The Monthly “Dot Connections” Understanding Two Flip Sides of the Coin to Get Digital Ready June 2018

Digital is the age of creativity and innovation, and creativity is all about connecting the dots.

The effects of an increasingly digitalized world are now reaching into every corner of businesses and every aspect of organizations. Digital is the age of creativity and innovation via connecting dots and spreading the knowledge.

            

        Understanding Two Flip Sides of the Coin to Get Digital Ready

Simplicity vs. Complexity? Simplicity vs complexity is an age-old dilemma even in English Grammar! The simplicity and the complexity are just opposite ends of the same spectrum. That compounds all "problems." You need complexity to understand and appreciate the simplicity and vice versa. It's all about balance and perception.

The “Push & Pull” Forces of Digital Transformation Digital is fluid, digital is also complex. It becomes complex if things do interact, particularly in the case of "nonlinear" interaction, interdependent relationships, and hyper-connected business association. You can't separate things properly, and often you cannot predict the actual effect of interaction straightforwardly. Therefore, running a high-performance digital business is no longer a single dimensional effort to applying the cool technologies or focus on short-term profitability only, but a multidimensional pursuit to embed digital into core business processes and build differentiated business capability. It is about how to leverage the “push & pull” business forces to adapt to changes and orchestrate a full-fledged digital transformation.

Innovation vs. Rules: Innovation is to transform novel ideas and achieve its business value. Innovation is doing something better than it currently is. Hence, it requires a sound and competent understanding of what is currently being done. Innovation is not serendipity, it's a mindset, a process, and the strategic business capability nowadays. From innovation management perspective, should innovators break rules, or does innovation need rules, and how to improve manage innovation effortlessly and improve its success rate?

Transaction vs. Transformation A well-run business has a healthy business portfolio of “running, growth, and transformation,” focus on both short-term gain and long-term win, to manage a seamless business transaction and transformation continuum. Here are three perspectives to connect dots between transaction vs. transformation.

Efficiency vs. Effectiveness: Effectiveness and Efficiency are two fundamental goals all businesses over the world are pursuing, however, more often, there is a lack of clarity upon their true means and how to achieve them accordingly.

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 2.5 million page views with about #4600th blog posting in 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. The content richness is not for its own sake, but to convey the vision and share the wisdom. Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking and innovating the new ideas; it’s not just about WHAT to say, but about WHY to say, and HOW to say it. It reflects the color and shade of your thought patterns, and it indicates the peaks and curves of your thinking waves. Unlike pure entertainment, quality and professional content takes time for digesting, contemplation and engaging, and therefore, it takes time to attract the "hungry minds" and the "deep souls." It’s the journey to amplify diverse voices and deepen digital footprints, and it's the way to harness your innovative spirit.

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Clarify Change and Digitalization through Inquiries

Digital organizations today are more organic than mechanical, hyper-connected and always-on, in order to achieve the long-term business vision. They have to adapt to the ever-changing environment and make consistent improvement. It is nevertheless true that the change itself has become unpredictable and evolutionary as it was done even a decade ago. Change Management has a very wide scope and is a relatively new area of expertise. There are incremental changes and radical changes, business management needs to clarify change and digitalization through inquiries, set out goals and work at them in a systematic way.
WHO are top influential change sponsors? Change starts with a "sense of urgency" which can only come from top management. Change leadership and sponsorship is critical to driving strategic changes and adoption. Because great sponsors can overcome organizational friction issues early in the maturity. The visible and active sponsorship is critical to focus on resource assignment, adoption, besides communication and training. It needs to focus on coordination and facilitation, not bullying and forcing. If it is a large scale of organizational-wide change, where you aren’t simply removing one thing and replace it with other, and then, identifying sponsors and influence is key. Effective change leadership is highly influential and methodical, it takes hard work and endurance, for creating and maintaining cross-functional trust, transparency, actions, and results. With strong sponsorship for changes, buy-in will happen more naturally; it means that people get understand why the change is necessary and getting them to participate in defining the better processes and then ensuring that they are actively involved in the monitoring of that process to ensure that they have a voice in improving it, should it require some adjustments after being deployed.

WHERE do synergistic attainment of organizational goals and superior returns on investment occur? Organizational change becomes common practice within an organization, it needs to be treated as a strategic function to reach its full advantage. Proper preparation, implementation, automation make change more likely to succeed and sustainable. Change cannot be just another thing that needs to be accomplished. It has to be woven into communication, process, and action of the organization. The change management system needs to be the alerts you put in place that act as tuning force to enable you to view things, temp, and harmonies going on, or not. Alignment with organizational design, enterprise architecture, and program office functions is ultimately where you need to be to really make a difference. It is easy to see change success where new working practices, systems, and actions plans are concerned. Change is never for its own sake, thus, keep improvement in mind, create synergy in the multitude of its impact across the organization. Irrespective of whatever strategy is selected, all change objectives (business, technical, service, safety, performance) depend entirely on the human objective. It’s never been able to create a large enough context of alignment unless each individual first experiences genuine alignment between their personal aims and the organizational ones.

WHAT is the expectation from change management? Improvement CANNOT happen without change, and change SHOULD NOT happen without improvement. The two go together. An organization can become or be made differently by the addition or alteration of something for the better. In other words, change without good reason and adding value is futile and useless. Improvement is a form of change; it's not about painting the building, changing the logo, letterhead, and typeface, it's about creating a better value proposition and successful operating system/culture that delights customers/clients and makes a step change difference in the way and quality that we do business and reward our stakeholders. The sustained business success depends on good virtues such as professionalism, positives, teamwork, trust, empathy, and loyalty, etc. You might call these shared values or a belief system. An improvement is a form of change, change can also be leapfrogged into business transformation. A change manager needs to assess and evaluate every specific scenario to create change program success. Ultimately, the success of the change program is measured by results that are important values to the organization - and the cultural adoption of these goals is part of that measure.

