The Digital Leader’s New Year Crystal Ball: How to Predict and Prepare the Next Level of Digitization

Going digital is more like a journey than a destination. Predicting and preparing the next level of digitalization is an iterative learning and doing continuum.

Just as the industrial revolution did a century and a half ago, the digital revolution is reshaping the way we live, we think, and we work. The digital world is dynamic, interconnected, and interdependent, with the abundance of information. A digital paradigm is an emerging digital ecosystem of principles, policies, and practices that set limits or boundaries; and also offers the guidance for problem-solving or creating something new to achieve a state of dynamic balance. Leadership is all about making directions and driving changes. Forward-thinking digital leaders: how can you predict and prepare the next level of digitalization at the end of the year?

The next wave of digital disruptions: Organizations large or small are on the journey of digitalization, adapting to changes in faster speed and expand digitalization in every dimension of the business. Digital organizations become more complex due to the accelerating speed of changes; nonlinear connectivity, the exponential growth of information, The matter of fact is that the changes sweeping the world are hugely disruptive and there is nowhere to hide. The emergence of potential opportunities for exploiting digitization is likely to follow a nonlinear pattern as the pervasiveness of an organization's digitization journey increases. Though technology is often the disruptive force of digitalization, the next wave of digital disruptions is expansive, will become more volatile, unpredictable, diverse, and overwhelming, due to lack of linearity and increased flux, uncertainty, and complexity. The digital ecosystem with all aggregates challenges and opportunities propels organizations further towards the challenges with faster speed. These are emergent digital new normals affecting organizations to a different degree, and how prompt the organization can respond to the tides of changes, grasp the opportunities and manage risks will make the business stand out as the digital master.

The next gen of innovation: Digital is the age of innovation. The hyper-connecting nature of digital offers particularly fertile ground for developing cross-industrial ecosystems and innovation opportunities, in part because ways of doing business and customer expectations both tend to be more flexible than the siloed industrial age. To envision the next gen of innovation, digital leaders need to ponder further: Is it possible to integrate the innovative concepts into a comprehensive approach that can generate better solutions to the seemingly insurmountable large-scale problems? How to deal with both innovation management and management innovation in a structural way? Can we develop an approach with a mix of “hard” innovation and “soft” innovation, which also places social, political and ethnic differences within a common framework to generate meaningful progress toward the next level of innovation? What’re the best or next innovation practices, What are the structure for innovation? What can you do differently? You need to listen, convey, inspire, motivate, bring in people to share the vision, inspire the mission, communicate ideas, and advocate people-centricity. There are many components in an effective innovation environment or ecosystem. Each component by itself may not cause a good environment, but collectively, they can weave an innovation ecosystem such as leadership, culture, capacity, practices, tools, recognition system measurements, risk approach to reach the next level of innovation blossom.

The next round of digital practices: The real power of digital technology comes from the innate appeal of interacting socially and intellectual stimulation that people derive from sharing what they know, expressing opinions and learning what others know and think. The real power of the digital organization is based on its intelligence to decide, the capacity to innovate, and the speed for changes. One of the key determinants of whether an organization can move to the digital new normal is the digital maturity of its people. There are many who do not feel comfortable with self-direction, nor do they look to their jobs for the level of potential that is possible. Therefore, the next round of digital practices are people-centric, how to build a work environment for people to communicate and collaborate? How to create the right mix of automation and collective creativity. How to grow a heterogeneous team, and how to define digital fit, etc. Organizations today need to constantly improve the business and see change as an opportunity while keeping a holistic overview of the business, those are the core messages of the text. When people are ready for changes and processes are not overly rigid, organizations are frictionless to catch up the change speed. A high-mature organization always look for opportunities across the business to increase the usage of emergent digital technologies accordingly and charter digital paradigm shift seamlessly. The next round of digital practices should focus on building a set of differentiated digital capabilities which are modular, dynamic and nonlinear.

Going digital is more like a journey than a destination. Predicting and preparing the next level of digitalization is an iterative learning and doing continuum. The new paradigm that is emerging is a digital organization that is more responsive, holistic, vibrant, driven, intelligent, innovative, ambidextrous, and above all enhances and supports the living organization.

Posted in: All about Future,Digital Master,Digital Maturity,Digitalization,Future of Leadership