Making Your Wildest Dreams a Reality with Design Strategy
When you're looking at the big picture, your dreams and aspirations may appear too large and overwhelming to actually realize. But by breaking things down with design thinking and design methodology, these wild dreams and big pictures are all very achievable.
As a strategic design studio, we often run workshops and design sprints with clients. During these workshops, we use creative problem-solving techniques (design methodologies and strategies) to address a diverse range of client opportunities, problems and challenges.
Although the use of the term "design" may mislead you to believe that these methodologies and strategies are limited to design-oriented topics, they actually work beyond this and can help in a variety of settings, topics and strategic subjects. They can help to solve problems in innovation, product management, IT, finance, business development, digital transformation, making hard decisions, public challenges, branding and setting up new companies.
In other words, they can help you to achieve things. They can help you to take the first steps to making your wildest dreams a reality.
So how do we use design strategy to help clients make things happen, from small and singular to large and complex challenges?
How design strategy helps to make things happen
We start by looking at a client's opportunities and challenges, no matter how big or small they are. Depending on the challenge, we run either a design sprint (big challenges) or specific workshops such as a Problem-Solving Workshop (small challenges).
These workshops go through a similar process:
1. Set the scene and define the challenge. Align everyone and choose what the next step forward is. At this stage, the aim is to ensure that everyone is up to speed and shares the same information.
2. Define your unfair advantages and use your company's strengths as a basis. Too often we see companies analysing competitors and copying their strengths.
3. Ideate on solutions: a challenge needs at least one or more solutions. Through ideation exercises, we ideate solutions and put them on display. The next step is to vote on prioritised solutions and decide on the best solutions according to the selection criteria.
4. Make it actionable: the aim at this stage is to make any of the chosen solutions actionable. We estimate the time and effort it would take to realize a solution and put it into practice. This is followed by defining what the client's next step needs to be and determining the order in which they must be executed. If it seems too big, we break it down into smaller pieces until we can define a step that can be achieved in a short amount of time. Because once the first step has been taken, everything else will naturally follow.
5. Determine the key metrics to measure your future success. No plan is complete without KPIs/milestones and remember: “It is better to aim high and miss than to aim low and hit.” Realising 90% of a high KPI will often yield better results than low and easy to achieve goals.
Through the process of these workshops, you'll begin to notice how even the most overwhelming and complex challenges can be broken down into bite-size and actionable chunks.
By achieving that first success and small step forward, you're on the way to achieving and realizing what may have been brushed off as an unattainable, wild dream. Once that first success is history, everything else will soon follow naturally and you'll be on track to making what may seem impossible a reality.