The Monthly CIO Debates Collection & “Digital IT” Book Tuning: Insightful Questions to Drive IT Change Oct. 2020

 Debating is not for stimulating conflicts, but for brainstorming better ways to do things.

Due to the changing nature of technology, IT leadership roles also continue to involve & shift the focus, to move up the maturity level. More and more CIOs are requested to take more responsibility and many CIOs present the breadth of leadership competency. The proactive IT debates help IT leaders to brainstorm better ways to do things and improve management capabilities. Here are the monthly CIO debates collections about envisioning digital IT leadership and running high-performance digital IT organizations.

    Insightful Questions to Drive IT Change

Can CIOs Create “Blue Ocean” to Run a Digital Business Now, Information is permeating into every corner of the business and IT is impacting so many business activities at the organization, CIOs can no longer hide in the corner to run an isolated organization, they need to have a holistic view of the business from a senior business leader’s perspectives and to provide the added value of abundance of information and emerging business technologies. More importantly, they should create or explore the “blue ocean” to run a highly innovative digital business.

The CIO as “Chief Improvement Officer”: How to Drive Evolutionary Change for Running Digital-Ready IT? Technology becomes pervasive in the modern enterprise, IT continues to grow in importance to organizations, both operationally and as a competitive advantage. Nowadays, regardless of whether they like it or not, CIOs have to play multiple roles and often get obsessed with many things. One of the most pertinent roles for CIO is to become the “Chief Improvement Officer,” to drive evolutionary change and run a digital ready IT organization.

Is IT Viewed as an Inhibitor or the Driver of Change We live in a technological world and every day more and more technology affects the way we live and work. Great opportunity, danger, and disruption are around every corner. However, many IT organizations are still perceived by business as a support function, slow to change. Forward-looking CIOs need to ask themselves: Is IT viewed as an inhibitor or the driver of change? What’re the best and next practices to reinvent IT for getting digital ready?

CIOs as “Chief Initiative Officer”: How to Take Initiatives on Change, Innovation, and Digital Transformation? The magic “I” in the CIO’s titles implies so many things: “Chief Information Officer,” “Chief Innovation Officer,” “Chief Improvement Officer,” “Chief Influence Officer,” "Chief Insight Officer," etc. In practice, the CIO role should transform from a reactive IT manager to a proactive digital leader; from a controller to a change agent Thus, the CIO as “Chief Initiative Officer” has become necessary or even imperative to manage strategic digital alignment and orchestration from concept to post-implementation of all initiatives from the C-level to the front lines, focus on changes and innovation. CIOs are also quite eager and enthusiastic to drive challenging transformation initiatives, to reinvent IT as the information hub and the business growth engine.

Why Is so Hard for Running IT “Out of the Comfort Zone” Technology is pervasive, information is growing exponentially. Business transformation or change initiatives today nearly always involves some form of information and technology. All forward-thinking organizations across the industries claim they are in the information management business. To adapt to the increasing speed of changes, organizations have to be more nimble about updating technology and managing information effectively. Hence, IT organizations today can no longer get stuck at the lower level of maturity to keep the lights on only or get struggling to make an alignment with the business. Digital IT organizations must get “out of the comfort zone,” to explore better ways of running IT as a trusted business partner, proactive change agent, and hyper-connected innovation hub. "Continual improvement" is the IT mantra in the digital era

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 3 million page views with 7200+ blog posting in 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. blog posting. The content richness is not for its own sake, but to convey the vision and share the wisdom. Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking and innovating new ideas; it’s not just about WHAT to say, but about WHY to say, and HOW to say it. It reflects the color and shade of your thought patterns, and it indicates the peaks and curves of your thinking waves. Unlike pure entertainment, quality and professional content takes time for digesting, contemplation and engaging, and therefore, it takes time to attract the "hungry minds" and the "deep souls." It’s the journey to amplify diverse voices and deepen digital footprints, and it's the way to harness your innovative spirit.

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Introduction


Chapter 1 Digital IT Leadership Q&A

Chapter 2 Digital IT Fitness Q&A

Chapter 3 Digital IT Innovation Paradox Q&As

Chapter 4 Digital IT Management Dilemmas

Chapter 5 Digital IT Potential Q&As

Chapter 6 Digital IT Priority Q&As

Chapter 7 IT-Business Gap Q&As

Chapter 8 Digital IT Performance Q&As

Chapter 9 IT Branding Q&As

Chapter 10: Digital IT Talent Management Q&As

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“Undermine” Quotes of “Digital Master” Oct. 2020

Great leaders have balanced viewpoints to perceive success and failure objectively, showing respect - even in failure - must be an expectation at all levels. Those who do not demonstrate respect for others' failure will eventually undermine the culture of creativity.

"Digital Master” is a series of guidebooks (28 + books) to perceive the multi-faceted impact digital is making to the businesses and society, help forward-thinking organizations navigate through the journey in a systematic way, and avoid “rogue digital.”

It perceives the emergent trends of digital leadership, provides advice on how to run a digital organization to unleash its full potential and improve agility, maturity, and provide insight about Change Management. It also instructs the digital workforce on how to shape a game-changing digital mindset and build the right set of digital capabilities to compete for the future. Here is a set of Undermine” quotes in “Digital Master.”

Weak cultures rely on a bureaucracy to enforce rules and regulations that undermine an organization's speed, simplicity, and competitiveness. Great organizations live their values!

If the battle between business and IT is still on, IT could lose the opportunity to toot its horn the “right way,” and actually undermine how much intelligence/experience/skill was required for running a high-performance organization.

Great leaders have balanced viewpoints to perceive success and failure objectively, showing respect - even in failure - must be an expectation at all levels. Those who do not demonstrate respect for others' failure will eventually undermine the culture of creativity.

Many say boards do not pay enough attention to the culture within the company. since the culture can undermine strategy. The board has to pay more attention to the culture, which will "eat the strategy" otherwise.

When weak cultures rely on a bureaucracy to enforce rules and regulations that undermine an organization's speed, adaptability, and competitiveness, it’s time to change.

Strategic plans are about change and changes will challenge some employees status quo, jobs, prestige. Expect them to undermine your strategies, so find a way to work around them, believe in your plan, communicate it widely,

The weak support from senior leaders is the most common reason for failure. Sometimes key leaders actually do not support a change and actively undermine that change. More often than not, however, leaders do support the change but radically under-estimate the importance of their active and visible support for the change.

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Innovation-Led Digital Transformation

The challenge of managing innovation is an overly conservative approach itself, focusing on individual line extension renovation rather than developing a broader portfolio.

Due to rapid change and continuous disruptions, companies have huge pressures to survive and thrive in today’s hyper competitive economic dynamic. To be a highly functional and adaptive organizational system, innovation is what leads to differentiation. There are many ways to differentiate and, therefore, there are many ways to pursue innovation. 

Fundamentally, innovation is all about figuring out the better way to solve problems and pursue truth. In the rapidly evolving business and economic systems, innovation management is very complex but critical for the firm’s survival and thriving. In fact, forward-thinking companies encourage “out-of-box” thinking and make innovation-led digital transformation proactively.

