Your Strategic Future

You probably don't know a thing about me, so just let me really quickly cover some basics because it's gonna become material to what I'm trying to share with you. I've been a designer my entire career. I'm a classically trained car designer, industrial designer. And then through my career, I've added lots and lots of new skills. And through that process, it's been forever frustrating that the kind of conversations that we're talking about, the tools that we're developing, didn't exist back then at the beginning of my career.

I grew up in interaction design when interaction design was like becoming a thing, and it caused us to rethink everything we knew about design. And so a lot of the reason why I'm here and then I've consulted for large and small organizations in a variety of industries. I've started companies. I've sold some of them.

Some we just had to put to bed. And along the way, I've been an educator for most of the last thirty years. I write a lot of books, etcetera. But the thing that drives me to do that is because I don't want you to have to, like, squander your time trying to build tools and learn skills, etcetera, that we have known about for twenty years. I want you to be able to build new tools and discover new territory.

And so I teach and I write books because I want to get those the experiences that I've had and the tools that I've found and the skills that I've understood to be important out as quickly as possible. So that really informs why I'm here today because Oh, by the way, anyone here have an MBA? Okay. I will be somewhat I have an MBA too along the way, that was one of the things I did to get skills.

I will be somewhat, if not greatly disparaging of the business world and MBAs. I'm not talking about you. I'm not even so much talking about me, but sometimes. The reason for that is what I learned in business school and it was not even the traditional business program, were a lot of misconceptions about what business should be, how it should be practiced, and especially how it viewed design and what we do.

Everyone in this room, if you're a designer, a design researcher, maybe you're a design adjacent, you are probably able to become a much better strategist than anyone that went and got an MBA, anyone that went to business school. And I'll be talking about why, but I know that sounds maybe incredulous to a lot of you because m business school is sort of like a black box.

Even when I created my own MBA program at California College of the Arts, I would sometimes hear my students say to each other, well, they're at Stanford. They're in a real business program. And I'm like, what do you think you're learning or they're learning that you're not? Right? So there's this sort of magical black box that business school represents.

And I'm here to tell you, there's not a lot in that black box that is magic. Certainly, there's nothing magical. They're all just a set of skills that you can learn, and the skills that you already have as a designer and especially as a design researcher are probably way more important to strategy than any of the skills that are taught in an MBA program, specifically sort of a traditional MBA program.

I'm gonna go out on a limb and say, these are the skills for a post AI world. I call them the four S's, the four C's. These are the things that AI is not good at and may never be good at, but who knows? Maybe maybe some of it gets good at. And this isn't just a rethinking of design education because it turns out a lot of this is already part of a good design education and that might be art, it might be architecture, etcetera.

This is where we need to go with education writ large and new forms of learning, because STEM was always the wrong direction. It was the wrong direction in the beginning, and now AI is proving that it's not a very resilient set of skills. These are the ones that we should be really emphasizing in education. I'm not going to talk about critical thinking or creative thinking.

If you're in the design industry, you know those things very well. I'm not going to talk a lot about communication skills and collaboration skills. They're incredibly critical, of course. There are some new tools. If you've ever heard of generative, communication or conversations for action, anywhere you see sort of a URL like that, I put tools online at my website. I have videos.

You'll see little markings like this, videos of some of my lectures that are online. So if you want to learn more about these things, that's the place that you might start. But I want to get these tools out to you so that you don't have to spend your time and years reinventing where other people have already gone.

I'm not going to talk about sustainability and social impact, even though they're incredibly important, because we have some new tools. We have sustainability scorecards and social impact inventories. We have ledgers of potential harms. And you should all familiarize yourself with them and then start using them in your projects, even if you're not asked to by your clients or your leaders, because those are part of your responsibilities, which is sort of what we've been talking about for two days, right?

I'm gonna concentrate on these skills because they're intimately related. And because I think designers are really well experienced and formulated to do these better than most people, partly because of how we've been brought up.

Also, aside from that, everyone should be involved with strategy. We've sort of heard that from a couple of speakers already, not necessarily about strategy, but about everyone being part of the process, especially people who are maybe disadvantaged and not usually brought into these conversations. They need to be brought into the conversations and be part of decision making, the co design, the co production, etcetera.

This is where design sort of lives in most I'm sorry, this is where strategy lives in most organizations. It's a couple special people that get to participate. Maybe they ask for data and some participated, some limited participation from others in the organization. But this is really what it needs to look like. It needs to be all the people that are involved with delivering customer experiences, dealing with customers even if they're not in charge of the delivery.

