Innovateviacollaboration

It’s important to cultivate the zest for generating new ideas or solving complex problems by breaking down silos, seeking out help and harnessing mass collaboration.

Human progress is achieved through three stages- dependent, independent, and interdependent. Thanks to emerging technologies and abundant information flow, the functional, geographical, or industrial borders are blurred, people are encouraged to break down silos, seek out help, brainstorm fresh ideas, and co-solve existing or emerging business problems collaboratively..

 Collaboration, teamwork, and unity bring complementary strength and amplify collective potential.

Strategic collaboration: Collaboration is about well aligning people, process and technology and managing them holistically to achieve certain values. In fact, cross-functional collaboration is a prerequisite to implement a corporate strategy. The management needs to have a collaborative spirit to initiate digital dialogues, brainstorm ideas, turn around the tough situations, and skillfully assign their talent, resources and time carefully to solve problems that really matter. Many companies count on their partners to build business capabilities. They can manage a mixed bag of diversified vendors and multifaceted partnerships via interrelations, interactions, or inter-relational interactions to accelerate products/service delivery cycles.

In reality, silos are a typical pattern used in complex business systems in an attempt to keep complexity under some semblance of control. One of the primary impediments to collaboration is a dissonance between upper and middle management and a similar dissonance between middle management and frontlines. If shortage of collaboration is a root cause for many problems at a strategic level, open-minded leaders and change agents are in strong demand to enhance cross-silo or cross-divisional communication, as collaboration is crucial to build dynamic capabilities for successful strategy management.

Cross-disciplinary collaboration: Many business problems are complex, trying to fix the wrong cause of a problem will waste time and resources, increase anxiety, and reward mediocrity, even creating more problems later on. If people all stayed in a box and didn't believe things exist outside of their box, there's no room to broaden our thoughts, expand knowledge, and they would have blind spots when making decisions for effective problem-solving. Business leaders and professionals who demonstrate multidimensional thinking and interdisciplinary knowledge, are able to understand the interdependence of issues, recognize and diagnose the plethora of contextual factors inherent in the circumstances, then intentionally and intuitively adjust their mindset and behaviors in order to exert influence in that context.

Collaboratively, the team with complementary mindset and skill set can sustain diversified viewpoints into holistic perspectives without enlarging cognitive gaps and causing too many side effects. Cross-disciplinary collaboration and integral methodology enable business leaders and professionals to look at the wider aspects around problem space, and then understand the effect of imposing boundaries within that space, in order to frame the right problem and solve it in a structural way. If the collaboration is not bearing fruit, then, by all means, upset the apple cart and start anew. It’s important to optimize collaboration complexity and make people more productive and business agiler to adapt to changes.

Global collaboration: Nowadays, we live in a hyperconnected global society, silos cause slowness and small-thinking. Organization is about collaboration, which needs to focus on harnessing cross-boundary collaboration through iterative communications, robust processes, and efficient technological tools. In reality, there are many international organizations, but very few integral global companies. There is a disconnect between different generations of employees, or cross-cultural misunderstanding due to the rapid change in technology and current worldwide culture that has taken place. Collaboration in the global organization requires a much higher degree of innovative thinking and cross disciplinary knowledge expertise.

The key is to stay connected and learn with each other between different generations, diverse cultures, varying vertical industries, facilitate cross-boundary communication and collaboration, inspire positive substance and style. Insightful global leaders are able to gain world-class insight which is based on the updated global view that looks at problems or issues in such a way that a solution emerges through an interdisciplinary and multicultural approach collaboratively. As a matter of fact, many companies that get stuck at the lower level of maturity have never been better positioned to break out of a static industry/geographical box and engage in mass collaborations to spark innovation and make leapfrog changes.

Collaboration does create a sense of belonging. It’s important to cultivate the zest for generating new ideas or solving complex problems by breaking down silos, seeking out help and harnessing mass collaboration. The real value of collaboration is to bring a diverse population together and a collective pool of all the expertise for unlocking collective performance and making societal progress.

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Initiateretrospectiveapproach

For every individual or an organization, a back view mirror is very important to learn from errors, mistakes, or shortcomings; and a “backward” approach from the future state is a logical approach to lead change and innovation.

We are living in a complex world where disruptions and conflicts are continuously happening. Looking back can teach you invaluable lessons and become well-prepared for the journey ahead. We cannot predict anything beforehand but can imagine with many experiences involved in the present or in the past. 

As the saying’s going: History repeats itself. Some things from the past are circular and keep coming back in. How should individual organizations look into the past or work backwards accordingly, in order to move forward confidently?

Change review, reflection, and recognition in business transformation efforts: Change is intense nowadays, lack of breathing space between change initiatives is often an issue. In practice, often when a change initiative is completed, people walk away without enough self-reflection and thoughtful checking to see if it adds value or evaluate if additional work is required. Without taking a breath to look back and learning critical lessons, people would repeat the mistakes they made before, get exhausted if they keep busy on taking more change initiatives with the same level of cognitive ability and behavior patterns. Either at individual or business level, you need both thinking modes and need to build in time for reflection which enables you to be conscious of your circumstances, and allows you to perform in a strategic and informed manner for driving change, especially transformative ones for achieving the better than expected results.

Changeability is a unique competency, organizational change management should be an adequate, logical, and systematic effort to any environmental shift. It must be defined in its base elements such as process, structure, culture, and associated benefits to be achieved. Work on an opportunity and then figure out what is the capability needed, what is the desired level of process, structure, and culture maturity. During such a process, they come with principles, best practices; repository establishment, standards formulation, governance establishment, think backward from there to what the next simpler step is; and then back to what are the next simpler components, back to what they have at hand. It takes truly strategic thinking and foresight to shape transformative changes, learn from its historical roots, keep the light on, and make a long term plan for the future.

Applying retrosynthesis to innovative problem-solving: Many of today’s problems are complex and interdependent; some of them are actually caused by previous solutions to other historical problems; others are symptoms of uncovered issues or concerns. Thus, learning from the past and digging through the historical root of problems are critical steps in shaping structural solutions. It means working through problems forward and backward iteratively to make sure there are no errors or gaps, to analyze the root conditions & causes that apply, to investigate the various solution options, to decide, to act, and then to cycle around. Ultimately, problem-solving capabilities evolve and move from the fundamental level to differentiated levels between categories based on the technology breakthrough, business driver, or societal evolution.

Technically, during the retrospective problem-solving scenario, the teams reflect on what happened in the iteration, identify gaps and take actions to fill them for moving forward. It is the process started at the “ideal state” - the unified perspective of “the problem gets solved thoroughly” based on clarified vision and diverse viewpoints. Then, take a logical scenario and scientific methodologies; whenever people start applying the scientific method of observing, creating hypotheses and taking retrosynthesis procedures to approve or disprove those hypotheses, eliminating outdated knowledge, practices, and driving desired results.

