Peter Merholz, who has urged design leaders to connect their work to what the business values, is reconsidering that advice. A company can track the screens a team produces while overlooking the exploration that helped it choose what to build. That’s what he means by design’s “legibility gap.” He explains why predictable work gets recognized:

This is not some fault of design, but instead reflects the values of business operations. Organizations value predictability, so that they can plan, budget, and communicate likely outcomes to their stakeholders. Predictability requires determinacy, where the nature of the work (its processes and outputs) are understood ahead of time—engineering will take 6 weeks to work through these Jira tickets; marketing will spend $50,000 to draw this amount of traffic. Determinacy in turn defines legibility, the qualities of work that can be seen, appreciated, valued, and accounted for.

Much of UX/Design work is indeterminate, and thus illegible. Examples include:

• You explore four concepts and choose one. The three abandoned efforts are invisible, and you’re asked why you didn’t just start with the workable one.
• Research reveals the requirements were misguided, so you reframe them around actual customer need. The roadmap retains the same name, so it appears nothing has changed.
• You draft the experience principles that will inform hundreds of downstream decisions, but none of which will be traced back to them.

I’ve supported connecting design work to an existing metric, with the qualification that a number can’t capture everything design work contributes. Here, he’s reconsidering whether the business’s existing criteria are sufficient.

His warning comes from a forestry example: in Merholz’s account, clearing a forest for timber production destroyed the undergrowth and other life that sustained it. The first generation flourished, but the next collapsed. He applies that warning to design leadership:

This legibility frame illuminates a potent detail that had escaped me. Where in the past I argued that design leadership is about translation and connection (I have used the phrase “connect design to what the business values” countless times), the real work is subtler and actually much more difficult.

If we want UX/Design to avoid the fate of the forest’s second generation, the real work of leadership is to evolve what businesses see as ‘legible.’ We need them to widen their aperture to appreciate the value of indeterminate work, which is open-ended, exploratory, emotional, meaningful, even beautiful.

Merholz leaves the practical question open: how does a leader persuade the business to support exploration whose result can’t be specified in advance? An existing metric gives that conversation a starting point, but it can’t settle which unmeasured work deserves support.

And it’s a question that I personally continue to grapple with.