glass-walled office at night, surrounded by light and shadow — capturing repetition, routine, and collective rhythm in modern work.]()
Pattern
Patterns surface through repetition — in meetings, in rituals, in unspoken rules. Design begins where observation becomes interpretation. To change a pattern is to challenge what an organization believes about itself.
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![A quiet workspace with a small dog standing between an empty chair and a long desk — evoking contrast, interruption, and the informal tension of everyday collaboration.]()
Tension
Teams rarely fail for lack of talent; they fail for lack of alignment. Friction isn’t dysfunction — it’s information. Every collaboration holds a tension that must be designed, not managed.
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![Two people reviewing design materials spread across a large table in a bright, structured studio — a reflection on synthesis, dialogue, and coherence in creative work.]()
Meaning
The outcome of any disciplined process is coherence — not the absence of chaos, but its orchestration. Meaning is what remains once motion has purpose.
The Discipline Stack
Five deliberate moves for navigating transformation without surrendering to it.
Design, at its best, is not a process but a practice of discernment — knowing what to hold still when everything else is moving. The Discipline Stack describes five recurring moves we use to structure that discernment. They rarely occur in order. They overlap, contradict, and repeat. Each one is less a step than a stance; together, they form the rhythm of disciplined change.
1. Observe / Listen — Seeing Before Solving
Observation has become a performance. We “collect insights” through dashboards and surveys, mistaking quantity for comprehension. But data isn’t listening; it’s surveillance.
Real observation requires empathy and exposure. It asks teams to inhabit the conditions of the problem long enough to feel its constraints. When we spent time on-site with a logistics client, the most useful insight didn’t come from analytics—it came from a medical practitioner who described his workflow as “mostly workarounds.” Every workaround is a map of institutional blindness.
“To listen is to accept that the system may be smarter than its designers.”
The danger of observation is fetishization: we romanticize research and forget its purpose. Observation without synthesis becomes voyeurism. Discipline means stopping when we’ve learned enough to act, not when we’ve exhausted curiosity.
2. Frame / Define — Making Complexity Legible
Most transformation fails not in execution but in definition. Teams debate solutions while assuming a shared understanding of the problem—an assumption that almost never holds.
Framing is how design translates ambiguity into alignment. But it’s also how power operates: whoever frames the question controls the possible answers. A disciplined frame therefore exposes its own bias.
In a healthcare engagement, the client’s brief was to “digitize the operator’s (medical professional, lab technician) journey.” We reframed it as “prioritize patient care.” That one shift redirected twelve months of planning from features to comprehension. Clarity isn’t a deliverable; it’s a decision.
Frames are temporary agreements about what matters. The risk of discipline here is rigidity. Frames should focus intention, not fossilize it.
3. Design / Build — Prototyping the Future Before It Arrives
Design has professionalized itself into production. We prototype faster than we can interpret. Every version becomes a simulation of confidence.
True prototyping is epistemological—it’s how organizations learn what they believe. A prototype is a conversation, not a product.
In one mobility project, three interface prototypes revealed that the underlying business model was incoherent. The prototype didn’t fail; it succeeded in exposing contradiction.
“Good design tells you what’s possible. Great design tells you what’s wrong.”
The discipline of building lies in restraint: stopping when learning plateaus instead of polishing until ignorance returns.
4. Measure / Learn — Turning Craft Into Evidence
Measurement is where aspiration meets accountability. But most organizations measure for validation, not illumination. Metrics confirm what leaders already want to believe.
Design measurement asks a harder question: Does the system behave as intended, and should it?
When we rebuilt a digital pricing platform for a global insurer, the success metric wasn’t clicks or completion—it was comprehension. Did actuaries/users leave more confident than they arrived? Reducing cognitive friction became a performance indicator.
“Evidence is empathy quantified.”
Yet even evidence deceives. Numbers sanitize the messy human texture of change. Discipline means interpreting metrics as conversation starters, not verdicts.
5. Evolve / Sustain — Designing for Learning, Not Completion
The promise of transformation is renewal; its reality is maintenance. Every system eventually drifts. What matters is whether it drifts by design or by neglect.
