Three Practices to Overcome Corporate Silo Mentality

With silo mentality, organizations lose their collaborative advantage as they are being over-managed and under led.

We have transitioned from an industrial to knowledge, innovation, and hyperconnectivity economy - with this shift has come to a change in organizational forms away from the traditional rigid hierarchies managed through command and control to more fluid and responsive network forms. Yet many business managers still apply old silo management mindsets to new ways of organizing and this legacy of the old economy limits many 'networked' organizations. Are silos a mere product of organizational design? Or is their nature tied to a deeper level: the humankind's nature? Despite the mountain of evidence pointing to the detrimental effects of these silos, they still seem to be quite common in organizations. The question is: why? In today's volatile economy, nothing impedes progress more than protective silos which are simply a form of bureaucratic amorphous mass designed to preserve the status quo. How does one eliminate bureaucracy? What would be some ideas to assist in breaking down silos in an organization where they are present?

Leadership innovation practices: A lot of organization’s reaction to the silo mentality goes back to leadership and trust. Silo mentality is a common challenge for lots of organizations. It is not structured, but the behaviors and attitudes of the leadership teams, and lack of strategic and team objectives and rewards that drive this mentality. If there is a high level of trust within the upper rankings of management, this will be conveyed through their actions and directions to those within their own work unit. If all of the upper-level management is engaged and focused on the same institutional goal and plan, they will be able to move forward in the same direction. By sharing the same vision, trusting that adjacent and support departments are all capable of completing their portion of the goal, and being able to coordinate and communicate effectively across departments, you can attempt to increase the performance of those members within each silo for the overall goal. Once a breakdown of trust or communication occurs, you begin to see each silo become more decentralized and self-focused. When leaders of an organization place an emphasis on building a culture of cross-functional collaboration, the opportunity for silos to work against the alignment of all departments towards the goals and objectives of the organization is diminished. Having leaders of respective functions to interact in a structured setting on a consistent basis goes a long way towards eliminating the silo mentality.

Collaboration practices: Creative collaboration via integrative diversity can overcome silos. Silos are inevitable in every structured organization. Silos are a method of containment and storage: bounded groups or insular tribes are evidence of silos, and silos are reservoirs for homogeneous thinking, limiting the organization's creativity and innovation. It is the responsibility of the leaders to initiate his or her team to break the silos to realize the common goals or strategy which are far more important than the personal and departmental goals. Fostering collaboration is the key to creating a seamless organization when in pursuit of a strategy. There are negative conflicts when the organization has little collaborative competency; and when they integrate, there is more potential to innovate and create value, more so when the collaborative competency of the organization is strong. Diversity is the key to innovation and growth in organizations, and only converted into value when it becomes integrative diversity - Silos are the opposite spectrum of integrative diversity and limit the organization's potential. Identities and differences are the sources of creativity although insulating them within silos contains this potential. Silos don't seem to fit within emerging 'networked' collaborative organizational forms, and if they are being reinforced, their existence is perhaps a legacy of old management thinking applied to new ways of doing - the result, higher risk of conflict and inertia, not something organization's want in a global marketplace that demands innovation, speed, responsiveness, and flexibility to succeed.

Outcome-based measurement practices: When you measure the end and not the means, the silo walls will become retractable. The problem stems from the way outcomes are being measured. When the collective outcome is the focus, the silo walls collapse. When individual and departmental outcomes are measured, the walls go up. In other words, what are the organization's rewards and recognition structure perpetuating? Differentiated performance metrics and rewards systems tend to bring this shift in perspective about, but they too are a necessary aspect of how an organization operates -- until they become counterproductive and have to be changed. So the effective scenario to break down silo includes following steps:

-Help staffs understand the priorities, perspectives, and strengths of people from other parts of the organization.

-Raise everybody's level of accountability.

-Ensure customer and strategic focus, if managed properly.

-Drive innovation that is relevant to the bigger picture.

In essence, with a silo mentality, organizations lose their collaborative advantage as they are being over-managed and under led, remain disconnected, hoard knowledge and power within silos, and do not have the competence to collaborate in the long term. There is no such thing as a perfect organization. Rather, the best organization is one that transitions from one form to another in order to adapt to the changes and improve organizational maturity from efficiency, effectiveness to agility.

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CIO as "Chief Innovation Officer": Three Aspects of IT Innovation

IT leaders are in a unique position to orchestrate business innovation symphony.

Most forward-thinking IT organizations are experiencing the digital shift from ‘built to last’ to ‘design to change’; from a back-office support function to a value creator and innovation engine. But how to manage such a digital transformation more seamlessly, what is the primary role of the CIO in harnessing IT innovation and building IT competency and maturity?

