How to Change the Culture - The Collective Habit Effectively

Culture = the collective habits of people. 

To change your culture, it’s about changing the habits of your people. We all know how challenging would be to change a bad habit; at corporate level, culture eats strategy for breakfast, but changing the collective habit of people is one of the most difficult things in running a high performing business; and at national or global level, changing an outdated culture that perhaps existing for centuries is like boiling an ocean. It is a tough journey, but in order to make a collective progress and advance humanity, shall we or can we make it work?  

The strategy is the direction of travel, culture is the mode of transport: If you can't change the habits of your people by encouraging the positive ones and challenging the negative ones, then there’s no way you can move up your organizational agility (change capability) and maturity. So the first step you need to change the people’s mindset, how do they think, and why do they think what they think. Or you have to apply scientific or Systems Thinking to perceive the soft, but the most invisible human factor like the culture which is not an isolated social phenomenon, but collective minds and attitudes weaved by many other elements based on psychology, customs, history, religion, or philosophy. When you understand the interconnectivity and root causes, you may well define a starting point to break it through, absorb the quintessential, but remove or discourage the negative mindset or attitudes.     

Identify the change champions: It seems to be who we are is essential to the way we do what we do and how well we do it. Culture supports self-actualization, aka Authenticity, will be a significant motivational force in meeting the challenges of business in the 21st Century, especially in managing the Millennials and today’s cross-generational and cross-cultural workforces. An essential first step is to find the people that already want to play the game change. You can never take everyone with you for a change. Even when the business has no other options, it is essential to have enough key people who are keen to take the journey with you. Mandating both the change and who's going to execute it, in disregard of individual autonomy, is a big part of what causes change initiatives to fail. This is due to the dependency on discretionary effort for change initiatives to succeed. The change to be made, the reasons for it, and the various roles in the change have to be properly articulated, and it is then up to the Change Manager to deliver it. In such situations, changing people’s mindset has been fundamental to changing the culture and the success of the program - making change optional or only fixing the symptom, not a root cause, is a recipe for failure.

Leaders have to present the change agility in their professional or personal life in order to lead change or drive transformation effectively: The basis is a leader that is right for the job, which is often more about personality than degrees! The drive and the thinking of the leader will either be a driving force or a show stopper. With the right leader, the positive culture will develop and the negative forces will be limited. Bottom line: make sure you pick your leader that supports the way you want to develop the organization along the change journey. Sadly there will always be a few who are just not willing or capable of making the changes. One of the key strategies will be how to deal with them if they start causing problems. People, Process and Technology in that order with the right people you can get good results. Add good processes and the results get better. Add Technology to automate and the results get even better. But you have to start with the right people, which really means great culture and great leadership throughout.

No doubt that culture change is more complicated than any other types of changes such as software update or an organizational restructure. Culture change is a slow and complicated process. In other words, culture is more powerful than strategy if you are not able to explain the value capture behind it. And frequently people are not open to value capture because they are shocked, angry or something else not constructive. You need a winning coalition who will enable the spread of the faith. It can be a long democratic process or a tough turnaround. Still, even it’s like to “boil the ocean,” you have to think the most effective way to do it, for your organization’s long-term prosperity.  

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How Often Shall you Revisit your Strategy

What really matters is having a continuous dialog about the progress being made to achieve the strategic initiatives.
Change is challenging and accelerating, organizational leaders need to spend more time on strategy, and it takes the time to redirect an organization’s strategy. Unfortunately, in companies that struggle to execute strategy, most of the management’s time is spent on near-term operating decisions and specifically delivering the annual plan. As a result, many of the decisions that shape the future organization are made unconsciously in the day-to-day running of the business, or annual budget process. Therefore, there’s disconnect between strategy and execution, and often it cause strategy execution fail to achieve the expectation. So how often should business leaders revisit strategy? Do you just waste time to play with the numbers or truly review the progress being made in your strategy meetings?

What really matters is having a continuous dialog about the progress being made to achieve the strategic initiatives. Most executives view goal setting as an annual event, even though business is dynamic, and the business objectives can change over that 12 month period. There is nothing wrong with the annual revisiting of the goals, but goal setting should be event-driven as well whenever it is needed during the year. Many CXOs don't understand that, and this is where their problems begin. They then talk about poor execution, poor productivity, poor results, and keep asking for more updates or reports without addressing some of the underlying problems with strategy and execution alignment and sometimes changing or conflicting priorities.