Benchmarking can provide a backwards-looking perspective: Benchmarking is the process of comparing one's business processes and performance metrics to industry bests or best practices from other companies. The benchmarking data, necessarily, refers to how both the peer group and your own organization has performed in the past. That often varies wildly from how the peer group is performing now, and from what your own organization wants or needs to do next. It provides a backwards-looking perspective upon whether the metrics can reveal anything meaningful for the identified purpose.

Benchmarking provides people across the organization with a common business language regarding processes, metrics, key issues, and outcomes. Get on the same page of measurable things. It’s an effective tool to gauge where the organization leads or lags; easily identify and prioritize business opportunities and assess risks systematically. It is far more important to understand your own current state & strategic goals, to gather rapid feedback regarding current performance and progress made toward those goals Business leaders with a benchmarking mindset can better define the right strategy for their organization by understanding their business’s capabilities objectively as well as gaining enough knowledge about their competitors and marketing conditions.

Historical lessons are important, as the old saying puts: “those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it." For every individual or an organization, a back view mirror is very important to learn from errors, mistakes, or shortcomings; and a “backward” approach from the future state is a logical approach to lead change. The past holds comforting thoughts in times of great stress or pain; it has value. However, the future brings hope and true meaning. Keep your focus in the direction of your destination and only glance at the past necessarily to stay aware of where you have been. The goal is to learn from the past, think ahead, to prepare and face the challenges and uncertainty on the way to the future.

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Initiatecultureassessment

Culture assessment is multifaceted, and culture change is a long journey.

An organization with an excellent culture is arguably capable of giving great results in their competencies. The culture of an organization is an indicator of the competency parameters at their best. 

Culture is a soft success factor, difficult to evaluate because the assessment of culture is not one dimension, finance-driven, but a multi-dimensional evaluation. Though it’s hard to measure culture directly, there are logical steps in evaluating its impact indirectly.

The value statement: Purpose, values and principles are part of corporate ideology/philosophy that shapes a unique culture and a corporate brand. Corporate value is a multi-dimensional concept; there are both "strategic" or "tactical" values, including employee value, customer value, supplier value, channel partner value, alliance partner value, managerial value, brand value, and societal value, etc. Culture is an amalgamation of people, their core values, socioeconomic realities, lifestyles, and education. Understanding value offers more added values because it helps you create a strong corporate brand.

Values aren't behaviors. Behaviors are reflections of what they truly value in any given situation in relation to what they say they value. By clarifying the value statement of the organization, business leaders can set the cultural tone which is manifested in the way people conduct meetings in the boardroom, the way people treat their employees, the solutions they offer to customers or the overall corporate brand. In fact, the corporate values management requires a close examination of all of the organization's vision, mission, purposes, strategy, culture, and leadership. While the business culture management needs to enhance clearly defined value proposition and enable strategy management to achieve business outcome.

Feedback management: Feedback is information gained from experience that can improve future performance. With a healthy feedback management cycle, you can build a culture of improvement by learning from constructive feedback and making reasonable adjustments on the way. Culture is a collective mindset, attitude and behaviors. The content of the feedback is oriented towards behavior, to make feedback more invaluable, try to understand the psychology behind those behaviors; uncover the attitude under the actions.

Negative feedback based on negative mentality or intention confuses people and makes a bad influence on culture because it drains energy or causes unnecessary pain. Also, feedback needs to be continuous, as close to real-time as possible, in control of the recipient and in a way the recipient can understand. Feedback does not focus on the past - it tells you what is happening so that you can adapt promptly. So collectively, strong feedback management builds a solid foundation to shape a culture of change and innovation.

Process of transparency: Transparency is important at many levels, to keep communication open, information fluid, process optimized, and structure loose, etc, for harnessing a high performance culture. Generally speaking, transparency enhances trust in the organization. You could supervise with control of every move. But to build trust, it is really important for teams to keep things transparent - be aware of how the whole process is going on, and what results have already been achieved.

Without transparency, everyone seems to walk in the dark, take guesswork, and cause conflicts. The effective way to transparency is through communicating, communicating and communicating. Transparency can help leaders tell a story of the journey from current state to future state, of improvements, of accomplishments, of enablement with business strategies, etc. It's definitely a great core competency to leverage, and an important factor to assess corporate culture.

Degrees of empowerment: In a traditional company with a command and control style of management and bureaucratic culture, the degree of empowerment is low, employees are reluctantly functioning to get their work done without demonstrating an ownership mentality. To build a culture of creativity, the management needs to empower their people, trust them to follow their heart and mind to achieve more. Trust is a key component of empowerment. In the team setting, to empower is to give the team a means to shine. It is not about individuals, but how well the team works together. Give workgroups the authority to make changes to their work process and accept responsibility for decisions related to their actions.

The employee satisfaction is still low in the majority of organizations today. To achieve high performance and unleash talent potential, it is critical to empower talented employees to learn, grow, discover “who they are,” and become “who they want to be.” The organizations with the culture of empowerment will reap the benefits of knowledge workers who have the abundance of creativity and the amplified human capabilities. Empowerment implies, if not required, responsibility and accountability. We are in the transition from knowledge economy to creative economy, it is important that everyone now has expectations in a new way of working. It's also critical that those leading the transition make it clear that with empowerment comes responsibility, innovation, productivity, and more fun.

Employee engagement: Overall speaking, employee engagement is still very low in many organizations, making business performance suffer. If empowerment is the top-down effort to refresh organizational culture; then the bottom-up engagement of personnel helps to build up an open working environment in which knowledge professionals feel comfortable to express their opinions, share thoughts, and discover alternative ways to do things. It’s about employees willing to give discretionary effort, want to stay, and are always looking for ways to improve individual and team performance.

A culture of engagement can be developed through management engaging in developing their employees interactively. It is all about creating a strong relationship, understanding, reflecting, and driving performance. It is through proper engagement that you can build trust, to help drive performance and continuous improvement. Of course, the employee has to do his or her part of having the right attitude, skills, and willingness to participate in the development process, develop their natural talent and unique competency to unlock their performance for today and tomorrow.

Culture assessment is multifaceted, and culture change is a long journey. Changing the culture starts at the mindset level, as you can’t impose the desired culture to your organizations or the societies, surely you can apply a clear logic to diagnose and fix culture related problems. A comprehensive cultural assessment enables the manager to diagnose the true cultural concerns as well as what could be the prescriptive recipe to fix it, or redesign a culture model for improving the organizational maturity.

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Uncoverfutureviaprediction

Isn’t a tough journey to celebrate 8300 blog postings - to pursue the digital way of brainstorming, innovating and story-telling.

