Initiatecriticalthinking

Without critical thinking to gain true understanding, the real problems cannot be diagnosed and the complex problems cannot be solved in a structural way.

Information is growing exponentially, the business environment becomes more complex than ever, critical thinking becomes more critical than ever in this dynamic world for making sound judgment and effective decision making. 

Critical Thinking is associated with the metacognitive disciplines that steer one away from believing falsehoods, more so than steering one toward the truth. It also implies multidimensional thought processes, systematic methodology, employing and applying the criteria deemed appropriate by the thinkers involved, to improve decision maturity..

Gathering and marshaling pertinent information: Generally speaking, people form critical opinions based on facts, discerned data, deep understanding, and clarified notions. To practice critical thinking and become insightful, you have to be selective about information you absorb, as information quality directly impacts decision effectiveness and strategy management success. Critical thinking requires one’s abilities to scrutinize circumstances, recognize problems, and find workable means for meeting those problems. It’s about gathering and marshaling pertinent information, to recognize unstated assumptions and values, comprehend and use language with accuracy to make objective judgment of people and things.

It’s important to leverage critical thinking for deepening understanding by listening to or observing; asking the right questions, and responding to what needs to be said or done. Effective decision makers are able to practice critical thinking to make their decisions rich in information and significantly different from the available data. They are open for constructive feedback. gather a mass of quality information, break it apart and reconstruct it with a level of accuracy for projecting futuristic events, or numbers, etc. Analysis of any kind of issues would be unconscionable without critical thinking being applied to some degree, in evaluation, dissection, or in an explanation of the diagnosis.

Integration of diverse thought processes: The real critical thinking far outweighs the conventional critical thinking techniques, such as reason, logic, calculation, and conscious weighing of expected outcomes, etc. Critical Thinking needs to combine different thinking processes, it is the mental process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing and evaluating information to reach an answer or conclusion.

Critical Thinking is not about overwhelming thinking chaos but about cohesive understanding and skillful reasoning, including both rational thinking (compare and contrast, define the frame of reference, etc.) and creative thinking (holding the contrasting factors in the mind until something new appears). Real critical thinking is a multidimensional and integral thought process to keep the mind flowing and understand things in profundity.

Bridge of cognitive difference: It would be good to think critically more often than we do concern about our actions in order to avoid blind spots and mind cognitive gaps. Critical thinking is essential for making decisions based on opening up with a diverse viewpoint, careful and comprehensive analysis and synthesis, and getting input from people with a broad range of cognitive difference, perceptions, or personalities on the particular matter. It is always beneficial to communication, interpretation, and accuracy of overall results when multiple heads with cognitive difference come together, interpret and define data sources and outcomes by practicing critical thinking for making collective decisions.

The opposite of critical thinking includes such as reflexive thinking, autonomic response, emotional thinking, or blindly following, etc. One’s beliefs or thoughts are developed from what they see, hear and experience. Some beliefs are developed from the misinterpretation of what they see, hear and experience. People’s perceptions are different when they see or experience the same things. Unfortunately, some knowledge is outdated, some perceptions are outdated, the learned beliefs could be outdated as well, forming one’s biases or blind people from seeing the other side of the coin. Critical thinkers grow a larger perspective, they can see or understand the situation from different angles, get input from a broad range of personalities and cognitive difference of people on a particular matter, in order to shape more objective viewpoints and make sound judgments

We shift the world from black & white to embrace the full color spectrum. Without critical thinking to gain true understanding, the real problems cannot be diagnosed and the complex problems cannot be solved in a structural way. Thus, it is the responsibility of each individual to examine themselves and to make sure they are open to true understanding, keep learning, broaden the lens and increase perspective by practicing critical thinking, see the value of inclusiveness and appreciate the power of collective insight, in order to define the right problems and solve them effectively.

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Uniquecompetency

Organizational capability presents a high level view on how business can achieve certain goals.

The purpose of the book “Digital Capability - Building Lego-Like Capability into Business Competency “ is to provide an insightful understanding of assessing, developing, and managing organizational capabilities in a structural way. The organization’s competency is based on a set of cohesive capabilities and how fast and effective they can be built upon. The high-mature organizational capability is the digital business differentiator, to keep the business unique, competitive, and innovative, to improve business maturity significantly.

The capability views enable dot connections and help the business identify “actuality, capability, and potentiality,” build Lego-like capabilities into core business competency and improve the success rate of strategy execution and overall business maturity.

      Unique Competency

Innercapabilityconnectivity Business capability defines "what" a business does or can do by encapsulating organizational resources (tangible, intangible or human resources) and integrating all important business components for producing a certain outcome.

Innerconnectionincapabilityarchitecture The exponential growth of information and the probability of surprising emergent properties bring both unprecedented opportunities and risks to organizations across industrial sectors today. Organization is at different stages of the business growth cycle, it perhaps requires diverse flows and differentiated business manageability. The architecture is used as an instrument to assess, design, and orchestrate capabilities, avoid implementation of redundancy, complexity, and duplicity, to improve overall business competency and maturity.

UniquecorproatecompetencyThere is no doubt we are moving from a static and linear business world to a hyper-connected, and interdependent digital era. In today’s business dynamic, there are always players starting with different resources and competitive positions; and there are always different complexities at a different time. Business leaders today need to identify the variety of capability gaps for strategy management; look ahead and be proactively looking for opportunities to improve; also compare your set of capabilities with competitors' to ensure that you are developing differentiated capabilities to gain unique business competency and build long term business advantage.

Innatecapabilitycheckpoints Organizational capability presents a high level view on how business can achieve certain goals. It provides a level of abstraction that allows more open consideration of business success factors such as people, process and technology.

Innerassessmentofcapability Organization is different, they are also at the different stages of business growth and maturity, there is no one size fitting all formulas or practices to develop a high mature organization. In face of fierce competitions and frequent disruptions, forward-thinking companies need to apply an interdisciplinary management approach, make an objective assessment of the key success factors of the corporation, such as capability, performance, culture, etc, to get the organization from here to there for adapting to the over-complexity and fast-pace of changes, and enhance an iterative strategy-implementation continuum.

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 7 million page views with about #8600th blog posting in 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. The “Digital Master” book series includes 28 books to share insight from the multidimensional digital lens and perceive the multi-faceted impact the digital era upon us is making to businesses and society. The content richness is not for its own sake, but to convey the vision and share the wisdom. Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking and innovating new ideas; it’s not just about WHAT to say, but about WHY to say, and HOW to say it. It reflects the color and shade of your thought patterns, and it indicates the peaks and curves of your thinking waves. Unlike pure entertainment, quality and professional content takes time for digesting, contemplation and engaging, and therefore, it takes time to attract the "hungry minds" and the "deep souls." It’s the journey to amplify diverse voices and deepen digital footprints, and it's the way to harness your innovative spirit.

