Sunday, February 27, 2022

Innovation

Real societal progress is made through the work of foreseeable leaders and business professionals who can figure out how to trend the future, capture the great opportunities to unleash collective human potential and build a highly innovative society.


In the face of “VUCA” new normal, individuals or businesses across boundaries evolve digital transformation with different speed. From here to there takes planning, actions, developing building blocks as well as making continuous adjustment. Rapid change and abundant knowledge bring both opportunities for business growth and chaos as pitfalls. 

Digital organizations and their people must learn through their interactions with the business environment, understand tales of changes, and make multifaceted shifts from mindset to attitude to behavior. They apply their learning, act, observe the consequences of their actions, make inferences about those consequences, and draw implications for future actions, with the ultimate goal to make a smooth digital transformation.

From industrialism to holism:
In the considerably static industrial age, organizations usually have an overly rigid hierarchy with functional silo setting, people are more compliance driven rather than potentiality-pursuing, getting stuck at the comfort zone with “we always do things like that” mentality. Often companies cannot reach the high level of business maturity with full speed. To make a smooth business transformation, it’s important to build the great mix of business elements that enable the organizational interdependence, enforce cross-functional communication and collaboration, keep information, ideas flowing frictionlessly to reach the higher state of business maturity.

To deal with a new normal with hyper-complexity, hyper-diversity, and interdependence, people need to think holistically, apply interdisciplinary knowledge to solve problems thoroughly. Business management should apply holism philosophy -transcending an adding or combination of thinking ways, to fix the silo misperception by integrating quality information, exploring multiple thought processes, willing to listen to the diverse viewpoints, and seeing both the forest and the trees.

From traditionalism to contemporarism: Traditional mindset is usually homogeneous, conservative, thinking “in the box”; or living in the past; traditional management is to apply reductionist methodology to achieve a certain level of business efficiency; however, with rapid change, such mindset and management discipline can only fix the symptom perhaps, but the real problems continue coming back. Contemporary means “living or occurring at the same time”; practice “out of the box” creative thinking, make continuous progress.

Traditional professionals are usually educated in the traditional classroom, take linear steps in working by holding common beliefs or taking some traditional practices. Contemporary leaders or professionals are perceived as modern, open-minded, informative, creative, heterogamous, and changeable to adapt to the digital new normal. They think globally and live digitally. They are equipped with digital mindset, having agility to adapt and create momentum, presenting unique and impressive digital footprint to build their contemporary digital persona; demonstrating digital fitness based on recombinant core competencies with continuous deliveries.

From conventionalism to adventurism:
In the static society with the scarce knowledge and traditional cultures, most of the people are educated to be compliant with conventional wisdom and most traditional companies discourage innovation. Conventional wisdom has a negative connotation about sticking to outdated knowledge or concepts, traditions or cultures, or simply the old ways to think or do things. Modern leaders and professionals are bold digital adventurists, who can craft and cast a clear vision, spur creativity, and explore alternative ways to solving either existing or new problems effectively.

Strategically, it will be effective to surface, examine, challenge and perhaps, even shift the underlying paradigms. Digital business leaders today should nourish the excitement, learn how to walk the innovation talk, start to expand the collaborative innovation process, create sustainable business value, draw from the experience and expertise of those around them, and take an adventurous journey of digital transformation.

Change is inevitable, compared to changes, the business transformation is more radical, with all sorts of ups & downs, opportunities & risks, bumps & curves. Real societal progress is made through the work of foreseeable leaders and business professionals who can figure out how to trend the future, capture the great opportunities to unleash collective human potential and build a highly innovative society.










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