The effects of an increasingly digitized world are now reaching into every corner of businesses and every aspect of organizations. Digital is the age of creativity and innovation, creativity is the most desired trait for digital leaders and professionals today, and innovation is the light every organization is pursuing. Which themes shall you set to advocate digital transformation? How to lead toward the digital future effortlessly? It’s the time to post #8300 blog postings to celebrate holidays.

 

Uncover Future via Prediction 

Initiatingchangewithforecast The speed of change is increasing, uncertainties and complexity are a common occurrence in any walk of our progress. The goal of business forecasting is about predicting what will happen and how to act on it by making effective decisions and solving complex problems. Either orienting change, navigating through strategy management, or developing competitive workforce, you may not be able to foresee specific instances of futures, but you can imagine general classes and positions to take advantage of shaping or mitigating what is then occurring, as well as how to influence and prepare for overcoming the learning curves and moving things forward promptly.

Uncoverfutureviaprediction Nowadays the perspective of rapid change and abundant knowledge unfolds into a wider multi-dimensionally systemic business continuum. The goal of the business forecast is about predicting what will happen and taking steps further, what shall you do upon it. To predict and respond to the emergent business properties and make information more “visible” for shareholders decisions, promotions, and even chart of accounts will create a richer value return from the enterprise data asset and improve the overall business decision effectiveness.

Innovativeplanning Given the "VUCA" normality of the business world and given the complexity of today’s business problems, management is both science and art. The plan is nothing but planning is everything for adapting to changes. To avoid planning fallacy, a diverse and dynamic perspective is crucial for thoughtful planning because no individual has all the necessary expertise and each person has some unconscious bias. Forward-thinking companies need to keep planning and improving as the planning process is a continuous cycle and a part of the management process itself.

Unfold Future Via Forecast Logic Rapid change and frequent disruptions are the new normal; uncertainties are a common occurrence in any walk of our progress, be it social, professional, or personal life. We cannot predict anything beforehand but can imagine with many experiences involved in the present or in the past. Forethoughtful business leaders and professionals develop and demonstrate strong forecast logic via information based insight and interdisciplinary knowledge, envision the trends and forecast the upcoming change with a certain degree of precision.

Unfoldingdigitalorganization The organization as a whole is more about people, process and technology integrated into a set of business capabilities for achieving business results at both strategic and operational level either consciously or subconsciously. With high velocity and unprecedented uncertainty, the future of the workplace will be shaped by changes that take place in the way people relate to themselves and to the experience of their environment and others around them.

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 5 million page views with about #8300th 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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Innovativelogic

Logic is the deep structure in language; hidden clue of creativity and superglue of scientific reasoning and philosophical wisdom.

Complexity, ambiguity, uncertainty are the reality today; it’s important to deal with the nonlinear, hyperconnected situations in today's digital dynamic. The most important capability of the cognitive mind with coherent logic is the willingness and ability to seek out knowledge, gain an in-depth understanding of people or things, identify problem areas, dig into root causes, make effective decisions and come up with novel solutions for moving forward.

Creative logic: Creativity is the high level mental capacity for recognition of intelligence, twisting and reconnecting dots to turn the spark into an expressible idea. Creative expansion cannot happen without imagination, passion, participation and cross disciplinary knowledge. Being creative does not necessarily mean you are completely spontaneous or lack logic. In fact, creative logic is the glue to bind up multiple pieces of innovative ideas, it could be either organic or integral; informative or intuitive. And often, creative outcomes come from recombining ideas in different ways to create the fresh ideas or new concepts cross-interdisciplinarily.

Creativity and logic actually are the “hybrid truth.” From a creative lens, logic is neither the same as conventional wisdom nor linear understanding or arithmetic rules only. Rather, it’s the hidden clue that enables people to see underneath the surface, expand their perspectives to shape a unique vision, interweave their emotional wholeness to generate new experience and come up with novel ideas. Thus, creativity is infused with an inner cohesion, mental agility, perceptual dexterity, and clicks at the intersection of consciousness and subconsciousness.

System logic: People, organizations, societies are systems. Every system has this side, that side, and the interrelationships of both sides. Complex problems are seen and experienced differently by different people. System logic is the coherent construction of a selection of aspects of issues; it provides a perspective that characterizes, analyzes, synthesizes, and then, recognizes both patterns and anomalies of a contextualized system. When investigating and handling complex problems, system logic helps people see the interconnected pieces, the interdependent relationships, the emerging properties, including interfaces and interactions associated with them.

System logic is inclusive, providing insight into interdependent components, emergent properties, and gains an accurate holistic understanding of the overall situation. It helps to address all elements of the entity and its environment in which the problems are generated and provides a structural framework for digging into the root causes. If using system logic to rationalize cause and effect, distinguish between symptom and cause when evaluating activities within a system, there are multitudes of causes and multitudes of effects which only become apparent as the observer changes how they describe the system (organizations, structures, elements, environments, etc). The goal is to figure out “why” and “what” about the problem before jumping to the “how,” with the ultimate goal for effective problem-solving.

Paradoxical logic: Paradox is the two sides of the coin which can exist side by side. Paradoxical logic enables people to balance out the biases, embrace complementary viewpoints, understand the situation profoundly in order to make effective decisions or craft better strategies. Paradoxical logic glues up a holistic point of view. In terms of “viewpoint,” one does often need to integrate different perspectives, even if they are opposite; and continue searching for new perspectives to uncover the myth behind the truth.

Without broad knowledge, profound insight, and ultimate wisdom, you can not understand both sides of the coin cohesively or discern multifaceted truth confidently. Professionals with high paradoxical intelligence are insightful and objective, they can see things from different angles; penetrate, perceive, and ponder, seamlessly integrate analysis with synthesis, in order to highlight the point and catch the wholeness.

Coherence is simply about logic and consistency. In today’s digital world, inference and logic are often nonlinear and multidimensional, enabling people to uncover patterns and understand the interconnectivity of complex issues holistically. Logic is the structure in language; hidden clue of creativity and superglue of scientific reasoning and philosophical wisdom.

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innateemphasisofarchitecture

 The enterprise is a shared-space that encompasses the organization and all of the other entities with which it interacts or which have a stake in the organizational overall context.

An architecture contains the organizational context and is strategic in that it gives direction to the business design and transformation, looks for leverage within the ecosystems, industries, and domain knowledge that defines the business interactions and interrelationships, reference and intelligence, etc.

 To brainstorm how the future architectures support the business strategy, and improve organizational maturity, the emphasis is on abstract views, hot issues and critical success factors.

 
Abstract enterprise views: Architecture contains business context, it is a practical organizational planning tool, to define a very flexible business blueprint, not only for knowledge collection, but also for strategic planning. It usually covers all areas of the business, with the abstract components including capabilities, functions, roles, events, rules, data, etc. There are different views of business evolution to reach the next level of organizational maturity. The most commonly useful view includes influencers, drivers, business models, and initiatives for change, etc.

