Human-centered design’s critical role in both digital and sustainability transformation

What you’ll learn:

In 2024, 77% of organizations agreed that “we are experiencing a dual transition towards a more digital and sustainable world.”
Organizations going through digital transformations too often stop with the digitization and optimization of their existing processes.
Achieving longer lasting and more meaningful results requires a transformative effort to reimagine the customer experience.

Editors note: This is the second part of a two-part series on sustainability in manufacturing and its role in digital transformation. The first part appeared March 20.

As 2025 progresses, we continue on a path of accelerating transformation in manufacturing. This era began in the mid-2000s and gained momentum in 2020, when pandemic restrictions pushed organizations to make rapid digital transformations to survive massive disruptions.

The rate of technical transformation’s pace is unchanged since COVID, and now that shift is joined by an equally urgent need to transition to sustainable products, services, and business models.

Today, many companies and institutions are managing both transformations at once. Recent research found that, in 2024, 77% of organizations “agree that we are experiencing a dual transition towards a more digital and sustainable world.” The challenge now is whether these organizations will manage true transformations or merely update their current offerings.

As we have seen over the past two decades, organizations going through digital transformations too often stop with the digitization and optimization of their existing processes, rather than fully reimagining and transforming their businesses.

Now, we see a similar tendency emerging with the sustainability transformation, mistaking small efficiency improvements for the massive reimagining that our global situation requires. To avoid this trap and the consequences of its missed opportunities, organizations can adapt the lessons of true digital transformation to create genuinely sustainable products, services, and business strategies.

Legacy optimization or true transformation?

For example, the most common stumbling block we see with digital transformation initiatives is mistaking legacy process digitization for full-on transformation. Digitization enables cost reduction, asset optimization, and more automation.

Positive outcomes, yes, but they’re not transformative in terms of revenue growth, innovation, product and service expansion, or the creation of intelligent and predictive systems. Achieving those longer lasting and more meaningful results requires a transformative effort to reimagine the customer experience.

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The same principle applies to sustainability transformation. Optimizing legacy processes and products to reduce carbon emissions, water usage, and other impacts can create cost savings and momentum to drive true transformation investments.

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Without rethinking the profit-driven mindset of 20th-century capitalism, however, traditional optimizations fail to deliver the sustainability improvements society urgently needs. They also leave organizations open to disruption from more innovative competitors, increasing regulation, and stakeholders with growing concerns.

Understanding and acting on this distinction can spell the difference between small, incremental transformation steps that quickly become obsolete and far greater ROI from wider-reaching, scalable sustainability efforts.

Human-centered design approach to transformation

Based on what we’ve learned from earlier waves of the digital transformation, the key element for successful tech-enabled sustainability transformation is a human-centered design approach to rethinking systems, processes, and products.

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We have identified three human-centered design strategies, based on our experience with digital transformation, that can help organizations realize the long-term benefits of their sustainability transformation, rather than just temporary efficiency gains.

Frame innovation around customer needs

Products are a way to meet a customer's needs, but when organizations frame all their exploration around product improvement, they miss the opportunity to use digital technology to meet those needs with a different constellation of products and services.

This product focus might result in small changes that incrementally improve the customer experience, but that are not transformative. Deeply understanding the customer allows for new opportunities to meet customer needs within a new sustainability framework, across an evolving ecosystem of touchpoints.

Streaming videos disrupting the video-store industry is a classic example of a new way to meet customer needs, and almost any “X-as-a-Service” offering was once a product that digital technology has transformed to better meet customer needs.

Consider electric vehicles. EV manufacturers have replaced legacy fossil-fuel engines in some passenger vehicles, which is a large step toward sustainability but an incremental one, ultimately still based on vehicle designs and the model of ownership from the last century.

For example, the average passenger vehicle trip in the U.S. had 1.5 occupants in 2022, down from 1.87 in 1977. Despite this low and declining average, most new vehicles have five seats, which raises their overall resource footprint and cost.

From a customer point of view, cars are not the need. They are merely the product that has met people’s needs to go to work, visit loved ones, pick up groceries and travel. Now, mobility-as-a-service innovations like rideshares, autonomous vehicles, and public transit are disrupting the need to own a personal automobile to meet consumer needs.

Meanwhile, the work-from-home revolution and new urban planning approaches like the 15-minute city are challenging the foundational assumptions around these needs. Human-centered customer research and journey mapping along with open-ended ideation can challenge assumptions and identify opportunities to meet user needs more sustainably.

Co-create an inspiring vision of the future with your stakeholders

Genuinely transformative sustainability programs must tell a story that engages and motivates employees, customers, and other stakeholders. Especially when sustainability initiatives require changes to longstanding processes and skill sets, employees need to see that those changes are driving progress toward a unique vision of the future they believe in, rather than simply being a new checklist or new rules.

Co-creating a new story about the organization, its products, its people, and its customers requires thoughtful and thorough concepting of a new vision that delivers real stakeholder value. The story about that new vision should describe the move toward a unique and positive future, to get people invested at the start and keep them motivated over time.

Understand the organization’s ecosystem

Innovating for sustainability and telling a compelling story about that innovation are two key elements of transformation success. The third is ensuring that the organization establishes a paradigm that embeds sustainability across the organization and in every decision-making process, rather than treating sustainability as a siloed function.

Setting the organization up for such a new paradigm requires looking at it through an organizational-design lens. What does the organization incentivize? How are decisions made? How is information shared with employees and other stakeholders? Are there hidden obstacles to adaptability and innovation related to structure, processes, culture, or skills?

Human-centered stakeholder research and service concepts can uncover opportunities to create an organization that is naturally sustainable, perhaps through new incentives, alignments, and processes.

Framing innovation around customer needs, co-creating a future vision that serves as the organization’s “why,” and aligning the organization’s structure and sustainability goals are all critical for successful long-term sustainability transformation.

These human-centered strategies can help companies move away from overreliance on incremental improvements to legacy products and processes, and toward offerings that reimagine what’s possible for customers, the company and the planet.