IT leaders are in a unique position to orchestrate business innovation symphony: IT leaders need to identify the issues associated with innovation in an enterprise and actually have developed a unique model and platform for open innovation. The challenge is, of course, with most organizations, there's a relentless focus on reducing operational expenses and for services companies, increasing efficiency, and utilization. This draws down the availability of resources that can engage with the type of innovation pursuit. The big changes for many large companies are that they are too busy working on the short or medium term goals. Of course, they know innovation is important, but they simply don't know what to do about it, so it's easier to focus on what they already know how to do. Companies which have great success with their original strategy have more difficulties in changing their path, especially those open capital companies with shareholders asking for more and more dividends for the next quarter. Nowadays, technology is often the innovation disruptive force, therefore, IT leaders are often at the right position to oversee business processes, and identify the critical business issues by working closely with a business partner from a long-term perspective, and leverage technology to manage innovation across the enterprise boundary.

IT leaders need to manage innovation portfolio including both incremental innovation and disruptive innovation in a systematic way: Unfortunately, in most of the organizations, innovation is still serendipity. An enterprise that depends on doing something, again and again, engaging various teams and groups, have less appetite for change. Incremental innovation can be tolerated to some extent, but disruptive innovation is almost impossible unless the company is going through a crisis. Even in the case of a crisis, most of the time, change of the leadership is required to accept disruptive innovation. Bottom line thinking is one of the great tragedies of modern corporations. The true value is hard to derive from support services since measuring productivity can be elusive and difficult to quantify. The channels of communication are further muddied because of the language barrier associated with IT. Hence, you need CIOs that can translate business-speak and tech-speak fluently. Information now is the lifeblood of any organization, by conveying the vision and communicating effectively, IT leaders can work more collaboratively with business leaders to solve business problems via innovation, and manage innovation portfolio in a more systematic way. Leading only with operational considerations is not the way forward. IT success needs to be accomplished by working with business partners to leverage opportunities for changing how the business competes in the marketplace.

Failure is inevitable for innovation, the fact is “fail fast and fail forward”: That said, sometimes more is learned and gained from failing. The key is to fail fast. Opening up a spirit and opportunity for people to stretch and try new things will, in the end, generate many more returns than were ever thought possible! In addition, The business expects ROI. It is true that the majority of IT organizations still cannot articulate their economic value to the board or shareholders in a language they understand and performance metrics will not solve the problem. Costs are part of the solution, but they need to be understood in terms of usage or volume patterns and they need to be distributed across often very complex revenue models, that are in a constant state of flux. There is also a bit of a political battle that goes on where IT claims its proportion of revenue value, even when far more precise mappings exist between costs and revenue. Once it plays that game IT matures beyond being a cost center and acts more like a business partner, or business within a business, because its value proposition can be backed up with something approaching empirical evidence as opposed to gut instinct.

An innovative and value-driven IT needs to understand stakeholders’ expectations and propose an innovative solution portfolio that corresponds to both demand and cost drivers with a focus on business priority, IT develops the professional competencies needed for successful business solution delivery, IT captures organizational knowledge to continuously improve performance, and harness innovation, ultimately improve the organizational level efficiency, effectiveness, agility, and maturity.

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Is UX Designer a Generalist or a Specialist

User-based design is not just a single business or technical project, it is an important element of your digital strategy.

The term "User Experience Design" in digital product development is a full lifecycle of research - define - design - prototype - iterate - test. The specific roles that align to these functions could be anything from user researcher, specialist, graphic designer, art director, content strategist, interaction designer, front-end developer, etc. UX Generalist is a designer who understands this cycle and can contribute at any phase. It's the T-shaped people things - The digital talent should all be generalists with a specialism!

UX is about in-between skills. The ability to understand processes and the workflows makes these processes function smoothly for both provider and user. Particularly in this day of age where online is about seamless movement between a combination of tools and services. Knowing tools and processes is good, but the ability to effectively solve problems and teach others how to do the same is the ultimate reason to work in the field of UX Design. The core of experience design is about using the process and contextual inquiry to gain perspective, which then, allows you to simplify the journey and add weight to the remaining emotional fulcrum points. Keywords here are: PERSPECTIVE and SIMPLIFICATION. The core of Customer Experience design is PERSPECTIVE: The core of front-end development is a hybrid between the elegance of expression, efficiency, and perfectionism. Iteration in development is a very different task from iteration in experience design.

A generalist still has a specialism. You may be knowledgeable about a lot of subjects, but there will always be something you're really good at. In turn, it's this overlap of your strengths that creates specialism that others don't have. If you are a broadly thinking person and like to consider yourself as a generalist, try to develop a helicopter perspective and you will be asked to give advice as soon as the "specialists" have come up with something which looks good from a very close distance but misses the general problem because he/she is just a specialist. The problem is: to be a good generalist you will need quite some knowledge of quite some fields.

It is about understanding all of the general parts of the design and then having specialties makes a lot of sense. A computer scientist can be a generalist in the sense that s/he gets the difference between functional and object-oriented code., they might understand the general patterns, but generally, they'll prefer one or two languages and really understand all the subtleties of each. Companies with more experience and a deep understanding of UX are aware of this conundrum and consequently, give UX talent an opportunity to work exclusively in discovery and representation of the user perspective on the product. A person who develops UX must be willing to learn, it is perhaps the most essential to developing this type of work tool, you must be abreast of trends and meet other colleagues who have solved problems similar to yours. Specialty in some particular field is always helpful and due to the self-interest of each profile has more knowledge in some area, but it is essential to develop learning in the area required and know where to seek knowledge, but after course there are problems solve specialist, so one must be able to meet the right person to ask for advice or where to look.