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Innovativeness

Innovative companies usually have unique capabilities to make them stand out and differentiate them from others to practice innovation and achieve better business results.

We are what we continue thinking and doing. High-professionalism means authenticity. Learning, experiencing, training, are all important to improve professional competencies nowadays. To move up toward the next level of professional competency, being innovative is a state of mind, creativity is one of the most desired professional competencies. 

People need to keep exploring their talent, broadening their relevant skills and deepening their expertise to solve more complex problems and achieve higher than expected results.

Take entrepreneurs’ spirit to turn the status quo upside down: The pace of change is expedited and knowledge is outdated sooner than what you think of. Thus, innovators are in strong demand to break down traditional thinking boxes, challenging common beliefs, and updating old rules. In ever-expanding and hyper-connected digital organizations, understanding the business dynamics, working to shape a good strategy takes attention and energy, turning the status quo upside down for dealing with uncertainty via interdisciplinarity of art and science.

Entrepreneurs think out of the box, professional managers set up and manage within the box; entrepreneurs present resilience; professional managers manage elasticity. In order to adapt to today’s business dynamic and spur innovation, such two sets of leadership characteristics can complement each other seamlessly, and also integrate each other’s viewpoints. Some leaders use a counter argument in open discussions just to ensure multiple points of view are explored, bringing together management teams in a common and committed effort, and moving people in the right direction despite many obstacles on the way to run a highly effective and innovative company.

Feedback and feedforward are important for a business’s success in the long term: Either doing innovation or solving critical business issues, lack of effective feedback management will deepen a variety of gaps and create measurement blind spots. Some traditional performance management causes dysfunctional behaviors and motivates people to hide bad news on delays and cost overruns. The invaluable information such as feedback on business action/impacts/outcomes, feedback on business initiatives realization/implementation, feedback on organizational potential can significantly improve business performance for the long run.

With frequent disruptions and exponential growth of information, high velocity and uncertainty, feedback needs to be relevant and continuous, as close to real-time as possible, in control of the recipient and in a way the recipient can understand. By improving quality and relevance of feedback, innovation managers can communicate their understanding and the contributions they expect of their parts of the organization to their teams and employees. They should truly listen to what their people have to say about solving the issues identified, and not let their own presumptions get in the way.

Innovation is not serendipity, but a management process and differentiated business competency: Environment either encourages or discourages innovation, the ease or difficulties inherent in surviving. In face of fierce competition and unprecedented uncertainty, individuals and organizations need to keep improving their level of competency from building linear capabilities to solve a specific set of problems to reaching the next level of integral and scalable competencies for solving more complex problems. It’s important to manage innovation systematically via a good alignment of great innovators, reliable information, disruptive technologies, and rigorous but not overly rigid processes for building innovation competency.

To truly build digital workforce innovation competency, "development, enhancement, and coaching" are important to meet the individuals’ and the organizational development needs, build cross domain knowledge, and set the process to achieve well-defined goals and reach the next level of the growth cycle and business transcendence. All businesses should have a handful of "bets" in the breakthrough innovation category to lift the business up to the next level of organizational growth. It’s also important to fine-tune many critical business factors, both “hard” and “soft” factors to build innovation capacity of the business.

To develop differentiated business advantages, companies have to keep searching for new opportunities to disrupt, rather than being disrupted. Every organization has their set of capabilities to get work done or solve problems. Innovative companies usually have unique capabilities to make them stand out and differentiate them from others to practice innovation and achieve better business results.

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Initiateanalysis

In the era with exponential growth of information, the challenge for the senior leaders is how to discern information they trust from information overflow.

Given the value that information is playing in the change and growth of organizations today, business leaders must become information-savvy. Information analytics tools and techniques are going to play an increasingly larger role in business. 

Effective senior executives should have a clear vision of what they need to know, how the information provided pertains to the strategic plan; they must be knowledgeable about the importance of analytical insights, cultivate an analytical thinking culture in their organization and run a smart business with adaptation, agility, and high speed.

Accuracy: Information Management is the overall process of aligning the use of information through the management cycle by what data you have, in what format and the location & method it is held, and keep refining data quality. Any business executives would like to be able to predict future trends based on current and historical data. The main concern of top execs is accuracy; the quality of information directly impacts on the quality of decision-making.

Although information can't always be knowledge; and knowledge doesn't always inform you... Information is an ingredient of knowledge; but in order to interpret information; you need knowledge; in order to keep knowledge updated, information needs to be accurate enough. Willingness to acquire additional information begins with acceptance you do not know enough to achieve your purpose; you recognize a gap in the knowledge you have and value in closing the gap, improving information accuracy and knowledge relevance for improving leadership effectiveness.

Integrity: Top management should verify the integrity of the system with varying components such as data, process, prior to trusting decisions emanating from it. In fact, data integrity and logic integrity can cause huge swings in information analytics. Without data integrity, the cool analytics that are simply wrong have impaired companies who believe they are doing the right things.

Sufficient time and resources must be budgeted to allow the data to be properly prepared in advance of any analysis. Without that, management will have unrealistic expectations about the timing and ROI of results. Obtaining buy-in from senior management is an important step in improving information management practices, as it is important that they are educated up front about the data preparation phase and how to improve data integrality, so being information savvy allows leaders at all levels to understand where they stand and what is required as a team to enhance business operations in lieu of remaining status quo, and improve decision effectiveness.

Consistency: Consistency is an important goal for data management. As inconsistent or broken business processes result in significant information inconsistencies which causes decision ineffectiveness. Data can be accurate, timely, but data can also be shared among many different business groups, it can be transformed, aggregated, derived for various business needs, each with possibly their own views on what the expected definition and quality of the data should be. That might be the very reason for data inconsistency. Breaking down silos, streamlining and standardization of information management processes is an essential prerequisite to providing effective information solutions and achieving information consistency.

To broaden the perspective of running a consistent business, there needs to be a baseline process defined across the organization to allow for consistency of the rating, look for consistency in information, teams, in organization as well as in their ecosystem. Multidimensional information management provides impressive advantages in terms of the speed of delivery, the quality of information for decision making, and the professionalism of the digital workforce. Knowing their capabilities and how they function is important to leaders as they have high influence on decision making and organizational culture.

In the era with exponential growth of information, the challenge for the senior leaders is how to discern information they trust from information overflow. You can walk through all the various dimensions of information quality such as accuracy, integrity, consistency etc, but business context is indeed a very important perspective. Discover how and where to find valuable information, not pull out the information they need and also learn what to ignore, in order to improve decision effectiveness and lead their business forward effortlessly.

