Cross-functional work has never been more complex. Go-to-market teams are being asked to hit ambitious outcomes with fewer resources, tighter timelines, and increasing interdependence across Sales, Marketing, R&D, and Operations. Our research shows that despite all the technology we have, there’s a persistent obstacle that slows teams down more than anything else:
They struggle to stay aligned.
There’s no lack of talent or effort. Instead, misalignment happens because it’s largely social: it’s shaped by how people understand problems, how they interact, and how they make decisions together. And that’s precisely why human-centered design (HCD) is emerging as a powerful tool for team performance.
Few people have illuminated this better than Jeanne Liedtka, professor at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business and one of the leading thinkers in organizational design.* She describes HCD methods as:
“a social technology to affect change… a holistic approach with a unique ability to create trust within teams and between teams, allowing them to have better conversations and innovate together.”
In other words, HCD doesn’t only help teams achieve better results, it also helps them become better teams. This, in turn, reshapes the way people relate, communicate, and collaborate, creating the conditions where alignment naturally emerges.
How Human-Centered Design Creates Alignment
Liedtka’s research shows that HCD works on three interconnected levels.
- Doing. First, teams engage in core activities like gathering data, identifying insights, generating ideas, prototyping, and testing.
- Experiencing. As they do this work, they have shared experiences—immersion, sensemaking, emergence, visualization, and learning in action. And those experiences gradually transform the team itself.
Becoming. Teams become more empathetic, more curious, more collaborative, and more comfortable working across differences. They learn how to move from uncertainty to clarity, from assumptions to evidence, and from competing interpretations to shared meaning.
This is a critical type of alignment, different from the kind that comes from merely declaring “We need to get on the same page.” It’s the natural kind that emerges when teams actually see that page together.
The transformation is subtle at first. Over time, those shifts compound into something powerful and measurable: teams develop the ability to learn together and adapt together—hallmarks of truly aligned groups.
Consider the story of Cox Enterprises, where human-centered design has been used intentionally as a lever for cultural change at scale. Brian Anderson, who leads the HCD program at Cox, describes transformation not as a sudden shift, but as a cumulative effect of repeated design cycles that reshape how teams show up, including:
- Reduce prep time. One leader reported that project prep time for workshops dropped by 50% thanks to reusable templates and shared methods.
- Decreased organizational complexity. Beyond speed and efficiency, Brian emphasizes how HCD helped create a culture of shared language and intention.
- Faster alignment across. Alongside human-centered design methods, visual collaboration tools like Mural became central to project work.
The Cox example illustrates the core of Liedtka’s argument: HCD works because it changes how work gets done. It introduces new social patterns—co-creation, visualization, shared sensemaking, psychological safety—that ripple outward into culture, transforming not just processes but mindsets.
Alignment Is Not a Meeting, It’s a Way of Working
Many teams treat alignment as a ritual: a strategic kickoff, a monthly business review, a weekly standup. But real alignment isn’t a check box. It happens when teams share context, meaning, and purpose continuously.
This is why HCD is so effective in eliminating what we call The Alignment Tax™: the rework, slowdowns, and friction that arise from teams having different mental models, different interpretations of the strategy, or different assumptions about what customers actually need.
HCD methods reduce this tax because it requires teams to:
- See the same information.
- Make sense of it together.
- Co-create solutions side-by-side.
- Test assumptions early and visibly.
By the time a team has moved through even a few cycles of human-centered work, they’ve developed a shared understanding that would take months to generate through traditional meetings.
Align Even Faster with Visual Collaboration
HCD methods are inherently visual: journey maps, storyboards, prototypes, concept sketches, insight diagrams. When work becomes visual, alignment stops being an abstract aspiration and becomes a concrete reality people can point to.
Teams move faster because they’re not wrestling with ambiguous language or siloed documents. They’re looking at the same artifact, interpreting the same inputs, and shaping the same output. Ambiguity drops. Shared understanding rises. And decision-making accelerates.
This is exactly why we exist: Mural and LUMA together turn human-centered design into an always-on alignment engine.
The Bottom Line
Human-centered design isn’t just a methodology; it’s a way to strengthen human intelligence and performance. Jeanne Liedtka’s research shows that HCD works because it changes the experiences teams have and who they become. In the age of AI, highlighting those uniquely human aspects of teams is a competitive advantage–something adversaries can’t easily replicate.
Seeing is how Mural and LUMA help teams get to better outcomes, faster.
Want to explore how human-centered design can increase alignment and help you reach your outcomes faster? The LUMA System is made for that.
* See Jeanne’s summary of her research in this recorded webinar: “Maximizing the ROI of Design Thinking”