Conference Agenda

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.

The fashion retail industry is under pressure from regulators and consumers to address sustainability challenges. In addition to implementing circularity practices to achieve sustainability goals, fashion organisations can benefit from new business approaches and re-evaluating their value propositions. Adopting new organisational customer-centred logics can be advantageous for such a purpose and can be pursued through a Strategic Design approach. To adopt a customer organisational logic, it’s essential to implement human-centric practices that enhance customer integration organisational capabilities.

Grounded in empirical evidence from the field, this study unveils a systematic examination of human-centred design research methods employed for fashion product development and the design approaches adopted to introduce these methods into the existing work processes of an international fashion retailer. It also highlights the challenges of implementing these new practices into the infrastructure of existing teams.

This article aims to contribute to a deeper understanding of how fashion organisations can transition towards more customer-centred practices. It provides valuable insights for industry practitioners seeking to drive change within product-focused organisations. It contributes to the literature on fashion product development by proposing a process of infrastructuring as a valid human-centred approach to evolve fashion organisations into adopting new organisational logics.