# Two sides of Design Impact...What teams can control vs. What orgs must enable

**URL:** <https://forum.zurb.com/t/two-sides-of-design-impact-what-teams-can-control-vs-what-orgs-must-enable/76>\
**Category:** Proving biz impact\
**Tags:** design-impact, design-influence\
**Created:** [July 11, 2025, 1:41am UTC](https://forum.zurb.com/t/two-sides-of-design-impact-what-teams-can-control-vs-what-orgs-must-enable/76 "2025-07-11T01:41:45Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 9

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**Author:** ![Hanna](https://yyz2.discourse-cdn.com/flex034/user_avatar/forum.zurb.com/hanna/32/494_2.png) [@Hanna](https://forum.zurb.com/u/Hanna)\
**Post date:** [November 2, 2025, 3:23pm UTC](https://forum.zurb.com/t/two-sides-of-design-impact-what-teams-can-control-vs-what-orgs-must-enable/76/9 "2025-11-02T15:23:16Z")

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I’m with the general premise: if there’s no design influence, there’s no design impact. But in my experience, orgs where design has influence by default are pretty rare. I see it as the design leader’s job to build that influence. And the further I go, the more I realize how critical selling/persuasion skills are.

Questions I keep circling:

1. At what point does “growing design maturity and influence” turn into just running headfirst into a wall?

2. What early signals suggest an org simply isn’t capable of this kind of transformation, so the effort is a dead end?

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