Irrational

Do not just fix the symptom, but dig through the root cause of team or business ineffectiveness, and make continuous improvement.

Change, unprecedented levels of uncertainty, and continuous disruptions are part of the new normal. Corporate leaders should be able to leverage information and knowledge to envision not only where a company believes it is going but also how it will get there. They need to do deep analysis on how it might be missing out on opportunities and how to manage risks.

 There are inherent dangers of too much information or incoherence in exponential growth of information; there are numerous problems related with miscommunication, poor judgment, or ineffective decision-making, etc. So how to overcome business vulnerability and improve business agility and maturity?

Incoherent information: Besides people, information is one of the most invaluable assets in the organization today. The amount of data to manage is huge and creates a lot of pressure. Hence, organizations have to leverage refined information to improve their agility and innovation. In practice, information quality directly impacts quality of business management, as incoherent information (unavailable, inaccurate, compromised, etc) would delay or decrease decision effectiveness, increase the complexity of problem-solving, and mislead the business in the wrong direction.

It’s critical to enhance information governance, improve data quality, information coherence, and knowledge management fluidity. Good strategic planning is based on quality information about customers, employees, competition, internal capabilities, and costs, and it needs to leverage emerging properties for making reasonable adjustments and improving the overall organizational quality and manageability.

Irrational behaviors: In face of “VUCA'' new normal, we observe technical and rational people acting on impulses or gut feelings or so-called “irrational mind” in spur of moments to become part of problems rather than solutions. Irrational thoughts cause illogical actions, enlarges the multitude of gaps, confuses the sequence and consequence, etc.

When problems happen, people want to protect themselves, and at the same time, do not want to take a rational step towards learning, they may generate negative emotions which release negative energy, and would not help to adopt the right course of action. Irrational behaviors and incoherent management further causes culture friction and decelerates organizational performance.

Inconsistent practices: Effectiveness is about doing the right things, from top-down, across the organizational hierarchy, business management needs to be consistent with what they think and behave by following the right set of organizational principles. When senior management allows inconsistent management practices to become the norm, people at all levels often become ineffective. It’s important to integrate both hard and soft elements into differentiated organizational competency.

Inconsistent practices and incoherent process management are often caused by a lack of policies and governance procedures that define processes; lack of commitment of resources and time to communication cross silos; or lack of philosophies to guide cultural change. The long-term business plan needs to be a cross-functional collaborative effort, not something one team does alone in a corner, in order to improve business consistency.

Due to the “VUCA” (Velocity, Uncertainty, Complexity, Ambiguity) characteristics of the digital new normal. Often irrational mentality and illogical solutions are reality. Do not just fix the symptom, but dig through the root cause of team or business ineffectiveness, and make continuous improvement. Forethoughtful business leaders envision the trends of their vertical industry, forecast the upcoming change with a certain degree of precision, navigate the organization into the uncharted water or blurred digital territories, steer the business in the right direction.

Posted in: Digital Pitfalls