Senior managers need to spend as much time together discussing strategy as they spend on operational (day-to-day) issues. The more time managers spend together brainstorming strategy, the more opportunity they will have to resolve strategic issues, to gain a commitment to the actions to be taken, and create a more integrated strategy management process. Often, there have been in too many strategy review meetings where time is wasted challenging the reported numbers, rather than reviewing what actual progress is being made toward achieving the strategic initiatives. The rules of thumb should include:

a) Everybody should share the vision and understand his/her value added in this track.

b) Senior management should promote all initiatives with a direct link to executives.

c) Executives should promote results and understand why the change identified on their radar do not deliver.

Goals are related to commitments. There should be transparency on goals set not just at the top level in a company but further down. As you agree on goals with your manager, having them displayed and tracked where your co-workers can also view progress is a big public expression of intent. Too often these are hidden within an annual performance system and reviewed once per year. It is useful to structure strategic thinking by commitments, goals, and objectives. As far as the frequency of assessing goal achievement status, the suggestion to do so daily seems excessive. More naturally, a weekly status of objectives and monthly status of goals may be more fitting. In the end, however, all this is situational. The goal setting practices include:

1) Commitments may be framed in the context of value propositions.

2) Goals many be framed in terms of well-defined outcomes along with associated earned value metrics to calibrate progress.

3) Objectives may be framed as more tactical activities.

The strategy is "shareware," not a "shelfware." It sets the direction for tactics and operations to aim at and support. Business leaders have to visit it more often for assessing change scenarios as well as goal achievement status. It is important to stress the importance of strategy execution and laser focus on achieving the strategic goals. Planning and execution are an interdependent and dynamic continuum.

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What are the Truly Competitive Advantages of Inclusiveness

The business leaders must work with the right mindset to create an inclusive organization with every dip in the business lifecycle.

Contemporary organizations are diversified with a multigenerational, multicultural workforce using multidevice to do multitasking. Competitive advantage can be created by bringing together diverse groups of people whose mindsets, experiences, preferences, skills, and capabilities are additive to one another. We are stronger through diversity, it allows us to explore options that one individual or a homogeneous group might not have uncovered; we are idea-rich and vision clear through inclusiveness. Diversity is the engine for creativity and a facilitator for merging building blocks of new ideas, fresh insights, and ultimate wisdom. But how to embrace the diversity of thoughts and achieve such competitive advantages of inclusiveness?

"Fitness for purpose”: Embracing Diversity has, at least, two positive aspects: Firstly, you are doing the right thing, giving every human being an equal opportunity on their merit and being inclusive, recognizing, that every one of us is different. But secondly, in this globalized world and market, it has amply been demonstrated, that embracing diversity makes total business sense, for many, many reasons. Good management practice is the ability to harness the best potential of all human resources in the organization. It is a waste of resources to leave any valuable human potential left unrecognized, untapped and unused. There are all kinds of differences that exist between individuals. The focus of inclusiveness needs to focus on cognitive differences, skills, abilities and the wealth of ideas since the value lies in the contributions of the individual to the organization. Effective communication is also important, since different perspectives, and talent, lead to well-rounded ideas and solutions. It is about skill and ability to work together. It is more a thing of personality match and expertise in the goal of the company.

Diversity should refer to the cognitive difference, the culture intelligence, and the strengths of the skills people bring to the team. Leaders should always look for the capabilities and skills that they don't have so that they can build a winning team and complement each other. In such a global climate, those businesses that are unwilling to GENUINELY embrace diversity, are unable to know how to tap their diverse resources, and be inclusive and recognize merit and ideas, no matter where they come from, will not be able to survive, leave alone thrive. Diversity can benefit any organization, as a whole. Equal opportunity is not just an end but also means of improving your company’s agility, and maturity.

