Design, Strategy, Futures, and What Really Matters
As a Design practitioner for 20+ years, I’m often asked these question by fellow designers, “How is Futures different from Design Thinking? What’s design strategy vs. design-led strategy?” Similarly, Futurists have their own nuanced interpretations and approaches to Futures studies. Rather than diving into an academic debate, I want to focus on what matters most: the impact of these approaches.
What I learned from serving clients, especially those with business backgrounds, who are under the pressure to deliver to their stock holders in the next quarter and concerned about ROI of invested efforts, was that nothing matters more than what it delivers at the end.
Here is how I view Design, Design Strategy, Design-led Business Strategy, and Futures Strategy, with some rough hand-drawn diagrams to help illustrate how they connect and overlap with each other. Open for discussion!
Design
In its conventional and narrow sense, Design is an executional function, a set of specific disciplines based on the objects we are applying the skills to—some tangible, some experiential.
For example, Graphic Design, Industrial (physical product) Design, User Experience Design, Digital Product Design, Service Design, Interior Design, and Architectural Design are delineated by the “thing” you are producing, whether it’s a 2-D graphic, a physical or digital product, an end-to-end experience, or a full suite of services.
Design Strategy
Design Strategy lifts the focus from mere execution to defining “what and how to design” in specific contexts. It involves making strategic decisions that guide design execution, considering factors like business impact, competitive advantage, and feasibility, often through an iterative, test-and-learn approach.
We can make incremental changes on the physical appearance of a product line of handheld devices, or, systematically create an overall product identity and incorporate it throughout the next few generations of product releases.
We can take a more consumer-centric approach to the definition of features to ensure our consumers (e.g., patients) have a wonderful experience interacting with our products and services, or instead, prioritize our customers’ (e.g., physicians) needs first to ensure that their pain points are solved. These are strategic decisions to make and directions to set so the execution of design is well-directed, informed, and aligned with larger goals.
Design-led Business Strategy
Business strategies can range from cost-saving measures to growth initiatives, from operational optimization to portfolio expansion. The human-centric, creative nature of Design makes it particularly powerful in areas involving people and innovation, such as strategies for customer experience and new business build.
One example on growth strategy: It was a multi-billion dollar personal care brand, seeking growth opportunities in white spaces. The quantitative and qualitative research we conducted showed clear patterns in not only who the new emerging customers are but also the use cases of each type of them using and purchasing such personal care products, with estimated market analyses showing the sizes of these opportunities. This helped to guide the brand with new product development, M&A, and marketing strategies. Without a human-centric and creative process that Design brought, we would have been looking at current market analysis and losing sights on what’s new and upcoming out there.
Design-led Strategy can also apply in areas even if it’s about cost savings and optimizations of operations.
Example with a tech client on talent strategy: By understanding the needs of recruiters, hiring managers, and candidates, we identified opportunities to leverage new technologies to streamline the talent acquisition process and ultimately save operation costs in recruiting and onboarding, and improve employee satisfaction and retention which in turn also saves costs for the organization.
Futures Strategy
Futures Studies, which Strategic Foresight is part of, systematically explores potential changes to anticipate how the future will unfold. Some Futurists focus on speculative, provocative work to inspire critical thinking, while others, like us, apply Futures to strategy, with the help of Strategic Foresight.
A key differentiator of Strategic Foresight from typical Business Strategy approach and other Futures disciplines is that it relies on the methods of building and exploring in multiple future scenarios.
Compare with typical Strategy, including Design-led Strategy, Futures Strategy pushes the horizon further out, and elevates design further up to strategic levels.
Examples: In a 3-5-year future of consumer project with a leading retailer, we explored 8 future scenarios and identified 4 new growth areas with cross-cutting opportunities based on trends in consumer, industry, and economic development. In a 3-8-year future of EV market strategy project with a EV player, we developed 3 key business concepts reach 200% revenue growth in 3 years, within 8 future scenarios based on uncertainties in economic development, international trade policies, consumer readiness, and infrastructure improvement. Read more on our case studies.
As shown on these diagrams, each of the disciplines/practices overlaps with the next one in some ways. There’s no clear delineation or isolation. In fact, that’s how a healthy organization should operate–connect these functions and disciplines, leverage their strengths systematically, and have them inform and guide each other.
The executional function of Design extends to Design Strategy because designers need to know how to make decisions such as prioritization of features to build, users to test with, messages to convey, guided by Design Strategy. Design Strategy, in order to align well with and have a voice in the overall strategies of the organization, should a role in Business Strategy. Design-led Business Strategy clearly blends well in many ways with Futures Strategy, because both Design and Strategy are by definition future-forward disciplines, projecting, planning, and creating something that doesn’t yet exist today.
TBD Futures’ approach: TBD Now and TBD Forward
Our unique approach at TBD Futures combines Design and Strategic Foresight, pushing the future-forwardness of design further, over longer time horizons, with rigorous research and analysis, while enhancing strategy with greater creativity.
The examples above about the personal care brand growth strategy and the tech company’s talent strategy are what we would categorize into “TBD NOW”-a single future scenario strategy with known and imminent factors.
TBD Forward covers longer time horizons, deeper and wide research and analysis on trends and uncertainties, multiple scenario building, ideation in multiple scenarios, and strategic roadmap by backcasting from the future vision. This approach multiplies what’s included in TBD Now in obvious ways: more drivers of change explored, more future outcomes analyzed, more ideas generated, more patterns identified, and a more robust and longer-term strategy formed with both rigor and creativity.
Read more about why exploring multiple scenarios are valuable in this case study.
We’ve delivered both to many clients across industries, went through numerous iterations to improve speed, accuracy, modularity, and effectiveness, and created significant quantifiable and qualifiable impact.
Summary
There’s a progression of Design being leveraged from an executional function to more strategic use cases. And the benefit of it has been proven by multiple research studies.
As McKinsey’s Business Value of Design report and the Design Maturity Index had shown us, organizations with a higher maturity of Design, meaning that they leverage design beyond the basic and executional levels to aid strategic decision making, outperform their peers.
It matters not what you call it, as long as the human centricity and creativity, and now the super-charged future-forwardness, are leveraged to your advantages, you will see positive business impact.
And that’s what TBD Futures aims to bring. Let us know what you think!