Opportunities and Limitations of Design Thinking as Strategic Approach for Navigating Digital Transformation in Organizations

Digital transformation is fueled by the growing offer of digital technology, promising new business models, and growing revenues. The inevitable systemic change needed for digital transformation accompanied by the dynamic conditions for such is what contributes to the growing complexity of transformation projects in organizations, bringing new opportunities and hurdles for the people affected. This complexity results in most digital transformation activities falling short of their goal and leaders not being able to create the desired impact. There is evidence that design thinking has the potential to significantly contribute to the field of digital transformation. This research project aims at getting a better understanding of how design thinking as strategic approach can contribute to the success of digital transformation activities and, if so, to what extent. With a mixed-method approach, including a literature review and qualitative research, we conducted three case studies. Our learnings show that digital transformation is very individual to the respective organization regarding scope, motivations, goals, and starting points. Therefore, there is no general or linear approach to digital transformation processes. Our findings show that it can start anywhere and includes forward as well as backward steps. The individual transformation needs of organizations are also based on the high complexity of transformation processes and activities. Orchestrating complex transformation projects requires a systematic, clearly structured, and integrated process. This process needs both diverging and converging activities in the areas of analysis, vision, learning, and diffusion. These activities enable ambidextrous navigation through all transformation areas. To overcome transformation hurdles, the constant integration of human, technology, and system perspective is crucial to mirror the interrelation of all three systems. We found that the organizational culture plays a significant role in successful transformation projects. On a strategic level, the cultural digital transformation maturity can serve as decision reference to define starting point, metrics, and individual identification. On a systemic level, we learned that methods are less likely to be transferred into the organizational value creation practice than concepts/principles (as individual lessons learned). Our cases show the vulnerability and fragility of transformation processes: On an operational level, transformation gets blocked by daily business or urgent matters leading to teams hitting the breaks in transformation activities. To make our research actionable, we developed an integrated and clearly structured digital transformation process and transferred the findings of this project for creating an adaptive digital transformation strategy kit, that aims at closing the research-practice gap and offers practitioners a scientifically substantiated strategic decision support on how to navigate their own digital transformation endeavors.