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In a world of uncertainty and accelerating complexity, traditional strategic planning—linear, rigid, and goal-bound—often falls short. It’s not that strategy isn’t important. It’s that how we make strategy needs to change.

At Cense, we embrace strategic design: a dynamic, complexity-aware approach to strategy that prioritizes coherence, learning, and responsiveness over rigid plans.

What Is Strategic Design?

Strategic design recognizes that in health, human services, and other complex systems, change doesn’t follow a script. Strategy isn’t just about picking the right goal—it’s about navigating through evolving environments while staying aligned with your values and intent.

We define strategic design as:

A practice of creating coherence across actions, resources, intentions, and learning within a complex system to generate positive, adaptable change.

It blends systems thinking, design principles, and evaluation to help organizations thrive amid uncertainty.

The Leadership Qualities That Matter

To design strategy well, leaders need more than vision—they need:

• Humility: To recognize what we don’t (and can’t) know in advance.
• Inquiry: To stay curious, gather insight, and challenge assumptions.
• Agility: To act, reflect, and adapt in real time.

Without these, organizations risk “strategy blindness”—mistaking activity for impact or rigid planning for strategic clarity.

The Four Pillars of Strategic Design

Our approach to strategic design is grounded in four interrelated ‘pillars’ (illustrated above):

1. Intent
   What’s your purpose? What change are you here to create? Intent provides direction, not destination.
2. Imagination
   What futures are possible? Imagination draws on foresight, insight, and creativity to explore what might be—before committing to what should be.
3. Production
   How do you make ideas real? Production involves prototyping, experimenting, and iterating to translate vision into meaningful action.
4. Learning
   How do you know what’s working? Strategic design builds in feedback, reflection, and evaluation from the start—not as an afterthought.

These pillars aren’t steps. They’re lenses you can return to throughout your strategy journey.

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Why Strategic Design Matters

Strategic design moves us beyond “set-it-and-forget-it” plans. It helps us build responsive systems that evolve as circumstances change, enabling:

• Greater alignment across people, processes, and priorities
• More meaningful engagement with complexity and uncertainty
• A culture of ongoing learning, not just accountability

This approach is especially powerful in systems where lives, well-being, and trust are at stake.

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Ready to Think Differently About Strategy?

At Cense, we help organizations transform how they think, learn, and act—starting with how they design strategy. If you’re curious about how to bring these principles into your work, let’s start a conversation.

Watch for Part 2 in this series: a step-by-step roadmap for applying strategic design in practice.

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Cense specializes in creating engaging, participatory approaches to using strategic design to shape plans, services, and evaluations.

A synthesis of Cense’s approach to evaluation for learning and strategic innovation

We’ve published many articles over the years on Developmental Evaluation, learning systems and how to integrate design thinking into the process and as part of the outcomes. In this article, we outline how we practice this and what it means to do strategic design with a lens to learning about how we innovate as we do it.

Innovation in complex human systems requires more than good intentions and clever ideas—it demands systematic ways to learn, adapt, and create value through intentional design. Over the years, our work at Cense has evolved from implementing developmental evaluation as an alternative approach to creating what we now call design-driven evaluation: an integrated methodology that weaves evaluation directly into the fabric of innovation and strategic development.

The Evolution of Our Thinking

From Evaluation to Strategic Learning Infrastructure

Traditional evaluation assumes stability—that the program being evaluated remains constant while users might change. Developmental Evaluation (DE) flips this assumption, recognizing that in complex systems, everything is in motion. Programs exist within dynamic environments where “the river I stand in is not the river I step in,” as Heraclitus reminds us.

But our understanding has deepened. We’ve moved beyond viewing DE as simply “evaluation for innovation” to recognizing it as fundamental infrastructure for organizational learning and strategic development. When properly embedded, evaluation becomes the nervous system of an organization—providing continuous feedback that enables real-time adaptation and learning.

The Design-Driven Evolution

This evolution led us to design-driven evaluation, where evaluation and design are intimately connected throughout the innovation process. Rather than bolting evaluation onto existing programs, we embed evaluative thinking from ideation through implementation, creating what we call “learning pathways” that capture insights at every critical juncture.

Design-driven evaluation recognizes that learning is both a journey and a destination. By approaching this journey through the lens of service design, we create systematic touchpoints for data collection and sensemaking that support continuous innovation and adaptation.

Core Principles That Guide Our Practice

Innovation as Learning Transformed into Value

At Cense, we define innovation as learning transformed into value through design. This isn’t about incremental improvement—it’s about fundamental development that creates new possibilities for organizations and the people they serve. Developmental evaluation provides the structured means to capture this transformation and guide it strategically.

Complexity as the Starting Point

We assume complexity from the beginning. Our evaluation frameworks are designed for organizations operating in conditions of volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity (VUCA). This means creating evaluation systems that can adapt and evolve rather than rigid measurement frameworks that break under pressure.