Compared to the business world 20 years ago, the speed of change is increasing, and digital ecosystem has become more complex and dynamic, Change Management also turns to be more complex, you have to both ponder the big questions about changes. to ensure a successful initiative and capture the full intent of the “change, as well as manage change effortlessly.

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The Monthly “Digital Boardroom: 100 Q&As” Book Tuning:The Corporate Board as Digital Shaper June 2018

Modern corporate boards play significant roles in guiding businesses in the right direction and achieve expected business results. Due to the “VUCA” characteristics -Complexity, Uncertainty, Ambiguity, and Velocity of the Digital Era, the directorship in any organization must have the agility to adapt to changes and build abilities to advise, inspire and motivate a group of people toward accomplishing shared visions and goals. Here is the monthly “Digital Boardroom” summary of the digital board’s performance inquiries.

         

The Corporate Board as Digital Shaper

The Corporate Board as Digital Shaper The business is complex, the world is complex, and leadership is complex. Leadership can be perceived with both broader scope of the open system and in-depth understanding of its interconnectivity and interdependence. The digital directors and executives today need to understand things and circumstance in a holistic way, deal with opposing views, cultures, constraints, and competitions, in order to steer the business in the right direction and navigate it through the uncharted water to lead digital transformation seamlessly.

Five Senses of Digital Board The corporate board oversees strategy, monitors performance, sets policies, advises management and plays an instrumental role in leading business transformation seamlessly. The digital-savvy board has to gain digital awareness, shape digital mindset, leverage five senses, and exercise creativity muscles in order to improve digital fluency and leadership effectiveness.

The Digital Boardroom Guidance: The Three Legs of the Stool The key dimensions of corporate board’s responsibilities include, but not limited to strategy oversight, policy-making, performance monitoring and executive advising - understanding accountability of business environment - regulatory, shareholder, etc. Highly effective boards can sense emergent opportunities and predict potential risks, prioritize and put significant efforts into governance and risk management, to steer the business ship in the right direction and achieve high-performance business results.


The “Futuristic” Digital Board? When we jump into the digital future of “VUCA” new normal –Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity, the digital leadership today must be able to steer the organization in the right direction. Corporate boards today mostly composed of seasoned business executives are no longer just the controller to ensure business compliance, they should have a clear business vision to predict emerging trends in the business, technology or industry. So, they can guide the executive team in the right direction and play the management advising role effortlessly. To discuss further: What is the profile of the “futuristic” digital boards, what’s the business insight those boards can offer and what are the great benefits they can provide for the business’s long-term prosperity?

The BoDs as the Digital Rule-Maker The purpose of the board of directors is to direct the organization in the right direction. The board directors as senior directorial roles have both privilege and responsibility to “talk the walk,” make the good policies or set digital principles to drive changes and lead digital paradigm shift. The board of directors is the digital rule-maker for getting the business management digital ready.

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 2 million page views with 4700+ blog posting in 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. The content richness is not for its own sake, but to convey the vision and share the wisdom. Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking; it’s not just about WHAT to say, but about WHY to say, and HOW to say it. It reflects the color and shade of your thought patterns, and it indicates the peaks and curves of your thinking waves. Unlike pure entertainment, quality and professional content takes time for digesting, contemplation and engaging, and therefore, it takes time to attract the "hungry minds" and the "deep souls." It’s the journey to amplify your voice, deepen your digital footprints, and match your way to human progression.

The "Digital Boardroom: 100 Q&As" Slideshare Presentation

The "Digital IT: 100 Q&As" B& N Order Link

The "Digital IT: 100 Q&As" Lulu Order Link

The "Digital Boardroom: 100 Q&As"  Introduction

The "Digital Boardroom: 100 Q&As" Chapter 1 Introduction: The Digital Board's Composition Inquiries

The "Digital Boardroom: 100 Q&As" Chapter II Introduction: The Digital Board's Digital Inquiries

The "Digital Boardroom: 100 Q&As": Chapter III Introduction: The Digital Board's Strategy Inquiries

The "Digital Boardroom: 100 Q&As" Chapter IV Introduction: The Digital Board's IT Inquiries

The "Digital Boardroom: 100 Q&As" Chapter V Introduction: The Digital Board's Leadership Inquiries

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Softening the “Hard” to Accelerate Digitalization

Organizations across the industrial sectors are on the journey of digitalization. Being “digital ready” goes beyond just applying the latest digital technology, it is a holistic effort and multifaceted discipline to touch every aspect of the business. There are many tangible and intangible variables to decide the ultimate success of business transformation. The purpose of such radical digitalization is to make a significant difference in improving organizational effectiveness, responsiveness, performance, and maturity. There is the need to “harden the soft or intangible business factors,” as well as the demand to “soften the hard business factors” in order to lead change frictionlessly and make a digital leap effortlessly.

The “hard” technology can create such soft touch, to make people feel better about themselves and build a people-centric digital organization: The powerful and lightweight digital technologies brings unprecedented digital convenience for both businesses and our personal life. The “hard” technology is the means to end, not the end itself; it must create soft touch for either engaging employees or delighting customers. As the saying goes, "People don't care how much you know until they know how much you care." Digital is the era of people. People’s feelings need to be addressed. To build a creative, productive, and happy workplace, the technology-enabled democratic processes will overtake silo-based, hierarchical control management methodology. Organizations are reshaped to be horizontally expanded into the holistic digital ecosystem. Many companies have never been better positioned to engage in multi-industry collaborations, but leading organizations have broken out of the static industry box, treat customers, partners and other industry ecosystem participants as active agents for brainstorming new ideas, co-solving critical common business problems, and creating new business models, etc. Instead of being rigidly grouped around a specific business, ecosystems draw together mutually supportive companies from multiple industries that collectively seek to create differentiated offerings and capture value they could not reach alone. The hard technologies create soft touch that people feel better about themselves, employees feel more meaningful about their work; customers have the delightful experience, shareholders are satisfied with what the business has achieved. Digital leaders do not just push harder; but emphasize participation, relationship, communication, collaboration, and innovation, and ultimately build a people-centric digital organization.

