This document summarizes Peter Morville's presentation on strategic design planning. It discusses framing planning as a social, tangible, agile, and reflective process. It outlines key principles for each stage of planning, including framing possibilities, imagining options, narrowing choices, deciding on a path, executing plans, and reflecting on outcomes. The overall message is that strategic planning requires considering multiple perspectives, embracing change, and learning from experience.

1. Planning
for Strategic Design
Peter Morville, UX STRAT Europe 2018

2. Agenda
• Introductions
• Purpose
• Principles
• Practices
• Conversations
“Do you know how to make God laugh? Tell him your plans.”

5. The Ants and the Grasshopper
On a cold, frosty day the ants began dragging out some of
the grain they had stored during the summer and began
drying it. A grasshopper, half-dead with hunger, came by
and asked for a morsel to save his life.
“What did you do this past summer?” responded the ants.
“Oh,” said the grasshopper, “I kept myself busy by
singing all day long and all night too.”
“Well then,” remarked the ants, as they laughed and shut
their storehouse, “since you kept yourself busy by singing
all summer, you can do the same by dancing all winter.”

6. Start
1
2
3 3
2
1
Goalè
“Planning is the crowning achievement of human cognition.”
The Cognitive Psychology of Planning (2005)

9. Our brains use stored memories to
constantly make predictions about
everything we see, feel, and hear.
Prediction is not just one of the
things your brain does. It is the
primary function of the neocortex,
and the foundation of intelligence.

10. What if perception is less about the
registration of what is present, than
about generating a reliable
hallucination of what to expect?
What if emotion is not agitation from
the now, but guidance for the future?

11. “Planning is the art and science of
envisioning a desired future and laying out
effective ways of bringing it about.”
“The purpose of design is to achieve a
greater understanding of the environment
and the nature of the problem in order to
identify an appropriate conceptual solution.”

12. “I had left the Marine Corps
not just with a sense that I
could do what I wanted but
also with the capacity to plan.”

14. Planning is the design of paths and goals.

16. The dark matter of strategic
designers is organizational
culture, policies, market
mechanisms, legislation,
finance models, governance
structures, tradition, habits.

19. • Design
• Planning
• Positioning
• Entrepreneurial
• Cognitive
• Learning
• Power
• Cultural
• Environmental
• Configuration

20. What is Strategy? by Michael Porter
• Strategy is the creation of a unique and valuable
position involving a different set of activities.
• Operational effectiveness (performing similar
activities better than rivals) is not strategy.
• A sustainable strategic position requires tradeoffs.

21. Activity System Map for Vanguard from On Competition by Michael Porter

22. Digital Strategy
• See any differences?
• Why might they exist?
• What are the tradeoffs?

23. Stories
Proverbs
Personas
Scenarios
Content Inventories Analytics
User SurveysConcept MapsSystem Maps
Process Flows
Wireframes
Storyboards
Concept Designs
Prototypes
Narrative Reports
Presentations
Plans
Style Guides Specifications
Design Patterns
User EXperience Treasure Map
by Jeffery Callender and Peter Morville
Strategic
Design
align with business strategy
shape experience strategy
help executives plan

24. “If engineers fail to plan, bridges collapse and people die. We’re now
learning the hard way, the consequences of bad software are no less dire.”
http://semanticstudios.com/how-to-plan-and-why/

25. Social
Tangible
Agile
Reflective
Framing
Imagining
Narrowing
Deciding
Executing
Reflecting

26. ★ Social
• What (plan with people, early and often)
• Who (family, friends, mentors, stakeholders)
• Why (get started, better ideas, empathy, buy-in)

27. ★ Tangible
• What (get ideas out of your mind-body)
• Why (distributed cognition, collaboration)
• How (writing, sketching, modeling, prototyping)
“How can I know what I think until I see what I say?” – E.M. Forster

28. ★ Agile
• What (plan for disruption, embrace change)
• Why (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity)
• How (Agile, Lean, optionality, improv)
“Plans are worthless, but planning is everything.” – Eisenhower

29. ★ Reflective
• What (question beliefs, methods, and goals)
• Why (human fallibility, context shifts, wisdom)
• How (metrics, feedback, metacognition, meditation)
“Mind what you have learned.
Save you it can.” – Yoda

31. Framing
How we understand and explain our plans.

34. “It’s not fear that
stops you; it’s your
unwillingness to
feel fear. That’s
what stops you.”
“I mean: is it really
an adventure if
there’s no fear?”

35. Beliefs are models (and) are often the main
thing standing in the way of change.

36. Goals Gone Wild: The Systematic
Side Effects of Over-Prescribing Goal Setting
• The harmful side effects of goal setting are far more
serious and systematic than prior work has acknowledged.
• The use of goal setting can degrade employee performance,
shift focus away from important but non-specified goals,
harm interpersonal relationships, corrode organizational
culture, and motivate risky and unethical behaviors.

37. A plan can be a process.

38. Imagining
Expands (awareness of) paths and possibilities.

39. Analysis-Synthesis Bridge Model
Dubberly Design Office

40. Hope = Willpower + Waypower
Charles Snyder (1994)

41. “Imagine a place, the most wonderful school you can imagine.”

42. Options let you be stupid.

44. Narrowing
Evaluation (and filtering) of paths and options.

46. Search Objects
Portal
Find
About
Discovery
Paths
Patterns
Incentives
Users
Brand
Findable Social
Goal
Gateway
Collection
Ask Browse
Federated
Faceted
Fast
“Give me a fulcrum and a place to stand,
and I will move the world.” —Archimedes

47. Planning Poker

48. If passengers die in a crash, pilots
die as well, whereas if patients die,
doctors’ lives are not endangered.

49. Breadth First Depth First

50. Deciding
Committing to (and communicating) a belief, path, or goal.

52. “I know a man who taught his
son to tie his shoe in five
minutes. He tied the shoelace
into a bow, then untied it one
step at a time. He taught his
son by doing it backwards.”
Richard Saul Wurman
Follow the Yellow Brick Road (1991).

53. Executing
An improv dance of listen, learn, and lead.

54. Progressive elaboration involves
continuously improving and
detailing a plan as more detailed
and specific information and more
accurate estimates become available.

55. “After completing the Build-
Measure-Learn loop, we
confront the most difficult
question any entrepreneur
faces: whether to pivot the
original strategy or persevere.”

56. SHIFT HAPPENS

57. Diversity is a cure for unpredictable adversity.

59. Reflecting
Insight by intent; reflection changes direction.

60. What bad habits have you picked up in
your decision making? Which steps do you
skip and which do you overemphasize?
Do your poor decisions tend to stem from
bad information, poor evaluation,
incorrect calculation, or a combination?