A case for design-led growth

Design is a critical tool for growth when prioritised within a business strategy, yet too often it is undervalued as a subservient function to product management. Accenture’s Álvaro Carpio Colón argues it’s time to elevate design thinking.

Álvaro Carpio Colón is the head of Transformation and Product Innovation – Design and Digital Products at Accenture Song.

The world must be redesigned. It is now widely accepted that our current growth-focused model is broken and it’s time for a new model focused on redistributive practices that help humanity, the planet and organisations to thrive.

Design must play a leading role in delivering a new phase that is more equitable and regenerative, or as the Australian Design Council expresses in its guiding manifesto, ”Design must be fundamental to the nation’s prosperity”.

Design’s value has been widely documented over the past decade by national design institutions across the world and independent research agencies like Forrester. Companies prioritising design have shown increased loyalty, better stock performance, higher revenues, and larger valuations.

So, why is design not seen as a critical tool to capture and deliver new growth opportunities and solve some of our society’s deeply entrenched challenges? Design’s characteristics of involving multiple stakeholders and co-designing solutions that consider many diverse perspectives make it uniquely placed to envision new regenerative futures. As Catherine Livingstone, the director of the Australian Design Council and former chair of the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Telstra and CSIRO, said: “Design thinking is hard but pays enormous dividends.”

Organisations, with their convening power, platform reach and resources, need to use design to help create this new future. Across both the private and public sectors design can achieve impact at scale to drive regenerative growth, but organisations must fundamentally shift the way they design to achieve this.

One key way to harness the power of design is for organisations to prioritise designing with a focus on connections. Design, with its focus on human-centricity, can be selfish and individualistic, focused on the needs of the single customer, citizen or organisation. However, this approach has driven a winner-takes-all mentality that is no longer sustainable. Conversely, while systems design can solve many of these problems, its scale and longer-term focus can seem impractical for some organisations.

Organisations need to take a pragmatic design approach that can increase the chances of impact, focusing on designing from deep connections between smaller groups of organisations or individuals for problems that need to be solved today.

For example, the disjointed experience of group travel or banking, or the fragmented services provided by government agencies, can be improved by designing from the strongest connection points, such as families or social services.

Just as bubbles form at specific points in boiling water, before the entire system reaches a tipping point, designing from deep connections can catalyse large-scale impact.

Take, for example, ReefCloud, an initiative with The Australian Institute of Marine Science, the Queensland University of Technology and other global conservationists to create an AI-powered tool that processes coral reef data 700 times faster than manual methods, enabling real-time global collaboration and significantly enhancing conservation efforts.

Design, therefore, must be accountable for connecting strategic intent to impact. It should be prioritised at the heart of a business strategy and not a subservient function to product management. However, having worked with a large portion of the top ASX and FTSE companies and government agencies in the UK, Australia and New Zealand, even in organisations with a chief design officer position this is often not the case.

For design to result in large-scale impact and sustainable growth, it must be a strategic as well as an execution function. One that can draw the thread from purpose to pixels, and from insights to impact.

Who can be better positioned to fill the chasm between strategy and execution than design? For design to live up to its full potential it should connect intent, insight and impact.

The final piece of the puzzle is prioritising the emotional impact of design. Design for emotion is one of the cornerstones of design, yet measuring how people feel is somehow always an afterthought.

The current economic value indicators such as fulfilment, mental health and joy do not account for the value of emotion. There is an opportunity for organisations to employ design to create additional value by measuring emotion in the way people interact with organisations.

Design should be the discipline that not only defines the emotions we want people to feel but also how to measure, track and scale those emotions. This will ensure the impact of design expands beyond a pure business lens.

Consider how Disney’s theme parks and movies are meticulously designed to evoke specific positive emotions like joy, wonder, and nostalgia. They relentlessly measure and optimise for these emotional outcomes.

Let us elevate design to drive regenerative growth, unleashing its transformative potential to connect and execute, evoke emotion and, more importantly, deliver on our collective vision for a better future.

Alvaro Carpio Colon is the head of Transformation and Product Innovation – Design and Digital Products at Accenture Song.