Business assets are no longer just about physical or hard stuff such as building or devices; it is critical to managing information - the soft business asset extremely well: Organizations have both tangible or physical assets and intangible or soft assets which enable business operating smoothly and build the competitive business advantage. All forward-looking organizations declare they are in information management business. Information becomes one of the most invaluable business assets besides people. Because companies across sectors around the globe transform themselves into the digital powerhouse that is based on information, and the business’s ability to explore soft assets has become far more decisive than their ability to invest in and manage physical assets. Information management competency, especially the ability to capture business insight and make the continuous improvement with consistency is the soft asset by which organizations can differentiate themselves from competitors, in order to reach the next cycle of the business growth and organizational maturity.

Soften the overly rigid organizational structure and processes to streamline business flow: Digital means flow, information flow, idea flow, and business flow. However, many traditional organizations have the inflexible pyramidal hierarchy and overly rigid organizational structure and processes, which stifle changes. Thus, it’s important to soften the hard processes or structure, the functional borders to ensure digital fluidity. Organizations, like individuals, need to be in flow to be fresh and adapt to change seamlessly. From an organizational structural design perspective, delayering becomes a lens through which it is possible to examine and then fix many other issues. An organization can approach such a flow zone when people are ready for moving to a fluid structure. On the business navigation dimension, digital flow can be streamlined by enforcing cross-functional communication, using common business language for harnessing understanding, taking incentives to encourage idea sharing. Forward-thinking organizations also experiment with different types of organizational structure to harness strategic business alignment, enablement, collaboration, and harmony.

Digital transformation represents the next stage of business maturity, which will improve how the enterprise works and interacts with its ecosystem, with people at the center of its focus. It takes both hard push and soft touch. The outlines of the fully digitalized world have long been sketched, but the shape, size, and color of digitalization keep evolving. The key is not to choose one path over the other, but to tailor your own path, mix the hard and soft, tangible & intangible, practice, practice, and practice more to make a seamless digital paradigm shift.

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The Monthly “100 Creativity Ingredients” Book Tuning: The Full Color Spectrum of Creativity June 2018

Developing creativity requires both internal motivation and self-awareness. 

All humans are born with raw creativity ability. Creativity has many dimensions, with multi-faceted truth and myth, manifold knowledge and multidimensional insight. Creativity is wings of our mind and tempo of our heartbeat. Creativity is a constructive disruption, not so bad addiction, and a sensational phenomenon. The purpose of “100 Creativity Ingredients - Everyone’s Playbook to Unlock Creativity “is to classify, scrutinize, articulate, and share insight about one hundred special creativity ingredients, to paint the picture with them, to add colors on them, to embed the music into them, and to make the story via them, in order to unleash our collective creativity potential.    

                   

 The Full-Color Spectrum of Creativity

The Full-Color Spectrum of Creativity? Creativity has many faces, the creative thinker is unique. Creative personality seems to be more colorful and paradoxical. Analogically, creativity is like a color spectrum, there are commonalities that are relevant to all colors which reflect the spectrum of light. Such metaphor connects the dot back to the nature of creativity.

The Multifaceted Creativity? Creativity is the most needed skill in the 21st century because digital is the era of innovation. Creativity is both innate and a skill. Developing creativity requires both internal motivation and self-awareness. Being original and being yourself is the first step, breaking down the convention thinking box, and practicing out-of-the-box thinking is one of the mental activities to stimulate creativity as well. Here is the further understanding about the multifaceted creativity.

Many Shades of Creativity Human CREATIVITY is perhaps far more advanced than what can be achieved by a machine so far. Our thoughts, emotions, "gut-feel," "intuition," "insight," and many more complex aspects of our consciousness and awareness greatly enhance our learning and thinking creatively.

The Multifaceted Aspects of Creativity Be it an art, a science, a talk, a humor, a different thought.... creativity can be applied in all the field ..if one can develop that skill of thinking differently. There are many shades of creativity.

The Multitude of Creativity Creativity is an innate ability to create novel ideas. Would you consider that creativity is a response to a stimulus and that individuals will manifest different behavioral responses to that stimulus depending on their individual experiences...? What are the personality traits or working environment which decide how creative the individual or team could be?

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 2 million page views with about 4700+ blog posting in 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. The content richness is not for its own sake, but to convey the vision and share the wisdom. Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking; it’s not just about WHAT to say, but about WHY to say, and HOW to say it. It reflects the color and shade of your thought patterns, and it indicates the peaks and curves of your thinking waves. Unlike pure entertainment, quality and professional content takes time for digesting, contemplation and engaging, and therefore, it takes time to attract the "hungry minds" and the "deep souls." It’s the journey to amplify your voice, deepen your digital footprints, and match your way to human progression.

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Intuition vs. Sensation

Intuition is more receptive, global, holistic and sensation is more active, focal, serial.

Intuition is the perception of inside images, and sensation is the perception of outside images etc. As Carl Jung, a Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst well described: Sensation and intuition are perceptive functions, they make us aware of what is happening but do not interpret or evaluate it.

The word intuition comes from Latin verb “intueri” which is usually translated as to look inside or to contemplate: Intuition is thus often conceived as a kind of inner perception sometimes regarded as lucidity or understanding. Often intuition is used to describe 'thoughts and preferences that come to mind quickly and without much reflection or conscious reasoning. Jung's definition of intuition is a reference to intuition as one of the functions of the psyche related to Ego-personality. He distinguished also between passive and active intuition. Intuition is a complex concept and perhaps it is impossible to make a single definition that applies to all kinds of situations in which intuition is involved.