Evolution is not an afterthought—it’s the architecture of adaptability. The organizations we admire most aren’t those that disrupt; they’re those that update without erasing themselves.
In venture programs, we use a simple heuristic: If a new version can’t explain what it kept, it’s not evolution—it’s amnesia. Sustainability is memory made operational.
Together, these five moves form a living discipline. They do not promise control; they cultivate coherence. They acknowledge that progress is rarely linear and that clarity, once achieved, must be defended. Discipline, in this sense, is not rigidity but rhythm—the capacity to re-enter uncertainty without losing integrity.
Evidence & Contradictions
Proof, friction, and the uncomfortable reality of design in motion.
Theory is generous. Practice is rude. Every framework meets resistance the moment it leaves the slide deck. This section is about what happens when design collides with reality — when coherence must contend with culture, budgets, egos, and entropy.
1. Bosch Power Tools — Clarity Through Contradiction
Bosch wanted to “design a platform for shared access.” What they really wanted was proof that a century-old engineering culture could still innovate without losing face. We entered a system obsessed with precision and permanence and asked it to think like a rental economy.
The contradiction was cultural: Bosch’s strength was mastery; our proposition was flexibility. It took three months of observation before a simple truth surfaced: the tools weren’t broken — the ownership model was.
The pilot platform we built shifted focus from product to usage. It worked, technically. But the deeper success was existential: a manufacturing giant learned to design for circulation rather than perfection. That lesson now shapes their ESG and after-sales programs. The prototype became policy.
Discipline in practice means teaching an institution to argue with its own DNA.
2. Allianz Health — Designing for Comprehension
Insurance is a system built on uncertainty and written in opacity. Allianz asked for simplification; what they needed was translation. We spent weeks mapping moments of confusion in customer calls — each one a symptom of linguistic design.
The insight was unspectacular but profound: people don’t fear complexity; they fear misunderstanding. So we rebuilt the digital experience around guided comprehension. Interfaces became conversational; policy documents became narratives.
After launch, comprehension scores rose by 27%, but internally the change was harder. Marketing celebrated clarity; compliance worried it would make the legal logic too transparent. Progress, as always, had its enemies.
The outcome wasn’t a cleaner interface. It was a shift in corporate literacy: clarity became a KPI. Every act of clarity redraws the boundary between service and control.
3. MINI Mobility — When Heritage Meets Foresight
MINI’s brand lives on emotion — design as charm, movement as identity. But emotion ages faster than technology. The question was existential: how do you modernize a feeling without neutralizing it?
Our brief was to design a mobility ecosystem that made MINI relevant in the age of autonomy. The challenge was psychological — how to maintain intimacy in a shared-mobility future.
We built speculative prototypes around belonging: subscription models, shared data rituals, personalized journeys. Each one asked whether the company was willing to let users co-author the brand. Some were embraced, some quietly archived. Transformation rarely fails for lack of imagination; it fails for lack of permission.
The project’s real outcome wasn’t a new product; it was a new vocabulary. MINI began speaking about movement as membership rather than ownership — a subtle linguistic shift that reframed its future.
The Pattern Beneath the Proof
Across Bosch, Allianz, and MINI, the same pattern emerges: design succeeds when it acknowledges contradiction instead of erasing it. Coherence doesn’t come from harmony; it comes from negotiated tension.
In practice, every project oscillates between structure and surrender — between what the organization hopes to be and what its systems will actually allow. That’s why transformation remains both necessary and impossible: it demands that people redesign the stories they tell about themselves.
The Discipline of Change lives in that friction — not in perfect outcomes, but in the courage to admit that every act of alignment leaves something misaligned. But friction alone is not enough. Once tension becomes structure, clarity itself turns political. What begins as a design problem ends as an ethical one — because coherence, once achieved, decides who belongs inside it.
The New Ethic of Clarity
When coherence becomes consequence.
Clarity used to be a stylistic virtue. Now it’s structural. In complex organizations, clarity decides how power travels—who understands what, and when. It determines which problems are visible and which stay safely hidden behind jargon or data.
