Strategic Design - Manifest

Redesign: The Illusion of Simplicity

Every digital leader has seen the diagram: discovery → strategy → design → development.
On paper, it looks neat and linear. Almost easy.

But saying that digital transformation works as simply as discovery → strategy → design → development is like saying building a skyscraper is just drawing blueprints and then pouring concrete.

In reality, skyscrapers take years of permits, regulations, structural reviews, supply chain management, and engineering compromises. One missing approval or one overlooked regulation, and the entire project is delayed or derailed.

Enterprise and government redesigns are no different. Great design is the blueprint – essential, but only 10% of the journey. The real success depends on the invisible 90%: organizational politics, stakeholder misalignment, technology roadblocks, and endless approvals, and hundreds of micro-decisions that decide whether the structure stands tall or collapses mid-construction.

This is the part of redesign that most leaders underestimate – and where projects succeed or fail.

The Minefield You're Walking Into

A large-scale redesign is not about delivering beautiful Figma screens. It’s about protecting and advancing a fragile vision across a hostile environment – like moving a protective bubble across a minefield.

Every meeting, every decision, every stakeholder interaction is a potential mine. Some you can see and avoid. Others remain hidden until they explode. The bubble gets stronger with each right step, each aligned stakeholder, each compromise managed. Or it weakens until it bursts.

That bubble is your design vision. 

In a small company, it can often move quickly and freely. In a government ministry or global bank, it is constantly under attack. Access issues. Endless approvals. Subjective opinions. Lack of domain knowledge. Shifting strategies. Important meetings delayed. Conflicting stakeholders. All of them slow down progress or block the bubble from moving forward. Your job is not just to do UX/UI design. Your job is to move the bubble safely across the minefield, reinforcing it along the way until it reaches reality – and you have a deadline.

Why Design Is Only 10%

Craft excellence matters. But in the environments I’ve worked in – government ministries, banks, telecoms, global enterprises – it never decides success on its own.

What really decides success are the things nobody teaches designers at school:

• Dozens of critical meetings. Each one must end in a win. A single failure can derail months of work.

• Hundreds of small decisions. Often made quietly, in isolation, hidden beneath the cover of bigger decisions.

• Organizational politics. Power games, ownership gaps, departments fighting for influence. One team executes, another owns the budget, a third provides feedback without context. People appear five months into the project with strong opinions, but no understanding of what’s been done. All of this can delay, dilute, or completely derail progress.

• Managing stakeholders. Knowing who to align, when to involve, and how to frame decisions so they stick. Without it, projects stall in endless loops of feedback and delay.

• Controlled environments. Allow uncontrolled feedback in a crowded meeting, and your design will be shredded before it can be defended.

I’ve seen brilliant concepts die not because of poor craft, but because a single uncontrolled meeting turned subjective and political. Hundreds of hours of design excellence collapsed in minutes. I’ve also seen the opposite – a project where weeks of deliberate preparation made the final approval almost automatic. That’s the razor’s edge: with no gameplan, even the best ideas are fragile. With one, momentum becomes unstoppable.

This is the Invisible 90%. It doesn’t make it into shiny portfolios or beautiful slides, but it decides whether your redesign lands as a product that works and creates impact – or as a watered-down mess, chewed up by the organization and stripped of its vision.

This is why at Flying Bisons we call it strategic design – the discipline of defending design vision against politics and compromises, and pushing it through blockers and shifting priorities until it creates real impact.

As Don Norman famously said: “Great design will not sell itself.” In enterprise and government, it’s even more true: great design is fragile unless backed by a strong game plan.

The Pyramid Framework - A Structured Game Plan

Since 2022, when we first started leading redesigns at a national scale, I’ve worked with my teams using a framework we call the Project Pyramid.

At its core, the Pyramid is a structured game plan that  ensures redesigns don’t collapse under the weight of enterprise or government complexity. Unlike the well-known design process, the Pyramid is built for environments full of politics, approvals, and dependencies.

It has four levels:

1. Foundation – scope, goals, rules, success criteria.
   The ground floor. Without it, nothing stands. This is where we lock the basics so later battles aren’t fought on quicksand.

2. Success Enablers – closing product logic and acceptance rules.
   No more endless debates. Flows, roles, rules of approval – set once, followed always. Ambiguity dies here.

