Welcome to The Design Loft.
After more than 35 articles and lessons, plus hundreds of links, the foundation is set.
All of you (subscribers) and those who’ve discovered The Design Loft have access to a broad-based toolkit, video collection, and set of linked resources to help you apply the fundamentals of strategic design to health and social impact work.
The steps for undertaking a strategic design process were profiled in an article published last summer (2025) on Censemaking.
In this issue, we present those ten activities as an introduction to The Design Loft’s next stage of evolution.
Undertaking Strategic Design
What does strategic design look like in practice? Here are ten features of a strategic design process.
Context and Boundary Setting. This first step is exploring the boundaries of our design scope. This includes the time horizon you’re planning for, the actors and relationships involved, including those affected by the strategy, and the necessary people, resources, time, and other constraints that will shape the process. This is part of systems thinking, and it helps you understand who and what are involved, scope the process, and shape the kind of knowledge you need to inform the work.
Background Research. Now that we have our context set, we need to know about what’s happened and what’s going on now. Strategy is about the future, but knowing where you’ve come from (as an organization or as individuals) and the baggage you’re packing matters. Background research can help identify path dependencies within an organization, habits, power structures, and levers that can be activated to drive action.
Engagement. Strategic design involves working with those affected, enabled, and embodied in the very plans we make. An engagement strategy can involve various levels of engagement, from deep co-design to consultation, and the level you use depends on many factors, including resources and your organization's cultural context. Higher engagement, more often, with greater time, care, and attention will almost always be better than less of any of these. Tactically, this can involve everything from surveys to focused interviews to public forums and any other means of gathering authentic, honest and open input.
Sensemaking. This process of understanding what it all means — the background, foresight, and direct consultation data. This is an active process where we collectively reflect on what’s been heard and seen, interpret, and frame the findings in the context of what is being done. This process has been discussed in more detail in earlier posts.
Envisioning. This part is about connecting the vision the organization wants for itself (its winning aspiration, to quote Roger Martin) with the data you gather. This is where your foresight scanning comes in, bringing in data from trends, scenario plans, and other exercises aimed at helping ‘see’ what might be coming, and then developing a means to envision what success — and the pathway to that place — looks like within these different hypothetical, but evidence-informed, situations.
Assumptions Testing. Another suggestion from Roger Martin is to use the question “What would have to be true?” To guide our assumptions-testing. When we answer this question, we determine some of the fundamental assumptions that underlie many of our plans. For example, if an organization aspires to double its services in the next five years, it may need certain resource requirements in place today to achieve that. If not, then this assumption doesn’t hold. A strategic plan has to be grounded in reality.
Tactics and Principles. Tactics are not strategy, but they are still the means to get from A to B. Adaptive, purpose-designed approaches might rely on a variety of tactics to support strategy. Principles are the touchstones that determine the appropriateness and timing of using certain tactics. Principles can help guide decision-making in the face of uncertainty. Articulating principles can make values practical and, in turn, actionable.
Support and Learning Systems. This is where our evaluation system comes in. Developing a system for learning, evaluation, and feedback is critical to determining the success of a strategy. Working in a living system means attending to patterns and building a sensitivity to conditions to enable decision-making. In addition, systems that support your decision-making can be spatial, policy, or habitual practices that encourage adaptive action.
Articulate the story. The last part of the process is to tie this together and tell the organization's story and where it will go (and how it will get there). Be specific enough to recognize important details, but not so specific that it confines the story to a single narrative. The reason is that the strategic implementation will be a story that unfolds over time, guided by the plan. It’s very much like the plan and story for a road trip.
Traps, Threats, SWOT, and Surprises. While not necessary to codify, it can be useful to include an articulation of the key threats, potential traps, and opportunities that might emerge. A SWOT analysis can be useful here to identify what people fear or see, and as a reference point when the unexpected arises. It can identify scenarios where there were conscious or unconscious concerns ahead of time and allow you to trace back the assumptions and preconditions that might have contributed to them.
Raw Materials Into Impact Fuel
Thank you to all of the readers, subscribers and supporters of The Design Loft. You’ve joined discussions, downloaded toolkits, and used many of the methods and strategies that have served as the foundation for beginning strategic design in health and social impact.
That material will remain available.
With the kindling in place, it’s time to light the fire. The upcoming lessons and posts are now taking those foundational pieces and putting them into a more sophisticated context. With the surface covered, we’re going to go deeper into the integration of systems thinking (and complexity), design, evaluation, and behavioural science into health and social impact.
The articles will be fewer but deeper in their look at specific issues. I’ll continue to refer to and link to the previous lessons. There will still be tools and strategies to share, but they will take a back seat to a greater focus on the human side of complexity in strategic design for health and social impact.
As always, reach out if you’d like to learn more or want support in taking this approach further within your teams. Let’s talk: https://www.cense.ca/censemaker/
Thanks for reading! Go have some fun taking your ideas further and putting them in flight. The health and well-being of our communities, institutions, and ourselves rely on us doing this better.
You have the language. Now it’s time to start speaking it fluently with some practice.
Images by Amador Loureiro on Unsplash