Design Leaders driving Customer Centric Transformation: a Recursive Interplay of Enacting and Adapting

Despite the growing recognition of customer centricity as a strategic imperative for organisations to compete and remain relevant, few have successfully delivered the expected outcomes and achieved lasting customer orientation. While many organisations appear committed, their efforts often fail to bridge the gap between top management's strategic ambitions and plans for execution. Acknowledging this, the focus of strategy implementation studies has shifted from conceptualising strategy implementation plans to how organisational actors make sense of and enact these plans in practice. The adaptive turn has led to an understanding that mutations in practices or routines emerging from the behavioural and social dynamics of implementation, represent essential adjustments to initially conceptualised strategies and strategy implementation plans. Nevertheless, research studies have yet to shed light on the feedback loop from enacting strategy back to (re)conceptualising strategy. Either the one or the other is the focus. The purpose of this study is to contribute to the adaptive turn discourse by examining how adaptations emerge from implementation feedback to inform the (re)conceptualisation of strategy, alongside management guidelines and policies to make adaptive strategy implementation more effective. Within this scope, the research focuses on the benefits and implications of design as a practice and mindset to intentionally foster the interplay between conceptualising, enacting and adapting. By adopting this perspective, the study reveals patterns of actions through which design leaders and practitioners navigate the continuous interplay between conceptualising and enacting strategy and implementation plans across multiple hierarchical levels and organisational units. Employing both quantitative and qualitative research methodologies, the study involved more than three hundred professionals across five European countries to assess their organisations' capabilities and practices in driving and executing customer-centric strategies. Thirteen key informants provided in-depth insights into enablers, barriers, and implications through interviews. The findings suggest that the transformation effort can be conceptualised as a continuous cycle of improvement, evolving through increasingly higher loops of maturity. This paper explores these adaptive cycles and delineates three phases of continuous strategy integration and reconceptualisation in action. It takes design leaders from engaging stakeholders in small pockets of the organisation to facilitating the enactment of strategic ambitions, all the way to establishing new structures and infiltrating all facets of the organisation. In this framework, tailored storytelling, prototyping and infiltration of organisational routines and platforms serve as mediums for continuous enactment and reconceptualisation of the strategy over time.