Sensation is a physical feeling or perception resulting from something that happens around: Sensation can evoke vision, feeling, thinking, and emotions. Emotions work for you. Sensation makes us feel alive; sensation helps us evolve, either to have a joy or feel pain. You do have to feel the emotions and live with them through. But as intelligent beings, it is important to manage emotions in a progressive way. When you become self-aware, when you know the triggers to the emotions, it is very important to experience sensation, but not be overwhelmed, learn how to feel and engage the life in a mindful way.

Intuition is more yin and sensation more yang. Intuition is more receptive, global, holistic and sensation is more active, focal, serial: Intuition is also called gut-feeling; because it seems to have got to do something with the gut. Intuition or being intuitive is when you have a gut feeling about something. It is when there isn’t an exact answer to the puzzle because you don’t have all the pieces. Chaos needs to be navigated by intuition. There are some forces: to step away from the normal noises and messages of life, which absolutely have their place but often drown-out or override intuition. The human brain can be a magnificent synthesizer of disparate pieces of nebulous information, and often formal techniques and procedures thwart and inhibit this mysterious mechanism from operating efficiently. We need an intuitive approach to the logical breakthrough!

Often we cannot control intuition but we can control sensation. We need to be provoked to make our intuition work and get our sensation meaningful. it's about proactively opening ourselves, leverage intuition to take “fast thinking” scenario and switch on creativity purposefully. An open mind leads to push intuition button and touch the sensation nerve, stimulate imagination, and spark creativity.

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Digital Workforce Hybridity

The digital paradigm that is emerging is the dynamic organization with hybridity of knowledge, processes, and competencies.

As our digitized world becomes hyper-connected, over-complex and interdependent, digital system themes with all the aggregates-spanning business challenges, paradoxes and opportunities bring organizations further towards the challenges of constructing and enacting "hybrid realities" across individuals, teams, looser groups, organizations, network-enterprises, and holistic digital ecosystems. The digital paradigm that is emerging is the sociological organization which is alive, holistic, vibrant, energetic, responsive, fluid, innovative and resilient with hybridity of knowledge, processes, and competencies.

The hybrid digital workforce: Today’s digital workforces are multigenerational, multicultural, multi-geographical, and multitasking. Each generations—Baby Boomers, Generation X, and Y (Millennials) and Z has different leadership, communication, working, and learning styles, they also evolve digital in a different way at different paces. There is the mix of old and new, physical and virtual things in organizations today. The digital workforce and workplace will be shaped by changes that take place in the way people relate to themselves and to their experience of their environment and others around them through cross-functional communication and collaboration. It is a hybrid, networked, and extended modern working environment in which the powerful digital platforms and computing technologies enable seamless conversations, delayer overly rigid hierarchical organizational structure & processes; inspire idea sharing, and brainstorming, engage employees and partners, as well as improve customer experience.

Knowledge ‘Hybridity’ (Interdisciplinarity): Digital organizations are complex and diverse, single dimensional operation-driven management discipline perhaps does not work out. The dynamic digital ecosystem can be perceived through the lenses of sociology, anthropology of cultures, economics, technological, organizational and communication sciences, poetical science or philosophical lens. That means the border of knowledge domains is blurred and the scope of knowledge is expanded in the continual base. It requires fundamentally different mindsets and paradigms such as accepting that digital influence is multidimensional and attainable, but control is not. Different organizations must tread on their path of the quest to understand the symbolic language of nature contributing to evolutionary processes. Knowledge hybridity or interdisciplinarity can be applied to digital management by integrating multidisciplinary methodology which involves applied Science (Engineering), Art (Design), principle (Philosophy), Cognition (Psychology), Social norms (Culture) and group behavior (Sociology) for reaching the next level of digital management maturity.

Innovation hybridity: Digital is the age of innovation. Innovation in the digital era is coming at seemly must faster pace, more changes and potential disruptions, but the patterns and rules of communication are pretty much the same. Nowadays it is hard to think of any innovation as not a hybrid, a combination of something old with something new or a number of new things. The broader the scope, scales, and impact of change, the more one leans toward calling it as an innovation. You could consider all innovations by hybridized in that sense. Digital innovation management does require interdisciplinary understanding to connect wider dots and see what’s possible, as well as the technical expertise to create disruptions. You need a certain form of framework and processes to ensure that you can qualify ideas, direct the right amount of resources, and make the wise investment to the most promising ideas based on their incremental or radical nature. The goal is the manage a healthy innovation portfolio with hybrid types of innovations, shepherd them through several phases of development, know when to move forward and when to return to an earlier phase, to improve innovation success rate.

Digital organizations with knowledge and workforce hybridity are able to adapt to the continuous changes and reconfigure the organizational structure and change their own behaviors for improving business responsiveness and flexibility. It is also important to build a high level of trust within the upper rankings of management, share the same vision, set the strategic goals, be able to coordinate and communicate effectively across departments and manage business performance to ensure the organization achieving the high-performance result and making a seamless digital paradigm shift.

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The Weekly Insight of the “Future of CIO” 6/15/2018

Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking, brainstorming, innovating and sharing.

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 2.5 million page views with 4600+ blog posting in 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. The content richness is not for its own sake, but to convey the vision and share the wisdom. Here is the weekly insight of digital leadership, IT Management, and Talent Management.




The “Magic Formula” to Achieve Digital Cohesion The very characteristics of digitalization are hyper-connectivity, hyper-complexity, and interdependence; with the exponential growth of information and fast-paced of changes. Digital makes an impact on the speed to run the business, the empathy for their people, the prioritization skills to get important things done, and the orchestration of their capability in high mature digital organizations. Every organization needs to explore their own way to get digital ready. But businesses can also learn from others’ failure, as well as summarize what they experiment, and develop the best and next practice, and improve their ability to consistently execute and make a digital paradigm shift seamlessly.