Inclusiveness will be the mantra of the future. Diversity can create a lot of confusion and conflict if people are not well prepared for it, and if the leaders are unaware of how to manage diversity. There should not be a stagnation in engaging the talent from different demographics. Any organization should focus on learning new things and how to surge forward in creating success stories. We can learn a lot from different mindsets (thought processes), cultures and positions, so organizations as a whole can be competitive enough to keep surging further. Having an inclusive culture always helps us learn from diverse people. Orienting people and making them aware of the diversity in their organization or team, helps them understand the value of harnessing the differences, and then giving them the tools and experience of how to effectively communicate and build trust across these diverse cultures are usually essential and the key to reaping the benefits of diverse organizations.

Inclusiveness needs to be well embedded in the business culture in a truly global organization. There are many multi-national businesses, but very few truly global organizations. Often, diversity is most common at very low levels of the organization, the higher the hierarchy the more homogenous the workforce is. Diversity nowadays is an essential policy for any global organization, which enhances the team with various and different aspects and traits, people with learning agility all like to work in the multinational workplace, because it will provide richness in ideas, opinions, cultures, activities, etc. The policy is still on the surface, though, organizations need to build an innovative and inclusive culture, this only happens when the ‘inclusiveness mindset’ is available to top management. In some cases, organizational culture is so powerful and even then will be able to influence the surrounding societies of the organization.

The business leaders must work with the right mindset to create an inclusive organization with every dip in the business lifecycle, from individual thinking to the collective mind (culture); from strategy to execution; from process management to performance measurement, to make it both principle and practice, and make it a truly competitive advantage of achieving long-term prosperity.

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How to Build a High-Mature Organization

Organizational maturity is not just about technical excellence or process efficiency, but more about business effectiveness, agility, innovation, intelligence, and people-centricity.

An organization or company may be in business for many years but has not matured its management practices or lack of well-defined sets of business principles. Most of the organizations stick to the lower level of maturity mode (reactive, inside-out, and operational driven), how can they move up the maturity level to become truly proactive and outside-in, more culture intelligent and people-centric?

Looking out of problems before looking into the problems: The first step when thinking about a system is to understand the purpose of the containing system. What Russ Ackoff used to call "looking out of the problem" as opposed to "looking into the problem." That is the synthesis before analysis. In most cases, you don't understand your business environment because you have never looked outside the boundary of the problem. If, and when, you ever develop the capacity for synthesis, you will discover the containing system has social, ecological, economic and political elements and you must advance the development of all of these factors in order to solve the problems in a holistic way and improve organizational maturity seamlessly.

You need to have a holistic view of the organization: The big corporations have varying levels of maturity. Some of the mixed levels of maturity are the result of acquiring and merging organizations and cultures. Companies that have taken the steps to mature their practices find that these become embodied in the corporate culture and the effects of the seven-year cycle are mitigated. Or many people create a solution at the beginning of a project and then give up when they cannot find the supporting data for their solution. You need to ensure that you are approaching a problem from a non-biased angle and then finding the solution that fits the resources you have. A high-mature organization not only discovers the business purpose but also helps their employees discover the purpose of unleashing the talent potential. However, in lower mature organizations, most managers are impeding progress up the pyramid rather than helping their people reach the summit. And there are no shortcuts to getting to that state, it’s a process and it takes time and a real commitment to getting there. To counter management's arguments, it is very helpful to have a quantitative understanding of what you are capable of achieving along with the pros, cons, and impacts of their decisions. It comes down to the proper setting of expectations. However, to be effective and credible, you need to have a holistic view of the organization. Focusing on one small piece may not work, the digital organization is all about hyperconnectivity and interdependence.

Agile is a philosophy and methodology to run a highly mature digital organization. Agile is rarely a straight line. It is all about interaction, incrementalism, and innovation. The journey is far more important than the destination. Add the seven-year cycle and you will see why traditional linear or waterfall style management does not work; that is every organization forgets what it learned in the previous seven years and new people are relearning what and how to do whatever failed before. This is not too cynical, it is 100% valid in all large organizations. There are not many exceptions. The management, process and implementation gaps are alive and well in every institution. If too often the efforts described are seen as too much work or requiring resources that most are not willing to invest to make improvements in a process. It's easier to blame human error in most cases. Run a controlled experiment (pilot the process). Collect data. Analyze data. Determine if your hypothesis is true or false. Make adjustments as needed and repeat the process until you get it right. Also, it might take several projects to find the solution to one problem because you may have to implement new systems and procedures to find the information you need.

