The flourishing relationship between strategy and design
Weekly insights 4: How do you find honey while bypassing the bees? Via a symbiotic relationship with a strong ally, aka strategy meets design.
The honeybadger and the honeyguide bird work as a team to scout honey. The Guide finds the comb and the Badger breaks it open, chasing the bees away. Together, they share and eat the honey. Lots of it.
The value of design is evolving as the world's demands increase and the speed of change accelerates. The current business landscape has many gaps to fill, but it cannot do it all and certainly can’t do it. Amid uncertainty and disruption, companies shouldn’t settle for safe and tested responses before trying to understand the root causes of the issue.
In this edition of Owtcome Insights, I want to share my perspective on Strategic Design as an experimental method that can help organizations deal with ongoing disruption and transformation and better prepare them for what lies ahead.
Strategic Design is an emerging approach to prioritizing and making better decisions by re-redesigning aspects of the business to achieve lasting success. It can give a holistic view by connecting human-centric approaches to innovation and designing differentiated products to provide impact.
At the heart of Strategic Design lies creativity, collaboration, and experimentation that align and focus teams' efforts on building better experiences and outcomes. But it is not always easy to recognize its benefits. It requires a hands-on approach to distill what is meaningful and what can give aspiring companies the competitive advantage they need when setting out to challenge the status quo. If it's difficult to embark on the journey, then reshuffling old beliefs and expectations will be a good investment in the long run.
To help you gain a better grasp on how it changes the way you are working, here are three of the lessons that shaped my perspective on Strategic Design:
#1. A non-linear and emergent approach to the unknown is less risky than it may seem.
How often do companies fail at innovation? A lot. The results are discouraging, looking at the success rate of innovation. The gap between intent and impact is significant. There are many reasons for that as, by default, innovation is risky and difficult, therefore, susceptible to failure. The challenge resides in the difficulty of balancing critical problem-solving, creativity, and emotional intelligence to see beyond the familiar and anticipate change and new possibilities.
When the unexpected is the norm, any predictions can become redundant. So relying on expertise alone is insufficient because there is no safe ground, and often small changes make a disproportionate impact visible only in hindsight. Knowledge decays, and, in the process, it can reveal that not all causation is an accurate correlation.
Rather than trying to affirm an irrelevant position, it is beneficial to abandon the pursuit of preconceived results and be more open to emergent possibilities. It is one of the strongest functions design performs - being playful and creative, open for exploration, and shaping outcomes.
Strategic Design allows ideas to merge and emerge. But it requires different metrics not to fall into the trap of measuring and quantifying success based on productivity. The outcome depends on your willingness to experiment. Trying to fit the unknown into tested methods brings a greater chance for failure than approaching the unknown with fresh eyes.
#2. Being actionable is more important during disruption than being strategic.
When everything moves very fast, a good idea (strategy) is only valid and valuable for a very short period. Teams need to act fast to bring the strategy to reality.
Design helps you get there by affecting a material change and devising a course of action - not just proposing futures but also ways and means to get there.
"To design is to devise courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones" Herbert Simon.
With Strategic Design, teams can co-envision and co-design more differentiated products because they use a broader lens and benefit from the richness of perspectives. They also have a way to test and bring a minimum viable product fast on the market to learn from feedback and iterate on the impact.
Some companies do it better than others. Why? They adopt a holistic worldview and prioritize action over extensive planning. They empower their teams to deliver meaningful outcomes to customers by letting them find concrete and simple ways to connect with them. That is how they use Strategic Design to their advantage. They have the means and the willingness to invest and experiment because they choose to do so. And they are in it in the long run as part of their culture.
Strategic Design doesn't discriminate between customers and the team. The people who create the experiences (the teams) are as valuable as those who benefit from them (the customers). But finding the right balance is every company's journey of trial and error.
#3. Strategic Design is not a go-big-or-go-home game.
As long as companies view Strategic design as a nice-to-have approach, they won't benefit from it. It takes a commitment to develop the skills and deploy design in the processes to reap the benefits it enables. But it doesn't mean that you should over-inflate the implementation. Whether you are a small or a big company with deep pockets, you can apply it and integrate it by beginning with the same three building blocks below. It doesn't always have to be a large-scale program that promises a radical transformation to become more successful. It can be a sensible approach with a practical set of activities, such as:
Critical framing
Critical framing addresses the critical problem-solving challenge. It combines problem framing (a way to understand, define, and prioritize complex problems) and sensemaking (multiple perspectives that make the unknown more familiar) to find deep-rooted issues.
You can make more effective decisions if you let the fear of the unfamiliar subside and apply multi-angled thinking. Identifying which basic assumptions and biases require a reset may also help you learn to communicate and see the changing context with better clarity.
Collaboration
Collaboration is at the heart of Strategic Design; what unleashes creativity. The potential of ideas is mostly underutilized when ideas stay on their own, and they are not by others to add and contribute to their development.
Some of the best ingredients in collaboration are "half-baked" ideas. They are the ideas that haven't yet received a full explanation, don't make sense but seem to have a unique appeal. Exploring together and asking each other to further build on such imperfect ideas can generate a tremendous creative process.
Cognition
Cognition helps teams integrate human aspects like emotions, tensions, and tacit knowledge into the design process. When you create a safe and inclusive space, teams have the total freedom to thrive, experiment, and innovate. Teams can integrate Strategic Design practices more effectively by understanding how to codify knowledge.
Change is more sustainable, and healthier habits are longer-lasting in an open, inclusive, and empowering culture. What remains after the initial hype of Strategic Design is a cultural tool that can help your company transform more naturally. But remember that one cannot simply acquire this capability and then rest on it. It's like sharpening a blade constantly, so it doesn't catch rust.
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Strategic planning alone is not enough in times of rapid change and constant disruption. The strategy needs a strong ally in the face of design to navigate uncertainties and change and thrive in complexity. The role of design stretches beyond the ability to question the status quo. It resides in its capacity to discover emergencies and future possibilities in determining and providing value. But, the symbiosis between the two makes the relationship powerful so that strategy doesn't get ahead and design doesn't focus on the wrong things. That's how companies can remain relevant in the long term.