Marzia Aricò
Designing clarity and intent, when leadership decisions outpace understanding. Using design as a tool for intelligence, governance, and direction.
Organisational Intelligence
Organisations are rich in data but poor in clarity. Leaders must decide faster on fragmented signals, with AI amplifying both opportunity and risk. Without shared visibility and governance, decisions default to instinct or politics, making alignment performative and transformation fragile. In this context, organisational intelligence is a leadership capability, enabled by systemic design.
Three Interconnected Pillars at the Core of My Work
pillar #1
Customer
Centricity
I help organisations design customer centricity as an intelligent system connecting journeys, data, and decisions, with AI accelerating sense-making through shared visibility. Journeys move beyond maps to become governance tools that align teams, guide action, and improve decision quality.
pillar #2
Design
Leadership
I work with leaders to build clarity, confidence, and systemic awareness, strengthening how they interpret signals, navigate uncertainty, and influence beyond their formal role. In AI-accelerated organisations, leadership shifts from managing delivery to shaping context and decision-making.
pillar #3
Adaptive
Governance
I help organisations design adaptive governance as a living system that integrates learning, feedback, and decision-making into everyday work. In AI-enabled environments, this enables continuous adjustment, updating how the organisation sees, decides, and acts as conditions change.
CASE STUDY
Building Customer-Centric Governance in a Global Bank
A large international bank lacked a shared view of its customer journeys. Teams worked in silos, investments were fragmented, and there was no governance model to guide priorities or budgets
APPROACH
A service architecture was designed for two core business lines, connecting customer journeys, services, and enabling products. Each service was linked to a small set of metrics tying customer outcomes to business and operational performance. This became the foundation for a new evidence-based governance model.
Outcome
Within a year, leaders gained a single view of service performance through a live dashboard. Clear ownership, new governance roles, and structured handovers improved alignment and decision-making. The organisation began to speak in customer-centred terms rather than products and channels.
"I had the pleasure of working with Marzia for a year on a transformation project. I have never learnt so much in such a short period of time. If you want to shake up your organisation and get people thinking differently, Marzia is the person to go to."
Emma Seal,
Executive Director,
JPMorgan Chase & Co.
Ways We Can Work Together
Leadership
Coaching
For executives and senior leaders navigating transition or complexity.
Strengthen sense-making and decision quality.
Build influence across functions and power structures.
Lead with clarity in AI-augmented environments.
Ways We Can Work Together
StrategicAdvisory
For leadership teams redesigning how the org decides and governs.
Embed journey management as a governance capability.
Reframe design, data, and AI as decision infrastructure.
Support transformation without losing coherence.
Ways We Can Work Together
Public
Speaking
For boards, leadership teams, and conferences.
Design’s role in AI-enabled enterprises.
Leading through complexity by design.
Customer centricity as organisational capability.
15+
Industries worked with, from financial services to luxury, pharma and telecoms, transferring insights across sectors to accelerate learning.
50+
Large organisations I’ve worked with, including JPMorgan Chase, adidas, Gucci, Xero, Gilead Sciences, Telenor, and ING Bank.
100%
Client satisfaction across engagements, built on trust, senior-level involvement, and work that delivers clarity where it matters most.
Upcoming Sessions
A snapshot of the courses, retreats, and conversations I’ll be part of in the coming months. These are spaces for thinking together, learning and doing serious work with curious, committed people.
Retreat
Online Course
Atelier
Frameworks, Books & Thinking Tools
My work is grounded in research and refined through practice.
BOOK
Design Leadership Chronicles
Design Leadership Chronicles is a book about organisational change through design, following visionary leaders as they navigate uncertainty, experiment boldly, and reshape businesses by turning insight into transformation.
"Dr. Marzia Aricò has gathered wisdom from top leaders in a beautiful and engaging format that is unlike anything ever made. It is a cross between a business school text and a careers guide for professionals migrating into the design world from product, marketing, engineering and other worlds."
John Maeda,
VP Engineering,
Microsoft
PhD
Service Design as a Transformative Force
My PhD at Copenhagen Business School examines how service design becomes embedded in organisations as an organisational logic, not just a set of tools. Grounded in institutional theory, it has informed my work with leaders worldwide, helping them design customer-centred organisations and build lasting service design capability.
Design Mavericks
Biweekly reflections on design, leadership, and organisational change.
About
Hi, I’m Marzia Aricò, strategic consultant, executive coach, and author.I help leaders navigate complexity by designing clarity, learning, and better decision-making at the intersection of design, leadership, and organisational transformation. After leading international design practices for over a decade, I now work independently with senior leaders, collaborating selectively with a trusted network of partners.I hold a PhD in Organisational Studies from Copenhagen Business School, authored Design Leadership Chronicles, and founded Design Mavericks, a global platform on design and organisational intelligence.