[Re]Designing Strategy

Your suspicions are correct! Most business strategy leaves a lot to be desired—and your business peers know this but won’t admit it because they don’t know how to do better. This workshop will explain how to perform better strategy by identifying better opportunities, improve your solutions, and maybe even get into the room where the big decisions are made.

The dirty little secret in the strategy world is that most strategy delivered in the world is terribly inadequate. Aside from being expensive and slow, it is just plain bad. This isn’t the fault of most practitioners but the tools and processes they’ve been taught to use. SWOT and positioning templates were never great tools but their use, in practice, is often laughable if not misleading. Strategy is too critical to be done so incompletely and poorly. If you want your contributions to be valued, it’s time to up your skills—and not with the same lame strategy that your business peers know. You need better tools, processes, and outcomes to make your work better for all stakeholders. Continuous Strategy is a clear, easy process improvement that anyone can practice and use. It corrects many of the mistakes of traditional strategy, places design research in the key position of customer/user/constituent insights, and focuses on both qualitative and quantitative value across all stakeholders, internal and external. It is a framework to better understand both the market and operational context in any situation and prioritizes the development of the best value for everyone—including the planet. This workshop will introduce the Continuous Strategy process and tools. Attendees will leave with a more profound understanding of better strategy, starter experience to practice it, and confidence to improve their design solutions.

Key Takeaways:

• You’ll learn why SWOT and Positioning templates are worthless and what to replace them with.
• You’ll understand where your research skills provide much needed-missing value in the strategic process.
• You’ll learn how qualitative and quantitative value merge and how to frame what’s missing to business peers that often don’t know the difference (or only value the latter).’
• You’ll learn the components of better strategy, including how and when to integrate trends and stakeholder value.

Strategy is (supposedly) how projects get green-lighted long before they’re given to designers to create. Poor strategy frames the wrong opportunities that designers must, nonetheless, achieve. Great strategy reframes market and operational contexts, resulting in the right projects landing on our desks. Designers must get involved with this pre-project phase if we ever want to work on the right opportunities. Plus, we have the very skills sorely needed by traditional strategy tools and processes to correct for their deficiencies (such as design research). Being proficient in strategy helps designers better demonstrate their value to the rest of the organization—particularly to an organization’s (or client’s) leaders.

Attendees will learn strategy basics (the good and the bad) and learn what to replace it with. Then, they will step through a strategic process, in teams, to gain familiarity with this process, using their own or pre-created customer data. They’ll leave the workshop with confidence about using these tools in their on work and practice.