Making the right decisions with an eye in the future 

Strategic design is the use of future-oriented design principles and practices to make organisations more innovative and competitive.

It consists of an integrated planning process that examines the relationships between how design and business may complement each other. Rather than taking a traditional design approach that focuses on aesthetics and on designing solutions without investigating the deeper surrounding issues in context, strategic design takes a learning and discovery approach. Decisions are made on the basis of actual facts, by acquiring a deep understanding of the client’s industry, competitors, goals and opportunities to determine what is appropriate, obtainable and makes sense.  

A design strategy should focus on: 

• Identifying opportunities for action.
• Identifying existing problems and redefining how they are approached.
• Helping deliver more complete and resilient solutions.
• Addressing unmet customer needs.
• Changing customer behaviours and attitudes.
• Emerging ideas and trends. 
• Opportunities to differentiate from competition. 
• Current benefits and successes to take advantage of. 

A starting point for strategic design is understanding the context  - market, trends, users, customers, partners, internal and external stakeholders - and their behaviour, motivations, values and needs. Diverse research methods can be used to gather real-time insight and information from sources within the organisation, and from the field.  

Solving complex problems

We’re in a time of complex, fussy, interdependent challenges that require organisations to work at the intersection of different areas of knowledge. Traditional methods and thinking are not enough to solve those problems. 

Strategic design can help organisations address the problems of today, navigate through an ever-increasing uncertainty and make good decisions about their future. That is achieved by escaping from the business-as-usual mindset to a future-oriented decision making.

Strategic design benefits

• Reduced duplicate efforts and valuable solutions

  By collaborating across silos and working in quick iterations, it provides more effective outcomes, reducing duplicated efforts and targeting solutions to deliver real value.

• All the team focused on the end-goal 

  Involving, aligning and coordinating people with different agendas, priorities and visions towards the same goal.

• Quick and comprehensive solutions

  Enabling a broader range of questions and developing more complete solutions that consider all aspects of a problem.

• Future-oriented decisions 

  Making informed decisions about the future of the business.

• Appropriate problem framing

  Framing problems properly from the start.