Today, there’s an ever-increasing overlap between business, strategy and design. As I coursed through the first term of my ‘Strategic Design and Management’ graduate program at Parsons School of Design, I came to understand that the ‘observable universe’ and the solution set for design strategy extends far beyond my initial comprehension. This interpretation and useful application of design in multiple fields was gracefully quoted by Steve Jobs in saying,” It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.” While some may call this increasing overlap of design and strategy a very natural kind of partnership, the question — Is Design Strategy any different than traditional strategy at all? If yes, how? — always kept me slightly restless. This article is an attempt to uncover few answers to these questions.
What is Design Strategy?
One of the principle things that I’ve learned in my program thus far is the importance of shared language and the need to establish the definition of terms before debating them. You’ll be fairly surprised by the amount of times and the number of people who’ll throw a phrase around without truly understanding the meaning of it. So, I will start by defining my understanding of each of those terms — Design Strategy and Traditional Strategy
From what I’ve been led to believe, Design Strategy is the most elegant way to arrive at the fittest balance between desirability, viability and feasibility. We’ve been saying that over and over again in our classes for the past 15 weeks. So, it must be true! While that made things largely clear in terms of our assignments, I had a very simple question in mind. Isn’t traditional strategy supposed to do the same?
Much of what I’ve read, learnt and personally experienced about Strategy makes it seem like the best means of arriving at a solution after considering all possible hypothesis, their outcomes and alternatives. Defined as that, it almost is a superset of terms, albeit the idea of exploring all possibilities tends to get ambiguous pretty soon. Whereas, Design strategy or better yet, design thinking is a way to uncover more possibilities, more approaches — almost an organized way to create clarity in ambiguous situations, get unstuck and to move forward to a solution.
How do they differ?
As succinctly pointed out in this article by Luke Wroblewski, the strategic thinking approach is largely informed by market analysis and aggregate consumer behaviour, whereas the design thinking approach relies on direct consumer observations and abductive reasoning (“What might be”). The Strategic thinking approach also helps understand consumer mindsets about future offerings that are not completely observable now and helps organizations make big moves by considering all opportunity costs, alternatives and trade-offs.
However, there’s a tendency for firms with a culture embedded only in strategic thinking and people equipped with only one set of tools to lead itself to ‘analysis paralysis’. This greatly ties in with the risk-averse nature of such organizations and the inability to make decisions which leaves it far behind in the race for innovation. This is where the design thinking approach largely succeeds. To quote one of my professors, “Designers learn by doing. We don’t say we know everything. We go and figure it out. That’s why it’s becoming a big business science because businesses work in the same way. They want to make things happen” The bias towards making, iterating and real-world learning is what makes design thinking great for innovation.
What works for Design Strategy?
Talking about making things happen, the tipping point from ideation to execution lies in communication. Key decision-makers need to be given a strong reason to believe. So, it’s not just about the story but the way you sell it. Jeanne Liedtka quotes in her article titled, ‘If managers thought like designers — in the Rotman Magazine, “If a strategy is indeed an invention — just one story about the future among many — then it is always contestable”. Since design science is inspired by doing and observing and in the real than metaphorical, it ends up telling a better story in most cases.
Maybe that’s also one of the reasons big consulting firms are buying design firms in droves over the last few years. As Fjord CEO Olof Schybergson quotes here “Investing in design and making it part of the firm is something that’s sustainable and trustworthy and believable to your clients.” Adopting design firms and the design thinking approach lets consulting firms sell a better story to their clients.
Another reason for consulting firms acquiring design firms is very rightly captured by Bryan Boyer’s comment in this article; “When we look at standard consulting projects by the big players (for ex. BCG, Bain or McKinsey), their mandate generally includes 1) analysis, 2) recommendations, and 3) a report outlining the implementation plan. In other words, sticking around longer-term to smooth out the kinks and make sure it all works and is implemented correctly is seldom part of the contract”. But today, big businesses are looking for more than just strategic advice, they want partners who can actually execute and that’s where design firms with their approach come into play.
What doesn’t work for Design Strategy?
There’s a flip side to this as well. Design Thinking is predicated on generating quick insights from extroverts. But an approach like this fails to capture the complexity observed in the daily life of most organizations. Most of the organizations are not filled with extroverts and many of the organizational problems are not necessarily human-centred.
Too often, in inexperienced hands, the design thinking process falters by moving too quickly from the ideation space to the solution space. Situations like these, where you wrongfully estimate the viability and feasibility of certain ideas without exploring the ‘why’ behind those ideas, fails to capture the true value proposition of the design thinking process — generating innovative solutions. As rightly pointed out by Kingshuk Das; “A new idea that seemed exciting at first or an impressive customer experience might turn out to be an inadequate revenue stream, too costly to implement, or too small to save a company faced with the massive business model or structural challenges”
Creative prototyping is a solution to the problem mentioned above. As part of the design thinking process, it is essential to push the boundaries of comfort. The art of creative prototyping involves testing ideas that generate extreme responses from consumers. Another quote by one of the professors,” The more you make something that a certain part of the population hates, the more is the probability that some other set of people will love it” While all the above steps form a designer’s toolkit and offer many great advantages, the danger with a toolkit is that they get labelled really quickly. There are times when the toolkit is not sufficient to respond to the problem that you are trying to solve and it is important to step away from it if need be. A good designer will always know that!
What works best where?
In today’s world, every organization is looking out for differentiation. At times, design thinking might lend itself to ways of breaking social norms than adhering to it. The fine line in many cases may just be decided by the kind of organization to employ the approach. An early-stage start-up might well be better equipped and have the necessary risk appetite to explore the full potential of design thinking methodologies. Larger well-established firms can experiment with design thinking methodologies in smaller parts of the business but the complexity of the organization and its cultural setting will tend to favour strategic thinking.
This might be a gross oversimplification of this conversation but it does help keep things clear in my mind. I feel the design thinking method is best applied to the creation of ‘soft-intangible’ experiences, services and processes; something that has become very common today in the ‘Age of Experience’. The strategic thinking method best works in addressing the ‘hard-tangible’ problems; problems that demand hard choices and defensible decisions around revenue models and ROI. Ultimately, the sweet spot lies in balancing both approaches and applying the benefit of one to the other.