Organizational maturity is not just about technical excellence or process efficiency, but more about business effectiveness, agility, innovation, intelligence, and people-centricity. Organizations which operate this way have happy staff and customers, strong balance sheet, and positive social influence upon the environment, it’s the way for the business to transform from “good to great,” and from “built to last.”

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Strategy Design vs. Strategy Execution: Which one is More Important

The design of a strategy is definitely more important. But executing a strategy is more time-consuming and challenging.

The word "strategy" is pretty amorphous with so many individual interpretations and nuances of its meaning that conversations about it often go astray amidst a blizzard of the latest buzzwords. A strategy is a detailed plot to beat the competition, coauthored and in effect owned by a critical mass of thought leaders in a company. More than 70% of strategy execution fail to achieve the expected result. Is it caused by strategy or execution? Strategy design and strategy implementation, which one is more important?

The design of a strategy is definitely more important. But executing a strategy is more time-consuming and challenging. There is no point in implementing a bad strategy, and bad implementation casts doubt on a good strategy. A lousy strategy remains lousy even when implemented. Hence, the significance of design, which decides whether you can be on a path of mediocrity or greatness. The design is king if this is done incorrectly all other aspects of the project fail. It will cost you big time redo and fix a bad design. Implementation is about the realization of such a concept or plan. It is all about an integrated system approach and every step is essential in reaching a specific outcome, and it is not about what is more important, but rather about the whole thing and the result. Do you have people who are good strategy designers and have also implemented these strategies efficiently? There are very few people who can understand and merge the thought process required in strategy design and strategy implementation. because strategy implementation has quite a lot common with project management basics. In order to bridge the gap between strategy and execution, you need a purposeful and rigorous method for translation of strategy into a realizable architecture before implementation in the sense of projects can begin. How else would you even know that you're working on the right implementation projects in the first place?

A strategy for business change should outline the anticipated benefits - with the benefits being delivered and executed via programs and projects. If the key strategic benefits have not all been delivered, and the strategy has been properly designed with adequate buy-in, then something has gone wrong with the program design and program and project level benefit realization. Something possibly missing is the internal capacity to understand the strategy to the extent that the management and executive teams can participate actively in strategy development and proactively drive implementation. They have to drive implementation, otherwise, the emergent business circumstances will continue to “disrupt” business normal, and nobody is adequately prepared to function well in this reactive mode.

Sometimes strategy makers spend more time designing the content of strategies than thinking how to implement them successfully. In other words, lack of accountabilities, lack of decision rights and inter or intra-divisional tensions. The organization's ability to refine, redesign, realign, reprioritize strategies during implementation or execution phase might cause originally poorly designed strategies to succeed or well-defined strategies to fail. More than 70% of Strategy fails in execution. It is about many different matters like resistance to change, silos or units with competing agendas, lack of clear and decisive leadership, leadership actions inconsistent with strategy, poor communication of strategy, lack of accountability on follow-through; inability to measure impact, too focused on short-term results, and maybe the most popular and big obstacle: making it meaningful to frontiers, translating strategy to execution, aligning jobs to Strategy. The most efficient way to make sure both design and execution stay aligned is to integrate the expectations of critical internal stakeholders into the design. If your strategy is designed with these expectations in mind, execution will succeed. Gaps are created when strategies are misaligned with the expectation of the implementation team. This requires an internal branding component of the initial strategy to be attached. Think of internal branding as the digital version of a salesman for your strategy.

Usually, strategy design fails to 'walk in another person's shoes'. Too many strategies that are developed by a small executive group fail when they are 'rolled out' to a bemused and unengaged senior management team. To make implementation work, the wider senior team needs to be involved in the development, have a great understanding and have ownership and commitment. Invite sales and marketing people to "buy in" the strategy by having them contribute their ideas to the strategy. In this context, the market is your implementation team. Don't expect them to just follow orders. In most cases, these are highly intelligent people whose knowledge capital contains a significant value to the design of your strategy and their involvement enhances your ability to close gaps. The whole concept of design of strategy includes the expectations of the line managers as well as anticipation of execution issues. If the momentum is not there to see it through to implementation, then it can't or won't be implemented, and as a result, it is just a piece of paper. If its execution does not result in increased market share in existing or new markets, then it is not a successful implementation. Applied to strategy implementation in organizations, this means it reorients a badly planned strategy that overlooks the expectations of the executive ranks tends to fail if the executives have no incentives (or bad incentives) to engage in organizational success. They turn to themselves, collect short-term profits and leave. That can be easily avoided by taking into consideration those expectations in the first place. If executive ranks feel engaged, they will align their individual priorities with those of the designed strategy and push for its success.