3. Productivity Enhancers – validating the concept, breaking it into modules, preparing patterns and DS for scale.
   Momentum lives or dies at this level. Validate the vision, break it down, arm the team with rules and systems so every micro-decision moves fast and stays aligned.

4. Execution – producing and handing off at speed, with rolling approvals.
   The collision point. Design, business, and tech hit reality. If the lower layers are weak, cracks appear everywhere. If they’re strong, execution feels inevitable.

The Pyramid works because it forces discipline: each level is about locking decisions in the right order, so you don’t have to go backwards. Every layer contains dozens of small but necessary steps. Taken individually, they may feel slow. But taken together, they create unstoppable momentum.

That’s the paradox of large-scale redesign: slow is smooth, and smooth is fast. By moving carefully at first – securing alignment, building enablers, reinforcing the protective bubble – you actually accelerate later. By the time you reach Execution, the system is too big, too complex, and too expensive to allow fundamental changes. And if you’ve done the groundwork right, you don’t need to change – you just build.

This is why we built the Pyramid: not to replace design craft, but to provide the frame that makes it survive in the most demanding environments. It is also our way of practicing strategic design – building layer by layer, locking decisions, and ensuring design survives organizational resistance.

What does “world-class redesign” look like when the Pyramid is followed? It looks like decisions locked in sequence, not chaos. It looks like stakeholders aligned instead of fragmented. It looks like systems designed for scale, not just for a showcase. And it looks like execution runs smoothly, because the foundations were done right. That is the standard leaders should demand – not only beautiful concepts, but resilient transformations that deliver and last.

The Chessboard of Change

Working in large organizations is like playing chess against an invisible opponent.

The opponent is not a person. It’s the system itself. The weight of the status quo. The gravitational pull of “how things have always been done.”

If you don’t anticipate moves, if you don’t think several steps ahead, you will lose your piece – your design – without even knowing how it happened.

• You need to know when to stand your ground and when to say yes. In large organizations, saying “no” too often will brand you as difficult and block future influence. Saying “yes” too often will dilute your vision until nothing meaningful is left. The skill lies in knowing which battles truly matter. Sometimes you need to protect a core principle of the design at all costs. Other times, you accept a compromise on the details to secure trust and momentum. Standing firm when it matters – and yielding when it doesn’t – is what allows your game plan to survive across hundreds of decisions.

• You need to negotiate, not fight. Fighting every battle head-on drains your influence and creates enemies you don’t need. Negotiation is about preserving relationships while still moving your vision forward. Sometimes you give up a secondary element today to gain trust and position yourself for a critical decision tomorrow. A smart compromise can disarm resistance, buy you time, and keep the project alive. The goal is not to win every discussion – it’s to keep advancing your game plan until the important wins are secured.

• You always need to come prepared. A vague discussion at C-level becomes a subjective battlefield, where loud opinions outweigh real expertise. If you walk into that room without evidence, stakeholders will fill the vacuum with their own biases. Preparation changes the game: data, benchmarks, user insights, and clear rationale shift the conversation from opinions to facts. The more prepared you are, the more you control the frame of the discussion. In complex organizations, preparation is not optional – it’s the only way to turn subjective chaos into objective alignment.

• You need to control subjectivity. In large organizations, every discussion is amplified. A single opinion voiced at the wrong time can derail weeks of work. Left unchecked, subjective debates spread fast and gain weight simply because they were spoken aloud. That’s why your job is to control when and where opinions are aired – and to transform them into objective conversations backed by data, prototypes, and clear rationale. The game plan exists to make sure subjective noise never decides the outcome of your design.

• “Never let an unprepared room decide the fate of your design.”

These are not soft skills. They are the rules of survival on the chessboard of change – the only way to keep your design alive against the system's weight.

The chessboard is unforgiving. But with the right mindset, you can win.

The Rules of The Game Plan - Things to Remember

Here are the fundamental rules I’ve learned after leading redesigns for some of the most complex organizations in Europe and the Middle East:

1. Prepare the battleground before the fight. Never walk into a meeting without setting expectations, aligning allies, and knowing exactly what you want to achieve.

2. Small wins build momentum. Don’t try to push a huge decision all at once. Deliver it as a stack of smaller, accepted steps. Once enough are secured, the big decision becomes inevitable.