The three best places to get customer insight about the experience: design research, a lot of us are in the room Customer service, and we know what experiences they're having and the kind of information they're, gathering. And salespeople. But it's I've never seen an organization where those three groups of people are in the discussion, certainly not in the strategy discussion, but are even talking to each other.

Okay. So let's talk about where strategy happens. I know this is a funky looking diagram. This is a traditional sort of development design diagram. As we heard from a speaker just a couple hours ago, this has been compressed because of the new tools that we're using. And we've heard from many speakers about the double diamond. Right? We're all familiar with the double diamond?

Great. Okay. I'm here to tell you there's a third diamond. And it's invisible to most people, most people in business, in fact. That other diamond is what happens over here. So in this side of the development process, it's really product focused, which is to say mostly service focused or sometimes there's other kinds of offerings. This is where all the important decisions get made.

This is where corporate strategy happens or business strategy. That's where people not usually us decide what kind of business should we even be in. Who should be our market? Who should be our customers? What should we be doing in the first place? And that's the strategy diamond. This is the diamond that you are probably not asked to participate in. Mina earlier talked about getting a seat at the table.

This is where the table lives. And this is where I'm confident that with the right sort of, development and experience, you can participate in that diamond. In fact, it's really critical that you do because that is where all the strategy and intents are decided, etcetera. How many people have ever gotten a product brief, or project brief, or creative brief, and looked at it, and the first thing you think is, who thinks we should be making this?

Like, who decided this is what and I've seen it a zillion times. Like, oh, we need an app for the Gen Z. It's like, no, no, no. They don't want anything to do with us. They they use apps, but not for us. Right? Or maybe it's a website or something else. That's a really common experience that designers and other developers, engineers, project managers, etcetera, have. Why is that the case?

Well, that decision got made way over here. By the time you get it in development, then it's too late. You you know, you don't get to go back and tell all those people they made the wrong decision. The best you can do as a developer, again, the engineering side or the design side, is try to make that thing that you know is wrong as good as it possibly can be.

And that's not very satisfying as a developer, especially as a designer, Especially when you're seeing you're so close to the market and to customers and you see other possibilities and you see competitors. It's really frustrating to know you're working on the wrong thing. Okay. So what happens when we do design research or when we talk to the customer service people or if you can get the time of the sales or business development people is that we get this really valuable insight into what how they live, what they need, what they want, what they desire, what they don't even know that they desire, etcetera. The fruits of design research cause us to reframe, and that's why we realize, like, no, we shouldn't be making a website, an app, a whatever.

We need to be doing this other thing altogether. But again, when you're on the design development side, it's too late. So our strategy needs to be, how do we get into that diamond? And if we can't get invited into it, which is not probably going to happen for a little bit for you, unfortunately, we need to at least get our insights into that diamond, into that process, so that what comes back out more closely resembles what we think is going to be a satisfying or successful thing that we then get to design the best way we know how.

But we're now working on the right thing, not just trying to make the pig look as beautiful as possible. Okay. In strategy, this sort of is how things divide. This comes out of sort of the military. You have two kinds of strategies: situational strategy, which is all about different contexts. And this is what I've learned in my career, is constantly learning learning new skills and using new tools to see the other contexts. And we've heard about a lot of these contexts through the speakers, today and especially yesterday, but most market strategy, and this is where I'm gonna come down really hard on how business people are educated and therefore how they practice, most market strategy does not even look at all those contexts.

So right off the bat, their strategy is really limited because their view of what they're looking at is incredibly limited. And of course, there are more and more contexts that we as designers are used to researching, understanding, working with already, and that those fall out into even more contexts.

And we're actually really good at all this once we have the tools and the skills to go understand that information, to research it. We're actually really good at using it as a design material. That's all the situation situational strategy. Then there's the operational strategy. And this is like how things work. This is where we're usually pretty bad as designers, because the reason why we went into design is we didn't want to do any of this. Right? I don't want to deal with the finances or the operations. But this is where our peers are.

And if we want to work successfully in a system, whether that's our company or another kind of organization or our client, we sort of can't ignore these things. You don't have to get an MBA. Don't have to go be experts at all of these things. But at the very least, we have to recognize that they exist and they're tantamount to us developing better products and services, better offerings, etcetera. So now is where I'm going to really dump on the business world and strategy.

