Thursday, September 30, 2021

Innerprogress

Whether we can set a progressive tone to make a transition from survival to thriving of our whole civilization may depend on how we make the mind shift to structure shift to behavior shift.


Change is the new normal; it is nevertheless true that the change itself has become unpredictable and evolutionary. Progress represents upward change or improvement. More often, progress is not a universal truth, but a relative truth; each person or organization needs to take their unique path to the journey of progressive change with many accumulated steps and a few leapfrogs.

 It takes a lot of effort and resources to make improvement, and it takes even more effort and management disciplines to sustain progressive changes.
 

Improvement: Progress itself is a change, either by individual or group efforts or induced by environmental and cultural tangible and intangible forces to make improvement. With the dynamic business environment, change with improvement in mind is a proactive approach that allows for planning and support considerations to be made. To explore the art of possibility and accelerate the progressive change, don’t always take a shortcut or control the behavior, it’s crucial to shape a progressive mindset, clarify the vision of changes. If we could come to some agreement on our collective purpose, our goal, our direction, then we can view progressive change from the perspective of accomplishing a well-defined goal, making improvement and fulfilling this purpose..

As the saying goes "practice makes it perfect": it brings the importance of the daily pattern of one's personal involvement to her/his improvement which would do a great job to shape a culture of improvement in the organization. When an organization develops a progressive culture, people feel supported and confident they will be developed and valued. Confident employees are more likely to be open, learn, grow and make continuous improvement. They can contribute meaningfully for a period of time before they are ready to move to the next level of accomplishment. Collectively, an improvement is a form of desired change, change can also be leapfrogged into business transformation.

Learning & training: Progress goes hand-in-hand with one of the digital principles-to learn constantly so we continually improve. In fact, progress cannot be made without continuous learning. Well trained and happy staff are needed to improve business performance and make continuous improvement. Developing and adapting learning and continuous improvement culture involves gathering data, doing analysis, defining areas to be improved, developing training and coaching programs, and building measurement scale for the improvement. That means fine tuning a progressive climate for learning and growth takes a structural effort, rather than a few random initiatives because it instills a culture that constant evolution and learning is taken seriously. In fact, building a dynamic workforce is to provide a progressive working environment with the necessary resources to improve productivity, innovativeness, and employee engagement.

In the corporate setting, having the senior people in operations and varying professional areas incorporates the inputs or outlooks into in-house training programs so that the business knowledge is shared with others who can then try them out and hopefully improve them. This is one way of developing a continuous cycle of corporate learning and improvements. Individually, all of us have talent, so build on the talent you have, seek to be apart from the crowd and set your own professional goals and pace, preparation builds positive outcomes, practice daily, remain coachable, do not let ego drive the outcome, your personal character will, in the end, drive your performances, your progress, your accountabilities, and enable a team's attitude to all you do each day.

Leapfrog progress with “paradigm shift”: The radical change from one era to another is often called paradigm shift. The digital paradigm has many dimensions sociologically, technologically, philosophical, psychological, etc, interacting and mutually influencing each other. In an industrial era, the fixed mindset is perhaps considerably ok to survive because the business and the world are slow to change. However, in the digital era, information is exponential and knowledge is only a click away. The growth mindset is a strategic imperative to adapt to the changes and transformations which are reshaping our thinking and recasting the way we view ourselves, reimagining what is possible.

Compared to incremental improvement, the transformative change often requires changing underlying beliefs, culture, or conventional wisdom, etc. The leapfrog progress is made via deprogramming old mindsets, letting go of "the voices from the past," reprogramming the collective minds with new perspectives, norms, and attitudes; to rejuvenate the environments in which we live, and the way we view the world. A digital paradigm is an emerging digital ecosystem of principles, policies, and practices that set certain boundaries, also offer the guidance for problem-solving or creating something new under the updated rules, keep information flow, let imagination sparkling, allow knowledge to repurpose or recycle, and achieve a state of dynamic balance. Thus, the accelerated mind is needed to make continuous improvement and speed up leapfrog progress with paradigm shift.

Whether we can set a progressive tone to make a transition from survival to thriving of our whole civilization may depend on how we make the mind shift to structure shift to behavior shift. Individuals should have a humble attitude and learning agility to make continuous improvement. Organizations should strive to explore the “digital-seek practices'' throughout their organization to accelerate the progressive journey of “seeking, experimenting, improving, innovating, and transforming.”