Great design, it has been said, occurs at the intersection of constraint, contingency, and possibility – elements that are central to creating innovative, elegant, and functional designs. But it matters greatly where you start. In business, we have tended to start strategic conversation with constraints: the constraints of budgets, of ease of implementation, of the quarterly earnings focus that Wall Street dictates. As a result, we get designs for tomorrow that merely tweak today’s. Great design inevitably starts with the question “What if anything were possible?” After all, if strategy is an invention, a product of our imaginations, and our assumptions are bound only by what we can imagine, then removing the assumptions that arise from the belief in constraints is job number one.

Design legend Paul Rand once said that design is the method of putting form and content together. This implies that content is as important as form. Design is not a purely visual exercise. The results are visual, but the entire process of design is not.

Some would argue that creativity is a sudden flash of insight, something which just happens magically while one, perhaps, takes their morning shower. This is not creativity; this is simply spontaneous inspiration. Creativity and inspiration can happen spontaneously, but it is possible to achieve these through a process, and not leave everything to chance.

When companies and creators talk about design today, their focus tends to be on new product development. Such a focus, however, generally leads to increasing complexity, higher operating costs and higher risk of failure, creating a vicious spiral that drives customers away and destroys shareholder value.

Process and service innovations do just the opposite, by creating a virtuous circle -- attracting and retaining customers by improving convenience and efficiency, and using those gains to fuel more innovations. This virtuous circle drives sustained differentiation and competitive advantage.

Because design solutions are always matters of invented choice, rather than discovered truth, the judgment of designers is always open to question by the broader public.

...this notion of the inevitable need to justify to others the ‘rightness' of the design choices made - is perhaps the most significant implication for the design of strategy processes in business organizations. Because strategic choices can never be proven to be ‘right', they remain always contestable and must be made compelling to others in order to be realized.