The Role of Digital Twins in Modern Strategy Execution
How digital twins enhance strategy execution by creating real-time, adaptive models that keep businesses aligned and responsive in a changing world.
Published
March 10, 2025
How Digital Twins Bring Strategy to Life
In a world where business agility is no longer optional, organizations must find ways to bridge the gap between strategic vision and real-world execution. It’s no good unveiling a shiny new strategy, if execution falls flat. One of the biggest challenges is that this execution is complex. It is filled with moving parts and uncertainties that make it difficult to anticipate how everything will unfold.
For instance, many companies struggle to anticipate how operational challenges will impact execution, leading to delays, misalignment, and wasted resources. This is where situational awareness becomes critical - leaders need the ability to detect risk before it leads to failure, ensuring strategies remain viable as conditions change.
To bridge this execution gap, businesses need new tools that allow them to predict challenges, test solutions, and iterate before committing. This is where digital twins come in – a technology that has revolutionized industries from manufacturing to urban planning and is now poised to make waves in strategy execution, helping organizations visualize, test, and refine their approach before acting.
Much like how engineers use digital twins to model and stress-test infrastructure before breaking ground, businesses can now apply the same principles to strategy execution. Rather than relying on static plans, they can create a living, dynamic model of their organization – one that evolves and responds in real time, ensuring execution stays aligned with strategic intent.
At In Parallel, we call this innovation the Parallel Twin – an advanced digital twin concept that enables businesses to execute strategy with precision, speed, and adaptability.
What is a digital twin?
A digital twin is a virtual representation of a physical object, system, or process that mirrors real-world conditions in real time. Originally developed for industries like aerospace and automotive engineering, digital twins allow organizations to simulate, analyze, and optimize outcomes before making real-world decisions.
When applied to business strategy execution, digital twins evolve beyond their traditional role. Instead of simulating machinery or infrastructure, they create a replica of an organization’s decision-making DNA - a living, breathing virtual environment where teams can navigate strategic scenarios, test outcomes, and adapt in real-time.
We’ve taken the concept of digital twins further with our Parallel Twin. This approach provides a virtual model of an organization’s operating environment, decision-making frameworks, and strategic initiatives, offering leaders real-time visibility into both internal execution and external market dynamics. By continuously monitoring shifts in competitive landscapes, regulatory changes, and broader industry trends, the Parallel Twin ensures businesses can adapt their strategies in response to external forces as well as internal priorities. This, in turn, enables organizations to enable businesses to move beyond static plans and execute Adaptive Strategies.
Traditional strategic planning tools often exist in silos and rely on outdated information, but the Parallel Twin integrates real-time data to provide a continuously updated view of an organization’s performance. It can simulate multiple scenarios, allowing businesses to test strategies before committing to a course of action. Beyond optimizing execution, it also helps leaders prioritize their next steps - ensuring focus is placed on the most impactful decisions rather than reacting to noise. This ultimately enhances decision-making agility, giving leaders and teams the tools to adapt and align on execution in real-time.
Why does it matter?
The future of digital twins in strategy execution
