Innovativeness

When the organization has put a stronger emphasis on empowering people, accelerating strategy, catalyzing innovation, and improving people-centricity, it is reaching the inflection point to achieve the next level of organizational maturity.

The digital paradigm has many dimensions, it means increasing pace of change and continuous digital disruptions, with high intensity and hyper diversity. It’s easy to get lost without multidimensional thinking. You have to gain an interdisciplinary understanding of the business via different lenses.

 It is important to involve not only putting all pieces together but also blending them in such a way that the emergent whole is somehow more than the sum of its parts. It’s crucial to embrace uncertainty, respond to a dynamic changing environment, strike the right balance of solid and flow, transaction and transformation, in order to run a real time high performance organization.

Interconnectedness of the parts and the whole: In today's hyper-connected digital world, the disruptions come almost overnight, the knowledge management cycle is significantly shortened. A simple variable can be both cause and effect. It's important for digital leaders and managers to see the interconnectedness of the parts and the whole, seeing interrelationships rather than isolated things, focusing on interactions between things rather than characteristics of things for uncovering patterns of changes rather than static “snapshots.”

The organizational structure carries inherent business capabilities as to what can be achieved within its framework, since misaligned structure or disconnected functions create decision bottlenecks, and reinforce a non-innovation friendly climate. To run an agile business that can self-manage and self-renew by adapting to changes, or creating conditions to change, highly cognitive information connectivity is like the nerve system of the business, to collect, process and update almost real-time information with a deep understanding of the decisions that need to be made and their impact, also guide the corporate actions and behavior on the way to adapt to the changing environment with speed and resilience.

Sensitivity to emergence: Reality will not be still. And it cannot be taken apart. The business has all different success factors such as people, process, technology, emergence, etc, to achieve certain purposes, it also has the fragility to fail unexpectedly. The emerging activities, events, or disruptions bring an unprecedented level of uncertainty. For most organizations, they still do have contexts of relative certainty, while simultaneously having contexts reflecting both complexity and chaos. A high-mature organization always looks for opportunities, preventing potential risks across the business via increasing the usage of abundant information and emergent digital technologies accordingly to charter business paradigm shifts seamlessly.

The enterprise is nothing more than a switch in the network lattice of the ecosystem. To accelerate performance and unlock business potentiality, focus on the emergence to create business synergy. Try to digitally connect key resources and assets and build innovation hubs and clusters across the digital ecosystem. To broaden creative impact, the aspect which matters is to ensure that the enterprise is connected to all the appropriate business ecosystems, lattice or otherwise, touch points, for improving information and idea flows, and catalyzing innovation consistently.

Balance of strategic exploration and technical exploitation: In face of fierce competitions and more selective customers, organizations need to manage both their balance and growth cycle effectively. if you stick and restrict, you cannot be dynamic; if you overly spend or expand, you are risky. It’s important to achieve operational excellence by consolidating, rationalizing, modernizing, integrating, securing, or optimizing; it’s also critical to explore the full potential of the business by planning, designing, developing, investing, innovating; build differentiated business competencies to perform in the future so that the organization does not only earn enough from today,' but thrive in the future.’

Performance is the accomplishment, to ensure the business has a solid footing; potential is an investment, improving revenue and catalyzing business growth. It’s important for management to make a strategy and its subcomponents as living things, make certain adjustments for adapting to changes, clarify the interrelationships of many pieces of moving parts, as well as varying scenarios of intended or unintended sequence-consequence scenarios accordingly. Either for individuals or the businesses, balance and harmony are about flowing, to make a strategic alignment internally or across the business ecosystem. Organizations today have to be solid enough to keep the business running but fluid enough to enable information and ideas to flow within the expanded digital ecosystem at the accelerating speed.

Run an innovative company as an organic system that keeps evolving. Forward-thinking businesses should manage both balancing cycle and growth cycle smoothly by exploring the new possibility, as well as continually tuning its structure and process, to become more adaptable and innovative. When the organization has put a stronger emphasis on empowering people, accelerating strategy, catalyzing innovation, and improving people-centricity, it is reaching the inflection point to achieve the next level of organizational maturity.

Posted in: Digital Agility,Digital Master,Digital Maturity,Innovation,Systems Wisdom