Adam Zeiner

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.

We also need to stop treating them as monolithic models of the entire system. We’re in the digital age now and maps are cheap. There’s no reason we can’t have multiple versions or break our research up into multiple maps, each with a well defined scope and focus.

The principles we use to build systems maps haven’t changed much since the 1980s.

I like the concepts “strategy” and “tactics” to capture what these two sides of design are about. As far as I can tell this appears to be the choice of words that professional designers and design leaders use.