"Roads or Pyramids?"It was just a few years into our partnership building Ally’s emerging UX design practice when Holly Thomson sprang that question. I knew just what she meant by it. "Roads," I said, thinking what a great metaphor for the mission we were on. Pyramids are impressive, but they’re just decaying monuments, and to what? Vanity? Mysticism? No thanks. They may not be awe-inspiring, but roads connect people with possibility. That’s the kind of leadership we were about. From that realization, I acquired a strong sense of purpose. For as far back as I could remember, I had been beating paths through the wilderness of design constraints and uncertainty to discover new possibilities, then building roads for others to get there. Progress, for me, isn’t so much the discovery of what’s possible, but in paving a smoother, faster way to it.I suppose I’m allergic to guesswork and inefficiency. If people are struggling with confusion and uncertainty, or wasting their talents on monotonous routines, I go into road-building mode:• Turning information into insights for decision-making• Streamlining processes to liberate experts from amateur tasks• Codifying abstractions into frameworks for problem-solvingMy instinct is to build today for more and better progress tomorrow. This is the nature of #DesignOps, as it came to be called in recent years. I’ve been practicing it continuously for decades, building metaphorical roads that lead others to Efficiency and Confidence, sometimes tunneling through mountains to get there.My career gained momentum with the discovery that I could innovate and transform as a designer. Impulsively, out of frustration, I learned HTML, CSS, ColdFusion, and SQL to make my vision for something interactive and truly immersive come to life as the front-end to a database. From that empowering experience, I learned I could engineer my way through a mountain if it stood in the way of progress. Ever since then, if the way forward is blocked, I acquire the means to un-block it. If the tools at hand are inadequate, I set my mind on new tools. Throughout my career, the instinct to tunnel through the mountain has been a useful service to others, paving more direct routes to what's possible.As a leader, the instinct remained but the mountain gave way to an endless expanse of peaks and valleys—people and processes. I’ve since acquired new tools to navigate this expanse, including one which, as a designer, I swore was the death of creativity: Excel.Funny, the things we learn. Without Excel skills, I’d be lost in the wilderness.