The Digital Boardroom Guidance: The Three Legs of the Stool The key dimensions of corporate board’s responsibilities include, but not limited to strategy oversight, policy-making, performance monitoring and executive advising - understanding accountability of business environment - regulatory, shareholder, etc. Highly effective boards can sense emergent opportunities and predict potential risks, prioritize and put significant efforts into governance and risk management, to steer the business ship in the right direction and achieve high-performance business results.

How Can IT Reach the Next Phase of Digital Blossom? Forward-thinking organizations across industrial sectors declare they are in the information management business. IT organizations need to be propositive, which means taking the proactive attitude, leading ahead of the pack, keeping ideas flow, contributing to the long-term business growth, and march to the next phase of digital blossom.

Three High-Quality Efforts to Enable Organizations Thriving Digitalization is series of radical changes, these changes are more extensive than what happened in the past. You have to transform the company’s underlying functions, processes, cultures, and the organization as a whole with adjusted digital speed. Today's organizations are increasingly exhibiting digital characteristics in various shades, extensiveness, and intensity. Therefore, it is important to understand that digital business development is multifaceted and take the high-quality effort to enable organizations thriving.

The Monthly “Digital Fit” Book Tuning: The Characteristics of Digital Fit June 2018 Digital makes a significant impact on every aspect of the business from people, process to technology, both horizontally and vertically. Digital becomes the very fabric of high performing business, being outside-in and customer-centric is the new mantra for forward-looking and high mature digital organizations today. But what are digital organizational traits, how to define digital fit and take a structural approach for digitalization?

Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking and innovating the new ideas; it’s not just about WHAT to say, but about WHY to say, and HOW to say it. It reflects the color and shade of your thought patterns, and it indicates the peaks and curves of your thinking waves. Unlike pure entertainment, quality and professional content takes time for digesting, contemplation and engaging, and therefore, it takes the time to attract the "hungry minds" and the "deep souls." It’s the journey to amplify diverse voices and deepen digital footprints, and it's the way to harness your innovative spirit.

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Three Aspects of Integral Digital Management Competency

Integral management Competency = Holism + Interdisciplinarity.

At the dawn of the digital era, businesses and the societies are heading into a dynamic, nonlinear, and hyper-connected digital ecosystem in which everything seems to affect everything else, brought silo, tunnel, and mechanistic view to an end. The traditional management discipline based on linear logic and reductional thinking is outdated somehow, an integrated digital management approach is about leveraging nonlinear processes and interconnectivity between problems in a managerial context, to ensure that the business as a whole is superior to the sum of pieces. Integral management Competency = Holism + Interdisciplinarity.

Enforcing inter-organizational linkages for holistic problem-solving: Digital is full of uncertainty, velocity, complexity, and ambiguity, organizations today are at the crossroads where the segregation or silo of business units are at a need to reach across the aisles and respectively work with each other in order to understand complex business problems holistically and solve them systematically, without too many side effect. Therefore, the digital organization is the living thing, the mechanistic production metaphor needs to be replaced with organic service metaphor, operation centrism becomes people-centric and multidisciplinary; the linear business system perception is replaced by the adaptive digital system, and technical behavior is replaced by socio-technical behavior. Therefore, business managers need to have a contextual understanding of the interconnectivity of both visible and invisible business success factors underlying the surface, enforce inter-organizational linkages for running a high-performance digital organization. Fundamentally, running a business is an iterative business problem-solving continuum. Behind every problem is a relationship dynamic out of alignment, the digital ecosystem is complex and volatile, it’s critical to create the relevant context to make a more lasting solution - without it, you are working without any boundaries or fix symptoms only. It takes the collaborative effort across the entire business scope to streamline processes, keep information flow seamlessly, enforce cross-functional communication & collaboration, and improve the long-term business competency.

Capturing business insight to overcome uncertainty, ambiguity, and paradox: The information grows exponentially and the rate of change has accelerated, indicating that digital leaders today must learn how to overcome uncertainty, ambiguity and deal with management paradox in varying circumstances. Uncertainty is the lack of certainty, a state of having limited knowledge where it is impossible to exactly describe the existing circumstance. Leading organizations across vertical sectors claim they are in information management businesses, the purpose of information management is to process raw data, refine information, gain business insight and foresight which can help to instruct organizations adapting to changes promptly. Business management, especially at senior management level, practicing integral digital management is about taking a holistic view and applying interdisciplinarity for planning and taking actions, which are always based on rough estimations of what the future conditions of business execution would be. Though business leaders today can’t predict every turn or curve on the digital journey, quality information and business insight allow them to envision emerging opportunities, predict risks, have the right level of ambiguity tolerance, and lead the business forward confidently.

Developing flexible, inclusive and innovative working environment: Every individual, including the leader, has limited knowledge or viewpoint; collectively, it is important to orient people and make them aware of the diversity in their organization or team, help them understand the power of collective insight, the value of harnessing differences and embracing inclusiveness. The “diversity of thought” is the enforcement of critical thinking and the power switch of creativity. Develop the flexible, inclusive, and innovative working environment, to tap diverse resources and recognize merit and ideas. To apply integral management discipline, digital leaders should shape the “inclusiveness mindset,” always look for capabilities they don’t have so that they can build a winning team with complementary mindset and skills. They should also practice nonlinear management discipline,
empower teams with efficient tools to harness communication and build trustful relationship across the functional border to build a highly flexible and highly innovative workplace. 

 The digital paradigm has many dimensions. it is like to solve a jigsaw puzzle with thousands of pieces, easy to get lost when trying to capture the big picture. It is important to involve not only putting the pieces together but also blending them in such a way that the emergent whole is somehow more than the sum of its parts. Taking an integral management approaches is all about understanding and examining the whole, break down the silo, flatten organizational hierarchical layer, significantly improve the overall organization’s competency and growth potential,in order to build high-effective, high-responsive, high-intelligent and high mature digital organizations.

