Strategy by Design

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.

It's remarkable how often business strategy, the purpose of which is to direct action toward a desired outcome, leads to just the opposite: stasis and confusion. Strategy should bring clarity to an organization; it should be a signpost for showing people where you, as their leader, are taking them--and what they need to do to get there. But the tools executives traditionally use to communicate strategy--spreadsheets and PowerPoint decks--are woefully inadequate for the task. You have to be a supremely engaging storyteller if you rely only on words, and there aren't enough of those people out there. What's more, words are highly open to interpretation--words mean different things to different people, especially when they're sitting in different parts of the organization. The result: In an effort to be relevant to a large, complicated company, strategy often gets mired in abstractions.

People need to have a visceral understanding--an image in their minds--of why you've chosen a certain strategy and what you're attempting to create with it. Design is ideally suited to this endeavor. It can't help but create tangible, real outcomes.


Unfortunately, many people continue to think of design in very narrow terms. Industrial products and graphics are outcomes of the design process, but they do not begin to describe the boundaries of design's playing field. Software is engineered, but it is also designed--someone must come up with the concept of what it is going to do. Logistics systems, the Internet, organizations, and yes, even strategy--all of these are tangible outcomes of design thinking. In fact, many people in many organizations are engaged in design thinking without being aware of it. The result is that we don't focus very much on making it better.

If you dig into business history, you see that the same thing occurred with the quality movement. As business strategist Gary Hamel has pointed out, there was a time when people didn't know what quality manufacturing was and therefore didn't think about it. Nevertheless, they were engaged with quality--they created products of good or bad durability and reliability. Then thinkers such as W. Edwards Deming deconstructed quality--they figured out what it was and how to improve it. As soon as people became conscious of it, manufactured goods improved dramatically.


Hit the Streets

Any real-world strategy starts with having fresh, original insights about your market and your customers. Those insights come only when you observe directly what's happening in your market. As Jane Fulton Suri, who directs our human-factors group, notes in her book Thoughtless Acts? (Chronicle Books, 2005), "Directly witnessing and experiencing aspects of behavior in the real world is a proven way of inspiring and informing [new] ideas. The insights that emerge from careful observation of people's behavior . . . uncover all kinds of opportunities that were not previously evident."

Very often, you can build an entire strategy based on the experiences your customers go through in their interactions with your organization. Service brands have a horrible habit of focusing on the one interaction where they think they make money. If you're running an airline, there's an awful temptation to focus all of your attention on what it's like to fly a particular route on a particular aircraft. In fact, you can track backward and forward a whole series of interactions that consumers have with you that are very relevant. If you start to map out that entire journey, you begin to understand how you might innovate to create a much more robust customer experience.

Recruit T-Shaped People




These teams operate in a highly experiential manner. You don't put them in bland conference rooms and ask them to generate great ideas. You send them out into the world, and they return with many artifacts--notes, photos, maybe even recordings of what they've seen and heard. The walls of their project rooms are soon plastered with imagery, diagrams, flow charts, and other ephemera. The entire team is engaged in collective idea-making: They explore observations very quickly and build on one another's insights. In this way, they generate richer, stronger ideas that are hardwired to the marketplace, because all of their observations come directly from the real world.

Build to Think


Design thinking is inherently a prototyping process. Once you spot a promising idea, you build it. The prototype is typically a drawing, model, or film that describes a product, system, or service. We build these models very quickly; they're rough, ready, and not at all elegant, but they work. The goal isn't to create a close approximation of the finished product or process; the goal is to elicit feedback that helps us work through the problem we're trying to solve. In a sense, we build to think.

When you rapidly prototype, you're actually beginning to build the strategy itself. And you're doing so very early in the innovation cycle. This enables you to unlock one of your organization's most valuable assets: people's intuitions. When you sit down with your senior team and show them prototypes of the products and services you want to put out in two years' time, you get their intuitive feel for whether you're headed in the right direction. It's a process of enlightened trial and error: Observe the world, identify patterns of behavior, generate ideas, get feedback, repeat the process, and keep refining until you're ready to bring the thing to market.


The Prototype Tells a Story

Prototyping is simultaneously an evaluative process--it generates feedback and enables you to make midflight corrections--and a storytelling process. It's a way of visually and viscerally describing your strategy.