Because I truly believe that traditional strategy, which is the same most strategy, is terrible. It's slow. It's incredibly sloppy. It's ridiculously expensive, especially for how poor the strategy is. I don't know how how many people in this room are suspicious of the strategy that they've seen or dissatisfied with.

Right? It's because they weren't looking at the right things, they didn't draw the right conclusions, they didn't even realize some of those contacts and lenses even existed, and then they just sped right along. Traditional strategists, traditional business people and it's not their fault, I mean it sort of is but this is how they were taught. So we can have a little pity on them that they weren't taught better, but, you know, at some point pity ends and you just sort of have to expect more of people, especially if they're getting paid a whole hell of a lot.

Okay. Who here has ever done a SWOT analysis? Okay. Or if you haven't done one, know what one is or saw one created. Most people in this room raise their hand. I am sad to say you have done it wrong. You were taught to do it wrong. Like you have all the accountability that you weren't taught well.

Almost every SWOT analysis is done wrong for a variety of reasons. For those of you that maybe don't know what a SWOT analysis is, this is simply a two by two quadrant exercise that the way that it's actually put into practice almost universally is a bunch of people, special people that get to be in the room, sit in a room and draw this on a whiteboard, and then they sort of just start listing things.

Like, oh, these are our strengths, these are our weaknesses, etcetera. And there's a bunch of problems with this. The first is that they almost always mix the market issues with the operational issues. And when you put those things together, because people have responsibilities in their business, the operational stuff always crowds out the market stuff. So the SWAT that ends up happening becomes overly operationally focused, and then the market, which is customers and what we should be doing in the first place, gets sort of pushed to the side. Does that sound like a good recipe for go to market?

No. Right? But this is how it happens. And then, of course, nobody validates anything that gets put on these lists, right? So yeah, like if you went to Stanford, if you're a Stanford MBA, the first thing you put is like, we went to Stanford. Is that a criteria that your customers care about? No. Well, unless your customers are a VC fund, maybe.

That's a special case, right? So none of these things are validated with evidence. This is where designers have a really good opportunity because, first of all, these should be what are called customer decision drivers. They shouldn't just be stuff we willy nilly put on a whiteboard because it occurred to us that it might be important or interesting.

But we know how to find those things in a way that most of our peers that are doing strategy don't. Okay. Next up. Anyone ever heard of a positioning statement? Right? Everyone. And how do you do a positioning statement? Anyone? Yeah? Yeah. You download a template and you fill it in and, like, oof, we have a positioning statement.

And it has the same problem, which is, where did we validate what we put into those blank spaces? Are those the best things? Are they even the real things? This is where the sloppiness of strategy starts and usually ends because this is essentially have a is game.

This is Mad Libs, right? And so most strategy is done in a really Mad Libsy kind of way. It's what someone thought about at the time. They didn't bother to validate it. It may or may not be important. But hey, we filled in. We checked that box, we're moving forward. There's new tools now. This is called the strategy choice cascade.

Anyone want to venture what's wrong with this one? Yes. Say it louder. I'm sorry. I did not hear that. Anyone close to her hear that? I know you weren't ready for her. Anyone else have an idea of what's wrong?

She said that she used it at work. Oh, you used it at work. Okay. And was that helpful, or was it yeah, why? It's just again, it doesn't have no evidence. It's just Bless you because I've never actually met anyone that's used it.

But, yeah, the big problem is these aren't bad questions to have answers to. But, like, where's the customer? Where's the market? Where's the them? It's all about us, us, me, me, we, we, we, Right? And so these tools are like, this is the latest strategy tool that's come out of Rotman in Toronto. And again, it's not a terrible tool.

It's just a really sloppy tool, and it's been used really sloppily. And thank God that someone, you know, validated that that's in fact what happens in the wild. Okay. I'm gonna share with you what should be a shocking bit of information. This was a report that McKinsey came out with right before we went into lockdown. So this is '19 or 2020, rather.

And in it they coined a term for what they call the superstar companies. And these are the ones that, like, they're the high growth companies. And basically what they said is these companies are creating not just all the growth in the market in their industry, whatever industry it is, they're creating all the value. Like it's just 15% of companies.

And this is all companies worldwide, private or public. They have another word or term that they claim for the other 85% of the companies, and that was zombie companies. And they said 85. I'm going to be a little more fair and say 70 because you can see, like, even that last 15%, like, they're going somewhere.

