What we often get wrong about strategic design

As a service and business designer since 2012, I have travelled the world, working with smart and passionate people to help global brands in different industries solve complex issues. It’s a rare career that keeps me fulfilled, curious, and always growing. Although, my title has changed over time, strategic design has remained at the core of my work. ?

“A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” These famous words from William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, which describe Juliet's love for Romeo despite being from rival families, also apply when discussing different disciplines within design, such as UX design, business design, and service design.

This article is a follow-up to my post exploring the evolving role of design and how strategy is vital to any design discipline. Though good strategic design is becoming increasingly critical in life and business alike, many people and organisations are instead adopting limited design-thinking mindsets. As a result, real strategic design is still in its infancy across organisations. This is further evidenced by my conversations with clients, colleagues, and peers on low design maturity, sparking endless discussions on why strategic design is not taken seriously.????

One thing that may not be well known is that the design community has become a cult of beliefs over the last ten years. Design thinking is taught in consulting firms, business schools, corporate strategy teams, and developer conferences, with dozens of TED Talks?on the subject (though they’re all the same basic video). Nowadays, anyone can claim to be a designer, change the world, and make lots of money doing it. As things become more complex, it’s clear that democratising design may have been an error, producing design innovators or disrupters who are often detached from reality and lack the conceptual expertise to inspire true change.

Strategic design is the art of solving problems that are too big for any one person or organisation to solve on their own. It's about bringing together different perspectives and skillsets to create innovative solutions that address the root causes of problems. It's about having the audacity to imagine a better future and then taking the first steps to make it a reality.

Of course, strategic design requires a deep understanding of the problem you're trying to solve and the ability to build relationships and collaborate with others. However, if you're up for the challenge, strategic design can be a powerful tool for creating positive change in the world.

Service and business designers are the unsung heroes of strategic design, going to great lengths to understand the needs of users and stakeholders and to create innovative solutions that meet those needs. They add the crucial human touch to strategic design, making sure that design solutions are actually usable and effective.

Of course, service and business designers don't always get the credit they deserve. They're often overshadowed by the more front-and-centre figures in strategic design, like "visionaries" or "strategists," but without service and business designers, their lofty ideas would never get off the ground.

Every agency having its own approach to design creates an element of chaos in the market. Definitions and concepts of expertise like service, experience, and business design can vary wildly, making it hard to form a consensus on how to use design to solve problems. Differing fundamentals across design agendas and organisations with discordant levels of in-house design maturity both lead to disagreements in the meanings behind designs. This just confuses a wider group of non-designers and individuals that want to adopt these design disciplines in the future. In the present, it leads to the slow adoption of good strategic design practices.

I believe titles are cheap. Tell me what you really do. Nevertheless, titles like “service designer” are becoming more popular in the innovation and business space, even if they’re still mostly a foreign concept to managers outside of the design world. Many have no idea how to hire and retain the right people to do the right work. In my experience, it is easier to demonstrate the value of your work while involving different people from across the business rather than just trying to explain what you do. ?

The world will continue to evolve in the face of complexity and uncertainty. Design is rapidly evolving as we advance beyond questions of whether a specific design role or method of strategic design fits an organisation. Like it or not, strategic design is here to stay. It might take on different forms, such as existing employees that are upskilled to move into new business units or strategic senior hires that can build a new team/department, championing strategic design across an organisation. The view of design in the business world has evolved, as it now exerts more influence in the decision-making of any organisation.

In summary, successful strategic design is a big (often brutal) undertaking. Strategic design is complicated, and the business world still doesn't understand how to effectively implement it, much less how to support service designers. Working with strategy requires an understanding of various aspects of the system. Service design also plays a role in multiple design toolsets, including design thinking, facilitation, design research, business design, and UX design.

Though the future is bright for strategic design, there is still a long way to go. But we can get there together. ??