How we use strategic design to make any challenge possible

As a strategic design studio, we often run workshops and design sprints with customers. In most cases, there’s always someone in the workshop who will comment and say something along the lines of: but doing this will take ages in our company, this is too complex, we’ll need more IT to make this happen. These pessimistic and discouraged comments arise because they’re looking at the big picture, which appears too large and overwhelming to actually realize. But by breaking things down with design thinking and design methodology, even the biggest pictures and challenges become very achievable.

During the workshops and design sprints we help organisations to run, we use creative problem-solving techniques to assist our clients in addressing opportunities, problems and challenges. These opportunities, problems and challenges can vary greatly depending on diverse factors. Although the use of the term “design” may mislead some to believe that our methodologies and strategies are limited to typical design-oriented topics, they actually work beyond this and can help clients with a variety of settings, topics and strategic subjects. Besides traditional design-oriented workshops, we run workshops to help clients solve problems in innovation, product management, IT, finance, business development, digital transformation, making hard decisions (we’d end up in a jungle on a deserted island if we tried to elaborate on these due to signed confidentiality agreements), public challenges (e.g. how to improve safety for cyclists and pedestrians during rush hours), branding and setting up new companies.

One aspect we take particular pride in is that we help clients to achieve things. We try to be as hands-on as possible and help them take the first step. One of my mentors once said: the only way to eat an elephant is to start eating it piece by piece (not that we actually eat elephants). Similarly, participants in endurance sports focus on conquering what is directly ahead of them instead of the end of the journey. Why? In both cases, the challenge or opportunity is so big that honing in on its entirety becomes too overwhelming and stifling. So how do we help clients overcome this barrier and make things happen, from small and singular to very big and complex challenges

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 Lightning Decision Jam or a Problem-Solving Workshop (small challenges).

For any of these workshop formats, we go through a similar process:

1. Set the scene and define the challenge: this is where we align everyone and choose what our next step forward is. At this stage, the aim is to ensure that everyone is up to speed and share the same information.
2. Ideate on solutions: a challenge needs one or more solutions. Simply staring at the challenge head-on won’t get you very far. 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.
3. 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. 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.

Through the running of our workshops, clients 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, they’re on the way to achieving and realizing what may have been brushed off as an unattainable and wild dream. Compare it to how participants in endurance sports focus on what lies immediately ahead whilst knowing that every small accomplishment is a step forward as part of a greater mission and achievement. 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.