What do you do if your strategic decision making is hindering the design of products and services?

1 Assess the situation

Before you make any strategic decision, you need to understand the context and the problem you are trying to solve. This means gathering relevant data, insights, and feedback from your users, customers, competitors, and internal stakeholders. You also need to define your design vision, objectives, and criteria, and align them with your business goals and values. By doing this, you can identify the opportunities and challenges that your decision will address, and avoid making assumptions or jumping to conclusions.

2 Explore the options

Once you have a clear picture of the situation, you can start generating and evaluating different options for your strategic decision. You can use various tools and methods to help you with this, such as brainstorming, prototyping, testing, SWOT analysis, decision matrices, and scenarios. The key is to be creative and open-minded, and consider the pros and cons of each option from different perspectives. You also need to involve your team and other stakeholders in this process, and seek their input and feedback.

3 Choose the best option

After you have explored the options, you need to select the one that best fits your design vision, objectives, and criteria, as well as your business goals and values. You can use a combination of quantitative and qualitative data, as well as your intuition and experience, to make this decision. However, you also need to be aware of the potential biases and pitfalls that can affect your decision making, such as confirmation bias, anchoring effect, overconfidence, groupthink, and sunk cost fallacy. To avoid these, you need to be critical and objective, and challenge your own assumptions and preferences.

4 Communicate the decision

Once you have made the decision, you need to communicate it clearly and effectively to your team and other stakeholders. You need to explain the rationale behind your decision, the expected outcomes and benefits, and the actions and responsibilities that follow. You also need to address any questions, concerns, or objections that may arise, and provide evidence and examples to support your decision. By doing this, you can build trust and buy-in, and ensure that everyone is on the same page.

5 Implement the decision

After you have communicated the decision, you need to execute it and monitor its impact on your design process and results. You need to assign roles and tasks, set deadlines and milestones, and allocate resources and budget. You also need to establish metrics and indicators to measure the performance and effectiveness of your decision, and collect and analyze data and feedback from your users, customers, and stakeholders. By doing this, you can track the progress and outcomes of your decision, and identify any issues or risks that may arise.