UX is not just a single business or technical project, it is an important element of your digital strategy, from research to planning; from multi-lenses inquiries to multiple-stage reviews; from visual arts to wireframes, it is not just about a user interface, but an end-to-end” customer experience and about your brand and competency. So UX designer needs to have ‘T-Shaped’ talent.

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How to Leverage Systems Thinking in Designing a Digital Organizational Structure

 The System Thinking and views of the business world are more balanced, and it is sensitive to the emergent factors to keep things flow.

Digital shift is inevitable, the digital revolution is reshaping the way we live our lives and the way we work. It’s forcing a fundamental digital transformation of business and our society. How to design organizations to maintain viability and deliver tactical actions for strategic effect, given weak, noisy, or evolving feedback signals due to systemic adaptive complexity in its environment? What would be the balanced design principles to enable successful emergent behavior and function of the organization in order that its structure is emergent as a self-organizing, self-redesigning team of teams? Or to put simply, how to design a digital organizational structure with the well-aligned resources, processes, and rules?

Finding the good starting point to transform the state of organization from ‘rigid’ to ‘fluid’: Given that the environment is both complex and rapidly changing, then your model of that environment will always be less than desired. However, there are some good starting points that are what you know about change processes. If you have a rigid organization that realizes it’s not viable or relevant, there’s a necessity switching to a fluid state, a fluid organization has potential to be anything that gets organized to a specific form and then either reorganized to a new rigid state or relaxes back to a fluid again. A core challenge appears to be discerning systemic understanding from a feedback mechanism that is a dynamic flow of cumulative stress, a pleasure which drives change or reinforces across a network of evolving interconnections.

-Strategic or systemic outcomes-targets;

-Dynamic business competencies across business capability orchestrations; the magic of orchestrating the ecosystems;

-Dynamic transient operations; dynamic systemic operations competencies (across platforms, capabilities-application-to-operations; dynamic systemic capabilities aggregation & integration, dynamic systemic platforms orchestration and aggregation (in the wide sense: resources, structures, processes, etc);

Systems Thinking can help you understand the way that your models are functioning and are likely to continue functioning. This allows you to question, analyze, and evaluate the underlying drivers of these systems and whether those drivers are moving you toward what you actually want. Theoreticians and strategists think about the higher leverage areas while the practical person or tactician works among the lower leverage areas according to the assumed or defined goals, rules, structures, etc of the system. A core challenge appears to be discerning systemic understanding from a feedback mechanism that is a dynamic flow of cumulative stress and pleasure (drives change or reinforces) across a network of evolving interconnections.

Converting from the mechanistic industrial paradigm to the digital paradigm requires starting with new system oriented beliefs and thought processes. The mechanistic production metaphor is replaced with organic service metaphor, technology centrism becomes multi-disciplinary people-centrism, the linear system perception is replaced by complex nonlinear and adaptive system discipline, a goal-seeking system becomes purposeful, and technical behavior is replaced by socio-technical behavior. There is an emergence-vs-design-paradox thereon across the wicked complexities around the multi-sided competencies issues, including the full-spectrum of maturity-ladders. The organizations that have hit the heights of success in the digital world aren’t those that have determinedly followed the old industrial models and silo ways of thinking; it’s those that have forged a new path for digital shift.

The highly complex and dynamic system needs to be elaborated in a well-organized effort. The System Thinking and views of the business world are more balanced, and it is sensitive to the emergent factors to keep things flow. Balance and harmony are not fixed, they are flowing. There are systemic consequences and impacts of thinking and actions in terms of interconnections and interdependencies. And this is the philosophy behind any digital transformation.

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How to Engage Top Management in Performance Management

It is difficult to have a highly competitive organization without highly competitive talent.

Performance Management is a significant management discipline in the business system. It’s the management practice that does not have hard coded programming like other business systems but directly drives corporate mindset, attitude, and behavior. What are success factors in Performance Management? How to engage top business executives in Performance Management? And how to build an effective framework of processes and guidelines dealing with dynamic, fluid, unpredictable pool of corporate mentality and behaviors?

Fundamental to culture change, a large subject in itself, is the need for Performance Management: Every organization has its own unique set of collective thinking and behaviors, some are reluctant to change, and others are open to change. It is supported by senior management to drive the culture in the right direction - and move the strategy of the business forward. In many cases, the senior managers are afraid of the change because historically there were no solid roots for adopting new ideas. A popular quote is that, "Culture trumps strategy." This is where HR may need to start in the education of corporate management. Even with great capable people, if the culture is not right - then the best-laid plans will go very slowly and possibly stall. The spirit of an organization comes from the top. The top team has significant influence for implementing Performance Management into practice in the right way. They are serving as role model for other managers in the organization. If the top team does performance management thoroughly, then the rest levels of managers do it thoroughly as well. Bottom line: every organization has a certain culture and to succeed in any endeavor, you need to understand the culture and the drivers behind any action, to understand the culture, HR professionals need to explore the implicit cultural traits (the hidden beliefs that are difficult to know and takes time to uncover), this also takes a lot of time and effort but the results are tremendous, you will achieve your goals regardless of the difficulties. A quick practical approach is to get buy-in from a top team that if they want the business results and outcomes, then performance management is a key system that runs alongside the business processes.