They're improving a little bit. But think about that for a moment. 70 of companies worldwide, according to McKinsey, are like going nowhere. In fact, lot of them are in trouble. And I'm sure you can in The US, I'm much better at this, but that's Macy's.

That's why Kmart is no longer although I'm surprised and delighted to find out that Kmart's doing great over here. But that's a shocking situation. And it should be terrifying, not just to business people, but anyone that cares about global business. And all of those companies, or at least most of those companies, they buy strategy. They're buying strategy from either consultants or large companies or even mid sized companies, and it's not helping them.

And that's because the strategy that they're doing or that is being done for them isn't looking at all the right things. And so it's probably even worse today, six years later, with AI. This is probably even more pronounced. That last 15% is probably 5%. It's all NVIDIA and OpenAI and other AI companies, and that should be even more scary.

But this is sort of my evidence that this isn't working. Strategy is not working for anyone. So how do we make it better? The first thing we need to acknowledge is we need to care about why people make their buying decisions, and those are called decision drivers. And those decision drivers fall in a whole bunch of categories, and function, meaning features, and price are not the big driving decisions on any sort of decision.

Certainly any buying decision. But price and features or price and performance is what every single MBA is taught to care about, focus on, and forget about anything else. That's part of the problem at the heart of business. So we need to reset our understanding or our definition of what value is. There are five kinds of value.

And again, the first two: functional value does this do what I need it to do financial value does it do it at a price that I can afford or I'm willing to spend that's where business stops, the quantitative value. Why? Because it's really easy. Easy to survey this stuff, easy to tabulate it, easy to express it as numbers. And because business strategy is so very sloppy, that's where they stop. But we all know, because we're in the business of people, that people make decisions for a lot of other reasons.

And those reasons are really important. We've heard about it from speakers in the last two days. There are three other kinds of value. They've always been there. We just don't talk about them. And they're qualitative. There's emotional value. What does this do for me? The classic example is, you know, I'm a man of a certain age. And so if I walk into a car dealership, and of course I have a family.

I have certain functional needs. I need a sedan or a minivan or something because I have kids and we go on holiday, etcetera. But what is it in the corner that keeps distracting my attention? Yeah. What color is it? Yeah. We all know this story. Who knows this story better than anyone?

The sales person. Yeah. The salesperson. This is their entire job is to pick up on this. If they don't care what my budget is certainly what I told them my budget is, if I even bothered to do that they don't care so much about my functional requirement because they can see exactly what's happening. And me, the rational engineer y kind of person or business person that I am, as I'm driving the curvy way home along the coast and I get into my driveway, and I walk to the front door, I look back lovingly, and then it hits me.

What did the what the fuck did I just do? Like, there's only two seats in this. Like, where are my kids again? And there's no room for luggage. And I went over budget. Like, how I'm a rational person. How did this happen? That's how it happened. Because it made me feel something that overrided my other choice. Right? It overrided my functional criteria and my financial criteria.

Maybe it made me feel younger or more successful or more virile or lots of other stuff. We call this irrational. It's totally rational. You all understand exactly what happened. This thing made me feel these things gave me lots of emotional value, so much so that it overrode all the other things that I say I care about, and specifically I say I care about them in a survey.

And yet, the reality is completely different. This is why salespeople know exactly what's going on with customers in a way that nobody in the marketing department does, because they don't bother to talk to the people in sale. It's also one of the reasons why the customer service people know customers in a way that other people in the organization don't because they get all the emotions, not just the good ones.

And then, of course, we as design researchers have the skills to go out and talk to people if we put these things in our process. And we have tools for these things. We're only halfway through this list, right? And things got really interesting. There's also identity value, you know, like is this me? Would I be am I a Mac guy or a Windows guy or an Android guy or an iOS guy or, a Fairphone guy or whatever? Am I a Coke guy, a Pepsi guy, a Perrier guy, a Kombucha guy?

Or whatever, right? Identity is really important to a lot of buyers, especially in certain categories. It's weird. Like humans are just weird. Accept it. It's really kind of fun to play with. But it's imperative that we understand our customers on this level. Because the deeper we go, the more powerful these decision drivers are.

And you can see right off the bat why most strategy is sloppy. They're not even asking these questions. They don't even know what's going on with the customers at the deepest level of their decision making. And of course, there's one even deeper that's about meaningful value. And we have a model, we have mechanisms for researching, understanding meaning in our customers, what they prioritize, what triggers them, or how they express meaning, And we can use it then as a design material.

