Mileage uses a wide range of strategic tools and methods to help organizations take advantage of untapped opportunities in the market, including research, ideation, market strategy, forecasting, technology planning, and business modeling
but we start with the bigger creative question that can transform businesses: How should people experience a product or brand, and what impact it can have in their lives?
Management consulting firms have been adopting the value of design in recent years. Even some of the largest strategy firms in the world, like Deloitte and McKinsey, are talking about customer journey mapping and customer experience design. Many design consultancies like Mileage have been applying their design toolkits to strategic business challenges for many years.
When the founder of Mileage first began his design journey as a turnaround strategist, he recalls being fascinated by the number of Fortune 500 firms taking fundamental strategy questions such as “Where should we play?” or “How should we compete?” to a design firm. This has now shifted to be the norm, and the lines between management consulting and design consulting seem increasingly blurry because both types of firms are meeting the same questions head-on for the same clients, and to make it even more interesting, they appear to be adopting each other’s techniques. Still, beneath the surface, there is a fundamental difference in how the two types of firms approach these questions, and that difference matters because it can drastically change the outcome.
The legacy toolkit for Growth Strategy is analytical; business schools teach strategists to root their thinking on data. Management consultants educated in this way begin strategy projects with a “current state” analysis, taking a deep dive into the current world to better understand the companies position. This might consist of an industry analysis to understand the market, competitive analysis to better understand the direct and indirect competition in a specific market. Management consultants review customer data, seeking to learn spending behaviors, needs, wants, and habits, and apply those insights to segment the market into different customer groups. Having done this analysis, and developed an understanding of the world as it is today, management consultants then look for opportunities for their clients to compete. Red oceans or blue, the thought is to analyze your way from the “current state” to a “future state”. It is full of analytical rigor and deductive reasoning, where every idea strives to be defensible with data discovered during the initial research. It also reveals an underlying mental model that perceives the world largely as a fixed area or map within which territory to play exists and must be discovered.
Designers do not see the playing board as a fixed canvas. They are an optimistic group, who see the world as a wide range of possibilities that can be crafted and tailored to our will. Design consultants begin a project by looking for inspiration that will push their thinking and ideation about the world as it could be. Inspiration can come from within an industry or outside of it, often referred to as cross-pollination. The method in which designers adapt an idea or strategy from a different industry in order to apply it to the current project. Sometimes a social trend will trigger an idea. It could even be driven by ethnographic research—observing potential customers—to better understand human needs. At this stage in the process, design consultants optimistically pass through “current state”, as they generate lots of ideas of the “could-be” state. Only when this imaginative, generative phase is completed, do we bring out the analytical tools to measure the feasibility of the ideas.
Is there demand in the market and a business model that will support this idea?
Does the client have the appropriate assets and internal capabilities to deliver this value proposition?
Is the technology needed to produce this idea mature enough?
How will this idea alter industry dynamics or competitive sets?
Legacy strategy tools are applied to evaluate the ideas to get a sense of what we need to do in order to bring them to life.
As strategists in a design consultancy, we have evolved and grown to apply Growth Strategy as a creative act. As many of us have seen, it is easy for analytical methods to kill ideas too soon, but worse than that, analytical approaches usually restrict the ability to generate truly game-changing ideas. If you start by seeing the world as fixed, you inevitably end up making small tweaks, not 90-degree pivots. This mindset inevitability leads to mediocrity.
For some strategy challenges, being “best-in-class” is good enough, and it is true that analytical approaches work extremely well for cost optimization projects. But to significantly enhance revenue and push the limits of possibility—either through new offerings or new forms of customer experience—we have a bias toward creative approaches.
If you want to do something that is truly innovative, to produce value in a way that your customers have never experienced before, to lead rather than follow, and to raise the bar of customer expectations, the tools of design can help get you there. Many management consultants recognize the need for creative tools and are experimenting with design. Still, it is not enough to simply add journey maps and post-it notes to an analytical process; you need to embrace a beginner’s mindset. With this mindset, Mileage is meeting critical business challenges head-on for our clients, helping them with new venture design, growth strategy, and customer experience design.