Design-Driven Foresight to Enable/Support Strategy Articulation
William Haas Evans
Strategy, Foresight & Design Practice | Jonah? | Organizational Design | Value-Driven Transformations | M&A (Design Thinking Post-Merger Integration)
Cicero Challenge: Day 28/90 “The potential of design-driven foresight to support strategy articulation through experiential learning” by Luca Simeone and Beatrice?D'Ippolito, International Journal of Strategic Management 2022. Charles Plath and I have realized that several of these papers are starting to help identify gaps in Strategic Foresight, and finding unique ways to integrate other (potentially more mature) designerly-type perspectives and practices and that's why this article is so valuable (as a designer actually applying these methods for articulating and executing strategies). This is the juice baby, so squeeze!
Overview & Summary
The article examines how design-driven foresight can trigger experiential learning and support strategy articulation in organizations. Design-driven foresight combines design methods like prototyping and visualization with foresight methods like scenario planning to create immersive and experiential representations of potential futures. The authors argue this approach can enhance strategy formation by facilitating hands-on learning and enabling organizations to explore multiple pathways before committing to a strategy.
The article presents a case study of PLUGGY (check it out, it's actually super cool), a 3-year European research project developing crowdsourced curation technologies for cultural heritage institutions. PLUGGY partners used design-driven foresight workshops to articulate exploitation strategies for the technologies.?
In phase 1, partners created future scenarios and paper mockups of potential applications. This supported knowledge translation across partners, created a safe space to learn by doing, and enabled granular stakeholder interaction anchored in tangible design artifacts. Partners converged on key exploitable results to inform software development.
In phase 2, partners created immersive prototypes and visual stories showing future uses of the technologies. This facilitated hands-on learning across locations as partners interpreted the prototypes based on their needs and interests. Oscillation between creative workshops and analytical strategy documents enabled iterative strategy refinement.
Three key mechanisms connect design-driven foresight to experiential learning and strategy articulation:
“The three mechanisms whereby design-driven foresight can help ignite and facilitate experiential learning processes and strategy articulation discussed above characterize a management practice that could support those strategists working with multiple different stakeholders and in relation to not-so-near temporal horizons. When anchored to the materiality of design moves, the processes of managing and coordinating the interaction among stakeholders become a matter of tuning, monitoring, and balancing divergent and convergent needs, interests, and ways of thinking to a greater level of precision.”
In turn, experiential learning supported ongoing strategy articulation (Strategy Design or Strategy Development) as partners explored ramified options before converging periodically. Tension between design artifacts' openness and strategy documents' specificity encouraged fluid interaction between divergent and convergent thinking. This revealed how design-driven foresight can elicit multi-directional, emergent strategy articulation through experiential learning, rather than linear analytical planning.
The authors argue design-driven foresight provides a management practice to coordinate diverse stakeholders by balancing convergence and divergence. Rather than seeking consensus, it preserves differences to enrich strategy making. The findings suggest design's participatory, material qualities can ignite experiential learning about complex innovations, supporting collaborative strategy articulation under uncertainty.
Suggested next steps include additional case studies across contexts, developing frameworks to select appropriate design-driven methods, and longitudinal studies on long-term impacts. There is also opportunity to create hybrid approaches pairing design-driven foresight with existing tools from other disciplines (like leveraging Value Chain Mapping to plot future trajectories of capabilities and products over time from which to articulate a strategic challenge worth solving in some future scenario or some of the more robust methods from Liberating Structures). Based on my personal experience as well, integrating design-driven methods at the strategic foresight stage makes it much more tactical (and effective bringing everyone along) moving to strategy design (specifically strategic hypothesis formulation) to strategy deployment.
About the #CiceroChallenge
“Read at every wait; read at all hours; read within leisure; read in times of labor; read as one goes in; read as one goes out. The task of the educated mind is simply put: Read to Lead.” - Marcus Cicero
These words from Marcus Cicero, Roman philosopher, educator, orator, ring as true today as they did over 2000 years ago. Though we live in an age of constant change, accelerating trends, technological disruption, and endless click-bait distraction, Cicero's wisdom reminds us that a vigorous intellect requires discipline, diligence, and devoted learning if we want to manage through increasingly chaotic times.
That's why Charles Plath & I launched the Cicero Challenge: 90 Days. 90 peer-reviewed journal articles. 90 reflections. (You can read more here.)