Service designer Daniel T Santos uses British cybernetician Stafford Beer’s Viable System Model to explain why strategic design work can disappear in plain sight:

System 1 is operations: these are the units that produce the countable output. The screen ships, the order moves, the revenue lands. System 1 is legible by construction, because the organisation was built to count what it produces.

System 4 is strategy and coherence. This is the outward and forward-facing work: sensing the environment, holding coherence across the parts, deciding what the service should become. This is where research that reframes a requirement lives. Where the journey gets held together across channels that each have their own backlog. Where the principles that shape a hundred downstream decisions are set.

System 4 work produces no countable artefact in the quarter it is done. So the organisation, looking through a System 1 lens, does not see it. Peter Merholz recently called this design’s legibility gap, and it is worth reading. Beer gives it a mechanism: the work is not illegible because it is done badly or explained poorly. It is illegible because it sits in a tier the measurement system does not read.

The organization cannot value work that it doesn’t measure. Santos’s answer is “a shared unit of account”:

Indeterminate work becomes legible when it is anchored to a number the organisation already counts.

Anchored instead of translated or championed!

You take the System 4 work and you attach it to the System 1 metric it was quietly moving all along. You decide, up front, which existing operational or financial number this work should shift if it succeeds.

Santos knows a number cannot capture everything design contributes. But organizations already manage by numbers. Linking design work to one it affects at least makes the work visible.