One of the problems with enterprise views today is that they are not fully integrated and completely coherent. Abstraction enables agreement at the strategic level as it allows business executives to get the concise view of their organizational strategy and structure, business logic and capability; enables them to understand when to look further; when to look closer; when to step in and when to stay out, unify multidimensional viewpoint and improve planning flexibility.

Critical success factors: Architecture can be used as a framework to explore management critical success factors for strategy execution, handle complexity, set priority and optimize underlying organizational functions and structure. It brings together purpose, usability, aesthetics, and more to create an environment for suiting business purposes. By leveraging architecture as a critical success factor explorer, business leaders or professionals can frame bigger thinking boxes and gain an in-depth understanding of organizational maturity.

In specific, there are macro environmental critical success factors which are technological, political, and economic related; there are also temporal critical success factors such as people, process, culture, technology, etc, An architecture is an effective tool to knit them together into tailored business solutions for implementing the strategy, truly make transformative change happen and sustain its impact. To enhance critical success factors, organizations need to keep re-defining, realigning, reinterpreting, and reinventing the enterprise components and their relationships, and apply interdisciplinary management methodologies and practices to drive transformative changes.

Hot issues: Communication is the coordination mechanism that makes organizations possible and keeps them real. Communication clarity directly impacts on the business effectiveness and organizational maturity. Architect plays a critical role in paying great attention to communication patterns in the organization, facilitating continuous dialogues on how people-centric organizations of the future ought to be designed openly and contrived in the face of upcoming challenges and drive collective progress effortlessly.

To harness cross-functional communication, architects need to be knowledgeable about the theories, models, and techniques from organizational communication studies, and facilitate important conversations and business dialogues for leading transformational changes. Dialogue is a means of coordination based on expertise and responsibility. It is relevant when people can understand what is communicated and are able to translate it into action or expertise. Effective architecture enables varying stakeholders to stay at the same page and use a formal and agreed communication plan for supporting business transformation.

The enterprise is a shared-space that encompasses the organization and all of the other entities with which it interacts or which have a stake in the organizational overall context. An architecture uncovers business patterns and visualizes organizational relationships and interconnectivities. The digital enterprise keeps evolving, like a switch that connects into the expanded business ecosystem. if the organization can actively influence its environment, it means that it can actively promote its environment, contain dynamics/realities and attenuate others. Consequently, an organization can try to make its environment friendlier in order to meet the strategies that it sees fit.

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Innovateviasettingrightprinciples

Purpose keeps people to be conscious of what they are doing; principles guide them in the right direction.

Principles are statements of values that a group of people agree to follow for achieving high performance. They are like the compass to guide through the organization for moving in the right direction. If the organization or society lacks a set of cohesive principles to guide through, people are perhaps running in the dark, making decisions blindly, walking around the problems helplessly, causing confusion and conflicts all the time. 

Good principles or policies should be communicated frequently, and followed uncompromisingly, to ensure the right things are easy to do, great talent is appreciated, innovation is encouraged and collective potential can be unlocked effortlessly.

 

Learn constantly so we continually improve: With fast pace of changes and overwhelming growth of information, Continuous learning and training become highly important to discover talent, develop new skills and build professional competency. Business professionals are humble to know that what they know, compared to what they do not know, is just the tip of the iceberg. They also become aware when some of the long-acquired knowledge is no longer applicable in certain situations. Thus, they need to become learning-intelligent - learn and relearn all the time and then apply those lessons to succeed in new situations.

Learning is a constant process. Organizations need to raise different "learning" issues, and nurture a culture of learning. Business professionals today need to become self-driven, must have the attitude to keep learning, learn fast and smart, show the discernment to differentiate invaluable knowledge from mass of information; and capture fresh insight from abundant knowledge; learn the lessons from the past and use it to guide actions in the future. In fact, we need to learn continuously in order to adapt to constant change

Put the right people in the right position to solve the right problems: The world becomes over-complex and interdependent, many of today’s problems are also becoming more complex and cross-disciplinary. Thus, it’s imperative to put the right people in the right positions, empower them to take initiatives with good intention; encourage them to do things in different ways, and equip them with the right tools to get the work done efficiently. Evaluate the right people with the right mindsets, skills, capabilities, as well as their unique set of competencies. Investigate what’s their innate strength, passion; define tasks they want to do and do better than others.

It’s also crucial to make an objective assessment of evaluators on whether they have cognitive intelligence, sufficient knowledge and professional quality to understand people as well as the problems that need to be solved .Great evaluators have appreciative eyes to recognize talent and character, and unique insight to have the right people solving the right set of problems without causing more issues later on. Find the right people through what they think and how they act. The emphasis is on trying to determine which professional competencies or capabilities should be used in which combination, and with what level of weight for each, for every different situation to get the things done effectively.

For effective decision making, think of consequence, not convenience: In today's “VUCA” business environment, decision-making is difficult due to varying reasons such as uncertainty and ambiguity of business circumstances, both cognitive intelligence and emotional excellence are important for business leaders and professionals to make sound judgment and effective decisions. Think of consequences, not convenience. Focus on dealing with the most critical issues in a logical way.

To overcome the subjectivity of personal perception, it’s important to think critically and profoundly, really dig beneath the superficial layer, make scientific evaluation and comparison, optimize a sound process, leverage the right set of information, weigh options appropriately and actually make an effective decision. The more important the decision, the more you need to have all quality data, dispassionately examine alternatives, perform all the preparation, with the increase of confidence of success.

Being innovative is more important than any specific innovation: Being innovative is a state of mind. It is about thinking differently, acting differently, delivering differently, adding value differently to solve problems creatively. Indeed, being innovative is all about how to disrupt the outdated thinking and the old way to do things. However, in many traditional organizations, innovation is just a buzzword, everyone talks about it, but very few people live on it. It is important to build a creative environment for encouraging creativity and developing the intrinsic innovation capacity of people, teams, and organization.

Being innovative is a growth mindset and a proactive attitude, with the unique traits such as interdisciplinary skills and knowledge, plasticity, openness to experience, tolerance of ambiguity, tendency to constantly question the status quo, capacity to adapt, emotional intelligence and risk-taking attitude. You cannot wait for something to happen, keep curious, always think profoundly, learn new things, and develop innovative capabilities.

Collaboration is at its essence, the intellectual harmony between humans: Silos are inevitable in every structured organization. Collaboration happens in the space between people in relationships receptively and thoughtfully, interacting and caring for one another’s needs, or co-solving tough problems smoothly. Cross-boundary communication and collaboration via integrative diversity can overcome silos, break down territories between functions, organization, industries, and geographical locations, and amplify collective effort to achieve high performance results.