3. Build big approvals on top of many small ones. It’s far easier to get 100 small things accepted in isolation than to get 5 big things approved in front of a board. When you’ve already secured alignment on the details – quietly, step by step – the larger decisions almost approve themselves. By the time the boardroom sees the big picture, it’s no longer a debate. It’s a confirmation.

4. Control the environment. Never allow uncontrolled feedback in front of a large group. Feedback should be pre-aligned, isolated, or handled 1:1. Control who’s in the room and what’s on the table.

5. Compromise on your terms. Every large project requires compromises. The key is to walk in with your pre-negotiated compromise – so you remain in control, not reacting under pressure.

6. Objective beats subjective. The higher the table (C-level), the more objective your discussion must be. Numbers, benchmarks, business rationale. Come unprepared, and your design will be eaten alive by opinions.

7. Make ideas theirs before you show them. The best presentation is when stakeholders already feel they know the answer. Share, align, and seed ideas before the reveal – so when you show the solution, it feels like their idea too.

8. Decisions in isolation. Fundamental calls should be secured in controlled, private settings before being exposed to the wider group. This is not secrecy – it’s strategy.

9. Protect the bubble. Treat every meeting as a chance to reinforce the protective bubble. One careless exposure can make it burst.

Mastering these rules is what we mean by strategic design. It’s not just about making things look good – it’s about playing the long game, anticipating resistance, and winning alignment at every level.

The Risk of No Game Plan

Without a strong game plan, most redesigns fail. The biggest risks?

• No game plan, or one that’s too simplistic. Hoping that “good design will win” is naive. A Gantt chart is not a game plan.

• Underestimating stakeholders. Assuming silence means alignment. It doesn’t. Without constant navigation, misalignment will surface when it hurts the most.

• Lack of allies. Without champions across the organization, your vision collapses early – long before the design is even judged on its merits.

I’ve watched organizations pour millions into design, only to see projects unravel because the invisible game wasn’t played. The failure is rarely visible on the surface – it shows up in endless delays, watered-down features, forgotten priorities, shifting goals, leadership losing patience.

But I’ve also seen the opposite: when the gameplan is clear, each small step builds pressure until the final approval becomes the obvious, almost automatic choice. That’s the real power of mastering the Invisible 90%.

So what is a game plan?

A game plan is not a Gantt chart or a linear process. It’s the detailed choreography of how a redesign moves through an organization. It’s dozens of small activities and micro-decisions, arranged in the right order: who sees which deliverable, who approves it, who doesn’t; which department to align with first and which to avoid until later; when to slow the project down to buy time, and when to accelerate to lock in momentum.

A game plan evolves as the project unfolds. Every week brings new information, new constraints, new politics. It’s the operating system beneath research, strategy, design, and development – the invisible frame that allows the visible work to survive. The game plan doesn’t replace design excellence. It protects it. It ensures that the essential decisions are made in the right rooms, at the right time, with the right people.

Without a game plan, even brilliant design is exposed. With one, the Invisible 90% becomes navigable – and fragile concepts become products that actually launch and deliver impact.

A Manifesto for Enterprise/Gov Redesign

Leading digital transformation at enterprise or government scale is like carrying a fragile protective bubble across a minefield. Every step makes it stronger or weaker. Every meeting is a test.

Great design is the blueprint. But a skyscraper doesn’t stand because of drawings – it stands because permits, approvals, engineering, and execution all align. Enterprise redesign is no different.

If you want your redesign to succeed at national or enterprise scale, you don’t just need designers. You need navigators of complexity. You need a gameplan. That’s how transformation doesn’t just launch – it lasts. That’s how redesigns move from blueprints to true impact. And that’s how the most ambitious digital leaders make history, not just headlines.

This is the essence of strategic design – and it’s the path we’re building at Flying Bisons for the next decade.

For leaders, the lesson is simple: design at scale is not about pixels, it’s about change. If you want your redesign to succeed, you must protect the vision, empower strategic designers, and measure success by impact – not concepts. Without this, even the best ideas will collapse inside the system.

And remember: slow is smooth, smooth is fast.

Ready to Build the Future of Strategic Design?

We're expanding our strategic design discipline – and we want you to be part of it.

As a Strategic Designer at Flying Bisons, you'll be architecting change. You'll protect design vision in hostile environments, navigate the invisible 90%, and turn ambitious digital strategies into reality.

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