Mass production, mass markets, and mass media were the underlying forces guiding organisations in the 20th Century. Modern management methods (e.g., marketing, strategic planning) ways for measuring value creation (e.g., market share, quarterly reports), and the use of the environment (e.g., extract resources, deposit waste) all evolved into economic models that have created many short-term benefits. But we now realise it has led to an unacceptable growling gap in prosperity and a natural environment that is being damaged faster than it can be replenished.

Our current economy is structured on value-extractive models or models that reinforce the benefits and interests of certain stakeholders at the expense of others, including our planet. Contemporary challenges faced have never been faced at the speed, scale, and scope of impact as it is in the current state. Deteriorating environmental conditions (e.g., climate change, the high contamination of oceans and other water reservoirs), and greater social disparity (e.g., growing inequality between the rich and the poor, the social isolation of women, etc.) are two of many challenges forcing organisations across sectors to increase their capacity to adapt to complex emerging realities.

Yet, most organisational leaders have realised that the knowledge available to fight these and other complex issues derived from isolated efforts that seemed to be limited in defining them and solving them in a holistic manner. In most cases, leaders are dealing with immense challenges that are extremely complex because they involve multiple agencies and stakeholders with independent agendas, organisational norms, politics, implementation strategies, and instruments. If only that wasn’t enough, they must be prepared for disruptive forces coming from different industries and organisational levels that happen at different rates and at different stages of their innovation processes. And, on top of that, there is an ever-increasing set of computational capacities that emerge at the end of the day as soon as they learn those presented in the morning. The growing application of sensors, new digital communication platforms, data collection systems, and other mechanisms are providing instant feedback on aspects of human daily life, global market dynamics, and the natural environment, that existing organisations were not designed to integrate in their innovation processes.

But this is not all about organisational leaders. In this blurred and ubiquitous landscape, ordinary people not only have greater access to different aspects of an organisation’s strategies, operations, and offerings but also new mechanisms they can use to challenge a leader’s purpose and reposition themselves within the context they live in. A few decades in with corporate social responsibility programs and philanthropy efforts have shown how modern approaches to lead social change have not been robust enough to overcome today’s complex problems alone; nor have logical arguments and anxious forecasts been able to cause organisations to act outside of the traditional conventions of managing companies, assessing value, and using the environment.

It is unreasonable to expect the people and organisation that funded yesterday’s programs will increase their giving to the necessary level to overcome complex issues of today’s world. While leaders know the current set of solutions does not work in the long term, they do not know exactly what to do. They do know that changing is extremely difficult for large, risk-averse organisations, especially those that have historically demonstrated success. Because these organisations were designed to thrive in the economy of scale, transitioning their culture, strategy, and operations to a more sustainable and equitable economic model often poses complex and ambiguous challenges.

The good news is that most leaders in these organisations know that better solutions will not emerge from current practices, be discovered in a university think tank, or be invented by a single company. They also recognise they cannot wait for best practices to be proven efficient, and must move forward, even in the face of significant unknowns. But how?

While significant efforts have been made to challenge the divisive paradigms of what is required for change, leaders still lack proper mechanisms to integrate considerations of the adaptive nature and diversity of human behaviour and the environment in which action is taken. Without the capacity to make sense of such complexity, and the ability to create interventions that consider the multi-level, cross-sectorial nature of contemporary challenges, leaders are merely adapting existing practices to create less harmful ones. It is in this context that leaders across sectors are increasingly using design to promote change.

Source: Everything Experiential