The Authoring Team in San Francisco. Photo by Murmur Ring/Dylan Chandler
June 08, 2023
What is Strategic Choice-Making?
Navigating institutional complexity through design.
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Strategic Choice-Making helps organizations move beyond reactive decision-making by shaping design features that align institutional purpose with systemic change. In contexts of rapid transformation—driven by sustainability goals, equity demands, digital disruptions, and economic shifts—design becomes not just about solving problems, but about orchestrating flows of influence, value, and behavior.
Strategic Choice-Making empowers institutions to make purposeful, systemic choices—ones that reconfigure platforms, infrastructures, and outcomes.
Why Now?
Most institutions are optimized for decision-making: choosing among known options under fixed constraints.
But today’s challenges—climate crisis, algorithmic governance, uneven development—require choice-making: the capacity to frame new paths, reconcile competing logics, and navigate ambiguity.
Strategic Choice-Making fills a critical gap in the design field.
It positions designers—and institutional leaders—as agents of direction, not just execution.
How It Works: The Strategic Choice-Making Model (SCMM)
[Insert diagram: SCMM]
At the core of this model is a question:
How do we choose the right features to carry the weight of our purpose, given the forces shaping our world?
Components of the SCMM:
Institutional Purpose – Long-term intent that guides what the institution values and invests in.
Macro Forces – Sustainability, equity, digitization, deglobalization, and financialization. These shape the context and constraints.
Strategic Features – The mediating design elements—interfaces, defaults, policies, rules, offerings—that turn intent into infrastructure.
Flows – The resource, relational, and informational movements that these features organize.
The SCMM offers a systemic grammar for shaping infrastructures through intentional design.
Strategic Choice-Making
Influencing the flows that shape our common future
Our institutions were engineered for a 20-th-century economy, yet they now face 21-st-century forces—climate volatility, digital finance, AI-driven logistics, demands for equity—that simply out-scale the old logics. In that gap between what our systems can do and what the world now asks of them, new kinds of choices must be made.
Strategic Choice-Making (SCM) is a design practice for that gap.
It moves us from reactive decision-making (“Which of these familiar choices do we pick?”) to purposeful choice-making (“What new possibilities must exist—and how do we shape them responsibly?”). SCM treats every product, service, policy or algorithmic rule as a feature—a leverage-point that channels flows of money, energy, data, attention, or trust. If we redesign those features with intent, we can redirect the flows—and, in turn, the futures they produce.
HOW TO?
1 ▸ See the forces, name the purpose
SCM begins by mapping two things:
Macro forces—sustainability targets, equity demands, financialization, digitization, de-globalization.
Institutional purpose—the long-term intent that truly matters to an organisation or community.
When purpose meets force, the space for innovation appears.
2 ▸ Craft strategic features
Features are the practical translation of intent: a pay-later button that makes credit visible to informal farmers; a bidirectional EV-charger that turns parked buses into grid backup; a transparent meal-configurator that turns airline catering into a circular food economy.
Each feature is designed to carry purpose and redirect flows—of capital, carbon, nutrients, opportunity.
3 ▸ Rewire the flows
By redesigning features, SCM rewires how resources move:
From > To SCM-oriented flows
Obaque credit Scoring > Contextual, dignity-first financial passports
Small changes in flow compound into large-scale transformation.
4 ▸ Iterate through the SCMM loop
The Strategic Choice-Making Model (SCMM) guides teams through four generative stages
Prompting – frame the question with purpose × forces.
Prototyping – build quick experiments to reveal hidden trade-offs.
Archetyping – surface patterns that can scale across contexts.
Infrastructuring / Platforming – embed the winning archetypes into durable systems.
The loop repeats—each cycle refining alignment between what we value and what we build.
Why it matters
Because EV chargers aren’t just plugs, they are energy policies in disguise.
Because a “skip cart” button shapes how a city eats, and what it wastes.
Because the choices we embed in code and concrete today will script the possibilities of tomorrow.
Strategic Choice-Making offers a disciplined way to script those possibilities, so that our infrastructures, platforms, and institutions can finally keep pace with the futures we all deserve.