Creating space for strategic design thinking

We recently won a DBA Design Effectiveness award for our service design work exploring the role that human contact should play in a digital-first customer experience. This work originated as a Strategic Design Runway. But what is a Strategic Design Runway? How did they emerge in Tesco Bank? And what lessons have we learned from them over the last few years?

A Strategic Design Runway is a project phase where we build time and space for strategic design thinking. We use this approach where the problem isn’t understood, or the solution isn’t clear. We conceived this approach with our partner Modern Human.

The use of Strategic Design Runways emerged because designers were increasingly finding themselves in projects where teams had been assembled – usually under the guise of being agile – to ‘build’ something. Developers were ready to cut code and teams geared to produce. However, for designers it wasn’t entirely clear what the right thing to make was, and so it was an uncomfortable situation to be in – how can you design a solution without understanding the problem? Interestingly, across these teams, there was a point (usually around the three-month mark) where there’s a watershed moment and team members would ask ‘why are we doing this?’, ‘where are we trying to get to? ‘What impact are we trying to create for our customers?’

From a design perspective, the reasons these situations occurred was often down to three things:

·??????A lack of understanding of customers and their genuine needs

·??????A solution already being pre-supposed

·??????Or just the desire to ‘build’ something

Starting at a point where there’s space for design thinking ensures we don’t fall into these traps. But we don’t do it alone. For Runways, we pull together a team, consisting of designers and colleagues from other disciplines around the business, to apply human-centred design. We don’t involve developers though – it’s too early at this stage as the team isn’t clear on what needs to be built.

?We’ve been doing Runways for several years and with each we codify lessons and iterate our approach. Some of our favourite lessons include:

·??????Teams must spend as much time exploring the problem space as they do the solution space. This enables a deep understanding of customers’ genuine needs and prevents superficial solutions that sound logical but don’t make a meaningful difference.

·??????Teams must explore the problem space from different perspectives – typically these are the ‘as-is' state, what is happening in the market, colleagues, and customers. This allows a holistic picture to be formed of where the opportunities lie.

·??????Everyone in the Strategic Design Runway team must get involved in design research – although led by designers, everyone gets first-hand exposure. This deepens empathy across the team and creates a shared understanding. Crucially, listening and understanding customers isn’t seen to be a job just for designers.

·??????A conscious effort must be made to create psychological safety within the entire Runway team – an example of this is that stakeholders of the Runway have equal involvement in the outcome as the core Runway group. Their role is to inform the work – as opposed to being ‘approvers’ of it. To create this relationship, care, time and attention is taken to help stakeholders understand their role and build a relationship with the core team. The core team also meet with their stakeholder group regularly. There’s no fixed agenda for these sessions and the team will ‘walk the walls’ to share their latest thinking. Initially (especially in the context of a bank), it feels uncomfortable not to present a deck, but over time the discussions become richer and everyone lets their guard down. [As we’ve moved to distributed working, our studio walls have been replaced by virtual walls through Miro.]

?We still have more work to do to increase their effectiveness – for example, we’re currently looking at how we improve the transition from a Runway into Delivery. They’re also not suited to every situation, and we must take care not to misdiagnose the intervention needed. Questions we always return to are:

·??????Does this situation need a design intervention?

·??????What type of design does it need?

By challenging ourselves on these two questions we can ensure Strategic Design Runways continue to be of tremendous value to Tesco Bank and our customers.