From strategic planning to the designing of strategies: A change in favor of strategic design

Abstract

This paper proposes the creation of organizational strategies rooted in the culture of strategic design, considering the epistemological presuppositions of the paradigm of complexity. It is a process that accepts and aims to deal with uncertainty, randomness, unforeseeability and contradictions, through dialogical cooperation between the multiple actors tied to the strategy and affected by it. The process is iterative, non-linear, and delimited in time, over five moments of collective creation: inspiring, imagining, inventing, implementing and incubating. It is a process of collective construction, developed by multidisciplinary teams, in which the strategist-designer can play different roles: antenna, visionary, experimenter, connector and entrepreneur. The intention is to offer an alternative model to traditional strategic planning that still follows Cartesian thinking in its inception.

Keywords: strategic design, design of business strategies, design process.