What is business design?

Business design is about making wise, intentional and informed choices about how to arrange your assets and resources to work better and achieve goals.

It's about knowing how and why you align skills, knowledge, processes and tools to create value for your stakeholders users or customers.

It's where the rubber of imagination hits the road of operation. Business design is the conscious decision-making that gets traction for your ideas and imagination within your operations, processes, training, and so on.

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Good design makes the right way the easy way

Good design is often invisible. When people 'just get it' or 'do the right thing' in their interactions, the chances are that design is at work (whether consciously or not). We've probably all got examples of the right way being the hard way.

Car park ticket machines are often an example of making things hard - with screens, buttons and instructions scattered across the fascia, and different payment methods (insert card, contactless card, coins, notes) all in different spaces, no doubt depending on where some new hardware can be fitted to a legacy unit. The user is not the centre of this journey…

There are other examples that are perhaps more applicable to most of us. As you look around the workplaces you use or visit, do you see "sticky notes on top of laminated A4 instructions, on top of signs, on top of things we use"? Situations like this suggest "the right way" is quite hard to fathom.

On the other hand, good design makes the right way obvious, and ideally easy, for the things that people are actually trying to do and achieve - not the things you need them to do.

Good design doesn't happen by accident

Tools and approaches like Jobs To Be Done (JTBD) theory and the Value Proposition Canvas can help with good design. This is especially true if you are brave enough to bring your real, actual customers (or users) into the process by facilitating the voice of the customer in a neutral and unbiased way.

Designing well starts from understanding where you are, and where your stakeholders need you to be - in their worldview, not yours. Analyse, simplify and clarify. Start with curiosity, find constraints, use imagination, and make wise choices.

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Good design is an investment

Investing in design is a wise choice whenever you need to be conscious about choices that revolve around delivering to people's high expectations or deep-seated needs.

This could be projects, initiatives, products or services where the sentiment is something like:

• this really matters to people
• we've tried to fix this before and missed the mark
• we've never done something vital this way before

As with most forms of investment, starting as early as possible usually yields the best returns over time. If the design mindset is important for something you are doing, adopt it as early as possible. Find and fix the hardest challenges in words and diagrams, rather than live operating environments. Good design is often iterative, and so can mean having a willingness to be proven wrong and adapt to strengthen the end result.

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How Applied Wisdom approaches help

Applied Wisdom brings tools, techniques and experience that help you question, analyse and understand your situation options quickly and with clarity. We augment the wisdom already in your team, and bring extra perspectives on:

• Curiosity
• Analysis
• Design
• Innovation
• Quality

Our business & consulting approaches are designed to be iterative and scalable, so they start from half-days, and scale up to various sizes of analysis, design, implementation and transformation projects.

Our design work supports every stage of our three phase model, which helps you get clear, get organised, and get outcomes.

If you're wondering, in need of clarity and confidence, or going round in circles, then please get in touch to discuss your 'now, next and options'…

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