Strategy implementation is a change management problem. Many executives who don't understand change management, or the maths behind it, believe they can 'execute Strategy' by just telling their team to 'get on with it,' and when that fails, they then remove the 'poor managers who didn't deliver' when the fault lies solely with themselves. Good design and good implementation are both necessary. Detailed time planning of all tasks is associated with strategy execution in relation to the strategy formulated. Be flexible in the execution plan, so that the change in results of individual steps can be accommodated to plan subsequent tasks and final goal achievement recognition, wherein, individual excellence should be mapped to link them to their capabilities and adequate recognition should be given to them. The strong stakeholders, who are capable and experienced, but do not fit in the specific role may cause the strategy execution effort to fail. Hence, planning the strategy execution during the design stage in detail is very critical,  in many cases, often the strategy that is eventually realized, in many cases, differs from the original plan.

It is crucial for organizations to invest in relevant thought leadership both from a business and technical perspective with a focus on producing a long term strategic roadmap that takes into account the strategic business long term plan along with the technology solutions necessary to enable successful realization along the way. Importantly, what this then provides is a clear vision and a point of reference for ensuring all investment decisions on or related to this path and ensure there is always alignment. With the increasing speed of changes in today’s digital organizations, strategy-execution is no longer linear steps, but a dynamic business continuum.

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CIO as Chief Improvement Officer: How do you Learn from IT Failures

IT delivery is about People, Process and Technology.

Although the information is the lifeblood of an organization, and technology drives business innovation today, most of IT organizations stick to the level 2 (reactive mode) or level 3 (alignment stage). Most of the businesses perceive their IT as the department less innovative in the enterprise and even the controller to stifle innovation. And many IT organizations are overloaded and under-delivered with a high rate of project failure. How can CIOs as IT leader learn from the failures, reimagine, and reinvent IT organizations to improve IT and overall organizational maturity?

IT delivery is about People, Process and Technology: The first is People. They will drive the processes and technology. Lack of leadership sponsorship can surely hamper a project success, as well not committing qualified resources. Companies would have to make a tough decision to increase their bottom line or net operating income, but they must do so by first: investing in their employees so they are able to find better opportunities in the future. The success of any project must include the welfare of the principals - employees. Involve your users by giving them active roles on the project, make them feel important, train them on the new product, appreciate and reward them then, your project is off to a successful start.There are basically two reasons for a project's success or failure - inside reasons such as lack of ownership and lack of leadership; and outside reasons - these are all the rest, lack of support from an executive, misunderstanding. These two areas are interlaced with each other. The reasons for failure include:

- Lack of senior executive sponsorship.

- Poor stakeholder buy-in from the people most impacted by the change.

- The weak value proposition in terms of business or customer impact.

- Value proposition failed to be translated into meaningful operational deliverables.

- Risk management weak.

- Management and planning deficiencies (too much staring at spreadsheets and reports and too little focusing on concrete deliverables, risk management, and real progress tracking)

- Overload on a project team or overloading the people most impacted by change alongside their day job.

- Too much time elapses between proper reviews of project/ status/ risk.

- Vendors fail to keep promises on delivery.

IT leaders need to raise the profile of IT and its importance in modern business today. On of the things that as a great contributor to IT Project failure is the fact that the real importance of IT to business success is under-estimated. When IT projects are successful they can and do add an incredible amount of benefit to the business and in general, successful projects do not get the same publicity that failed ones do. So it's really up to IT leaders in the profession to raise the profile of IT and its importance in the modern business world. It also takes a step back to determine if you do have the "right people on the bus and in the right seats" and to recognized the need to grow the intellectual capital required to be successful. Knowing how to "really do" risk management, quality assurance, vendor management, etc, not just fill out templates that were originally designed to provide directions and to create thought and brainstorm. Additionally, the ability to be agile and adapt to the changes -- because change happens. Always learn from the past, but look to the future. Whether it's good or bad, respect and learn from the past, but don't dwell on it because the next project is going to be different.