For teams to operate effectively in the innovation space, a high performance team with inclusive and progressive traits is composed of complementary mindsets and skill sets, embraces diverse viewpoints and maximizes the collective potential. Collectively, they are able to develop core teaming skills to communicate and collaborate, build upon trustful relationships, to enhance mutuality or attunement with one another.

Purpose keeps people to be conscious of what they are doing; principles guide them in the right direction. To really add value, principles need to be grounded in the context of the organization expressing them; clearly understood, articulated, and commonly shared, they are the genetic code of any healthy organization, and compass to navigate business toward the destination steadfastly.

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Unpuzzlingprofessionalism

Heralding a dynamic organization needs to leverage the holistic perspective to emphasize communication, participation, relationships, collaboration for unlocking business performance and potential continually.

The purpose of “Digital Fit: Manifest Future of Business with Multidimensional Fit“ is to share insight about multidimensional enterprise fit from digital characteristics, organizational structure, change, knowledge, and talent perspectives; evoke critical and paradoxical thinking about digital “fit vs. misfit,” spark healthy debates on how to define and develop true digital fit, and build a fitting working environment to inspire creativity and accelerate digital transformation.

 

            

Unpuzzle Professionalism

Innovateviaupwardcareercycle It is a complex world out there with so many variables that determine performance and potentiality, individually or collectively including inter-dependencies within teams/organizations. For the majority of employees, their "purpose" is to feel accomplished as they are doing meaningful work. How to lift an upward career cycle by using your talent and putting the right effort on unleashing your full potential, to not only make yourself feel good but also create value to the organizations, nations and human societies?

unpuzzleprofessionalism Being a professional is inherently and inextricably linked with high levels of “professionalism”; not only having the skill sets to solve a certain set of problems, but also presenting high-quality professionalism which indicates great attitude and professional discipline to make high performance and keep unlocking their potential.

Innatepotetential Human potential is both myth and truth. On one side, the condition of being human is the endless search for the conditions that allow the human to maximize human potential. On the other side, not only there's known upon the unknown, also unknown upon the unknown. There are physical potential, intellectual potential, and spiritual potential. The "view of the talent potential landscape” has many dimensions intellectually, psychologically, philosophically, and sociologically.

Innovating Future via Alignment The black and white boundaries continue to diminish due to the occurrence of increased economic integration among industries, nations, and people movement across cultures. Heralding a dynamic organization needs to leverage the holistic perspective to emphasize communication, participation, relationships, collaboration for unlocking business performance and potential continually.

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.

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 5 million page views with about #8300+ blog posting in 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. blog posting. The content richness is not for its own sake, but to convey the vision and share the wisdom, to inspire critical thinking and spur healthy debates. 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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Innovationingredients

You can’t imagine a successful innovation process without its continuous improvement.

The digital era upon us is about innovation with accelerated speed. Without innovation, companies will get stale and become irrelevant due to hypercompetition and frequent disruptions.

 Culture of innovation, like a blender, can mix three important ingredients-focus, passion, and teamwork in a high performance team, put the right innovation elements to nurture a creative environment, incorporating multiple and diverse components such as value, trust, communication, collaboration, simplicity, adaptability, and continuous improvement, etc, to build a highly innovative organization.

Passion: Due to the increasing pace of changes, innovation can happen anywhere across the organization and its ecosystem. Passion is an emotion, which is something that comes from within, enabling determination, fueling imagination and triggering creativity. Imagination flows freely when supported by the fluidity of thought and feeling. Passion can charge up your energy to break through the conditions and kindle imagination.

Passion does play a critical role in creative pursuits and innovative initiatives. If you do not have the passion for what you do, creativity and talent become hard work which in turn disables determination etc. Following the passion also requires a good sense of judgment that you are on the right path to becoming more innovative. A passion with a good positive chain of thoughts followed by innovative activities often brings good outcomes and leapfrogs progress.

Focus: Innovation is a state of mind that focuses on crafting creative ideas and spurring innovation. You need to spend time and energy on setting the right priority and focus on creative activities. Creativity can start on an unconscious level, and then, when ideas start shaping, it is brought into our conscious awareness. Creativity doesn't come automatically. Sometimes you need to think hard as creativity has a quintessential facet with the integration of multiple thought processes; it often happens at the intersection of consciousness and subconsciousness.

Usually, quietness and focus allow you to boost energy, wire up and come up with better ideas. Social interaction or meaningful conversations can also help to generate ideas, if you stay focused and get connected in the right way. Prioritization is critical to force people to be more proactive for driving innovation and focus on innovative problem-solving. To be a proliferate creative type, time management coupled with discipline is a crucial step towards staying focused, developing innovation competency.

Teamwork: Nowadays, innovation is often a teamwork, breaking down silos and being intentional about developing processes that encourage collaboration and enforcing flexibility is crucial to think of alternative solutions from the outside-in lens. It’s about people brainstorming together to reinvent a highly innovative business through collective creativity and effort. Real-time sharing and anticipation, active listening, transparency, and mutual trust are crucial ingredients in building a creative team, generating enriched ideas and innovative solutions.

Innovative team members exhibit complementary mindsets, skills and qualities that make them better able to generate or discover good ideas, being both competent and confident to do something new or different, and not being at the effect of their learning anxiety. Collaboratively, they can build new things based on the business needs, and come up with optimal solutions to delight customers, in order to run a highly innovative organization.

Innovators demonstrate the very characteristics of creativity, curiosity, concentration, and customer-centricity. You can’t imagine a successful innovation process without its continuous improvement. The main challenge organizations face when attempting to digitize and innovate is a cohesive management discipline with the tailored methodology in a consistent manner through which they can implement innovations and develop ideas into fruition.

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Initiateperformancebestpractices

Managing performance means understanding results, setting metrics, and making continuous improvement.

Corporate Performance Management is a management control from strategy to the shop floor. "If you can't measure, you can't manage," legendary management guru Peter Drucker once asserted. 

Managing performance means understanding results, setting metrics, fixing plans, and making decisions to ensure it happens. It takes multifaceted approaches from multidimensional perspectives to unlock digital performance and catalyze change.

  

    Initiate Performance Best Practices

Initiate Performance Management Methodology and Practice Enterprise Performance Management is the integration of multiple methodologies and practices with each embedded with business analytics to make better decisions and implement the strategy. Managing performance means understanding results, setting metrics, and making continuous improvement. Performance Management methodologies include strategy maps, customer intelligence, driver-based budgeting/rolling financial forecasts, quality management, and scorecards, etc. Enterprise Performance Management integrates them as a large umbrella.

