The Dance of Strategy and Design

Design Playbook

Choreographs Growth through the dance of Strategy and Design Businesses can spend a lot for a strategic action plan. Studies show, however, that even with a good plan, 60%-90% of all business strategies fail before they even launch writes Mollie Barnett, Former Forbes Councils Member in her article published in Forbes dated Jul 11, 2024. But is strategy merely a plan? It is a Transformational Blueprint for sustained success of an enterprise. It serves instead as a transformational blueprint for the sustained success of an organization. According to McKinsey’s research, only 56% of organizations meet most or all of their transformation goals, and a mere 12% manage to sustain these goals for over three years.

Strategy lies at the intersection of space (Value) and time (Economy). Here, space serves as the canvas for visualization, while time provides the context necessary for that visualization to be realized. Exhibit 1: The Space where Value needs to be defined is clearly Aspiration It is clear from Exhibit 1 that we are entering a New Era, and merely making incremental changes to past practices will not suffice for a sustainable future. There should be no doubt that the future must be shaped by our aspirations and intentions, rather than merely addressing the unfulfilled needs and desires of the past.

Exhibit 2: Strategy is Visualizing the Intent of Growth and Realizing its Impact As shown in Exhibit 2, this is not just the vision of a select few; it represents a shared aspiration of an entire enterprise aimed at fostering growth and long-term success. Achieving this requires organizational discipline that is both collaborative and widely embraced. It is important to differentiate between Enterprise and Business: the former refers to a concept, while the latter pertains to operations. The smooth transition from Concept to Operation serves as the foundation for strategic success. In today's context, an enterprise extends far beyond the traditional notion of a business.

It encompasses the Universe of Customers who actively engage in proving concepts and driving growth. This Universe includes clients, employees, stakeholders, shareholders, business partners, technology, vendors, and society at large. The challenge of strategy is to bring a Unified Vision to play across this Customer Universe. Those who succeed will be the Industry Leaders who set the trend rather than try to catch up. Change is one thing, progress is another – Bertrand Russell Over the last 150 years of Industrialization spanning 4 distinctive waves, strategy has always been addressed in the context of competition. It is now time to pivot it to the context of innovation. There is a marked distinction between Competition and Innovation.

Competition demands understanding the strength of others and adapting to them to succeed; whereas innovation demands playing to one’s own unique strengths. Only then does the Strategy become the engine of growth. Today's strategy necessitates an emphasis on Value Creation that aligns with the paradigm of "New". This shift requires the development of new capabilities, moving away from the previous approaches of Value Extraction that focused solely on incremental Value Addition to Value Creation that capitalizes on the advancement of Digital Technologies.

This is where the dance of Strategy and design come into play involving the five elements of Data, Talent, Materials / Resources / Energy, Financial Capital and Intelligent Infrastructure fusing to Create sustainable new products and services involving more intrapreneurs and entrepreneurs who hitherto did not have the Access and / or the Voice. The term “Capabilities” is an encrypted one involving the Capacity to Transform and the Ability to Perform. Such ability being the fusion of all the five elements harmoniously organizing Work, Workforces and Workplace to Orchestrate Innovation and Operations continuously and mutually inclusively.

These Capabilities must find unified buy - In and expression across the nine segments of the Customer Universe addressed earlier. Design Playbook A design playbook is a shared artifact that choreographs the priorities and guardrails of Visualizing and Realizing a Strategy across a Customer Universe facilitating an immersive participation and progression. Before we dive into detailing a Design Playbook, it is critical to understand that Design has evolved from Industrial to Personal to Intelligent Design. The modern design needs to address both the engagement (process of creation) and the experience (intelligently on-demand).

Being digital technology centric, every enterprise must find a way to transform their processes from a siloed information processing systems to real time digital computing across an ecosystem; shifting the Critical Success Factor (CSF) from building a Pipeline of Customers to a Pipeline of Intellectual Property (IP) that focuses on Value Creation. The following Exhibit 3 therefore illustrates the need to transform the enterprise technology environment from a DevOps to GrowthOps one, even before one can begin the journey of transformation.

Exhibit 3: The Construct of a Design Playbook Exhibit 3 illustrates this new organization of work, workforces and workplaces that renew strategies dynamically to the relevance of a digitally intelligent economy with a Design Playbook that serves the purpose of inclusive and sustainable growth. A critical shift in reshaping the transformation engines of the enterprise is the Data Science led Engineering approach for Creation leading to Contextualization and Commercialization. An FT editorial on Aug 13, ‘24 headlined