Running a successful dynamic digital organization means that you should leverage five senses, be open to changes; be informative to act; be flexible to take alternative paths.
The emerging digital era upon us is full of uncertainty, velocity, complexity, and ambiguity. Digital transformation is not about leveraging the latest technologies as a one-dimensional enhancement, it evolves production, adoption, assimilation, exploitation, and exploring of value-added novelty in the business. Digital organizations are like the living things which need to keep growing and expanding. From business innovation and evolution perspective, what would an amazing digital breakthrough look, smell, sound, feel, and taste, how to prioritize what you know about and keep eyes open for signs of things you don’t know about, for driving change and making a digital paradigm shift effortlessly?
Look cursive: The digital breakthrough has the s-curve shape, which mostly requires adopting new technologies, processing exponential growth of information, and gaining insight. The digital boundaries are not “sharp” lines, but like the cursive waves with zig-zag patterns on it, and they are fluid to adapt to changes. Every digital organization is like the switch hyper-connected to the interdependent digital ecosystem. To function seamlessly, an enterprise has to be linked to many and varying touch points between itself and its dynamic environment. The challenge for organizations is to manage its portfolio of relevant cross-border strategic synergies and organizational interdependence with the appropriate mix of business elements to keep moving forward. To understand the business as a complex adaptive system requires an in-depth understanding of how things have come together, being “built,” and how to lubricate its parts, and keep it running frictionlessly. Information and technology can fuel the “digital engine. Ideally, an amazing digital breakthrough is like the upward cursive spiral to reach the next level of the business growth cycle and organizational maturity.
Smell fresh: Digital is the new age paradigm associated with deep ecology and natural evolution, thus, it smells fresh. It is the era of innovation which is ‘anything new to businesses’ or purists want to call it as ‘new to the world.’ Innovation is about transforming fresh ideas to achieve their commercial values. Creativity in the digital workplace is fundamentally about the collective mental production of new ideas, not just any fresh ideas, but the creation of ideas that are both original and valuable. Creativity is like the seeds, it smells fresh, to grow it, you need to have the level of curiosity and good attitude, desire to learn, observe, with the natural ability to maintain an open & inquisitive mind and have a playful attitude to discover and experiment, get out of ‘we always do things like that mentality,” dare to fuel imagination and share fresh perspectives. Being highly innovative is about breaking down silos and conventional wisdom, seeing things from different angles and solving problems in different ways.
Sound like a symphony: With frequent digital disruptions, changes cannot be just another thing that needs to be accomplished, it has to be woven into communication, process, and actions of the business. Change has to be orchestrated at all levels, sounds like a symphony via synchronized communication and harmonized instrumental performance. The digital synchronization occurs when all parts of the choir sing their respective parts in harmony to achieve the business purpose and strategic goals. The business management has to keep the in-house order, but also simultaneously coordinate with all sorts of business partners or stakeholders across the geographical territories and time zones, take into account the time lag and ensure they can orchestrate the digital symphony harmoniously. The role of digital leadership is to leverage information & technology, blend the way to enforce cross-functional communication & collaboration to shape a digital business by linking all important business aspects together, creating a context where people can collaborate where they are empowered and respected and make collective decisions timely. As the matter of fact, a digital organization can only achieve high performance and amazing digital breakthrough by taking the collaboration road.
Feel emotional: To run a highly responsive and highly effective digital organization, the management must get a feeler of the business view and speed, as well as how people feel about changes. The psychology behind of change is usually the mixed bag of positive & negative, with the full emotional cycle. Emotions play a huge role in the front of the decision process to reflect the humanity of the organization. Digital transformation involves risks. an empathetic review to come to a decision reflecting the best outcome possible. Great opportunity, danger, digital convenience, and disruption are around every corner. There are also many reasons to feel panic. The bigger the “change” is, the more important to keep changes on track and take these into account early rather than late. Digital transformation is not for the fainted heart. Monitoring the change pulse of the business is to assess the business’s maturity traits such as adaptability, flexibility, resilience, responsiveness, agility, effectiveness, speed, etc. The change pulse of the organization should be synchronous with the pace of digital transformation. The digital dynamic ecosystem explicitly seeks to create a creative environment where people can grow, innovate, and feel better about themselves. You can feel creative tension when you sense the freedom to be creative, the harmony is achieved not through compliance, but through idea sharing and relationship development. There is the full cycle of emotions behind the digital transformation,
Taste bitter, spicy, sour, and sweet: Digitalization is the thorny journey with many bumps and curves on the ways. Digital innovation has all sorts of flavors, there are sweet spots, highly innovative digital organizations are hunting for constructive criticism and smart skepticism which tastes bitter, but it’s good for the organizational improvement. The constructive criticisms such as good advice or timely feedback either taste spicy or sour, are crucial to business advancement individually or at the business scope. Not to have critics could make your path easy, but you might not be able to explore the collective business potential. However, pay more attention to those destructive criticisms with negative intentions. Today’s working environment is multigenerational, multicultural, and multidevicing, or to put simply, hyperdiverse. The high taste of digital business means openness, responsiveness, innovativeness, and fluidity.
The multidimensional digital evolution is based on socio-cultural, socio-technical, socioeconomic, organizational, scientific, philosophical, psychological, and artistic, etc, lens. Running a successful dynamic digital organization means that you should leverage five senses, be open to changes; be informative to act; be flexible to take alternative paths; be nimble to adapt; be intelligent to decide; be elastic to scale; be resilient to recover, and be innovative to thrive.