From Performance Appraisals to Performance Optimization Managing performance is a wonderful idea! But too many companies ignore the difference between doing PA (Performance Appraisal) and actually being proactive in performance management. In fact, in performance management, much less time should be spent on evaluating past performance, but moving to removing barriers to future performance. You can ask yourself some questions to move in the right direction like how frequent feedback will add value to your organization and the employees, what are the organizational goals and what value can performance evaluation add to it? What rewards should be linked to performance evaluation and how these rewards will affect the productivity of your employees and contribute to the organizational goals?

Value of Scoreboard Traditional management runs in silos; silos introduce lots of delays, waste, queues, and bottlenecks. The linear business system perception needs to be replaced by the adaptive digital system viewpoint. Digital management needs to be holistic and informative for overcoming the challenges brought by “VUCA” new normal. You can only manage what you measure. Performance Management is a holistic management discipline that needs to connect many relevant dots such as dynamic strategic planning or organizational structure tuning to involve business development, enablement, and enhancement. The correlation between strategy, structure, and performance can be figured out via logical reasoning and insightful inquiries.

Start Small & Think Big Practices Information Technology plays a significant role in driving changes and weaving all crucial ingredients into business competencies. There is no one size fits all formula to run a highly effective digital IT, different IT organizations and enterprise as a whole are at a different stage of the business maturity. Thus, IT leaders have to keep up for improving IT return on investment and stepping up for enforcing IT leadership visibility. Here are a set of the digital CIO’s “Think big & start small” practices.

Balance Practices for Leading to the Future The digital era upon us means fast-paced changes, continuous disruptions, overwhelming information, and shortened knowledge life cycle. Organizations of the future are increasingly exhibiting digital characteristics in various shades, extensiveness, and intensity. Leading evolutionary changes and driving business growth is the never-ended journey which takes planning, methodologies, and practices. It’s important to understand that digital management is multifaceted and holistic. Balance, growth, and harmony are not fixed, they are flowing. Here are three digital balance practices for leading to the future.

The blog is a dynamic book flowing with your thoughts; growing through your dedication; sharing your knowledge; conveying your wisdom, and making influence through touching the hearts and connecting minds across the globe. The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 5 million page views with about #8200 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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Innovatingviacrossboundaryleadership

Cross-boundary leaders demonstrate high levels of cognitive intelligence and various skill sets to awaken possibilities in people with diverse talents for delivering extraordinary performance.

The world is becoming hyper-connected and interdependent, being global is not only about crossing borders but also cultural divides between organizational and social sectors. Cross-boundary (cross-cultural, cross-industrial, cross-functional) leadership needs to become the new normal to broaden perspective of leadership substances and styles; deepen the understanding of leadership character and insight; connect the dots between leadership and management and lead transformative change effortlessly.

Cross-boundary leaders can make a deep influence because their unique observation and clear discernment can touch the heart and connect the mind: The substances of leadership are all about vision, influence, fairness, and progression. Global perspective is important in a more volatile, uncertain, ambiguous, hyperconnected and globally distributed world as you need a directional guide. Cross-boundary leaders are inclusive, as the variety of perspectives opens minds, bridges the differences, harnesses the values that each of us can bring to the table, unify the diverse perspective into a clear vision for driving desired change steadfastly. The difference between local leadership and cross-boundary leadership is based on the breadth of knowledge, objectivity of perception and insightful perspective. It’s also important to have enriched professional and life experience, nonlinear skill sets, as well as differentiated competencies to amplify leadership influence.

Cross-boundary leaders must be able to execute on a global scale and adapt quickly to change: As per the circumstance point of view, there is a cross-boundary leadership context, how to lead in the broader global scope. Cross-boundary leaders bring fresh insight with cross-functional, cross-sector and cross-cultural perspectives; they should be very adaptable and have a high degree of "learning agility" as they manage people across functional and broad geographic boundaries. They are able to communicate and collaborate in a way that keeps people focused and connected in spite of the distances. Leadership is an influence. There is “situational leadership” to deal with different circumstances; cognitive intelligence and culture empathy to make sound judgement and solve problems effectively. Cross-boundary leaders are good at shifting from one leadership style to another, but keep the leadership substance on check; they are good at identifying and articulating paradigm shifts; able to adapt quickly to change and make a difference at the global scale.

Grow the new breed of cross-boundary leadership via personalized training: Leadership is a journey with continuous practices. Vision, decisiveness, loyalty, justice, listening, empathy, attitude, drive, risk-taking, humbleness, integrity, perseverance, and multi-dimensional intelligence to tolerate ambiguity, etc, are all crucial to shape cross-boundary leadership. For cultivating leadership with the global mind, look around to find out how to bring talented leaders with the right leadership traits closer to integrity and authenticity, train them with proper skills and cross-boundary leadership competency effectively. Identify the right minds and personalities, and provide personalized leadership training, create depth in future replacements, effect change, strengthen cohesiveness, and strategize effective action plans that materialize the vision.

Cross-boundary leaders demonstrate high levels of cognitive intelligence and various skill sets to awaken possibilities in people with diverse talents for delivering extraordinary results. They can deal with "leadership paradoxes"—the more you learn, the more you appreciate how little you know, with a humble attitude; they can improve leadership effectiveness and maturity by gaining self-and organization-initiated cultural experiences and leadership practices.

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Insightofpitfallsinstrstegymanagement

The enterprises today need to become more open and responsive for adapting to changes, overcome challenges, keep the management processes and practices on track and achieve the desired outcome.

Many companies spend a significant portion of time formulating rock solid strategies, but execution does not go smoothly for achieving the expected results. There are varying reasons why strategy management fails, and there isn’t always a right or wrong choice in any situation, there are a lot of gray areas, varying blind spots, capability gaps in strategy management. 

As a matter of fact, execution is often more difficult due to its complexity and the culture resistance. The senior manager should set policies, adopt the posture of "we are in this together," to manage the collective insight and clear up the blind spot, bridge capability gaps and handle gray areas thoughtfully to ensure the pieces of the puzzle can be integrated into a clear business picture, and the organization can reach the clearly defined destination step-wisely.

Variety of blind-spots cause decision ineffectiveness and mislead strategy implementation: With overly restrictive hierarchy, most teams across functional boundaries operate with an incomplete and relatively small view of the world, and take linear management discipline. Blind spots are inevitable, and usually caused by silo-thinking and homogeneous team-setting. Too often in an effort to keep moving forward, the management makes poor judgment, and jumps to the wrong conclusions. The business management, especially senior leaders have to be humble to realize there are many things you know you don’t know and perhaps even more which you don't know what you don't know. Otherwise, the arrogant attitude with a silo mentality will create numerous blind spots in strategic making, change, talent/performance management, resource, capability management, and further cause failures in strategy execution.

