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.