Every design decision creates a politics of understanding. In a data-driven economy, governance begins with design. Whoever defines the interface defines the institution. Interfaces, workflows, and dashboards are not neutral; they define whose version of reality becomes operational. When we say “make it clear,” we rarely ask, clear for whom? Clarity is never universal. It always chooses its audience.
This is the ethical tension design must now face. The same systems that make knowledge accessible can also centralize it. A perfectly coherent organization may also be a perfectly controlled one. We once assumed that confusion was a failure of communication; sometimes it’s a symptom of freedom—the space where alternatives still exist.
In the last decade, design culture embraced the rhetoric of inclusion and transparency, yet much of the work still optimizes for efficiency. AI now accelerates that impulse. We train machines to generate order at a scale humans can’t follow, then marvel at their confidence. Automation doesn’t remove ambiguity; it buries it.
The question isn’t whether AI can design, but whether design can still interpret. Tools now act faster than institutions can think.
The discipline of change demands a new kind of literacy—an ability to read the systems that read us. Clarity must evolve from a visual goal into a civic one: a commitment to make the logic of our technologies comprehensible to the people they govern.
In our projects, this has become a recurring negotiation. Clients ask for simplicity; we argue for legibility. Simplicity flatters; legibility educates. One hides complexity behind elegance; the other exposes it carefully, so that users can navigate rather than merely comply.
The difference is moral. Simplicity seeks conversion. Clarity invites participation. A clear system is not the one that hides complexity—it’s the one that shows where complexity lives, and why. Design without transparency is just choreography.
Clarity, then, is not the end state of design—it’s its ethical horizon. The work of design is to make power legible without making it absolute. To let people see the system, not surrender to it.
As organizations integrate AI into decision-making, this ethic becomes urgent. If we delegate judgment to systems we no longer understand, we risk replacing confusion with obedience. And obedience, elegantly designed, is still obedience.
The next frontier of design leadership is not the invention of new interfaces or experiences, but the cultivation of discernment: teaching institutions—and algorithms—to know the difference between precision and understanding.
Reflection — Design After Design
On alignment, restraint, and what remains once the method ends.
Every discipline eventually outgrows its own language. Strategy borrowed from war. Design borrowed from art. Now both speak in software. The words that once defined progress—innovation, agility, transformation—have been rendered so frictionless they no longer resist misuse.
We now inhabit a world where design operates everywhere and means almost nothing. It scales faster than its own ethics, branding everything it touches as improvement. But the discipline worth defending isn’t the capacity to make—it’s the capacity to care.
To design after design is to work beyond the aesthetic of certainty. It’s the slow practice of constructing coherence without insisting on control. In a century defined by automation, the designer’s role may no longer be to invent systems, but to interpret them—to expose how they think, what they privilege, and who they forget.
‘‘The more autonomous our tools become, the more accountable our designers must be.’’
If Section III described design as rhythm, this is its silence—the pause required for reflection, the moment where restraint becomes an act of intelligence. Progress has a tempo, but wisdom has a threshold.
When the frameworks dissolve, what remains is a question: How do we build systems capable of evolving without erasing their humanity?
Perhaps that is the real discipline of change—not speed, not scale, but stewardship. A kind of design that privileges continuity over novelty, literacy over delight, and understanding over output.
Formist’s work increasingly lives in this space: where systems meet consequence, and where design is not a service but a stance. A refusal to accelerate simply because acceleration is possible. A belief that the future should be built with clarity, not haste. Real progress isn’t acceleration. It’s alignment.
The next era won’t belong to those who move fastest, but to those who move with clarity—to teams that can translate ambition into systems, and systems into enduring impact. Design is how that coherence takes form.
Editor’s Note
This essay was developed with the assistance of artificial intelligence as part of Formist Studio’s ongoing research into design systems and emerging technologies. All ideas, editing, and final authorship were directed and refined by the Formist editorial team. We view this collaboration not as automation, but as exploration—an inquiry into how intelligence, human or synthetic, can be disciplined toward understanding.