Gaining Culture Empathy via Sociology

Learn, improve, adapt and evolve. And it’s the nature of evolution.

The emerging digital world upon us is about hyperconnectivity and interdependence. When organizations start maturing, a key transformation must take place and it takes multidimensional thinking and cross-disciplinary knowledge. As such a large scale of changes, more than not, needs to gain the anthropological understanding of human society, instill desired culture value, and learn historical lessons all the time. It involves people, process, and technology, and enables ecosystem orchestration with a multipolar and interdependent digital world.

The digital transformation views via an anthropological lens deepen the understanding of how relationships, ecosystems, market dynamics, and the connections between related business functions: Sociology is the study of human interaction, usually within the context of organized groups, communities, or "societies." It is the systematic study of human society, especially present-day societies. We define most societies by shared patterns of beliefs, attitudes, and actions. It helps business leaders and professionals understand and enliven the varied social contexts in a better way, and enable them to take a progressive approach to solve many complex problems facing business today.

Society is an organization that belongs to us and the way to change it is to modify our individual, group, and collective practices so that they facilitate both the development of our fellow citizens and the functioning of our collectivity. By applying sociological discipline, 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. We can identify individual, group and collective best practices that we can then choose to implement in our own societies, with the goal to advance human society systematically.

For businesses to work in a self-sustaining (emergent) way, they need to be the dynamic, hyper-connected, and interdependent system that keeps evolving: The digital transformation view via a historical lens helps today’s business leaders and professionals gain lessons learned, avoid repetitive mistakes and open the new chapter of humanity. One can always see farther when standing on the shoulders of others: If we do not accept our choices and mistakes in the past, we can never really move forward. The study of history is important because history repeats itself; therefore, we can discover the pattern of the future by studying the past.

People repeat history, not the other way around, and that is why we need to learn about our history as a species, all the way back. Looking at history needs to come from a genuine respect for difference and we must see the entire picture for the good and bad reality. Many versions of history can all be simultaneously "true." The point of view and the personal biases of the teller of "His or her story" will always factor into it. Independent thinking and critical thinking are critical to learn history, without setting limits to one version of truth; and transform hindsight to insight and even foresight to guide through the future journey more confidently.

Culture is collective mindset, attitude, and behavior, which are inherited and evolutionized via years of human footprint and historical refinement: Culture is the sub-branch of sociology and a crucial aspect of anthropology as culture is a residue of learning. Culture and brand are the most important "soft" elements that a company will make since they will define how the company interacts with its various stakeholders and build the differentiated business advantage. Culture eats strategy for breakfast! It means the way things are done and allowed to be done every day. Humans are vehicles of natural and cultural solutions.

In a culture savvy digital organization, self-motivated leaders, teams, and employees have a passion for challenging themselves, advancing their thinking ability, making things happen. People have to be given the opportunity to be creative, they have to become empowered and discover the innovative way to do things. In fact, culture is the competitive advantage of the business and the cultural aspect is an intrinsic factor that drives the organization's business longevity. An organization with excellent culture is arguably capable of providing great results in their competencies. The culture of an organization is an indicator of the competency parameters at their best.

Contemporary society is the product of the past. So we need to understand it, we need to know the facts and more importantly the underlying patterns. We should study sociology to understand the deep insight of human society, study history to learn from the past without experiencing it, study cultures today to stretch our minds and views of ourselves. We learn, improve, adapt and evolve. And it’s the nature of evolution.

Posted in: Connecting Dots,culture Master