What is the connection between business strategy and design (thinking)? How does remote team collaboration contribute to business success?
My interest in understanding business and its success goes back a good while. I remember the time when rationality and competitive advantage were the only way to explain the success of an organisation.
The main concern of the strategist was to explain the rationale behind a certain way for a company to compete.
There were mainly two answers, either developing a low-cost strategy (be careful - not to confuse this with low prices, which is not a strategy) or developing a differentiation strategy.
If you close your eyes and think about some renowned companies, you can fast categories them into one of the two strategies.
Luckily though in the last twenty years our understanding of business success has radically evolved. The most significant contribution to the field has been looking at the strategy of an organisation no longer from a fixed point in time, but as a dynamic evolution of choices/events.
We no longer can merely explain the rationale of the success of a company, but to decode the source of its success.
There is a new dynamic element in the strategist's role - design.
We conventionally use the word design when referring to a product, meaning its shape, colour, usability, etc. This understanding of design comes from a long tradition of industrial design. Differently though, when using the words design in the modern's work strategist, we refer to the dynamic element necessary to explain an unfolding strategy.
Since the beginning of the twenty-first-century strategists turned into strategic designers - from explaining the success of their organisations in the past, to forge future strategies for success.
Besides the contribution of design for the success of organisations, the advance in technology can further enable the creation of sustainable strategies by fostering creativity and innovation to happen.
The challenge I perceive in my job as a design strategist facilitating remote sessions is to maintain the level of humanity needed for the creative process.