Intersectional innovation: Creativity often happens at the intersection of conscious and subconscious thinking; knowledge and imagination, and all sorts of interdisciplinary dots connected to generate novel ideas. Innovation is a process to transform those great ideas and achieve their commercial values. Innovation often happens at the intersections of business and IT, or people and technology. Intersection innovation happens when ideas result from the clash of consumers and producers are more likely to be out of the box and disruptive, to create and manage ideas in an interdisciplinary way.

Digital Information Technology is in the unique position to oversee the underlying functions and processes which underpin innovation capability. The intersection of IT and people is where innovation happens; companies need to invest in IT necessary to advance businesses through either incremental or radical innovation. To amplify innovation effect, some additional innovation variables that might merit consideration are the scope, scale, and impact of the changes. Information Technology catalyzes innovation and drives a seamless digital transformation.

Directional Innovation: Innovation is the means to end. It is important to think when talking about innovation, not purely about technological advancements or breakthrough innovations, but also about different propositions, approaches to solve a problem or achieve the well-set business vision. A significant change can be called as a directional innovation if taking an alternative approach to make an impact on the corporation’s long term perspective or lead to increased revenue generation, either from expanding existing markets or creating entirely new markets. The challenge for directional innovation management is to understand where and how you can improve to scale for getting the biggest effect on either improving business performance or unleashing its potential.

We live in the era of people centricity, focusing on customers' needs should be an easier path to drive directional innovation. Innovation can be achieved with empathy, looking beyond the direct customer problem, wish or request, taking the context of use into account and perhaps by using a wide network of experts to come up with new propositions. Customers cannot solve your problems, but they can provide insight into their goals, their problems, and their context is invaluable. Customers may not always know the "products or services” they want, but they clearly understand their needs and pains, so involve them as early as possible in the process of directional innovation.

Ecological innovation: The traditional hierarchical lines will phase out and a collective of business partners, customers will emerge working collaboratively to co-solve complex problems collectively and drive ecological innovation effortlessly. Some companies have created institutional platforms that focus on building longer-term relationships, and sustaining mass collaboration that allows participants to develop subject knowledge over time and focus more directly on business objectives and digitally enabled innovation and transformation. The ecosystems draw together mutually supportive companies from multiple industries that collectively seek to create differentiated value that could not create alone, spark innovation and lead to collective progress.

The unprecedented convenience brought by digital technologies makes the world smaller and flatter, and brings fierce competitions across the global scope. It's important for businesses to digitally connect key resources in their vicinity/context to the resource-rich innovation hubs across the business ecosystem. Ecological innovation happens in the space between people in relationships receptively and thoughtfully interacting with interest and caring for one another’s needs, orchestrating the total enterprise ecosystem to either generate wealth for shareholders or generate prosperity of constituencies, co-develop great ideas or co-solving tough problems. Many companies that get stuck at the lower level of organizational maturity have never been better positioned to break out of a static industry box and engage in mass collaborations to spark creativity and enforce innovation. When continuing innovation takes place for the community to thrive, the ecosystem is dynamic and healthy, keep a balanced cycle and reach the renewal stage.

The challenge of managing innovation is an overly conservative approach itself, focusing on individual line extension renovation rather than developing a broader portfolio. The business and economic environment play an important role in sparking creativity and catalyzing innovation. It’s important to gain an in-depth understanding of different flavors of innovation as the variety of ideas or innovation directly contributes to the business value in terms of engagement, productivity, and profitability. Innovation happens frictionlessly in an open environment, that in turn, should lead to “inspirations,” which will further fuel more inclusiveness and innovation and drive digital transformation continually.

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The Monthly Quality Master Book Tuning: Insight of Information/Knowledge/Software Quality Oct. 2020

Insight is perception through multidimensional cognizance. 

Digital organizations arise when the scale of the interrelations, interactions, or inter-relational interactions surpasses the silo-based organizational capacity. Quality management ensures that in an organization, products or services are consistent to meet customers’ satisfaction. Digital Quality management needs to take an overarching approach with multidisciplinary practices. Quality is everyone’s business.


This book “Quality Master: The World Class Insight about Quality” is not about discussing specific quality standards or techniques well adopted in different industries, but for sharing some insight on how to understand the multitude of quality attributes from different perspectives, recognize quality champions to inspire quality culture, set digital principles and develop the best and next digital quality management practices.

          Insight of Information/Knowledge/Software Quality

The gaps between knowledge and insight? Insight is perception through multidimensional cognizance. If knowledge is manpower, wisdom is nature power, then insight is perhaps the bridge between manpower and nature power. There are multilayer meanings upon insight. The gaps between knowledge and insight are existing, and how to dive into the depth of knowledge sea and climb the insight-wisdom pyramid?

The Insight and Impact of Software Quality With information permeation and continuous disruptions often led by technology, IT needs to become strategic focused and increase the top-line business profitability for the company. Fundamentally, IT is a scientific and system engineering organization, which is shifting from monolithic technology focus to mosaic information-driven. Not all IT departments are staffed properly to be software development houses yet they are often required to do custom software development and deliver high-quality products and services to delight customers.

Three Quality Aspects of Digital IT Software quality begins with the quality of the requirements. Every company desires to have 'quality software.' But the challenge is that many people struggle to provide a definition or rationale. It is an age-old adage that you can't nail software quality down to a single definition. And perhaps we try too hard to come up with one-size fits all into a single sentence. In fact, there are quite a few perspectives on quality software.

CIOs as “Chief Inspection Offer”: The Important Factors In Digital Quality Management  Quality management ensures that an organization, product or service is consistent, effective, and meet customers' expectations. As Drucker wisely put it: you can only manage what you measure. The quantitative measurement helps management continue improving IT efficiency. Quality management ensures that an organization, product or service is consistent, effective, and meets customers’ expectations. Modern IT organizations are the complex business system,...

The New Book Introduction: “Quality Master: The World Class Insight about Quality” Digital organizations arise when the scale of the interrelations, interactions, or inter-relational interactions surpasses the silo-based organizational capacity. Quality management ensures that in an organization, products or services are consistent to meet customers’ satisfaction. Digital Quality management needs to take an overarching approach with multidisciplinary practices. Quality is everyone’s business. This book “Quality Master: The World Class Insight about Quality” is not about discussing specific quality standards or techniques well adopted in different industries, but for sharing some insight on how to understand the multitude of quality attributes from different perspectives, recognize quality champions to inspire quality culture, set digital principles and develop the best and next digital quality management practices. Slideshare Presentation

Quality is about doing the right things right the first time. High-quality enterprise consists of high-quality people, products, or services; business capabilities and processes, etc. To effectively lead the organization to reach the next level of business maturity, it’s important to shape quality as the mindset and quality as the management discipline.

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“Yield” Quotes of “Digital Master” Oct. 2020

The most productive innovation teams should apply multiple knowledge disciplines, close cognitive gaps, connect wider dots to yield better ideas, and competitive advantage.

"Digital Master” is a series of guidebooks (28 + books) to perceive the multi-faceted impact digital is making to the businesses and society, help forward-thinking organizations navigate through the journey in a systematic way, and avoid “rogue digital.”

