How a Designer Approaches Strategy Crafting

How a Designer Approaches Strategy Crafting

I will divide strategy crafting into two camps for this discussion. The first camp is strategy crafting when there is a clear problem and the solution is the goal of the strategy process – for example, crafting a specific strategy to create change or a new solution in the short to mid-term. I’ll call this problem based design. The second camp is larger and broader with less clearly defined outcomes – for example, when establishing a strategic framework for an organization or a long-term planning horizon. I’ll call this expeditionary strategy crafting.

Problem based design. When a clear, or even hazy, problem is the center of the task at hand, I like to use a six-stage approach that most closely follows the model I presented. Allow me to further unpack the activities and outcomes in each of the six stages.

Collaborative design & direction setting: During the design phase, it is most important to spend time identifying the problem, understanding who are the clients and stakeholders, and scoping out the project. I like to use a design brief to summarize and communicate the work here and eventually establish criteria for success. The brief is a useful guiding document that helps plan the project, establish timeframes for meetings and events, and generate an initial cost proposal. I also augment the design brief with a set of design schematics, these are single page templates that ask the key questions for each stage of the process. The design schematics are simple to use but it would take too much text to fully explain them here – send me an email if you are interested in learning more.

Discovery, research, & assessment: The discover process is one of background research, environmental scanning, any SWOT (or similar) analysis, historical research, and potential futuring activity. It is important to identify the forces at play in the current environment and at some point in the (not too) distant future and articulate the implications for your organization, the larger context, and the various stakeholders.

Divergent thinking, & ideation: Divergence is about creating choices. It is also about building on ideas over multiple sessions or iterations. The result is early concepts of potential solutions that can be further refined over time. You should enter divergence with a clear problem statement that emerged from the design and discovery stages. Divergence should be fun and engaging. It should also use a wide variety of techniques to stimulate creativity, avoid typical thinking, and create positive turbulence.

Convergent thinking, filtering, & selecting: The convergence process is one of narrowing down choices to those ideas best suited to action and results. Often, it is helpful to develop and refine key planning assumptions and test ideas to discover what really resonates with stakeholders so that tougher, later choices become easier. I like to revisit the initial design criteria again at this stage as a way of building filtering devices and eventually rank and compare the best choices that will get deeper exploration as prototypes.

Prototyping & piloting: Prototyping is a process for building models of potential solutions, refining them through repeated testing, and preparing them for eventual production or implementation. I often follow six steps in the process: visualize possible solutions from the best choices – use stories to bring ideas to life – determine what elements or functions the prototypes will test – build models, develop experiments, and get feedback from stakeholders – refine the prototypes – determine what works and plan to launch. By the end of the prototyping stage, a single clear strategy for addressing the problem should emerge and have enough detail developed that implementation can proceed.

Implementation, tracking, & adjusting course: Here in the last stage of the problem based design approach to strategy, plan to make the ideas real. Decisions are required about the timeline, budget, impacts, and feedback mechanisms. It is useful to spend time discussing and determining what success should look like relative to the problem at hand and go so far as to list specific outcomes with metrics. Also, detailed cost projections or as much as a financial strategy should also emerge. I like to establish multiple targets for actions and link them to accountable managers or groups.

Often in my engagements, however, the goals are much more broad than a single solution to a problem. A more fluid process is required for strategy crafting. The design thinking principles are still evident, but the process needs to be more expeditionary than problem focused.

Expeditionary strategy crafting. Applying design thinking to strategy crafting requires four stages in the design process. These four distinct but highly interdependent stages provide a sound foundation for a large variety of possible planning tools and experiences. Each phase has a specific set of outcomes and goals and these outputs serve as important inputs to the next stage of the process.

1. During the initial design of the strategy crafting process, key effort ensures that the entire process will meet expectations and take the appropriate amount of time, resources, and engagement. Tools are selected to address important questions and deliver the necessary outcomes.
   
2. The paired processes of divergence and convergence are all about exploring opportunities and creating choices then sifting and filtering through the possibilities to craft the best strategies for the future. Divergence employs a variety of creativity and innovation methods to generate a large number of choices.
   
