By Design, Not By Intent
I’ve watched many a friend struggle to understand how they could be complicit in harm they never intended to cause. They had stepped into a role at her company, excited about making a difference, only to discover that the position itself was structured in ways that perpetuated the very inequities she wanted to address. “But I never meant for this to happen,” they would say, as if their intentions could somehow retroactively change the outcomes.
Most people step into roles—whether as teachers, managers, voters, neighbors—believing their good intentions will guide good outcomes. They assume systems bend to individual will, that personal ethics can override institutional architecture. But systems don’t care about your intentions. They are designed, whether we mean for them to be or not, to be repeatable and scalable. They spread from one state, one city, one town to another so that we understand each other. But because of history, because of how history has played out, this is not an equal thing. We have agency in these systems, but that agency operates outside of what we intend.
As a Black man in America, I live with this reality daily. I watch people discover, often with genuine shock, that they’ve become complicit in harm way beyond anything they intended. They spend years trying to wash off the ink and bloodstains of their own participation, confused by how their earnest efforts produced such painful results. The tragedy isn’t their surprise—it’s their assumption that intention alone could protect them from design.
This is where captivity really grabs us. You’re not enslaved by your intentions, but you have precious little agency against the systems you operate within. Those systems—our laws, our institutions, our understanding of what’s right and wrong—become designed the moment they scale beyond the inner sanctity of a community or a neighborhood. And when they become systems, they function according to their design, not our hopes.
The revelation hitting America isn’t that systemic injustice exists—it’s that having the board tilted against your favor always leads to this isolating place we find ourselves in now. Many of us have always known this truth: systems don’t accidentally produce inequity. They are designed to produce exactly what they produce. The patterns aren’t glitches—they’re features. The consistency isn’t coincidence—it’s architecture. And yes, while the hand that pulls the levers must be held accountable, somewhere along the way, we must address the removal of the lever. It is not enough to hope they won’t act in ways to reduce our liberties, but to ensure they cannot.
We’re beginning to understand that better worlds require intentional design. Not hope. Not good intentions. Not individual virtue. Intentional design with consciousness of the human spirit at its center.
This is the heaviest thing a person can do—move past hoping the world will be better and begin building it to be better. I would never say that this charge isn’t a burden that exacts a heavy toll. To do so requires accepting on a heartbreaking level where we really are and what’s at stake. It’s letting go of the bliss of not knowing. And that’s not anything someone can make you do. It requires approaching business, community, institutions, platforms, technology, healthcare, insurance, education, everything, from the lens of deliberate construction rather than wishful thinking.
It means asking different questions. Not “What do I want this to accomplish?” but “What will this accomplish when abused?” Not “What are my intentions?” but “What happens when someone else steps in?” Not “Am I a good person?” but “Am I participating in good design?”
The minute we start building from this perspective we join a fight that’s been ongoing for generations. It’s a fight to protect what makes us who we are while elevating what makes us who we could become.
The systems that shape us were designed with their creators’ benefit in mind, not our liberation. And as their benefit increases, they encourage us to build in hope while they build weapons. They tell us not to build while they are building these weapons. And this is their greatest lie: that you cannot design a better world, only those better than you can.
For those who make that painful decision to see where we are, they can see what parts of the rubble is redeemable where others are full of rot. And through this surveyorship, they begin to intentionally design this better place. Not through the work of being good people with good intentions, but the work of building good systems with conscious design. The work of creating structures that produce the outcomes we actually want, rather than hoping the ones we have will somehow transform themselves through the force of our individual virtue.
Our dreams are powerful when they are shared, acted on, and brought to reality. The floodwaters are rising for everyone now. The question is whether we’ll spend our energy treading water hoping for an Ark or building rafts.