It perceives the emergent trends of digital leadership, provides advice on how to run a digital organization to unleash its full potential and improve agility, maturity, and provide insight about Change Management. It also instructs the digital workforce on how to shape a game-changing digital mindset and build the right set of digital capabilities to compete for the future. Here is a set of Yield” quotes in “Digital Master.”

1 It's important to outline the strategic intent and frame the strategy to be understandable and implementable. Otherwise, people's different interpretations yield many unintended consequences.

2 The "thinking" part of ST implies an ST approach - when applied to a problem description - may yield several significantly different solution descriptions. And different ST methods are likely to yield a wider set of solutions.

3 IT organizations have finite resources to apply to get the best yield possible to meet stakeholders’ expectations. IT Architecture deals with business initiatives, derived from strategy, improves visibility of applications, and maps the applications to the processes.

4 The most productive innovation teams should apply multiple knowledge disciplines, close cognitive gaps, connect wider dots to yield better ideas, and competitive advantage.

5 Processes underpin the business strategy. The processes are the tool to get the result you formulate in the strategy. The level of automation can play a role in selecting the right processes for improvement and yield high ROI.

6 From a process management perspective, not all activities within a process can be automated but automation certainly makes the process more repeatable and predictable. The level of automation can play a role in choosing the right process for improvement and yield high ROI.

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Capability Development Deployment via Asking "Who, What and How”

There are competitions, conflicts, and controversies all over the place in today’s complex marketing environment. The dynamic capabilities can be built via sensing changes within the business ecosystem. 

Organizations across vertical sectors are on the journey to make digital transformation. Transformational capability creates something new out of something old, for reaching the new horizon out of an existing vision. 

Organizations across vertical sectors need to discover their “innate strength,” do enterprise capability mapping to streamline strategy management, understand relationships or dependencies between different capabilities, recognize their people with high competency, and make an objective assessment of their business capability maturity. In specific, business capability development answers questions such as ‘who,’ ‘what’ and ‘how,’ etc., to clarify its coherence, build core business competency, and improve organizational maturity.

What capabilities are crucial to enable a good strategy which helps the organization reach a well-shaped vision: Processes underpin capability, and capabilities underpin business strategy. The “big picture” view of capability is the condition or suitability of organizational capability to support the intended future operating model and implement a well-defined business strategy. Enterprise capability management, in essence, is to identify capability gaps, designing and modeling a portfolio of capabilities that are used in various combinations to execute the business strategy and achieve expected business outcomes.

Take a viewpoint, risk-based approach, identify capability patterns of the company and the risk profile of the enterprise performance deficiencies. If you cannot see or read your strategic competencies and capabilities, then it's a great question to ask of the executive and strategic planning team. So the capability mapping is a useful tool to visualize the enterprise, highlighting the value of having a good understanding of current and future capabilities. A core competency of the enterprise is a combination and harmonization of multiple capabilities with a focus; it’s valuable, rare, and difficult to imitate. Organizations with multiple and complementary core competencies can unlock business performance and build differentiated business advantages.

How to shape the critical business capabilities by leveraging the limited business resource and expertise: Work, consisting of atomic or composite steps that transform resources to achieve an objective or provide a capability. Organizational capabilities continue being considered the market-relevant bundles of resources with the potential to drive business competitiveness. With emerging digital technologies and abundant information, the hyper-connecting nature of digital organization offers particularly fertile ground for developing dynamic and recombinant digital capabilities with all crucial business elements such as people, process, technology, resources, etc, cross-industry ecosystems to drive an iterative strategy execution continuum.

Because the ways of doing business and customer expectations both tend to be more flexible, responsive, and entrepreneurial, than the siloed industrial age. Dynamic capabilities are the organizational and strategic routines by which firms achieve new resource configurations as markets emerge, collide, split, evolve, etc. On one side, activities describe the processes and procedures carried out to actively change an effect object, a target resource, which is an important building block of dynamic capability; on the other side, the “Dynamic Capabilities” could be qualified as a business resource. Loose coupling makes it possible to change the components without affecting the system. In fact, Dynamic Capability is a firm-specific resource/asset that is difficult if not impossible to imitate because of the degree of organizational learning capacity, unique culture ingredient, or management expertise.

Who are high potential and top performers possess differentiated professional competencies to orchestrate unique competency of the business: Any entity, human, automated, or any aggregation of human or automated, performs an activity and provides a capability. A professional is an individual who strives to represent skills to perform certain activities and delivers high quality. In fact, people are the most critical success factors of the business to develop unique business competencies and achieve higher than expected business results. Organizations can make an objective assessment of their people by asking: How well does the individual continue to perform and grow in their current roles, how likely are they to take on new challenges at work, rapidly learn and grow into next-level roles, or roles that are expanded and redefined as business changes?

A high professional presents either high competency or high potential. High performers understand the business requirements with stakeholders engagement in the activities they perform. High potentials who are distinguished usually by their mastery of new roles quickly and effectively, learn more rapidly than their peers, and they are the driven force to build dynamic business competency. Both high performers and high potentials need to demonstrate a certain level of leadership skills - ability to listen, align, motivate, inspire others to achieve the desired results. Highly capable professionals are learning agile. From accumulating working experience to sharpening linear skillset to building the nonlinear professional skills, and ultimately developing a cohesive capability portfolio, they can improve digital proficiency, and orchestrate unique competency of the business.

There are competitions, conflicts, and controversies all over the place in today’s complex marketing environment. The dynamic capabilities can be built via sensing changes within the business ecosystem. It is important to look at dynamic capability from a quite different perspective, apply a capability map to identify critical patterns, business components, and the digital management disciplines for making holistic investment decisions, expediting the capability delivery cycle, and building differentiated company advantage smoothly.

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Insight of the Week 10/23 - 10/30 “Future of CIO” Oct. 2020

 Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking, brainstorming, innovating and sharing.

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 3 million page views with 7200+ blog posting in 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. The “Digital Master” book series includes 28 books to share insight from the multidimensional digital lens and perceive the multi-faceted impact the digital era upon us is making to businesses and society. The content richness is not for its own sake, but to convey the vision and share the wisdom. Here is the weekly insight of digital leadership, IT Management, and Talent Management.

Capability Mapping and Development to Shape Business Competency Organizational capabilities continue being considered the market-relevant bundles of resources with the potential to drive business competitiveness. A "business capability" describes what is a business entity in the organization, what is their purpose and output to the enterprise. There are many "ingredients" in business capability development such as people, processes, technology, and various intangible and tangible resources, etc. It is crucial to identify and close enterprise capability gaps, doing effective capability mapping, and proactively developing a set of differentiated capabilities to enable strategy execution, achieving business coherence and improving organizational maturity.

Real-Time GRC in the Boardroom Now with the uncertainty around almost all industry sectors, companies large or small are faced with volatile market situations, emerging digital technology trends, extreme competition, nonlinearity, and ambiguity, etc. Corporate GRC disciplines have a direct link to business and its processes, and foster guidance, values, and principles governing the company's commercial activities for adapting to the business new normal. The purpose of running a digital corporate board is to direct the organization in the right direction, enforcing GRC disciplines in an almost real-time manner and monitor its performance continuously.

