The Danish love to cycle.
Not only do they like cycling, they want to make cycling easier. The roads and infrastructure are designed to simplify getting on your bike and spinning your legs.
They have a design language on how the roads should look, feel, and operate.
A design language takes an idea, in this case making cycling easier, and creates rules on how the experience will operate.
This decreases the mental load for everyone involved. The car drivers know what to expect and what to look out for. The cyclists understand where and what they should do.
Simplifying the experience and making it consistent makes it easier for everyone.
Revolution
Once they have a design language, they don’t rip up all the roads and align everything with the new standard.
They implement the new language when they make a new road or when they upgrade an existing road.
They are working on constantly improving the roads and the experience for all the road users.
They are working on the evolution of the experience for their users rather than a revolution.
Philosophy
The whole process comes down to how they want to approach the whole thing. Whole is the keyword here. Looking at everything.
What is the world going to look like? Your world might be an entire planet or it might be how the desks are set up in your office.
These decisions should fit into an overarching idea of how the whole decides the parts and how the parts create the whole.
In this case, they use a Design language to express in real terms how their philosophy of bike riding is created in the real world.
Action
With any good team, there are constant and never-ending improvements in line with an overall goal.
As the leader, you need to be clear on what that goal is and what that goal means for your team.
The philosophy drives the action. The action expresses the philosophy
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Luke McMeeken-Ruscoe 