Adam Zeiner

Pace Layers help visualize, distinguish, and discuss different kinds of work and teams within an organization. Here, I bring together a bunch of great thinking into a single construct.

At Design Council, we work across the design economy, and — even though we have specialisms in architecture & the built environment, social innovation & business innovation — we have Experts whose design work goes well beyond that and our research and frameworks should be something all designers can use.

And though it's useful to be able to tell them apart, design is about strategic and tactical work happening together. At the heart of many stubborn design projects and unimpressive outcomes are people coming in with an incompatible mental models; overplaying strategy or tactics, and neglecting the other.

Strategy is brain-work – more often than not it’s abstract and invisible, and challenging to articulate. This is the research, analysis, and debate that goes into making decisions, and the data that comes from observations, interviews, user studies, post-its, brainstorms, and mind maps.

This explains a good deal of what works and doesn't work for teams, especially when it comes to their mission. For highly capable knowledge-work teams (marketing teams, software teams, research team, etc.), low-leverage missions tend to be uninspiring.

1. Alignment & common language

An ecosystem map provides business stakeholders with a holistic overview of the different stakeholders and their internal relationships that together make up the ecosystem in which they aim to operate.