The bigger the program and the longer the time between major delivery points, the greater the risk going up exponentially: One advantage of the Agile techniques over the waterfall is that the much shorter time between concrete deliveries, so customers/ executive sponsors/ stakeholders can more readily determine whether what's been delivered is what they really want. When dealing with large and complex projects you need to make sure that you have everything in place and good and dedicated sponsorship is essential as is governance. Having a project checklist covering each and every task involved with a successful project is a good idea. If you can create a list like this and ensure that you have a tick in every box your chances of project success are greatly increased. Further, often team members are being switched in and out of projects due to changing business priorities. This is not only detrimental to the projects but the team members too, this normally leads to time delays on the project when their replacements have to be brought up to speed. This can mean that the project overruns on time and goes over budget. The most successful projects are often those where the project team has remained constant throughout the life of the project. Insufficient business and stakeholder buy-in often delays progress of IT projects and can often cause failure due to sent of IT pushing change with no benefit for the end user. Poorly defined and controlled scope / requirements are also a common culprit in project downfall.

Failure sometimes is inevitable. But fail fast and failover. Go beyond IT failures, IT develops the professional competencies needed for successful business solution delivery, IT captures organizational knowledge to continuously improve performance, The IT and stakeholder departments have clear objectives, processes and indicators with clear accountability and responsibility to deliver business objectives and implement business strategy steadily.

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A Courageous Board

"Group-think" and lack of courage to ask the tough, strategic questions is the chief weakness on Boards today.

Corporate Board is one of the most important corporate governance bodies in modern businesses. It's easy to overlook that at its core, governance is ultimately about the willingness to act. That willingness requires, among other things, courage. Sometimes, a lot of it. Courage to speak one's mind ranks at the top with the criteria for high-performance board members. How to build a courageous board though?

"Group-think" and lack of courage to ask the tough, strategic questions is the chief weakness on Boards today. Boards are getting better as the awareness grows of how important Board composition is. The more a Board represents or mirrors its stakeholders, the better served will be the organization. Corporate success leads to complacency and causes managements and boards to be asleep at the wheel. Nobody knows enough to be a director. All we can ask is that directors have an informing intellectual curiosity that they insist be addressed. This is the scale which should determine board composition rather than "gender, race, color or creed.” There is sensitivity around executive hubris but, if Boards of Directors do not ask the unaskable in time to prevent a crisis, who will?

To be courageous to listen to what you don’t want to hear and to have the guts to make tough decisions: None of us will ever know enough, and that is why humility is a critical component of trustworthiness. A board that is fractious can never make real progress; it is collegiality, respect, transparency, competence that allow a board to be effective. Being more representative of stakeholders the Board serves is one way to increase effectiveness. The ability to ask the tough questions, to listen with the courage to what you DON'T want to hear and to have the guts to make the hard decisions- it’s very important director selection criteria. There is nothing wrong with civilized candor. Pointing out that the "emperor has no clothes" usually is helpful. But the great directors and chairs shape corporate strategy. They meaningfully contribute to evaluating options against anticipated trends in the marketplace or of competitors. They thoroughly understand the business strategy, and indeed, they themselves may have shaped it. They can see trends, can identify competition. They can identify emerging and declining players and can specify exact reasons for their success, including that of the company or not. It's not enough to be independent if you can't do those things.

Courage comes with competence. Directors do not push back when they do not have competence, experience, and creativity. You need industrial knowledge to understand business, but you also need "outside the industry" thinking to stimulate creativity for solving the ‘old problems’ in a new way. There is a direct relationship between competence and courage. Put differently, there may be a willingness to act, but an inability to do so. The board simply does not know what to do. The vast majority of companies are caught up in their existing routine. They have blinkers on and do not think outside their industry or business to see threats and opportunities. Or if their strategic planners identify and bring forward such SWOT analysis, it often is ignored. The common mistakes made by board or executives include making business assumptions, but often don’t check if they are right, or others see things as they do. And much of it is due to lack of communication around assumptions, expectations, knowledge, and speculation.

It is the courage, trust, and confidence that allow the board to positively influence organizational performance through the executives. It's more about the boardroom culture engendered by board leaders. It’s all about leadership from the top which sets the tone and governs boardroom culture, behavior, and influence corporate culture and behavior as well.

