Design is the Strategy
This is the single most important principle, and it requires establishing a “design first” approach by making design a central component of not only your corporate strategy, but your product and service strategies. This means your products and services are conceptualized, designed, built, and marketed utilizing one or more design methodologies and practices versus the typical business approaches. That’s the beauty of design methodologies, is that they can be leveraged for everything from creating companies and digital products to solving complex problems, forming new partnerships, even testing new sales and marketing approaches. From a tactical perspective, it means utilizing Design Sprints instead of a kickoff meeting, design principles instead of objectives, or prototypes instead of requirements, etc.

Establish a Design Culture
This goes beyond simply producing great design or hiring a bunch of designers. It’s the full embodiment of the first principle above of Design is the Strategy, where designers hold senior leadership positions, are involved – or lead – strategic planning and decision making processes. And everyone – especially non-designers – has deep knowledge and respect for the value of design as a holistic and process-driven discipline that should be integrated throughout the organization. It also requires diversity of talents and backgrounds in all roles, which leads to diverse opinions and ideas.

Utilize Empathy for All Initiatives
Typically used as the first step in Design Thinking because it’s a skill that allows us to identify and acknowledge what others are feeling in order to develop a shared understanding of users’ goals, needs, likes, dislikes, and unmet needs. Strategic Design emphasizes using this practice for all business initiatives, regardless if it’s for internal employees and stakeholders, or external partners and customers. It works for most situations in order to better inform decision-making and solve complex problems. For example, it will provide deeper insights to help you learn about employees’ healthcare needs before purchasing a plan, or partners’ expectations for a new technology collaboration, or customers’ needs that will inform your product strategy, etc.

Create an Entrepreneurial Environment
Awesome ideas come from anywhere, and the people that develop great ideas are extremely passionate about developing and launching them; reward those visionaries with opportunities to lead the development of their ideas. Even as a side project. You’ll get a much better product/service rather than handing it off to someone who didn’t conceptualize it, and has little interest in making it successful (i.e. the not invented here syndrome).

Iterative Design & Development
The goal of all teams within a company should be to iterate, build, and launch initiatives quickly, regardless of the output. This requires deploying iterative design skills, processes, and designers throughout the enterprise, not just in product or creative departments. This leads to faster and better insights and the ability to iterate and scale initiatives.

One key component of this is rapid prototyping and testing, where Strategic Design applies it broadly across the enterprise beyond product development. For example, it can be used to rapidly prototype and test team structure or composition, or even prototype a flat organizational structure or a new floorplan. An incredible way to employ rapid prototyping and testing is through a Design Sprint, which is a highly interactive design-focused workshop that utilizes a five-phase framework to solve problems and develop new solutions through rapid ideation, prototyping, and user testing.

Embrace Failure & Continuous Learning
If your company is iterating, building, and launching initiatives quickly, there’s going to be failures.  That’s just part of the process, so embrace it. The goal of design and Agile methodologies is to ensure that failures are small (i.e. feature level, not product level), but often. Failure leads to continuous learning for your team – and broader organization – as you continuously learn about your customers’ needs, goals, and expectations. Which makes it easier to innovate. So don’t shy away from failures, celebrate them!

Promote Servant Leaders
Because Strategic Design is so different and unique, it requires unique leadership. Servant leaders are selfless and humble, value diverse opinions, team-oriented, and focus on encouraging and developing leaders (versus being a task-driver). They always shelter their teams from blame and consistently give credit to their teams instead of themselves. They are rare individuals, but only because the business world has falsely promoted the wrong values for so long. Servant leadership is required to ensure all the other principles above are respected and valued, and this in turn will make any organization truly dynamic and innovative.