Running a Future-Driven Digital Organization

Running a future-driven organization starts with the growth mindset and following with progressive activities. 

Digital organizations are the living systems which keep growing and maturing. Organization of the Future is an organization designed openly for anyone with ideas on how human organizations ought to be contrived in the face of the “VUCA” digital new normal, hyperconnectivity and fierce competition. Reimaging the future of business is exciting, but investigating the different path for unlocking business performance and potential needs to take a systematic approach and develop it into a more solid form. Digital leaders must realize that you cannot wait until there is an immediate pressing task, continuous adaptability is necessary in an ever-changing world, in order to run a future-driven digital organization.

Visionary leadership: Nowadays, with the increasing pace of changes and unprecedented uncertainty and complexity, driving business forward is extremely difficult. You have to look into an unknown future and attempt to define the business landscape with its risks and opportunities. Thus, visionary leadership is in demand because lack of vision will dim down leadership effectiveness or mislead business in the wrong direction. Vision is extremely important for the digital paradigm shift because those who look through the lens of the previous industrial era perceive their reality very differently from those who leverage the lens that the new era has crafted. Envisioning is the imagination's inner screen lighting up in the context of where the future is heading. Vision differentiates transformational leaders from transactional managers. For running a future-driven digital organization, visionary leaders have better sense to capture business trends, have the insight to understand things holistically; respect the diversified point of view, move energy to a higher level by offering a clear vision of what is possible, in order to lead the organization toward the uncharted water and blurred business territories confidently. Vision is not just an innate talent, it takes practices, to get the shadow out of your mind, and to clear your thinking by concentration. Vision comes to those who exercise themselves to understand what they hear, as they listen; to perceive what they see, as they look; to convey the empathetic understanding as they speak.

The future of organizational design: Traditional organizations are often silo-based and strictly hierarchical; digital means flow - information flow, idea flow, and business flow. Therefore, the future of organizational design should streamline flow and achieve autonomy. However, still very few organizations understand all the gains they could enjoy from organizational structure tuning. It is about how to improve profitability, develop the culture of learning, encouraging innovation and improving employee engagement. Within a well-design structure and fine-tuned processes, dedication and effort will be spent on innovation rather than overcoming organizational hurdles, internal politics, and pushing against structural boundaries. The future of the organization is fluid, flexible, informative and autonomous. The right mixed structure allows the growth mindset and digital culture to bloom so the business can stretch out in every business dimension for driving the full-fledged digital transformation.

The future of business model: Every corporate venture comes with a business model, it’s about how the business makes the profit. With the emerging digital technology trend and abundant information, the new business model can be discovered if organizations can ride the learning curve and explore the art of possibility. Many well-established organizations experiment in corporate entrepreneurship activities that can improve organizational growth and profitability, and depend on the company’s competitive environment, their impact will increase over time. Thus, corporate entrepreneurship can be seen as a business model innovation, because if a well-matured business identifies a new value proposition that requires a change in the business model or the creation of a new one, then it’s strategically safer to develop an independent venture. So, you could say that every corporate venture comes with a business model innovation, even not all business model innovation need to become new ventures. Running a future-driven digital organization is an adventure to explore the concept of a business model by addressing some core questions such as, who are your target customers? What need is met for the customer? What offers will you provide to address that need? How well can you leverage the emerging technology and trends? Which role will your business play in providing the offering? Etc. With hyper-competition and shorten the business life cycle, to avoid fast obsolescence, besides the focus on operational efficiency, or incremental improvement, the business model needs to allow space for innovation.

Running a future-driven organization starts with the growth mindset and follows with progressive activities. Visualization enables people to bridge between the innovations of tomorrow with the business realities of today. So part of the digital journey is to share a clear vision, prepare people for the digital new normal to recognize increasing collective consciousness, in order to master the change and drive the seamless digital transformation.

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