Strategic Design: Making strategy better with people.

Strategic Design: Making strategy better with people.

Strategy means different things to different people, and how you define and implement the strategy can take many, many different forms.

Business leaders might view strategy as setting the financial direction of an organisation, defining overarching vision, purpose, values, and behaviours, or creating strategic initiatives relating to functional areas of the organisation such as HR, Marketing, Operations, Technology and Finance.

The definition of strategy depends entirely on what leaders understand their remit being. As a result, there is sometimes a disconnected understanding of how strategy at various levels feeds into implementation activities. It often leads to blurred lines between teams and an absence of shared accountability.

At DNA we see strategy simply as being:

• Multifaceted: touching all areas of products and services whilst also laddering to an organisation’s purpose, vision, and values. 

• Outcome-driven: The pathway to driving valued outcomes rather than the destination itself.

• People and impact-led: created, led, and crafted by people and for people. 

Experience clearly shows that strategy places people at the centre gets better results. Forrester did an in-depth study of IBM’s investment in human-centred design and showed a 301% ROI over three years.

Human-centred design encourages people-led strategies. They are more tangible for teams to act upon and are less likely to fail in-market. The level of influence strategy has across an organisation directly ties with the people contributing to it, enabling it, and actioning it.

To design strategy that leads to valued outcomes, we adopt the following three philosophies:

People are your most credible source of truth.

When leaders are guided solely by internal stakeholders, they often rely on unvalidated assumptions. We often see organisations perpetuate assumptions when implementing their products or services. The missing link is the needs of their customers, as it is one of the most important sources of truth, and it evolves constantly. 

We have recently supported a NZ bank with customer research to understand better how to develop a mobile strategy. By taking a human-centred approach to this strategy, we uncovered:

• New fishing grounds that were missed by previously following internal-led assumptions or outdated data.

• We broadened our view and could make connections to other related experiences by viewing the problem through the eyes of the customer. 

• We positioned strategic directions based on what we heard from people to ensure it was designed for people.

Human-centred design at its core tells us that customers, employees, and partnerships all play a role in informing an organisation’s strategy and widens the perspective of decision-makers.

Marry strategy to tangible delivery pathways.

Strategy is challenging to implement effectively without a strong expression of how employees will action it, customers will receive it, and partners will advocate on its behalf.

To ensure strategy can move into delivery, focus on the practicalities of how it will be delivered.

Design product and service strategy alongside the internal enabling factors your organisation operates within – employees, process, data, technology, and partnerships. Each of these elements plays a critical role in delivering product and service strategy effectively.
Work through core use cases to elicit how, when and who will be involved in implementing each strategy across time horizons.

The more intricately linked your strategy is to its delivery pathways, the more sustainable and enduring it will be, leading to better customer experiences and outcomes for the organisation.

Customer data is central to enabling human-centred practices.

Data and insight are key enablers to building a product and service strategy that meets customers' needs. Human-centred design highlights the core role of customer research in capturing useful data. These sources range from quantitative market research and evaluation to exploratory qualitative research.

Exploratory qualitative research explores underlying customer needs and expectations when defining a problem up-front. The rigorous synthesis of qualitative data can effectively inform and shape product and service strategy – often supported by quantitative research to size an opportunity’s merit.

We recently supported an organisation in designing a digital tool reflecting a core component of their product strategy. However, we quickly recognised through research that customers would not be getting value from this tool due to its convoluted purpose. As a result of our approach, we were able to make recommendations to refine their product proposition which led to a single-minded purpose and a tool that met the true needs of their customers.

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We use a human-centred design approach to design purposeful products and services while building internal enablement pathways to delivery, change and adoption. This is the first article of three about Strategic Design.