Three Questions Assess a Person’s Digital Altitude

Attitude leaps altitude, altitude inspires attitude.

The world is moving into the deep, deep digital new normal with wide, wide digital connectivity and tall, tall digital pillars. A digital paradigm is an emerging digital ecosystem of principles, policies, and practices to navigate uncharted water and enter to blurred boundaries; also offer the guidance for problem-solving or creating something new under the digital rules. It is the transformation that is reshaping our thinking and recasting the way we view ourselves, the systems of which we are the part of the environments in which we live, and the way we view the world. Therefore, digital altitude - simply the height or depth of your digital thinking and views become more critical for today’s digital leaders and professionals to inspire changes and motivate actions in the right direction. Altitude is less about your position, more about your vision. Which questions should you ask to assess a person’s digital attitude?

Does altitude inspire attitude or attitude decide altitude? Attitude leaps altitude, altitude inspires the attitude. The higher the altitude is, the better vision you could capture. The foreseeable vision is indeed crucial. Just like the nature ecosystem has provide the impetus to her evolutionary agenda of human mind and consciousness: for every need, provisions are there, for every problem, solutions are there, for every scientific development, resources are there, but to be discovered, you need to have great digital altitude and discovery eyes with clear vision, applying human intelligence and through the process of discovering, human mind and consciousness will expand and evolve. With great digital altitude, the digital leaders and professionals can observe, perceive, and pay attention to the myriad of internal, external, national or global forces that define and influence the way we do business these days. These digital forces must be dealt with, but before they can be dealt with, they must appear on digital leaders or professional’s' radar screen. Visionary is the one who can envision the future, the proper digital altitude will enhance your vision. The strategy should be driven by visionaries and being on the ground does not prevent a person from being a visionary; as being on top does not prevent a person from being short-sighted. Digital altitude is nothing to do with the status quo or title, successes come from both attitude and aptitude, and altitude comes with grit and determination.

Do outliers often have higher digital altitude? Outliers - the one who can step out of a conventional thinking box, or linear patterns often have higher altitude, because they do not get stuck in the box, but observe and understand things outside of the box and connect the dots across the boxes. Digital transformation represents a break with the past, with a high level of impact and complexity. Transformation efforts need to be undertaken as the means of getting to a set of differentiated capabilities to accomplish a defined goal. Otherwise, they cannot have the clear focus and business rationale that is essential to gaining any traction in changing an embedded culture. At the industrial era, the pace of change was more predictable and planning for execution was the focus. Expectations from individual or business consumers outstrip the readiness of most organizations. Now, everything requires shorter term planning without giving up the strategic endgame and proper digital altitude. The higher digital altitude helps to expand the digital horizon and speed up, the digital leaders and professionals should also look to businesses outside their industry to spur the out-of-box thinking and dot-connecting innovation; to find examples and opportunities for how these other firms addressed similar challenges and implemented different types of products and services to delight customer or reach new markets. Too often, business leaders focus only on those companies they see as their direct competitor. Indeed, digitalization disrupts not only the business boundary but also industry boundary, today’s organization is more as an organic living thing thriving at the expanded business ecosystem.

How is digital altitude related to talent competency? COMPETENCY is a synthetic word, including both thinking abilities and “hard” & “soft” skills. Amongst critical thinking, creative thinking, as well as many thinking capabilities, attitude, entrepreneurship, leadership, and passion, all are important elements of competency. More precisely, digital competency is about hybrid skills, ambivert personality or ambidextrous capabilities, and there are many perspectives on competency. It's important to define the set of competency to tailor your organizational needs. So it has become necessary to develop strategic core competencies for digital professionals. Altitude, attitude, and aptitude all contribute to building talent competency. Altitude inspires you to focus on big picture and long term perspective, attitude motivates you to continue learning and making an improvement, and aptitude helps you strengthen the strength. With the good combination of all of them, competency can be built and upgrade to the new digital height.

Digital altitude is about how far you can see, how broad you can explore, how deep you can perceive, how fast you can get out of the box when needed, how high you can climb, and how many dots you can connect to spark innovation. It is an increasingly important quality for digital professionals to envision the future full of uncertainty and velocity, begin with an “end in mind,” and to keep focus via a clear view and synthesizing skills and competency. successes come from both attitude and aptitude, and altitude comes with grit and determination.

Posted in: Talent Master