Design: to devise for a specific function or end
Merriam Webster
These are challenging times, the toughest I’ve ever known and these tectonic plates are forcing fundamental changes in all parts of life most fundamentally though in the way we work together.
So if you want to thrive, the old ways of doing things will no longer stand. Talent and customers will drift away leaving your business as an archaic shell ready to collapse.
I’ve always been struck by how little thought has gone into the running of businesses, teams, organisations in whatever context. So little thought goes into designing how you are going to deliver your business goals that so often your team, the people you rely on so quickly run out of steam.
I’ve been working with Hope Creative ((https://www.hopecreative.co.uk/) to think about how design can help organisations (by which I mean anything from teams to SMEs to departments within larger organisations) meet these new and difficult times in ways which staff AND customer needs are aligned to provide meaningful work and services.
Your team members (maybe even you?) want their work to connect with their own professional purpose. They want a better work life balance, they love the ability to work wherever they want to. The implications of this are massive. What happens to the office? How do you build a team culture? All of this is being widely talked about everywhere in business. Yet no clear solutions are coming forward.
Customers too are looking for a deeper relationship with the brands they interact with. The want their purchases to have a deeper meaning than simply being the cheapest available.
In our conversations we can see that there is no simple straightforward solution. We need bespoke, designed systems customised to meet the specific needs, value propositions and
Given all this it’s clear that our starting point has to be to go to deeper in what that organisation is there to do. The reason why Hope Creative approached me is because my work ids rooted helping people understand their WHY.
My key inspiration is Simon Sinek’s Golden Circle. All businesses know WHAT they do, some know HOW they do it, almost none know WHY they do it.
I use this and other techniques to uncover the purpose behind an individual or an organisation.
Our conversations therefore are about how can we bring together what I as a Leadership Coach and a Creative Design agency can bring together to create a more powerful design solution that helps the organisations we work with shift into this new paradigm.
High falutin’ I know but to really mark yourself out in the marketplace, to really improve productivity AND to deliver great value for your customer knowing your WHY is the place where we all have to work harder.
Hope Creative and I want to go beyond values to bed a business on rock solid principles which are authentically acted out in the right sort of behaviours, which have the processes right but also how the look and feel of an organisation is presented to staff and customers. So yes logos, websites but also signage, leadership behaviours, processes, internal comms, everything which makes an organisation properly work.
This is more than an OD exercise, it’s more than re-branding. It requires us to design systems which consistently help staff work in ways which full realise the purpose of the organisation, to understand and embrace the WHY.
Those that do so will be the ones who will succeed.
Watch this space, It’s going to be a journey!