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Innovativelogic

The business world is diverse, nonlinear, and ambiguous today, the multifaceted perspectives unfold into a wider multi-dimensionally enhancing business growth & balance continuum.

Digital organizations or society are dynamic and ever-evolving. There is a shift from seeing a societal system as a set of interconnected components to seeing a modern societal system as a set of interwoven threads with nonlinear logic as the very clue. 

The linear logic helps to break down things to the pieces, but it often ignores the interconnectivity between parts and the whole. In the dynamic digital business, business logic is often nonlinear and multifaceted. It’s important to understand the coherent business logic of the whole organization, mostly not at the level of part of the organization, to clarify sequence and consequence of problem-solving scenarios and figure out the cause and effect of transformative changes.

Interdisciplinary logic: Running an effective business is fundamentally about how to apply logic to solve problems, implement ideas, and guild teams to make things happen timely. Business logic comes in partly overlapping views: corporate information - checks to see if the information is in or out of balance and whether it is sufficient for optimized decisions and also what informational investments you have that will support business growth. Business rules - describe the operations, definitions, and constraints that apply to an organization, expressing policies and workflows to keep organizations running and improving, interwoven people, processes, corporate behavior, and computing systems in an organization, to help the organization achieve its goals.

Business logic becomes nonlinear as organizations or human societies turn to be more hyper-connected, and interdependent. It’s important for organizational leaders and professionals to apply a multidimensional thinking box to understand business context and sustain diversified viewpoints into holistic perspectives without enlarging cognitive/decision gaps and causing too many side effects. It means to have the better opportunities to connect the dots across the geographical, functional, organizational, industrial, or generational boundaries, integrate multidisciplinary knowledge and methodology to optimize organizational performance and harness people-centricity.

Culture logic: Culture is created out of the systems, processes, human capital and associated continual development, organizational hierarchy, and strategic design of the organization. Culture is like the glue that holds and binds an organization together interrelatedly. Culture Logic is a collective thinking process where a result is derived from a variety of thoughts. It’s also a clue about how people make decisions or get the work done in the organization. When the culture fails to enable effective strategy management, it’s important to diagnose the root causes, behaviors are on the surface - the tip of the iceberg, attitudes are in the middle, and thoughts are underneath. If you can uncover the pattern of culture logic, there's a better opportunity to diagnose the real problems and solve them smoothly.

In traditional companies, there are different types of subcultures in different divisions or geographical locations; and there are societal cultures outside the organizational culture, all of which influence each other, sometimes cause conflict, and decelerate business speed. To keep the organizational culture cohesive, it’s important to understand the interrelationship between them; and apply integration logic to ensure they are diversified and unified in an effective way to enable strategy management and accelerate performance.

Process logic: The process is "what are you trying to do, what result are you trying to achieve." Process management is to manage the known from flowing. Process design is logical-how it is or will be done - describes a solution; process underpins capability, and capability underpins corporate strategy. Incoherent processes cause delays, waste resources, disengage employees, and dissatisfied customers. Ineffective process management is often caused by a lack of policies and governance procedures that define processes; lack of commitment of resources and time to education & communication cross silos.

Process management is more as a business management philosophy and a holistic management practice to enhance process logic and coherence. The simplified, end to end processes clarify business logic, enable speed of execution and allow the organization to act in a coherent manner. The robustness of the process means there's risk management embedded into the process, to improve organizational resilience. The degree of business process coherence decides how flexibly the organization can adapt to business dynamics and how innovatively it can drive progressive changes. Logic plus consistency lead to coherence.

The business world is diverse, nonlinear, and ambiguous today, the multifaceted perspectives unfold into a wider multi-dimensionally enhancing business growth & balance continuum. It’s important to figure out the “right level” of planning, untangle complexity, clarify business logic, keep iterating, adjusting, evolving, and working on a rhythm of sustained products or services deliveries.

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Innatepolicy

The more effortlessly you can align, integrate, and optimize the important business factors such as policy, process, culture inside an organization, the closer you can solve crucial problems and accelerate performance.

Generally speaking, the policy is a set of principles for decision making or guidelines to drive behaviors. Policies need to serve a purpose. Top leaders are both policy makers and followers. The corporate board needs to clarify whether the organization ensures policy coherence across the portfolio; or whether the policy-making and governance are effective enough to improve multifaceted value creation of the company.

Leadership mindset and commitment make policy effective: Setting and monitoring policy compliance is a governance activity. Strong board leaders set good policies to inspire transformative change and incremental improvement accordingly. Effective policies shouldn’t enhance “we always do things like that” mentality and stifle change or innovative problem-solving. Good policies lubricate the business value chain and streamline business logic, so people crossing the boundaries will pull in the same direction to drive progressive change.

Just because policy exists, it doesn't mean they will be effective or followed smoothly. There are some organizations out there that have a plethora of policies and many of them are nothing more than that, just a policy, it takes leadership and commitment to improve policy effectiveness. Change in rules or policy will only become sustainable if leadership, especially at the senior level out there, changes his or her mindset.

There are correlations between policy-making, culture, and performance: Purpose and policy clearly understood, articulated, and commonly shared, are the genetic code of any healthy organization. Good policies encourage desired behaviors and nurture needed culture. the Board of Directors and “policy committee” co-set policies, oversee and monitor the varying alignment and progress against strategy, policy, and culture, help the business make progress and fulfill the purpose.

Good policies are “shareware,” all parties should benefit from following them, to make the working environment more open and fairer. People in high performance organizations follow good policies voluntarily for their own benefit, to shape a set of desired culture or accelerate performance. Also, a creative workplace reduces the number of policies to inspire free thinking, break down conventional wisdom and achieve innovation performance.

Do the policies say, if needed, update policies to encourage change timely: In the knowledge society we live in,  the management intends to follow their rational scenario to handle varying situations. In reality, there are ecosystem uncertainty and human factors such as irrational, cognitive, or behavioral aspects increasing the risk of achieving business performance. Highly effective boards set good policies for encouraging great things to happen and letting the capability shine to achieve higher than expected business results.

Policies are communication from the top. When circumstances change, policies need to be updated to ensure people continue to do the right things. By following a right set of policies with flexible management disciplines, the digital workplace can be provocative, passionate, from letting go of the current reality to allowing an unknown future state to emerge, and solve problems proactively.