3. Convergence has the primary goal of making choices from the large variety of opportunities created during divergence. Here filtering, selecting, and testing ideas is critical. Early concepts of the strategies begin to form.
   
4. During the final alignment stage, the strategies and corresponding strategic documents are produced and carefully aligned with the resources and capacities available to successfully execute.

Looking more closely at the process, the image below adds guiding questions and hopeful outcomes in steps along the top of the diagram, and potential tools and considerations in corresponding steps along the bottom of the diagram. The four stages are shown in orange. The image shows a broadening set of possibilities as the triangle widens through divergence and then a narrowing set of opportunities and big ideas as the final strategies are crafted.

One of the most important parts of the entire process is the development and refinement of the key strategic statements that form the backbone of strategy. During the process, a lot of options arise as opportunities for the organization, but no one organization could or should pursue them all at once. The best opportunities should evolve into the big ideas that could significantly strengthen, advantage, or transform the organization over time. As these are considered and tested, they will evolve and change form. Some will fall away after the organization’s capacity to execute is added to the process. In the end, the final strategies that are crafted should be the best ones for pursuit of the planning horizon.

Opportunities are generally unrefined and tend to emerge from the divergence process as somewhat reactive and recognized due to the changing environment. They can be very broad or very specific and are of undetermined value at this early stage. They are not yet tested and while they may be interesting it is not yet determined if they are significant enough to help focus the organization and its agents.

As opportunities evolve to what I call Big Ideas, we weed out the most reactive and spend more time developing those that are proactive, recognizing the changing environment. The big ideas tend to be more organization wide, engaging and motivating more than one single part of the organization. Big ideas are compelling and help serve as a focus point for effort. And they have more clearly developed value propositions.

The table below depicts 5 Evolving Characteristics: Opportunities to Big Ideas to Strategies.

Opportunities	Big Ideas	Strategies
reactive, recognized due to the changing environment	proactive, recognizes the changing environment	expeditionary: adaptive to changing environment
very broad or very specific	works across all constituents and partners	linked to each constituent and partner w/ accountability
interesting (maybe)	compelling (always)	clear & executable
value undetermined	creates value	measurable value and outcomes
favorable circumstance, but may not help people focus	serves as a focal point of effort	focuses behavior over an extended period of time

During the final filtering and selection, I focus intently on crafting strategies. Beyond recognizing the changing environment, good strategies are expeditionary and can evolve and adapt to anticipated and unexpected future changes in the environment. Strategies come with accountabilities that are clearly linked to organizational managers, organizational constituents responsible for success, and external partners and collaborators. The clarity of the strategic statements evolves from being initially interesting or novel to being compelling to becoming clear and executable. They are associated with measurable value and outcomes and serve to focus individual and group behavior for an extended period of time.

In conclusion, over the course of this and the last post I sought to explore and explain design thinking and expand on what you may have perceived a designer is. I hope that you were excited by the possibilities of considering yourself a designer. I shared a few design thinking models that I like and showed my own model. In the second part, I applied the design thinking models to two kinds of strategy crafting challenges, problem based design and the broader expeditionary strategy crafting. I couldn’t give these full treatment in the space I allotted here, so I encourage you to reach out to me with your own thoughts or questions. I’d like to finish with two final thoughts.

Success in strategy involves the confidence to believe you can change the world, or at least a small part of it. Design extends beyond strategy crafting to both organizational and environmental design. Organization design is a process of aligning, reshaping, replacing, updating organization structures, processes, technologies, roles, and resources. Most if not all strategies I’ve encountered relied on the strategists’ and executives’ strong belief that the organization must and will change as a result of strategy execution. Equally important but less often considered is environmental design and along with it the belief that we can and should shape our environments through strategy.

A second consideration is a perspective extremely helpful to the strategy crafter, that of human centered design and participatory strategy. Again, I turn to IDEO:

“Embracing human-centered design means believing that all problems, even the seemingly intractable ones like poverty, gender equality, and clean water, are solvable. Moreover, it means believing that the people who face those problems every day are the ones who hold the key to their answer. Human-centered design offers problem solvers of any stripe a chance to design with communities, to deeply understand the people they’re looking to serve, to dream up scores of ideas, and to create innovative new solutions rooted in people’s actual needs.”

