Take the Logical Scenario to Beat Digital Change Curves

Riding change curves is particularly important for improving business responsiveness, increasing speed and achieve business maturity.

Now with the uncertainty around the volatile market situations, extreme competitions, continuous disruptions, and unprecedented business complexity, digital organizations today must be responsive to the increasing speed of changes. Digitalization is a journey, not just a one-time business initiate, riding ahead of the change wave takes both strategy and methodology. How to take the logical scenario to beat digital curves, improve business performance, and achieve business maturity.

Understand the learning curves: The real problem seems to understand the curve and how it relates to change. It is the logical scenario to gain curve awareness, motivate people to acquire the relevant knowledge, develop changeability, and then truly make change happening. The learning curve is applicable to everyone even those who planned and conceived the vision. To improve the success rate of change and business transformation, understanding the learning curve need to be the prerequisite that comes before change can actually take place. From change management perspective, change curve seems to be a tempting solution on how to explain the change scenario to the people concerned; conveying a clear vision, opening the honest dialogue, making an objective assessment of current state, appointing change champions, setting the dynamic change processes and applying the right methodology to manage change effectively. Riding learning curves to sustain change is another important perspective for making the change as a new normal and business competency.

Apply multi-step iterative processes and structural management disciplines: Change Management is all about balancing the main business elements impacting change: People, Strategies, Process and IT. Too often the middle-level change managers don’t have the big picture business oversight. Therefore, sometimes, the large scale of change such as digitalization is acted on the basis of improving one part of an organization at the expense of other parts of the organization. To make effective organizational scope changes, you have to maintain and fix any imbalance in those elements by establishing a cross-functional change management team to involving the management of different functions. All stages must be handled with attention and proficiency to ensure success. Keep in mind, change management should be the stepwise and iterative multi-stepped processes. It takes a lot of effort and resources to make change happen, and it takes even more effort and management disciplines to sustain changes. In practice, a mature organization is one that can quickly and safely assess all of the consequences of a possible change and devise effective plans to provide a combination approach for having both sense of urgency and overcoming change curve, to achieve and sustain those changes.

Take calculated risks: It takes courage to step out of the comfort zone,  risk-taking is an important ingredient for either change or innovation. Thus, willingness to fail is an important factor which must be fostered by top managers. Part of being a leader is taking the risk, but also control the risk. This is particularly important under the “VUCA” digital new normal because there is both abundance of opportunities and perils on the way. However, many organizations are not fertile ground for change or innovating, with static culture, people avoid taking risks, and seldom learn from their mistakes. High mature digital organizations are able to do something different, adapt to change new normal, and make continuous improvement. There is a willingness to "not know," from letting go of the current reality to allowing an unknown future state to emerge; be curious and receptive to improvisation and experimentation (and failing). Risk-taking is part of change scenario, it is a balancing act to have enough failure and an environment that encourages learning from failure quickly and cheaply, take calculated risks without having failures that are too frequent or too expensive. Change shouldn’t be just a few random business initiatives, it needs to be embedded into the corporate culture, and develop it as an ongoing business capability.

Digital businesses become more dynamic and hyperconnected, change is the new normal with faster pace and velocity. We are living in a complex world where inventions, developments, and conflicts are continuously changing and that makes it impossible to have complete knowledge and understanding of many issues facing the business today. Therefore, it’s important to take the logical scenario, apply the right strategy and methodology. Riding change curves is particularly important for improving business responsiveness, increasing speed and achieve business maturity.

Posted in: Change Management,Digital Master,Digital Maturity