Insurmountable Challenge

 The more effortlessly you can guide, align, integrate, and optimize important business elements, the closer you can accelerate business performance 

The emergence of potential opportunities for exploiting digitization is likely to follow a nonlinear pattern as the pervasiveness of an organization's digitization journey increases.

 Top executives should provide input upon varying issues, identifying seemingly “insurmountable” upcoming challenges or hidden pitfalls, to ensure that their organization is strategically positioned to achieve fine-defined goals, and adapt to the ever-change environment confidently.

Planning challenge: Uncertainty is inevitable nowadays, it means the future cannot be, in any way, deduced from the past. Though for most organizations, we still do have contexts of relative certainty, while simultaneously having contexts reflecting both complexity and chaos. Strategy complexity usually involves early in the business management life-cycle and careful examination of numbers and types of stakeholders across the organization; numbers of external dependencies, business context, etc, which require tailored management approaches. That means nowadays, planning is more dynamic, and it requires more flexibility in implementation. It might be good to work with plans and assumptions and scenarios, as long as you keep in mind that these have been elaborated from past experiences and past knowledge, thus, it requires more planning and more flexibility in implementing.

The blind spots, understanding gaps, and change pitfalls are inevitable challenges in strategy management. It's critical to look at strategic challenges from a business impact perspective as well as from a solution perspective. It's not all about "making a strategy" as an end-product, but about implementing it afterwards. It is also about communicating the quality of the strategy, saying openly what is known and what is not. The more integrated and culturally the strategy management is, the more sustainable and productive business initiatives are. As such, it becomes far more about influencing others to choose to allow/enable the success of management discipline. The super execution is the result of synchronization of all key business factors to create business synergy and build differentiated business competency.

Coordination challenge: In the physical or business world, most relationships are nonlinear, There is a poor fit between the new business and the old system which are often caused by overly rigid organizational structures. Lack of direction, internal politics, current culture/blame, misaligned systems/processes, overly rigid hierarchy or mistrust, dysfunction, silo, too much complication, etc, all those create frictions and make the organization stagnate. But communication in a traditional, hierarchical, bureaucratic organization will only go so far no matter how well it is done. With a missing link of communication, it easily creates the gaps and leads to unhealthy internal competitions, causing people who are supposed to be on the same team to work against each other.

The full engagement and coordination of diverse shareholders is challenging because in reality, there are numerous points-of-view and reference points of varying stakeholders such as: board members, senior executives, middle managers, professional staff, business partners, etc. There are some processes (like involvement, engagement, etc) if done effectively, generally have beneficial impacts on most people. But even in these cases, there will be individual variability. Fundamental structural and cultural change is critical in most cases. Organize a total immersion communication and dialogue program for senior and middle-level management groups to get buy-in, and each department has a role to play in strategy implementation. Too often organizations do a great job of sending out their message that enables the strategy yet they fail to ever take in any feedback. Thus, the professional change agents or specialists with a set of tools and flexibility help to take transparent approaches or interactive procedures for harnessing effective communication, breaking down those old thought chains, freeing the organization from the past, and lubricating the business for speeding up change.

GRC challenge: Digital transformation is radical change, it has to be woven into the collective mentality, process, action, and communication of the organization. A good governance standard provides a common corporate "language"; work instructions, proper standards; even about putting the right leaders in place at the right time in a business life cycle or condition to reconnect the missing links or bridge the weak link, and improve the business’s top-line business growth. It’s also about setting good policies, monitoring and knowing when things are not going to plan so that you can take appropriate actions at the right time, allowing the right mentality and culture to bloom.

Effective GRC is steering and facilitating the successful transformation of an organization. It provides monitoring, measuring, and enforcement mechanisms to corporate management. However, in many organizations at the lower level of maturity, GRC is reactive in the sense that there is a lot of rushing around trying to fix problems after they have occurred. Proactive GRC ensures there are adequate controls in place to operate responsibly in accordance with its values but not to the extent of restricting the aspiration to achieve business vision. The higher the complexity of the organization and the complexity of the environment in which it operates, the higher the requirement for business connectivity and the stronger governance disciplines needed to improve business adaptability.

Change is continuously happening and spiraling up in such a dynamic environment. The leader of the future needs to have a contextual understanding about the interconnectivity of the business success factors underlying the surface and focus on building cohesive business capabilities. The more effortlessly you can guide, align, integrate, and optimize important business elements such as people, process, and technology, the closer you can accelerate business performance and lift the business up to the hyper-cycle of digital transformation.

Posted in: Digital Pitfalls,GAPs,GRC,Strategy