The Next Phase of Digital Refinement Cycle

The emergence of potential opportunities for exploring digitalization is likely to follow a nonlinear pattern with accelerated speed.

We live in the exponential digital era. The digitalization paints an excellent picture of the business interaction and interdependence of the expanded digital ecosystem. Forward-thinking organizations are in the state of introducing new business concepts, experimenting with something new or exploring better opportunities to grow their business, balancing the main elements impacting change such as people, processes/procedures and Information Technology, tuning key business success factors to reach the next phase of digital refinement.

Planning - adjusting - evolving digital refinement cycle: With the faster paces of changes and continuous disruptions, digital organizations today have to enable desirable emergent property. Thus, planning and forecasting become challenging, and planning fallacy turns to be a business reality. It’s important to figure out the “right level” of planning, or take the dynamic planning to keep iterating, adjusting, evolving, and working on a rhythm of sustained products or services deliveries. To put another way, it ’s important to get you off the ground and running, make the proper adjustment when new events come up, also ensure that there is sufficient time to prepare the stakeholders for the changes on the way. To make planning effective and practical, it is important to get the bigger picture and be clear on what, who, when, and how to achieve business goals through iterative communication, incremental goal implementation, and make a necessary delegation implementation plan collaboratively and seamlessly. The healthy planning-adjusting-evolving digital refinement cycle creates the business synergy to strive vigorously in leading digital transformation.

Learning-acting-improving digital refinement cycle: With the exponential growth of data and the mixed bag of new information and outdated knowledge. Digital organizations and their people must learn through their interactions with the business environment continually. High organizational learning relates to high response in recognizing and addressing system constraints. Learning agility at both the individual and business level is a differentiated digital competency and the organizational culture shift. It will directly impact the speed of the digital transformation. A learning organization is one in which leaders encourage learning-acting-improving as an iterative business continuum. They apply their learning, act, observe the consequences of their action, make inferences about those consequences, and draw implications for future actions. Such adaptive learning in a collective way helps the business not only survive but also thrive, to ensure the organization knows the tasks and knowledge required to sustain itself and create an environment and business systems to support those tasks being done and build the organizational competency. Moving to the next phase - generative learning allows employees at all levels are open to new ideas, co-create fresh knowledge, experimentation with alternative ways of doing things, learning from instead of condemning or punishing mistakes, errors. And reach the next level of innovation blossom.

Simplifying, optimizing, and energizing digital refinement cycle: Simplicity is an optimal level of complexity. The fundamental of the management discipline is to simplify things. Refresh the core business processes to make sure changes are not only predicted but also fully prepared. It is also important that many companies approaching the next phase of digital refinement, have objectivity and humility to realize that their system or processes are out of date and work on upgrading them step-wisely. Digital refinement focuses on people centricity and adaptability, to ensure businesses are built to changes, and ensure people can have the right information and tools to get their job well done. The successful process refinement often goes hand-in-hand with organizational structure management. The challenge for any business is to explore successful organizational structures that help to empower people, enforce iterative communication, and harness cross-functional collaboration to accelerate business performance and unleash the full digital potential. Companies that are skilled at simplifying, optimizing and energizing the business can gain competitive advantages by pushing the boundaries of a more sophisticated business mix.

The emergence of potential opportunities for exploring digitalization is likely to follow a nonlinear pattern with accelerated speed. The high mature digital organizations are highly conscious about what’s happening in their environment, well prepared to move into the next phase of digital refinement with the ability to adapt to changes promptly, grasp opportunities timely, and prevent risks effectively.

Posted in: Digital Fit,Digitalization