Strategic Leadership in Enterprise Digital Transformation: A Systems-Thinking Approach to Scalable Innovation

Abstract

Enterprise digital transformation (DT) represents a systemic organizational shift characterized by technological disruption, structural reconfiguration, and cultural realignment. Despite its strategic importance, failure rates remain significant, often due to fragmented leadership approaches and insufficient systemic integration. This study argues that scalable innovation in DT requires the integration of strategic leadership competencies with systems-thinking cognition. Through a systematic literature review of 124 peer-reviewed studies, we develop the SL-STSI framework (Strategic Leadership–Systems Thinking for Scalable Innovation), a multi-layer conceptual model explaining how leadership capabilities, systems cognition, and organizational enablers jointly drive innovation performance. We further formalize the framework into an analytical model suitable for empirical testing. The structural architecture of the SL-STSI framework is visually depicted in Figure 1, illustrating the multi-layer interactions between leadership competencies, systems cognition, and organizational enablement mechanisms that jointly produce scalable innovation outcomes. This visualization clarifies the recursive feedback dynamics central to sustained digital transformation performance. The findings demonstrate that systems thinking amplifies the effectiveness of strategic leadership by enabling holistic problem framing, interdependency recognition, and adaptive governance design. This study contributes a structured theoretical integration, a named conceptual artifact, and a formal model specification, offering both academic advancement and executive guidance for sustained digital enterprise transformation.