Three Fresh Twists to Deepen Digital Impact

Digitalization makes significant impacts on every aspect of the business from people, processes, to technology and capability both horizontally and vertically.

Organizations of the future are increasingly exhibiting digital characteristics such as hyperconnectivity, fierce competition, and interdependence in various shades, extensiveness, and intensity. Organizations today across the industrial sectors aim to move into a more advanced stage of digital deployment by tailoring their own unique strength and business competency. They need to keep making fresh twists, fine-tune methods and processes, and stretch out in every business dimension for deepening their digital impact and driving a seamless business transformation.

Make changes in Change Management: Compared to the business world decades ago, the speed of change is increasing, and the digital ecosystem has become more complex and dynamic, to put simply, change itself changes. Change Management is all about balancing the main elements impacting change: People, strategies, processes/procedures and IT. Statistically, there are more than two-thirds of change initiatives failed today. The perils of Change Management can waste a lot of resources and cause a lot of pains. Change is happening at a more rapid pace, but it takes a lot of energy to break down old habits and outdated processes. Change Management is seldom effective because many companies try to build an impressive skyscraping before ensuring there is a sufficient "foundation" to support them. That’s why it’s important to make changes in Change Management when it’s necessary for improving change management effectiveness. Change Management processes evaluation is important because it’s an important aspect of shaping changeability. Change Management shouldn’t be too fluffy, it evolves how to define, specify, prioritize, prepare, execute, implement, consolidate, stabilize, harvest or form, and perform, etc. Even optimized processes and smart tools ain't bringing the expected effects if not driven by dedicated professionals, people are change masters. Change is an ongoing journey, managing change as a business continuum means that it’s not sufficient to control people’s behaviors manually because you can’t manipulate how they think. Select potentials, recognize change agents. Real change evolves how to deprogram old mindsets, let go of the old voice or experience, reprogram people’s mind with fresh knowledge, norms, and attitude, fine-tune the processes to change by leveraging the powerful digital collaboration platforms and tools, break down silos, monitor the change progress by setting the right performance indicators, establish a new blueprint for how you plan to create the digital reality.

Diversify the diversity: Digital workforce is multigenerational, multicultural, and multi-devicing. Digital organizations are a huge melting pot of various diversity. Besides diverse physical identity on the surface, such as age, gender or race, businesses leaders today must broaden their perspective and deepen their understanding of diversity. From the management perspective, diversifying the diversity is truly about expanding the spectrum of modern diversity, to proactively evolve: Creative diversity, cognitive diversity, cultural diversity, skill diversity, and personality diversity, etc. Diversity is the hotbed to spark creativity. A creative team should have a cogitative difference and diversified worldview. In this regard, diversity should refer to cognitive differences, culture intelligence, and the strengths of skills people bring to the team. Diversity is a facilitator for merging significant building blocks of new and existing ideas and concepts. It is an excellent engine for creativity. Even amongst a collegial group, sharp differences can arise. Collegiality and critical thinking are not mutually exclusive. It is important for a creative team to have people who do not have the same view of the small part of the world that the team is dealing with so that they can pay off each other. Leaders should always look for the capabilities and skills that they don't have so that they can build a winning team and complement each other. In such a global climate, those businesses that are unwilling to genuinely embrace diversity, diversify the diversity, are unable to know how to tap their diverse resources, and be inclusive and recognize merit and ideas, no matter where they come from, will not be able to survive, leave alone thrive.

Solve problems in problem-solving methodology: The problems become more complicated in this ever-complex world. Never assume you know what the problem is, do not jump to the “HOW” before figuring out why and what. Digital leaders and professionals should ask themselves: Are you part of the problem or part of the solution? Very often, people have a good intention to solve problems, but they lack an in-depth understanding of real problems or take outdated methodology or approach to solve them. That perhaps causes more issues or old problems keep coming back. Sometimes lack of creativity becomes the problem after many people refused to deal with it for various reasons, and ignored it until it becomes a problem and later, the bigger problem, and the even huge problem to avoid the problem. Thus, solving problems in problem-solving is a strategic move to improve problem-solving effectiveness. Both diagnosing the right problems and solving them in the right way are important. Problems that arise in organizations are almost always the product of interactions of parts, never the action of a single part. Look at the problem from as many perspectives as possible, leverage Systems Thinking to understand the interconnectivity between parts and the whole, and apply creativity to generate a variety of options for dealing with problems elegantly and solve them radically with less side-effect. Effective leaders routinely zoom out to see the larger system and their part in the mess, assess their own role in problem-solving objectively. It takes extraordinary discipline to carve out the time for this type of reflection; it is always important to develop a healthy habit and the best practices for problem-solving and build a reputation as the great problem solver.

Digitalization makes significant impacts on every aspect of the business from people, processes, to technology and capability both horizontally and vertically. Keep tuning processes & methodologies and making fresh twists are all important approaches to both short-term gratification and long-term outcomes.

Posted in: Digital Master,Digitalization,Principle/Practice