Three "A"ttributes of High-Mature Digital Organizations

Do not underestimate the perfect wave of combined integration of all of the exponential growth curves of information and changes. 

With the exponential growth of information and increasing pace of changes, the world keeps on turning, spinning, and innovating around you, and there will be new technologies, new perspectives, new approaches, new tools, new people that will have an impact on your team and your organization almost every day. What are important attributes and characteristics of high-mature digital organizations, and how to develop unique business competency to groom more digital masters?

Autonomy: Running a self-autonomous organization is to improve business efficiency, effectiveness, responsiveness, and maturity. Self-organizing is a natural human activity, it’s also about empowerment and trust. It’s about building a work atmosphere to encourage creativity, autonomy, and mastery. With autonomy, the team organizes by itself on how it will address the problem that has been presented to it. The business should expect high-professionalism from the team. The business keeps the process transparency, the manager does not micromanage, but inspect and keep track what the team is doing; to put another way, the management focuses on “why,” and “what,” not “how.” Thus, autonomy stimulates creativity. You give the team freedom to do things in their own way, figure out alternative solutions, and deliver the best outcome. They have the full authority on practices, tools, processes or engineering disciplines and methodologies they would like to use to deliver products/services/solutions continuously. In fact, autonomy is the symbol of digital maturity. The workplace is dynamic with the right organizational culture, where people can take ownership of their works, processes, and believe they can deliver the better than expected results. Thus, the business is in the state of flow frictionlessly, and the organization reaches the high maturity (seemly effortlessly, there are a lot of hard effort behind the scene though)

Adaptability: Digital means fast-paced changes, continuous disruption, overwhelming information, and shortened knowledge life cycle, how successful the individual or the organization can handle such “VUCA” digital new normal depends on how fast and capable they can adapt to changes and overcome upcoming challenges. Consider the digital organization as the self-organized but interlaced and hyper-connected ecosystem, adaptability is the ability of people or systems such as organizations adapt themselves smoothly and fast to changed circumstances. The main challenge organizations face when attempting to digitize and innovate is a consistent process through which they can make the seamless change or develop an idea. In the ever-changing digital dynamic, individually, people should develop adaptability through openness, be able to seek ways and means of adjusting their perspective and those around them. Collectively, organizations are made by people and people are the key element in self-adaptive organisms of today's digital organization. At the organizational level, self-adaptation is faster if made with the full involvement of people in organizational change, starting from relations between people, and improve the changeability of the business. The digital workforce today has to learn and relearn all the time and then apply those lessons to succeed in new situations. Adaptive innovation processes can provide the community self-organizing methods to collectively deliver results. It can also provide a consistent way for companies to evaluate the promised value as well as addressing and deal with risks, to move into the deep digital new normal.

Alternative: With continuous disruptions, never assume that you know the real issue is, not just symptom; never think there is a short list of solutions that you can pick from. Digital is the age of options. With unprecedented digital convenience brought by lightweight technologies, people now enjoy alternative ways to learn, work or shop. They can tailor their own needs to select what the best option for them. With the breakdown of physical barriers and blurred digital territories, they should become more open to the diverse viewpoints, connect the dots in the interdisciplinary domains, look for alternative ways to do things, and take the unique path to digitize and innovate. It is tough, but imperative to step out of the conventional thinking box, and “We’ve always done things like that,” mentality. One of the biggest challenges in this complex digital world is the fact that we need different perspectives, different knowledge and different ways to solve a problem. From business management lens, companies should always explore the alternative organizational structures, alternative recruiting pipelines, alternative communication channels, and alternative ways to engage employees or delight customers. Digital leadership is based on understanding a situation and weighing up the odds, trying to discover an entrepreneurial way forward. It’s also about co-create alternative visions and dreams into existence of new solutions or expand the lens to capture the further and bigger picture in order to zoom into the future clearly. Fundamentally, in pursuit of options is the journey you seek for inventions, new designs, and creative problem-solving.

Do not underestimate the perfect wave of combined integration of all of the exponential growth curves of information and changes. Shaping digital mindsets and characteristics take both strategy and methodology. It is important to understand that digital transformation is multifaceted, to reach the stage of the high digital maturity, organizations have to stretch out in every business dimension, strengthen organizational capacity and build business competency,

Posted in: Digital Fit,Digital Maturity,Digitalization