Strategy and Evaluation as Inseparable

In our approach, evaluation is not separate from strategy—it’s a critical component of strategic development. This requires close integration between strategy development and evaluation, with bi-directional information flow ensuring that strategy informs evaluation and evaluation informs strategy simultaneously.

The Design-Driven Difference

Embedding Learning Throughout the Journey

Design-driven evaluation maps learning opportunities throughout service journeys rather than focusing solely on endpoints. By building evaluation layers onto service journey maps, we identify critical touchpoints where systematic data collection can provide insights into both process and impact.

This approach allows us to:

• Identify activities and behaviours throughout the entire innovation journey
• Provide user-centered perspectives on services and programs
• Map the systems, processes, and relationships that users navigate
• Anchor data collection to service transitions and critical decision points
• Test and refine theories of change in real-time

From Reactive to Proactive Learning

Traditional evaluation often operates as a post-hoc assessment. Design-driven evaluation embeds feedback loops from the beginning, incorporating “the feedback, learning, and evidence-guided adaptation capacity into the fabric of the plan.” This transforms evaluation from a retrospective judgment into a proactive guidance system.

What This Means in Practice

The Three Essential Components

Successful developmental evaluation requires three integrated elements:

1. Mindset: A complexity-ready orientation that embraces uncertainty and views programs as part of living systems
2. Skillset: Facilitation, sensemaking, and developmental design capabilities that enable collaborative learning
3. Toolset: Multi-method approaches that can capture the richness of complex system interactions

Resource Integration

Effective implementation requires both external perspective and internal knowledge. External evaluators bring the emotional and perceptual distance to see patterns hidden in plain sight, while internal evaluators provide crucial context and nuance. This collaborative model ensures both rigor and relevance.

Strategic Planning Integration

Design-driven evaluation transforms strategic planning by embedding learning mechanisms directly into implementation plans. Rather than creating static five-year plans, we develop adaptive strategies with built-in sensing and sensemaking capabilities that allow organizations to navigate uncertainty with confidence.

The Value Proposition

Evidence for Innovation

Without systematic evaluation, innovation remains wishful thinking rather than demonstrated impact. Our approach ensures that organizations can document not just what they’re doing, but what’s working, why it’s working, and how to replicate or scale successful innovations.

Quality Assurance for Design

Design-driven evaluation assesses not just whether programs achieve their intended outcomes, but whether they’re designed well enough to achieve positive impact in the first place. Many innovations fail not because they’re poorly implemented, but because they were never designed to succeed.

Organizational Learning Capacity

By embedding evaluative thinking throughout organizational processes, we help build internal capacity for continuous learning and adaptation. This creates resilient organizations that can thrive in complex, changing environments.

Looking Forward

As the complexity of challenges facing health and human service organizations continues to increase, the need for sophisticated learning systems becomes more critical. Design-driven developmental evaluation provides a framework for creating these systems—not as additional burden, but as essential infrastructure for innovation and impact.

The integration of design thinking with evaluative practice creates new possibilities for organizational learning and strategic development. By treating evaluation as a design challenge and embedding it throughout innovation processes, we transform evaluation from an external judgment into an internal capacity for wisdom and adaptation.

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At Cense, we specialize in creating design-driven evaluation systems that support innovation, learning, and strategic development in complex organizational environments. Our approach combines rigorous evaluation methodology with innovative design thinking to create learning systems that guide transformation and demonstrate impact.

Ready to explore how design-driven developmental evaluation can support your organization’s innovation goals? Contact us to discuss how we can help you build systematic learning into your strategic development process.

Strategy isn’t just about planning—it’s about preparing to meet the future, to shape it, and not just react to what comes our way. In complex conditions, organizations that invest in clear thinking are the ones that perform better, adapt faster, and lead with confidence.

Why Strategy Making Matters

Strategy is an intentional, designed process for determining what to focus on and how to achieve what you want. It accounts for the context you’re in at present, what you’re evolving into, and the resources required to undertake what you’re looking to accomplish.

The process of creating a strategy and building the conditions for successful implementation is called strategic design. These enablers include developing tools and processes for feedback, learning, and adaptation that enable a strategy to survive in living systems. After all, our organizations, communities, and markets are all part of dynamic ecosystems of activity and influence, so our strategy needs to be suited to these.

Among the biggest criticisms of strategic plans is that they are static and don’t account for or enable change in complex environments. Strategic design addresses this limitation by creating adaptive frameworks rather than rigid plans.

The Investment Case for Strategy

Strategy making involves marshalling some of the most valued resources within your organization: time, focus, leadership capital, and money. The return on those investments is significant.

A strategy-making process asks: how will you set yourself up to win? By “win” I mean accomplish your mission, which includes creating an organization that can survive and thrive through complexity.

