The more effortlessly you can guide, align, integrate, and optimize important business elements such as people, process, and technology, the closer you can accelerate business performance.
The rapid change, exponential growth of information, consumerism, and many other factors are creating new challenges and opportunities for enterprises to survive and thrive. Organizations of the future are increasingly exhibiting digital characteristics in various shades and intensity to make seamless transitions, deliver faster and increasing market share and tailored approach to fit specific circumstances and respond to the external environment dynamically.
From mechanic to organic: Most traditional organizations have “mechanic nature” in the industrial age, running at silos, with restricted hierarchy which slows down the speed of changes. Thus, it’s a worthwhile effort to re-imagine the future of business to embrace high business velocity. In practice, designing an organic and multidimensional socio-technical business system is more difficult than designing a single-dimensional “mechanistic system." An organic digital organization consists in being able to break away from static, stale, and slow patterns, and being able to make continuous adjustment, improve organizational responsiveness and manageability. To drive change smoothly, the digital organizational structure should be solid enough to give some sort of forms or meanings and open enough to its environment and allow the movement of information, ideas and people frictionlessly, in order to make proactive changes within the expanded digital ecosystem effectively.
From operational alignment to strategic alignment: Overly rigid organizational structure or silo processes stifle change and innovation. Alignment shouldn’t just refer to top-down conformity, order taking, or inside-out operational mapping. It needs to include a broader scope of organizational tuning such as integration, engagement, collaboration, partnership, harmony link, fuse, affiliation, coalition, fit, match, meld, and convergence. Strategic alignment means that the strategic intent of the business can be understood, both within the organization and the ecosystem. Only by aligning the outside view with the inside view, can you understand the needs of people but also the channels needed to support them. The strategic alignment has to be done with a “big picture,” having the business architecture in mind that supports the strategic goals of the organization, and become an analytical “e-harmony” process where the actual configuration of the organization's strategy is a consequence of design and implementation strategies.
From cozy to creative tension: Many organizations are not fertile ground for ideation, silo thinking, bureaucracy, and internal politics, create negative vibes surrounding their working environment. People in those environments avoid taking risks and seldom learn from their mistakes, get stuck at their own comfort zone for self-preservation; or have no energy or desire left to think long term. To make a smooth digital transformation, it’s critical to develop an organizational environment that inspires positive emotions and facilitates creativity, allow ideas to flow, get protected, channeled and nurtured. In fact, innovation often comes from the floor and not the ceiling. You can feel the creative tension when you sense the freedom to be creative, the harmony not via compliance only, but through idea sharing and open debating.
From vulnerability to anti-fragility: The inevitable range, breadth, depth, and pace of uncontrollable factors acting on any organizations across vertical sectors mean identifying business vulnerability and constant fine-tuning are essential to improve the organizational maturity. From an organizational management perspective, the complication of traditional organizations caused by over-layering, rigid hierarchies, fractal structure, or the machine-like operational model with a kind of reductionism, mechanism, or approximation, etc, could make the business vulnerable in the face of volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity of digital new normal. Thus, it’s important to shape a digital organization with some antifragile characteristics such as optionality, interdependence, self-healing, etc, for allowing the business to tolerate volatility or even thrive from it. A high mature digital business as a complex system, contrary to what people believe, does not always require complicated systems, regulations and intricate policies. The simpler, the better. Autonomy is encouraged and look for optionality.
Running a high-competitive digital business is complex because all things do interact, particularly in the case of nonlinear interactions and interdependent relationships. It’s critical to make smooth transitions from static to flow, silo to holistic, and mechanical to organic. The more effortlessly you can guide, align, integrate, and optimize important business elements such as people, process, and technology, the closer you can accelerate business performance and lift the business up to the hyper-cycle of digital transformation.
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