One: And that better go into strategy, because if we're not talking about this, we're just in la la land. We're doing the same sloppy strategy that McCronesia. Is doing. And like you can do better. I'm here to tell you, you can do a lot better. By the way, this is a much better way to segment your customers, especially if you want to create meaningful value and meaningful experiences for people. And I hear from a lot of designers that that's really what drives them.

They wanna make meaningful things both for themselves and customers. Then your segmentation should reflect where people have priorities of meaning because if your segmentation's all demographic, for instance, which is just the stupidest way to treat people, but it's easy because it's easy to express in numbers. But if that's your approach to segmenting a market, you can't back your way into meaning from that.

Like, it's all over. It's up hill like a cliff. It's going to be really difficult to approach those emotional, those identity, and those meaningful decision drivers. And this stuff is it's valuable. That's all I'll say. At some point, it comes to quantitative it's always hard to quant the qual, but at some point, it happens, and sometimes that's the market cap. Right? So a good example of this is Instagram when it got purchased by Facebook Now Meta.

We know what the numbers were. We know it was a $1,100,000,000 deal that at the time seemed absurd. Right now it doesn't seem so absurd. And we can look at the books and see that the financial accounting of the company at that time said that it was an $86,000,000 company. The next day it was a $1,100,000,000 company and even though we're designers, we can do that kind of math, right?

There was an extra billion dollars off the books. And the day after the sale, where do you put the billion dollars? Like, because it didn't exist yesterday. And accountants have this special place to put it in the, balance sheet. It's called goodwill. Meaning we don't know what to do with it. So we'll just put it here in goodwill because we've got to balance things out. But it was literally invisible the day before.

It did not exist. And the reason why I'm using this metaphor of a iceberg is because all of this is invisible to business tools and business processes. They cannot see it. Our business peers cannot see this value because it's totally invisible to them, which means it's totally unaddressed and invisible in their decision making.

Right? So now we know how that stupid design brief or product brief got decided because they don't even see the things that we see and that we value. This is why you're so valuable to the strategy process because you see this stuff. You have skills, you have tools, you have processes to understand people on this level and to use it as a design material. And hopefully, you know, hopefully you do this for good, not for bad. That's going to be your responsibility.

We now have some academic research. This showed up a little bit yesterday. But this is the BJ Fogg behavior model that talks about behavior change. How do people change behavior? Why is this important? Because every business strategy is about changing people's behavior, whether it's customers or partners or competitors, etcetera.

Where does behavior change happen? Right up here. So if you don't understand the cognitive psychology about how people make decisions and what they factor in to make the behavior, again, you're not even playing the game. You're not on the board. You're on some other board on another table in another room because you're not even looking at the stuff that's absolutely critical.

People are doing one thing now. If you're a startup, you want them to do this new thing. That's behavior change. That happens up here. It's called state of mind. Right? And so if this doesn't factor in your strategy, you don't probably have a winning strategy. And I know that sort of the cognitive side part of this is going to be new to you.

That's probably something you haven't seen before. Not going to be hard for you to grasp, by the way. This comes down to, at its basis, basics, qual versus quant. And a lot of businesses, especially business people, frame up this phony tension or dichotomy between qual and quant.

Mostly because they're really familiar and comfortable with quant, so they do a lot of it. And they're really suspicious. There's some people that are absolutely suspicious about Qual. They don't think it exists at all because it's so invisible. But even if they do think it exists, like it's expensive and it's hard and I can get 1,000 responses to my survey.

And how can you do 100 or 1,000 interviews? We don't have the budget for that, right? It's not an either or. It necessarily has to be a both and. But many of your business peers, they don't see it that way. They don't understand it that way because they don't even understand the half of it, let alone, I'm going to accept that we have to do something that I don't think is real or I don't know how to do.

But the reality is, if you want to do good strategy, you need both the qual and the quant. And again, you have these skills. Maybe there's a couple new techniques like laddering that you have to learn to understand how to research meaning or identity, etcetera, but you have all the skills to make this happen. By the way, the quant and the qual is a much larger societal problem. Quant is killing the world because it's taking over our understanding, our framing, our decision making about everything.

Quanta's ruining sports. It's ruining food. It's ruining science. It's certainly ruining physics. It's ruining marketing and business strategy. It's ruining sort of everything because when you take your eye off or you deny the qualities in the world, guess what? They go away. Right?

