Well put! I for one have run into this dogmatic elitist mindset on more than one occasions. One encounter which will stay with me forever was I was once coaching a team trying to help get the team more involved in design and understanding their customer better, the lead designer pulled me aside and said he didn’t want them involved, that “adding people who aren’t designer to the design process will just slow me down, make bad design choices and generally waste my time” He finished by saying “they’re not designers, they wouldn’t get it” 🙄

The best designers I’ve ever worked with bring people along for the journey — love the facilitator analogy, thanks for sharing 👏