Universalunderstanding

The point is that cooperation rather than domination is a great way to advocate inclusiveness, overcome common challenges, advance global communities, and expedite collective progress.

Compared to the industrial era with static knowledge and overly restrictive boundaries inherited from the last century, today’s hyper-connected and interdependent world has blurred boundaries, abundant information, and hyperdiversity (multigenerational, multicultural, multi-devicing workforce). Organizational leaders and professionals should develop global cognition by opening their mind, having intellectual curiosity to embrace the variety of perspectives, define universal leadership principles to lead change, inspire innovation, gain universal understanding of complex issues, develop universal cases to solve problems that can make significant impact on the global scale.

Universal understanding: Despite the worldwide difference of enriched languages, cultures, traditions, and talent, it is critical to clarify and gain universal understanding of certain concepts or ideas that impact our beliefs or dig into the root causes of common problems we all need to solve. Often, people confuse the symptom with the root cause of complex problems. Misunderstanding is the big cause of many human problems. The most important capability of the cognitive mind is the willingness and ability to seek out fresh knowledge, deepen understanding, address our ignorance and the assumptions we make to minimize it.

In order to survive in today’s digital new normal - velocity, complexity, uncertainty, and ambiguity, it’s important to gain a universal understanding of global issues, identify the multitude gaps such as perception gaps, knowledge gaps, experience gaps, cultural gaps, resource gaps, and deepen understanding with global contextualism. When you truly understand, you know the real issues are, you’ll know what you need, and how to get what you need to achieve the “art of possible.”

Universal leadership principles: Leadership is about change and innovation. Is it possible to harness universal leadership principles across the globe to accelerate collective progress? Principles are more abstract based on wisdom to guide mindset, and thus, more universal. Although leadership is not a formula, the underlying principle is like the light tower, to guide people toward the right direction for reaching a well-planned destination. If fine-tuned, a set of principles could guide, unify, and accelerate collective human’s progress.

Principles are often transcendental, going across time spans or disciplines. By following a universal set of principles, global leaders can lead with a realistic, credible, positive, attractive and innovative vision, clarify their goals directly related to defining the current and future challenges and know what they are looking for; motivate people to make progressive changes constantly.

Universal business cases: To solve problems at the global scope, it’s important to define more global universal business cases, which implies setting rules, standards or formats that can be adopted by worldwide business audiences, for articulating a problem, defining the scope, and making an objective business requirements assessment. It also means that the intention behind such initiatives is to solve some complex problems with global context, enabling people to view things from broader perspectives, capture fresh insight about those issues, and generate options to solve them collaboratively.

The global flavor of universal business cases are defined for solving large scale, complex problems. It clarifies common values, sets common standards, and advocates inclusiveness. It helps people do better pre-work, not necessarily put everything in the case development, but set "success criteria," list relevant issues worth further consideration, enable consideration of the range of options, rather than the more traditional "jump to solution" problem-solving.

The world has become much more complex and smaller all at once due to blurred territories, virtual interactions, intriguing business relationships. Discover the logic underneath historical events, decision processes, leadership patterns by deepening understanding of different states, different attitudes, or different beliefs in the global scope. The point is that cooperation rather than domination is a great way to advocate inclusiveness, overcome common challenges, advance global communities, and expedite collective progress.

Posted in: Global Perspective,Problem Solving,Thinkingaire