Business Intelligence-led Performance Management Business Intelligence refers to computer-based techniques used in spotting, digging-out, and analyzing business data, to achieve and evaluate business value. Businesses need insights that drive real value. Enterprise Performance Management is the integration of multiple disciplines with each embedded with business analytics, such as segmentation analysis, and especially predictive analytics, to make better decisions and assess the business results of strategy management effectively.

Influence Competency and Professional Maturity Digital transformation is an evolutionary journey which means a renewed understanding of the future of business-what’re the disruptive trends; how your organization catalyzes the progressive changes and how much better you can do to leverage creativity and lead a seamless transformation. Influence competency is based on the leadership substances such as vision and purpose with effective styles such as participation, coaching or delegation. In order to make profound influence, you must demonstrate high levels of cognitive intelligence and various skills (as following), and have strong ethics, responsibility, integrity, and empathy.

Perceptive Problem-Solving "Digital Master” Perception is the way that your eyes see the world and your mind interpret it. How you perceive the situation or the world depends on your cognitive abilities, knowledge, experiences, and capabilities, etc. Thus, it’s personal. Due to exponential growth of information and continuous disruptions, more often than not, those existing or emergent problems also become more complex than ever. Thus, either individually or collectively, perceptive intelligence is crucial to define the right problems and solve them effectively.

Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking about the new ideas; it’s not just about WHAT to say, but about WHY to say, and HOW to say it. It reflects the color and shade of your thought patterns, and it indicates the peaks and curves of your thinking waves. Unlike pure entertainment, quality and professional content takes time for digesting, contemplation and engaging, and therefore, it takes time to attract the "hungry minds" and the "deep souls." It’s the journey to amplify diverse voices and deepen digital footprints, and it's the way to harness your innovative spirit.

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The Best “Understanding” (iii) Quotes of “Digital Master” Oct, 2020

 When you truly understand, you know the real issues are, you’ll know what you need, and how to get what you need to fix them.

"Digital Master” is the series of guidebooks (28+ books) to perceive the multi-faceted impact digital is making to the businesses and society, help forward-thinking organizations navigate through the journey in a systematic way, and avoid “rogue digital.” 

It perceives the emergent trends of digital leadership, advises on how to run a digital organization to unleash its full potential and improve agility, maturity, and provide insight about Change Management. It also instructs the digital workforce on how to shape a game-changing digital mindset and build the right set of digital capabilities to compete for the future. Here is a set of “Understanding” quotes (iii) in “Digital Master.’

1 With today’s digital new normal - velocity, complexity, uncertainty, and ambiguity, in-depth understanding of either problem you intend to solve or the people you try to get to know have become an important quality for digital leaders and professionals.

2 Lack of understanding leads to “fixing the symptom, not the root cause” syndrome, and could be the very reason for the “Mighty Fall.”

3 When you truly understand, you know the real issues are, you’ll know what you need, and how to get what you need to fix them.

4 When in-depth thoughts and understanding transcend into wisdom, the good solution to a specific problem can be scaled and applied to other domains; the mindsets with a cognitive difference can be connected via empathy and the hearts can be touched via positive emotion flows.

5 First, understand, and then be understood, in this order. Sufficient, especially interdisciplinary knowledge is fundamental to spark creativity and gain insight.

6 Leadership must go beyond the status quo, to value collective wisdom, because it helps you actually understand the problem, and understanding a problem is the most critical step in solving it. Leadership is not about who is above, but who has a real understanding with insight to see underneath the surface: Effective leadership must come from in-depth understanding first, before communicating. To put it briefly, understanding and insight are leadership substance, and communication is the leadership style.

7 The insight is based on fully understanding which takes both creativity and reasoning, intuition and logic, the power of acute observation and deduction, questioning, connection, penetration, discernment, and perception.

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Leading Digital Transformation via Culture Evolution

Culture is deeper, culture is changeable, and the speed of culture change may also be expedited as the world becomes more hyper-connected and interdependent.

Every organization exhibits a culture. Anytime people work together for an extended period of time, a culture is formed. The departments within the organization have a subculture. The divergent workgroups that operate within the organizational system or subsystem also have a subculture. People’s demeanor, how they relate to one another, how they confront issues and resolve them is due to culture as well. 

We all know the old saying: Culture eats strategy for lunch. Organizations across vertical sectors are transforming from industrial silos to hyperconnected holistic digital businesses. How to make an impact on organizational culture to lead expected transformation and unlock the full business potential?

From culture as a custom to culture as a corporate mindset, attitude & character: When talking about culture, most people think about custom and only see the iceberg of culture: art, food, fashion, behavior, communication patterns, body language, mass media. In the corporate setting, culture should not be seen superficially as, "is everyone happy or we all wear jeans to work." Such understanding perhaps only scratches the surface of in-depth culture discipline. Culture is something a company does; it's the collective mindsets & character that are closer or further from an ideal. The character is fed by the heart and mind, we really need the acumen and power to probe at a very deep level. We call it organizational culture when such a mindset and attitude is set at the very top of the organization, and when people from top down concern about which ideas within our walls that derive profitable actions and collective confidence and wisdom.

Culture is a corporate mindset & character. Without character, the strategy is just a style without substance. Without a high performance culture, there is a lack of passion, motivation, and engagement to implement a strategy. Culture is often the #1 root cause to fail strategy. Culture change is a tough journey as you can’t impose the desired culture to your organization. To change "culture" is to change the persistent emotional experience of the people, there is friction and change inertia. First of all, you need to make an objective assessment by understanding the varying issues such as: the cognitive skills and decision-making biases; behavioral styles and patterns; or motivational drivers and passions at the corporate level. Altogether and combined, they provide a well-rounded assessment baseline of the organizational "character.” And then, you can follow a set of well defined principles and practices to transform culture. There needs to have a strong corporate character to make your organization unique. Without integrity of character, the good strategy will fail to inspire confidence and achieve business goals and objectives.

From culture as an asset to culture as a corporate competency: Organizations rise and fall, not on the quantum of plans and resources, but on the capabilities to manage, lead, yet most importantly to execute. it. Culture is a soft asset, but also a tough element which can harden the hardest, and lift your organization to the next level of digital maturity effortlessly, or sink your business tragically. Culture is invisible, but the culture system is a powerful pillar to run a digital organization. Culture is certainly part of the environment in which an organization operates, it represents the 'box' in which decisions and actions occur. In order to move up to the next level of organizational maturity, companies need to build culture as a corporate competency and the cultural aspect is an intrinsic factor that drives the organization's business longevity.

Culture is a competitive differentiator, the organizational differentiation may be facilitated by a culture encouraging innovation individuality and collectively. Culture needs to be changed to adapt to the emerging digital trends and pulling strategy execution towards the right decision. The culture of an organization is an indicator of the competency parameters at their best. Culture as a competency can be measured through performance. An organization with excellent culture is arguably capable of providing great performance results in their competencies. In fact, culture as the unique competency is a decisive factor for the business’s long-term success.

