How to Shape High Mature Digital Organizations via Unusual Angles

The digital dynamism consists in being able to break away from static or stale, and being able to keep information and ideas flow across the functional and even organizational boundaries for catalyzing changes.

The digital era upon us is volatile, complex, uncertain, and ambiguous. There are many causes of business stagnation and numerous roadblocks to changes, such as short-sightedness, culture inertia, misalignment of systems, inflexible processes, overly rigid organizational hierarchy, functional silos, groupthink, comfort zone, status quo, or lack of creativity, etc. How to shape high mature digital organizations via unusual angles for enforcing hyperconnectivity, interdependence, and people-centricity.

Touchpoints: The emerging digital platforms and collaboration tools enable the business to break down functional, organizational or even industrial silos. An enterprise has many and varied “touchpoints” between itself and the environment of which it is a part in order to adapt to business dynamics, ensuring that the enterprise is connected to all the appropriate ecosystem, lattice or otherwise, touchpoints. Therefore, it requires a different design of management with a new set of tools. The business management style should shift from “command and control,” hard force” driven, and out-of-date disjointed top-down management paradigms to a large dash of “freedom to manage,” with more fluid and responsive network forms with some “soft touch.”

Digital organizations are nonlinear systems and subsystems in which there may be crucial touchpoints and numerous elements in achieving the desired impact that can sometimes be the result of a very small initiative or decision, this is the magic of nonlinear systems reasoning. If you pick the right thing to alter, you can sometimes achieve enormous outcomes at little or no expenditure of effort on your part. This approach requires great knowledge and insights. Moreover, rapid changes do not happen in isolation from each other in a predictable way; it is important to apply contextual understanding to dig into the “HOW” part of an integral design and become highly responsive to changes and highly innovative to thrive in the complex ecosystem, and ultimately, organizations need to ensure the business as a whole is superior to the sum of pieces.

Rough spot: Newtonian mechanics based on reductionism have fueled industrialization. However, now we are moving in the hyperconnected digital economy, business leaders can't just sit back and apply yesterday’s techniques to today's problems. Terminology differences are a rough spot. Each school of management, as in all schools use particular terms in specific contexts to standardize their use and mean the same thing to all practitioners within that school. To break down old school silos of thoughts and traditional management, visionary leadership, cross-functional communication, collaboration, transparency, etc, are the keys to breaking down the perceptions and realities of the existing or emerging issues and harness the holistic management disciplines. The “across schools” practitioners can speak different languages, each sees the world through their practices and manage change differently.

Digital businesses today are more like the organic living thing keeps growing, rather than the mechanical system keeps spinning. Therefore, to break down the old reductionistic management discipline, holism needs to be the digital management theme. To keep evolved and invested in the greater purpose or vision, every department in the company needs to work together to be successful, It takes collaborative efforts across the entire business scope to streamline processes and keep information flow seamlessly and run a fluid digital business seamlessly.

Thin line: As you learn more from failure than from your success. There's no shame in knowingly starting something that might succeed, but might fail as well. There is a thin line here between success and failure, as everybody has some sort of such a system in place. In fact, learning from failures is a way to improve until you find a wonderful solution that will suit the market or simply a waste of time. If you never fail, you're never taking any risks, or you're calling things successful that wasn't.

Emotionally, no one wants to fail even if it is a small failure. Regardless of if it’s good or bad, the outcome is not anticipated and expected. In practice, where there is a risk, you want to investigate it early and find out whether or not it can be addressed. Failure is a failure and a fantastic opportunity to learn something and then to have another go. You can only FAIL BETTER only if you learn from the failures. And then failing is something that prompts you to move ahead.

The digital dynamism consists in being able to break away from static or stale, and being able to keep information and ideas flow across the functional and even organizational boundaries for catalyzing changes. Today’s digital leaders and professionals need to be dynamic with open, intelligent, and growth mindset, have high abilities to understand and handle changes from different angles, enforce creative communication to suit varying situations so as to make things happening and develop organizational competencies to shape a high mature digital organization.

Posted in: Digital Master,Digital Maturity,Systems Wisdom