Deal with the “Pale, Stale, and Failing” Patterns Properly and Lead Digital Transformation Smoothly

The journey of going digital will not be so smooth, there are many curves and bumps on the road. 

Digital transformation isn’t just an extension of continuous improvement of the current business, but a quantum leap with radical change. The journey of going digital will not be flat. It represents a break from the past, with a high level of complexity and uncertainty. The path for digital transformation can be iterative, evolutionary, revolutionary, or disruptive. Ad hoc digital transformation is doomed to fail. How to deal with “pale, stale, and failing” patterns properly and lead digital transformation smoothly?

Pale vision: The true business vision is a reflective process of an organization really understanding itself and its strategic goals, to perceive the future of business. Anybody with a dream can draw up a vision, but it needs top leadership with the strategic insight into the problem to carve up the vision in actionable steps. Due to the “VUCA” characteristics of the business dynamic, rapid changes and overwhelming growth of information, business vision could be cloudy pale and make the organization “lost in the dark” if management is not well preparing the upcoming disruptions. Pale vision also happens that every side of the fence, commercial and technical, under the silo walls, misbelieves the relevance and difficulties of each other’s works. Vision is the ability to see beyond what is to what could be. It is the synthetic view of ‘looking forward,” and “looking behind,” “looking beyond,” and “looking around.” However, in many organizations, there is a tendency for business managers to focus on short-term goals or quarterly results due to pressures from shareholders and unprecedented uncertainty facing businesses today. Pale vision with “near-sighted” view distracts the team and discourages transformative changes. Good leaders don't lose the sight of long-term perspective or 'big picture' vision even though they spend certain time, efforts, and resources on achieving the short-term quick wins. The great leaders stand up as high as they can and look in every direction they could to shape a clear and colorful vision to inspire changes and tell compelling stories to steer digital transformation holistically.

Stale knowledge: Knowledge is power, but it is without a doubt one of the most invaluable and most poorly managed asset in business today, and it’s worthy of massive amounts of attention and resources. Siloed or outdated knowledge is what leads to a decrease in imagination or decelerates the speed of changes. With the exponential growth of information and shortened knowledge management cycle, There is false information, and knowledge is outdated sooner than you think. Stale knowledge is also like perished food, easy to get expired. Thus, knowledge cannot be managed like those other hard assets. More attention needs to be placed on the conditions that allow knowledge to flow and generate value rather than try to manage or control knowledge like it is a thing that can benefit from that type of intervention. Knowledge management is actually not an isolated discipline, it needs to be embedded in the key business processes to shape a learning organization. An essential role for Knowledge Management is the need to connect ideas but also people, and crucially management. Because at the end of the day, what you expect is companies that are capable of mobilizing collective knowledge, ideas, experiences, capacities to business competency and learning plasticity for adapting to the ever-changing environment and anticipating in business transformation proactively.

Failing signals of strategy implementation: Strategy management is challenging. There are about two-thirds to three-quarters of large organizations struggle to implement their strategies. Why does strategy execution unravel? Lack of accountabilities, decision ineffectiveness, or inter & intra-divisional tensions. It seems logical the more ambitious strategy the businesses undertake, they should expect higher levels of friction; disconnect between strategic goals and tactical tasks; culture inertia or inefficient processes. People is often one of the weakest links in strategy management. To dig deeper, the execution gaps exist at the people’s mindsets or the organizational culture. Sometimes strategy makers spend much more time designing the content of strategies than thinking about how to implement them successfully. The matter of fact is they have to drive implementation, otherwise, the emergent strategies will continue to be ignored. More specifically, the common failure signals of strategy implementation also include such as, value proposition failed to be translated into meaningful operational deliverables; management and planning deficiencies, too much staring at spreadsheets and reports, but too little focusing on concrete deliverables, risk management, and real progress tracking; the weak value proposition in terms of business or customer impact, etc.

The journey of going digital will not be so smooth, there are many curves and bumps on the road. To deal with “pale, stale, and failing” pattern properly, it’s important to take an overarching approach that has to dig underneath the surface of businesses and take holistic management to integrate both hard and soft business elements to organizational competency, improve organizational adaptability and lead digital transformation smoothly.

Posted in: Digital Master,Digital Pitfalls,Digitalization,Lessons from Failures