Sunday, June 4, 2023

Initiatives

Organizations and the world have become much more complex and smaller all at once, the range, breadth, depth, and pace of uncontrollable factors acting on any organizations mean constant fine-tuning is essential.

Every individual or business evolves business transformation with different speed. Not just tear down all the old things in the previous era; but strike the right balance between the new way and the “old way” to come up with better solutions. 

From here to there takes visioning, planning, actions, developing building blocks for changes and making continuous adjustment. The high mature organizations are highly conscious about what’s happening in their environment, with the ability to grasp opportunities, adapt to change timely, and prevent risks effectively to achieve higher than expected business results.

Only after extensive observation, can you gather adequate data and initiate information based dialogues: Observe how things get done in the organization, do silos or bureaucracy block the way? Does the business management make logical sense? See underneath the symptoms and dig into root causes. Observe objectively by leveraging contexts and multiple viewpoints. Observations and inquiries can mutually reinforce each other if only you ask thought-provoking questions, gather adequate information, and make extensive observations in a logical way.

Observe objectively, holistically, what you perceive depends very much on your goals and on what you concentrate on given the limited amount of working memory available. See around corners, understand different perspectives without pushing toward the one that you think is the truth, gather adequate data, valuable feedback, initiate data based conversations.

Only after studying each independent or interdependent process by asking questions about each independent variable, are you on the right path to optimize processes effectively: It’s a construct that involves the ability to recognize and diagnose the plethora of contextual variables inherent in the business processes and present circumstances. Make the inquiries of the samples you collect: "Does the sample consist of countable elements?", "What is the distribution of the sample?" The metrics of the process shall reflect the business outcome management cares about.

There are a variety of processes that need to be fine-tuned to improve organizational agility and maturity. Selecting a process to improve should be based on the business goal and priority, automation, complexity, etc are also considered factors. You should perhaps consider the emergent process, which is inherently "complex" due to their collaborative, knowledge-intensive nature. Like most other aspects of business, business processes must integrate with and support the final outcome to produce a product or service and generate revenue. By understanding and tuning critical variables, process management effectiveness and efficiency can be achieved through automation, standardization and optimization.

Only after you learn how to “ignore,” you become more conscious to focus on the most important things, benefit from a structured approach to produce high performance outcome: To adapt to the “VUCA” new normal wisely, ignore the trivial, but pay more attention to the significant details, seek out fresh knowledge, address ignorance and the assumptions you make to minimize it. Upon increasing paces of changes, the reality is that there are a lot of things that can go wrong and it is not always easy to identify what is important. Laser focus on the goals you intend to achieve; things that really matter, be selective on the knowledge you want to learn, the people you try to communicate with; the things you are interested in to do, the problems you need to solve, manage workflow effectively.

Some ignorance are fatal, causing significant damages. People ignore the problems around them because they can't figure out the exact cause and effect so the solutions are vague, variable or unknown. Or they ignore the problems because they are so complex and there are more problems behind it, there are chains of problems which are intimidating. It is important to prioritize things. It's only if the actual work is micromanaged and regulated to the point where resources are not able to drive change, then change becomes stifled.

Organizations and the world have become much more complex and smaller all at once, the range, breadth, depth, and pace of uncontrollable factors acting on any organizations mean constant fine-tuning is essential. The central idea is that one must first become "integrated with oneself"; only then, will you become effective problem-solvers. The business transformation has to go a few inches deeper and apply interdisciplinary knowledge to make leapfrogging business changes.

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