Roger Martin’s concept of playing to win emphasizes that strategy is not about playing it safe or simply surviving—it’s about making clear, integrated choices that position your organization to achieve meaningful success. In his framework (developed with A.G. Lafley of P&G), winning means defining what success looks like for your organization, where you will compete, and how you will win there. It’s a call to be bold, decisive, and intentional—strategy as a set of choices made in service of a defined goal, not just a plan or process.

Four Key Returns on Strategy Investment

1. Clarity and Alignment

A good strategy provides clarity in your purpose, direction, and the conditions in which you operate. This means bringing into focus what you do, how you do (or intend to do) what you do, the resources you have (or need), and the steps required to get to where you want to go.

This alignment has tangible value. McKinsey research shows that there is a 1.9 times increased likelihood of achieving above-median financial performance when the top team works together toward a common vision¹.

Alignment also creates coherence in your organization. It ensures that people’s energy is focused in the same direction, reducing unnecessary duplication, miscommunication, and wasted efforts while better channeling organizational resources.

2. Better Decisions, Faster

Strategy enables better prioritization under uncertainty and disruption. A strategic design process (different from just a strategic plan) fosters scenario planning, risk anticipation, and structured experimentation. This enables leaders to respond to change quickly because when change occurs, they have already envisioned ways to address the unexpected by training their mind and focus.

It’s not about predicting the future, but anticipating possible outcomes and developing a way of thinking and acting that can sit within this range of possibilities.

This approach avoids expensive missteps, allows early course correction, and encourages timely pivots. It’s also a way to ensure that decisions and actions are aligned with a pathway, not just arbitrary.

3. Resource and People Engagement

A good strategy engages the resources within your organization—material, cognitive, and human talent. On the talent side, we know that contribution is one of the primary factors underlying job satisfaction and performance. People also stay when they know where the organization is going and how they can contribute meaningfully to something bigger than themselves.

As a leader, your strategy will also help you better clarify what you have and what you need to get things done. Personnel inventories can help with this process through the personal inventory method.

On the cost side, a good strategy builds internal culture and cohesion, leading to long-term cost savings in recruitment, onboarding, and lost productivity.

4. Increased Innovation Capacity

Innovation is creating something new that has value—it’s putting your ideas into practice. Innovation might be needed to adapt or survive (like public health units rapidly changing their procurement models or staffing deployments at the onset of a pandemic), as a means to gain an advantage over competitors, or simply to meet an unmet need.

Strategic thinking opens space for intentional, not accidental, innovation. Without a strategy, innovation is scattershot (or non-existent) and unscalable.

Resilience in the Face of Complexity

Strategy is about being the best at what you can, creating positive impact, and enabling sustainable evolution. As we discussed in a previous post, strategy isn’t a plan. It’s not tactics, either. When undertaken as strategic design, a strategy enables organizations to thrive within living systems, rather than be subject to the whims of complexity.

Strategic design helps organizations navigate complexity with intention—not just react. Adaptive strategies reduce costs tied to disruption, crisis management, or failed change efforts. The cost of not preparing for complexity far outweighs the investment in strategic foresight.

Looking Forward

Strategy making is a crucial investment for organizations seeking to thrive in complex environments. By focusing on clarity, decision-making capability, resource engagement, and innovation capacity, strategic design creates the conditions for sustainable success.

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Cense helps organizations with strategic thinking through strategic design. If you want to discuss your needs and explore how we can help you organize a strategy for more health and impact, let’s chat.

References:

1. Keller, Scott, and Mary Meaney. “High-performing teams: A timeless leadership topic.” McKinsey & Company, June 28, 2017. https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/people-and-organizational-performance/our-insights/high-performing-teams-a-timeless-leadership-topic

In today’s health and service sector environment, leaders are facing more complexity than ever. From overlapping user needs and environmental disruptions to rapid policy changes and emerging technologies, it’s a lot to navigate. But complexity doesn’t have to be a roadblock—it can be an invitation to design smarter, more adaptive strategies. That’s where strategic design comes in.

At Cense, we think about complexity not as a problem to solve, but as a condition to work with.

What is complexity?

Complexity shows up when things are connected in ways that make outcomes uncertain. It happens when multiple forces—people, policies, technologies, environments—are interacting at the same time, often unpredictably. This isn’t something we can fix with a checklist or a five-year plan. Instead, it calls for a different mindset: one that’s curious, flexible, and aware of how things influence one another over time.

Why traditional strategy doesn’t work

Many planning models assume we can predict and control what’s going to happen. But in complex systems, that’s rarely the case. When the path ahead is unclear and keeps shifting, we need tools that help us sense, learn, and adaptas we go. That’s where strategic design comes in.

