Experience-led Strategy:
The Role of DesignThinking in
Strategy Making
Eric Paquin
Innovation Lead
Design and Innovation Lab, @AdaptCentre
@goepic_ie
The ADAPT Centre for Digital Content Technology is funded under the SFI
Research Centres Programme (Grant 13/RC/2106) and is co-funded under the
European Regional Development Fund.

Product
Management

Design
UX
Product
Management

UX / Design
We

Experience-led Strategy:
The Role of DesignThinking in
Strategy Making
Eric Paquin
Innovation Lead
Design and Innovation Lab, @AdaptCentre
@goepic_ie
The ADAPT Centre for Digital Content Technology is funded under the SFI
Research Centres Programme (Grant 13/RC/2106) and is co-funded under the
European Regional Development Fund.

Eric Paquin
Innovation Lead
Dlab @AdaptCentre
@goepic_ie

Ability to innovate at
speed will be the
competitive differentiator

“Speed is irrelevant if you
are going in the wrong
direction”
Ability to innovate at
speed will be the
competitive differentiator

Understanding of
Design Thinking
How it can help
Strategy Making
Tips and Tools

What is…
Design Thinking

The Design
Thinking
process

The
Design
Thinking
process
• A process?
• A methodology?
• A philosophy?
• Multidisciplinary
• Human-centered
• Bias to action / prototyping
• Iterative

Inspiration Ideation Implementation

Design Stages
Understand the
problem
Interpret the
results
Generate ideas
(Ideate)
Prototype,
experiment
Test,
implement,
improve

Design Stages d.school
Darden School
of Business
SAP IBM IDEO Accenture
Understand the
problem
Empathize
What is? Discover
Observe
Inspiration
Discover
Interpret the
results
Define
Reflect
Describe
Generate ideas
(Ideate)
Ideate What if?
Design
Ideation Ideate/
PrototypePrototype,
experiment
Prototype WhatWows?
Make ImplementationTest,
implement,
improve
Test What works? Deliver
Test
Implement

Strategy
and
Open
Innovation

Strategy and Business models

What if…
(the research question)

From UX to Strategy
via Design Thinking
UX consultant
UX clients
Design
Thinking firms
Execs
The Design Ladder from the Danish Design Centre Framework (DDC, 2003)

“Prototyping with peoples’ lives is also a
delicate proposition because there is, rightly,
less tolerance for error.“
- Tim Brown
Human centered,
not Business centered
strategy

Focus on the
PEOPLE and
business
PROBLEMS,
not the strategic
solutions
You had me at “PROBLEMS”!
“Sometimes problems don’t require a solution to solve
them; Instead they require maturity to outgrow them.”
– Steve Maraboli

Experience
Led
Strategy
Everyone designs who devises courses
of action aimed at changing existing
situations into preferred ones.
-Herbert Simon
Design (n.d.) defines design as “the art
or action of conceiving of and
producing a plan or drawing of
something before it is made,”
Strategy (n.d.) as “a plan of action
designed to achieve a long-term or
overall aim.”
(source: Oxford Dictionary of English )
…is the action
setting stage
for your
strategy.

What wows…
(what the research says…)

Source: Innovation Trends Report 2019, Bret Waters, Stanford University

What does
your CEO
think you
do?
“He thinks I build enablers to support his long-term strategy”
“Create a solid pipeline of innovation opportunities”
“Helping to change the understanding of the entire organization
with regard to how successful new products are developed”.
“He thinks of our group as being the one group in the company that
can step away from the operational thinking of a business unit, giving
us the luxury of looking forward without constraints”
“My CEO thinks I’m the guy who pops in with cool ideas once in
awhile”
“My CEO thinks I’m the guy who always has expensive ideas”
“He thinks I’m a little weird”
“Honestly, he didn’t know anything about innovation until he
interviewed me”
“Hunting for insights and building business cases around them”
“Pulling the organization into a more forward-thinking state”
“We ask too many questions and don’t provide enough answers”
“Envision a future and get us there”
“Accelerate the transformation of our organization”
“Figure out how to build better solutions for customers”
“Make senior leaders more innovative”.
Source: Innovation Trends Report 2019, Bret Waters, Stanford University
When asked…

TIME
VISION
INNOVATION

TIME
VISION
INNOVATION

8 step to
transform
your
organization
(Kotter, 1995)

5 stages of
Design-Led
strategy
People
Problem Framing
Business Models
Vision
Communications

ITERATION
IDEATION
EMPATHY
STRATEGIC
VISION
BUSINESS
MODEL
PROBLEM
FRAMING

What works…
(…and what doesn’t!)

Misconceptions and
barriers to adoption

Design
Thinking
Tools for
strategy
Build the right team
Problem framing activities
Canvasses
Design Sprint
Workshops

Build the right team

Design
Sprint

More tips
and tools
for
strategy
• 5-whys
• Visualisation
• Journey Mapping
• Value Chain
Empathy / Problem framing
• HMW (How Might We… use UX to
improve our strategy?)
• Canvas
• Mission/Vision madlib
Ideation
• Prototyping on Business Model
• Communicate vision / seek feedback
Implementation

Ideation:
StratLib:
Strategy
Prototyping
(Source: https://medium.com/swlh/5-powerful-business-madlibs-16f7699c65f7)
Guided MadLib:
Our strategy is [..]. We will lead a [..] effort of the market through
our use of [..] and [..] to build a [..]. By being both [..] and [..],
our [..] approach will drive [..] throughout the organisation.
Synergies between our [..] and [..] will enable us to capture the
upside by becoming [..] in a [..] world. These transformations
combined with [..] due to our [..] will create a [..] through [..] and [..].
digital first, agile, open, innovative, efficiency, competitive advantage,
ecosystem, networked, collaborative, learning organisation, social
media, revolution, cloud based, big data, secure, internet of things,
growth, value, customer focused, digital business, disruptive, data
leaders, big data, insight from data, platform, sustainable, revolution,
culture
(source: https://blog.gardeviance.org/2014/07/a-quick-route-to-building-strategy.html)
Our organisation will overcome [obstacle 1] and
[obstacle 2] in order to achieve [main goal] by [action
1], [action 2] and [action 3].

Ideation:
Mission
statement
WRITE A MISSION STATEMENT OF NO MORE THAN 16WORDS
Our mission is to ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________
In order to ________ ________ ________ ________ ________ ________
For ________ ________ ________
REDUCE TO NO MORE THAN 8WORDS
Our mission is to ________ ________ ________
In order to ________ ________ ________
For ________ ________
REDUCE TO NO MORE THAN 4WORDS
________ ________ ________ ________
(Time box: 16/8/4 mins)

Understanding of
Design Thinking
How it can help
Strategy-making
Tips and Tools

VIDEO: THE LOOP, a short documentary about
design thinking at IBM
ARTICLE: How to create a design-led culture at
your business (Fjord/Accenture)
BOOK: Change By Design (Tim Brown, IDEO)

For a technology-centric organisation,
becoming Design mature is not about
how designers are organized
But about how you support
non-designers to think
with a design mindset!

Thank you!
Feedback and discussion
@goepic_ie
www.adaptcentre.ie
www.goepic.ie