🌿🧭🌳 OD100: Strategic Design
Curated resources on Strategy ∙ Org Design ∙ Org Development ∙ Adjacent fields
Celebrating the 100th edition of the newsletter 🎉
Thank you for your continued support and readership. We started the newsletter as a small sharing initiative back in January 2020 and we’re happy that now over four thousand of you, Strategy & Organization professionals and curious people from all over the world, are reading and sharing it.
As those of you who’ve tried constantly publishing a newsletter have learned, it’s a challenging, hard endeavour, with lots of time and energy investments. Thankfully, the unexpected, insightful and warm conversations and connections with some of you provide us enough fuel to keep sharing, evolving and hope for a world with better and more impactful strategies and organizations.
Thank you all,
Raluca & Bülent
Starters
1 of 6 / Emerging Europe: Operational art in eDiscovery: A strategic approach to international expansion - operational art as environment analysis, opportunities and threats identification, and plans to leverage opportunities and mitigate threats.
✼
2 of 6 / Tim Herbig: Horizontal and Vertical Strategy Coherence - interconnectedness of strategy elements across a layer and of strategies across layers.
✼
3 of 6 / Owtcome and Kevin Richard: Turn the Tide with a Multi-Ocean Strategy - fresh perspective of using metaphors in strategy work: “oceans as value spaces, players as contextual behaviors, and monsters as underlying threats”.
✼
4 of 6 / Foreign Policy: The Futility of Grand Strategy - “the Clausewitz Trap (…) Anyone who acquires celebrity from their strategic acumen inexorably believes in their own strategic genius and makes ego-driven mistakes.”
✼
5 of 6 / Dave’s Research Company: Growing Research in Product Organizations - pace of layers linked to context, intent and action in 4 key areas of research practice: user reality, team dynamics, product, org. dynamics.
✼
6 of 6 / ThoughtCo: What Is a Paradigm Shift? - anomalies that cannot be explained in the dominant paradigm bubble up to create a shift. There’s a life cycle of paradigms, similar to seasons. It’s useful to notice the springs around us and not be stuck in winters (paradigms that lost their fitness with the current reality).
Main
Strategic Design book
Thanks to John V Willshire and his Artefacts newsletter, we’ve recently discovered Dark Matter and Trojan Horses: A Strategic Design Vocabulary, the wonderful book by Dan Hill - you can read it on Scribd or get it on Amazon.
To illustrate some of the key points, here are a few quotes that we picked (highlights ours):
As opposed to engineering, with its focus on problem solving, strategic design is oriented towards questioning the question, re-framing if necessary.
As opposed to policy-making expertise, with its focus on the creation of models, strategic design is predisposed to sketching and iterative prototyping as a learning mechanism, while engaging in stewardship to ensure that user-centredness and design intent is realised in delivery.
As opposed to particular content expertise, focused within a bounded discipline, strategic design's discipline is in integrative systems thinking rather than a form of path dependency, and is able to move freely across disciplines rather than within them, revelling in the complexity of a more holistic understanding of the system.
(…) As opposed to traditional design practice, strategic design attempts to move beyond products, services and spaces into relationships, contexts, and strategies, yet without losing sight of the symbiotic relationship between meta and matter, and genuinely engaging with the public and civic as much as with the commercial.
(…) As we have seen, in terms of design practice, strategic design at systemic scale is about this zoom from matter to meta, or rather, the importance of designing both the matter (the objects, spaces, services) at the same time as the meta (the context, the organisation, the culture). Strategy is enacted through a focus on the quality of execution, rather than an abstract model.
We hope these ideas intrigue you and make you curious to at least scan the book, if not even to read or study it - it’s only about 140 pages long.
The vocabulary that the book introduces (matter and meta, play, MacGuffin, trojan horse, platform, layer, dark matter) might inspire new conversations in Strategy & Organization work.
Dessert
1 of 2 / AskNature: How a Camel’s Fur Coat Keeps It Cool - beautiful interplay of mechanisms to achieve desired outcomes in harsh conditions.
2 of 2 / Visual Complexity: A visual exploration on mapping complex networks - inspiration for creators of (strategy and organizational) maps.
✼
Bon appétit!
Curated by knowledge chefs Raluca and Bülent Duagi.
As the Sense & Change team, we’re working with Directors in 🇷🇴 Tech companies to make more impact with the limited resources they have at hand, by:
🧭 having a clear strategy that enables better and faster decision making;
🤝 organizing better to both run operations and implement strategy with the available bandwidth and budgets;
🚀 implementing strategic initiatives and programs in an efficient and effective manner, paying attention to the people side of change;
⚡️ intentionally developing proper internal capabilities that are sustainable in the long run.
We've been recently advising, mentoring and training leaders from:
· Adobe, DB Global Technology, Deloitte Digital, HP, IT Smart Systems, Orange, Orange Services, OTP Bank, Servier, Stockday and TotalSoft.