It’s important to challenge, debate, and initiate dynamic and respectful dialogue to broaden perspectives and close blindspots; listen, accept, and act on the blind spot, and always be ready to deal with another blind spot opportunity. High mature business leaders need to ask themselves: Did I overlook anything? What's my unconscious bias and how can I overcome it? Did I always listen to the two sides of stories? What perspective am I taking that might blind me to other things I could have distinguished otherwise. Continue to see the importance of dealing with blind spots by enhancing a healthy feedback-feedforward cycle. The invaluable feedback on business action/impacts/outcomes, portfolio realization/implementation, organizational performance/potential can significantly improve the overall business agility and maturity.

To survive and thrive amid constant changes and disruptions, companies must learn how to manage the “shade of gray”: The emergence of potential opportunities for exploring business transformation is likely to follow the nonlinear patterns with exponential speed. There is a mixed reality of fresh knowledge and outdated information; order and chaos, truth and false, right or wrong, etc. To clarify clouded vision, accelerate business speed and catalyze innovation, the organizational management needs to make a smooth shift from “command & control” to people-centric self-management, establish strong principles, learn how to manage the shade of gray, reclaim the right balance of process and creativity, standardization and flexibility, and build strategic and operational agility into their business foundations.

To handle grey areas effectively, it’s important to build common-accepted standards or compatible rules, bridge the variety of differences, improve the holistic understanding of things and relationships, the psychology and motivation behind the scenes, etc. The goal of grey area management is to optimize the processes and develop the next practices that enable effective problem-solving, rather than generate more issues strategically, culturally or globally. The gray areas perhaps imply hidden risks or uncovered pitfalls, that could also mean growth opportunities. A business system gains more and more energy until it crosses the point of system resilience. To improve business competency and resilience, the risk management mechanism needs to be well embedded in soft business factors such as corporate culture and put in place a mandated risk tolerance structure via escalation requirements based on current risk ratings. So the organization can strike the right balance of standardization and flexibility, innovation and risk management.

Capability gaps stifle changes and cause failures of strategy management: Capabilities enable business strategy. Business capability provides a differentiation and abilities to do things and finish tasks in a consistent manner. Capability-enabled strategy has significantly high success rate. Thus, identifying capability gaps and closing them effectively is a critical step in strategy management. Organizational capability mapping starts with the realization of the gaps where you currently no longer can deliver the strategic business objective for your company and shareholders. Determine what the future needs to look like, and what the transformation must look like, which capabilities you can build in house, which capability needs to be acquired; which capability is linear, which one is more integral? Als, compare your set of capabilities with competitors' to ensure that it is developing differentiated capabilities to gain unique competency.

It takes time and effort to build high mature organizational capabilities and core business competencies. To fill the capability gap, make a road map that sets goals for capability shaping and competence building. Discover the business strength that can be transformed into a core capability if it aligns with the strategic direction. One integral capability may be implemented by multiple capabilities. One core business competency is based on a set of relevant capabilities. High performing businesses depend on their differentiated sets of dynamic capabilities which are underpinned by the well-managed business processes matrix within the organization to enable strategy management and accelerate performance.

We are at the intersection of knowledge economy and creativity economy, strategy execution is often a multipath-driven, iterative continuum. There are numerous barriers and pitfalls on the way. The enterprises today need to become more open and responsive for adapting to changes, overcome challenges, keep the management processes and practices on track and achieve the desired outcome.

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Innovateproblemsolvingviainterdisciplinarylogic

Innovatively, every problem has multiple solutions, every solution needs to have some intuitive pieces to convey the art, technical components to refine the science and sequence to clarify the logic.

 

Innovatively, every problem has multiple solutions, every solution needs to have some intuitive pieces to convey the art, technical components to refine the science and sequence to clarify the logic.

 
Due to the “VUCA” new normal, with inevitable disruptions, problems today are complex as nonlinearity, hyper-diversity, fewer rules, information exponentiality, unpredictability, etc, are all causes of unrepeatability. Interdisciplinary logic is the very clue to see things from different angles, connect wider dots and multi-talented people to glue up integral solutions and unlock the business performance.

Perceive the wider aspects around thorny problem space and then understand the effect of imposing boundaries within that space: In the industrial age with restrictive silo settings, people often drive mechanically thinking about a problem in normal traffic and linear logic. However, nowadays, the situation is fluid and dynamic, with a lot of inter-dependencies and uncertainty. It's important to see interrelationships rather than isolated things, understand patterns of change rather than static “snapshots”; explore objective facts instead of subjective perceptions. Sophisticated problem-solvers need to have interdisciplinary knowledge to gain the contextual understanding of the interconnected pieces of tough issues underlying the surface, as well as dig through the cause-effect by taking a structural approach.

In practice, the interdisciplinary knowledge helps the business professionals to not only work in the box but also across the multiple boxes, broadening the understanding of interrelationships; deepening the thoughts about root causes, rather than getting stuck at the symptoms only. Cognitively, it involves critical thinking, holistic understanding, and interdisciplinary logic to appreciate varying viewpoints, manage the dynamic with emerging activities, frame the bigger thinking boxes, in order to frame the right problems with many intricate pieces and components.

Prescribe interdisciplinary solutions to complex issues: The normal scenario to solve the large complex problem is to break it down to the smaller pieces and solve them efficiently. But if lacking a holistic view based on interdisciplinary understanding, those solution pieces cannot be put together seamlessly. There are confusion, contradiction, or conflicts existing in the multiple components such as processes, structures, people, culture, etc. So the interdisciplinary logic behind complex problem oversight and solution refinement is based on the identification of cognitions, relationships and behaviors within a model, context, or scenario. See the trees and forests, not only put things together, but also fine tune a premium solution that moves from functioning to delight.

Innovatively, every problem has multiple solutions, every solution needs to have some intuitive pieces to convey the art, technical components to refine the science and sequence to clarify the logic. A great solution goes between flexibility and a hard process by eliminating unnecessary complication, lowering cost, and optimizing processes. For the large scale problem-solving, an interdisciplinary scenario for problem-solving is a structural process to harness integration and interconnection of the across organizational, industrial, national and international business, social and political systems to achieve common purposes

Predict and prevent critical problems from happening by applying interdisciplinary knowledge and logic: Great problem solvers not only focus on solving problems effectively, but also proactively predict and prevent problems from happening. The predictive analysis of problems includes forecasting, simulation, cross-knowledge domain analysis, and risk management. The quality of prediction is based on the quality of information and quality of problem-solvers. The trend involves retrospective and prospective data. Predictive and preventive problem management is a complex domain and information becomes meaningful when being sorted through and processed to make sure its coherence.

In fact, it is an interdisciplinary approach which involves cognitive science, sociology, culturology, psychology, philosophy, ecology, etc, to predict and prevent certain critical problems from happening. Even though you couldn’t predict anything beforehand, you can always imagine different scenarios based on “lessons learned” with many experiences involved in current or in the past. The true power of predictive problem-solving comes when you integrate the interdisciplinary logic into processes, applying the model in real-time to predict the likelihood of events or issues, do the scenario analysis and dynamic planning all the way.

