Fall Into Strategy: The Practice of Making Strategy Real

Strategy is the means of connecting our aspirations and resources to our actions and outcomes.

Strategy is something we design with our organization’s goals, values, assets, people, and customers/clients/patients/partners in mind. Strategic design is the means and positive impact is the end.

Over the coming weeks, we’ll be walking through the art and science of making strategy and putting it into practice. We are going to explore what the practice of strategy looks like — from the perspective of leaders and stakeholders at all levels. This multi-layered, systemic and creative approach is what makes it strategic design and not strategic planning.

One looks at strategy from a systems lens and embeds evaluation and implementation as part of its design. The other, strategic planning, is about coming up with a plan and recommendations. Strategic design is planning with action and attention to complexity as part of it. Strategic planning is about developing a model that seeks simple answers to connect A to B.

There’s similarities, but much difference in their delivery and implementation.

This series — Fall Into Strategy — builds on the Censemaking Summer Series on Strategic Design and Complexity. This theme fits with the changing seasons and the vibrant colours and transformation that comes with autumn (in the Northern Hemisphere and where I live, at least), but is meant to be for all seasons.

What’s Falling Your Way

Over the coming weeks, we’ll be looking at the following topics through the practice lens, with the aim of helping you think through the steps for building a resilient, effective, fit-for-purpose strategy for your organization. We’ll help you think about complexity and systems, explore human-centred service design, and what is required to connect our plans, our actions, our outputs and the impact we seek.

Topics will include:

1. The Design Helix model for understanding how we make things that work
2. Strategy as a conversation
3. Decision-making in complexity
4. Measuring what matters and designing for learning
5. A living strategy (versus dead plans)
6. And practice-based issues that come into the conversation about what it means to do work that matters, with purpose, and with impact.

Join me as we explore the making of strategy and the design for living systems approach that powers health-serving organizations and prepares them for the dynamic present and uncertain future with confidence.

If you’re already interested in getting going, consider subscribing to The Design Loft or reaching out if you want more expert advice.

Photo by Daniel J. Schwarz on Unsplash and Photerrestrial on Unsplash