The Very Characteristics of Organization with High Changeability

 It’s important to first understand how much change capability is really required for the effort you are kicking off, adapt to the continuous changes via self-adaptability and self-renewal.

With continuous disruptions and fierce competitions, organizations can make major leaps forward in developing change capability and capacity by involving the entire organization in digital transformation efforts that support key business strategies to drive performance improvement and accelerate business speed. Here is a set of the very characteristics of digital organization with high changeability.

Flexibility - able to figure out alternative ways to do things: One of the biggest challenges in this complex digital world is the fact that we need different perspectives, different knowledge and different ways to solve problems. Flexibility is about embracing different PoVs and figuring out alternative ways to solve problems. Flexible organizations tend to have business managers with the right mix of digital leadership traits and a variety of skills. They are clearly comfortable with ambiguity and uncertainty without being slaves to them. They do not focus on hierarchy but on information, ideas, creativity, flexibility, openness, and problem-solving. The culture of flexibility advocated by effective leadership is about bringing out the best in others, building flexible teams, with extensive experience and high responsiveness.

Digital organizations achieve strategic flexibility by developing the lego-like module design architecture, hybrid organizational structures, and dynamic capabilities with quality and reusability. Flatter structures will help to speed up organizational response to changing markets by improving the organizational structural flexibility to break down silos and enforce cross-functional collaboration. Ideally, the digital organizational structure needs to be solid enough to keep things in order but also fluid enough to interact with the expanded digital ecosystem seamlessly.

Robustness - able to withstand adverse conditions: Digital organizations are information overloading and knowledge abundant, siloed or outdated knowledge stifles organizational change and decreases business speed. To reach information robustness and knowledge abundance, you need to not only assimilate the existing knowledge, more importantly, but you also have to create the new knowledge, more frequently to replace the out of dated knowledge, build robust, not overly rigid processes to do the work, develop innovative partnership and intimate customer relationships, and leverages flexibility to unlock performance.

Strategy management is not a series of linear processes but an iterative strategy execution continuum. Strategy making process should be robust, not overly rigid. The development of robust business strategies is greatly aided by beginning with a rich problem framing process, robust strategy alternatives, agreed criteria on which the strategies ought to be compared, an understanding of the risks/uncertainties facing the business unit in executing the strategy. Examine sensitivity analysis results to identify possible ways to further improve the promising alternatives.

Resilience - able to recover quickly from adverse and unpreventable conditions: Either at the individual or business level, resilience is the ability to respond to changes proactively, stay positive, focus, and flexible. The level of organizational resilience depends on how they can manage the gray area effectively at today’s “VUCA” –Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous business environment. The key is balance, giving enough autonomy to the business to make its own decisions or manage risks effectively.

A business system gains more and more energy until it crosses the point of system resilience. Strategic risks are about uncertainties, inherent variability and the unknown interdependencies among sources of risks. To improve organizational resilience, the risk management mechanism needs to be well embedded into both soft business factors such as corporate culture and hard organizational elements such as process; it is less about control, but more about risk intelligence.

Heralding an ecological digital organization with high changeability need to emphasize participation, relationships, communication, collaboration and unlock business performance and potential continually. It’s important to first understand how much change capability is really required for the effort you are kicking off, adapt to the continuous changes via self-adaptability, self-renewal, and maintaining the digital balance, weaving all necessary business elements into the building blocks of business capability and highlighting the very characteristics of “Changeable Organization.”

Posted in: Change Management,Digital Master,KPIs