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The Monthly Foresight: Running Digital Organization with Autonomy June 2018

The effects of an increasingly digitalized world are now reaching into every corner of businesses and every aspect of organizations. Digital is the age of creativity and innovation, creativity is the most wanted trait for digital leaders and professionals today, and innovation is the light every organization is pursuing. Which themes shall you set to advocate digital transformation? How to lead to the digital future effortlessly?

             

 Running Digital Organization with Autonomy  

How to Run a Digital Organization with Autonomy: The business world is moving from a static, siloed, and mechanic industrial mood to the dynamic, fluid, and innovative digital mentality. Because the speed of change is accelerating, so the attempts to solve the existing challenges through the lens of the old paradigm continue failing. The new paradigm that is emerging is a digital organization that is more responsive, holistic, vibrant, self-driving, and above all enhances and supports the living organization and the dignity of the creative human spirit. More specifically, what is the digital way of running an energetic and autonomous digital IT organization?

The Organizational Autonomy and Digital Transformation Digital disruptions are inevitable, and digital transformation is unstoppable. Organizations shouldn’t just respond to them in a reactive way. The new paradigm that is emerging is a digital organization that is more responsive, holistic, vibrant, self-driving, innovative, and above all enhances and supports the living organization. In fact, autonomy becomes one of the most critical characteristics for digital organizations to thrive as well as the symbol of achieving high-level digital maturity.

Three Characteristics of Digital Organization? Digital organizations are like the living systems that can self-renew in thriving as high-performance businesses. Digitalization means that companies need to infuse digital into every aspect of the business, expand to every dimension of the organization. It is the movement from static to flow, silo to holistic, mechanical to organic, and command & control to self-management for shaping the digital-empowered workforce with following characteristics.

Three “A” Characteristics in Running Digital Organization? Digital transformation is “pushed” by both visible forces and invisible forces, hard forces and soft forces from multiple directions. The digital transformation is now spreading rapidly to enable organizations of all shapes and sizes to reinvent themselves. The organization should leverage the latest digital technology platforms and tools, keep tuning its structure, process, and people, to become more digital ready -be adaptable, living, innovative, and people-centric. Here are three “A” characteristics in running the digital organization.

Autonomy, Alignment, and Acceleration of Digital IT Organization With the exponential growth of information and ever-fast changes, great opportunity, danger, digital convenience, and disruption are around every corner. With emerging digital technologies, the territories between functions, companies, and industries are blurring, or converged, IT is the linchpin for integrating the business as a whole and running a hyperconnected digital organization. IT also has to take the step-wise approach to reinvent itself from a cost center to a strategic business partner through autonomy, alignment, and acceleration.

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 2.5 million page views with about #4700th blog posting in 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. The content richness is not for its own sake, but to convey the vision and share the wisdom. Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking and innovating the new ideas; it’s not just about WHAT to say, but about WHY to say, and HOW to say it. It reflects the color and shade of your thought patterns, and it indicates the peaks and curves of your thinking waves. Unlike pure entertainment, quality and professional content takes time for digesting, contemplation and engaging, and therefore, it takes time to attract the "hungry minds" and the "deep souls." It’s the journey to amplify diverse voices and deepen digital footprints, and it's the way to harness your innovative spirit.

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How Can IT Reach the Next Phase of Digital Blossom?

To reach the next phase of digital blossom, IT is thriving to grow vigorously, to flourish and become the game changer of the business.

Forward-thinking organizations across industrial sectors declare they are in the information management business. IT organizations need to be propositive, which means taking the proactive attitude, leading ahead of the pack, keeping ideas flow, contributing to the long-term business growth, and march to the next phase of digital blossom.

High-level CIO Leadership Competency: Reinventing IT starts with leadership innovation. CIOs should be empowered to lead changes, bridge IT and business gaps, and drive digitalization proactively. Due to hyperconnectivity and interdependence of digital organization, the breadth of digital CIO role requires IT leaders gaining a comprehensive understanding of the business ecosystem, including interwoven business elements such as customers, employees, business partners, all other stakeholders, the business’s competitive landscape, etc. The top CIOs today are the specialized generalist to practice expert power. The depth of CIO leadership is based on the unique insight IT leaders can bring up to the table, their profound understanding of the digital ecosystem, their business acumen, technique expertise, and leadership strength. What determines the maturity level of the CIO position is the impact they have made on others, and hence, their reputation as well as achievements. To reach the next phase of digital blossom, CIOs and other CXOs should stand side by side with the ultimate business goals of creating innovative products, integrating IT across all business units and transforming IT into the profit center. CIOs who have developed high-level of influential competence seek to understand the mindset of all related parties and practice multidimensional leadership influence based on fact-based communication, mixing candor with openness, and balancing curiosity and humility.

Digital IT is not just a service provider, but a business solutionary: To keep IT relevant for the long run, the role of IT in the current business environment should be able to solve critical business problems and enable business outcomes. IT management must get a feeler of the business view. This is extremely difficult to achieve without spending significant time on learning the business. It means that IT understands what’s the customers’ true need from outside-in view, not just follow their order, but help to solve their problems in the better way. Because the ways of doing business and meeting customer expectations both tend to be more flexible than the siloed industrial age. Running IT as the business “solutionary” is about leveraging information and the latest technology tools for providing solutions that will increase the functionality to lower cost, and if applicable, increase output. To reach the next phase of digital blossom, digital IT should focus on information, insight, improvement, and innovation, to ensure IT is no longer just a commodity service provider, but the strategic business partner. Even you cannot fulfill all business’s demands, but you deliver what you promise, and you do what is the best fit for the business’s strategy and goals.