And so we're designing systems, and this is part of the frustrations that I think you all feel, I certainly feel, especially where I live right now. We're designing the qualities out of society because we're trying to measure everything and the only easy way to measure things is to put numbers around them. In fact, there's a myth of business that is every MBA is taught, if you can't measure it, you can't manage it.

And I'm here to say, like, yes, you can. We can all probably sit down for an hour, especially collectively, and figure out a decent way to measure quality of life or customer happiness. And it's not NPS. That was a boneheaded approach. But, you know, like And even if you can't measure it, that doesn't mean it's not important.

I can't remember who just put up in the last two or three presentations about devising or valuing the measuring the value of design. If anyone asks you to prove the value of design, don't fall into that trap. Don't accept the premise of the question, because they only mean quant, and the moment you accept that as a premise, you just lost. Because there is no way to quant all the quality. What's the value of a beautiful view on a top of a mountain versus what's the value of mining all the gold or minerals inside it? You are never gonna win that if if you stick to quant as the deciding factor, etcetera.

Okay. So I already said we we find this in sort of those three areas, biz dev sales, customer service, and design thinking. And before someone says this, or if anyone ever says this to you, well, what about b to b? Like, my my customers only care about price. They have a budget. Right? I'm here to tell you that as long as you're dealing with another human, and that's kind of falling into question now, right, with AI, as long as there's a person in the equation, this is just as true for B2B as it is for B2C.

And if you ever question that well, you won't probably, but someone around you will who can finish and Mark, you can't do this, and John and Steve, you're probably too old for this. Who can finish this question? Nobody ever got fired for hiring Well, yeah, you know this. We all grew up with this.

IBM, right? IBM was never the cheapest. So there goes the price, you know, argument. They were never the best. So there goes the functional value argument. What is the number one decision driver in enterprise? Anyone? You know it's a trick question.

Yeah, but a specific kind of risk. Reputation. Sorry? Reputation? Yeah, job security. If this goes south, I don't want to lose my job. So I'm going to hire the company that, like, well, if they couldn't build it, it obviously couldn't get billed. You can't blame me for that decision. Number one decision driver that's why it's important to uncover these In enterprises, I don't want to lose my jobs.

I'm going to go with the safe I'm going to mitigate my risk choice. Right? Is that what the customer told you? No. They probably don't realize it themselves. And even if they do, they're certainly not going to tell you this. Right? But if you're in enterprise sales, if you're running you're still trying to run a SaaS company, and you don't realize that that's the number one decision driver, like, what are you even doing?

You're not playing the game again because you don't understand what your customers' behavior change metrics or mechanisms, triggers are. How could you possibly be successful? Right? Okay. So let's talk a little bit more about strategy. I call this the periodic table of strategy. And it is I guarantee you, everything you need to consider for strategy is up there on that board.

It's sort of like, oh, not Wheel of Fortune. What is Jeopardy! Right? Okay. So all the pieces that you need to address are there, whether you choose to or not. And I guarantee you that most of the people doing strategy in the organizations they're around or a part of are not looking at all these pieces. And you don't have to spend a day or a week on each one, Even if you were just to spend maybe five or ten or fifteen minutes on some of them, especially the ones in gold and the ones sort of in black and white in the middle, you will do better strategy than anyone that has a strategy title or anyone has a degree in strategy, etcetera.

The first two lines are the most important. You can't really eliminate those. So there's the market sequence, which is all about taking the customer decision drivers and moving them through either segmentation, but then competitive analysis. Then that sort of figures out your environmental analysis. That gives you your best position.

That automatically identifies your best opportunities and your biggest threats, and that leads you to the framing of what should we be offering in the market based on those opportunities. How do we make use of those opportunities? What's critical here is that you have to do the whole sequence, and you have to do all the steps, and you have to do it in the sequence of these six pieces because the output of one module or process is the input to the next one.

So one of the big problems with strategy is, you know, you have a strategic team and you put these folks on the positioning, you put those folks on the customer, whatever, because you're not really looking at what what your customers need. Put these ones on the competition, and then we all sort of push it together and see what we did.

But everyone's using different criteria. They've identified different issues. If they've designed identified decision drivers at all, they're not consistent across all those three things. So they don't go together. You have to start on the left and move through to the right. It doesn't take forever. But I guarantee you, when you get to the end, you will have found the best opportunities for that client or your company, etcetera.

