Design Thinking and Digital Intent, Part 2

Shifting from Strategic to Digital

Organizations love renaming things. In part, this is a result of the imitation conundrum. It’s much easier to change a name and tinker with things around the edges in an attempt to drive success than it is to recreate whole parts of a business or processes. This is also a result of simple laziness to some degree. But where leaders are truly committed to success, they recognize the fact that times change, and their business must change with them. What might not have worked in the past may indeed work now, after some lessons have been learned.

In this time of digital transformation, the concept of strategic intent is still present, but has morphed somewhat into digital intent. Their roles are not very different. However, we’re now framing intent as the foundational stepping stone of an effort to ensure that business and organizational activities and processes leverage the changes and opportunities of digital technologies in a strategic way.

In discussing the concept of digital intent in Part 1 of this series, I tied it to the process of design thinking. Just as, in design thinking, we always ask “How might we…?” conceiving a digital intent follows the same approach. Here are some examples of digital intents:

• How might we get from being a culture of days to a culture of minutes?
• How might we enable quicker decision-making?
• How might we reduce the number of manual touchpoints / interventions?
• How might we increase our resource capacity—by reducing the number of hours per task—and also lower risk—for example, by touching fewer systems?
• How might we shift our workforce to doing more strategic work?
• How might we help our workforce to become more proactive and less reactive?

As you can see, the purpose of all of these digital intents is to ground organizations as they embark on their digital-transformation journey. These sorts of digital intents are the foundational elements of large, transformational efforts and define highly strategic business problems that we need to solve. Defining such digital intents is the key to a successful design-thinking session or design sprint. Failing to recognize the importance of digital intents ensures that innovation and creative thinking remain relegated to the independent actions of teams instead of their being interwoven into an organization’s larger digital-transformation initiatives.

Take Time for Design Thinking, but Get to Doing Quickly

Any transformation takes some time. But capturing digital intents through a design-thinking process allow us to accomplish a digital transformation in small, manageable pieces. This is why it is so critical to involve top-level executive leadership in design-thinking sessions. If only mid-level management participate in design-thinking sessions, they won’t be able to define the overall strategic vision of the organization. Why? Because mid-level management is not generally empowered to look beyond the tactical stretch goals they must execute in the near term. In contrast, top-level management, at the very least, is supposed to be able to understand how these digital intents fit together and move an organization forward on its digital-transformation journey. I have seen the design-thinking process break down just because of having the wrong people involved.

Some think, “This is a great process, but we just can’t do it.” Sometimes folks are not set up to pivot when innovative or new ideas present themselves, as they so often do coming out of a design-thinking process. There is not enough design doing happening. Many organizations are thinking of innovation on an individual level rather than as a pervasive way of life within the organization. Be sure to take your time with design thinking, but make sure that all of its outcomes translate into action quickly. Be sure you actually capture the design thinking as digital intents and real working prototypes.

Some say that innovation can either enable a company to grow exponentially or cause it to go bankrupt. The differences between these two outcomes are numerous, but one simple idea is consistent: Think strategically and ensure that the digital intents you capture actually speak to your organization’s core strengths—or are at least achievable. Tie digital intents to your organization’s strategic initiatives and ensure that they move the organization forward.

This is an exciting time to be in design. The way we execute on solving the challenges that lie before us can either ensure that design remains an important part of business strategy or that it does not. It is up to us to carry this mission forward.