When design is included in the strategic management of businesses it can be a source of competitive advantage achieved through customer-focused differentiation.

SDM consulting is concerned with the management of design in the identification, diagnosis, and resolution of business issues that are of strategic importance to an organisation. Where you innovate, how you innovate, and what you innovate are design problems. When you bring design thinking into that strategic discussion, you join a powerful tool with the purpose of innovation, which is to grow and move forwards.

Continuous effort, not strength
or intelligence, is the key
to unlocking our potential 
–Winston Churchill

SDM: The goal

Essentially Strategic Design Management [SDM] serves as a method to harness creativity, innovation and competitive advantage within key markets and to integrate organisational goals, internal and external analysis and implementation. Everything designed, be it a product, identity, interface or a communication has one thing in common – it has to be managed.

The scope of SDM ranges from the tactical management of corporate design functions including staff, methods and processes; to the strategic advocacy of design across the organisation as a key differentiator and driver of organisational success. It includes the use of design thinking ie using design processes to solve general business problems.

What is Strategy Design Management?

Strategic Design takes the standard design process further in a critically important way.  Instead of creating individual designs for individual products, strategic design ties planned, predictable design strategies with the broader business strategy of the company for better design process efficiency, reuse, brand management and more predictable innovation. Strategic design also helps to ensure that a process exists for optimising all internal and external communication by ensuring that all individual customer touch point are sending a consistent message.

This is closely aligned with today's design thinking.

By aligning product, advertising, marketing, communication, packaging and customer service through consistently applied design strategies, your company can build an even more powerful branded message.

The Strategic levels

Design management is to be seen to have a strategic level, a business level and an operational level. The strategic level deals with design management decisions that involve the long-term competitiveness of a company. The Business level involves short-term, less wide-ranging decisions, implementation of strategy, and contribution to policy development. The operational level encompasses project management and implementation of policy.

Strategic Thinking

At the outset of a project, gmdesign takes a system view working to uncover and understand the opportunities, and to map strategies for realising them. We focus on strategies for participation and engagement. Garth Morley uses his design expertise to demystify complex issues and facilitate participation and engagement around these issues.

We allow design solutions to emerge through iterative methods. The best results come from not being afraid to make mistakes and our approach is to embrace ‘mistakes’ as learning by encouraging experimentation and minimising the cost of our methods. In this way we foster an exploratory culture within our projects, prototyping ideas and testing them prior to committing to more elaborate designs or production work. This maximises experimentation and minimises risk, resulting in an outcome that is far more likely to succeed.