By Cheryl Detrick Founder & Strategic Navigator, Detrick Strategy
For most people, the most enjoyable part of a construction project (other than when it is all done!) is the design process. They have spent a considerable amount of time dreaming about what they want the final result to be. Design is where those dreams become rooted and real.
That is very similar to the Design point of the Detrick Compass™ framework. Design carries forward everything learned in Orient and Envision: the brutal truth of your reality, costs and tradeoffs of the envisioned future, strengths and existing assets, and identity and non-negotiable issues. This is where the earlier work stops being an intellectual exercise and becomes real.
This is also where, if something important surfaced in Orient or Envision, Design cannot simply ignore it. The piper eventually gets paid. A problem ignored upstream becomes design risk downstream.
I have worked a lot with engineers—structural and civil. They played a critical role because it is important to check the existing foundation before you build on top of it.
Before beginning serious Design work, make sure the foundation still holds. Orient told us where we are. Envision determined where we want to go. But both need a quick reality check before building begins.
Has something changed since Orient? Have we learned anything that changes our assumptions? Is the envisioned future still the right destination? Has the surrounding ecosystem changed?
Organizationally, that might mean market conditions, new or changing technology, labor availability, or competitive forces.
The Detrick Compass™ is sequential, but it is not static. You move forward while continuing to check whether the ground behind—or beneath—you has shifted.
A key component of Design is to look outward before inventing. Very few things are 100% unique. Find out who else has wrestled with this. Take the time to research existing models, approaches used elsewhere, emerging practices, lessons learned. While you are researching, don’t just look outward—look sideways. Look at your natural alliances and existing ecosystems. Are you part of industry associations, national networks, peer organizations, trusted vendors, or technical organizations? Those established relationships may already provide expertise, shared language, or learning communities. More importantly, they already understand something about who you are and what you do so you do not have to begin every conversation by explaining your business. By looking sideways, you do not spend time recreating expertise, infrastructure, or community that may already exist in your world.
However, the goal of all this research is not to find something to copy—it is to understand what others have learned. You are seeking to borrow learning, not replicate blueprints wholesale.
You will separate the principle—what makes the model work—from the form—how another organization has implemented it. A model can be perfect for someone else and totally wrong for your business.
From there, Design moves in two distinct movements. First, it starts with where you want to go, works backward to today, identifying the barriers and assets along the way, then works forward to use the assets and address the barriers in the right order.
Work backward first, understanding the path. Start with the envisioned future: what has to be true immediately before that end result can happen? What has to happen before that? And before that? Keep working backward until you reach today and the earliest condition that can actually be acted upon.
From Envision, you will have a list of potential problems and barriers. As you work backward, you will run into these. Do not assume that the stated problem is the actual problem. Like in medicine, a proper diagnosis is important before ordering a procedure.
If, for example, during Envision or Orient someone said, “we have a capacity problem,” the cause could be physical plant, workflow, culture, or supply chain. Each of those causes requires completely different solutions. Identify those during your journey from the future to today. Likewise, you may have heard, “we have a collaboration problem.” Maybe. Or perhaps leaders are rewarded for protecting territory, family/business relationships distort authority and decision rights are unclear, teams have incompatible goals, or one leader (or influencer) is poisoning trust. As you are working backward and find one of those barriers, envision it solved and identify exactly how you solved it. It will involve taking apart the cause of the barrier and addressing it piece by piece. These will not likely be simple or easy answers.
It is important to recognize that the people who participate in the Design process may not all do so for identical reasons. People may each see a different value in the same initiative. That is okay. Participation does not require identical motives.
While Stakeholder feedback informs Design, that feedback does not automatically govern Design. The feedback may represent a real need, an insight, a constraint, or it may identify a future barrier. Take the time to distinguish which it is.
Once you have worked backward to today, you begin the second movement. Work forward, building the path. Which assets can help?Design cannot become an exercise in finding everything that is wrong. You need to know what you already possess that can help create the future — people, expertise, relationships, systems, infrastructure, financial resources, customer loyalty, or natural alliances. What you already have can become part of the answer; those assets become building blocks.
Which barriers have to be removed, reduced or worked around? What has to happen first because something else depends upon it? What can happen simultaneously? As barrier conditions appear, are they new or have you tried to solve them before? If so, what did you do? What happened? What worked? What failed? What organizational scar tissue did the attempt leave behind? You must diagnose the actual constraint before choosing the intervention.
Some of those barriers cannot be accurately understood or effectively solved without the people who experience them. During Design, bring the right people in at the right time, but not everyone needs to participate in every conversation. Projects, programs, and ideas often grow outward in concentric circles before coming back into smaller groups for specific detailed work: early concept → critical stakeholders → broader ecosystem → steering committee → task forces → subgroups.