Let data and analytics speak. As we all know, executive management always responds to "data," senior management usual focus is on numbers or revenues, can your Performance Management create or contribute towards more revenues? The prime understanding required is the SWOT of the management team. This is essential because the same would be reflected in the entire organization, in the people system and its function. Also the Strength - Weakness analysis of the members and whether they truly function as a team. Actually, there is an expectation of all levels of leadership, entry, mid- and executive, to critique or at least be aware of how data (S.W.O.T. analyze) affects an organization. Consequently,  the most effective way in confirming senior management's buy-in is to show how the data, directly and indirectly, affects productivity, performance, and profitability. Decisions that affect the lives of people, and the vitality of an organization, should be executed on the heels of history and data.

One of the good way to engage top managers is to apply a suitable Performance Management framework. A suitable PM framework for the organization (not one size fits all) combined with a culture and an attitude that truly values the delivery of performance feedback whenever and wherever it is needed will win out. A suitable Performance Management framework delivers the results they need, in a demonstrable or measurable way, and ideally strategical. Top managers are not interested in a time-consuming process that records history; everyone wants recognition but isn't PM supposed to enable achievement? Top managers must influence their organizational culture and management attitude via leading by example - and it's HR’s job to help them by challenging them to decide what it is that they want from it; and manage it in more integral and systematic way.

Performance enhancement through delegation, decentralization and empowerment: Though top management sponsorship is crucial, Performance Management should not be confined at the top but to all levels, at strategic areas where Performance Management can give desired results for the business, how to manage performance parameters so that desired results are achieved. In many situations, the managers need full autonomy to complete the programs and projects. It is possible only when they are empowered and delegated to take needed decisions. Otherwise, bureaucrats take advantage and the projects are unfinished. Many line managers were obstructed due to improper goals. There is a need for monitoring, evaluating and giving the right feedback for the people on the job. This also need for right leaders. It is useless to come up with a strategic business plan if the people component is not considered. Some people think that with the plan, the people component will just take care of itself. Or they are relying on HR to include programs that will support the plan. In any case, top management has to ensure that the people component is considered so that all facets of performance is covered especially since implementation of the plan will be done by people.

-Aligning the PMS with the overall organization strategy, mission, and objective and how

-Adapting to a proactive fair PMS can contribute towards the leadership strategy.

-Training and coaching to senior management that highlight the importance of having a

-Fair system contributing towards a motivated workforce leading to more productivity and revenues.

Performance - Commitment - Results. And these require management support. Having a logical flow of thinking from strategic business direction to operational planning is important, but all these have to be supported by other programs like facilities planning, market development, etc. in the business area and performance and competency development in the people area. The blessing that came through business strategy planning is the clearer direction of competency development and a clearer basis for evaluating performance. These are important pillars of Performance Management. Instead of simply saying that an assigned work was completed successfully, but giving time for evaluating how the work was achieved in terms of planning, use of available resources, clarity of direction, how teamwork was achieved (not only within a project but in using the knowledge/experience of other people), how the manager and the person involved worked in synergy, etc. From a business perspective, Performance Management, when employed as a way of maximizing results through competence, using cooperative effort rather than relying on fully self-generated effort in an open atmosphere of communication among people including staff with managers, can have deeper and longer impact on organizational performance. The usual incentive programs don't really give much push toward improving performance, but when a program digs deep into individual desire for self-improvement and each one has the opportunity/capability to improve performance with the help of management, then the program can fly.

Performance Management needs to be well integrated with talent management and culture management, and it should focus on improving future performance and talent development as well. What you can show management is how you are moving the organization toward excellence by using PM to get people who are interested in improving doing just that or those that are not - being separated. You can use PM to challenge with stretch goals the performances and behaviors if they are met consistently - you are providing no comfortable resting places. It is difficult to have a highly competitive organization without highly competitive talent.

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Agile vs. DevOps

Both Agile and DevOps are for harnessing integration, interaction, and innovation.

Agile is a big umbrella term refers to the mindset, philosophy and the set of principles to run business or manage projects, also covering the comprehensive methodologies like XP, and lightweight management frameworks like Scrum. DevOps is a deployment pipeline that stresses communication, collaboration and integration between software developers and information Technology (IT) professionals.

Both Agile and DevOps are for harnessing integration, interaction, and innovation. DevOps is the natural result of organizations taking agility past their development processes to encompass the entire software life cycle, including deployment and maintenance. So in the same way Agile teams break the silos between Quality Engineers and software developer, instead of the development organization throwing finished software over the fence to the operation organization, everyone retains a stake in the overall cycle. Developers work on the deployment and monitoring tools, hardware engineers are part of the original design team, etc.

