Business design (a.k.a modern business consulting)

Business consulting is changing. Finally. The world surrounding client companies is moving faster, and the problems that these companies face are closer to core than earlier. It’s no longer about long term strategy, market positioning, operational efficiency, or product roadmap. These things have become table stakes, which is not to say that fixing them is easy. It’s just that you need to be able to provide these to get in the game in first place.

The clients big challenges revolve around balance and synchronicity — optimising their whole system. The problem is manifold. Areas to consider include (but is not limited to) technology, organisation and people, customer experience, values and the company story. The companies that are able to mix these ingredients in just the right proportions win.

For such a systemic problem, the solution has to be different. The role of consultants has changed. It’s no more about being “the outside smarts”, but about being the partner for the leadership and the organisation. Providing a fresh point of view and challenging learned habits. And about collaborating closely as a team with the client to mix the vast amounts of client’s business knowledge with the innovation and design process knowledge; outside-in view; and diverse priorities of the consultants. The whole process is closer to the core of the client, and thus the end result is more their own strategy; inseparable from their organisation.

This modern consulting is called business design.

Business design — a paradox?

Business design has it’s roots in design practices and in what is called “design thinking”. The term refers to the balance of design, technology and business creativity coming together to form solutions that are desirable, feasible and viable all at the same time. Design thinking combines three approaches, but also three areas of functional expertise: design, technology and business.

What exactly is the role of business in design thinking? How can business complement the design and technology angles. And, more interestingly what is really included in the business domain in this context? What could be the practical applications in designing for viability? What is viability? And what is business design?

I will give a few examples and thoughts from my own experience. But as business design is still forming and the practices and needs vary case by case, I’d also like to spark discussion and new posts on the topic.

Why is design needed?

I feel that one of the challenges with the more traditional business consulting approach is that it has overlooked the status of the client organisation.

Assessing the culture and health of an organisation or its ability and willingness to receive advice from an outside party has not been part of the project scope.

In addition, the way that customers view the client’s organisation ie. what customers wish for that organisation to provide them with has not been an area of interest. In the classic approach, also competition and target markets have mostly been discussed on macro level, as a whole and with a very one sided way.

However customer experience is exactly the area where most companies have their largest problems today. Customers have more power than ever. They can easily compare offerings of different companies and choose the provider that best suits their needs in technology, price, quality, and image.

Designers, on the other hand have built their work on the end-user perspective for a long time. Design methods are driven by understanding and empathising with the end-user and creating solutions that provide delightful experiences. These solutions are inspired by the end-user needs, which often are quite different from what the client company imagines. This is why design is now everywhere.

Everyone in a design team drives to have customer perspective and wants to include real customer insight in the process. Often however, it is the business designer’s responsibility to make sure that also competition and competing offerings are studied. Business designers also have a key role in forming a full understanding of the other market forces at play in the client’s environment.

In a project my business designer role represents the commercial motivations.

This includes assessing the viability or money making potential of the solution the team is working on. But business design can also help the design team and the client’s decision makers find a common language and a common ground.

Translating the customer problem

Before work can start, the whole team needs to understand the client’s problem. Here my experience is that business background helps in translating the problem statement to the language of the design team. For example if the client sees that their issue is in too high sales costs and low add-on sales, then the problem formulation for the design team might be something like: How might we increase customer loyalty and longer term engagement? This doesn’t guarantee that the client always has quite correctly diagnosed their key problem, however it helps identify where they hurt.

Assessing and designing for viability

During a design project business approach is needed to make sure that there is money to be made with the designed solution. This includes defining who the target customers are; sizing the market; evaluating what customers would be willing to pay for the solution; studying and analysing customers and competition; designing business and pricing models; and building a business case with appropriate level of detail.

You then need to bring this view also to the rest of the design team and push them towards a solution that fulfils the commercial needs of the client.

And the rest of the team should also push the business designers to better estimations. Design and technology are more concrete trades than business, and thus designers and technologists are often excellent at finding and pointing out hot air and lack of concreteness in business cases.

I think that for business design a very hands on and concrete approach is best and should be prioritised. The best way to asses pricing, for example, might be to create a few pricing model options based on a prototype and trying to sell the prototype to real representatives of the target customer group with this planned price. Or, at a later state even trying to sell pre-orders to the solution (on Kickstarter, for example). Much can also be done by studying Google keyword search data and by participating in doing end-user interviews. It also often pays to iterate a few rounds and try a few different things to get to a better results accuracy, you don’t need to get it right the first time.

Empathy for the client organisation

Business designers often come from a consulting or corporate background. We have worked with organisations of different cultures and sizes. And thus, we can empathise with and understand the operative environments of large corporations. We know that collaboration between organisation units is difficult. This is exactly where the end customer frustration often originates. The silos of a corporation create blind spots where the client organisation itself has difficulties in identifying end customer needs. An outside consultant, approaching the problem from the end-user perspective, is better positioned to identify such opportunities.

Communicating back to the client organisation

Business experience is also helpful in communicating the benefits of a solution to client’s decision makers, as it allows communicating in their language. Today, many decision makers are quite aware of the advantages of design approach, however providing even rough estimations of the monetary value or business case formulations helps them. It’s almost like translating the design results to the language of business. It also helps the clients prioritise and sell the proposed solution within their own organisations. The ability to provide a monetary value for the proposed solution is especially critical when larger investments are needed.

Supporting change planning and management

Often the design project and the resulting solution starts a change process in the client’s organisation. Understanding governance structures, how organisations operate and the challenges of organisational change process is very useful when estimating the costs and implications of a solution. It also helps the whole design team when they participate in planning the change process. Continued collaboration during change process helps assure that the operational changes truly support the designed and planned approach.

Bringing structure to the process

Business designer is often also responsible for assuring that the design project is efficient and stays on schedule and budget. She brings structure in the process. However, it is a balancing act, and anyone participating in a design project should be able to live with a certain amount of ambiguity and chaos, and enjoy even the messier parts of the ride.

Obsessing about customers and being passionate about business

Finally, it comes down to being just passionate about the work. I love being part of designing a solution where everything falls on its place and creating delightful experiences for end-customers.

I feel lucky when I have the chance to collaborate with people who come from very different backgrounds, and have different focus and priorities than I do and who challenge my way of thinking.

It is also very rewarding to be doing more concrete things than I used to: customer research, solving problem as part of the client team, building solutions, and creating exciting business opportunities for the client.

Photo credit: Unsplash Jacob Mendoza