At the d.school, design has always taken a human-centered approach. Senior designer Nadia Roumani has built her career at the intersection of strategy and human-centered design, helping social sector leaders navigate complexity while staying grounded in the real needs of the people they serve. Alongside her long-time d.school collaborator, Thomas Both, she continues to advance this integrated approach, including through an upcoming workshop with Stanford Social Innovation Review, designed to help leaders strengthen their strategy without losing sight of the humans at the center of their work.
Why Strategy Needs Design–and Design Needs Strategy
For much of my career, I have worked at the intersection of strategy and human-centered design—two disciplines that are often treated as separate, sequential, or even in tension with one another. Strategy is sometimes seen as rigid and abstract; design as open-ended and exploratory. Together, they form a surprisingly effective partnership. What’s consistently true in practice is that, when combined thoughtfully, the two are far more powerful together than either can be alone.
This integration has been the through-line of my work for nearly two decades—as a strategist, facilitator, and now as a senior designer at the Stanford d.school, where my focus is helping social-sector leaders build skills to navigate ambiguity while still creating meaningful, measurable change for people.
This integration is especially important today because social-sector leaders are increasingly being asked to do more with less. Government funding is shrinking, trust with institutions is fragile, and teams are under constant pressure to scale - often at the expense of reflection and learning.
Traditional, static strategic plans are no longer sufficient. Three-year plans can become obsolete within months as political and funding contexts shift. What leaders need instead is the capacity to become learning organizations - grounded in purpose, responsive to change, and able to adapt without losing direction.
Human-centered design reconnects teams to the people they serve and reminds them why they entered this work in the first place. Strategy ensures that this energy is channeled toward outcomes that matter.
The Challenge I See Again and Again
When social-sector leaders arrive to do strategy work, they often don’t lack commitment or activity—they lack clarity, specifically, clarity at the human level. Teams can easily describe what they’ve done or plan to do, but struggle to articulate:
- who they are specifically trying to reach;
- what behavior or outcome they are actually striving to change or support; and
- where their efforts can have the greatest leverage.
Goals are framed as activities (“launch a program,” “host a training session”) rather than outcomes, and audiences are described in broad terms like “children” or “the public.” Without alignment on the who and the desired outcome, teams end up with a narrow solution space focused on familiar activities, and little guidance on where there might be room for exploration and creativity.
The Cost of Strategy Without Design
At the same time, strategy developed without human-centered design often becomes a theory built in a vacuum. Without engaging the people you aim to serve, or with whom you want to co-design, teams risk pursuing well-intentioned activities that don’t lead to meaningful outcomes.
The costs are real:
- resources drained on efforts that don’t change behavior;
- erosion of trust with communities; and
- teams that lose confidence when they don’t see results.
Over time, this disconnect contributes to burnout. I’ve come to believe that a clear, testable strategy is actually an antidote to burnout, especially when paired with design, which allows teams to learn whether their assumptions are grounded in reality. This is where strategy matters. A clear strategy acts as a guide: it helps teams make choices, align internally, and decide what not to do. It creates focus in a sector where needs are endless and resources are limited.
Teams often look to human-centered design as a way to innovate or improve services and programs—but as its core, if done robustly, it keeps your team and organization grounded, accountable and relevant to the communities you serve. It helps teams test whether perceived needs are real needs, and whether proposed solutions are actually desirable. Just as importantly, it builds trust by shifting teams from imposing answers to listening, learning, and adapting.
The Limits of Design Without Strategy
Of course, the reverse is also true. Human-centered design without strategy can leave teams overwhelmed. In the social sector, it doesn’t take much ethnographic work to uncover dozens - if not hundreds - of legitimate needs. Without strategic guardrails, teams struggle to decide:
- where to go deeper;
- which needs to prioritize; and
- what success actually looks like.
Human-centered,community-engaged design takes time, energy, and resources - all of which are scarce. Strategy provides the focus that allows teams to utilize design selectively, where it can have the greatest impact.
Strategy Sets the Direction; Design Drives the Learning
I often describe the relationship this way: strategy clarifies what we are trying to accomplish, while human-centered design clarifies what we need to learn—and provides a disciplined way to uncover the insights required to achieve meaningful impact.
Strategy articulates a starting hypothesis: Which communities or stakeholders are we prioritizing? What outcome are we trying to change? Why this approach? Design then stress-tests that hypothesis through real engagement with people—uncovering nuance, surfacing deeper emotional and behavioral needs, and revealing whether a solution is actually likely to work.
Importantly, this isn’t a linear handoff. Strategy informs where design is most useful, and design, in turn, refines and strengthens strategy. The relationship is dynamic and iterative, especially critical in complex systems where certainty is impossible.
My Professional Passion
I’ve noticed a familiar divide: people who love strategy are often hesitant about human-centered design, and those who love design can feel intimidated by strategy. My professional passion is helping leaders see that these are not competing approaches—they are deeply complementary tools for creating real impact in people’s lives.
This integration is at the heart of my work as an educator and practitioner, and it’s why I’m excited to continue exploring this intersection. Because when strategy and human-centered design come together, teams don’t just plan better, they learn better, adapt faster, and create change that actually sticks.
