Digital Board: 100 Q & As ~ Future of CIO

The board of directors as the de facto guardian of modern organizations has an important role to play in steering the organization toward the uncharted water and blurring business territories.

Organizations today have to live up with the business dynamic which is uncertain, ambiguous, complex and flux. The overwhelming growth of information is permeating into every corner of the business, and rapid changes are touching every activity, function, business, and industry. The matter of fact is that the changes sweeping the business are hugely disruptive and there is nowhere to hide.

The board of directors as the de facto guardian of modern organizations has an important role to play in steering the organization toward the uncharted water and blurring business territories because they oversee strategy management and set the policy for driving changes. With more and more organizations are on the journey of the digital transformation, from the board composition perspective, which challenges do you face, when and how do you tackle the issue of change in the boardroom? How should board directors get an in-depth understanding of their role and responsibility while the business change is accelerated across the business scope and knowledge life cycle is shortened significantly? What are important perspectives to build a digital savvy board? And how to build a high-performance board for today and the future?

The great questions stimulate quality brainstorming. The corporate directors are the senior leaders, shall they ask or answer questions? As in many, if not most instances, there is a perception that leaders "should" be the most experienced and thus have all of the answers. That's a fallacy. Confidence comes from being comfortable in your role as a top leader, acknowledging that your job as a leader is NOT to provide answers for yesterday but facilitate solutions for tomorrow. In fact, the board directors are the mastermind behind the digital transformation by asking insightful questions. Asking good and pertinent questions is critical for governing changes and driving digital transformation. The high performing Board shows the ability and openness to "question itself, the senior management team, and its decisions and discussions.

The purpose of the book “Digital Boardroom: 100 Q&As “is to share 100 insightful questions for rejuvenating the boardroom to get digital ready. It is important for boards to make invaluable inquiries and take proactive approaches for leading digital transformation seamlessly.

Question and brainstorm on much-needed oversight and additional rigor to the boardroom composition and succession planning process.
Practice critical thinking and independent thinking for identifying blind spots, criticizing the strategy constructively and advising management insightfully.
Practice “out-of-the-box” thinking to ask open-ended questions about IT and how to build an IT-friendly and technology-savvy digital board.
Practice strategic thinking and systems thinking, ask insightful questions, to become the mastermind of digital transformation.
Make profound inquiries about the future of leadership, constantly question the status quo and set the digital leadership tone to get digital ready.

The contemporary corporate board as the directorial role plays a significant role in overseeing strategy, advising corporate executives and monitoring business performance. The board directors should also walk the talk to digitize the boardroom with strategic imperatives because often the digital tone is set at the top and echo spirally to all levels of the organization. The differentiator between a digital leader and a laggard is not about the title and authority, more about the mindset and attitude. Digital attitudes are about being experimental and persistent. Hence, digital board directors today need to show intellectual curiosity, creativity, learning agility, and risk tolerance, etc. A high mature digital board is like a lighting tower to navigating the business in the right direction and taking all these significant responsibilities more “thoughtfully.”

Chapter 1 The Digital Board’s Composition Inquiries: The boardroom composition will directly impact how they lead and which tone they will set for the entire organization to follow. While there are many components of leadership, one of the most important ones is the ability to adapt, model and influence change.

Chapter 2 The Digital Board’s Digital Inquiries: Digital is about the accelerating speed of changes and the abundance of information. Digital boards as the strategic advising role are the “mastermind” behind digital transformation to oversee strategies, drive innovation, catalyze changes, and monitor performance.

Chapter 3 The Digital Board’s Strategy Inquiries: Digital boards help the business management identify and close strategy blind spots, pinpoint decision fatigue, explore the boardroom fundamental and strategic oversight responsibility, and monitor its implementation and performance results, amend wherever necessary to match changing marketplace conditions.

Chapter 4 The Digital Board’s IT Inquiries: Given how applying IT is becoming so intrinsically important to so many different enterprises across industrial sectors, digital board directors should ask more insightful questions about IT because leading companies across industrial sectors claim they are in the information management business.

Chapter 5 The Digital Board’s Leadership Inquiries: Contemporary digital boards should set the critical tone from leadership grooming to talent development to culture cultivating, to ensure the right people are put in the right positions for leading digital transformation and improving the digital leadership effectiveness and maturity.

The Digital directorship Manifesto

Figure 3 The Digital directorship Manifesto

The best-in-class board practices scientific governance disciplines based on logic and rationalization with an inquisitive attitude and inspirational leadership style, to steer the enterprise ship in the complex and ambiguous digital business dynamic, to expedite changes and accelerate digital transformation.

Digital directorship goes Deeper over louder;

from Compliance to Performance to Excellence;

from homogeneity to heterogeneity to High-Maturity.

Digital directorship requires a clear vision, multi-dimensional intelligence, and creative communication:

Inquisitiveness over “status quo”;

Constructive governance over checkbox compliance methodology;

Problems Solving over bureaucracy;

Creativity over Rubber stamp;

Constructive Criticism over groupthink;

Information-savvy over “gut feeling”

Digital directorship achieves high maturity in pursuit of mastery:

Digital Mind Fit over conventional wisdom;

Fresh Eyes over assumptions;

“T-Shape” Expertise over outdated knowledge;

Creative Tension over friendship;

System Wisdom over linear thinking.

Digital directorship is the MASTERMIND behind the digital transformation.

Leadership is all about change and directorship is about steering the business in the right direction. Digital transformation is on every forward-thinking company’s top agenda; innovation is the light every organization is pursuing, and digitization becomes the new normal of business expansion. All of these bring significant opportunities and responsibilities for the new breed of digital BoDs. Because the board in a high-level directorship position plays a crucial role in setting key digital tones for leadership development and talent management. High-performing boards also set goals for their own performance and regularly evaluate how they are performing as the board. An effective board enables and directs management towards good outcomes, and ensure the business is on the right track to reach the well-defined business vision.

The "Digital Boardroom: 100 Q&As" Slideshare Presentation