You'll also have teed up the best messages or elements for doing your external messaging to those customers later. Then when you've said, this is what we're going to do because this is the best things that we can offer in taking advantage of the operations or the opportunities we see. Now you take it into operations and you do the operational sequence.

You have to do it that order. What happens if you do it the reverse? You can yell it out or you don't have to. You essentially reverse the process and you build what you wanted to build in the first place, which is a lot of tech startups, right? And then you end up building something that you wanted because you just sort of assumed the rest.

You assumed the market side. And then you find out like, no, nobody but you really wanted this. And you've wasted a lot of time and money. And that's 90 some odd percent of all startups. Right? So you have to do the market stuff first. And then you do the second round, which is, Okay, we know we're going to make this.

How do we make this as well as possible? How do we configure what capabilities are going to need? What are we going to prioritize? Because that's going to determine our partnership strategy. What we're going to build ourselves? What we're going to buy in services? What's our financial model in order to make all this worthwhile, and then how do we configure teams and etcetera.

All of that follows after you've figured out what the market actually needs or wants. That's the strategy process. That's how you clean up strategy and no longer do it sloppily. And the rest of it is all like, yeah, then look at the trends. But the trends go there and there. There's two places where you consider trends. And you re weight them based on how important they are.

Climate change better be a 10 out of 10 in whatever trend analysis you do. And if it's not, then you probably have missed something. AI is probably a 10 out of 10, I'll say begrudgingly, because you can't ignore it. You do the same thing for stakeholder analysis. So everything that we've talked about in terms of stakeholder engagement over the last two years, this is where it hits strategy.

And this is the complete list of stakeholder categories. They're not all going to apply to everything you do, but the ones that you do, spend a few minutes and think, Okay, who's a potential friend and who's a potential foe? Because the friends become your partnership strategy and the foes become your messaging strategy or sort of messaging recovery risk mitigation strategy.

Because you can tell immediately, like, oh, they're going to knock us on this. They're going to say so we need to be prepared before we even go to market for that to happen. Right? Again, I guarantee that most business people have never even looked at the complete set or even bothered doing a partnership strategy at the beginning, and certainly not a faux strategy.

This is what looks really messy, like most of the design that we do. Like, it can look like this. By the way, it's not always a good idea when you're doing this sort of stakeholder analysis. All five kinds of value. Not bad to add data, communication meaning human communication and trust into this, too. Where is data moving?

Where is trust built and not? Because those will help you identify new kinds of opportunities. So back to the SWOT. Those SWOTs happen automatically, but there's two of them. One for the market sequence, one for the operational sequence. We've no longer commingled them, and they get automatically done in this process. Has anyone ever heard of Porter's Five Forces?

Anyone care to remember? Yeah, it's not necessary. This is where Porter's Five Forces are. And basically what Porter said was there are five big forces that every company has to keep in view. They have to prepare for. They have to keep their eye on. But when you look and I'm not going to run through them all. You can look them up.

But when you look at the board now, there's not five forces. There's like 45 forces. All of it, any of it, could kill you if you don't have your eyes on it. Right? It's the child labor NGOs that came after Nike in the '90s for subcontractors' labor conditions.

Nobody at Nike was even looking at it. It wasn't that they hated children or hated people in other countries. They just weren't aware of it because nobody was looking at the whole board, right? And so they weren't prepared when the NGOs finally came after them, right? If you're looking to take five or ten minutes on each one of these some time or at regular intervals, you'll identify these things before they happen, and then you can be prepared for them.

There's a bunch of questions that this helps you identify or answer, but these are the questions you can use when you're talking to a client. Are you looking at a new job? Or I just had a meeting last Saturday with a bunch of investors that are trying to do investment better. And these are the questions I said.

This is what you need to ask your startups. You fund these before you fund them. And if they can't answer them, you either need to walk away or help them answer them. Because they're not going to do a good job with that. And there's like three pages of this. So it's not simple stuff, but it's important stuff.

And all of you, I guarantee, have the ability to ask these questions, to do some of the research yourself, to ascertain the answers. And that makes you a better strategist than like 95% or 98% of all the strategists in the world that even have an MBA. I won't have time to do this, but I built a tool for you. You can go to that URL and it'll help you walk through these processes.

It's in beta. There's some bugginess, whatever. But here's a tool that I made that you shouldn't have to reinvent yourself. And there's a bunch of other tools. So please don't take a photo of this because this is consulting work that I've done for a client. And I took their name off, but it probably shouldn't show up. But this is called a waveline.

