When Everyone Does Their Job and the Organization Still Gets It Wrong
Public Essay · Organizational Transformation and Continuous Change · Societal and Institutional Change
Public scholarship · Organizational design and institutional practice
What Target's costume controversy reveals about the shared responsibility of designers and retailers, the risks hidden between functions, and the need to recalibrate corporate judgment.
William W. Towns, Ph.D., MBA
August 2026
Target recently acknowledged that a children's Halloween costume it sold was offensive and “should never have been part of our assortment.” The company removed the item, apologized, and said it was examining how the product reached the market and what needed to change.1
That statement settles one question for purposes of management analysis. Target has already concluded that the costume should not have been sold. The more useful question is the one embedded in the company's own response: If the product never should have been sold, how did it make its way through the organization and into the assortment?
The answer will eventually require facts that are not yet public. We do not know who designed the costume, which Target teams reviewed it, what concerns were raised, or whether any internal checkpoint failed. It would be premature to assign responsibility to a specific employee or to claim that a recent corporate policy change caused the decision.
We can still identify the larger institutional problem. A culturally consequential product can begin with a designer, move through manufacturing and vendor systems, pass buyers, category managers, brand teams, photographers, digital merchandisers, lawyers, and risk professionals, and reach the public without anyone exercising judgment over the whole. The paradox of a large organization is that everyone can do an individual job correctly and the organization can still get the decision wrong.
Individual competence does not guarantee collective judgment.
The failure is broader than a single organizational blind spot. It is an industrial-ecosystem failure in which responsibility passes across designers, manufacturers, merchants, brand teams, and retailers until no one owns the complete decision.
Responsibility begins at the point of design
Retailers occupy the most visible position because they place products before customers. That visibility can obscure where responsibility starts.
Design is not only an exercise in form, function, novelty, or commercial appeal. A design enters a world of history, symbols, identities, and different lived experiences. Its meaning does not remain under the creator's control. A designer may intend humor or provocation and still create something whose harmful meaning is foreseeable to people with a different history or lived experience.
The standard should not be that every designer must anticipate every possible reaction. That demand would be impossible and would reward defensive sameness. The practical standard is more disciplined: designers and the organizations that employ them or purchase their products should identify when a product draws on culturally sensitive imagery, ask what histories it might activate, seek perspectives beyond their own, and escalate uncertainty before commercial momentum makes reconsideration harder.
In my Corporate Social Innovation course, we have explored this problem through several fashion cases. In 2018, Prada withdrew figurines and accessories after critics compared their imagery to racist caricatures.2 That January, H&M removed a children's hoodie and its promotional image after showing a Black child modeling a garment bearing the words “Coolest monkey in the jungle.”3 In 2019, Gucci withdrew a balaclava-style sweater after critics compared its design to blackface.4 That February, two styles from Katy Perry's footwear line were removed from sale after critics said the black versions evoked blackface imagery.5 The companies and brands apologized or acknowledged the criticism. Prada later formed a diversity and inclusion advisory council and supported a design lab led by Theaster Gates to expand pathways for underrepresented designers.6 Gucci announced design scholarships, new diversity leadership, education, and an internal exchange program.7
These cases are not identical but share a common theme, and the creation of a new initiative does not tell us exactly why an earlier process failed. Together, however, they reveal a recurring pattern that extends beyond Target and shows why the design process belongs inside the risk system. The creator has a duty to question the product. The manufacturer has a duty to test it. The brand has a duty to understand what it communicates. The retailer has a duty to decide whether it belongs before its customers. Each participant owns part of the decision, but someone must own the whole.
Risk concentrates in the spaces between functions
Organizations divide work because specialization creates speed, expertise, and scale. Consider an Olympic 4x100-meter relay. Each runner may be among the best in the world, and the team may place athletes strategically across the four legs. Yet the race can still be lost in the exchange zone. Individual speed cannot compensate for a failed handoff. The same risk appears in product systems. A designer evaluates concept and execution. A vendor manages production. A buyer considers customer demand, price, and assortment fit. Legal teams check compliance. Marketing teams create the presentation. Operations teams manage inventory and distribution. The organization depends not only on the strength of each function, but also on what happens when responsibility passes between them.
