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Strategic design dimensions

These dimensions are part of my design framework and serve as a foundational element for generating my system definitions. They provide a structured approach to align strategic design practices with systemic change, innovation, and stakeholder engagement. They have been co-written with a custom GPT that help me with the overall coherence and some of the heavy lifting in the backstage. My use of AI is a bit like Grammarly vs Starcraft 2.

Innovation ambition

—Systemic change orientation

The systemic dimension helps frame the extent and nature of the transformation ambition that a project aims to accomplish. Projects may target deceleration and optimization within the current reality, catalyze a transition toward an emerging paradigm, or imagine the groundwork for a radically new reality. Each aspiration level requires distinct approaches, strategies, and considerations to effectively navigate the complexity of systemic change.

Response strategies

  • Business as usual: Not aligned with any change objectives
  • Slow Down: Focus on optimizing and reducing impact within current constraints.
  • Shift: Enable transitions toward an emerging paradigm.
  • New Reality: Imagine systems for a fundamentally different future.

—Systemic Depth

Systemic depth defines the extent to which an intervention engages with the issues it addresses. It provides a continuum, from solving visible and immediate problems to addressing deeply entrenched systemic structures. This dimension helps stakeholders align on the desired depth of engagement, balancing symptoms-level deliverables with ambitions for structural transformation. It also ensures transparency about the scale and complexity of the undertaking.

Depth levels

  • Surface-Level: Addressing visible issues or symptoms with targeted, quick solutions.
  • Focused: Exploring specific components or subsystems to identify root causes.
  • Systemic: Mapping and addressing the interconnected elements of complex systems.
  • Transformative: Redefining fundamental paradigms, frameworks, or structures.

—Challenge appetite

This dimension highlights the degree of interest or eagerness displayed by stakeholders to explore challenging, unfamiliar, or disruptive perspectives. It reflects their willingness to confront assumptions, engage with uncertainties, and consider bold or unconventional ideas. The challenge appetite can influence the scope, depth, and ambition of the intervention

Appetite intensity

  • Low appetite: Limited interest in new or disruptive perspectives.
  • Moderate appetite: Some curiosity about alternative futures and discontinuities.
  • High appetite: Strong desire to engage deeply with challenging ideas.
  • Transformational appetite: Actively seeks radical changes and transformative exploration.

—Strategic funding

This dimension reflects the financial capacity and willingness of the client to allocate resources to the intervention. It helps establish realistic expectations, scope and scalability while ensuring the design and approach align with the client’s financial constraints and strategic priorities.

Budget type

  • Minimal budget: Limited financial capacity, focusing on highly constrained, low-cost solutions. Efforts prioritize efficiency and small-scale, incremental improvements, often requiring significant compromises on scope and ambition.
  • Conservative budget: Moderate financial allocation with a focus on cost-effectiveness. Allows for basic exploration and implementation but limits the depth of research or the breadth of innovative possibilities.
  • Moderate budget: Provides adequate financial resources to support a balanced approach. Enables deeper exploration, robust testing, and iterative processes while maintaining cost-consciousness.
  • Expansive budget: Offers substantial financial resources to pursue ambitious, large-scale interventions. Facilitates comprehensive research, stakeholder engagement, and the exploration of transformative solutions without significant resource constraints.
  • Strategic investment budget: Resources are allocated with a focus on achieving systemic, long-term impact. Prioritizes initiatives that generate high returns on social, environmental, or organizational value, reflecting a commitment to transformative change.

—Internal activation

This dimension reflects the degree to which the primary stakeholder seeks to use the design intervention as a tool for internal advocacy, rallying teams, fostering collective momentum, and driving organizational change from within.

Activation degrees

  1. Low activation: Views the intervention as a standalone activity with no intent to influence or mobilize the broader organization.
  2. Localized activation: Seeks to energize a specific team or department without extending the impact to the wider organization.
  3. Organizational activation: Intends for the intervention to resonate across the organization, creating shared energy, sparking discussions, and aligning teams around a common vision or challenge.
  4. Transformational activation: Uses the intervention as a catalyst for widespread internal advocacy, challenging the status quo, rallying diverse stakeholders and instigating deep cultural and strategic shifts across the organization.

Intervention coordinates

—Social resonance

This dimension reflects the degree to which stakeholders are attuned to and actively respond to social challenges and inequalities. It measures their willingness to engage with and address systemic issues that impact communities, emphasizing their level of alignment with socially innovative approaches to create meaningful change.

