Tuesday, January 15, 2019

Voyage Into “VUCA” Digital Dynamic

 Digital organizations are expanding both horizontally and vertically, across all business dimensions to voyage into “VUCA” dynamic with speed.

With the increasing pace of changes and continuous digital disruptions, businesses today have no choice but ride change waves skillfully, catch rising tides timely, and voyage into “VUCA” digital dynamic courageously. A digital paradigm is an emerging ecosystem of principles, policies, and practices that set limits or boundaries; but also offer guidance for problem-solving or create something new from old. The purpose of the digital transformation is to make a significant difference in the overall levels of business performance, responsiveness, and organizational maturity.

Leveraging the digital vision to pull through silos, tensions, or constraints: Vision is basically a qualitative statement defining the "perception" of the organization for steering the business in the right direction without “getting lost” at the myriad of daily busyness, the multitude of silos, tensions, or constraints. Given that articulating a vision includes a coherent and powerful statement of what the desired future state can be and focuses on common goals and step-wise approaches. It is no surprise that there is a tension between “old and new,” from the business model, mindset, process or practice perspectives. It is the reality that there are functional silos existing, so the organizational progress and harmony often get hampered by the team or functional level “He said, she said,” scenario. Most businesses also face resource or schedule constraints. Nowadays, there are so many things in the business executives’ plate, they have to spin them all very well in order to keep the right balance. Thus, leadership vision is not just about zooming in but also stepping into the future proactively. If people at the different level of organizational hierarchy understand the part they play in achieving the company goals, to ensure the business as a whole is superior to the sum of pieces; they are provided the right type of incentives, people will do the right things with the proper checkpoint to ensure business success. Thus, the bottom line is, for any company to succeed, it’s essential for the entire company to be pulling in the right direction, break down silos, soothing tensions, and overcome constraints, to accelerate performance and unlock business potential.

Setting stages to keep digital flow: Organizations, like individuals, need to be in flow to operate smoothly and adapt to change effortlessly. An organization can approach such a flow zone when people are ready for moving to a fluid structure. Digital leaders are eager to set stages to drive a frictionless, immersive, and relentless digital transformation. Keeping digital fluidity requires mind change at every level of the organization and gain an in-depth understanding that things cannot stay the same. The highly effective digital organization has a higher level of responsiveness and performance because information can flow to the right people to allow them making the right decisions at the right time to bring better results and improve business fluidity. Digital information and knowledge flow help to unlock latent expertise, collaborate through communities with geographically-distributed teams and arise the opportunities to analyze and reuse information they create to amplify knowledge impact and scale best practices. Further, delayering becomes a lens through which it is possible to examine and then fix many other issues for keeping the business dynamic and highly functional. An organization can approach the flow zone when the positions in its hierarchy have clear or accountable tasks.

Striking the right balance of change vs. stability; innovation vs. standardization, learning vs. doing, coordination vs. competition: Digital is all about the rapid changes, blurred functional/business/industry territories, expanded organizational horizons, stability is not equal to stagnation. Change becomes the new normal, it’s important to follow the “balance” principle, which means you need to keep the business running forward at the steadfast speed, even you have to “rock the boat” accordingly. Digital is the era of innovation, organizations should always be open to, conscious of, and feel empowered to act upon “out of the box” thinking, but also need to consider the continuum between innovation and standardization. The right tension between innovation and standardization is actually healthy to ensure that people in tactic or operational management understanding that they actually can go hand-in-hand together in an appropriate way. Digital does mean the unprecedented level of mass collaboration, also means fierce competition. Good competition can lead to enhanced quality of life through innovation and progress. But bad competition can produce a myriad of negative externalities. “Coopetition” is a hybrid word to describe the digital new normal, it's about businesses collaborating to achieve common goals in one area but compete in the other area.

Digital organizations are all about information savvy, adaptation, people-centricity, high-performance, and speed. They are expanding both horizontally and vertically, across all business dimensions to voyage into “VUCA” dynamic with speed. They are complex enough to act intelligently and nimble enough to adapt to changes promptly,

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