From culture as a behavior to culture as a corporate brand: If the culture thing is like an iceberg, the “visible” part of culture is the collective attitude - how employees behave in the workplace, interact with customers, adapt to changes and accept challenges., etc. At the societal level, cultural behavior is the end product of collected wisdom, filtered and passed down through hundreds of generations as shared core beliefs, values, assumptions, notions, and persistent action patterns. It is the policies, procedures, rewards, and retributions that drive behavior and it is the employee attitude and behavior that expresses “culture.” The spirit comes from the top, the culture will only be as strong as the behaviors of the senior leaders and the way they use these to demonstrate their commitment to the values and vision on a daily basis.

Business transformation is the change, but on a grand level, at the level of the system, differentiate in terms of the end result on a systemic level. Culture change is critical to make a leap of digital transformation. For example, today’s working environment is multigenerational, multicultural, and multi-devicing or to put simply, hyper-diverse. Many large multinational organizations have certain “diversity” best practices. However, if inclusiveness is not embedded in your business culture, it could generate multiple gaps in decision-making and strategy management. To step further, it’s important to develop culture as a business brand which differentiates yourself from competitors. Branding is not something that takes time away from the fundamentals of operations, execution, and management. It is instead a methodology, a different way of looking at how you do things innovatively and build a strong organization reputation. 

Culture is deeper, culture is changeable, and the speed of culture change may also be expedited as the world becomes more hyper-connected and interdependent. Digital organizations are living organisms on their own, different from the sum of its parts. Sustainable change is rather achieved by true internal shifts, which is more related to transformation than to "managing" change. This is needed to support a cultural change through the change lifecycle which enables everyone, wherever they are in that cycle, to accept the direction of the journey and focus on benefits realization and building long term business advantages.

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The Monthly “100 Creativity Ingredients” Book Tuning: Interdisciplinarity & Intellectual Ingredients of Creativity Oct. 2020

To inspire creativity and drive change, digital organizations need to harness the cross-functional collaboration by expanding business boundaries and playing innovation oddball skillfully.

All humans are born with raw creativity ability. Creativity has many dimensions, with multi-faceted truth and myth, manifold knowledge and multidimensional insight. Creativity is the wings of our mind and the tempo of our heartbeat. Creativity is a constructive disruption, not so bad addiction, and a sensational phenomenon. 

The purpose of “100 Creativity Ingredients - Everyone’s Playbook to Unlock Creativity “is to classify, scrutinize, articulate, and share insight about one hundred special creativity ingredients, to paint the picture with them, to add colors on them, to embed the music into them, and to make the story via them, in order to unleash our collective creativity potential.

 

 Interdisciplinarity & Intellectual Ingredients of Creativity  

Playing Innovation Oddball: Expand Boundary In the industrial age, the overly rigid hierarchy is often the cause of organizational bureaucracy and leads to business stagnation. With overwhelming growth of information and emerging digital technology, the black and white boundaries continue to diminish in the 21st century due to the occurrence of increased economic integration, characterized by the movement of people with diverse backgrounds across geographical borders and the wider communication empowered by advanced digital platforms and technology. To inspire creativity and drive change, digital organizations need to harness the cross-functional collaboration by expanding business boundaries and playing innovation oddball skillfully.

Creativity & Neurology At present days, we cannot separate knowledge and creativity if we want to stay competitive in the market. Creativity is a complex neuro-psycho-philosophical phenomenon which is difficult to define literally. Fundamentally creativity involves the ability to understand and express novel orderly relationships.

The New Book “100 Creativity Ingredients” Introduction Chapter 1: Intellectual Ingredients Creativity is not a “thing,” it’s a process that happens as a proactive mental activity to a problem. The nature of consciousness is important in creativity. Creativity is the high level of thinking, and thinking is probably one of the most difficult things for human beings, the thinking capability well defines the difference between humans and other creatures; and the level of thinking may also well reflect who we are.

The Monthly “100 Creativity Ingredients” Book Tuning: Interdisciplinary Creativity All humans are born with raw creativity ability. Creativity has many dimensions, with multi-faceted truth and myth, manifold knowledge and multidimensional insight. Creativity is wings of our mind and the tempo of our heartbeat. Creativity is a constructive disruption, not so bad addiction, and a sensational phenomenon. The purpose of “100 Creativity Ingredients - Everyone’s Playbook to Unlock Creativity “ is to classify, scrutinize, articulate, and share insight about one hundred special creativity ingredients, to paint the picture with them, to add colors on them, to embed the music into them, and to make the story via them, in order to unleash our collective creativity potential.

The Monthly “100 Creativity Ingredients” Book Tuning: Interdisciplinary Creativity II "All humans are born with raw creativity ability. Creativity has many dimensions, with multi-faceted truth and myth, manifold knowledge and multidimensional insight. Creativity is the wings of our mind and the tempo of our heartbeat. Creativity is a constructive disruption, not so bad addiction, and a sensational phenomenon. The purpose of “100 Creativity Ingredients - Everyone’s Playbook to Unlock Creativity“ is to classify, scrutinize, articulate, and share insight about one hundred special creativity ingredients, to paint the picture with them, to add colors on them, to embed the music into them, and to make the story via them, in order to unleash our collective creativity potential.

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 3 million page views with about #7200th blog posting in 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. The “Digital Master” book series includes 28 books to share insight from the multidimensional digital lens and perceive the multi-faceted impact the digital era upon us is making to businesses and society. The content richness is not for its own sake, but to convey the vision and share the wisdom. Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking and innovating the new ideas; it’s not just about WHAT to say, but about WHY to say, and HOW to say it. It reflects the color and shade of your thought patterns, and it indicates the peaks and curves of your thinking waves. Unlike pure entertainment, quality and professional content takes time for digesting, contemplation and engaging, and therefore, it takes time to attract the "hungry minds" and the "deep souls." It’s the journey to amplify diverse voices and deepen digital footprints, and it's the way to harness your innovative spirit.

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Real-Time GRC in the Boardroom

Without effective GRC discipline, the business will face significant risk for surviving, and opportunities which it creates cannot be properly transferred into multidimensional business value. 

Now with the uncertainty around almost all industry sectors, companies large or small are faced with volatile market situations, emerging digital technology trends, extreme competition, nonlinearity, and ambiguity, etc. Corporate GRC disciplines have a direct link to business and its processes, and foster guidance, values, and principles governing the company's commercial activities for adapting to the business new normal. 

The purpose of running a digital corporate board is to direct the organization in the right direction, enforcing GRC disciplines in an almost real-time manner and monitor its performance continuously.

Real time information delivery: Information is the lifeblood and one of the most invaluable assets in digital businesses today. The power of information is to deal with the mountain of information with both technology and human know-how, convert information into invaluable knowledge or real-time insight, empower the business with real-time insight from the boardroom to front desks across the organization in ways never possible before. Data quality is a very important aspect, the BoDs shouldn’t digest the information provided by the management only, they need to proactively search for quality information via varying sources, harnesses fact-based communication and ensures the corporate board’s effectiveness and maturity.

