How tangible is your strategy? How design thinking can turn your strategy into reality

Purpose Improving your company's ability to execute its strategy requires increase alignment, greater agility and a singular clarity regarding the desired outcomes. This paper aims to describe how the SAP Design Services Team uses design thinking and its principles to improve the organization's ability improve its ability to execute strategy and even evolve the way SAP identifies and defines its strategic vision. Design/methodology/approach This paper examines both the value of the design thinking approach as well as the organizational practices employed to insure its success. Findings The study has found a number of best practices for the development of artifacts to make strategies tangible, as well as the organizational requirements for the wide spread adoption of design thinking as an approach for the entire organization. Applying the principles of design thinking the Design Services Team has developed the means to analyze, refine and convey business strategies in the form of artifacts or prototypes. While demonstrating what the final offering will be from a customer's point of view, these objects also express the strategic planning as well as external market forces and risks within their narrative. Going beyond traditional communication channels this approach not only expresses the vision and intent behind the strategy but also an eventual end‐state; in short this method allows everyone across the organization to understand the real meaning of your strategy by knowing what success will look like when its achieved. Originality/value By reexamining both how they identify and develop their strategies as well as how those strategies are communicated and refined in implementation, organizations can increase their effectiveness and decrease time to execution. Today most strategies are conveyed as broad visions that lack any specifics regarding how the goals are to be achieved allowing it to be disintegrated at the point of execution. Combining the aspirational message with tangible examples of the end‐state makes the message and the mission clear and actionable.