Speed matters for riding learning curves and reaching the next phase of the businesses maturity: With overwhelming growth of information and increasing pace of changes, how successful organizations can handle digital disruption depends on how fast and capable they can adapt to the ever-changing environment. However, many IT organizations still have the reputation as the controller and not fast enough to respond to changes. The type of speed issues in many traditional IT organizations come from gaps created between IT and the rest of the company or the IT management’s short-term focus of transaction. Up to the next level of digital blossom, IT needs to adapt faster to grasp business opportunities for marketing expansion, shaping unique business competency for the long-term business growth. If possible, IT should focus on the fastest speed available because that is where the main threat is to competitiveness. IT acceleration also means to speed up the organizational vehicle, make sure IT and business are always on the same page though. An information-savvy organization can reach the inflection point to speed up and achieve high performance through seamless execution and by taking the collaboration road.

To reach the next phase of digital blossom, IT is thriving to grow vigorously, to flourish and become the game changer of the business. Running IT as the business becomes a new fixture for digital management in their efforts to substantiate their competitive position, affect the market landscape, drive new revenue growth, and bring the competitive business advantage effortlessly.

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The Monthly “Lesson Learned”: The Barriers and Pitfalls to Changes June 2018

The shift to the digital paradigm cuts across sectors, geographies, and leadership roles; and it is now spreading rapidly to enable organizations of all stripe to reinvent themselves.

Digital makes a significant impact on every aspect of the business from people, process to technology, both horizontally and vertically. Digital becomes the very fabric of high performing business, being outside-in and customer-centric is the new mantra for forward-looking and high mature digital organizations today. Digitalization is the thorny journey and innovation management is both art and science. What are the pitfalls on the way?

                  

  The Barriers and Pitfalls to Changes

Can you Scrutinize the Opposite of Digital Characteristics? The shift to the digital paradigm cuts across sectors, geographies, and leadership roles; and it is now spreading rapidly to enable organizations of all stripe to reinvent themselves. Not only should you know what is the digital all about, but also the digital leaders should further contemplate and scrutinize: What are the “OPPOSITE” of digital characteristics, and how to overcome the roadblocks to lead the journey of the digital transformation?

Five Barriers to Change Management Success Change is inevitable, and organizational change becomes a common practice within an organization, but more than two-thirds of change effort fails to achieve the expected results. What’re the barriers to cause the change failures, and how to make Change Management tangible rather than fluffy?

Three Change Dilemmas? The digital business dynamic allows the organization to morph into the business conditions and organizational capacities change to allow a better fit. Change is inevitable, and the pace of change is increasing. But change is never for its own sake, one of the good reasons for the change is to solve business problems both large and small, hard and soft. Change is neither an isolated nor a random initiative, it is an ongoing business capability. Change is complex as well, here are three change dilemmas.?

What Factors keep Business from Championing transformational change? Organizations large or small are faced with more radical digital or management transformation now, however, change management (the overarching term includes both transformation and change) has very high failure rate overall, what factors keep business from championing transformational changes, or what are key success factors in driving transformation?

Three Pitfalls in Change Management Organizations large or small are faced with more radical digital or management transformation now because the digital business ecosystem is still evolving. The digital dynamic continues to evolve with increasing speed of change and rapid integration of business across the globe. However, Change Management (the overarching term includes both transformation and change) has very high failure rate overall, what are key success factors in driving digital transformation? And which pitfalls on the way to keep business from championing transformational changes?

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 2+million page views with about #4500+ blog posting in 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. blog posting. The content richness is not for its own sake, but to convey the vision and share the wisdom, to inspire critical thinking and spur healthy debates. Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking and innovating the new ideas; it’s not just about WHAT to say, but about WHY to say, and HOW to say it. It reflects the color and shade of your thought patterns, and it indicates the peaks and curves of your thinking waves. Unlike pure entertainment, quality and professional content takes time for digesting, contemplation and engaging, and therefore, it takes time to attract the "hungry minds" and the "deep souls." It’s the journey to amplify diverse voices and deepen digital footprints, and it's the way to harness your innovative spirit.

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The Digital Boardroom Guidance: The Three Legs of the Stool

High effective boards set the digital principles, oversee strategic alignment, optimize risk management, accelerate business performance, and improve organizational maturity.

The key dimensions of corporate board’s responsibilities include, but not limited to strategy oversight, policy-making, performance monitoring and executive advising - understanding accountability of business environment - regulatory, shareholder, etc. Highly effective boards can sense emergent opportunities and predict potential risks, prioritize and put significant efforts into governance and risk management, to steer the business ship in the right direction and achieve high-performance business results.



Ensure the strategic alignment of business goals, portfolio management, and performance measurement systems throughout the organization: Effective strategy oversight requires sincere commitment to be independent, insightful and timely. Nowadays, with the exponential growth of information, there is the insight underneath and there are a lot of things board directors need to catch, such as the interconnectivity between the business parts and the whole, new industry standard & regulation or the emerging technology trends, etc. Strategic partnership and alignment with business goals need to remain at the forefront of the board going forward. It means about business working as a whole to improve communication, harness partnership, demonstrate business value and engage employees. The board should ask the management questions such as: How do you actually align the organization to best carry out the vision? Are your people acting in a way that is consistent with the strategy? Are your processes functioning to deliver consistent results with the strategic intent? Are your processes, technology, and people integrated to ensure a consistent ability to deliver customer value as defined in the strategy? Etc. If they can answer those questions with "yes," the business achieves strategic alignment. The boardroom sponsorship, "executive management buy-in" or "executive management's unconditional collaboration" are all critical to achieving the seamless strategic alignment.