With overwhelming growth of information and continuous business disruptions, today’s digital organization simply just can’t stand still. Information potential directly impacts the business's potential of the organization. Therefore, just-in-time information management is crucial for running a real-time digital organization. The corporate board as a top governance body also plays a significant role in overseeing information management agenda, highlighting the strategic perspective of information management and improving its differentiated value across the company.

Real time decision-making: In the digital era with “VUCA” characteristics, timing is always important to leverage the right information for making effective decisions by the right people at the different layers of organizational hierarchy. Time is a critical factor in decision-making scenarios, as you can’t afford to defer critical decisions until such time that all facts and information are available. The Board's role, in large part, is to make good decisions that enhance the value creation for the organization in the long term. The real-time business insight can help corporate board leaders make effective decisions timely, and this is more imperative when uncertainty, velocity, complexity, and doubts are major hindrances to decision making.

Decision making is both science and art, it takes both data analytics and intuition in order to make effective decisions. Most decisions the corporate board makes are strategic, it is important to make sure that you are using the right inputs and a model that adequately fits the problem to carry out the analysis. In fact, properly done real-time analytics should drive decisions as it will give you information that you wouldn't have otherwise. Keep in mind though, analytics is important, but do not forget common sense.

Real-time GRC: Forward-looking BoDs leverage executive scoreboard to oversee performance and enforce real-time GRC intelligence. Organizations could miss the opportunity if they solely focus on quantifiable benefits or short-term business profit. Digital board leaders today should gain a balanced viewpoint about the risk and opportunities. Poor board governance causes organizational confusion, which wastes resources and hurts the ability to maximize the company's mission. The executive scorecard filled with real-time business insight enables board leaders to review key people, finance, operational deliverables periodically and practice GRC disciplines scientifically.

Also, sometimes governance "standards" can be taken too far and become their own bureaucracy. A well set up GRC system would have the corporate board involved in developing, setting and monitoring the companies' strategic plan, orchestrating the strategy across the enterprise even in the real time. A Balanced real-time Scorecard, correctly and fully implemented and used, is nothing more than a strategic decision support system, enables the BoDs to take their fiduciary responsibilities effectively.

Without effective GRC discipline, the business will face significant risk for surviving, and opportunities which it creates cannot be properly transferred into multidimensional business value. Corporate Boards need to deal with the poor governance and eliminate all the bureaucratic regulations that deal with the symptoms, not the root cause and enforce real-time GRC discipline. For the majority of the time, the corporate board agenda should be focused on the performance progress toward the goals, targets, or schedules, etc, of the value maximization planning and improve the overall business maturity.

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Going Digital via Accelerating the Variety of Business Cycles

 What's fundamentally changed is that management no longer gets to sit on the sidelines, they need to proactively adapt to the new normal, uncovering hidden or loose coupled business logic, understand and accelerate the variety of business cycles.

Running digital organizations are all about information savvy, adaptation, people-centricity, high-performance, and speed. Business management often has to spin multiple plates and keep them synchronized. The more complex the situation is, the more different approaches and role gaming is needed to reach for effective pattern-finding behind the “VUCA” new normal and drive the organizational change effectively. 

Forward-looking companies across vertical sectors are at the inflection point of digital transformation, they need to accelerate the variety of business cycles for catalyzing innovations and accelerating business performance.



Divergence - Convergence cycle: In the business setting, in order to innovate, it is necessary to follow a process where divergent and convergent thinking are always present and where you can use different tools. Ideas are seeds of creativity that can change a certain situation and future. The future vision is one of them, a very powerful one. Divergent thinking is nurtured by interdisciplinary knowledge and enriched experience to create new ideas. Divergence cycle typically occurs in a spontaneous and flow manner, such that many ideas are generated in an emergent cognitive fashion. And then, convergence cycles consolidate, optimize, prioritize, and implement the best of a few ideas based on top business goals or resource availability, to achieve high business value.

The digital workforce today is hyper-connected and divergent in many ways, sharing natural affinity for fresh perspectives and collective insight. They do not focus on hierarchy but on ideas, openness, and creative problem-solving via harnessing cross-functional communication, fostering collaboration, embracing collective insight, and enforcing the divergence-convergence innovation cycle. From the problem-solving perspective, creative problem-solving is an iterative convergence-divergence-convergence cycle. While the team is analyzing the "problems," it will better go more convergent to really hone in on the "why." Once you figure out what the true problems are and are ready to ideate that needs to be divergent thinking. Finally, when down-selecting ideas and eventually prototyping, that would be more convergent thinking.

Sequence-Consequence cycle: The digital era upon us is about people-centricity. The sequence is like the journey, helping you understand the overall customer experience. If the sequence of events is based on "outside in" data and the end result is to transform the company to increase its customer centric maturity, and build a culture to focus on creating customer values, then it is a sequence of customer experiences or simply a strategic plan to achieving business goals. Defining what the best customer experience is leads to a positive emotional reaction, a “WOW” factor. After that, you have to create a relationship, to maintain positive behavior of the customer (loyalty, word of mouth, positive influence on employee engagement, etc.), and accelerate a healthy sequence-consequence cycle as a sort of business logic to delight customers and drive progressive changes.

From the strategy management perspective, the alignment process becomes an analytical harmony process in which the actual configuration of the organization's customer-centric strategy is a consequence of design and implementation people-centric strategies. When a problem occurs, it is an unintended consequence of the design. If a problem occurs due to the construction of the business system, not the design of the system, that particular problem is not an unintended consequence of the design. It is a consequence of the construction. For such problems, intervention would not be needed beyond the structure level of the iceberg model. So understanding the sequence-consequence cycle helps the business management narrows down the root causes of problems and solve them effectively.

Performance - Conformance cycle: Performance without conformance is not genuine. Conformance without performance adds very little to the firm value. To some degree, conformance is inherent within the value-driven performance. The transformation-driven strategic management takes a holistic view of things both internally and externally as the way of coming up with actions that will improve organizational performance and conformance in order to achieve the set goals in a structural way.

More specifically, "performance management with a conformance mechanism embedded should be focused on the maximization of capital allocation, company performance and shareholder value. An effective performance-conformance management framework provides an anchor to define and deal with the Key Performance Indicators, integrating both numerical and qualitative information that relates to improving business performance. It has a functional specification detailing its meaning, intent, relationships to other measures, calculation, data requirements, reporting requirements and ownership, and conformance standards, etc. It helps to generate stated outputs under specific life cycle conditions; consequently, resulting from specific inputs, processes, and outputs.

The digital world is dynamic, nonlinear, uncertain, and volatile, emergence becomes apparent. What's fundamentally changed is that management no longer gets to sit on the sidelines, they need to proactively adapt to the new normal, uncovering hidden or loose coupled business logic, understand and accelerate the variety of business cycles, be fully engaged in helping the team deliver the most valuable things for the organization, achieve better business results and unleash the full digital potential of the organization.

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The Monthly “Dot Connections”: Intelligence, Insight, Innovation Oct. 2020

 A mindset could be called influential intelligence if it has a high mental ability to discover the inter-relationship among different disciplines. 

