The Power of Design in Strategy: Transforming Ideas into Action (4/5)

Step 4 in the Guide to Achieving Strategic Breakthroughs Series

Did you know that about 70% of potential business breakthroughs never see the light of day? Often, it’s not the idea itself but the lack of a solid approach or policy to tackle a specific problem that causes failure. This stat highlights a crucial point: without strategic design, even the best ideas can fall flat.

So far, we’ve walked through the innovation journey, starting from sparking new ideas to putting together the right team and setting. We’ve also looked at how to identify challenges and trends to find opportunities for strategic breakthroughs. It’s been about setting the stage for the big play: creating strategies that work.

In this post we will explore the value of developing a strategy, guided by a specific challenge or opportunity, to enable decisive actions.

The Importance of Design in Breakthrough Design

Here’s the deal: designing strategic solutions is key to making a business breakthroughs a reality. The design stage is at the heart of strategic innovation workshops and business transformation.

Strategic breakthroughs don’t magically appear. They are meticulously crafted, born from a deep understanding of challenges and opportunities, refined through creativity, and brought to life by decisive action. The essence of strategy development lies in discovering key factors in any situation and orchestrating a symphony of actions to address them. The misconception is that strategy is all about the actions we take, but the truth lies in the design stage—the blueprint that guides every step towards success. It requires an innovative mindset to sculpt a clear direction from complex challenges and define the path forward.

Crafting Strategic Solutions: The Blueprint for Success

Strategy essentially involves designing a set of ‘policies’ or approaches to effectively address major challenges. It’s about formulating a pathway that moves you from collaborative ideation to effective problem-solving. The “guiding policy” is crucial—it sets the overall direction without micromanaging every step, acting as guardrails to keep us on the right path. By focusing our efforts and anticipating challenges, a guiding policy facilitates navigating complexity and seizing opportunities efficiently.

In strategic innovation workshops, it comes to designing strategic solutions, the focus shifts to the ‘what’—creating approaches that resonate with the problem at hand. It’s not just about listing actions but about formulating a coherent, overarching strategy that guides those actions.

Here, the discipline of Design Thinking, particularly its convergence phase, becomes invaluable with the help of workshops where cross-functional teams come together to review and refine the collected insights, prioritise strategic goals, and co-create a shared vision for the future. Techniques such as affinity mapping, voting, and scenario planning can be employed to facilitate this process. The outcome of the convergence phase is a well-defined and actionable strategic approach that serves as a roadmap for achieving the organisations objectives while remaining flexible enough to adapt to changing circumstances.

To get this stage right, defining the problem accurately is essential, as it ensures that we’re crafting not just any solutions but the right ones. The solution should serve as the big picture approach, a framework or canvas that paints a clear picture of your direction, leveraging your strengths and targeting opportunities with precision.

The Interplay of Collaboration and Creativity in Business Transformation

Developing a range of solutions requires a blend of creative thinking and strategic planning. Collaborative ideation exercises, such as “Ten for Ten” and “Crazy Eights,” encourage rapid idea generation, fostering a culture of innovation. These techniques are essential in strategic innovation workshops, where diverse ideas are synthesised into actionable strategies.

We use a variety of ideation exercise to get the best ideas out in the open. Some of our favourites include:

Ten for Ten: A rapid brainstorming activity designed to generate a high volume of ideas in a short period. Participants are challenged to come up with 10 ideas within 10 minutes, focusing on both speed and creativity. This method encourages quick thinking and helps to bypass overthinking, leading to a diverse set of solutions.

Crazy Eights: A fast-paced ideation technique designed to encourage rapid idea generation. Participants are asked to fold a sheet of paper into eight sections and then sketch or write down eight distinct ideas, one in each section, within eight minutes.

The Wall of Ideas: A creative session designed to rapidly generate a large volume of ideas by leveraging trigger questions. Participants respond to these questions with ideas, jotting them down on sticky notes and then attaching them to a wall.

With a collection of potential strategies, the next phase is crafting the guiding policy. This policy is the strategic design in action, translating broad strategic thinking into a focused, actionable direction. It’s a creative phase that encourages wide-ranging thinking and exploration of all feasible means to achieve the breakthrough.

Bridging Ideas with Reality

However, ideation alone isn’t enough. The critical part of this process is selecting the best path forward from the myriad of ideas generated. This selection process involves evaluating ideas based on their feasibility, potential impact, alignment with the strategic directive, and the organization’s ability to execute them. It’s a matter of balancing ambition with practicality, ensuring that the chosen path is both visionary and achievable. This is where voting comes into play.

Voting in workshops and facilitation sessions empowers participants by giving them a voice in decision-making processes. It helps in prioritising ideas, solutions, or topics by democratic means, ensuring that the group’s preferences and collective wisdom guide the session’s direction. This method enhances engagement, fosters ownership of outcomes, and efficiently narrows down options to those with the broadest support.

Turning strategic design into actionable steps is pivotal, marking the transition from ideation to implementation. It requires detailing the guiding policy into specific plans, assigning resources, setting timelines, and defining metrics for success. This phase is the bridge from strategic vision to tangible actions that bring the vision to life.

From strategy into action

In our journey through the realms of strategic design, we’ve uncovered the intricacies of crafting a strategy that not only addresses challenges but also harnesses opportunities for transformation breakthroughs. As we prepare to delve into turning these strategic designs into actionable steps, remember that the journey from concept to reality is where the true magic of strategy unfolds.

Join us in our next article as we explore this transition, providing you with the tools to bring your strategic vision to life.