Enabling a Strategy and Design Mindset
It Takes More than a Repeatable Process to Innovate… It Takes a Mindset
As a growing consulting firm focused on the Federal government, we have something in common with our clients. Our workforces must both increase their focus on habitually using innovation techniques to solve problems – getting results more quickly and more broadly.
Arc Aspicio is in the middle of implementing an exciting and bold vision to dramatically expand our strategy consulting practice and to enhance our use of innovation practices and methods to solve mission problems. Success in implementation, however, goes beyond using repeatable practices to get results. It involves incrementally changing how our workforce thinks so that they can identify when to reach back and apply one of our methods and accelerators.
Design thinking is a repeatable process that helps diverse teams generate a wide variety of ideas, mature them, experiment and prototype, and develop a practice implementation plan to make them happen.
But to really institutionalize Design Thinking in work teams, it takes more than a repeatable process and sponsorship from senior leaders. It takes a mindset.
For Arc Aspicio, this mindset is an innovation culture where employees are inspired and enabled to create, promote, and share ideas to improve our processes every day and recommend larger projects for reinvention.
Notable things about this mindset include:
- A relentless focus on the users, stakeholders, and the mission
- A dedication to following a stakeholder’s journey end-to-end to ‘see’ innovative ways of doing things
- A focus on building strong relationships every day to enable the tough decisions that come when a team needs to prioritize and implement innovation
- A team focus on improving things all the time, and knowing when to initiate a new project to solve a problem or reinvent a process or system
For us and for the government, strategy and design go hand in hand. As our company evolves and enhances our mindset to think strategically and design with the mission in mind, so we also help the Government do the same for their workforce.
Creating the ideas isn’t hard. Implementing innovation is. Having the full support of a workforce with a design mindset is the key to success.
About Arc Aspicio
Arc Aspicio is a management, strategy, and technology consulting firm that takes a mission-oriented approach to complex client challenges. As a rapidly growing company, Arc Aspicio has a bold strategy for 2016-2018 that drives growth through new capabilities in strategy, design, human capital, data analytics, information sharing, cybersecurity, and strategic communications. The company is known for a strong, collaborative culture that values gratitude – for its clients and its great team. And, #welovedogs! Follow us on Twitter @arcaspicio or learn more at www.arcaspicio.com.