The effects of an increasingly digitized world are now reaching into every corner of businesses and every aspect of organizations. Organization of the Future is an organization designed openly for anyone with ideas on how human organizations ought to be contrived in the face of the strategic imperatives of the digital era. The work is not the place you go, but a live organization and an experiment lab where you can connect the dots to explore the art of possibility.

 

       Intelligence, Insight, Innovation

 

Logic, Intelligence, Creativity & their Interwoven Relationships "Intelligence" is from Latin word “intellego” -Inter-lego: Bind together, read between the lines, or connect the dots. Creativity is an innate thought process to connect the dots and generate innate ideas. Logic is a thinking process in which a result is derived from a thought. To untangle unprecedented complexity, we reach a stage to assess logic of everything: thoughts, language, actions. More specifically, logic, intelligence, and creativity, how do they interplay

Intelligence and Influence The digital era upon us is about information abundance and pervasive intelligence. Our intelligence with regard to any given type of information is a function of our mental capacity to refine information, recognize and interpret patterns, and our consequent ability to use the perceived information for making sound judgments or taking logical actions. A mindset could be called influential intelligence if it has a high mental ability to discover the inter-relationship among different disciplines. With unprecedented complexity and exponential information growth, contemporary leadership is based on multidimensional intelligence, and intelligence amplifies influence at different cognitive or hierarchical levels to drive progressive changes.

Orchestrate Digital Innovation based on Business Intelligence Information is the lifeblood of digital business nowadays, the digital era upon us is about algorism, raw data from machines needs to be processed into information that is further refined into intelligence. And the quality of intelligence depends greatly on the quality of information. In specific, the abundant information can be refined into business foresight and customer insight that provide the very clue to connect wider dots to stimulate great ideas, build the updated competency model, and take a transformative journey from running a reactive business to shaping a real-time highly intelligent organization.

Creativity vs. Insight Creativity is an innate process to create novel ideas, it is a type of “out-of-box” thinking; insight is thinking into the box after thinking out of the box. Creativity is a result of living in your intuitive space. It is an action or a reaction to the world. Insight is the deep intuitive understanding of things, and it often breaks through the conventional wisdom. Insight is not only about trying to "think outside the box," but an intuitive expression and alternative path that takes you wherever it needs to go, without boundaries, with the goal to think beyond the surface and break through conventional wisdom.

Insight, Innovation, and Influence of Modern Digital IT The exponential growth of information, the wave of emerging digital technologies and the tide of “digital transformation” are creating new opportunities for the business to grow and mature. Forward-looking organizations begin to see IT as an integral part of the business, empower IT to lead changes and learn how to strike the right balance between “old” and “new” ways to do things. Here is insight, innovation, and influence of modern digital IT organization.

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 3 million page views with about #7200th blog posting in 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. The “Digital Master” book series includes 28 books to share insight from the multidimensional digital lens and perceive the multi-faceted impact the digital era upon us is making to businesses and society. The content richness is not for its own sake, but to convey the vision and share the wisdom. Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking and innovating new ideas; it’s not just about WHAT to say, but about WHY to say, and HOW to say it. It reflects the color and shade of your thought patterns, and it indicates the peaks and curves of your thinking waves. Unlike pure entertainment, quality and professional content takes time for digesting, contemplation and engaging, and therefore, it takes time to attract the "hungry minds" and the "deep souls." It’s the journey to amplify diverse voices and deepen digital footprints, and it's the way to harness your innovative spirit.

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“Far-sighted” Quotes of “Digital Master” Oct. 2020

  As top leaders, you need to be farsighted, see further, but be practical as well via taking the step-wise approach for reaching it steadfastly. 

"Digital Master” is a series of guidebooks (28 + books) to perceive the multi-faceted impact digital is making to the businesses and society, help forward-thinking organizations navigate through the journey in a systematic way, and avoid “rogue digital.”

It perceives the emergent trends of digital leadership, provides advice on how to run a digital organization to unleash its full potential and improve agility, maturity, and provide insight about Change Management. It also instructs the digital workforce on how to shape a game-changing digital mindset and build the right set of digital capabilities to compete for the future. Here is a set of Far-sighted” quotes in “Digital Master.”

1 The groundbreaking inventions or innovations are driven by people not only far-sighted but determined to make their ideas succeed.

2 The flashes of inspiration we now see in retrospect as groundbreaking inventions or innovations were driven by people not only far-sighted but determined to make their ideas succeed.

3 Breakthrough innovations are often driven by creative people not only far-sighted but also well-determined to make their ideas succeed by challenging the rules of the game, connecting interdisciplinary dots, harnessing heterogeneous group interactions, or accelerating knowledge transfers.

4 It’s important to develop the future-oriented “synthetic board” with insightful board directors to share the far-sighted vision, represent the overall quality of leadership, set digital culture tones, make a sound judgment, empower changes, and inspire innovation.

5 As top leaders, you need to be farsighted, see further, but be practical as well via taking the step-wise approach for reaching it steadfastly.

6 Top leaders go beyond a senior title, they are the leaders who should build a far-sighted vision, represent the overall quality of leadership, set digital tones for talent management, make a sound judgment, empower changes, inspire innovation, they are both curious explorers and dedicated faster learners.

7 To avoid being disrupted, business leaders should be farsighted and cautiously optimistic, set up a prioritization process to remove inefficiency, change things which really matter for the long-term prosperity of the business, and enable companies leveraging their various environments and ecosystems to chase growth opportunities and unlock their performance.

8 Altitude, attitude, and aptitude all contribute to building talent competency. Altitude inspires you to be far-sighted, focus on the big picture and long term perspective, attitude motivates you to continue learning and making an improvement, and aptitude helps you strengthen the strength. With the good combination of all of them, competency can be built and upgraded to the new digital height.

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Perceptive Problem-Solving

Solving complex problems today requires perception intelligence, multidisciplinary knowledge, profound insight, enriched experiences, as well as taking an end-to-end response , a structural and an iterative approach.

Perception is the way that your eyes see the world and your mind interpret it. How you perceive the situation or the world depends on your cognitive abilities, knowledge, experiences, and capabilities, etc.  Thus, it’s personal. 

Due to exponential growth of information and continuous disruptions, more often than not, those existing or emergent problems also become more complex than ever. Thus, either individually or collectively, perceptive intelligence is crucial to define the right problems and solve them effectively.

Overcome bias caused by prepositioned perceptions in order to identify root causes of complex problems or frame the right problem to solve: Perception is an interpretation based on your own conditioning, cognitions, surroundings, or experiences, leading you to make judgments. There are all sorts of misperception symptoms such as stereotypical thinking or unconscious bias, preconceived ideas about how things should happen, seeing the trees but missing the forest, etc. Perception gaps will cause the blind spots when either defining the real problem or solving it smoothly. A solution is nothing if the real problem is not perceived. Without perception intelligence, people continue fixing symptoms but allow real problems to grow under the surface, out of sight, out of mind, until they turn out to be fatal issues and become out-of-control.

