## 3 The GOLD Approach: Materials and Methods
### Introduction of the Global Organization Alignment and Decision (GOLD) Tool  
Digitalization and VUCA influences lead to continual and potentially disruptive industry changes. Thus, organizations need to continuously analyze their external contexts. The identified external changes are evaluated in the context of the organization's internal (core) competences, strengths, and weaknesses to categorize the changes as potential new threats, opportunities, or ignorable. Based on this understanding, organizations should prioritize their next adaption/adoption projects to overcome the innovator's dilemma: \"when new technologies cause great firms to fail\" [29]. This reactive mitigation strategy only works if organizations do not overlook threatening changes and embrace dynamic capabilities that allow for agile and fast adaptation [30]. Thus, the relevant question is how to support organizations in identifying and mitigating new opportunities and risks on time? Generally, external changes and trends are rather intangible and complex. Therefore, organizations need a holistic approach, ideally driven by a standardized process that integrates the relevant perspectives and methods for analysis. This enables organizations to continually analyze their external context, identify changes, and make these changes transparent and tangible (see Figure 2). After identifying the changes and their impact on the industry and the organization, they need to be analyzed, evaluated, and prioritized to then design and implement suitable mitigation strategies. Throughout the process, complementary perspectives and expertise must be integrated, aligned, and supported to derive educated decisions for the organization. Today, organizations are often supported by consultants who select fitting perspectives and methods for analysis and guide them in their usage. However, organizations miss a standardized, guided, and tool-supported approach that allows them to independently customize, analyze, and derive educated decisions. This article proposes and introduces the GOLD Framework building on the dynamic capability logic, commanding a sensing, seizing, and transforming process of change management [30; 31]. It enables the design of dynamic and customizable strategies depicted as canvas-based interfaces, easing usability due to their familiarity in practice. To guide this holistic, complex, and continuous process of analysis, we propose that it gets IT-tool supported. Here, we suggest the adoption of the GOLD Tool. The GOLD Tool builds on prior work such as the Business Model Developer [32; 33] and has already been adopted in other projects targeting the Industry 4.0 context and the complexity of multi-stakeholder collaborations [6; 7]. It has several features that support organizations in  
Figure 2: Multi-step Analysis Process. continuously analyzing their risks and potentials in a transparent, aligned, and aggregated fashion [6; 7; 28]:  
1. It integrates any theory and method of analysis (e.g., as a canvamized version). 2. It supports the integration of as many processes, steps, and perspectives as desired. 3. It supports the customization of the methods and/or steps to suit the target groups. 4. It enables users to connect the different steps, perspectives, and methods of analysis via hierarchization, interconnections, and/or overlaps. This step ensures that all entries and elements are up to date as e.g., changes in connected parts get highlighted and require checking and modifications from the users. 5. It guides users through the multi-step analysis process in a pre-defined and/or customizable order. These features are the backbone of supporting a holistic, multi-perspective analysis process. Here, the GOLD Tool enables users to enforce and pre-define as many rules as desired but simultaneously offers endless customization potentials, preventing any undesired restrictions. It is unique in making analyses, results, decisions, and consequences transparent and tangible via guidance, precision, and connections despite their complexity.