Background

An organization deploys capabilities to execute its activities. Some of these capabilities are critical to survive and thrive. In three easy steps, you can determine objectives to steer the development of critical capabilities in your organization.

Steps to determine objectives

Determine objectives for developing a particular capability in your organization as follows:

1. Identify the advantage the capability would bring.
2. Determine the direction for developing the capability.
3. Set the priority of developing the capability.

Advantage

To identify the advantage that a particular capability would bring to your organization, you can perform a VRIO analysis to determine four relevant properties of the capability:

• Valuable: able to exploit opportunities and defend against threats.
• Rare: scarce and difficult to obtain.
• Inimitable: hard to copy or substitute.
• Organized: set up to capitalize on organizational resources.

Together with information about its presence in your organization, you can use the outcomes of the VRIO analysis as follows to identify the advantage a particular capability brings:

Direction

Determine a course of action for developing a particular capability in your organization as follows:

• No advantage: ignore (if not present) or disinvest (if present).
• Competitor’s advantage: acquire so it will be present in your organization.
• Competitive parity: specialize so it will be rare in the market.
• Temporary advantage: unite with other capabilities so it cannot be imitated in the market.
• Unused advantage: secure in your organizational design.
• Strategic advantage: maintain in your organization.

Priority

There are several ways to prioritize activities. What is best depends on your way of working. When pursuing Agile, set a priority for developing a particular capability as follows:

• Now: do this first.
• Next: do this second.
• Later: do this after the second.

Designers continually develop knowledge with customers, commissioners, users, fellow designers, partners, and other stakeholders. They produce and use knowledge of different sorts. This post explains which sorts of knowledge a team needs to accomplish design work.

Sorts of knowledge

The way a team is organized rests on the following sorts of knowledge:

• Strategy: the plan to accomplish design goals.
• Structure: the way of organizing design work.
• Systems: processes and procedures of design.
• Style: the way designing is approached.
• Specialisms: fields of specialization of designers.
• Skills: talents and abilities of designers.
• Shared values: accepted values, norms, and standards for designing.

These seven sorts almost entirely correspond with the seven internal factors in the McKinsey 7S Model. Other points of departure are conceivable, but the McKinsey 7S Model applies well in practice. Furthermore, many managers know this model. For a brief introduction to this model, see, for instance, Strategic Management Insight or Investopedia.

In practice, the two sorts Systems and Style can be hard or unnecessary to distinguish. For instance, a design team may consider style as the processes and procedures to which the team members are accustomed. In such cases, you may conveniently combine the two sorts into one sort, System.

Framework for design knowledge

These sorts of knowledge and their interrelationships form a framework that can be used to:

• Analyze a design activity.
• Grow knowledge that is of interest to design work.
• Make design knowledge part of a team’s DNA.