Both Agile and DevOps are customer-centric: Agile advocates bringing the voice of the customer right into the team in order to tear down that wall in the value stream and open up a dialog with the customer, to allow greater transfer of ideas, both ways. In the same way, DevOps breaks the invisible wall between development and operations, to open up a dialog and optimize the whole process in ways that perhaps were not possible before. To sum up, agile involves the customer in the development process to lower the risk. Develops involves the operation and test to streamline the test and deployment of the software, thus further involving the customer and potentially lowering the risk even more.

DevOps and agile are complementary to each other. DevOps can eliminate the waste incurred by "Definition of Done." The software is never really "done." Even after it goes live, it needs to run smoothly and to ensure that, there is a continuous stream of work. DevOps brings the culture of end-to-end software engineering processes under one umbrella and tried to address existing silos and challenges: a) with iterative development and frequent production releases of product increments, the bottlenecks to push that releases in production by operations team at same pace and frequency still existed thereby limiting the full potential of being Agile b) often there were risk and uncertainty associated with production releases due to differential environments c) the contribution from operations team and their expertise to product development and environment provisioning were underutilized until the late till production release thereby facing multiple challenges. There are other such numerous reasons which have been addressed through DevOps culture through improved communication and collaboration with operations team during the entire software engineering processes. Now the term 'DevTestOps' is picking up, which advocates and put the emphasis on more and more automation testing and involvement of Development, Testing and Operations team all working together from day one of the project.

Many organizations actually struggle with a waterfall of "Strategy - Agile - Operations," while others have simply made Operations a "stakeholder" of Scrum teams who need to get in line with feature development, sprint timeboxes, and Product Planning. Essentially DevOps is a solution set for getting software into production. Agile (the mindset) on the other hand embodies the strategy to be flexible, fast and adaptable to changes. Scrum (methodology commonly confused with "Agile") is a lightweight framework for how to do software development agile.

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What’s the Purpose of Designed Systems

The purpose is the source of all power.

Humans have purposes, organizations have purposes, and human society as a whole has collective purposes as well. What is the purpose? Does cause-effect analysis define purpose? According to the dictionary, the purpose is:

- the reason for which something exists or is done, made, used, etc.

- an intended or desired result; end; aim; goal.

- determination; resoluteness.

- the subject at hand; the point at issue.

-the practical result, effect, or advantage: to act with good purpose.

The purposes of designed systems are to provide processes that enable specific outputs and that will meet specific needs. This is accomplished by developing the high-level requirements with main purposes or system requirements, and decomposing to lower-level requirements or subsystem requirements that define processes, in order to generate stated outputs under specific life cycle conditions; consequently, resulting from specific inputs, processes, and outputs. So, the purpose itself is a multidimensional system. It has the same properties as any other system.

-It has emergent properties that help us deal with future possibilities.

-It has outcome properties which help us get things done by relying on our past experience.

-It has relational properties that help us resolve the tensions between future possibilities and past experience.

Any purpose that a system has is defined by the observer looking at that system, man-made or natural. Systems are merely descriptions of what an observer notices and includes in their defined boundary of interactions. These descriptions, of course, are highly useful, but they are still only descriptions and not entities. This is why cause-effect is tricky because there are multitudes of causes and multitudes of effects which only become apparent as the observer changes how they describe the system (organizations, structures, elements, environments, etc). If using cause and effect logic to help distinguish between symptom and cause when evaluating activities within a system, you are able to draw from the results both the outcomes and causes of the system. Perhaps you know that there is more often, very few root causes and similarly a limited number of outcomes that reveal themselves when this work is conducted properly.

The cause-effect analysis does have to rely on different levels of abstraction (models). Depending on complexity, you can adjust the level of abstraction by applying inductive through deductive logic, the linear cause and effect logic is applicable depending on the entity under evaluation, both man-made and natural environmental risks. In many cases, multi-sequential adverse event propagation is applicable for man-made systems. Further consider the interaction of complex system elements: the human, software, logic abstraction, and the business environment. Consequently, the adverse propagation is dependent on physics, expected human dynamics and the specific entity design. Accordingly, Cause-Effect analysis anticipates purpose but not until the system is actualized, can you really observe manifest purpose.

If the original intent is expressed in Effect on Context, then a system design can be analyzed as to the likelihood of purpose. However, if the design is expressed as conformance to a pile of 'system shall' statements called requirements, then there is no solid basis for anticipating fitness for purpose because the purpose of the system is not conformance to requirement. The purpose of the system development may be conformance to requirements, but that does not mean the operating system will be fit for purpose. So using effect as a descriptor for the purpose has issues, in that when an observer changes what they see as the effect of that set of interactions, then the purpose also must be described differently, which begs the question why is describing purpose useful? Purpose entails a) Effect on context, b) Intended vs. Actual, and c) Source of Effect. Designers are the source of the intended effect and unintended effects. The system in operation is the source of actual effects, thereby reveals actual purpose, but is not the Source of Purpose, only the means for cause Purpose (both intended and unintended) to happen.