Strategies are best crafted from the perspective of human-centered design or as I sometimes call it, participatory strategy. When I employ my design frameworks, I facilitate sizable strategy sessions across the divergence, convergence, and alignment stages. The broader the strategy, the more engagement is needed. As constituents engage in ideation and selection processes, they slowly being to own the strategies. The most important resource during execution and implementation is the human resource, those that help create the future.

So go ahead, try some of the methods and approaches I outlined. The beauty of design is that it’s an iterative and emergent process. If you take risks, remain persistent, and trust the process, even if it sometimes feels uncomfortable – great things can arise.

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Robert Brodnick, Ph.D. Founder, Brodnick Consulting Group robert@brodnick.consulting 530.798.4082

A Designer’s Approach to Strategy Crafting

A Designer’s Approach to Strategy Crafting

I am excited to open the year with a series on design thinking applications to strategy crafting. This month, I will discuss how a designer would approach strategy crafting then follow with deeper dives on divergence, convergence, and prototyping in the coming months. Part one, is about design thinking and the traits of designers. I will lean on experts and colleagues to help me answer these questions. In part two, I will get more specific about strategy crafting from the design perspective and offer design tools for crafting strategies to move an organization forward into the future. I’ll focus on my tools and applications. Here we go...

What is Design Thinking? Who is a Designer?

I often use Thomas Lockwood’s words to answer the first question. “The term design thinking is generally referred to as applying a designer’s sensibility and methods to problem solving, no matter what the problem is. It is... a methodology for innovation and enablement” from Design Thinking (2010). Here are some other takes that I like to offer:

From IDEO in Design Thinking for Educators (2011) design thinking is human centered design thinking is collaborative design thinking is experimental design thinking is optimistic

From Tim Brown in Change by Design (2009) inspiration ideation implementation

These views begin to fill in the blanks, but to further complete the picture let’s go back to one of the seminal writings on design thinking. In his 1992 article Wicked Problems in Design Thinking, Richard Buchanan put three significant conceptual stakes in the ground. First, he postulated that design thinking was a new and emerging liberal art (more on this later). Second, he framed the design process as a way to solve some of the world's most difficult and wicked problems. Third, he explored how design thinking is applied across a large number of problems and how extensively design affects contemporary life. He summarized four orders for design thinking:

1st order: 
symbolic and visual communication. Examples here include graphic design works like typography, publications, illustration, photography, video, infographics, and computer graphics and animation. This order focuses on communicating ideas and information.

2nd order: 
materials and tangible objects. Examples here include everyday products, clothing, tools, machines, and anything we use in our 3D world. Design here can go between the virtual and physical and extends to include psychological, social, and cultural experiences related to the objects.

3rd order: 
activities, services, and simple systems. Examples here include services, user experiences, human machine system interfaces, and simple organizational processes – anything where one or more individuals are experiencing interactive interaction with an intentional and pre-designed system.

4th order: 
complex systems to include cultures, environments, and organizations. Examples here include architecture and urban planning, complex engineered systems, and social systems and media. As Buchanan writes, this order is “more and more concerned with exploring the role of design in sustaining, developing, and integrating human beings into broader ecological and cultural environments.”

So far, we have explored a bit about design thinking, what some of the characteristics are, and what designers tend to be concerned about. Now we can look at further characteristics of the thinking itself. A final translation I’ll offer comes from Roger Martin.

In The Design of Business (2009), Roger compares and contrasts analytical and intuitive thinking and explores what design thinking might be. He suggests that analytical thinking is a dominant kind of thinking found is business and science for quite a long time. This kind of thinking is characterized by exploitation of ideas and resources. Success depends on thinking and outcomes being repeatable and predictable. Progress forward tends to be incremental and based on historical data and trends. The hallmark is consistency; analytical thinking requires 100% reliability.

In comparison and as an opposing polarity, intuitive thinking is dominant in the arts and the world of innovation and creativity. This kind of thinking is characterized by exploration rather than exploitation of ideas and resources. Success depends on there being a single perfect form or expression – one perfect fit, like one of Mozart’s piano concertos. Success depends on thinking and outcomes that take effect over the long term, often moving in leaps and bounds and always more dependent on future orientation rather than historical trends. The hallmark is innovation; intuitive thinking requires 100% validity.

