Incoherentpseudo

To overcome “pseudo” effects in business management, it is important to do deep analysis, gain empathy, and improve people-centricity.

The speed of change is accelerated, organizations large or small spend significant time and resources to deal with radical transformation or small changes such as adopting a new software application. 

There are many views to understand change, and there is no one size fits all formula to pursue it. Incoherent management approaches with following symptoms cause friction and business stagnation.

Pseudo planning: With the faster pace of changes and continuous disruptions, planning and forecasting become challenging because companies are still trying to “feel their way” through these economically stressful times. The management keeps busy, any strategic thinking seems to be taking a back seat to simply keeping things together, planning fallacy turns to be a business reality. One of the causes of planning fallacy is lack of information-based communication between varying shareholders. Often, objectives are not actionable because they have not been communicated properly to the people who are responsible for their delivery across organizational hierarchy.

Pseudo-planning is sometimes caused by pseudo-intelligence. It’s important to leverage information-based analytics to do the planning. Good planning is goal-directed, purposeful, and intelligent, and all intelligent activities are planned to reach well-set goals. The dynamic planning process is the continual attention to current changes in the organization and its external environment, and how this affects the future of the organization. It is important to get you off the ground and running, to ensure that there is sufficient time to prepare the stakeholders for the changes on the way.

Pseudo involvement: It’s the reality that people dislike change, prefer to do things that they always do. In many companies that get stuck at the low level of maturity, the challenges of stakeholder involvement are real for change management efforts. Pseudo-involvement" (a pretense of engagement) is the symptom that the management pushes for change; though employees may change their behavior for a while, their mindsets and attitude stay the same. The "button" that gets pushed is that leaders often assume they can pretend to involve people but actually do not intend to pay attention to their input at all. So over the long run this pseudo-involvement fails to engage employees and overcome resistance.

We should recognize that a lot of changes are unpleasant for those impacted. In change management, the resistance that delays more than anticipated often comes from these areas of the organization where employees were informed rather than involved. The goal of change management is to transform staff emotion from pseudo to enthusiastic, from reactive to proactive; enhance a healthy psychological cycle from denials-to-resistance to exploration to commitment.

Pseudo agile: Everything is in a constant state of flux. Agile is about iterative communication and iteration, continuous delivery and improvement. Agile is not only a software development methodology, but it is also a set of philosophy and principles. Agile transformation is not an easy journey. The best way to fail in agile transformation is to think that you will implement agile inside a business unit without taking into account the whole enterprise. Because it’s about to integrate. Take any agile software development method and think about all the business units and people who have to engage to create the product. It is a corporate management philosophy.

There is lots of confusion about agile. Often “Agile" is used as a near synonym for "unprofessionalism"; "pleasing selves"; failing to realize a business requirement "; we don't do estimates, we're agile"; "there is no documentation, we're agile." Every situation is different, every business is different and you have to fit the solution to the problem. In order to make a smooth agile transformation, you need wise decision makers, who can bear the risk, and drive everyone towards the common goals. From doing agile to being agile, it is the transformation from methodology adoption to mind shift, from process toning to culture refining to improve organizational agility.

With “VUCA” as a new normal, we cannot predict anything beforehand but can imagine with many experiences involved in current or in the past. To overcome “pseudo” effects in business management, it is important to gain empathy, improve people-centricity, making the seamless paradigm shift from information scarcity in the industrial age to knowledge abundance in the digital era; knitting all necessary elements together into competitive business advantage. Either individually or at the organizational level, it’s important to manage uncertainty and fill opportunities gaps, accelerate business growth and reach the next level of maturity.

Posted in: Digital Pitfalls,GAPs