All design is strategic

Ben Holliday – Medium

In this post, Ben take the approach to strategy set out in Lingjing Yin’s post and applies it to design, making the argument that from that perspective, all design is strategic (though not only strategic), because it should always be in pursuit of the overall objective. That sounds right – though it does bring a risk of circularity (like any other word, as soon as it means everything, it means nothing).

The strong part of the argument is that no one aspect of design should be singled out as being strategic or not strategic. That’s a useful thought in part because it applies to more than just design: in a sense, the very point of strategy is to create something which provides a basis for decision makers of any kind to test their approach. The existence of a strategy is what allows all the individual decisions to be strategic without being regimented. And once that’s in place, it also becomes possible to zoom between levels of detail and perspective, as Matt Edgar observed, prompted by Ben’s post:

It is not possible in any kind of complex system to use strategy as a detailed control system; psychohistory is not real. It is possible to set principles which allow autonomous decisions and decision makers to converge on strategic goals. In that sense, at least, all design can be strategic.

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