Thursday, June 14, 2018

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 The traditional management discipline based on linear logic and reductional thinking is outdated somehow, an integrated digital management approach is about leveraging nonlinear processes and interconnectivity between problems in a managerial context, to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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