It’s important to distinguish between desired output and the purpose of a system and discern behavior vs. purpose as well. In mathematical programming, the purpose is called cost function and the solution is the desired output. It's true that we can express the relation as "cause and effect," but the purpose is introduced by the designer. It is also useful to discern behavior (response to stimulus) vs. purpose (effect on context). The effect caused by a stimulus is also called behavior. That 'effect' refers to the entity that experienced the cause. That 'effect' is different from the effect that system behavior has on its context. The effect of cause-effect may be seen as yet another cause. Thus, you need to put additional effort to do extrapolation and find the purpose. Certain "systems" attend to cause and effect and they do not define purpose. The systems "state," not "purpose," needs to be considered as well. These systems include "dynamic" complex sociotechnical systems. While they are unintended they include system failure outcomes, but nothing to do with system cause and effect purpose.

People have purposes that arise from our interactions with others. They too are influenced by unconscious emotions, these are manifest as values, social, political, technical etc.. These tend to be dynamic because our interactions are dynamic. People also have purposes that they associate with outcomes, these are influenced by their unconscious motives and are manifest as goals objectives etc. In a positive sense that ST thinking concepts can assist you to address a particular problem, situations that would otherwise would not for a particular purpose. It’s helpful to view system models in an outcomes sense, and that can be reflected through cause and effect and intentions of those involved.

The purpose is the source of all power. It is amazing what people can do when they see they have a source of all power within themselves, a system can be seen, to have a purpose of its own when it produces unexpected behavior. And some complex systems produce behavior that is hard to fathom and sometimes impossible to understand. But these properties function together as one interactive, dynamic, multi-dimensional system of purpose that is at the heart of any human system.

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Is HR Best Practices Overused

Best practices perhaps help you improve efficiency, but innovation and strategy will differentiate you and help you build the competency.

The principle, Policy, Practice, Process, and Performance are all important term in modern management discipline. However, the situation is, what is relevant to one organization may not, and is probably not, to another. There are principles, policies, and practices that a company could adopt from another, but even if in the same sector, there is no guarantee of success taking into account leadership, culture, and historical practices.

It's very difficult to call anything a 'best practice' because if it were, EVERYONE would know about it. In the end, it is what works best for YOUR company that leadership determines. So many of these types of questions are answered 'it depends.' It depends on because every company, location, industry is different. However, it is good to know the principles of effective practices - that help you learn from one another- learn from each other's mistakes, but not fall into the trap of copying each other and expecting the same results. HR professionals need to make more evidence-based decisions and be equipped with a strong understanding of what effective practice means for your own industry- that way you can make more informed decisions and be in a better position to question the business partners.

HR Benchmarking practice needs to be more strategic focus: Formal benchmarking provides evidence but only if you are benchmarking your own practices and outcomes with others, because this can potentially highlight strengths, weaknesses and how you can improve performance. Benchmarking done well is about becoming the best you can be (and getting there faster), not about proving you are the best - therein lies the route to complacency! Traditional HR benchmarks tend to be transactional ( budgets, headcounts), and don't provide any indication of how to change behavior and improve outcomes. Ideally, the transformational HR needs to benchmark with strategic measures (growth, future-driven performance) with the clear goals to change mindset, behaviors and outcomes.

Your “best practices” need to be well aligned with your core value, principles, and standards. If you are asking your employees to follow "best practices," how do you write performance evaluations? Are you measuring the performance against the best practices or the standards within your company? Employees should follow best practices, but often, those best practices are not aligned with corporate values, corporate strategy or performance metrics. Best practice is a phrase that is overused and poorly understood in many business areas, not just HR. You will hear "best practices" thrown around everywhere in many sectors etc. What does it mean, therefore, it’s always important to get back to the business fundamentals.

Either best practice or next practice, there are definitely effective practices that link to better performance outcomes, but in a dynamic knowledge-based environment, these may change slightly or significantly from one organization to another - there is no BEST that necessarily works for all. Either for HR, IT or any other business functions, best practices perhaps help you improve efficiency, but innovation and strategy will differentiate you from the mass, and build the competency to become an industrial leader.

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How to Leverage Paradoxical Thinking and Systems Thinking to Understand the World

The world you perceive depends on the way you see and the lenses you use. - Steve Covey

Our conscience and morality in living a quality of life that sustains the health of the mind, body, and spirit, leads us to put a yardstick to events.

 Everything is perspective. Everything is a judgment based upon the perspective that is influenced by our own mentality, experiences and also our belief systems. As old saying: “Nothing is either good or bad, but out thinking makes it so.”

