[2] Gilbert’s approach brought a version of the military “Commander’s Intent” into the design world to help align large teams distributed globally,[3] and was the subject of the documentary film The Loop.

[6] Gilbert managed a variety of tech start-ups and other companies, including Lombardi Software in Austin, Texas, where he was Chief Technology Officer and later president.

[7] Although not trained as a designer, Gilbert “got religion” on how it could help scale businesses in the 1980s, and “Ever since then I’ve been pursuing this notion that the magic in any product or service is how it's experienced by the end user,” he said.

Gilbert told the Harvard Business Review in 2021 that software developers are often in the habit of addressing pain points of IT departments rather than the needs of the end user.

“Sometimes we developed new features simply because they represented a technical advancement, not because they solved the users’ business problems.”[11] To introduce design thinking to 400,000 IBMers, Gilbert identified three broad aspects of the company that needed to change: its People, its Practices, and its Places.

[9] By the time of his retirement in 2022, the design group had expanded to 5,000, integrated into every aspect of the company’s business across 175 countries, playing a major role in performance evaluation, HR, finance organization, data, and other services.