Proven strategies for success
In order to drive projects through and make them work we have found it essential to establish a strong understanding of direction at board level and below, and we have achieved this by encouraging collaborative strategy and design work, not just talking and writing reports but involving senior management in design strategy and middle management in design detail and, in both cases, in making things, real artefacts that people can build, explore and understand.
It's also essential to take small, iterative steps towards a long term vision expressed as outcomes and not as solutions - because it's highly likely that high concept solutions imposed at the outset will need to be adjusted, often radically, during the course of the programme. Grandiose solutions rarely address real world complexity adequately and, in fact, in a fast moving world the best strategy is to move quickly in small steps, mapping, modelling and testing new ideas and devising real world scenarios in which they might have to work.
We also find that unless each participating section of the business understands and lives the underlying principles (qualities, values) by which the service model works and uses them to inform decisions about its operation and development, the thing will very quickly unravel.
Aligning the evolution of product design, service provision and brand communications (internal and external) allows the business to grow evenly and profitably. Careful alignment requires transparent internal communication and collaborative decision making; this enables the products and services a business sends to market to be not only innovative, but also profitable and sustainable, to be serviced and supported throughout their lifecycle and, most importantly, to be understood by their producers and consumers.
Our philosophy of strategic development is non-linear; it is based on the ideas that neither technical operations nor sales alone lead development of customer-facing services; that product, service and communication are integral things and that change is the norm, with constant adjustments necessary to align the brand with product and services promise. Communications are not an afterthought, but part of the strategic design. To make the principle work over the long term means cutting down organisational boundaries between product, operations, marketing and sales and organising around projects not departments.
Within this framework, we prefer to design brand and service architectures that are themselves complex rather than monolithic and which are sensitive to multiple customer needs - not one voice fits all. Designers often say their goal is to design out complexity, to make things simple. They mean simple to use, which does not mean to say simple in its responses. The brand should be built around a strong unitary narrative but with the richness and flexibility to adjust voice, message and value proposition according to multiple combinations of customer need, identity and channel context. We build these coherent brand architectures into channel strategy and information design. We avoid excessively consistent one-voice-fits-all brands that are well suited to mass media but poor servants of relationship marketing and customised products and services.
Next... Designing for complexity