The world you perceive depends on the way you see and the lenses you use. (Covey) Somethings are always good, and some are always bad, especially if you include concepts and emotions in your definition of "things." Good or Bad? It can depend on the way we 'see' the world. Our paradigms can be "compared to the lenses in our glasses. What we see isn't a completely accurate reflection of reality, it is shaped by our thought processes, attitudes, and perceptions. The objective Truth, we use as our yardstick, is just as much an illusion as our subjective perceptions: good vs. bad, talking vs. listening, giving vs. receiving etc.... anything 'social' or 'joint' that benefits all of us in a dance of harmonious balance. What you may think is bad, is not to someone else. Good and bad are simply perspectives, shaped by culture and personal experience. People are different, cultures are different, however, as for the substance: human moral constructs determine right and wrong. Regardless of religion, culture and any other differences, there’s a moral compass to help human beings find the common ground, then people can respect the difference and to harmonize the way moving to the upground through empathy, and make collective progress in human society.

A"Thinking" classifies many things, Good" and "bad" depend on how you believe a situation to be - influenced by your consciousness and attitude about life. Consciousness is the quality or state of awareness, or, of being aware of an external object or something within oneself. It has been defined as sentience, awareness, subjectivity, the ability to experience or to feel, wakefulness, having a sense of selfhood, and the executive control system of the mind. Despite the difficulty in definition, many philosophers believe that there is a broadly shared underlying intuition about what consciousness is. You conscious mentality drives your attitude, the attitude and behavior depend significantly on human values, conceived a new image of human for emphasizing the role that our species can play in shaping its own destiny, as humans have always created an environment of their own out of symbols which become human values after being cultivated; they may develop new abilities to direct their own evolution on ethical values determined according to emergent realities created by an interdependent global community. Each really new idea needs to break one or more old habitual thoughts. Even an old idea of Free Will, for example, needs to break habitual thought about the same cause having the same effect. And many other habitual thoughts revolve around the mediocre understanding of causality. This explains “resulting tendency towards inefficiency and stagnation” and the danger of “egalitarianism” “resulting tendency towards inefficiency and stagnation” --- turning into, what is mediocracy about.

Symbolic systems (language, beliefs, law, customs, values, morality, overall culture…) are the most important subject for researching in global perspectives. This kind of systems may lead groups of humans to raise their consciousness about the need for organizing consistently their means (ideas) — choosing and implementing them according to their ends (goals). The healthy, then moral evolvement of human relations, being necessary for pushing ahead frankly and effectively the development of any particular community, makes necessary to create, maintain and improve the kind of cultural values. It may help and lead people, to develop individually and collectively their gregarious and cooperative features inherent in human nature. It is combined with the sense of responsibility and free decisions, that would support altogether the manifestation of humanitarian societies to be aware of the role of human beings on the planet Earth.

We are on the major shift from industrial silo to digital hyperconnectivity, now the physical barriers: the oceans, the mountains, and the deserts can no longer isolate us, and knowledge is only clicks away, Success in the digital world demands both paradoxical thinking - to see the two sides of the coin; and Systems Thinking - to understand the interconnected nature of digital societal system. But this old saying is still true: “Nothing is either good or bad, but our thinking makes it so.”

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Does Digital Leadership Become “Harder” or “Softer”?

The hardcore of leadership never changes: it’s all about making a positive influence and providing direction, both for oneself and others

The digital world today is much more complicated and that requires an ability to juggle multiple and competing demands and clear the vision under cloudy climate and uncertain circumstances. Businesses need to recognize the change and help leaders meet the challenge via business savvy and agility. Improvisation, fact-finding, analysis and synthesis, trial and error, all are marks of leadership. However, compared to industrial leadership, is digital leadership 'harder or softer'? How can you get the balance right - Leadership substance, leadership competency, and leadership styles?

Leadership is the good combination of “Hard Skills” and “Soft Skills”: The "hard-core" of leadership is 'soft': It is about influence and change. Now, here's the hard truth that all leadership-oriented organizations must deal with. As long as investors and the stock market hold the Boards and top management of any private or public company accountable for achieving certain financial and operating objectives over the short and long term, the practical reality of today's business world is that business leaders must have both technical "hard" skills and leadership "soft" skills in the proper ratio. Although the line between the hard and the soft skills are blurring. When cataloging the "hard" skills in the leadership and management study, there are groups of skills that might be considered. The first one would be business strategy skills including visionary thinking, strategic planning, market evaluation, and customer needs, product development, capital planning, Board and external market management, corporate culture, technology trends, executive management requirements, among others. The second one would be the management skills of planning, leading, organizing and controlling. The third one would be the operational skills of Marketing, Sales, Operations, Engineering and Research, Manufacturing, etc. The fourth one would be financial skills such as Income and Cash Flow Statement and Balance Sheet knowledge, etc.

