Abstract
‘Strategic agility’– i.e., how organizations can strategically plan and cope with uncertainty through a continuous tuning, monitoring, and re-balancing of their operations – has been characterized as a critical component to foster organizational resilience. This paper aims at investigating whether and how design can support organizations to acquire greater strategic agility. Our analysis is grounded in a case of a globally operating software company that has recently established a design team and introduced design methods in its development processes. The paper shows how design favoured processes that are generally linked to strategic agility (distancing, anticipating, reframing, experimenting, decoupling, and dialoguing). Taken together, these pro- cesses were key in building the strategic agility needed in transitioning from a product- centric orientation towards a user- and service-centred approach.
Keywords
strategic agility, service design, service-centred
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2022.275
Citation
Harre, O., Simeone, L., and Seidelin, C. (2022) Fostering resilience: The potential of design to support strategic agility, in Lockton, D., Lenzi, S., Hekkert, P., Oak, A., Sádaba, J., Lloyd, P. (eds.), DRS2022: Bilbao, 25 June - 3 July, Bilbao, Spain. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2022.275
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Conference Track
Research Paper
Included in
Fostering resilience: The potential of design to support strategic agility
‘Strategic agility’– i.e., how organizations can strategically plan and cope with uncertainty through a continuous tuning, monitoring, and re-balancing of their operations – has been characterized as a critical component to foster organizational resilience. This paper aims at investigating whether and how design can support organizations to acquire greater strategic agility. Our analysis is grounded in a case of a globally operating software company that has recently established a design team and introduced design methods in its development processes. The paper shows how design favoured processes that are generally linked to strategic agility (distancing, anticipating, reframing, experimenting, decoupling, and dialoguing). Taken together, these pro- cesses were key in building the strategic agility needed in transitioning from a product- centric orientation towards a user- and service-centred approach.