1. Check your Organisational Design
Do your structures and processes (= forms) support your vision for the future? Or are the desired behaviour, values or principles hindered? This template helps you review your organisational design. Be bold in revising, omitting, or redesigning. Typical forms are: all meetings, sales process, brand, spaces, organisational charts, purchasing rules, IT systems, production processes, product descriptions, strategy process, …
2. Principles for Change – Orientation Instead of Rulebooks
Starting Point
The previous strategy, business models, or processes are no longer effective – the environment has changed. A powerful organisational design is missing – e.g. in growing start-ups or after restructuring.
Existing tools and processes do not support the desired behaviour aligned with the vision and strategy.
Methodology
- Develop a shared change vision: Where do we want to go?
- Derive principles from this vision and agree on them within the leadership team.
- Use these principles to shape key tools and processes. For example:
- What should our budgeting process look like to be strategically effective?
- How do we design employee reviews to promote agility, transparency, and customer focus, for instance?
Impact: The Functions of Principles in Organisations
- Organisational principles function like an internal compass:
- They enable coherence between structure, behaviour, and strategy.
- They create freedom to act – clear orientation instead of rigid rules.
- They facilitate day-to-day decision-making and make leadership more relatable.
- They encourage self-organisation because there’s clear communication on what’s important.
- Change principles also support the transformation process itself. Some proven principles include:
- We don’t improve the past – we shape the future.
- The path should anticipate the future. (prefigurative work)
- People love and commit to what they’ve helped shape. Not everyone decides, but everyone can contribute.
- Those who do the work know the most. Therefore: involve them early, broadly, and sincerely.
3. Outside-In Thinking with Design Thinking
Typical Starting Points:
- The organisation is losing relevance in the market
- Customer feedback is being ignored
- New business models are failing to connect with customers
Benefits of the Tool
Better understanding of markets, users, and their needs – and using this to develop real innovation.
Methods & Phases
1. Exploration – Understanding what Matters
The starting point is a specific question, e.g.:
“How can we adapt our business model to the needs of the market?”
This phase is about gaining genuine customer insights, for example through contextual interviews, shadowing, customer journey mapping, personas & empathy maps, user diaries, service safaris, etc.
2. Creation – Developing Solutions
The exploration generates new questions, e.g.:
“How can we create value based on the insights gained through the exploration?”
Now, new ideas are developed – up to a prototype level – using methods such as paradoxical interventions (e.g. “What would our nightmare competitor do?”) or analogy work (e.g. “How would McDonald’s solve this problem?”)
Impact
Design Thinking is more than a creative process – it transforms the organisation:
- Shifting perspectives becomes part of the culture
- Cross-functional teams think along the value chain
- Customer centricity becomes a shared responsibility
- New business models and concrete service improvements emerge
This article was developed in collaboration with BUSINESSART – Austria’s magazine for sustainable business and future-oriented leadership. The English version is available as an e-paper here. Our shared goal: to show how dialogue, diversity of perspective, and a sense of responsibility can shape the future – especially in times of uncertainty.