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CIOs as Talent Master: Do you have High Quality Data Talent?

No matter data talent or any other type of IT professionals, being learning agile is the most important attitude due to the changing nature of technology.

Data Analytics has become the top priority of CIO's agenda at any forward-thinking organization today. However, high-quality data talent is still in serious shortage: Should data scientist a domain expert? Does a statistician need to be a domain expert to perform effectively? Does a programmer need to be a domain expert to perform effectively? Does any technical expert need to understand the business domain?

The problem is that today most companies see the data scientist as a single role. Few companies sees data science the ways it should be a broad spectrum career path that goes from the business analyst and a subject-matter expert to specialists in statistics and modeling. Because in the end, they should take responsibility to provide decision support to the management. Unless they know the domain they won't be able to contemplate and analyze the situation. If they have domain knowledge, they know which variables to include and which ones to exclude; and why are they important and how to investigate better. Complementary roles of domain experts and data scientists have to be acknowledged. The domain expertise is useful on two levels - first to tackle the problem and second to understand the client. In particular it is necessary to determine how to best serve the client's needs in light of the scope. But more on a theoretic level, a scientist should accommodate emergent needs that have not been articulated as such. In the latter case, domain expertise forms the beginning and end of any analysis shaping what gets considered and what becomes invisible. If a person does have analytical skills without domain knowledge then he/she can acquire the domain knowledge. In general, you need to know the basics, but most importantly, you need to be quick on your feet and adapt if necessary. It's useful to know "all" statistical methods - but you might just use something you hadn't heard of before.

It certainly doesn't hurt to have domain expertise. Being a domain expert not only reduces costs but also improve analytics efficiency, so it’s important to show how to make all the pieces (business side, product development, technical) fit together. Companies should understand this before investing on professionals. Fail to understand this will render all investments useless they will be frustrated by the lack of good results. You need to be quick on your feet and adapt if necessary. It's useful to know "all" statistical methods - but you might just use something you hadn't heard of before. Same goes for domain expertise: you need previous experiences that you can leverage and compare with to be able to understand the context quickly, and it's imperative to do so. A domain expert with data analytics expertise can facilitate in
1). Data interpretation,
2). Data visualization,
3). Choosing better data analysis technique whose result will carry some meaning to user,
4). Market the result by explaining it to the user as he /she is one amongst them, and
5). Improve the technique with user inputs.

The answer is almost always - it depends on. In software if domain expertise is prioritized to the detriment of technical ability, your project will accumulate a mountain of technical redundancy that may never get paid off and cost huge amounts with time. After a while, you also realize that there are broad similarities that underlie many different industry domains, regardless of what specific expertise is required, and often times you can rely upon this to better establish your own credibility even when you don't know the domain. This is especially true with both data modeling and data analytics, which both involve understanding the deeper structural connections of information first, and only then getting into the weeds of domain level content. At some point, the value of the expert/decision-maker to the scientist/decision-facilitator is just to implement the results diligently and timely. Unfortunately you can lead a horse to water but they may choose not to drink, at which point you must coerce them with logic, KPIs, and pretty plots which still may be seen as a foreign language. There are two scenarios: domain experts come up with some hypothesis (some candidate patterns or regularities) which may or may not be statistically significant (spurious pattern). Validity may be tested using Data Science algorithms. The other scenario is that some hypothesis is generated automatically by "Data Science" algorithms, but that may be based on correlation (may not be causal etc.), and therefore it needs domain experts' nod if it makes sense.

No matter data talent or any other type of IT talent, being learning agile is the most important attitude due to the changing nature of technology, and IT talent needs to understand business domain in order for better communication and cross-functional collaboration, and ultimately building the best products or service for fitting customers’ need.

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Leading by Questioning

The art of questioning is to ignite innovative thinking; the science of questioning is to frame Systems thinking, with the progressive pursuit of better solutions.

We’ve been living in such a dynamic world, change is the only constant, actually even change itself has been changed and expedited. There is information abundant and even overloading, but problems solving does not become easier, but turns to be harder. And first things first, you should ask yourself: Do you frame the right questions before answering them right. It takes courage and humility to ask, because you have to break down the status quo and break through the conventional wisdom, to keep informative and inquisitive, always to challenge and ensure that the question itself is corrected before answering…

Asking the right questions helps validate how thorough and deep your team's thinking is on a particular issue: it can also assess whether they consider various different perspectives. It's always about the questions, particularly to get your team to come up with their own answers to solve a problem or address an issue. By doing so, you've led them to easily buy-in on the direction to follow. The leader simply coaches the team along the way, including asking more questions as necessary.