Leadership is more agile, elastic and resilient in the digital era: Leadership is figuring out which decisions need to be made and laying out a compelling vision for the path to follow. Leadership is also the ability to make smart decisions for the short- and long-term ability to gain active support for their successful execution. Static leadership does not work well. Leaders must master more than one management style, and must adapt to a changing business environment. To embrace change can be seen as a desired behavior just like “display trustworthiness” or “lead by example.” Leadership “hard” skills can and should be defined, but also leadership and management skills. Plus key desired behaviors. This is useful when defining leadership roles and levels when identifying leader development areas, and when assessing leadership skills and experience. Broad management/leadership education is typically streamlined, but it’s useful for individual add-on education and training. It is also useful for career planning purposes. The great leaders use their personality and should be encouraged to do so. In the best of all possible worlds, businesses would have individual assessment and programs tailored to meet that person's goals, strengths, and areas for improvement.

Leadership and management always go hand-in-hand: Business leaders need business strategy skills (such as vision, strategic plans, technology trends, corporate culture, go-to-market model…). They also need good managerial skills (such as organizing their leadership team, measurement, follow-up results…). They need to understand, build and assess the operational skills in their leadership teams. Business leaders also need people management skills and key desired behaviors. They need to fully understand financial targets, and they need an excellent management team. But in addition, business leaders need to be authentic. This is not something you teach or measure. A business leader should be allowed and encouraged to excel by using their personality. Leaders do need to focus on the bottom line but also apply visionary and strategic thinking, plus enthusiasm, and unique personal leadership styles. The result can be brilliant corporate achievements. Soulless managers who only focus on numbers won’t make it far but can cause lots of damage to the organization.

The substance of leadership never changes, it’s all about making a positive influence, and providing direction, both for oneself and others. However, leadership competency and styles need to be adaptable to the increasing speed of change and hyperconnected and interdependent nature of businesses and global society today. Leadership is about striking the balance of both the hard and soft elements. Leadership is about vision, also about alignment and integration.

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Innovation Intelligence & interpretation

The good Customer Experience management is a norm, but a great Customer Journey with exceptional Customer Experience offers the 'WOW' factor.

It is without a doubt that many organizations have come to the realization that in order to be successful within their industry, they have to focus their efforts on the Customer Experience, to build a customer-centric organization. However, what do you think Customer Experience is all about? What is the difference between Customer Experience and Customer Journey and can they be used interchangeably? Employees deliver the Customer Experience, should you also be mapping Employee Experience with the same rigor as Customer Journeys?

Customer Journey is the end to end set of activities and processes that a customer completes while acquiring a company's products or services. The customer journey is all of the things you do to take a flight from A to B, from the moment you go to the website to order tickets, to when you walk off the plane at your destination. Customer Experience can then be defined as a set of conscious and subconscious attitudes, feelings, and beliefs regarding said activities. The idea is to understand the Customer Experience in order to refine the Customer Journey. Customer Experience is how you feel about the whole process. It is the sum of all thoughts, experiences, feelings, reactions, attitudes, etc, that customers have or will have in regards to using or potential using of your product or service. Customer Experience can be either overall (in regards to the entire product) or in regards to just one touchpoint with the product or service. The Customer Journey is a representation of the touchpoints a customer engages with a brand. 

Customer Journey Map is a visual interpretation of individuals’ relationship with an organization, service, product or brand over time and across channels. The experience dives much deeper into each touch point and the whole experience. The deep look uncovers the nuance and emotion of each touch point and the transitions in between. You need to understand the journey before you can focus on the experience. The journey is the path customers take. The experience is the fulfillment of a need that keeps them on the path to you or the lack of fulfillment of a need that causes them to abandon the path to you and seek a different one, the journey is for awareness, the journey is for service received, and the journey is for retention, etc.

The employee can greatly influence the customer's perception of the company and its products or services. Statistically, the #1 reason for customers leaving a company is an attitude of indifference from a company representative. Companies have not yet understood the extent of the influence an employee has in any situation with a customer. One way to gain this needed insight would be to do an employee journey map and integrate that into the customer journey map to see where the disconnects are. It is these disconnect points that will reveal opportunities that will benefit not only the customer but the employee as well. Employee Engagement mirrors Customer Experience levels. And when as an organization you have the capability of doing Customer Journey Mapping, you can use this to map Employee Journeys! Said differently, the value a product or service has for a customer can be influenced by an employee he or she is in contact with.

Employee Experience itself has layers of optimization - direct work environment related and employment-related. It's an interesting world emerging ahead of us. As far as digital and employee contributions, there is a clear trend emerging about the need for the coexistence of both to really deliver that branded experience. Fundamentally organizations need to understand whether their process or the elements of the process are commoditized or intimate. Forcing customers through a commodity digital channel when it requires an intimate approach will never achieve high levels of satisfaction. So the conversation is how you use employees as mechanisms in a process to transform an input into an output for optimizing Customer Experience. The focus is then on the required skills, knowledge and attributes of the employee. Where emotional intelligence is a differentiator then the selection, training, and coaching (continuous development) of such employees is a core competence.

The good Customer Experience management is a norm, but a great Customer Journey with exceptional Customer Experience offers the 'WOW' concept as the necessary success factor to ensure you stay ahead of the game, particularly with your peers in business. Hence, you have to put the customer and the employee at the heart of everything that you do as a business - excellent employee experience directly influences exceptional customer experience, and great customer experience management is a differentiator for companies.

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