Some years ago, a startup called Vocera came to us with a new technology based on the Star Trek communicator--that "Beam me up, Scotty" device. They had worked out the technology--an elegant device the size of a cigarette lighter that you could wear around your neck and use to connect instantly with anyone on the network. But the team had no way to describe why people would need the thing. We made a five-minute film that played out a scenario where everyone in the company had these gadgets. The storyline followed how one person used the communicator to rapidly assemble a crisis team dispersed across an office campus. The film showed that while fixed communications and mobile phones are very good for expected interactions, this device was ideal for reacting to the unexpected.

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.

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  • jo

    This article has been so useful for me. I am writing a report on my own business and this cleared no end of things up.

  • Kaylee Lucas

    The most important thing is the ability to channel your dreams to the organization. They need to understand where we are heading and share the same dreams, especially the designers.
    Kaylee - Master Cleanse Consultant

  • Kaylee Lucas

    Kaylee - Master cleanse consultant

  • William Siebler

    This is great advice. I had never thought about things from a designer perpsective. However as I plan the redesign on my Bluestone business this is going to be really helpful thank you.

  • Pabini Gabriel-Petit

    I agree with Helmut that most companies don't do a good job of identifying, hiring, or managing T-shaped people. I recently wrote an article for UXmatters on this topic, "Specialists Versus Generalists: A False Dichotomy?." In the article, I discuss how corporate culture can be an impediment to hiring T-shaped user experience designers, how to recognize T-shaped UX designers, and how to manage these valuable people.

  • Helmut Fleps

    This type of thinking can be extended to processes, such as, sales pitches, sales cycles, and pipeline management. Furthermore, the empathetic point of view can only help a company because it allows associates to understand the point of view of the customer, and shape procedures accordingly.

    However, I disagree with Karen. "T-Shaped" people are all around us. The problem is that companies try to 'dumb down' duties and make jobs mundane, thus to have that person expendible. This is both in business and creative operations. In addition, our education system is based on us learing science, math, history, art, amongst other subjects. However, corporate America requests that we suppress this knowledge to earn a paycheck. In addition one cannot deem another person as being "T-shaped" unless meeting them in person. Therefore, I suggest it is safe that most HR representatives are not "T-Shaped." This assessment can be made because HR reps at first simply judge on experience posted on a piece of paper(resume), and often fine ridicule in certain intagibles a person may hold.

    Therefore, in order to find true "T-Shaped" employees, you must look beyond experience and seek employees that are truly efficient in nature.

  • Zach Smith

    Karen's comment is spot on. Becoming "T-shaped" is about evolving our capacity to perceive and act in work in life. Being "T-shaped" means we've got the capacity to simultaneously dive deep and maintain a broad perspective. If organizations (governments and communities too!) want T-shaped people they will have to nurture and support their development which includes creating and holding space for them to do their thing.

    The other thing to realize is that the road doesn't end at "T". In our work, we encounter and actively seek to develop "H-shaped" and "A-shaped" people as well. What changes in the move from "T" to "H" is that these people can not only cross-pollinate within their team or organization, they also have the capacity to work across industries and national cultures. We could call them the new global citizens.

    "A-shaped" people have all of the flexibility and drive of the"T" and "H" shaped people plus the ability to integrate the entire value chain into the context of their work. Think Richard Branson, for example.

    What's exciting is that there's no reason to stop at "T". "T-shaped" people are, in a sense, just the beginning.

  • Robin Smith

    I wholeheartedly agree with this. We've been design-engineering concepts into businesses for some years and have developed a model for companies and organisations to be able to 'see' their businesses. This often ends up as a motivating visual that both focusses and inspires the entire business across all stakeholder groups including customers and consumers (Like our Green Union Jack for Dale Vince's Ecotricity). But strategy requires more than one perspective and most approaches to success are multi-facetted, so we've also developed a tool called a 'relevance engine' which can help focus action and communications from the core concept (positioning) out to any number of channels (propositions). As our clients (partners) are all change-makers, design engineering is not just an advantage, it is essential in delivering results against tough and rooted opposition.

    Robin Smith
    Host Universal, No1 in ethical communications
    6-10 Lexington Street, Soho, London, W1F 0LB
    T +44(0)2078494500 F +44(0)2078494545

  • 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.