Latest revision as of 13:30, 1 September 2025

Practice Patterns

What does good Enterprise Design work look like

"Good designers do not accept any situation as given; instead they always begin by asking challenging questions to better understand the true nature of what they are dealing with."
- Harold G. Nelson and Erik Stolterman

Doing Enterprise Design means defining a future worth pursuing for a usually messy, always changing entity: an enterprise, prone to the uncertainty and complexity of any human undertaking.

Even when your co-creators seem to know exactly what this future looks like, how can you tell if they are right in their predictions? When industry analysts or experts give you advice, is there some blind spot they are missing? When your own research, ideas and thinking point you into a certain direction, should you trust your instincts and go there? And when you finally got it, will the people managing, building and running your enterprise everyday support and adopt our design? To design an enterprise is not a question of optimising a well-oiled machine, nor of predicting the future, detailing out every step in a plan or blueprint, or performing group therapy with your co-creators. It is a design task: generating enough shared insight and inspiration to come up with a sound idea, then relentlessly developing and challenging a concept for the future. This section gives you nine patterns to do just that.

You will discover ways to:

Obtain observations and data to inform your design decisions from the early, fuzzy stages all the way to realisation;
Open up to serendipity and surprising sources of inspiration that can send you off into an entirely new direction;
Radically push design quality by immersing yourself and your co-creators in the reality of the people you are designing for;
Get unstuck and taking a fresh view on challenging topics by shifting perspective and focus;
Boil down your ideas and concepts to the very essence to let others fill in the blanks;
Reveal the effects and consequences you and your co-creators might have missed when designing.

The Practice Patterns are:

@@ Line 12: / Line 12: @@
 Even when your co-creators seem to know exactly what this future looks like, how can you tell if they are right in their predictions? When industry analysts or experts give you advice, is there some blind spot they are missing? When your own research, ideas and thinking point you into a certain direction, should you trust your instincts and go there? And when you finally got it, will the people managing, building and running your enterprise everyday support and adopt our design?
-To design an enterprise is not a question of optimising a well-oiled machine, nor of predicting the future, detailing out every step in a plan or blueprint, or performing group therapy with your co-creators. It is a design task: generating enough shared insight and inspiration to come up with a sound idea, then relentlessly developing and challenging a concept for the future.
+To design an enterprise is not a question of optimising a well-oiled machine, nor of predicting the future, detailing out every step in a plan or blueprint, or performing group therapy with your co-creators. It is a design task: generating enough shared insight and inspiration to come up with a sound idea, then relentlessly developing and challenging a concept for the future. This section gives you nine patterns to do just that.
-This section gives you nine patterns to do just that. '''You will discover ways to:'''
+'''You will discover ways to:'''
 *Obtain observations and data to inform your design decisions from the early, fuzzy stages all the way to realisation;
 *Open up to serendipity and surprising sources of inspiration that can send you off into an entirely new direction;