Strategic Design and Consultants

Separating out strategy, evaluation and service design in human services comes from old thinking that produces few benefits for the organization and make-work for consultants. There is a better way.

We do a lot of silly things out of habit. Somewhere along the route toward the establishment of a professional management culture, we started separating out core functions of what we do into piecemeal ‘projects’. This is consistent with the scientific management approach and its reductionist perspective on solution development and (perceived) efficiency, which is wholly at odds with systems thinking and good organizational design. Yet, it persists.

This decoupling of strategy, service design, evaluation, and organizational support has led to an enormous market for consultants and little tangible benefit for organizations and those they serve.

It’s also a reason why we see such little value for our efforts and leaders struggling to manage the disconnection between what their organization seeks to accomplish and what it actually does in practice.

Observations from Practice

What I see is this:

Organizations ask for a strategic plan — and even embed that requirement into their charters – without much attention to means of realizing that plan in daily activities over its duration. Funders ask for evaluations that are entirely disentangled from the operational plans, program designs, and organizational structures that are in place to support their funded programs. Meanwhile, potential investors or partners ask if things can “scale” without any concept of what that request entails in real terms (and whether such “scale” is possible in the first place).

What it invokes are questions like:

• Why do we separate the design of our products and services from the design of the organization that develops them?
• Why do we plan roll-outs of initiatives independent of the evaluations needed to assess their impact and effectiveness?
• What is the rationale for creating a strategic plan without a plan or the means to support and guide its implementation?
• And what is the logic in establishing services for humans without involving these humans in their creation, implementation, evaluation, and development in some way?

Redesigning Consulting

As a professional consultant, I know firsthand the benefits that an external perspective, supported by years of experience can bring to an organization. That ‘helpful outsider’ perspective that a good consultant can bring is what allows organizations to see patterns, develop insights, and discover possibilities that would be difficult to do otherwise.

It’s because I know this industry well that I know where it fails — and it fails a lot. That is partly to do with the reductionist way consultants approach their work. They might be good strategists, maybe great researchers, or strong evaluators, but often they are working in a system that demands systems approaches while they provide reductionist, piecemeal offerings focused on parts. This is not just a problem of consultants; we’ve created organizational cultures that endorse, prop up, and demand this kind of reductionist thinking.

Requests for Proposals (RFP) are classic examples where organizations want a task performed without the means to integrate strategic design fully into their work. If you ask for an evaluation, you’ll get one. Want a strategic plan? Let’s map it – and only it — out. Great consultants — and good prospective clients — create the space for conversations about the content of an RFP ahead of any decision about. It’s not self-serving to suggest that bringing consultants into the RFP development process to determine boundaries, scope, and possibilities might get everyone something better. A good consultant will tell you what’s possible and maybe offer more value with some adjustments to the requirements.

For example, developmental evaluation is one area where additional support is often necessary. I’ve encountered many organizations that want DE, but aren’t equipped for what it brings. An RFP that asks for a DE proposal won’t yield value unless a series of conditions are met and supports put in place. It’s one of the reasons why so many people get frustrated with this work and often steer away from it when the problem isn’t the method or approach, but the systems around it.

These can be designed.

Design for Destiny & Destination

Destiny is a word that often is construed as being predetermined fate, but its orginal meaning and its sibling word destination are worth considering.

Destiny

• Origin: From Middle English destinee, borrowed from Old French destinee (“fate, purpose”), which came from the Latin destīnātus (past participle of destīnare).
• Latin root meaning: de- (“completely”) + stīnare (from stare, “to stand, fix, establish”).
• Original sense: something firmly established or appointed; a fate that is “fixed” or “set.”
• Evolution: By the 14th century, destiny in English meant “the power that determines the course of events” and later “the predetermined course of events itself.”

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Destination

• Origin: From Latin destīnātiō (“a determination, purpose, design”), derived from destīnare (“to make firm, establish, appoint”).
• Original sense: an act of firmly setting or appointing something.
• Shift in meaning: In Late Latin and Old French, it came to mean the appointed place (where something or someone is fixed to go).
• Modern sense: By the 15th century in English, destination meant “the place set for the end of a journey.”

The power that determines the course of events and the appointed place (where we are going) is what strategic design offers. It aligns purpose with structures within systems and feedback to create a total package for an organization. It doesn’t parse out certain activities, ignore systems, or forget people.

Not every problem or issue requires a holistic, strategic design approach. There are times when an evaluation might be needed on its own. But when we step back, we’ll start to realize that those situations are rare. Why wouldn’t we want to integrate learning from an evaluation into our operations and leadership? Why might we ignore the implementation of a strategy to serve a plan? It stops making sense.

By setting up ourselves to think more about what we do, how we do it, who we serve, and what kind of impact we seek to make, we engage in strategic design (which includes systems thinking and evaluative thinking). It’s about being intentional in our planning and delivery to create things — products, services, organizations — for living systems (people in environments). It gets us away from viewing the planet, the market, community, our people, and leadership as distinctive and separate. This approach can help us resolve the tension some experience between looking after our bottom line, our people, our community/planet, and impact because we used a different process or criteria for designing for each of them.

Strategic design (+ thinking) can help remedy that and consultants — if they care enough to do it — can be a means to help you practice this.

Your destiny is in your hands, by design (if you choose).

I do this for a living and help organizations using strategic design, so if this is something you want to learn more about and require support, let’s talk.

Photos by Charles Forerunner on Unsplash . Thanks, Charles for making your creative images available for use under license.