How strategic design helps

Strategic design blends systems thinking with creative problem-solving. It gives leaders a way to work with uncertainty by focusing on:

• Framing the problem: Taking the time to ask the right questions before jumping to solutions.
• Engaging people: Bringing in diverse perspectives from those with lived and professional experience.
• Making and testing: Using quick experiments or pilots to learn what works in real settings.
• Reflecting and adapting: Making time to learn from what’s happening and adjust as needed.

This approach doesn’t ignore the messiness—it embraces it. Strategic design helps you design with complexity, not against it.

Getting started

If you’re working in a health or social system and feeling stuck or overwhelmed, try this:

1. Zoom out: Map out who and what is involved. What forces are interacting?
2. Zoom in: Where are people feeling the pressure most? What are the patterns or signals?
3. Ask different questions: Instead of “What’s the solution?”, try “What’s really going on here?”
4. Start small: Try a low-risk experiment. Learn from it. Build from there.

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You don’t need to have all the answers—just a way to learn as you go. Strategic design gives you a structured, flexible way to move forward with purpose, even when the future is unclear. We’ve prepared a simple 2-page strategic design worksheet that can help you get started.

Want help bringing this approach into your organization? Let’s talk.

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When undertaking strategic planning for organizations operating in the complex space of health and human services, how do you account for creating meaningful ways to learn and adapt? Developmental Evaluation is how.

Developmental Evaluation is a means to provide evaluative insight to guide the evolution of your program, but did you know it can be a tool within a strategic planning framework?

By use of strategic planning, we’re speaking about something designed for human and living systems. These are the kind of complex, dynamic and evolving organizational environments that don’t respond well to traditional strategic plans. Those traditional models (e.g., logic models, five-year plans, Gantt charts) have three fundamental assumptions that make them problematic for these contexts:

• Stable environments
• Predictable cause-effect relationships
• Static goals and controllable variables

In short, these approaches discount complexity. Complexity describes systems (interactions within a context) made up of many interacting parts that create patterns or behaviours too intricate to predict from their simple components alone. It’s the phenomenon where a “whole becomes more than the sum of its parts,” yielding emergent properties that aren’t obvious from studying individual elements in isolation. These are predictive systems, rather they are ones that are influenced — and that’s what a strategic plan in this context is meant to do.

A great complexity-informed strategic plan encourages a design that is adaptive, flexible, yet also offers meaningful guidance and the capacity to learn as you go.

Creating the Means to Learn and Adapt

In complex social systems, emergent behaviour, feedback loops, and interdependencies render linear models unhelpful and simplistic at best, harmful at worst. Traditional models are also difficult because of their tendency to promote goal fixation. Focusing too rigidly on predefined outcomes can lead organizations to ignore shifting contexts, miss emergent opportunities (or squelch adaptive behaviour that comes through emergence),and undermine adaptation and learning within the organization.

Developmental evaluation (DE) is an evidence-generation and sensemaking approach that assists leaders in addressing these issues using data about their programs to facilitate learning, strategy, and adaptation.

We often don’t immediately think about evaluation when we think strategy (isn’t that what we do after the strategy is developed?), yet by building a system that includes a feedback and learning approach like DE by design into the strategy, we’re far more likely to use it.

One of the limitations of DE is that it- like most evaluation models, frameworks, and designs- is created once a program design is already in place or launched. This limits the utility by forcing the evaluation to fit the program, rather than embedding it more fulsomely in the program. This is a design-driven approach to evaluation and strategic planning.

The connection to strategic planning involves incorporating the feedback, learning, and evidence-guided adaptation capacity into the fabric of the plan.

DE and Strategic Planning

Too often, ‘adaptive strategy‘ is reduced to “make changes as you go” without a clear means of knowing what to change or guidance on how to use feedback to shape that change. Taking a design-driven approach and integrating developmental evaluation into the strategic planning process ensures that this part is covered.

This means ensuring that, just as you might design some key features of a strategic plan, like a SWOT analysis, a review of the mission and vision, or an implementation roadmap, you insert evaluation and learning into your plan. This means embedding points for data collection and analysis, synthesis, and sensemaking as part of the plan’s implementation. Unlike traditional strategic planning models, evaluation is something done after-the-fact. What a design-driven, DE-informed approach does is make evaluation and the attention to feedback a part of the process from the beginning.

Just as you design (create with intention and skill) your strategic plans, so should you do the same with the means to make that plan a success. If you’re designing your strategy for the real world (and not just creating a plan for its own sake), then adding DE to your process and plan is one way to ensure that you go further and do more.

For more on this, read: Norman, C. D. (2021). Supporting systems transformation through design-driven evaluation. New Directions for Evaluation, 2021(170), 149–158. https://doi.org/10.1002/ev.20464

To learn more about this and how Cense creates complexity-ready strategic plans and developmental evaluation, reach out and let’s talk.

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash