Structured Design Process and Strategic Management

This organization is applying the Structured Design Process to implement its strategic vision through a Collaborative Action Plan. The stake holders in the community will implement this plan in four distinct and interactive stages. Stage one is about definition to build consensus on the problem situation as well as delineate a boundary of relevance. For this hypothetical example, the triggering question is “What are the critical current and anticipated issues to be addressed in order to achieve our strategic vision?” The stake holders generate and clarify ideas in response to a triggering question. The triggering question is prepared by the Inquiry Design Team. The next step is about affinity clustering representation. The stakeholders explore relationships for patterns to classify the issues into four affinity clusters. Then the participants are asked to vote on an individual and subjective basis by selecting the first critical five ideas. Step three is to influence representation, also referred to as problematique. Dialogue is focused on a different generic question to determine the relational pattern.
Stage two designs alternative scenarios for resolution of the problematique. The action alternatives are proposed by the stakeholders and the meanings are detailed. The different options field representation is to resolve the strategic management problematique. The superposition representation makes transparent to the stake holders the options with maximum leverage resolution of the problematique. The deepest level of representation exerts the maximum leverage. In step four the stakeholders design alternative scenarios after revisiting the options field representation.
Stage three evaluates the proposed alternatives for the most viable solution. This is done through a Trade-Off procedure. The stakeholders propose criterion relevant to the evaluation of alternatives presented. The respective priorities are represented and weights are assigned according to the priority structure. The criterion with the highest relative importance is assigned 100 points and the lowest is 30 points.
Stage four is the Action Plan. This is based on the preferred alternative with the highest points. The action plan represents the collective wisdom of the stakeholders. Sometimes the stakeholders prefer that the action plan is detailed into a blue print with role assignments to individuals or specific organizational entities.