Evaluate and control risks, and conduct scenario planning when necessary: Risk oversight is the critical responsibility of the board. Scenario planning is an important technique for managing risks. One common practice is to identify measures that provide insight into whether an identified risk is becoming real and to meter any investment to deal with it based on the monitored results. What valuable about even quick high-level scenario planning is that you can often establish a set of What-if scenarios with agreed-to response plans in place. Considering each risk in terms of its immediacy, impact on the organization and the organization’s ability to absorb the shock and survive to repair itself in the worst case scenario. This will allow your organization to gain time to prepare, rather than relying on a reaction approach or waiting to develop a strategy after monitoring indicates the disruption is in progress. The board should ask the management: Is your market sector volatile or relative stable? Does it have many innovators who are also big and aggressive? Who plays the biggest part in the sector, competitor, customer or the policy maker? And then, the board and management can work on what strategies or small low-risk steps you might take now that can better position you to more quickly identify or turn the disruption into your advance. Through logical scenario planning, large investments could be avoided if they ultimately turn out to be unnecessary.

Establish policy, procedures, help to ensure understanding, ownership, and accountability by management and employees: Though the board needs to do their homework, they must specify the role in essential functions such as strategy management, finance/budgeting, IT management, talent management, etc. Setting good policies and procedures to improve business effectiveness is a judicious duty of the boardroom. The principles or policies as a compass will guide all levels of the organization to operate more like the human body operates with the cells (employees) and organs (functions) of the organization being able to make decisions cohesively in a very organic relationship with its environment, to achieve common goals. Digital organizations are flatter, with an “every individual as a stakeholder” culture. Behaving accountable is the result of a culture with values that need to be organized and nurtured. The leaders and managers should be more interested in finding "causes," not interested in assigning blame, in order to build a culture of accountability.

In a world of well-defined problems, directors are required to exercise leadership influence over volatility, manage uncertainty, simplify complexity, resolve ambiguity, high effective boards set the digital principles, oversee strategic alignment, optimize risk management, accelerate business performance, and improve organizational maturity.

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Unconventional CIOs: How to Play Odd Balls for Running Innovative IT

IT has potential to become creative business problem solver because it is in the unique position to connect cross-functional dots.

Digitalization is driving hyperconnectivity and unpredictability, demanding more rapid deployment that can quickly adapt to the changes and adjust to the new market conditions. Digital power is the combination of the power of knowledge, the power of information and technology, the power of people, and the power of creativity. Traditional IT in the industrial age is often blamed as the controller and change laggard, but nowadays, all leading companies across the vertical sectors declare they are in the information management business, IT needs to become the linchpin of digitalization and innovation engine of the business. To be creative, you must do something different, creativity is all about change. CIOs should take bold leadership, practice unconventional thinking and run innovative IT to get digital ready.

Shape bigger, much bigger box of thinking: Organizations large or small are stepping into the deep, deep digital new normal. IT also needs to shift from an isolated support function to a people-centric business partner. It is also important to switch from inside-out operation driven to outside-in customer-focus. Thus, digital CIOs and IT professionals must be able to shape the bigger box of thinking, break down silos, and “we always do things like that” mentality. When they leave those outdated mindsets and standards to seek additional knowledge, fresh insight, and experience, they are stepping outside of the older box and expand into a much bigger box, to keep creativity flow. From the problem-solving perspective, it encourages looking at the wider aspects around the problem space and then understanding the effect of imposing boundaries with that space, in order to frame the right problems and solve them effectively. From innovation management perspective, shaping a bigger box by making connections between different boxes enable the organization to handle innovation streams for different purposes and with different time frames. Innovation is, in fact, the business mechanism through which you grow and envolve something to make it greater (value-added or breakthrough) based on a combination of modification of previous attributes or approach. From the anthropological perspective, the deep problem that reveals at the societal level is to understand what are the evolutionary pathways implied by those mind switches and how we can leverage different thought processes to solve complex problems facing us today's business effectively.

Boost the creative performance of inclusive teams: Traditional IT organizations take orders from customers, keep busy on fixing immediate problems. Digital IT needs to spend more time and resource on innovation-related activities. In practice, innovation in the "corporate" world has a lot to do with fostering a creative environment, build heterogeneous teams to boost creative performance. Ideas will flow frictionlessly and innovation will happen seamlessly when people are given free space to practice creativity without overly rigid rules, inflexible structure, or bureaucratic management to hold them back. Digital CIOs are inclusive leaders who dedicate to developing creative teams for doing interdependent works, be sure to get all potential perspectives involved, so everyone has a say, enforcing collective creativity, accountability, and trust. An organization that has a lightweight process and collaborative culture which allows ideas to flow, get protected, channeled and nurtured will succeed more often than an organization that has the overly rigid process and functional silos. The digital management is really open-minded to implement fresh ideas, build up a positive emotional climate, foster trustful relationship, cool down stressed people before they stress others, build up trust by bonding people around clear and benevolent intentions, make sure smooth information flow and achieve creative performance effortlessly.

Reward risk-taking, not just compliance: Traditional IT organizations act as the controller to avoid risk. Innovation comes with a risk of failure, usually not well tolerated by risk-allergic mindset. Digital IT needs to move from risk avoidance to risk mitigation to risk management and intelligence. Failure is part of innovation, as long as risks have been identified and agreed with stakeholders as per business need, you can take place risk models which effectively predict, optimize, and consider a continual and sustainable approach with multi-faced perspectives. The successful thinking about risk leads to survival by mitigating risks, and the accumulation of enough resources to thrive by capturing opportunities in it and adapting to the uncertainty and changes. Thus, to develop an innovative IT organization, IT leaders should encourage risk-taking, build the culture of risk tolerance, reward calculated risk-taking, inspire the culture of innovation, recognize innovators, fail fast and forward, learn from failures to improve innovation success rate. Thus, it is important to create a working atmosphere to allow free expressing the creative potentials. Most of the innovative organizations are headed by innovative leaders with original ideas, who can see, understand and appreciate the merits of people who can think differently and do things in the better way, and take the specific threshold for justifying opportunities and business outcome.

Remember that information is the lifeblood, and knowledge is power. IT has potential to become creative business problem solver because it is in the unique position to connect cross-functional dots. As the CIO, you have the most influential position within the business to make the true proactive contribution to run a highly innovative IT organization.

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