Design Thinking for Strategic Planning and Innovation Training Course

Course overview

Strategic plans often fail because they begin with internal targets, financial assumptions, or executive opinions rather than evidence of what customers, employees, partners, and communities actually need. Leaders are expected to set a clear direction while markets, technologies, regulations, and stakeholder expectations change quickly. This course helps professionals use design thinking to turn ambiguous strategic challenges into testable opportunities, credible priorities, and practical initiatives that can gain support across the organisation.

Participants learn a disciplined design-thinking approach for strategic planning: framing a strategic challenge, mapping stakeholders, conducting and synthesising discovery research, defining insight-based opportunity areas, generating options, and testing strategic assumptions before committing significant resources. The course connects human-centred design methods with planning tools including strategic intent statements, opportunity portfolios, prioritisation matrices, innovation roadmaps, business-model hypotheses, and measures for learning and value creation. Participants gain the ability to move from qualitative evidence to a strategy that decision-makers can review, fund, and govern.

Instruction combines concise faculty-led sessions with facilitated workshops, a running strategic-planning case, peer critique, and hands-on work using visual collaboration and planning tools. Each participant develops a design-led strategic planning pack for a real organisational challenge or a supplied case. The final deliverable includes a challenge brief, stakeholder map, insight summary, opportunity portfolio, prototype or experiment plan, strategic roadmap, and executive recommendation suitable for presentation to sponsors.

The course is designed for managers and strategy contributors who already participate in planning, transformation, innovation, service improvement, or portfolio decisions and need a more evidence-led way to shape strategic choices.

Course objectives

By the end of this course, participants will be able to:

• Frame a strategic challenge using a design brief that defines users, context, constraints, decision owners, and success measures
• Map stakeholders and ecosystems using power-interest analysis, journey maps, and value-network views
• Plan and conduct discovery research using interview guides, observation prompts, and secondary-data review
• Synthesize qualitative evidence into insight statements, personas, needs, and opportunity areas
• Generate strategic options through facilitated ideation, scenario prompts, and business-model hypothesis design
• Prioritize opportunity concepts using desirability, feasibility, viability, risk, and strategic-fit criteria
• Design low-fidelity prototypes and learning experiments to test critical strategic assumptions
• Produce a design-led strategic roadmap and executive decision pack with initiatives, metrics, owners, and review points

Benefits of attending

Target competencies

Who should attend

• Strategy Managers — who must convert enterprise priorities into evidence-based strategic choices and initiatives
• Business Unit Leaders — who need to align growth, operating-model, and customer-value decisions with stakeholder needs
• Innovation Managers — who must build and test opportunity portfolios before seeking investment
• Transformation Leaders — who need practical methods for involving users and employees in change strategy
• Product and Service Managers — who shape roadmaps that depend on validated customer problems and value propositions
• Programme Managers — who coordinate strategic initiatives and need clearer assumptions, outcomes, and governance measures

Requirements and prerequisites

Participants should have experience contributing to business planning, service improvement, change programmes, product development, or innovation initiatives. They should be comfortable discussing organisational goals, customer or stakeholder needs, basic financial trade-offs, and project constraints. Familiarity with common planning concepts such as SWOT, KPIs, risk registers, and stakeholder analysis is useful, although the course does not depend on advanced strategy frameworks. Participants should bring a current strategic challenge if possible and be able to use spreadsheets and presentation software at a basic level. No prior design qualification, coding ability, specialist research software, or graphic-design experience is required.

Training methodology

Faculty-led instruction introduces each method through strategic-planning examples, followed by guided application in individual and group workshops. Participants work through a running case and, where appropriate, their own organisational challenge: interviewing stakeholder needs, clustering evidence, writing insight statements, generating opportunity concepts, and testing prioritisation choices. Teams use Miro for visual synthesis, Excel for scoring and portfolio analysis, and PowerPoint for executive communication. Facilitated critique sessions challenge assumptions and strengthen decision logic. The final session converts workshop outputs into a practical 90-day application plan and sponsor-ready recommendation.

Course outline

Day 1: Framing strategy through human needs

• Design thinking principles for strategic planning and innovation
• Strategic challenge framing with how-might-we questions
• Strategic intent, ambition statements, and planning horizons
• Stakeholder ecosystem mapping and power-interest analysis
• Customer, employee, partner, and sponsor segmentation
• Assumption mapping for strategic uncertainty
• Research objectives and evidence-planning canvases

Workshop: Participants create a strategic challenge brief, stakeholder ecosystem map, and assumption map for a selected planning case.

Day 2: Discovering evidence and strategic insight

• Semi-structured interview design and question sequencing
• Observation methods and contextual inquiry prompts
• Secondary research using market, operational, and policy evidence
• Journey mapping for end-to-end stakeholder experiences
• Interview note capture and evidence coding
• Affinity mapping and thematic clustering
• Insight statements, tensions, and unmet-need definitions

Workshop: Participants analyse a research evidence set and produce an affinity map, stakeholder journey map, and prioritised insight statements.

Day 3: Creating and selecting strategic options

• Opportunity-area definition from validated insights
• Divergent ideation methods including brainwriting and SCAMPER
• Future-back thinking and strategic scenario prompts
• Value proposition design for strategic initiatives
• Business-model hypotheses and value-creation logic
• Desirability, feasibility, viability, and risk assessment
• Opportunity portfolio matrices and prioritisation criteria

Workshop: Teams generate an opportunity portfolio, score concepts against agreed criteria, and select a strategic option for development.

Day 4: Testing assumptions before committing resources

• Prototype types for services, policies, operating models, and customer propositions
• Critical-assumption testing and experiment backlogs
• Learning goals, test metrics, and evidence thresholds
• Experiment design using landing pages, storyboards, and service simulations
• Pilot planning and minimum viable initiative scope
• Ethical research, consent, and stakeholder-risk considerations
• Interpreting test results for strategic go, revise, or stop decisions

Workshop: Participants design a prototype and experiment card that tests the highest-risk assumption behind their selected strategic option.

Day 5: Turning innovation into an executable strategy

• From opportunity concept to strategic initiative architecture
• Innovation roadmaps with horizons, dependencies, and decision gates
• Outcome metrics, leading indicators, and learning measures
• Initiative ownership, governance forums, and review cadences
• Resource assumptions and investment-case narrative
• Executive storytelling with evidence, options, and recommendations
• ISO 56002 innovation-management guidance for strategic integration

Workshop: Participants assemble and present a sponsor-ready design-led strategic planning pack, including a roadmap and 90-day action plan.

Tools & standards covered

Miro, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft PowerPoint, ISO 56002

A typical training day

Live online deliveries follow the same structure in the East Africa Time zone, with shorter screen blocks and longer breaks.

What the fee includes

How you can take this course

Certification

Participants who complete the full five days receive the Skillset Development Certificate of Completion, stating the course title, course code, dates and delivery format — suitable for professional-development records and employer reimbursement.

Frequently asked questions