Bring people into the process before decisions that substantially affect them become cast in stone. People who actually experience the system should enter the Design process earlier rather than later. Design with, not simply for, the people who will live the system.
This becomes especially important when culture, leadership, trust, or power may be part of a problem or barrier identified during Orient or Envision.
If, during the investigation of those problems/barriers, early evidence raises red flags, good Design may require confidential or intercept conversations, evaluation of exit interviews, turnover patterns, or trust assessments as well as conversations up and down the enterprise. Leadership may need to grant the authority to do that work independently and understand that individual sources may need protection. Any findings can be reported holistically, thematically, or by pattern, all without exposing individuals to retaliation.
Design for the whole system. Avoid optimizing one piece at the expense of the relationships. Design asks: what pieces have to work together to produce the envisioned future? During Design, complexity can be worked on in pieces, but the design must continually reconnect the pieces to the whole.
You must also Design for actual humans. Do not design a system that works only if people behave exactly as you hope they will, because they won't. Humans have habits, fears, concerns completely outside the workplace and, occasionally, a spectacular capacity for acting against their own self-interest.
Make sure you find out if the model requires specific desired behaviors. What makes the desired behavior easier or harder? What does someone gain by performing the behavior you are relying on and what do they believe they might lose if they don’t? Can you craft an incentive to help with adopting it?
Once you have a basic Design in place, next test viability from every direction. A model may be conceptually awesome and still be impossible to build. Test the model for:
- Operational viability: can it actually work?
- Capability viability: do we have, or can we obtain (and afford) the expertise?
- Financial viability: can we pay for it?
- Technological viability: do the necessary systems exist or can they be affordably created?
- Market/human viability: will the market support it, and will people actually use or participate in it?
Finally, test sustainability: can we keep doing it after the initial enthusiasm or funding disappears? Your specific context will determine what models are viable.
Part of Design is establishing your guardrails: what absolutely must happen
and what absolutely must never happen. The lane between those two
gutters is where people have room to adapt, test, and choose.
Make sure you Design enough—but not too much. Design does not require having everything anticipated. Sometimes the right answer is: “We know enough to move, and we will learn the rest by moving.” That is not sloppy Design; it is intentional incompleteness. You need to build enough structure to create coherent action and learning without pretending to know what can only be discovered through experience.
Envision surfaced the costs of the future. Design has to figure out how those costs will actually be carried. We identified some of those as leadership, staff, customer/business, relationship/reputation, and self-identity costs. In a major change or pivot, several may arrive simultaneously.
Therefore, Design asks: what capacity do we need to absorb these costs without having the transformation itself crush the organization? For example, additional cash reserves, temporary staffing, outside expertise, and potentially different timing than hoped for. Design must account not only for what the future requires, but for the enterprise’s ability to survive getting there.
Another critical thought, especially during a major pivot, is to preserve what matters while changing what must, because you must know how much of who you are you can lose before you are no longer you.
Go back to your non-negotiables and identify what is core and what is merely familiar, what can or must change, and maybe what should be left behind. A company may abandon a product without abandoning its purpose.
Good Design changes what must change without casually destroying what gives the organization its identity.
As with other Detrick Compass™ framework points, the boundary is not rigid. Design and Align can overlap, particularly in a build where important voices are actively shaping the emerging model. The test is this: if stakeholder input can still legitimately change what is being built, you are still in Design. If the essential Design components and guardrails are sufficiently clear and the question becomes whether the necessary people can carry it forward, you are moving into Align.
Design shapes and reshapes the model. Align builds sufficient working agreement around the emerging or chosen design to move. This does not require everyone to agree on every choice in order to stop designing and shift.
The bottom line of Design: Start with where you want to go. Work backward to today, identifying the barriers and assets along the way. Then work forward, using the assets and addressing the barriers in the right order. Everything else in this framework point is how to do that without lying to yourself about reality, people, conditions, capacity, or the cost of change. It is about making it real.
The next point in the Detrick Compass™ framework we will dive into is Align because even the strongest strategy will stall when the organization is not aligned to carry it. Alignment connects purpose, governance, leadership, people, operations, systems, resources, incentives, and decision-making. Align is what turns strategy from a leadership document into shared organizational movement.
In the meantime, have a thought, question, or perspective this article raised for you? I’d love to hear it.
If you are reading this article and want more about the Detrick Compass™ framework series, explore The Birth of the Detrick Compass™ , First, We Orient, and Envision, A Future Worth Choosing.