Every business has moments on its journey when it’s time to reflect on past achievements, and think about what the future holds. These are defining moments, so how can you ensure the process is truly effective, generating the most impactful ideas to future-proof the company?
Business design, a combination of creative and strategic thinking, is increasingly being deployed at these vital moments in corporate development.
This approach focuses on reimagining services and business models from the customer’s perspective. It breaks through the corporate silos and works fluidly together with customers and people from different parts of the organization in order to form a balanced view of both business and customer needs. This enables teams to focus on the most relevant opportunities to improve the customer experience, as well as the daily lives of the employees who are delivering these experiences.
Business design brings to life a future vision of what each decision, action or change will mean to people, from employees, through to the end customer and their experience with a brand. This enhances shared understanding, creates common ground for supporting the vision and influences actions and behaviour in the organisation.
At Moving Brands, we use this approach to get to the heart of the customer experience, allowing our clients to see how any idea would manifest in reality. This enables them to envisage what the change would add to a company, rather than take away from it – a commonly held fear around the subject of change.
Marketing Takes the Lead
The process encourages focusing less on analytically slicing the problem, and instead imagining a world without it. This creates optimism and moves the conversation along to identifying the actions that need to take place to make that ‘world’ a reality.
Marketing teams often hold the responsibility for customer insights and engagement and therefore are at the center of many of these transformation programs. They are no strangers to the struggle of successfully working together with other internal teams, for example product design or sales teams. Challenges arise because these teams have different priorities, different ways of working and use different language. Business design has the ability to bring various internal teams together, working towards the same goal, ensuring buy-in across the whole organization.
This powerful technique provides an accessible way for all colleagues to visualize the strategy the business is going to take, and constantly test ideas to establish potential issues or better iterations of the execution.
While utilizing design in business reinvention is gaining attention across industries, many companies still opt to enlist professionals to focus on one particular problem they have identified – dwindling sales, for example.
There is no doubt that this might temporarily solve a specific issue, but the holistic approach offered by business design can deliver more sustainable change within an organization; from the customer or employee experience, to the company culture, or the brand itself. This often delivers a much greater legacy of success, setting the business up more effectively for the future, and unleashing never before imagined opportunities.
Suitable for Any Business
Business design differs from conventional methods by bringing together a multidisciplinary team of strategic, creative and technical thinkers and makers to provide different perspectives and work concurrently on the challenge.
The process can be applied to businesses of all sizes, shapes and goals. At Moving Brands, we have learned that actively designing our engagement model, portfolio of clients and creative process is as important as the quality of the artifacts we create. A lot of the success of an engagement comes from the client’s experience of the journey – the emotional cycle, co-creation, the divergence and convergence of ideas, and the interaction with the team that is built around their needs. We keep our vision of ‘creativity for the moving world’ as our north star but strive to change 1% every week based on our observations on the evolving needs of our clients.
While all businesses are unique in their journeys, ambitions and values, utilizing methods such as business design can provide a better understanding of how to achieve their aims, prepare for the future and equip them to meet inevitable challenges in their future.
Hanna Läikkö is global principal of business design at Moving Brands – an award-winning, independent, global creative business working as one studio across London, San Francisco, New York and Zürich. Hanna combines her experience and insights from 10 years in management consulting with the practices and approaches of creative problem-solving and visioning.