And it differs from a customer journey map because what it's tracking is what's going on in customers' heads on the qualitative level. It's not tracking touch points. The touch points sort of end up getting referenced. It's tracking how people care and feel and what's important to them and how they're making decisions.

So that's what these, you know, confusion, anxiety, etcetera, that's what's bounding those customer wavelines. And then the green one is the ideal. And ideal is basically your opportunity to be a screenwriter or a scriptwriter or any kind of author. You get to make a new story. But it's a story about the experience that plays out in emotions and meaning. And you write a new story, and then you go back later and say, okay, what touch points need to be there in order to make that the new story, the new experience?

And if you only look at the touch points, and again, you only look at the functional value, like, you'll never get to this because you're not framing the customer experience in terms of the things that is most important. If you sat down and try to do if you did this with a salesperson, you're gonna get a much better indicator of how someone sells that car or that piece of software, etcetera, than if you sit down and have a conversation with them only about the touch points and the functions that their customers say they need and maybe need or may not need, etcetera.

So we need to use these tools to help us not just understand what needs to go into strategy, but then at the end build that strategy and then deliver it. There's a bunch of other tools like theory of change, etcetera, that's probably not news to anyone that's in the NGO world. That's sort of the tool of choice these days.

But it's also really kind of simple, right? Like simple in the sense of what are you trying to do? Who is it for? How's it going to help them? How are you going to measure your success in the end? And what's your end goal? Like those are pretty standard, obvious questions. But until this tool became standardized, a bunch of stuff was funded that never sort of materialized because nobody required their fundee to have this mindset to look at these things and to track it.

So thirty years ago, I gave a talk in Melbourne with this title. And I'm here again because it's happening again. At that time, it was about the internet. And in between, we had also the mobile revolution, and now, of course, we have the dreaded AI. But in every storm becomes not just potential disruption and even destruction.

Every storm also comes with opportunity. And so the reason why I wanted to talk to you about strategy and the fact that you're well positioned to become a strategist and you don't have to if you don't want to, that's totally fine. But should you want to, this may be one of the ways you weather that storm. Upskilling into strategy, being absolutely audacious to go against the folks with the MBAs, because you can.

I'm here to tell you, you have the skills to do that. You may have to be really good at selling yourself and convincing someone those first couple times. But this may help you survive the storm that's coming. And we can't even see its boundaries today, and it's changing so quickly. It will there will be good things that come after this storm, but we can't even see those today.

But your ability to chart a course through that storm will be the difference between maybe not success and failure, but maybe satisfaction and dissatisfaction in your career over the next few years. I'll leave you with some really good advice from my friend Brenda Laurel, who taught her students about what she calls grand strategies.

And I know a lot of us, regardless of your generation, are not super happy about all the opportunities you find or the work you're asked to do in the organizations that you work for, whether it's your own company or whether it's a client. She says look for the grand strategy. What's the grand strategy that satisfies what you've been asked to do, what their criteria are, and satisfies your personal criteria as well?

And in every situation she tells us at least, there is a way to do this. Maybe it's that you want to put sustainability into the criteria of what you're designing. Just don't tell them, right? Don't tell the client, don't tell your company, but do it anyway. Because you can sell sustainability on the basis of efficiency who doesn't want to save money or on the basis with consumers' health.

You can sell almost anything to consumers under the guise of health. Hopefully, it's things that will actually make them healthy. Inside an organization, if you need to sell something like sustainability but you can sell anything again, efficiency works. They want to save money. They want more profit margin. Or risk mitigation go talk to the lawyers, because it's their entire job to mitigate risks.

And if you can come at them with like, well, if we did this and we did it this way, we can mitigate our risk. Their ears will prick up, and they'll be on your side. And then, you know, they'll whisper in the CEO's ear like, oh, yeah, this is a good idea. Right? So there's always a way of building a grand strategy that satisfies your needs as a designer, design researcher, strategist, or whatever it is that you want to do, while satisfying whatever the meager, often wrongheaded criteria that you've been given, that come from a client or come from your own organization.

Okay. I'll leave it at that. I know that I gave you a lot, and this is the end of the whole conference, and you're all tired and whatnot. But I really appreciate your attention and this opportunity, Steve and John and everyone else. And I just hope that you go forth in your career with some confidence that there is sunlight out there, and, you have options that maybe you didn't think you had.

Thank you.