IAC handbook

This handbook for design leaders provides instructions to apply IAC, the in-house method of Design Impulse for building capabilities that make design a primary value driver. We regularly update our handbook to ensure IAC’s usability. Email us if you have any questions, remarks, or suggestions regarding our handbook.

Formulate

Formulate your ambition in boosting your design organization’s reputation.

1. Describe your design organization’s business challenges.
   • Communication
   • Organization
   • Personnel
   • Administrative organization
   • Finance
   • Information management and security
   • Legal
   • Technology
   • Housing
2. Determine in which dimension(s) you want to boost your design organization’s reputation, given its challenges.
   • Influence
   • Performance
   • Impact
3. Define indicators that measure the fulfilment of your ambition, with for each indicator a target value range and its current value. For example:
   • Number of new product categories in an assortment.
   • Costs of developing products, in an absolute sense or as a percentage of total project costs.
   • Revenue from the sales of products, in an absolute sense or as a percentage of total revenue.

Estimate

Estimate whether your ambition can be fulfilled.

1. Check the availability of time, money, and resources required for action.
   • Personnel
     • Employees from involved organizational units
     • Employees from involved organizational levels
     • Experts in relevant fields
   • Documentation
     • Organizational models
     • Business models
     • Standard operating procedures
   • Data sources for value measurements
     • Influence
     • Performance
     • Impact
2. Draft an action plan to build capabilities for design that enable you to fulfil your ambition.
   • Identify
   • Analyze
   • Construct
3. Analyze the viability of your action plan to justify investments in time, money, and resources.

Inventory

Inventory contributing capabilities that your design organization deploys working with stakeholders (i.e., parties representing customers, the business, and operations). To this end, analyse end-to-end processes within your design organization’s application domains, using functional study models as a point of reference.

• Perform an act
  • Perceive a situation
    • Sense (e.g., see, hear, touch, smell, or taste)
    • Interpret (i.e., understand)
    • Evaluate (i.e., compare with a goal)
  • Set a goal
    • Formulate
    • Consider (i.e., weigh pros and cons of)
    • Accept
  • Undertake an action
    • Define
    • Specify (i.e., visualize and detail)
    • Effectuate

• Share content
  • Communicate content
    • Send
    • Receive
  • Exchange content
    • Inform [of]
    • Reply [with]
  • Agree on content (in a transaction; see figure below)
    • Demand
      • Request
      • Accept
    • Supply
      • Promise
      • Declare

• Provide a service
  • Develop a service
    • Conceive
    • Elaborate
    • Implement
  • Promote a service
    • Introduce
    • Position
    • Offer
  • Deliver a service
    • Prepare
    • Execute*
    • Conclude
• Administer an activity
  • Direct an activity
    • Designate
    • Frame
    • Allocate
  • Manage an activity
    • Plan
    • Realize
    • Evaluate
  • Control an activity
    • Steer
    • Measure
    • Adjust

*) Draft (i.e., create, review, and validate) a design (see figure below)

Find

In the design market, find contributing capabilities that your design organization does not deploy.

• Translate value into the language of stakeholders
• Measure value in the metrics of stakeholders
• Co-create value together with stakeholders

Map

Determine the polarity of the effect of contributing capabilities on the indicators for ambition fulfilment:

• Positive
• Neutral (no effect)
• Negative

Characterize

Classify contributing capabilities according to the kind of content:

• Strategy
• Structure
• System
• Specialism
• Skill
• Shared value

Also classify contributing capabilities according to the nature of the content:

• Knowledge
  (if explicit, that is, it can be formalized as a theory)
• Experience
  (if implicit, that is, it can be described as a case, but not formalized as a theory)
• Intuition
  (if tacit, that is, it can be documented as a behavior, but neither described as a case nor formalized as a theory)
  • Instinct (if innate)
  • Acquirement (if learned)

Determine the current market position (i.e., the competitive advantage) of contributing capabilities:

Rank

Rank contributing capabilities on their expected merits for different aspects of your design organization.

Prioritize

Determine priorities for the construction of contributing capabilities in your design organization, based on their characteristics and rank:

Acquire

Acquire contributing capabilities that are not yet operative in your design organization (in case of strategic shifts, rapid growth, or performance gaps).

Refine

Specialize contributing capabilities that are operative but not yet exceptional (in case of underperformance, inefficiencies, or lagging progress) and therefore just give an equal advantage.

• Substitute
• Combine
• Adjust
• Modify
• Put to another use
• Eliminate
• Reverse

Furthermore, merge contributing capabilities that are operative and exceptional but just give a temporary advantage (because they are easy to copy, mimic, or substitute in your market).

• Join
• Unite
• Integrate

Anchor

Capture and share contributing capabilities that are operative and distinctive but not yet collective (in case of unevenly distributed, fragmented, or vulnerable expertise) and therefore just give an unused advantage.

• Document, teach, and learn theories
  (in case of knowledge)
• Document, present, and study cases
  (in case of experience)
• Document, show, and internalize behaviors
  (in case of acquirement)
• Recruit and onboard new team members
  (in case of instinct)

Assess

Determine the outcome of fulfilling your ambition.

• Success: full achievement
• Default: partial achievement
• Failure: no achievement

Investigate

Determine the causes of this outcome.

1. Generate hypotheses
2. Test hypotheses
3. Confirm hypotheses

Decide

Decide on the next move to fulfil your ambition.

• Renewal
  (if your ambition has been fulfilled)
• Repetition
  (if your ambition has not been fulfilled and still can be fulfilled)
• Reformulation
  (if your ambition cannot be fulfilled and needs to be adjusted)

Development

Strategy. Combine scale with agility. — David Butler & Linda Tischler

System. Define a portfolio strategy, identify gaps and unmet or latent needs, and define segments for customers and users. — McKinsey Design

System. Define quantified metrics, build a holistic metrics system, and define supporting operational metrics. — McKinsey Design

System. Turbocharge processes, speed up internal feedback loops, and improve handoffs. — Invision Inside Design

System. Set goals, determine ground rules, and provide facilities to acquire, create, and shareknowledge. — UNStudio

System. Cultivate trust, give your people consistent support, and change up common routines every so often to create positive surprises. — User Experience

Promotion

Strategy. Represent design at the top level of the organization, improve employee experience with design, and spread design practices. — McKinsey Design

Strategy. Build up your reputation, spot talent through your network, and establish a flexible talent pipeline. — Workable

System. Describe design work in terms of business goals, collect evidence of design results, and communicate the business value of design. — BoagWorld

System. Demonstrate desired behaviours, provide motivators, and recognize and acknowledge displayed behaviours. — PositivePsychology

Delivery

Strategy. Translate the corporate vision into tangible goals, center the customer, foster collaboration, and uphold operational excellence—all while expanding creative limits. — Aquent

Strategy. Form a cross-disciplinary team, further knowledge integration, and implement decision-making through consensus. — Purdue University

Strategy. Let people explore the future, get familiar with it, and work together to address the resistant factors. — Livework

Strategy. Empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test. — Stanford d.school

Strategy. To produce an innovative outcome for a complex challenge, iteratively explore, define, develop, and deliver. — the Design Council

System. Explore user experiences, discover user motives, and define user requirements. — Interaction Design Foundation

System. Recognize and remove overly complex content, organize knowledge, and filter content. — UX Collective

System. Bring ideas to fruition through a build-measure-learn feedback loop (Lean Startup). — Eric Ries