Three Perspectives to Run a Transcendent Digital Organization

A digital organization starts with a transcendent purpose that leads to a unique natural design, a design most fits to achieve the business goals and reach the state of business flow, zest, and harmonization.

The emerging digital technologies are now spreading rapidly to enable organizations of all shapes and sizes to reinvent themselves. Companies shouldn’t just respond to them in a reactive way. The highly complex and dynamic business needs to be elaborated in a well-organized effort, leverages nonlinear processes and interconnectivity between problems in a managerial context, strikes the multitude of digital balances which impact with each other to improve the overall business maturity. Digital businesses are hyperconnected, interdependent, always-on, here are three perspectives to run a transcendent digital organization.

Transcendent business purpose: The digital organization is like the living thing or an organic system, with cells that have a function, an infrastructure for input and output. The digital business has its own purpose and the people working there maintain purposes of their own. It can bring greater awareness of intricacies and the systematic value of the organizational systems, processes, people dynamics, resource alignment, information power, and technological touches. Does a digital organization have a brain or need a brain? If having a one, it might be its information management function. The aim of information management has often been described as getting the right information to the right person in the right format and medium at the right time in order to decide effectively and adapt promptly. However, the current business paradigm is still dominantly rooted in the mechanistic understanding/framing of the reductionistic management discipline. There are connections between alignment, architecture, and integration. If you don’t understand the business deeply, you can’t deliver relevant results except using silo structures, slow and clumsy processes. To build a transcendent digital organization, the designer must not only consider the purpose of the enterprise but also the purpose of employees. The digital business will be "organically" and adaptively developed iterating and empowered to enforce its transcendent purpose by intelligent organizational design and expanding both horizontally and vertically, across all business dimensions.

Transcendent skills: Due to the continuous disruptions and shortened knowledge cycle, either individually or collectively, it is hardly possible to work out a strategy without utilizing your knowledge and experiences in developing transcendent skills and building unique competitive advantages. The often described attributes of transcendent skills include such as adaptability, intelligence, creativity, influence, transformative leadership, etc. Traditional organizations are often process driven or operation oriented, but digital organizations should be capability-based and innovation-driven. From the strategic management perspective, transcendent skills woven into unique competency make the big wish into viable strategy management and leapfrog digital transformation. Different businesses are at a different stage of the business maturity cycle. The strategy as a vector has both direction and force. The digital leader’s transcendent skills such as navigation competency which requires the multidimensional understanding of both tangible and intangible business success factors, directly impact how they lead and what they could bring to the table, make strategic choices, identify key business capabilities and hone them into the unique organization-wide competencies. It’s also important to create an organizational roadmap for skill-developing and competency-building in order to implement the strategy smoothly and lead change effortlessly.

Transcendent innovation: The digital era upon us is the age of innovation. Every organization needs to develop tailored innovation principles, methodologies, practices by leveraging effective technologies, tools or methodologies and apply them wisely with the expertise to really add value or drive innovation. Transcendent innovation is disruptive in nature with high return and high risks. To disrupt, you must hear the whispers of customers, contexts, inner worlds and outside worlds. Cross-industrial dot connection would leverage nonlinear thinking to provide a better opportunity for managing transcendent innovation than linear thinking. Radical/Breakthroughs/ Transcendent Innovations are not something everyone can accomplish. The most powerful innovation navigation system involves tapping the organization's ecosystem for collective perspectives and knitting all critical business elements such as people, process, and technology into transcendent innovation capacity. At the organizational scope, it’s important to build an inclusive working environment as a melting pot to inspire creativity. Highly creative people in the team or across the teams are collaborating, clarifying, building on each other's ideas, discovering nuances, identifying patterns and connecting unusual dots to keep creative energy flow. From an innovation management perspective, you have to manage a transcendent innovation portfolio and develop innovation competency systematically.

A digital organization starts with a transcendent purpose that leads to a unique natural design, a design most fits to achieve the business goals and reach the state of business flow, zest, and harmonization. An organization can reach a high level of maturity by leveraging nonlinear processes and interconnectivity between problems in a managerial context, stretching out in every business dimension for driving the full-fledged digital transformation.

Posted in: Digital Master,Digital Maturity,Digitalization