If Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast, Then Design Eats Culture for Dinner.
Guess what strategy eats for lunch?
The feedback loop existing between culture, strategy and design make them inseparable parts of the same overall goal. Each supports the other in pursuit of resiliency, and neglect of one causes the others to suffer. While the three are interconnected, they are also distinct elements within a system.
Design is principally defined as a verb: “to prepare the preliminary sketch or the plans for (a work to be executed), especially to plan the form and structure of,” suggesting a process. Whereas strategy is defined as a noun: “a plan, method, or series of maneuvers or stratagems for obtaining a specific goal or result.” Particularly since the emergence of design thinking as a practice, the noun-or-verb-ness of both strategy and design have overlapped, intersected and, in some instances flipped. Recent ambiguity aside, they remain distinct activities that support each other within a larger operation.
The emergence of the Design Strategist is another signal of the distinction between the two roles. A hybridization of Designer and Strategist can tackle a different set of challenges than an individual with one or the other skill set. While design thinking can be confused with strategy, it is actually one of many tools that might be applied in the development of a strategy. Thus, as a verb, it is part of the design process. A strategist will take the findings of the design activities and propose a concrete plan, the strategy. Because so many roles now require the ability to develop strategy as a key responsibility, hyphenate-strategist roles are becoming more common across industries.
Just like most roles now require individuals to possess strategy skills, business require strategy for their operations. Strategy within a business acts as a plan that a group of people can organize themselves around. Strategy also represents pattern recognition within the ecosystem of the company. In both large and small companies, strategy helps keep people working towards a common goal amidst uncertainty. Because uncertainty is a fact of life, and of business, there is always risk associated with strategy. However, the benefits and advantages of strategic planning can outweigh the risks if a strategy has resiliency built in. To achieve this we must, at the very least, acknowledge the inevitable unknowns.
If humans were rational, and plans could be developed reliably on rational behavior, perfect knowledge might be attainable by a mind like a super computer with access to all to the other minds. But humans are not rational, which we are beginning to understand more scientifically through the emergence of behavioral economics. So even if we could get responses from every possible stakeholder on a given issue, those responses would be interwoven with inherent and unintentional bias. Not to mention the bias created by the strategist’s own mental models. For these reasons we cannot have perfect knowledge, and so must accept the existence of unknowns and anticipate unintended consequences.
Enter feedback: similar to the feedback loop of culture, strategy, and design, we can learn, build and measure iteratively until we reveal any flawed assumptions or biases impacting the solution. It is through this iterative process that strategy remains dynamic and resilient, and is never “done.”
Building resiliency
- Building regenerative capacity (trust, creative capacity)
- Instrumental systems to “listen for change” (active listening)
- Responding to the disruption (empowerment)
- Learning and transformation (bolster)
