Innatenewnormal

To avoid being overwhelmed by the complexity, start listening, collect qualified information, embrace multiple perspectives of the issues, and build a strong team with cognitive differences.

Organizations "become complex," as an evolutionary trend, not for their own amusement, but do it to respond to environments proactively. In fact, complexity has increased exponentially and has become part of the digital new normal and needs to be elaborated in a well-organized system manner with contextual understanding. 

It’s important to understand the complex new normal with varying characteristics, in order to manage a variety of complexity as both art and science.

Ambiguity: Given the unprecedented level of complexity of the business world and given the challenges of today’s varying problems, ambiguity is the haziness of reality and has the potential for misreads. To deal with ambiguity and improve decision effectiveness, it’s important to engage people with cognitive intelligence, gain insight by seeing things from different angles, open a new perspective, be able to change perspective if necessary, and figure out better solutions to either existing problems or emerging issues.

Ambiguity can be understood as being similar to business risks; it involves the mixed meanings of conditions. Often, lack of knowledge and scarcity of insight lead to poor problem-solving for the long run. Thus, it’s important to understand the dynamic environment, capture business insight, envision alternative scenarios, make decisions based on rough estimations of what the future conditions of execution would be and deal with ambiguity scientifically.

Interdependence: Digital blurs the geographical, functional, organizational, and even industrial borders nowadays. Traditional hierarchical lines will phase out and business becomes more hyper-connected and interdependent. You can't separate things properly or you cannot predict the actual effect of interaction straightforwardly. It’s important to manage its portfolio of relevant cross-border strategic synergies and organizational interdependence with the appropriate mix of enabling organizational elements, and maintain the right level of digital balance.

The world is an interdependent entity. The survival of our whole civilization may depend on our ability to experience the wholeness of nature and the art of living in harmony, to get away from letting things fall through and start creating “integrated wholes,” ride above the learning curve and make a seamless paradigm shift to achieve a state of strategic coherence, structural flexibility, dynamic balance and take the journey of digital transformation steadfastly.

Nonlinearity: When organizations or societies are not just about linear relationships, they are defined as nonlinear dynamics. Things become more complex, particularly in the case of "nonlinear" interaction, you can't separate things properly or you cannot predict the actual effect of interaction straightforwardly. The more nonlinear, interconnected, and interdependent the environment, where uncertainty and emergence become more prevalent, hence accelerated rates of change, the less likely ordered hierarchical systems are to be the answer due to the rigidity.

Due to the “VUCA” nature of digitalization, change is unavoidable and digital disruption is inevitable. Applying interdisciplinary management to gain an understanding of nonlinearity as the very characteristic of the digital organization could be at the tipping point for managing changes and the digital transformation. In fact, understanding nonlinearity as the very characteristic of the digital organization and business ecosystem could be at the tipping point for the digital paradigm shift. It indicates the radical shift from a silo, linear management style to holistic and nonlinear management discipline to break down silos and encourage cross-functional communication and collaboration to solve problems in a structural way.

Diversification: Digital organizations are diversified with a multigenerational, multicultural workforce using multi-device to do multitasking and the digital workplaces are a huge melting pot of various diversity. Diversification is the hidden dimension to reach the next level of business growth. In fact, diversification and differentiation make the business stand out by allowing the business to bridge silos, close decision bottlenecks and develop the unique business competencies.

Digital enterprises are inherently and intensely complicated. It’s important to link the power of diversification to key business initiatives and organizational effectiveness. Hyper-diversity includes cognitive differences, levels of capabilities, complementary experiences, the spectrum of skills, unique competencies, cultural perspectives, and personalities. Thus, organizations need to move the needle of diversification, bring in fresh ideas and new perspectives to make creations and build a better future together.

Unpredictability: Change happens at an increasing speed. These changes do not happen in isolation from each other in predictable ways. They act as a complex and unpredictable system, feeding, amplifying or ameliorating the effects of business operations. Even though you couldn’t predict anything beforehand, you can always imagine different scenarios based on “lessons learned” with many experiences involved in current or in the past. Although not everything is predictable, information is still one of the most important assets of the company. Information becomes meaningful when being sorted through and processed to make sure its coherence.

The approach to deal with uncertainty and unpredictability includes planning in a short time and taking incremental effort, allowing the acquisition of new information along the way. When information is refined into the business foresight and customer insight, it becomes the “light tower” to navigate the business in the right direction. It requires taking leaps of setting some of the right things in motion, and delicately balancing and re-balancing the results toward urgent, but hard to predict outcomes

To avoid being overwhelmed by the complexity, start listening, collect qualified information, embrace multiple perspectives of the issues, and build a strong team with cognitive differences. Complexity Management is the methodology to dig through the root cause of the issue or the chain of business problems, minimize value-destroying complexity, encourage and enhance value-adding complexity in a cross-functional approach to accelerate organizational performance and unleash its full potential.

Posted in: Digital Master,Digital Maturity