Strategy by Design

By: Tim BrownWed Dec 19, 2007 at 7:54 AM

In order to do a better job of developing, communicating, and pursuing a strategy, the head of Ideo says, you need to learn to think like a designer. Here's his five-point plan for how to make the leap.

The team used the film to tell their story; it helped them raise VC funding and it acted as the guiding framework for the development and marketing of the product, which is called the Vocera Communications Badge. But there's an interesting twist to this tale. We thought the badge would work best on big office campuses. The market thought otherwise. Vocera's two largest markets are hospitals and big-box retail stores.

In the end, it didn't really matter that the market opportunity morphed into something different. Because you're testing and refining your strategy early and often in the design process, the strategy continually evolves. When the market changes, as it did with Vocera, the strategy can change along with it. This gives you a big jump start over abstract, word-based forms of strategy, in which the first time you get to test the strategy's outcome is when you actually roll it out. You can't gauge the strategy's effectiveness until you achieve the end result and do your postmortem. I don't see why that's useful. By building your strategy early on, in a sense you're doing a premortem: You're giving yourself a chance to uncover problems and fix them in real time, as the strategy unfolds.

Design Is Never Done

Even after you've rolled out your new product, service, or process, you're just getting started. In almost every case, you move on to the next version, which is going to be better because you've had more time to think about it. The basic idea for the notebook computer came out of Ideo some 20 years ago: Ideo cofounder Bill Moggridge is listed on the patent for the design that lets you fold a screen over a keyboard. Since then, the laptop has been redesigned -- and greatly improved -- hundreds of times, because design is never done. The same goes for strategy. The market is always changing; your strategy needs to change with it. Since design thinking is inherently rooted in the world, it is ideally suited to helping your strategy evolve.

It all comes back to the fact that in order to really raise innovation productivity within organizations, at the strategic level and everywhere else, you have to increase the amount of design thinking inside organizations. Doing so helps you get to clarity faster, helps your organization understand where you're taking it, helps you figure out whether you're on the right track, and enables you to adapt quickly to change. Those are pretty valuable survival skills.

Some companies already understand this and are working design thinking into their organizations. It's not such a hard thing to do. The toughest part is taking that first step -- breaking away from your habitual way of working and getting out into the world.

Tim Brown is the CEO and president of Ideo, one of the world's leading product-design firms.

From Issue 95 | June 2005

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Recent Comments | 17 Total

January 15, 2008 at 11:05am by Karen McGrane

I agree with his point about hiring "T-shaped" people. Unfortuantely those people can be hard to find, and traditional organizations don't do enough to nurture them.

Strategy by Design

Design Is Never Done

Recent Comments | 17 Total

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