Recipes for Systemic Change - Helsinki Design Lab

Strategic Design27The remainder of this section takes a deeper look at theattitude, approach and abilities that enable successful strategicdesign. Our interests have overlaps with areas of organizationalpsychology, management, scenario planning and foresight,political science and many others. Each of these fieldsyield deep insights into the nitty-gritty of the issues and weencourage you to pursue that literature as well. The purposeof this book is not to pretend that design could or even shouldsupplant these other fields, but to explore the qualitative differencesthat arise when choosing a middle path.Becoming StrategicThe definition of design and itsrole in the world continues to evolve.Broadly speaking conventional definitionsof design revolved aroundshaping objects and symbols,but more and more design is alsoexpanding into shaping decisions;the latter is how we define strategicdesign. In an increasingly interconnected, complex and regulatedworld, the effectiveness of innovations at the discreteproduct or project level is becoming limited. In healthcarearchitecture, for example, creating significant innovationsby focusing on buildings alone is virtually impossible due tothe highly prescribed and regulated environment. Today’shospital solution is predetermined to such an extreme thatthe designer has little—or no—room to create new value inhealthcare (or architecture for that matter) by working onthe building alone. While the scale of our healthcare challengesrequire strategic improvements, our current systemsof decision-making are often only able to entertain minorupgrades to existing elements and processes.While it is easy to agree that the focus should always beon delivering better health, it can also be difficult to rememberthat the systems we live with, such as healthcare, arehuman constructions and their dynamics are the result ofaccumulated decisions. They can be redesigned. Doing somay entail a critical re-examination of the notion of ‘bestpractice’ to ascertain whether established wisdom is still wisein our current context.The emergence of design as a specialized task can betraced to the rise of mass production. Before massive quanti-The purpose of this book is not to pretendthat design could or even should supplantthese other fields, but to explore the qualitativedifferences that arise when choosinga middle path.