Phil Duncan Spent 19 Years Proving Design Earns Its Seat

Phil Duncan does not look like a leader who needs to prove anything. He has held the title of Chief Design Officer at Procter & Gamble for nearly two decades. He has led the company’s Olympic program from London 2012 through Pyeongchang. He has grown the design organization from roughly 200 people to 580, with plans to add another 100. He has reported to six consecutive CEOs.

And yet the first thing Duncan did when he sat down with Jennings at The Future Of Conference on May 13 was acknowledge that, for a stretch of those years, the design organization he inherited was living on borrowed credibility.

He called it Special Island.

The most dangerous place for a design team is the magazine cover

Early in his tenure, Duncan looked around P&G’s design function and saw a team that had earned a reputation far bigger than its operational contribution. Design had landed on the cover of a major business magazine. The CEO loved the work. The team was proud.

The problem was that none of that translated into embedded business value. The design team was celebrated but peripheral. Brand teams on “the mainland” were doing the hard commercial work, and design was waving from across the water.

Duncan’s diagnosis was blunt: the team needed to leave the island, sail to the mainland, and do the unglamorous work alongside the brand teams, on declining brands as well as growing ones, on everyday packaging as well as showcase projects.

That decision set the trajectory for everything that followed.

From critiquing to creating

The structural move Duncan made was to shift P&G’s design culture from one that primarily critiqued external agency work to one that created work in-house. It sounds simple. It took a decade.

The design organization built internal studios that started as creative and design shops, then expanded to include media production, retail partner skills, social content, and influencer relationship management. Duncan frames this not as an empire-building exercise but as a consumer-speed problem: the company’s consumers were building brand relationships on mobile devices faster than P&G’s external agency model could keep up with.

The result is a studio network that the rest of the company now sees as a central capability hub, not a finishing department. And the growth in headcount did not come from the design team lobbying for resources. It came from business unit presidents looking at their available headcount and independently deciding they needed more designers to win.

That distinction matters. When the budget holder who has nothing to do with design voluntarily asks for more designers from a finite resource pool, the value argument is settled. No ROI framework required.

The reporting structure question nobody asks correctly

At conferences like this one, someone always asks whether the Chief Design Officer should report to the CEO. Duncan has lived the full range of that question.

When he rejoined P&G as CDO, he reported directly to the CEO. Then, about two years in, the structure changed: he moved under the chief brand officer with a dotted line to R&D. His first reaction was that it felt like a rug pull.

His second reaction, after living with it, was that the new structure actually worked better. Not because reporting to the CEO was not prestigious, but because having two senior leaders personally invested in design’s success created more growth surface area than one. The CEO, Duncan noted, is busy with genuinely enormous strategic decisions. A CDO two levels down from the boardroom but with two invested sponsors gets more operational traction than a CDO one level down with a distracted one.

The industry’s fixation on the org chart line misses the real question: how many senior leaders feel personal ownership over design’s outcomes?

AI is making the work richer, not better (and that is the right answer)

When Jennings asked about AI, Duncan offered the clearest framing a design leader has given this year. He did not say AI is making the work better. He said it is making it richer.

The distinction is precise. The teams at P&G that are integrating AI tools into their daily workflow are exploring creative territory they might not have reached on their own, pushing into forms and concepts that were previously out of reach. But Duncan is careful not to call the output better, because the consumer has not yet decided whether it is.

And that is where his caution kicks in. P&G competes globally in categories where competitors are already using AI-generated imagery in advertising, including synthetic babies in diaper campaigns across Asia. P&G has chosen not to follow, at least not yet, because the consumer trust question is unresolved. If the tool augments truth, the consumer will accept it. If the tool manufactures truth, the consumer will call it out.

Duncan’s shorthand is worth borrowing: the horse is out of the pasture, so get on with it. But know what kind of ride you are signing up for.

580 people, and the hard part nobody talks about

The growth from 200 to 580 designers is the number that gets repeated. The part that does not get repeated is the leadership obligation that comes with it.

Duncan spent a meaningful portion of the conversation on the uncomfortable side of team building: the personnel decisions that protect the organization’s standard. Jennings referenced a college basketball coach who once said that people think he is a fantastic coach when he has a great team, and a pretty average one when he does not. The lesson Duncan drew is that the best teams are built by leaders willing to make the calls that keep the standard high, even when those calls are painful and personal.

He told a story about moving someone from the beauty business into home care about 16 years ago, matching that person to a business president’s needs. The business president eventually became a CEO. The person Duncan placed led home care for over a decade and pulled people up behind her, including the now head of design for a major CPG company. The seed was a single personnel decision made by a design leader who understood that developing people sometimes means moving them into uncomfortable territory.

Duncan’s career advice to the room distilled to three mindsets, delivered with the directness of someone who has watched too many talented people stall out for avoidable reasons. A growth mindset, because mastery is never finished. A learning mindset, because the CDO who stops learning about athlete contracts or metaverse design or brand architecture stops being useful. And a sharing mindset, because the ultimate job of the person in the chair is to make the chair irrelevant.

He quoted the Artemis program: our job is to become irrelevant and set ourselves up for the next group.

The design brief that matters most is the one nobody writes

Underneath all of Duncan’s themes runs a single operating principle: design’s relevance is not declared, it is demonstrated. You do not earn your seat by being celebrated. You earn it by being embedded. You do not prove value by winning awards. You prove it by having the business ask for more of you. You do not expand influence by lobbying. You expand it by showing up on the declining brand, the boring shelf reset, the brand architecture project that no one finds glamorous but every consumer navigates.

For 19 years and six CEOs, Phil Duncan kept showing up for the unsexy work. The result is a 580-person design organization that the business built around itself, not because design demanded it, but because the business could not win without it.

That is the only design brief that matters.

Phil Duncan is Chief Design Officer at Procter & Gamble. Bob Jennings is the CEO of 3D Color. This conversation took place at The Future Of Conference on May 13, 2026.