Solving Complex Challenges: Strategy Design vs. Systems Thinking

I use them depending on what I want to achieve: In all my projects, I want to see the big picture, understand the problem, align with the organisation’s strategy, involve users early, or avoid fragmented processes.

Why they’re powerful

Both methods take a holistic view and consider the entire ecosystem rather than only isolated parts. Personally, I always start from the Operating Model to quickly understand the industry, the broader context, key processes, and potential interdependencies. Opportunities for improvement often lie at the intersection of business units. Think Marketing and Sales on leads for instance. Both tend to define the problem before trying to develop the solution. And both favour iterative processes where findings and solutions are continuously refined, which I like.

Key differences

But there are differences: While Strategy Design prioritises user-centred design (Salesforce calls it Human-Centred Design – HCD), Systems Thinking looks primarily at interdependencies and how different parts of a system affect each other.

Systems Thinking might be IBM’s favourite and Strategy Design aligns with Salesforce’s approach, both companies leverage these two powerful methods.

Our approach at Fluido

At Fluido, we always take a customer-centric design approach, with a combination of ideation, co-creation, agile and DevOps methodologies. We stay very close to Salesforce’s best practices and philosophy of course (We do only Salesforce-based transformation programs after all).

Our focus is on business outcomes. We want to address and solve the immediate issues, but also empower our clients to achieve long-term success and maximise the value of the investment in the Salesforce clouds and ecosystem. That’s what we do.

Let’s continue solving complex challenges with the right approach!