The more effortlessly you can align, integrate, and optimize the important business factors such as policy, process, culture inside an organization, the closer you can solve crucial problems and accelerate performance. With a set of good policies and strong governance discipline, business management can translate strategy into operational terms aligning the organizational processes and structures to create synergies and synchronize organizational thoughts, actions or behaviors to mobilize changes consistently.

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Innerchangedimensions

With VUCA” digital new normal, leaders must have a greater awareness of business intricacies and realize that one of their greatest strengths will be their multifaceted changeability.

Organizations across the vertical industries are on the journey of digital transformation. There are various approaches to change such as planned change, unplanned change, imposed change, negotiated change, and participative change. Transformative changes are nonlinear and multidimensional, often taking a holistic approach with an iterative continuum. 

The more complex the change is, the more complex the solution could be. The success factor to the “transformative change,” and its further “championing” has been the endless self-exploration in emotional, intellectual, technological dimensions that need to co-evolve together, for amplifying and sustaining its impact.

Knowledge/intellectual dimension: Information exponentiality and rapid changes are the new normal, unsurprisingly, the “commonly known” method is no longer working anymore when the circumstances change radically. Nowadays, the fresh knowledge can be captured from the abundance of information almost in real time; but it doesn’t take long for that knowledge to become a commodity once the market is exposed to it. At traditional organizations with command and control management style, employee engagement is very low, people fear to step out of their comfort zone and adapt to changes. They are simply not motivated to be either change agents or innovators.

Today’s digital workforces are knowledge workers, creative workers. It’s important to shape a set of change mindsets with positive mentalities such as growth mindset - thinking change as the opportunity, strategic mind - keep the end in mind, think long-term, problem-solving mindset -fixing the real problem, not just symptom, creative mindset - discovering an alternative way to do thing, learning mindset -show the humility to learn and catch up, etc. The management can provide intellectual challenges, stimulate creative energy, discourage negative emotions or unhealthy competitions, encourage alternative problem-solving, and tolerate calculated risks.

Psychological dimension: Change is difficult either individually or collectively, managing change is like the upward spiral. The psychology behind the change is that “People like to change, but do not want to be changed.” There are full emotion cycles behind changes, and it is the mixed bag of positive emotions- openness to new ideas and perspectives; and negative emotions - resistance to change, fear, etc. Because there are different psychological perspectives, there is no one size fits all approach to addressing the different psychological responses and thereby reducing anxiety. Thus, change leaders should apply a multidisciplinary change management approach to make change happen in a structural way by shaping advanced mindset and connecting wider dots.

Change means the removal of something old, but people are emotionally attached to those things being possessed. Change in people has the same impact just in varying degrees, producing some degree of anxiety. People need time to assimilate change and work through the issues that result from the change, moving from the emotional to the rational. Empower change agents and reward change champions. The change should be viewed as an opportunity to solve a business problem, improve productivity, cut costs or optimize products or services. To achieve desired changes, an organization must create an environment that enables effective collaboration, shares and promotes ideas, and provides necessary incentives for employees to improve change management success.

Technology dimension: It is true that information grows exponentially, and the growth of technology triggers a paradigm shift. Never before has abundant information needs to flow across the boundary to generate value; never before has the lightweight digital technology moved more quickly and missteps have larger trajectory impacts on every aspect of the business. The management needs to figure out whether information technology can help to design new business models; scale the right way to achieve strategic objectives; how the technical aspects of a workplace fit together directly impact the effectiveness and maturity of the company.

Modern digital technologies bring unprecedented convenience for people to learn and work, improve their productivity, learning agility, and innovativeness. Digital technologies are more lightweight, powerful, intuitive, and fast. Organizations today should leverage digital technologies, platforms, and tools as the enabler of communication, collaboration, social interaction and forward-thinking aggressively. Being a digital leader will need to master the art of creating differentiating value from piles of emerging or commoditized technologies. The leadership teams should craft and cast the vision for the ways in which tomorrow’s business technologies can create sustainable business value, and apply the right technology to the business with tailored solutions.

With VUCA” digital new normal, leaders must have a greater awareness of business intricacies and realize that one of their greatest strengths will be their multifaceted changeability. There are intensity of change and there are numerous reference points of varying stakeholders, and they all have a different view on "change." The management can keep all activities relating to change initiative transparent, take advantage of the latest technology tools for communication, enhance the practice of change, build a viable organization to deliver impressive business outcomes and improve business performance cohesively.

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Innercollaboration

Generally speaking, the policy is a set of principles for decision making or guidelines to drive behaviors.

As hyperconnectivity is the very nature of the digital organization, cross-silo collaboration is crucial to build and sustain a dynamic workplace in which collaboration happens in that space between people in relationships receptively and thoughtfully interacting with interest and care for one another’s needs and activities. 

The most effective digital workplace is in which sharing and collaboration are the norms, understand, and recognize that everyone plays a “piece of the pie,” inspire teamwork and collaboration which are the route towards building a people-centric organization.

 

       Collaboration

Innovateviacollaboration Collaboration is at its essence, the intellectual harmony between humans. Nowadays, organizations become hyper-connected and interdependent. The functional, geographical, or industrial borders are blurred, collaboration happens in that space between people in relationships receptively and thoughtfully interacting with interest and caring for one another's needs and activities to unleash collective potential.

People-Centric Digital Organization by Cultivating Zest Digital organizations are all about information savvy, adaptation, high-performance, and speed. Forward-thinking organizations today aim to move into a highly advanced stage of digital deployment by tailoring their own unique strength to build their core competencies. The digital era upon us is the age of people and options. It provides great opportunities to think of better ways to do things, engage employees, delight customers, cultivate zest, and develop an intensive and effective working environment for improving business performance and accelerating organizational speed.

Characteristics of Digital Era We are experiencing a major paradigm shift from the industrial age with information scarcity, traditional "asset-based" accounting and productivity measures, and approaches to the digital era with knowledge abundance and holistic management discipline. The emerging digital era has many dimensions and demonstrates different characteristics, providing unprecedented opportunities to leap the business up to the next level of organizational maturity.

Aspects of Effective Collaboration in a Digital Organization The very characteristics of the digital age are hyperconnectivity and interdependence. The paradox is that people from every corner of the earth can co-create the knowledge, collaborate to overcome common challenges facing in human society seamlessly, they would also compete for the resource or works from anywhere, which causes hyper-competition as well. At an organizational level, silo thinking becomes the very obstacle to stifle innovation and stop the business from moving up the maturity level. From the management perspective, what should you do to break down barriers so that talented people can collaborate more effectively?

