By Tim Brown

“In order to do a better job of developing, communicating, and pursuing a strategy, the head of IDEO says, you need to learn to think like a designer. Here’s his five-point plan for how to make the leap.”

“It’s remarkable how often business strategy, the purpose of which is to direct action toward a desired outcome, leads to just the opposite: stasis and confusion. Strategy should bring clarity to an organization; it should be a signpost for showing people where you, as their leader, are taking them - and what they need to do to get there. But the tool executives traditionally use to communicate strategy - spreadsheets and PowerPoint decks - are woefully inadequate for the task. You have to be a supremely engaging storyteller if you rely only on words, and there aren’t enough of those people out there. What’s more, words are highly open to interpretation - words mean different things to different people, especially when they’re sitting in different parts of the organization. The result: In an effort to be relevant to a large, complicated company, strategy often gets mired in abstractions.”

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