Resonance types

  • Blaming: Not only detached from social challenges but actively attributes responsibility for social problems to the affected individuals or communities. This level reinforces stereotypes and dismisses systemic factors, often perpetuating harmful narratives that justify inaction or resistance to change.
  • Detached: Displays little awareness or concern for social challenges. Social issues are seen as external to the organization’s core objectives, with minimal effort to understand or address them.
  • Superficial: Demonstrates basic acknowledgment of social problems but addresses them in a limited or symbolic manner. Actions are often disconnected from systemic understanding and focus on surface-level initiatives.
  • Aligned: Shows a genuine commitment to understanding and engaging with social challenges. Stakeholders take meaningful steps to incorporate socially innovative approaches into their strategies and practices, aiming for measurable impact.
  • Catalytic: Fully resonates with social challenges and prioritizes transformative action. Stakeholders actively seek to drive systemic change, collaborating with affected communities and leveraging innovation to address root causes of inequity and injustice.

—Climate crisis awareness

This dimension reflects the degree to which stakeholders acknowledge, understand, and act upon the realities of the climate crisis. It measures their awareness of the interconnected challenges posed by climate change and their willingness to take meaningful action to mitigate its impacts and adapt systems for resilience.

Levels

  • Denial: Rejects or actively denies the existence or severity of the climate crisis. Stakeholders downplay scientific consensus, dismiss evidence, and often perpetuate narratives that shift blame onto individuals or vulnerable communities.
  • Minimization: Acknowledges climate change as a peripheral issue but treats it as a distant or manageable concern. Efforts are limited to small, symbolic actions without addressing systemic drivers or engaging in substantial mitigation or adaptation measures.
  • Recognition: Accepts the seriousness of the climate crisis and its systemic implications. Stakeholders begin integrating climate considerations into decision-making, taking moderate steps toward emissions reductions, sustainability, and resilience-building.
  • Proactive engagement: Demonstrates a deep understanding of the climate crisis and actively works to align strategies with climate science. Stakeholders prioritize decarbonization, regenerative practices, and system-level changes to contribute meaningfully to climate mitigation and adaptation.
  • Transformative action: Fully internalizes the urgency of the climate crisis, embedding climate justice and planetary boundaries into every aspect of decision-making. Stakeholders embrace a leadership role in driving systemic change, fostering resilience, and empowering communities to thrive in a changing climate.

—Ethical parameters

The ethical dimension focuses on ensuring interventions remain transparent, inclusive, and sensitive to risks, particularly related to data. Shared ethical principles enable trust and accountability among stakeholders throughout the intervention.

Ethical aspects

  • Consent: Ensuring informed and voluntary participation from all individuals involved.
  • Inclusion: Ensuring diverse voices are heard and represented.
  • Transparency: Promoting openness about goals, methods, and processes.
  • Data Sensitivity: Managing data responsibly to protect privacy and compliance.
  • Cultural Sensitivity: Recognizing and respecting cultural differences to avoid harm or misrepresentation.
  • Participatory Design: Actively involving affected communities in shaping the intervention to ensure relevance and appropriateness.

—Epistemic Fields

The epistemic dimension organizes the processes of knowledge creation, validation, and sharing within interventions. Collaborative efforts are supported through clarity in knowledge rigor and its relevance to the intervention.

Fields

  • Sensemaking: Translating fragmented observations into coherent insights.
  • Knowledge Generation: Producing original research and novel perspectives.
  • Validation: Testing and verifying insights to ensure credibility and applicability.
  • Sharing: Disseminating knowledge in accessible, actionable formats.
  • Paradigm Interrogation: Challenging entrenched norms and assumptions.
  • Insight Coalescence: Synthesizing diverse inputs into unified, actionable outputs.

Process dimension

—Inclusion scope

This dimension describes the extent to which the intervention involves and includes the individuals, groups, or communities directly affected or concerned by the challenge or problem it seeks to address.

Scopes

  1. Minimal inclusion: the intervention focuses on addressing the challenge from within the organization, with little or no engagement of external stakeholders or affected groups.
  2. Consultative inclusion: involves limited input from selected individuals or groups (e.g., collaborators, customers, or communities) to inform the intervention, often through structured formats like surveys or interviews.
  3. Collaborative inclusion: actively engages a diverse range of affected stakeholders as co-creators or partners in shaping the intervention, ensuring their voices and perspectives influence outcomes.
  4. Transformational inclusion: embeds the people affected or concerned by the challenge at the core of the intervention, giving them significant decision-making power and creating solutions that are deeply rooted in their lived experiences and needs.

—Innovation process stage

This dimension identifies how early the intervention is within the broader innovation process, providing a clear understanding of its position along the continuum from discovery to implementation. By situating the intervention in the innovation journey, this dimension helps define the scope, ambition, and methods to be used, aligning stakeholder expectations and ensuring the right level of engagement for the stage.

