Tony Bynum, MBA, MDM
Associate Professor of Practice & Director, ID Executive Academy, LYMNL / IIT - Institute of Design
The longevity of your organization or company is limited to the extent that it is defined by what you sell or make rather than by what you do to meet the higher-level needs of the economic buyer of your products and services.
The biggest misconception about design is that it is about creating aesthetics or about making things look nice, and that you have to be trained to practice it.
Most leaders think of design as a group or function, but I believe design is a way to make sense of complexity and see / create an ownable POV about the future.
THE PROBLEM AFTER NEXT: Every transformation budget I see right now is funding speed. Faster cycles, faster analysis, faster decisions. But speed only pays when you're heading in the right direction, and the capability that lets an organization sense change and make course corrections is something I call dexterity, the ability to perform and transform simultaneously.
In the next three to five years. Dexterity isn't something that can be turned on or installed, It lives in the judgment of people moving and shaping the organization. This is an act of reframing, and it is the rarest skill in a large company.
BIO: Tony Bynum studies how organizations can adopt the mindset, toolset, and skillset of human-centered, design-led innovation as a strategic capability.
Over twenty-five years in strategy, innovation, and design-led practice, he has advised Fortune 500 companies, global NGOs, academic institutions, and early-stage ventures through periods of structural uncertainty. His current line of inquiry concerns what he terms Organizational Dexterity, adopting the mindset of design in order to perform and transform.
At the Institute of Design, Bynum directs the Executive Academy, where he builds and delivers programs that place senior leaders in the midst of live business problems rather than immersing them in theory. His teaching integrates design research, strategic foresight, and distributed leadership models across global immersion programs, capability sprints, and cross-disciplinary learning labs. He previously established the Design Thinking Center of Excellence at Northwestern Mutual and has held faculty appointments at Rutgers University, Northwestern University, and CEDIM in Mexico.
His frameworks, including Design-Led Dexterity, the Application Gap, and Insights to Impact, are in active use across corporate and academic settings, and treat design as organizational infrastructure rather than a creative service.
He holds an MBA, a Master of Design Methods from the Institute of Design, and graduate training in organizational psychology. His work has been featured at Fortune Brainstorm Design, STEM Connector, and Design Observer.