Dear (none)Designer,

Welcome back to the thirty-seventh Design at Scale™ Newsletter – focusing on innovation and how design drives change in a large organisation or an agency.

As we enter the 21st century, we find ourselves in an era of data saturation, significantly impacting our daily lives. The McKinsey 7S Framework is a well-recognised tool that helps organisations evaluate and manage change by analysing seven interconnected elements. These elements work together to ensure that an organisation performs effectively while maintaining alignment and mutual reinforcement.

The seven "S" elements are:

Hard Elements (more tangible):

• Strategy: The "tactical" plan for achieving competitive advantage.
• Structure: How the organisation is organised
• Systems: The processes, procedures, and daily operations.

Soft Elements (more intangible):

• Shared Values: The core beliefs and corporate culture that guide the organisation.
• Skills: The capabilities and competencies of the organisation and its employees.
• Staff: The individuals within the organisation, including their demographic, educational, and attitudinal characteristics.
• Style: The leadership and management approach within the organisation.

Paradoxically, leaders focus on a guiding YouTube video on how to conquer the amount of emails or how best to manage our Slack and MS Teams. How can we collect feedback from the site or any other communication medium? Additionally, do we have a roadmap, weekly plans, and a 'how might we' plan for the level of effort in a constantly evolving, dynamic world of constant change?

To many designers (or other professionals), this is not a so-called "cohesive and complete picture" of the proposition that your team is spending the time on.

Many companies create and maintain processes that replicate the agreements and the communication across the two chains of command (client-agency, business–delivery). Believing that what has been agreed (with minimal knowledge at the beginning) will remain throughout the entire proposition, the same.

In contrast to containing the understanding of a constantly evolving proposition, we need to translate the overall business complexity into a space (not a document) that reflects the level of effort, statement of work, identification document, and other relevant documents living in an ecosystem and constantly adapting to new situations. In other words, these documents function like smart documents and evolve in response to one another.

How can we navigate correctly across all these different touchpoints, and how can we identify the signals and reduce the noise?

Inevitably, each document or other piece of evidence, so to speak, will have at least some fraction of the information that designers need. Preferably, all tied to design function, in a unified form or shape that reflects the design team and how it fits into a big picture—profoundly altering the whole cycle and the blend between business, design and development.

Specifically, the type of information we need to deliver the proposition on time.

Here are some questions you might want to ask;

• What problem are we solving instead of what are we building?
• Do we rely on existing functionality, or are we building a new proposal?
• Are we integrating the brand or changing it?
• Do we have a design system, and if not, are we building one?
• Do we have access to the engineering team, and if not, how do we hand over our files?
• If we do, what are the SLAs in place, and what can we rely on to reach a successful handover?
• How many people are in our team?
• How many people do we support?
• How many people support us?
• What, when, and how we communicate the incremental delivery update throughout the entire project or delivering the proposition

Inevitably, these high-level questions should give you a better, if not greater, understanding of where you and your team are. Whether you are a junior, midweight or senior designer, these questions and hopefully their answers will guide you through the process of where you are and where you need to go next.

To those who wish to set themselves apart from the competition, we offer a Design at Scale™ – Academy courses where we collect, debate and train designers in teams of 001, 010, and 100 to break the silos and communication barriers and become leaders that deliver Design at Scale™.

For more information, please visit Designa at Scale™ – GRID Magazine, where you can find additional relevant articles that explore high-performing teams, self-organising teams of 001, teams of 010, and teams of 100 that deliver the value proposition within a product-led environment.