Scenario to Break Down Silos There are different definitions of silo. The segmenting or sectioning of work by skill/knowledge/type/etc is a necessary component of business operations. However, silo mentality and silo management often mean keeping people’s mind static, keeping people separate rather than keeping work separate. It sets barriers to changes, decreases business effectiveness and efficiency, and decelerates the speed of the organization. What is the rational scenario to break down silos for streamlining business flow, and unlocking individual and group potential?

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 7 million page views with about #8600th blog posting in 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. The “Digital Master” book series includes 28 books to share insight from the multidimensional digital lens and perceive the multi-faceted impact the digital era upon us is making to businesses and society. The content richness is not for its own sake, but to convey the vision and share the wisdom. Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking and innovating new ideas; it’s not just about WHAT to say, but about WHY to say, and HOW to say it. It reflects the color and shade of your thought patterns, and it indicates the peaks and curves of your thinking waves. Unlike pure entertainment, quality and professional content takes time for digesting, contemplation and engaging, and therefore, it takes time to attract the "hungry minds" and the "deep souls." It’s the journey to amplify diverse voices and deepen digital footprints, and it's the way to harness your innovative spirit.

Read More

Innercompleteness

Problem-solving evolves both big picture and detail. More often than not, solutions to complex problems are not true-or-false, but better or worse.

Many problems today are complex and interdependent. Every complex problem can be considered to be a symptom of another problem. In today’s hyper-connected and interdependent business world, some complex problems are perhaps like snowballs, keep growing. 

As problems exist not in isolation, but as an interacting system of problems. Complex problems can be broken down to smaller ones, and every problem perhaps has multiple solutions. Sometimes you solve one issue, but cause another one or a few more. There is the opportunity you can take care of a chain of problems, not just an individual problem. Can solutions to strategic problems be ever completed? What does completeness mean from a solution architecture perspective, how to figure out the best possible solution to solve problems radically?

“Completeness” is not equal to “done”: Problem-solving is a multi-stepped process that includes both problem resolution and solution implementation. The completeness of problem-solving is relative to the organization that is served by the solution architecture. Solution architecture as a framework provides processes, guidelines and best practices to walk through the solution scenario by clarifying: Where do you need solution framework and guidance? What are optimized processes, practical methodologies and best practices to solve problems? How to handle different stages of problem-solving with attention and proficiency to ensure success? There is “completeness” in problem-solving if you can understand and scrutinize via a strategic lens and measure its effect objectively without ignoring the potential problems it might cause at the tactical level.

In most cases, your solution is not complete as you don't understand your business environment, because you have never looked outside the boundary of the problem. Thus, you often ignore the interdependence of seemingly different problems. Not to mention it sometimes brings more opportunities for growth and innovation when broadening or deepening the understanding of problems you intend to solve. It is important to discover the containing system has social, technological, ecological, economic and political elements and you must advance the development of all of these factors in order to solve problems creatively and systematically. If it’s truly incomplete, you can always continue the journey of problem-solving to make improvements.

“Completeness” in problem-solving is not necessarily "complete solution," but customer-tailored, best possible solutions: The digital era upon us is about people centricity based on empathetic understanding, choice-providing and innovation. With increasing pace of changes and continuous digital disruptions, the practices that are "best" today are almost always not "best" in the future since practices, as well as technologies and markets, are constantly morphing under pressure. If complete solutions do not always exist, the best possible solutions would be more people-centric. Everybody talks about customer experience these days, vendors are no exception, how to design, not necessary "complete solution," but customer-tailored, "grade" or "range" best possible solutions, each with different results, budgets and risk profile, help customers overcome real business obstacles or add value; that's the key to building up a successful business.

Mutual trust is built via two-way communication and professional interaction. The buyer's long-term goals are accurately represented internally at the seller. The seller's capabilities to fulfill said goals are also accurately stated. Other expectations are managed successfully. The appropriate resources can be quickly marshaled on both sides in the event that something occurs requiring remediation. The vendor can actually help customers surface and resolve their internal conflicts. Both Customers & vendors have to walk into any major transformation initiatives with their eyes wide open, fully expecting to apply changes as they move forward. A good vendor focuses on processes, and there's always an opportunity for improvement, not for perfection but to make continuous improvement.

Solution architecture should be used in developing structural business "solutions," not necessarily complete: Problem-solving is a multi-stepped process that includes both problem resolution and solution implementation in a structural way. There is a lack of structural processes suggested for defining and solving problems systematically. So many people do not know how to connect the dots cross disciplinarily, nor think inclusively, nor comprehend dynamics, induction or deduction, nor understand expensive variables, interfaces, and interactions. Solution architectures should be used in developing structural business "solutions," not necessarily complete, but structural to fix the problem without causing too many other issues.

The comprehensive understanding of a complex business problem requires both cross-domain knowledge and breakdown of the silo mentality, leverage different thought processes to define problems analytically or solve problems systematically. An effective solution architecture can help problem-solvers walk through the generalization-specialization scenario, challenge automatic assumptions that something needs fixing, slow down the mentality of “jumping-into-how,” combine or integrate different pieces of answers to ensure a cohesive solution to larger problems with less side effects. 

Problem-solving evolves both big picture and detail. More often than not, solutions to complex problems are not true-or-false, but better or worse. The intention to solve complex problems is not about finding the perfect solution but making progressive problem resolution, increasing the influence and being part of the solutions. So completeness is not a destiny, but a journey of pursuing the best possible solutions.

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Innateriskcultureissues

Organizations must have solid risk management disciplines, make objective assessments, develop a high-effective management framework, and make the smooth transition from risk mitigation to risk intelligence.

The ubiquity of information has provided both growth opportunities and increasing risks to organizations across industries. However, many companies are immature in the way they do their Strategic Risk assessment and management, enterprise risk management is blamed as a time wasting and unproductive exercise. 

Following are some of the important risk culture issues. It takes systematic understanding and planning upon enterprise strategic fit, consistency of direction from management, structural capability, risk intelligence to improve business effectiveness and maturity.

The management overly emphasizes on controlling, mitigation, rather than risk management and intelligence: Traditional approaches to managing risk tend to focus on monitoring leading financial indicators and keeping tabs on regulatory changes. That’s still an important exercise, but not sufficient to run a high performance organization facing “VUCA” new normal. To build a risk-aware culture and improve business risk management maturity, the leader with risk intelligence will integrate risk management into the enterprise’s core decision-making processes with the proactive risk management scenario and integrate GRC practices to improve business responsiveness and adaptability.

Often, risk and reward are proportional from innovation management perspective. The risk management needs to lift up from risk control to risk intelligence which can identify the potential business growth opportunities. The revenue leaders in cross-industrial sectors are the best practitioners for risk intelligence. They make a smooth shift from risk-avoidance to the risk management and risk intelligence mentality. They can't and won't be able to manage or predict every emerging event, but by mapping and measuring complex interactions in real-time can gain early warning, anticipatory awareness of possible/plausible negative impact.