This division is necessary, but it also fragments the field of view.
Each function may encounter what seems like an obvious question and fail to raise it because someone upstream must surely have asked it already. Once that assumption takes hold, no one asks the decisive question: Should this product, presented in this context, enter the market under our name?
A product rarely falls through one crack. It travels through seams between specialized functions. Commercial review may assume that design addressed the product's cultural meaning. Design may assume that the commissioning company understands its customer. The buyer may assume that vendor approval established acceptability. The marketing team may assume that the assortment decision settled the product question. The retailer may treat the supplier's design as a finished input rather than a decision that still requires judgment.
Every approval can then become evidence for the next person to move the product forward without objection. By the fifth checkpoint, reviewers may stop evaluating the product and start validating an emerging organizational consensus. More checkpoints do not automatically produce better scrutiny. Poorly designed checkpoints can simply distribute accountability so widely that no one feels authorized to interrupt the process.
Process must preserve judgment
Large companies cannot operate through intuition alone. They need standards, workflows, approval thresholds, and repeatable controls. The danger arises when process substitutes for judgment.
A product can meet technical requirements, pricing targets, safety standards, inventory specifications, margin expectations, and production deadlines while still presenting an obvious reputational and stakeholder risk. Those checks answer whether the organization completed required tasks. They do not, by themselves, answer whether it made a sound decision.
Organizations become vulnerable when leaders trust the steps in the process more than the judgment of the people inside it.
The remedy is not a senior executive review of every costume, sweater, toy, advertisement, or package. At Target's scale, that would create delay without assuring insight. Leaders need a system capable of exception recognition: the ability to tell when an apparently routine decision carries unusual cultural, historical, identity-related, or reputational significance.
A good system gives people a simple way to flag that exception. It routes the decision to people with relevant knowledge. It makes clear who can pause, test, revise, or stop the product. It also protects the employee or designer who raises a concern after money, status, and deadlines have accumulated behind the original choice.
The solution is not bureaucracy around every product. It is an organization smart enough to recognize which products are not routine.
Representation alone does not create decision quality
Target's controversy has become entangled with criticism of the company's changes to its diversity strategy. The public record does not establish that those changes caused this product to reach the assortment. The absence of proof should not prevent leaders from asking what capabilities changed. The more rigorous question is this: When an organization restructures or removes a program, where do the capabilities associated with that program go?
Target says its current “Belonging at the Bullseye” strategy connects inclusion to consumer relevance and business results. It aims to offer products and services that help guests feel “seen and celebrated.” Target also reports that it concluded its three-year diversity, equity, and inclusion goals and REACH initiatives, stopped participation in external diversity-focused surveys, and renamed its Supplier Diversity team Supplier Engagement.8
Organizations can change programs, names, and reporting structures. They cannot eliminate diversity from their customer base. Nor can they treat cultural intelligence, employee voice, community knowledge, supplier insight, and reputational-risk detection as optional simply because the structure that once housed them changes.
Representation matters, but it does not complete the operating model. Four questions matter:
Who is present when the decision is made?
Who feels able to challenge the prevailing view?
Whose knowledge reaches the people making the decision?
Who has authority to change or stop the outcome?
Representation gets people into the room. Inclusion determines whether they can speak. Organizational design determines whether anybody has to listen.
A diverse team can still produce a blind spot when the relevant employees never see the product, lack credible channels for objection, or know that their objection carries little weight. A less diverse team can consult widely and still fail if commercial incentives override the information it receives. The management task is to connect perspective to voice, voice to authority, and authority to accountability.
A societal recalibration of corporate risk
I use the Societal Recalibration Cycle as a practical framework for understanding what happens when shifts in technology, markets, public expectations, and institutional trust change the environment around an organization. One stage is decoupling: the organization's operating logic no longer matches the conditions it serves.
Corporate decision systems were often built when product, communications, human resources, social impact, and enterprise risk could be treated as separate domains. That separation is increasingly artificial. A product decision can become a consumer-trust event, an employee event, a political event, and a financial event within hours.
Social media did not invent organizational blind spots. It made them visible at a speed and scale that many internal systems cannot match. Society has become highly efficient at identifying institutional mistakes. The strategic question is whether companies have become equally efficient at identifying those mistakes before society does.