To dig through, people’s perceptions reflect their thinking capacity - the breadth and depth of the cognitive understanding, as well as their mentality traits - positive vs. negative or egoless vs. egotism, etc. If you only know two colors - Black and White; then perceptions are filtered into one of those two dimensions. You can only know what you know, but there are more dimensions which you don’t know. Even if you have all the different angles to consider but the problem may look very differently depending on your perception. Distorted perceptions deepen misunderstanding and cause conflicts or unnecessary pain. In fact, solving complex problems today requires perception intelligence, multidisciplinary knowledge, profound insight, enriched experiences, as well as taking an end-to-end response and a structural and an iterative approach.

Great problem-solvers with perception intelligence are open-minded, learning agile, insightful, and masterful of independent thinking and real critical thinking: Even though everyone lives in actual reality, we experience actual reality through the filter of our personal realities. Sometimes out of date perception is like time glue that keeps you still while the rest of the world moves on with faster speed. People’s perception reflects who they are and which lens they apply to make the judgment of others. Every digital leader and professional needs to make an objective self-assessment: Can I perceive right and make sound judgments in most of time? Am I a conventional thinker or an innovator? Am I often part of the solution or part of the problem? To improve perception intelligence, do not always follow the conventional wisdom or preconceived opinions, be an independent and critical thinker without being excessively critical, continue updating knowledge and gain deep insight and empathy.

Also, in the industrial setting with a considerably static and silo environment and the scarcity of knowledge, the classic management practitioners often apply linear thinking with a set of linear skills, which imply cause and effect with no feedback. Problems today become complex if things do interact, particularly in the case of nonlinear processes and interactions. You can't separate things properly or you cannot predict the actual effect of interactions straightforwardly. Further, because of interconnectivity and the many potential options in a complex system, a small effect in one place can cause a cascade of events that produce a nonlinear big impact. While the linear logic helps to break down things to the pieces, it usually ignores the interconnectivity between parts and the whole, causing more side effects later on. Perception intelligence helps us to ask big why, dig into root causes, and leverage the right models to understand highly complex or nonlinear problem-solving scenarios. So solutions are made from a much broader and encompassing view that is not possible in linear thinking. It means that never think there is a short list of solutions you can pick from, and always be open to solving the problem in an alternative or better way.

Complex problems require high perception intelligence and a coordinate solution which requires integration of different sets of knowledge and fluency across multiple disciplines: Cognition can happen in many different ways and combinations. A perceptive mind is subjective but can be open enough to embrace other minds’ perception for solving problems collaboratively. The most important capability of the cognitive mind with high perception intelligence is the willingness and ability to seek out knowledge and address our ignorance and assumptions we make to minimize it. Collectively, perception intelligence can be improved via embracing cognitive differences and cultivating the culture of learning and creativity.

In reality, problem-solving in the majority of organizations today is woefully inadequate. Oftentimes, misperception is a common symptom, events and patterns are observed on the surface, and then the action is taken to fix the symptom, but that is too early. It will cause a higher risk of conflict and inertia, not something organizations want in a global business environment that demands innovation and speed. To improve problem solving competency in the emerging 'networked' collaborative organizational forms, understand that everyone plays a "piece of the pie" in collaborative problem-solving. Everyone has a voice and every voice carries weight. Always listen to the two sides of the story. If you stand at the right angle to see both sides, you know even they are different, but both hold part of truth in it. To have this happen reliably requires a bidirectional and reciprocal cycle of feedback, so recognize the real problem-solvers with perception excellence and encourage cross-domain communication and collaboration.

We live in a world where change is the norm and we confront a number of high complex problems. It’s a strategic imperative to overcome bias caused by prepositioned perceptions and embrace collective insight in order to frame the right problems and solve them effectively. Change is the new normal, if we don't embrace it, accept it, roll with it, or make it happen, we are outdated. When the collective perception is closer to the perception of the most advanced mind in the world, humans as the whole can accelerate the progress; if the opposite is true, unfortunately, the society still gets stuck in the outdated perception, far behind the digital era we are stepping in. So let real problem-solvers shine and inspire perceptive problem-solving to drive the seamless digital paradigm shift.

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The Monthly Communication Brief: Data-Driven Communication Oct. 2020

Communication is not just the soft discipline, it’s both art and science. 

The great communicators are the high-quality leaders or professionals who can communicate objectively with strong logic, clarity, and understanding; the great communicators are the great artists who are fluent in creative expression or metaphorical description. 

Communication is both art and science. How to set principles and develop practices to improve communication effectiveness and build communication competency?

                                Data-Driven Communication 

Let the Data “Do the Talking” We live in a world with exponential growth of information, which brings both opportunities and risks for people and businesses today. There's the implication that, with enough data, which can be refined into insight to make communication more trustful, and decision more fact-based. Perhaps one of the important digital mantras to foster communication is that “let the data do the talk,” to advocate fact-based communication and cultivate a culture of accountability to improve organizational effectiveness and maturity.

How to Avoid these “Mismanagement” Pitfalls The digital business dynamic is full of uncertainty, velocity, complexity, ambiguity, fierce competitions, and continuous disruptions. Digital organizations keep evolving with the increasing speed of change, the exponential growth of information and the rapid integration of business across the globe. Traditional management approaches based on command and control style and overly rigid hierarchy have some critical defects for leading organizations up to the next level of business maturity. Practicing digital management is about taking a holistic view and applying an interdisciplinary management approach to planning and executing business strategy. How to avoid the following mismanagement pitfalls and make the digital paradigm shift smoothly?

Is Communication the Bottleneck in Decision Making Communication is KEY to modern management, however, communication is not just the soft discipline, it’s both art and science. For example, there’re communication challenges between management and employees, there’s “lost in translation” in cross-functional conversations, how to overcome such challenges? Is communication the bottleneck in decision making, how to achieve the expected outcome? Understanding the logic behind these inquiries can untie the communication knots.

How to Communicate Effectively in Digital Dynamic? The speed of change is significantly increasing. Decentralization, globalization, and diversified workforces can all be practical reasons for communicating barriers. How do you communicate a common message across the globe with empathy, and, in particular, make sure the message you want to communicate resonates effectively?

The CIO as Digital Conversationalist: Is IT Communication a Vicious or Virtuous Cycle Communications are the tools to solve problems, and languages are the tools to make communications. Communication clarity directly impacts on the business effectiveness and organizational maturity. However, in many organizations, miscommunication or misunderstanding leads to conflict and malfunction. Often, communication gaps are caused by cognitive difference, ambiguous process, or management bottleneck, etc. Information Technology plays a crucial role in driving information-based communication and breaking down communication bottlenecks. Communication also directly impacts IT management effectiveness. The CIO as a digital conversationalist needs to make an objective assessment: Does IT communication often go through a vicious or a virtuous cycle? How can IT leaders and professionals leverage different conversation styles to construct the collaborative vision and deliver high-performance IT results for the long run?

“Digital Master” is a series of guidebooks (28+ books) to perceive the multi-faceted impact digital is making to the businesses and society, help forward-thinking organizations navigate through the journey in a systematic way, and avoid “rogue digital.” It perceives the emergent trends of digital leadership, advice on how to run a digital IT organization to unleash its full potential and improve agility, maturity, and provide insight about Change Management. It also instructs the digital workforce on how to shape a game-changing digital mindset and build the right set of digital capabilities to compete for the future.

Read More