Design in strategy and complexity

Designed strategies can also assure creative businesses of minimised risk, maximised value and optimised performance, while achieving hit ratios in excess of 90 per cent.

Today's globally transparent creative economy, feeding off the information expressway, has brought an end to some traditional design and idea theories. In a creative economy, commodity or interactive ecology is facing higher costs of production while margins continue to decrease. Things have changed; have become uncertain and unpredictable. Organisations struggling with change are acknowledging that the old ways of designing things don't seem to work anymore.

 We have been educated to look into problems by making forecasts. We project the past into the present and thence out into the future. We look at the trends and search for causes. And we are expected to be able to predict future trends. All we have to do is get enough smart people in a room to reach general agreement on the causes and the effects. But change has been making a fool of cause and effect; it has gone its own way with a remarkable lack of respect for elegant forecasts. And it's been laughing at experts and at consensus. That's why we have given up designing and are catching trends instead.

Social networking is the best example of the kind of change that is now crawling over everything. Nobody is in control of it. Nobody designed it. Nobody knows how it is mutating, minute to minute. And nobody knows where it's heading. It's spreading, and suddenly, change looks almost alive; it's become alive and organic.

Faced with this kind of change, where do we look for insights on how to carry a design into the future? A trip to a design fair? I don't think so.

Design magazines in a nearby bookstore will deliver one kind of answer. We will find advice aplenty, built on a common design recipe: showing currently successful designs. How many years must we repeat these processes, to achieve things that others have already accomplished?

 Identifying our own design seems to demand, first, that it be successful. Then its characteristics are generalised so that others can adopt them.

The problem is that in the design process you're dealing with some very short time lines. So while design may not be in its initial state, it is not yet final.

Design in strategy is a crucial discipline. It directs that the designer determines not only what to design, but why, and how to innovate contextually. Both tangible and intangible aligned trials must be conjured up, over the long term. This process involves the interplay between design and business strategy, forming a systematic approach that integrates holistic thinking, research methods that are used to inform business strategy, and strategic planning, to provide a context for design. These methods have changed since everybody gave up trying to predict what is coming next.

Awareness

Initial conditions can create big changes in design. Little things can cause big things to happen a long way off in time and space; a small change in water temperature in the Pacific can set hurricanes battering New York City. Small movements set off large swings that are completely unpredictable. You may be able to predict short, but you can't predict long.

Individuals matter. Individual actions can set off big changes. Groups are no more likely to be effective at predicting long or setting off change than are individuals.

Be aware you are not the only person thinking creatively at this moment. More than 1,000 people in the world may be thinking just what you are thinking at any given moment. But only 10 per cent of you will design and develop that idea.

Do it now or leave it, but please don't simply lean on design magazines.

Development

Development is nature's engine for making change. Things develop as the result of mindless advances that are constantly being tested against the environment for usefulness. The most useful developments will be sustained while those less useful will be wiped away. Every aspect of design, no matter how complex, is the result of development. Design is unavoidable. But development, given enough chances, will permit the creation of something that is better. Successful design and development requires continuous experimentation. The more possibilities you throw at the market, the more "fit" you'll find. Stay foolish and stay hungry, as Steve Jobs said.

Things will organise themselves

It may not sound like a strategy, but without help, disorganised masses of newly born ideas will organise themselves into spirals. With enough energy, things will organise themselves in your brain. Chemicals will organise themselves into clocks that flip into different colours and configurations at precise intervals. You don't have to work so hard at organising things. They will organise themselves and do so in a way that's sustainable - but only if you understand what are you doing and what you will do next. My secret is to build a mind map and then throw it away - remember everything, then forget it.

To be continued.