How to get the most out of design for your brand and business.
The smartest businesses are starting to see how design can create value beyond the physical.
This is an exciting time for design. Yet, there are many who still wonder why.
Some people say design no longer works to create competitive advantage. With so many categories leveraging design, when so many products are “designed”, how can you stand out and create advantage? Well, that is the wrong way to look at it.
The people who take this view fail to see the higher purpose of design. And many think of design only as a noun, not as a verb. Design has always been a powerful approach to value creation, however it is only in recent years that companies have started to embrace design as an approach to innovation and growth.
Why is this? The main reason is the business climate we are living in. In a complex and increasingly unpredictable world, business people are starting to realise that their toolbox is dated. Tools that favour analytical analysis and predicting the future based on past data no longer provides reliable outcomes.
Success in today’s business climate, let alone survival, takes agility, speed and creativity. It’s real. Competition hits us all from every possible angle.
This is where design comes into play.
Design is essentially about, well, thinking and working like a designer. And designers are good at working with ill-defined problems, accepting that a linear approach is likely to fail, when creating novel solutions and solving complex problems. Designers explore multiple ways to frame problems, they seek new directions, they experiment, they build prototypes to test and learn, and they connect things. And most importantly, the design with the end user in mind. Through multiple iterations, where creativity and logic develops in parallel, designers are typically able to create new solutions much faster than conventional business people.
The smartest businesses are starting to see how design can create value beyond the physical. In addition to using design for styling purposes, design is used to innovate services, experiences, but also culture, business models and strategy.
However, the best design creates more than style, more than single products, services and customer experiences and the intangible. The best kind of design connects the purpose and strategy of a business with the internal processes and culture, and enables the organisation to deliver unique brand experiences, consistently and coherently across touch points over time.
In business, nothing works in isolation. Designing different touch points from the outside perspective is all good, but the real value lies in connecting the external facing brand experience (your product of your product, service, visual identity, behaviour, channels, environments etc.) with your internal delivery system (your operations, your culture, business model etc.), and your company’s purpose and strategy.
In other words, the great potential of design lies not in its single-disciplinary application (e.g. a a new service, a new business model, or product), but in making the whole system work.
When you use design to connect your purpose and strategy with your operations to orchestrate and deliver meaningful experiences across all your touch points, you will see the true power of design.
At Wonder Inc., we believe this is where design can create the most value, and this the approach we advocate. This approach is called strategic design. Simply put, it means making the big picture work.
Strategic design is the approach that looks at your business as a system, connecting your business strategy with customer experience and making everything that enables it run smoothly. It is “design thinking”, applied to the whole system. It involves gaining a clear understanding of the causal links within the business system (internal and external). It’s effects can be exponential. Instead of treating symptoms, it starts with a thorough diagnosis. And that often results in the re-framing of the problem at hand. Re-framing, i.e. defining the problem in a different way, is one of the most powerful tools in design. It is a third of the job, in fact.
Design has three main parts. The first is framing the problem (not always an easy task). The second is finding the right idea that will solve it (often easier than people think). And thirdly, it’s about getting the idea right (making the solution work).
If you have a headache, you might think of taking a pain killer as the quick solution. But that would not be treating the cause, which is likely to exist somewhere else in your system (your mind and body). First you need to assess the situation (diagnosis), then define the problem in the right way. Then you have to figure out what will solve the problem (sleep? exercise? relaxation? diet?). And thirdly, you need to make that solution work for you. This is where strategic design is crucial. Unless the solution fits your system, be it your values, your beliefs, your body type or anything else, it’s not a great solution.
Design that simply makes something look great or work great is never enough. As a business, you need a total solution that not only delights your customers, but one that you have the capability of delivering on in a profitable and sustainable way. The world is filled with beautiful design artefacts, but it is void of beautifully designed systems.
With this higher definition and purpose of design, there is no limit to its potential. Its value is subject to how well we put it to use. Just like our imagination, it has no limit, its potential is infinite.
