Initiativesforambidexterity

 Companies are gradually opening up to the next practice to build up differentiated competency with a set of unique capabilities.

In the face of “VUCA” reality, people and organizations are at the different stages of learning, growing, maturing cycle. Individually, ambidexterity means people are versatile, building a unique set of professional competency for achieving high performance, unleashing potential all the time. 

Collectively, an ambidextrous organization can strike the right balance of listening & telling, innovation and efficiency. practice innovative leadership for improving business agility, resilience, speed.

To reinvent a digital organization, it’s important to balance” listening & telling” for improving its agility and maturity: Due to exponential growth of information and rapid change, many of yesterday’s solutions are not fit for the new circumstances. Organizations need to become listening organizations, their management should strike the right balance of listening & telling, make continuous information savvy conversations. As there are always two sides of the story; you need to listen carefully to gain true understanding. So the outcome of a successful discussion would be new perspective, fresh knowledge in improving decision coherence and problem-solving effectiveness. 

Listen and hear what people are saying or trying to say, even try to figure out what’s in their mind, not being said yet. Communicate carefully about the reasons for changes, and be honest about the impact. So you have to learn the hard way to improve management effectiveness only if you have both a listening and telling organization. If you do not listen, you will lose full support of the collaborators, if you don't tell, your collaborators will not know what is required, and thus, you cannot achieve the results you want to achieve. Actively listening and communicating to one another also creates excitement which propels good ideas to be formed and actions to be taken. People down the organization need to be encouraged to speak up and work cross functionally for optimizing business processes and achieving business excellence.

An ambidextrous organization can strike the right balance of harnessing innovation and improving efficiency: Innovation is a unique advantage that differentiates leaders from others. An "ambidextrous organization” is an organization that can handle innovation streams for different purposes and with different time frames, and also keep optimizing processes to improve business efficiency. Innovation explorers develop unconventional solutions, then, when ideas are fully developed and a prototype built, innovation implementers take over and work on serial production, to make products or services more reliable, easier to make, and cost-effective.

Innovation ambidexterity means that the organization can manage a healthy innovation portfolio with the right mix of incremental innovations and breakthrough innovations. Because incremental innovation is usually top-down, but breakthrough innovation is often bottom up. Businesses with innovation ambidexterity can develop competitive teams with different focus, separate teams focused on disruptive innovation from teams that focus on implementing and sustaining incremental innovation. Organizations can build a balanced portfolio to achieve higher-than-expected business results.

The art of digital management is to build a high performance organization with “simplexity”: Due to the “VUCA” nature of digitalization, business complexity is unavoidable. . It becomes complex if things do interact, particularly in the case of "nonlinear" business relationships, you can't separate things properly; and you cannot predict the actual effect of interaction straightforwardly. Over-complexity in a business may be hiding simple and innovative ways to do things. The art of digital management is not to complicate things, but to eliminate unnecessary complications.

The emergent business complexities include hyper-connectivity, hyper-diversity, hyper-dynamism, and non-linear complexity. The management needs to ponder: How do you know you have the minimum required complexity, as to support flexibility without hurting the support costs? “Simplexity” is a portmanteau word to reflect the digital reality. One one side, complexity is a property of intelligence. On the other hand, complication will stifle innovation and decrease productivity. In the core of simplicity lies complexity. The management needs to encourage desired complexity, simplify and optimize the business for reaching the next level of digital maturity.

Companies are gradually opening up to the next practice to build up differentiated competency with a set of unique capabilities. An ambidextrous organization must leverage all of the relevant disciplines in place and actively monitor emerging business opportunities in order to strike the right balance of growth and stability, process and flexibility, the best and next practices to solve problems structurally in a time frame that will yield strategic advantages.

Posted in: Digital Balance,Digital Fit,Digital Master