Sunday, December 19, 2021

Innovationpitfalls

Running a business is a thorny journey with many ups and downs, frequent disruptions and distractions on the way.

Every organization is different, they are also at the different stages of business growth, they have different functions, structures, layers, and systems, aiming to move into a more advanced stage of business deployment by tailoring their own unique strength and business maturity.

 In some businesses, especially large well-established companies, miscommunication, misinterpretation or misunderstanding is prevailing and leads to conflict; blind-spots, bottle necks, grey areas in a variety of management cause business malfunctioning. To bridge business management chasms, it is important to involve not only putting different pieces together but also blend them in such a way that the emergent whole is somehow more than the sum of its parts.

Close blind spots in decision-making: Corporate managers or professionals have to make decisions either strategically or tactically on a daily basis. But everyone has some blind spots, some with more, some with less. Silo mentality is a common challenge for lots of organizations because it creates blind spots in decision-making or problem-solving. To dig deeper, it’s about certain negative mentalities such as egotism, unconscious bias, lack of holistic thinking and updated knowledge, etc. People can make further inquiries by diagnosing the root causes of blind-spots: Can you provide logical reasoning by clearing the blind spots to help find out what is really happening? Can you see the bigger picture and not live the day-to-day activities only? Can you capture the contextual insight beneath the surface? Are you skeptical of common belief or common sense which perhaps does not fit the new circumstances anymore? Can you overcome stereotypical thinking or preconceived ideas about how things should happen? Can you always dig through the root cause, not only fix the symptom? Can you listen empathetically, initiate information based communication, and manage emotions effectively? Etc.

To close blind spots, it’s important to harness cross-functional communication, keep business processes transparent, keep employees informed of what’s going on and encourage constructive feedback for the management to improve. We live in an era with unprecedented complexity and uncertainty. Business leaders and professionals have to be humble to realize there are many things they know they don’t know and perhaps even more which they don't know what they don't know. Until that happens, they will continue in the lives of blindness, making ineffective decisions, and causing more problems. Listen, learn, share, be inclusive, act on the blind spots, collaborate with counterparts, look forward through the front window, also peel through the real mirror periodically, to ensure you are in the right direction for solving problems smoothly.

Break down bottlenecks in management disciplines:
Business management is multifaceted, organizations have limited resources, talent, tight time schedules, so there are a variety of bottlenecks which block the way of change management, stifle innovation, and cause business stagnation. To dig through the root causes, from a change management perspective, overly rigid or prescribed processes create bottlenecks for streamlining change scenarios. In addition, communication bottleneck and collaboration ineffectiveness is a dissonance between upper and middle management or middle management and frontline employees. From innovation management perspectives, homogeneity is the bottleneck of idea generation, and silo-setting will stifle idea creating and flowing. Either implementing strategy or unlocking performance, resource bottleneck limits business capacity and decelerates business speed.

In order to break down varying bottlenecks, organizational hierarchy must have enough central control to achieve coordination toward the large-scale goals, and enough autonomy to keep all subsystems flourishing. There is a need to delegate roles and responsibilities of processes, make sure that all staff is aware of plans/processes, timely updates, how resource allocation is determined and should be understood by important parties; the management needs to update and identify individual team members’ strengths and weaknesses regularly, ensuing the skills gap is closed. It is also important for creating both internal and external beliefs around how business management is a movement for enablement and improvement, to break through bottlenecks, build business competency and accelerate business speed.


Manage "gray areas" effectively:
The emergence of potential opportunities for exploring business transformation is likely to follow nonlinear patterns with exponential speed. Philosophically, there isn't always a right or wrong choice in any situation and there are a lot of grays. To survive and thrive amid constant changes, companies must learn how to manage the “shade of gray” due to blurred territories and ambiguous conditions, in terms of “right, wrong or marginally right or wrong.” This makes it very hard to choose a right or wrong from your choices. The management has to have the ability to ask the hard questions and engage in meaningful dialogue even if you do not agree with one another you can indeed agree to disagree yet, stay engaged with one another, practice paraconsistent logic to make tough decisions and solve problems holistically.

To understand and manage grey areas effectively, let people view ideas from different perspectives, brainstorm diverse thoughts and ideas, apply thinking techniques, harness different experiences, perspectives, encourage people to express themselves, brainstorm ideas, and inspire inclusiveness. So the organization can reclaim the right balance of rules and flexibility, control and autonomy, standardization and personalization, stability and fluidity; centralization and decentralization to build strategic and operational agility into the business foundations. Business gains more and more energy until it crosses the point of system resilience. To improve business resilience and maturity, organizations should investigate "hidden risks" or uncover gray areas, and manage them well to improve their business maturity.

Running a business is a thorny journey with many ups and downs, frequent disruptions and distractions on the way. To steer the organizations in the right direction; the management should take a holistic approach, identify blind spots which perhaps block vision and decision, break through bottlenecks that limit business development, deal with grey areas which implies pitfalls smoothly, develop the best and next practices to lead changes in a structural way.




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