Bringing these two together now, Roger suggests that design thinking is a more sophisticated combination. It is perhaps even a subtle mix or a continuous exercise in balance. Roger offers five key points of advice for design thinkers. First, to always seek to reframe extreme views, whether they are purely analytical or purely intuitive, as a creative challenge. Second, to empathize with your colleagues on the extremes. Third to learn to speak the languages of both reliability and validity. Fourth, to try to put unfamiliar concepts in familiar terms, for both the designers and for your colleagues on the extremes – storytelling is a useful tool. And finally, when it comes to proof, use size to your advantage. It’s a complicated idea made up of two suggestions: first, proof, the outcome or the doing, is the designers strength; and second, that size works differently at opposite ends of the spectrum. Large is better for the intuitives and small is better for the analytics. Design thinkers should be adept in both analytical and intuitive thinking but be able to translate between the two camps.

Who is a designer? I love Wikipedia. When I asked this question I was awarded the following, “a designer is a person who designs. A designer is an agent that specifies the structural properties of a design object. In practice, anyone who creates tangible or intangible objects, such as consumer products, processes, laws, games and graphics, is referred to as a designer.” Ok. Well, it seems a bit oversimplified. There may be something in the production angle. Maybe it’s about the job. So where do designers do their work?

Digging a bit into the professions that employ design, my investigation tells us that design is hot. In fact, you can take the name of just about any object, process, or system and put the word designer behind it and you’ve either identified someone’s current job or just created a new one that someone would like to apply for. Too broad. Maybe that avenue isn’t going to answer our question. I do like the way Peter Drucker views the job of the designer, “The job of the designer is converting need into demand” from The Essential Drucker (2001).

So, with that being said, maybe a designer is quite simply a person who designs and gets the world excited about what results from the process. I like a more broad answer. I will stay with Herbert Simon’s notion that “everyone is a designer, and design thinking is a way to apply design methodologies to any of life's situations”, from the Sciences of the Artificial (1969). Let me go a bit deeper now on what seems to make up design and how we might begin to apply the methods to strategy crafting.

Design in stages. Design appears to have emerged from the arts, from crafts, from architecture, and as the industrial revolution gained steam, the design process began to evolve into identifiable stages. Yet, historians and design theorists have attempted to trace the origins of design thinking with little conclusion. Whether it be the fine arts, the natural sciences, engineering, or the social sciences, “design eludes reduction and remains a surprisingly flexible activity” (as Buchanan opens Wicked Problems in Design Thinking).

At the most basic level, there are three distinct stages to the design process – define the problem, explore (cycling between creating and refining), and implement the preferred solution. At the most complicated level, I have seen design models with dozens upon dozens of steps and instructions. Neither of these approaches seem to have a high utility for me with the most basic being too general to offer guidance and the most complicated being too rigid and overly demanding. I would like to shine a light on five specific design stage models that appear to have utility.

Ambrose and Harris. This was one of the first design models that I studied and used in depth. They established seven steps within the design process: define, research, ideate, prototype, select, implement and learn. The process starts with the design problem, the target audience, and an understanding of the problem’s constraints. Important is the creation of a design brief to summarize early learnings and plot the course forward. This is augmented with research about the history of the design problem, end-user research and opinion-led interviews, and potential obstacles.

The next cluster of activities includes ideation, prototyping, and selection. During the ideate stage, end-user needs and perspectives are identified and ideas are generated. Prototype results then are presented for user-group and stakeholder reviews and eventually to the client. Selection pits the late-stage prototypes against the design brief criteria. Implementation and learning sort of coexist as final adjustments are made to the design and future improvements are identified. Importantly, the process is not strictly linear and frequently involves revisiting earlier stages for reworking as the solutions evolve.

Tim Brown, Tom Kelley, et al at IDEO. IDEO has some serious chops in the area of design. It could be safe to say they are the leaders in the field. The key players have led many projects and written prolifically on the topic. Their partnership with Stanford’s d.school has formed a designer’s engine that served many companies. IDEO focuses on human-centered design in five interconnected stages: discovery - interpretation - ideation - experimentation - evolution.