Target's own strategy provides a clear test. If belonging is meant to strengthen consumer relevance, then the intelligence required to understand how different customers may experience a product must reach assortment decisions. Otherwise, the aspiration and the operating model have decoupled.
Design firms face the same test. If creativity remains insulated from cultural knowledge, a firm can celebrate originality while repeating imagery that communities recognize immediately. Retailers cannot outsource judgment to designers. Designers cannot hand responsibility to retailers. Re-coupling requires both to treat cultural meaning as part of product quality, not as a communications issue to manage after launch.
Redesign the decision, not the apology
The wrong lesson from Target's case would be to improve the crisis response. The company responded quickly, accepted responsibility, removed the product, and promised to examine what happened. Those steps matter. They address the event, but not the system that produced it.
As part of its review, Target should map the product's full journey, from design and vendor selection to customer presentation, and ask where different information or authority could have changed the outcome. The inquiry should examine the design partner as well as the retailer. It should distinguish individual error from predictable system behavior.
Five changes would strengthen that system:
Risk-based escalation. Define indicators that move a product out of the routine review path, including identity imagery, historical symbolism, vulnerable audiences, and heightened brand exposure.
Structured challenge. Require reviewers to ask how people with a different history or lived experience might interpret the design. Use red teams, independent groups asked to challenge prevailing assumptions, before production and again before customer-facing imagery goes live.
Shared but explicit decision rights. State what the designer, vendor, buyer, brand team, and risk function must examine, then name who owns the integrated decision and who can stop it.
Connected cultural intelligence. Bring consumer insight, employee knowledge, community relationships, and relevant external expertise into product decisions rather than leaving them inside human resources or corporate affairs.
Learning loops with consequences. After a failure, identify which assumptions, incentives, handoffs, and escalation rules need to change. Track whether the redesigned process catches future exceptions earlier.
This is not a call for designers to surrender creative freedom or for companies to submit every product to a committee. It is a call to treat foreseeable social meaning as a design constraint and a business variable, alongside cost, safety, function, and market demand.
Transformation does not occur because a leader announces a new value or adds another approval form. It occurs when information, authority, incentives, and accountability change.
The real measure of learning
When several checkpoints fail to detect the same risk, blaming the last person in the chain may satisfy the demand for accountability while protecting the system from scrutiny. Individual conduct matters, but the deeper questions remain: What information did that person have? What was the person expected to evaluate? Could an objection change the decision? What incentives favored speed, novelty, margin, or agreement? Which upstream approvals made the product appear legitimate?
Target has said that the costume never should have been in its assortment. The test of that statement is not the force of the apology. It is whether designers, vendors, merchants, and internal reviewers will operate differently because of what the company learns. Trust returns when stakeholders can see that the system that produced a failure has changed.
The broader challenge for modern institutions is no longer simply to respond quickly when the public identifies an organizational blind spot. It is to design organizations capable of identifying those blind spots first.
Related Frameworks
Related Research
Sources and further reading
- Associated Press, “Target faces renewed backlash after stocking Halloween costume with ‘minstrel show features’”, Aug. 25, 2026; Reuters, “Target apologizes for children's clown Halloween costume after backlash”, Aug. 24, 2026.
- Cady Lang, “Prada Pulls $550 Keychains After Blackface Comparisons”, Time, Dec. 14, 2018.
- H&M Group, “H&M Issues Unequivocal Apology for Poorly Judged Product and Image”, Jan. 9, 2018.
- George Steer, “Gucci Pulls ‘Black Balaclava’ After Blackface Comparisons”, Time, Feb. 7, 2019.
- CBS News/CNN, “Katy Perry Faces Criticism Over Shoe Design Resembling Blackface”, Feb. 12, 2019.
- Prada Group, “Prada Announces the Diversity and Inclusion Advisory Council”, February 2019; Prada Group, “Theaster Gates and the Dorchester Industries Experimental Design Lab”, September 2021.
- Gucci, “Gucci Announces Changemakers”, Mar. 18, 2019.
- Target Corporation, “Target's Belonging at the Bullseye Strategy”, updated May 20, 2026.