We're excited to welcome Leanne as the Director, Strategic Design at Snowmelt. Leanne joins us as she finalises her PhD at the University of Technology, exploring the intersections of design and strategy. She has a background in consulting and research, working at the intersection of design and business. We sat down with her to ask a few questions as she joins us.

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Can you tell us a bit about your journey in consulting and academia, and what brought you to Snowmelt?

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Since my undergraduate course in visual communication design, I have been interested in exploring what design can do for organisations – how design approaches can be used to unpack complex design challenges beyond the traditional applications, such as visual communication design. Over the course of my career, the idea of design thinking took off and there were a lot of fascinating conversations and roles developing for designers in business as a result. I had the opportunity to meet Roger Martin around the time he released ‘The Design of Business’ and was in an industry role at Billy Blue College of Design, where I met lots of interesting people working in the design thinking space.

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I was afforded the opportunity to produce an issue of the college’s journal, BBetween, focusing on the topic of design thinking for designers and businesses. Through that project, I had many conversations and read a lot. The things I was reading on the topic pointed to designers ‘learning the language of business’ to bring design practices closer to business. So that was a motivating realisation - and I did just that. I returned to Uni to undertake a Master of Management at Macquarie University, which catalysed my career in working at the intersection of design for business, particularly strategy. 

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After that, I moved into place-based strategy consulting for a few years, and then went to work at Deloitte. In my time with Deloitte, I was tasked with bringing design into their strategy and operations team alongside the design capability team centrally located within consulting. In this role, I worked with some super bright people and worked on exciting projects. I was challenged to find unique ways to integrate design perspectives into traditional models of strategy consulting, which also involved internal training and development. I then had an opportunity to join the Design Innovation Research Centre at the University of Technology Sydney after my time at Deloitte. As a team, we would undertake projects with partners utilising design approaches and researching aspects to contribute to knowledge development in this space. It was in this role that the PhD project came up. This led me to my current studies investigating the role of design in strategy. 

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The question for me after my PhD was where to go and what to do. I am passionate about continuing to contribute to knowledge development and the education of future leaders with design as a central theme of all that I do – but I also love applying my knowledge to projects.  So, the opportunity to join the team at Snowmelt popped up at just the right time for me. I had great conversations with the team and found so many synergies around design and systems and general ambitions and values – and well, here I am! I am excited to apply all of my research and practice to the practice with Snowmelt.  

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Could you share an example of a challenging problem you've solved with a design-led strategy approach?

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I worked on an exciting medical device innovation research project in my role at the Design Innovation Research Centre. We collaborated with the UTS Business School and a broader research conglomerate to develop a business model and service design approach that would support the delivery of the technology. In the scope of this work, we had to articulate the needs and requirements of major stakeholders across the healthcare network, including patients, nurses, surgeons and insurers. The work became critical to mapping out the issues and changes required to facilitate the technology.

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It also inspired a parcel of work to encourage essential conversations for the medical devices company about how they should reconfigure their operational strategy to guide the establishment of a new manufacturing facility here in Australia. This project showcased how a design approach can support the navigation of complex problems and bring stakeholders together to talk meaningfully about change while capturing the narratives and visually mapping what it takes to enable change. 

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‍What excites you about systems and design-led strategy in the contemporary and commercial spaces?

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‍Organisations are operating in complex environments that are increasingly challenged to consider their contributions to society and the environment. That means that organisations can no longer afford to focus only on what they do to compete but instead on how they operate in the broader ecosystem to sustain nature and life. In that frame, the questions of strategy change extend and expand organisational activities' remit and require a system perspective.  Design practices are attuned to working within and navigating complexity or ‘wicked problems’ towards innovative futures. Combined, systems perspective with design approaches create the condition to comprehensively understand the problem spaces that organisations operate within and expand conceptions of strategy to imagine futures that extend the current paradigm and conventions held by a given field or industry. 

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Further, organisations are about people, and systems and design-led strategy perspectives afford highly participatory and human interventions. Design is about being attuned to humans and their needs in delivering changes. Bringing systems perspectives into those conversations allows complexities and requirements to be seen and meaningfully engaged with. Together, design and systems approaches create the condition to articulate and realise meaningful, impactful, progressive, future-focussed strategies.

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I am excited about systems and design-led strategy because I see this as being at the core of contemporary strategy practice. 

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What do you want to explore most in the intersections of your PhD and the work we do at Snowmelt? 

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‍Strategy has long been conceived of as something that happens cyclically, but I believe that organisations can continue to adapt and develop approaches to strategy as they need to. My research has shown that design is an emergent strategy practice focusing on developing strategic options through design research sensing activities. The design actions and modalities used in strategy create space for generative experimentation to define strategic choices that are innovative and adaptable. It brings others into the conversation while leaning into complexities and tensions and challenging current-state assumptions about how business ‘should’ be.

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Learn more

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• Read Leanne's bio, or contact Leanne through our webform to learn more.
• More on the health project can be found in article 1, or article 2, or on the UTS website‍
• Roger Martin, The Design of Business (2009)

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Snowmelt welcomes Leanne to the team. We look forward to the new perspective and expertise she'll bring to our mission and partners.

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