Yet, Tim Brown (IDEO President) will be the first to admit, “The design thinking process is best thought of as a system of overlapping spaces rather than a sequence of orderly steps. There are three spaces to keep in mind: inspiration, ideation, and implementation. Inspiration is the problem or opportunity that motivates the search for solutions. Ideation is the process of generating, developing, and testing ideas. Implementation is the path that leads from the project stage into people’s lives.”

Tim Ogilvie. Tim is a friend and colleague and leads the service innovation firm Peer Insight. A few years ago, Tim coauthored Designing For Growth with Jeanne Liedtka and the book focused on a four stage design model that was driven by four key questions: what is? - what if? - what wows? - what works?

One of the goals in building their design process was to make the tools and methods of design thinking usable and accessible to anyone interested in using them. I suggest they succeeded in created a simple method. What is explores the current situation. What if envisions new possibilities. What wows is very human-centered and leads to choices and what works uses action to find the best solutions. The four stages are supplemented with detailed steps and a few templates in their fieldbook.

Hasso Plattner. Hasso may not be the first name that comes to mind regarding design but his name appears at the genesis of many important organizations and movements in modern design such as the software company SAP, the Hasso Plattner Institute and the University of Potsdam, and the Institute for Design at Stanford – the famous d.school.

While the d.school now employs a five stage model including empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test; he unfolded his design model in six steps: understand - observe - point of view - ideate - prototype - test. What I particularly like about Hasso’s design thinking process is the inherent nonlinearity of it. The model and designers who use it regularly like to jump steps from point of view back to understand, ahead to prototyping, then back to ideating. This allows the design project to be both artful, fluid, and at the same time rigorous.

My model. I hope you are beginning to see the pattern, there are significant similarities in the stages and steps. Each of the models is somewhat customized and tailored to the needs of the designer, but similar. Here are the six steps I like to use in my design projects.

1. collaborative design & direction setting
2. discovery, research, & assessment
3. divergent thinking, & ideation
4. convergent thinking, filtering, & selecting
5. prototyping & piloting
6. implementation, tracking, & adjusting course

You can see how they fit together in the graphic. The entire process is driven by a vision for the future, continuous creativity, and regularly checked alignment with the environment, users, and the organization's capacities and internal dynamics.

I’ll write more about this model in part two, but for now, let’s review the models we’ve explored so far. If we take the most general model with three stages as a guidepost, we can align the multiple design models and compare their stages. I really do encourage you to read into the details of each of the models, work with one that fits your personal style, or build one of your own to best suit your needs.

General Model	Ambrose/Harris	IDEO	Ogilvie	Plattner	Brodnick
define the problem	define	discovery	what is?	understand	collaborative design & direction setting
	research	interpretation		observe	discovery, research, & assessment
explore, create, refine			what if?	point of view
	ideate			ideate	divergent thinking, & ideation
		ideation
					convergent thinking, filtering, & selecting
			what wows?
	prototype	experimentation		prototype	prototyping & piloting
implement preferred solution	select
	implement	evolution	what works?	test	implementation, tracking, & adjusting course
	learn

I believe there really is some magic in the design process. By combining often disparate actions and ideas, new insights emerge about the future. New possibilities arise, and the method allows you to test, first in low risk situations, then in more real world environments before fully committing to implementation. It’s a liberating process. And it might be more widely applicable then we might think.

Last spring Peter Miller wrote an article called, Is Design Thinking the New Liberal Arts? I was intrigued. The liberal arts are considered the combination of disciplines and skills required to educate a free-thinking citizen of the planet. Ranging from arts, languages, literature, and philosophy to mathematics, natural science, and social science, the liberal arts have influenced and formed the basis for higher education since classical Greek times. Relatively unquestioned, the liberal arts have been considered the key building blocks of knowledge and progress.

Recently, design thinking methods have been placed alongside the liberal arts and questions have been raised – is something more needed to take us further? Will the designers take such a prominent role in the future of learning and doing. That’s yet to been seen. For now, I like to think that great designers figure out how to do things that appear to be undoable. Perhaps there is some magic in that after all.

In the next post I will explore how a designer might approach strategy crafting.