Often a big risk is that the risk management system is detached from the real management of the business: As strategic risk management is a critical component of business strategy, a more mature organization will find it much easier to achieve the goal of implementing strategic risk management, whereas a less mature organization will obviously find it much harder. To improve risk management effectiveness across the organization, it’s important to embed risk identification and assessment in operational processes including project management, integrating the risk management system in the running of the operation, so that if the risk management system doesn't spot it, the business won't either.

People are the center of risk management. There are "human factors" such as irrational, cognitive, or behavioral aspects in risk management. If the management has put in place effective GRC processes for protecting business brand and reputation. It helps the management clarify what the brand stands for, how the company wants its stakeholders to see and perceive the brand name. The organization's brand equity is the key asset of concern when it comes to the question of reputational risk. When looking at the risk - control relationship, you need to remember that they are independent variables working together.

Silo-based risk management enlarges management gaps and causes long term concerns about business resilience: In business, every day is a risk, but when a company embarks on a growth strategy, the risk curve will always be greater than a “business as usual” approach. Critical uncertainties are the unknowns below the tip of the iceberg with utmost relevance for the organization or entity you're planning for. Risk management may require a lot more future vision as well as a strategic mindset, be cautious of the things that would prevent the execution of the strategy from achieving the stated aims or that would even make the strategy completely obsolete. It might be good to work with plans and assumptions and scenarios, as long as you keep in mind that these have been elaborated from past experiences and past knowledge. It’s important to integrate corporate risk management into strategy management, so conditions of known risk are amenable to constructing alternative scenarios and evaluating them; not only predict and prevent risks, but also identify opportunities for business growth and improve business maturity.

Integration of corporate risk management into organizational culture is another crucial aspect of running a risk intelligence organization. Meaningful enterprise risk management is as much about changing organizational culture as it is anything. All people must support it if they need to create risk management effectively in organizations, improve employees' awareness of short and long-term objectives and strategies; make clarity of individual accountability for business objectives and enhance employees' understanding of policies and risk. To develop an innovative organization, encourage calculated risk-taking, fail fast & forward, and learn from failures to innovate effectively.

With high velocity and hyper-connectivity, people and organizations are becoming more interdependent with each other. Organizations must have solid risk management disciplines, make objective assessments, develop a high-effective management framework, provide backup options, and make the smooth transition from risk mitigation to risk intelligence.

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Inclusiveleadership

Leadership is about vision and direction, alignment and integration to solve complex problems effectively.

Leadership is about vision and direction; digital leaders today can lead change and harness innovation by practicing open leadership styles and enhancing interdisciplinary management discipline. 

To make a smooth shift from silo-based traditional economy to hyper-connected knowledge-abundant creative economy, cookie-cutter leadership needs to be updated toward gap-minding, innovative or situational leadership. Great leaders should build their unique set of leadership competency to support the “circumstantiality” between leadership and achievement. Because today’s business workforce is hyper-diverse with multigenerational, multicultural, multi-divicing characteristics, what are emergent traits and how to shape the new breed of world class leaders and managers to harmonize humanity?

Adaptive leadership: Due to rapid changes and exponential growth of information, the command-and-control style of leadership is gradually out of steam; leadership in the coming decade will need to be more adaptive and distributed; being able to adjust thinking processes according to changes in the environment, or being learning agile to update knowledge and abstract it into insight and wisdom for improving decision effectiveness.

Adaptive leadership de-emphasizes hierarchy and accelerates strategic change. Adaptive leadership teams comprising a diverse range of individuals with the cognitive difference will be able to listen to diverse voices across the organizational hierarchy in which employees confront external realities directly and are likely to raise critical questions, draw on a wider set of experiences in order to close blind spots and improve collective leadership maturity.

Inclusive leadership: As we move forward and upward, we will understand that we are all leaders with different expertise in the different arena. Great leadership is a set of advanced mindset and exemplary behaviors. Leadership mindset should be open to change, deep to make profound influence; inclusive to embrace diverse viewpoints; empathetic to understanding others, and innovative to solve problems smoothly. Good leaders are good coaches who set guidance to instruct actions of teams; make influence on where to go based on a clear vision and how to get there via a good strategy.

Great leaders build a fearless and inclusive working environment to spur creativity; recognize the gifts that all people have and are willing to share the leadership role; support people and also stretch them to live to their full potential, both individually and as members of a high performing team. They practice open communication in developing trustful relationships, allowing the passions of people to do good and to move the right person at the right time, into the right place for solving the right problems timely.

Personalized leadership: Leadership is an influence based on leaders’ unique character, mindsets, strengths, and personalized styles. Many mediocre organizations wait until the people are put into "leadership" positions to be introduced to the elements of leadership. These organizations set themselves up for failure by following this mindset. Forward-looking organizations proactively cultivate authentic leaders who can amplify their influence through their personalized leadership styles and practices.

Human society is at a turning point that requires applying human science to using positivistic, scientific methods for studying human phenomena and building a harmonized society via the lens of personalization. Personalized leadership or self-leadership are great practices for leadership development. As per the circumstance point of view, there is global leadership context - how to lead in the broader global scope; there is situational leadership to deal with different circumstances, personalization needs to be the theme for leading a people-centric world.

With all those advancements academically or practically, we are in fact, stepping into the era of personalization with cross-disciplinary understanding. Leadership is about alignment and integration to solve complex problems effectively. The power of influence has many dimensions and depends on a number of factors. To improve leadership effectiveness, it’s about harmony; to achieve harmony, it’s all about balance. Leadership is a continuous journey with accumulated steps and a few transcendental movements to push the human world forward determinedly.

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Innersophistication

The emphasis of leadership sophistication is on trying to determine which competencies or capabilities should be used in which combinations, and with what level of weight for each, for every different situation, in order to improve leadership effectiveness. 

From one generation to the next, the substance of leadership does not change, it’s about the future, change, and influence. However, digital leadership trends will continue to emerge. 

Here is a set of featured blogs to dig into the “keywords” of the 21st century to brainstorm the future of digital leadership and business transformation.

     Sophistication

Innatesophistication We live in a complex world with a mixed bag of new and old; fresh knowledge and misinformation, truth and false, etc. To deal with complex problems and interact with hyperdiverse people in our modern society, being sophisticated implies being authentic, intelligent, articulate, decent, consistent, and profound, etc. Modern society is a dynamic continuum with collective human progress. A sophisticated leader or professional has a unique set of complex mindsets, recombined capabilities and skills to understand multifaceted situations and solve problems thoroughly.

