Digital Management Styles

The digital management styles are interrelational, interactional, and integral, ultimately, systematic and innovative.

We are living in a “VUCA” complex world in which inventions, developments, and conflicts are continuously changing and that makes it impossible to have complete knowledge and understanding of many complex issues today.

Traditional “command & control” management style loses the steam, the digital management approaches are adaptive and flexible, applying systems thinking to gain a holistic understanding of the organization, manage business relationships and resources effectively, take a comprehensive, anticipatory, and design approach to radically advance human well-being and build healthy business ecosystems smoothly.

Interrelational: Digital organizations are dynamic and ever-evolving, with the blurring functional, geographical, and even the industrial borders. In fact, for businesses to work in a self-sustaining (emergent) way, they need to be the dynamic, hyper-connected, and interdependent system that keeps evolving. Therefore, it’s important for leaders and managers to learn how to think about systemic wholeness, seeing interrelationships rather than isolated things, for understanding patterns of changes rather than static “snapshots.”

The digital organizational structure is interrelational to connect cross-functional dots so the business management practices need to be informative, interactive, and help to reduce the tensions, frictions, and conflicts that arise. The holistic digital management is about leveraging Systems Thinking to see a system as a set of interwoven threads, establish digital management principles for understanding how the “part” interconnects with the” whole.” The digital management processes should be developed to help communicate objects and concepts smoothly and drive changes via the "pulling" and anticipating.

Interactional: The whole is greater than the sum of the parts. Identify business system/subsystem input/output boundaries, the organizational system interaction, information collection on subsystem input or output, modeling, and analysis of the business system or subsystems, as well as external variables to the system that can and cannot be controlled. The digital interactional management processes should be developed that help to communicate with the “two-way” street and keep business flow across the boundaries without friction.

“A System is not the sum of its parts, but the product of the interaction of those parts." -Russ Ackoff. Structure and behavior are two elements co-working in every nature organism and in every system designed by human nature. Digital management fosters communication, collaboration, and accountability so the large group of people can interact, form, and amplify collective capabilities to deal with common business challenges and achieve well-set goals. It also helps to diagnose business issues with a holistic viewpoint and take actions via cross-functional collaboration, and continuous interaction.

Integral: Every system is a construct of the mind. It is like three sides of a con, this side, that side, and the integrative relationship between them. Using math, the formula looks like"(this, that) interaction = whole." The coherent Business Logic of the enterprise involves multiple integration logics such as technical integration, operations integration, GRC integration or customer-centric integration, etc. Without the whole picture with cohesive integration logic, separate parts of the organization will care for their own part but cause redundancy or unwanted complications later on.

Digital organizations are organic systems with integrated organizational management processes being developed that help to build a cohesive set of business capabilities. Digital management is system-oriented, integrating Organizational Design (OD) into the process design and organizational re-engineering, to ensure that the whole is superior to the sum of pieces and manage the business in a structural way under complex, uncertain and ambiguous circumstances.

The very characteristics of digital organizations are hyper-connectivity, hyper-complexity, and interdependence; and with the increasing speed of changes, traditional management is just not fit enough for speeding up and toning the business competency. The digital management styles are interrelational, interactional, and integral, ultimately, systematic and innovative. After capturing a big picture type of holistic view, and then, the strategic goals need to be well planned and thoughtfully renewed to achieve the “art of possible.”

Posted in: Digital Master,Digital Maturity,Systems Wisdom