Stages

  • Discovery: The very beginning of the innovation process. The focus is on identifying broad challenges, uncovering unmet needs, and exploring new possibilities. Activities often include horizon scanning, weak signal analysis, ethnographic research, and conceptual framing.
  • Definition: Still in the early phases but more focused than discovery. This stage involves synthesizing insights, defining the problem space, and establishing a clear direction or challenge to address. Stakeholders align on priorities and key objectives.
  • Exploration: Transitioning toward ideation and concept generation. Multiple potential solutions are explored and tested through early prototypes or models. This stage aims to balance creativity with feasibility, refining ideas into actionable concepts.
  • Development: Ideas are developed into concrete, testable solutions. Prototypes are iterated based on feedback, and early pilots may be conducted to validate assumptions and prepare for scaling. The focus is on refining the solution for practical application.
  • Scaling and implementation: Solutions are finalized and rolled out to a broader audience. Activities include creating detailed implementation plans, ensuring sustainability, and addressing operational challenges. The focus shifts to embedding innovation into the system or market.

—Temporal Scale

The temporal scale helps stakeholders synchronize the pacing and duration of design activities. Time is framed to balance project urgency with sustained, impactful results.

Timeframes

  • Rapid: Prioritizing speed and efficiency for urgent needs.
  • Iterative: Emphasizing repeated cycles of testing and refinement.
  • Deep/Immersive: Allocating significant time for thorough engagement and research.
  • Sustained: Supporting long-term efforts to enable systemic change.
  • Hybrid: Combining short-term and long-term approaches.

Deliverable dimensions

—Temporal Horizons

This dimension defines the time horizons of interventions, supporting alignment on short-term deliverables and long-term impacts. It ensures a balance between responding to present needs and building a sustainable foundation for the future.

Horizons

  • Short-Term: Delivering immediate, actionable outcomes.
  • Mid-Term: Planning incremental scaling or adjustments.
  • Long-Term: Designing for enduring systemic change.
  • Intergenerational: Addressing impacts across multiple generations.

—Output Tangibility

The tangibility of outputs dimension categorizes deliverables to align with stakeholder expectations, ensuring clarity in the nature and intent of project outputs. It highlights the spectrum of outputs, from conceptual to practical, ensuring all deliverables are purpose-driven and contextually relevant.

Artifact categories

  • Abstract Frameworks: Conceptual deliverables, such as frameworks, theories, roadmaps, or strategic plans that outline long-term goals and possible futures.
  • Policy and Governance Recommendations: Structured proposals for decision-making, including policy recommendations, manifestos, and scalable solutions tailored for broad application.
  • Concrete Deliverables: Tangible outputs, such as tools, policies, guidelines, toolkits, and pilot programs that support implementation and scale-up.
  • Prototypes and Demonstrations: Functional or semi-functional prototypes, immersive installations, and concept demonstrations that allow stakeholders to engage with and test ideas.
  • Visual and Narrative Tools: Infographics, maps, visualizations, storytelling formats (e.g., scenarios or videos), and reflective artifacts that simplify complex ideas and provoke discussion.
  • Collaborative Artifacts: Co-created materials, such as sketches, collages, or brainstorming outputs, supported by workshops, training sessions, and knowledge repositories.
  • Documentation and Analysis: Detailed written reports, ethnographic artifacts, and databases that capture research, insights, and cultural or behavioral contexts.
  • Speculative Outputs: Visionary and predictive deliverables, such as speculative prototypes, scenarios, and forecasts that explore future possibilities.

—Level of Fidelity

The level of fidelity dimension determines the precision and maturity of outputs produced at various stages of an intervention. It provides stakeholders with a clear understanding of the trade-offs between exploratory concepts and fully realized deliverables. By aligning expectations for the fidelity of outputs, this dimension supports informed decision-making and ensures resources are used effectively.

Levels

  • Early and Exploratory: Low-fidelity outputs for open-ended exploration.
  • Iterative and Evolving: Medium-fidelity outputs refined through ongoing feedback and iteration.
  • Mature and Validated: High-fidelity, fully tested deliverables ready for implementation.
  • Speculative and Visionary: Outputs designed to provoke discussion and explore potential futures without requiring full validation.
  • Scenario Testing: Simulated environments or conditions for evaluating how a deliverable performs under different variables.
  • Stakeholder Engagement Outputs: Artifacts designed to solicit input and foster alignment among diverse stakeholders.
  • Scalable Outputs: Deliverables designed with adaptability for broader application in mind.