Innersophisticationii With unprecedented digital convenience brought by emerging technology and abundant information, blurred geographical or functional/industrial borders, and fierce competitions, It is difficult to have a highly competitive organization without competitive professionals who demonstrate sophisticated talent that implies contextual intelligence, profundity, versatility, and consistency.

Innersophistication We live in a complex world full of order and chaos, truth and myth. Sophistication seems to have appeared rather suddenly within the history of human evolution. In fact, it’s part of our journey to climb the intellectual hierarchy. Being sophisticated is not exactly the same as being intelligent; it perhaps implies being natural, authentic, original, articulate, decent, or paradoxical.

From Survival Instincts to Thriving Sophistication! The mind is the software that promotes and regulates each function and each action of our body, from the reproduction and reconstruction of our cells to the food process and distribution, to our voluntary and involuntary movements, and to all our behaviors, etc. All of the mind’s requests are then processed, implemented, and interfaced by the brain in the different areas of the body. This extraordinarily sophisticated operation is silently going on 24/7, and most of us will never know much about it. However, the brain activities function for survival instincts are still primitive. What are the further aspects of human sophistication in regards to vision, communication and innovation for problem-solving or overcoming challenges?

Leadership Sophistication and Maturity We slowly, but steadily move to the era with an abundance of knowledge and rapid change, it has raised the bar of leadership significantly. Digital leadership is sophisticated because there are many variables in it, and there is a delicate mix of expertise, interpersonal skills, along with a lot of different attributes. Sophistication implies intelligence, uniqueness, unban fit, and complex problem-solving, and the following aspects.

The blog is a dynamic book flowing with your thoughts; growing through your dedication; sharing your knowledge; conveying your wisdom, and making an influence through touching the hearts and connecting minds across the globe. The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 7 million page views with about #8600 blog postings. Among 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking and innovating new ideas; it’s not just about WHAT to say, but about WHY to say, and HOW to say it. It reflects the color and shade of your thought patterns, and it indicates the peaks and curves of your thinking waves. Unlike pure entertainment, quality and professional content takes time for digesting, contemplation and engaging, and therefore, it takes time to attract the "hungry minds" and the "deep souls." It’s the journey to amplify diverse voices and deepen digital footprints, and it's the way to harness your innovative spirit.

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Innovativeinterface

Organizations should identify or cultivate great interface personas, empowering them to oversee complex issues that need to be dealt with thoughtfully.

In the digital era, we will be confronting a number of high-complex problems in the hyper-connected, complex world. The business solutions will require an integration of different sets of mindset, knowledge fluency, and professional expertise across multiple disciplines. Thus, the multitude of interface personas are in demand to bridge different gaps, close decision-making gaps, and improve problem-solving effectiveness.

Cognition interface: In face of “VUCA” normality, there are different angles to understand a problem and varying factors in making decisions. People have limitations in their thinking and reasoning. The truth is that each of us is a “complex blend of contrasts - positive and negative; intuitive and logical” with imperfect judgment. The cognitive gap is one of the serious problems for creating blind spots of both problem defining and problem-solving. If you don’t have a sound solution to each newly created problem, you’ll have very little chances to succeed in solving the main problem, Thus, insightful leaders and professionals who are fluent in critical thinking and multidimensional thought processes can play a cognitive interface role in sharing contextual understanding of handy issues or circumstances at the moment in order to bridge cognitive gaps, to get root cause of problems and solve them radically.

When you judge something, you form a critical opinion of it based on facts, discerned data, or preconceived notions. Cognitive understanding requires a person's ability to grasp or comprehend information and make logical reasoning. In the real world, people are different across every dimension with different cognitive skills, culture backgrounds, life experiences, and personalities, etc, so they filter information differently, perceive things differently, and they prefer to apply different philosophies, methodology, and practice to solve problems. Collectively, through an effective cognitive interface role, the heterogeneous team setting with cognitive differences can improve collective decision effectiveness by complementing each other’s mindset, competency and harnessing the power of teamwork, proactively search for fresh knowledge, deep insight, bridge cognitive differences, and possess.

Culture interface: Culture as a collective mindset and behavior shapes how we think about human society in which different groups, organizations, communities, societies develop their own set of subcultures based on certain beliefs or common senses. Every culture has quintessential value, and some defects as well. To improve culture empathy and keep advancing human society, a culture interface role is in demand to deepen understanding of culture via anthropological, sociological, language, historical, philosophical lens, reading thoughts behind the words; digging into the core culture value and belief, clarifying logic to unpuzzle culture-related issues.

Many companies across the vertical sectors are expanding at the global scope, they need to shift their reputation from local to global; adapting to a multicultural environment smoothly. In fact, adapting to different cultures is now emerging as a critical success factor for global professionals working in multinational enterprises. However, miscommunication or misinterpretation is a common pitfall which is often caused by misinformation, perception gaps, or simply lack of contextual understanding of people, things, or situations across cultural boundaries. Global leaders and professionals as culture interface demonstrate cultural empathy, not only seeing through the eyes of someone who is different, but also have to think through that person’s mind; culture intelligence: not only observe the differences of language, traditions, customs, on the surface; but also see through the value, common belief, implicit knowledge, wisdom underneath.

Interdisciplinary interface: Digital enterprises are inherently and intensely complicated. With a high velocity and frequent disruptions, changes or problems do not happen in isolation from each other in predictable ways, but intertwined across knowledge domains or functional geographical borders. The digital business today is not just working within the industry, but expanding into adjacent territories, and permeating cross industrial boundaries. Thus, the interdisciplinary interface roles have significant influence on bridging silos, integrating cross-disciplinary knowledge and expertise, articulating interdependence of issues through multidimensional lenses, for lubricating business relationships, harnessing cross-boundary collaboration and improving problem-solving maturity.

In practice, interdisciplinary interface leaders or professionals share in-depth understanding of common interested issues between diverse parties, recognize and diagnose the plethora of contextual factors inherent in the circumstances, then intentionally and intuitively help people adjust their mindset and behaviors in order to exert influence in that context, look at the wider aspects around problem space, pull people in the same directions based on such common understanding, in order to accelerate change and achieve high performance results.

The world becomes flattened as people all over the globe can share knowledge, co-create fresh ideas and co-solve problems collaboratively. Organizations should identify or cultivate great interface personas, empowering them to oversee complex issues that need to be dealt with thoughtfully; inviting them to the big table to co-develop strategy; encouraging them to keep sharpening their knowledge and expertise, with the goal to build competitive teams and make leap frog changes.

