Design Processes Must Evolve with Emerging Technology, Say Experts
Harvard Business Review | January 30, 2026
In today’s rapidly changing technological landscape, businesses find themselves caught in a challenging pattern of episodic, large-scale change initiatives. These efforts often involve extensive re-engineering projects and significant investments in new information technology systems. Yet, despite these endeavors, many organizations struggle to fundamentally transform their core operations and remain impeded by sluggish organizational "metabolism," according to insights shared by Manish Sharma, Lan Guan, and H. James Wilson in a recent Harvard Business Review article.
The Challenge of Continuous Transformation
For decades, companies have attempted to adapt through major change projects that aim to overhaul processes and systems. However, these transformations tend to be sporadic, costly, and risky, burdened by immense transaction costs. These costs arise from the friction involved in coordinating people, managing information flow, and aligning complex work within organizations. Such friction has made sustained, deep transformation prohibitively expensive and difficult to maintain over time.
Experts Weigh In
Manish Sharma, Chief Strategy and Services Officer at Accenture, together with Lan Guan, Accenture’s Chief AI and Data Officer, and H. James Wilson, global managing director of technology research and thought leadership at Accenture Research, argue that the traditional approach to organizational change must evolve. Wilson is also coauthor of Human + Machine: Reimagining Work in the Age of AI, New and Expanded Edition (HBR Press, 2024), which explores how artificial intelligence (AI) reshapes work and business processes.
The authors emphasize that emerging technologies, especially generative AI and other advances in machine learning and data analytics, offer new opportunities to rethink and reimagine design processes. Instead of undertaking periodic, disruptive change projects, businesses can leverage these technologies to enable ongoing, incremental evolution of processes. This shift can help reduce coordination friction, streamline information management, and better align complex workflows in real-time.
Toward a New Paradigm of Agile Design
The article highlights the imperative for organizations to develop a “living” design process—dynamic, data-informed, and continuously adaptive. Such an approach not only fosters agility but also allows companies to keep pace with technological advancements while maintaining operational coherence.
By embracing this new paradigm, businesses can overcome the costly inertia of episodic transformation and instead achieve sustainable growth through continual design evolution. This transformation is vital for maintaining competitive advantage in a world increasingly shaped by AI and automation.
Conclusion
As technologies continue to evolve at an unprecedented pace, the article underscores the need for executives and business leaders to reconsider how they approach organizational design and transformation. Continuous, technology-enabled evolution of design processes may well be the key to unlocking more effective, efficient, and resilient organizations in the years ahead.
For more insights on generative AI, technology strategy, and organizational transformation, visit Harvard Business Review’s Generative AI section.
