Wednesday, June 10, 2015

To Celebrate #1900th Blog: Three Thinkings to Make you Stand Out as a Digital Transformational Leader

Leadership is not just about what you say, or even what you act, to dig through and lead more profoundly and cohesively, it’s about WHY, WHAT and HOW you THINK!

Thinking, thinking, and thinking more. Here comes the #1900th posting. The intention of the abundant thinking is to achieve the other kind of richness - Content Enrichment. With the increasing speed of changes and unprecedented digital dynamic, Thought Leadership is a mindset. Leadership is all about future, what are the most crucial thinking processes to make one stand out as a digital transformational leader?
Strategic Thinking: Strategic thinking is the "big picture" thinking to keep the end in mind, it's about where you are, where you want to be, identify the gap and create the alternate approaches to anticipate and provide solutions with long term perspective. A strategist has an inquisitive mindset that always be curious, constantly gathering of information, learning knowledge. But become skeptical about perceived information so that you examine everything well before accepting it for its real truths before advising it to others - keep your knowledge being valid; have experience, but must be up to date with business trends and essential technologies. This is the lifeblood as a strategy practitioner: (1) An understanding of the past and an understanding of the future so far as data permits; (2) The ability to view the complete business system as an ecosystem with all its dependencies and interconnections. (3) The ability to tie these things together in order to develop actionable plans. (4) ability to identify key leverage points where the non proportional impact can be made (5) ability to hypothesize interventions and iterate them till the right fit is made. Simply put, a strategist has knowledge, common sense and vision to bring all stakeholder together with right view and conduct.


Systems Thinking: Systems Thinking is about "seeing the trees without missing the forest;" it's to understand how the “part” interconnected with the”whole - the digital ecosystem.” Systems Thinking advocates holism, interdisciplinarity, and versatility. This is always a good start when working to build collaboration: understanding where each is coming from and having some trust from them. This is something that you should work towards. And organizations arise when the scale of the interrelations, interactions, or interrelational interactions surpasses our brain's capacity to be able to do whatever it does with smaller scales. It's important to leverage ST to understand the variety of business relationship. Systems thinking digs deeper: It is the discipline for discerning relationships and context that are not obvious and may upon first thought even appear to be doubtful for their veracity or usefulness. Systems Thinking would help you get behind the "surface" validity, and give you deeper insight into the nuances of why and how.


Out-of-Box (Creative) Thinking: Out-of-Box thinking keeps creativity flowing! Fundamentally, the "box" is the set of "rules" you are abiding by at any moment in time, by the breakdown of old rules, your mind sets free to create the new ideas, usually comes from identifying and challenging assumptions and then generating more possibilities. Great ideas only happen outside of the usual restraints. Start with "what if . . ., " and see where it takes you. Only then do you have enough to start weeding out the bizarre and tweaking sound ideas into reality. The point is not to be unduly constrained in your thinking, but at the same time, not to lose sight of the objective of thinking. Particularly, the box keeps changing. In today's competitive digital dynamic, what was outside the box yesterday, may not be such today. Our thinking has to continuously evolve, adopt, and prepare for changes. There are not such things as too much out-of-box thinking, but it's also important to shape the newer box to stay focus. There’s nothing wrong with lots of out-of-the-box creative type thinking as long as you couple it with some good analytical (left brain type thinking). Think of it as going from divergent thinking (out-of-the-box) to convergent thinking where you filter or funnel down the ideas to those that make sense given your capabilities. Thinking outside of box means you are in a continuous learning mode, also, embrace critical thinking, independent thinking, and creative thinking.  When one leaves those thoughts and standards to seek additional knowledge and experience, they are stepping outside that box to unfamiliar territory. We all should broaden our points of interest and try new things to extend our thinking box. That leads to a better mutual understanding and more advanced society among all humans.


Leadership is not just about what you say, or even what you act, to dig through and lead more profoundly and cohesively, it’s about WHY, WHAT and HOW you THINK! Thought leadership is not a “nice to have,” but “must have” quality to lead more effectively. It is the ability to assimilate knowledge, to think with knowledge, but transcends to the insight and wisdom. It is a disciplined mindset with the process that can innovate and extend knowledge. Leadership is all about CHANGE! Start with big WHY, the substance of leadership is to drive human progress, develop expertise and craft wisdom to make leadership influence both touching the hearts and shaping the minds, also keep the personal leadership style as well, because every leader is unique. Be authentic, be influential and be mature.

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