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Idea & Innovation

The digital CIOs have to wear different colors of hats and master multiple leadership personas and management roles effortlessly.

The book “12 CIO Personas: The Digital CIO’s Situational Leadership Practices” is the extensive brainstorming and logical content expansion of my book “CIO Master: Unleash the Digital Potential of IT,” to reimagine and reinvent CIO leadership via practicing multitudes of digital influence.

 The important thing is that CIOs as the top leadership role must have a strong mindset, a unique personality, and a clear idea of what needs to be done, yet creative enough to not hold the company back from growth. Regardless of which personality they have, digital CIOs need to be both transformational and situational, innovative and tactical, business savvy and technology insightful, communication-effective and operation-efficient.

CIOs as “Chief Idea Officer”

CIO as ‘Chief Idea Officer’: Three Aspects of Idea Management Innovation is the light every forward-looking organization is pursuing. However, innovation should no longer be treated as serendipity; it can be managed systematically and scientifically. From strategic planning to resource allocation and funding, to program management, to rewards and recognition, the comprehensive innovation management with platform support, and on-site program management can help an organization build a strong innovation program from the ground-up.

Innovative Idea Management Framework The purpose of Idea/Innovation Management is to prepare everything to maximize the transformation of an idea to achieve its business value. The science of idea management is about setting principles and building a practical framework with fine-tuned processes and structures to walk through a generation-assessment-implementation-performance-risk management scenario.

Innoativeportfoliomanagement Contemporary organizations are organic systems which keep evolving. Every business should spend sufficient time on developing their own unique set of strengths and capabilities. The objective of building a health portfolio with potentiality theme is to provide visibility of the overall portfolio that is to explore a new path for the business growth, support the company's strategic objectives and assess opportunities to realign resources and investments as appropriate.

“I” Factors in Digital Innovation Digital era is the age of innovation. And digital innovation has the broader scope and three phases: Discovery of a problem or new idea, designing a prototype solution and the ultimate delivery of a commercially astute outcome. Innovation is not serendipity, but a systematic process to transform novel ideas and achieve their business values. At the enterprise scope, innovation management should focus on building a healthy innovation portfolio to establish business competency. Here are three “I” factors in digital innovation.

Innovationprocess Innovation is not serendipity, in a basic view, innovation is a process and every process needs to be managed. Incremental or radical types of innovation should be managed via tailored management processes.

Modern organizations have their own sophistication with silo functions, the sea of information, and the pool of talent. The CIO is an inherently cross-functional role, to bridge the business and IT; the data and insight, the business’s today and tomorrow. The digital CIOs have to wear different personas and master multiple leadership and management roles effortlessly. They need to lead at the strategic level for conducting a complex digital orchestra; they should be handy managers to plumbing information and keep it flow smoothly; they also have to be like diligent gardeners, to build a unique IT landscape via tuning technology, removing waste, nurturing culture, and empowering people.

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Innerframework

Frameworks add value as they are implementations of the patterns to avoid having to reinvent the wheel.

Organizations and the world become more complex than ever, in order to make effective decisions and solve problems in a structural way, Framework as a coherent set of ideas, principles, agreements, checklists, standards, processes, tools and building blocks, do & don't practices and practices provides the outline for something intended to be fully developed or explored, to address diverse business perspectives and practicalities, define or develop a set of cohesive business competencies.

The framework is the “expression of theory”: Theories are the collective insight based on accumulated knowledge or refined “lessons learned.” via experimenting or practicing. The theory of phenomena should always be open to interpretation and understanding of the theory should rightly be questioned, when it fails to account for what actually happens. A solid framework as the “expression of theory” broadens our perspective with structural components to either make effective decisions or solve problems systematically; helps the practice deliver consistent results and achieve repeatability of the outcome.

If the theory is a system of ideas explaining something, based upon general principles independent of the facts, one of the challenges is to establish a practical framework with updated vocabulary or terminology that can be used across the organization to express this theory, instruct actions, and achieve repetitive results. When looking for results, it is not a question of knowing what the best answer is based on theory, but what actions will lead to desired outcomes that matter. To keep the theory relevant, the framework of articulating the "theory" of phenomenon should always be open to interpretation, understanding of the theory should rightly be questioned, when it fails to account for what actually happens. Just like some theories could be outdated at a certain point, the framework should also be updated or enhanced when the circumstances change. Either for driving innovation or other productive activities, the right dose of theories needs to mix with the right sets of best and next practices, to continue challenging existing knowledge, develop fresh insight and lead evolutionary changes.

The framework is the “integrator of design”: The organization as systems don’t exist independently and that there are interactions between systems such as system overlaps and real in-and output dependencies. A framework is the structure to gain a big picture view; integrate module design, clarify organizational strategy, do a variety of analysis to support the strategic goals of the organization. To run a high mature organization, it’s important to integrate the organizational design into the business process and re-engineering management by applying business architecture as a practical framework, enforcing mutual respects between organizational design and business process management can lead to effective business transformation.

From software or other modern product design perspectives, there are few cases in a plug and play fashion model but between buy and build, there is a middleware solution option, which is “assemble,” taking Lego approach-integrate multiple and different specialized commercial software components into customer-tailored solutions with speed. If the enterprise software architecture as a framework is sound, then it can help to integrate software design and improve products/services quality and efficiency. There are connections between alignment, architectural framework, and integration. Add value for implementations of the patterns to avoid having to reinvent the wheel, and optimize the resource allocation and configuration of the value-creating business processes and capabilities.

The framework is the “leverage of paradox-pairs”: To deal with hyper-connected and interdependent business new normal, a well-developed framework laser focuses on the strategic goals, facilitates cross-functional communication, and maintains the digital balance of quite a few paradox-pairs for driving change in a structural way; such as solid vs. flow, induction & deduction, pushing and pulling; opportunity vs. risk; simplicity vs. complexity, standardization vs. personalization; candor and diplomacy, management vs. governance; centralized vs. decentralized; transaction vs. transformation, etc.

The paradox is that all creative activities are subversive in questioning the status quo. To deal with complex problems effectively, a framework approach helps to improve knowledge fluency, enhance interdisciplinary understanding, and leverage paraconsistent logic to deal with tough situations, strike the right balance of short term issues-fixing and long term problem-solving. It creates a scalable means for communicating and collaborating throughout the enterprise, strengthens collective problem-solving efforts, and enforces governance disciplines.

Frameworks add value as they are implementations of the patterns to avoid having to reinvent the wheel. Organizations must begin thinking about ways with iterative planning-implementing continuum and leverage the framework approach to scale up and broaden their ecosystems and revenue streams to become more responsive and flexible, optimize business management and enhance governance practices.

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