Improvising Digital Transformation: Strategy Unfolding in Acts of Organizational Improvisation

Digitalization disrupts markets leaving organizations with unprecedented challenges in increasingly turbulent business environments. To cope, organizations engage in their digital transformations. Crafting digital transformation strategies, they seek to exploit digital technologies to leverage new business opportunities. In management circles, crafting such digital transformation strategies is portrayed as an act of advanced planning and subsequent execution. In practice, however, strategy making in an unprecedented situation coined by a turbulent business environment, rather resembles the situational, intuitive practice of improvisation. Building on an ethnographic study in a large German car manufacturer (Car Inc.) undergoing its digital transformation, we report how Car Inc.’s digital transformation strategy unfolds in acts of organizational improvisation. Car Inc.’s digital transformation strategy is not planned and executed top-down but unfolds bottom-up coordinated by a digital unit purposefully organizing a sequence of multiple acts of organizational improvisation guided by a multi-layered minimal structure