Problems today become much more complex than ever, oftentimes, problem-solving must be both systematic and innovative via multidimensional thought processes and cross-disciplinary knowledge and expertise. Interdisciplinary logic has both artistic sentiment and scientific discipline to clarify sequence and consequence of problem-solving, encourage collaborative attitude and actions for reaching higher than expected outcomes.

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Innovationrules

The evolution of innovation only exists in a dynamic environment in which the management sets principles, creates insight and takes advantage of all sources of creativity in an open way and leaps up innovation maturity.

A digital workplace is all about people-centricity, empathy, innovation, agility and high-level business maturity. It is always on, inter-dependent and hyper connected, people are always the most important asset in any organization before, today, and future.

In an ideal digital workplace, the organizational structure is solid enough to keep people or things in order; but fluid enough to keep information and ideas flowing.

       Innovation Rules

Innovationvsrules Innovation is to transform novel ideas and achieve its business value. Innovation is doing something better than it currently is. Hence, it requires a sound and competent understanding of what is currently being done. Innovation is not serendipity, it's a mindset, a process, and the strategic business capability nowadays. From an innovation management perspective, should innovators break rules, or does innovation need rules, and how to manage innovation effortlessly and improve its success rate?

Innovationprinciples We are approaching the digital world with complexity, hyper-connectivity, and the highest level of education ever, and as a result, more people are competing in an increasingly competitive global arena. We also see much more innovation in more and more areas of the business landscape as a result of an increasingly well-educated population across the globe. So setting principles to manage innovation in a structural way becomes more strategically important. The purpose of Innovation Management is just so simple: If you work hard, have a good idea, and deliver to your customers, you will be rewarded. But it takes principle, strategy, discipline, and daily practices to flex your innovation muscle.

Innovationrules Innovation is to transform novel ideas and achieve their business value. Innovation has to result in something which leads to a better state than where we are today. There are many ways to differentiate, and, therefore, there are many ways to pursue innovation. There’s no one size fits all success formula for innovation management success.

Innerrulesfordisruptiveinnovation Shaping a disruptive innovation to fit the market often requires strategies, designs and product introductions that build towards the long-term vision. It demands insight, understanding, patience, persistence, and courage, among other things. What are the more specific ‘rules’ for creating disruptive products and innovations?

Innovation: good principles or outdated rules Innovation is a journey which involves brainstorming, experimentation, trial, error, research, applying structured methods or tools for implementation, reviews, systematic analysis, and debugging, and is therefore not possible to pre-describe how it will work out. Therefore, organizations can no longer rely on a single individual or team to drive innovation. The businesses need innovation silver lining from specific tools rising to an overall problem-solving system environment. The evolution of innovation only exists in a dynamic environment in which the management sets principles, creates insight and takes advantage of all sources of creativity in an open way and leaps up innovation maturity.

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 5 million page views with about #8300th 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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Innovativecapabilityassessment

The maturity of a business capability would be based on the abilities to deliver on customer needs or to achieve the desired capability outcome.

The capability is the ability to achieve the desired effect under specified performance, standards, and conditions through combinations of activities and resources. The enterprise consists of a portfolio or matrix of capabilities that are used in various combinations to execute the business strategy and achieve expected business outcomes.

Enterprise capabilities are typically expressed in generally high-level terms and require a combination of people, processes, and technology to achieve. Top business leadership or management team needs to make an objective assessment of their investment on business capability development, making an objective assessment of "importance," "performance," and "maturity" attached to enterprise capability.

Importance: The organization leverages business capabilities to understand the markets/environment, create new products and services, and deliver values to their customers. To improve business competency, it is important to have a good understanding of current and future capabilities as well as their impact on implementing the strategic business goals. There are tactical capability necessities that keep the lights on; there are strategic capability differentiators that build unique business competencies. An objective assessment of capability includes the importance of each capability to the enterprise; different weighting may be applied to the capabilities of shaping organizational competency.

Transactional capability keeps the daily business on; transformative capability enables the business to monitor or seek disruptive opportunities, and make a large scale of changes. Some capabilities are linear or static; some are integral and dynamic. Integral capability is often nonlinear and synthetic in nature, combining the modular capabilities exposed in a platform to create new experiences and expand its impact, embedding agility in processes and focusing on building long-term business competency. Compared to process view, capability view keeps you from being dragged into too many details that the top management is perhaps not interested in. Assessing the importance or criticality of capability helps the business management set the right priority by balancing short-term and long term perspectives, to enable the strategy and build their business long term advantage.

Performance: Business capability is an acquired and organized "ability" within a company and takes hard work to put in place. Capability can contain many services, processes, and functionalities to perform a set of activities for achieving successful outcomes, whether financial, brand, or double bottom line. So the performance evaluation of capability helps to clarify: What the business does - capabilities; how the business does it - processes/functions, and what performance results have been achieved; how to fine tune capabilities to improve business performance.

To make wise investment on capability development, create a business initiative brief that describes business objectives, scope, outcomes, business and technical capabilities within scope, approach, costs, time frames, risks, etc as the initial basis for launching the business initiative. Conduct a fit/gap analysis of capability vs requirements, facilitate the process of deep analyzing, to identify areas in a capability portfolio that can be changed and optimized, such as duplicated capability or ineffective capability, etc. Also, be aware of the integration of a single functional capability into a holistic portfolio of capabilities across all enterprises, to build unique and sustainable business advantages.

Maturity: Either at the individual or organizational level, the capability is considered one of the fairer criteria to differentiate leaders from laggards. Business Capabilities are the abilities to produce specific goods or services for serving customers, gaining market shares, and building business competency. Capability maturity evaluation includes analyzing capability gaps in the context of future need, capability dependency or business capability reliance on technology capability, investment calculation, etc. The often described maturity attributes of business capabilities include, such as robustness, speed, comprehensiveness, responsiveness, agility, optimization, quality, resilience, etc.

The maturity of a business capability would be based on the abilities to deliver on customer needs or to achieve the desired capability outcome. Since a capability is made up of people, processes, and technology, you can use overall process maturity as one part; you can measure the percentage of business units engaging the capability on a year by year basis. To improve the overall maturity of a corporate capability portfolio, it’s important to map business capabilities and strategies, re-purpose well-designed components and systems for designing and configuring dynamic business capabilities, to ensure that strategic goals can be accomplished quickly and consistently to reach high-level business maturity.

The organization’s competency is based on the set of differentiated and cohesive capabilities and how fast and effective they can be built upon. An organizational capabilities today are the result of its history and this history constrains what capabilities the firm can perform in the future. Thus, organizational leaders should spend reasonable time on making an objective assessment, fine tuning organizational capability and increasing capability coherence.

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