Asking questions is a nonoffending way of making the point not only understanding the point of view of another side. It can be used in multiple social interactions. The key point is to use the right questions to slow down the analysis and decision-making processes sufficiently to acquire all the necessary information to make a correct decision. There is a strategic value of understanding businesses and being able to ask the open-ended questions that evoke a response to enlighten or illustrate a specific issue or topic. If you do not understand their frame of reference, formulating the questions or understanding the context of the response becomes meaningless. One of the best practices to questioning is to ask Five "Why" to get to the root cause of any matter. It helps to dig in further and discover true causes or needs.

"Asking questions culture and mentality" has to be driven by leadership - In reality, culture eats strategy for breakfast, people follow good leaders or potential leaders, and culture evolves with them, "no such things as bad questions" attitude should be ingrained in a company. If management doesn't demonstrate an honest desire to expand learning through insightful Q&A but instead uses Q&A to reinforce or validate their own position, then their teams will quickly react accordingly - stifling the opportunity to better understand the situation and deliver superior outcomes.

The art of questioning is to ignite innovative thinking, the essential to questioning also stimulates the creative sides of our brains in order to find answers. The science of questioning is about asking the right question at the right time to the right person for the right information, it is also based on the art of listening, it’s the attitude, the trust, it’s the soft science of communication embedded with hard science of problem-solving capability. The science of questions is also about fact finding, the analysis, the structured thinking, the objective evaluation and comparison, the progressive pursuit of better solutions, it’s human’s cognitive improvement.

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Is Culture the #1 Root Cause to Fail Strategy

 Change the culture is the mindset. It is the employee mindset and behavior that expresses "culture."

Organizations rise and fall, not on the quantum of plans and resources, but on the capabilities to manage, lead, yet most importantly to execute. Great culture saves even the mediocre talent and plans. Many companies fail in execution more than 70%, and culture is often the root cause to such failures. It is about many different matters like resistance to change, silos thinking with competing agendas, lack of clear and decisive leadership, leadership actions inconsistent with strategy, poor communication of strategy, lack of accountability on follow-through; inability to measure impact, too focused on short-term results, and maybe the most popular and big obstacle: the spirit of business (culture) comes from the top (leadership) - and then making it meaningful to frontiers, translating strategy to execution, aligning the work to strategy, and those aspects are all part of culture. So is the culture the #1 root cause to fail strategy? Who do create the culture of a company? Can it be changed? How can it be remained for years or centuries?

Culture should begin from the senior management and then it will be followed by others. Leading by example, support from the senior leadership and coaching might be effective as well. It is important to make sure that the strategy has been communicated broadly and well understood by everyone. The emphasis of fieldwork, practical intelligence over theory, is very instrumental. It can probably never be repeated too often. It is also important to build concrete plans within each of the functional areas that support the strategy and ensure there is good alignment across the organization. Creating a culture that supports strategy execution is the work leaders should master. Many people talk about creating or changing cultures, but only a select few have lived or acquired that mastery.

The strategy is defined by vision and culture. If the strategy is about growth, whatever the way you make it, and then if there's no culture of execution, there would be no spirit, no positive attitude, and no good behavior. A culture defines people's attitude and the organization's process. First, you have to build a company culture that encourages your co-workers to think of new strategies to be implemented, then you've got to define a process to improve this idea by stimulating the development of it, or to shut it down as smoothly as you can, but not to discourage new ideas. Then you'll have to define the metrics to measure the success of the strategy, whether it's a strategy concerning growth, or employees satisfaction or clients satisfaction. It is also very important for the person who came up with the strategy to be given the credit for, it's also about building up a trustful and positive culture to advocate professionalism and innovation.

Culture is the critical success factors to support strategy execution. These success factors have to filter all the way through each layer of the organization for a unified execution. Culture unifies different groups of people. People have been the driving force of much of what mankind has accomplished. The degree to which culture supports strategy depends upon the degree to which culture unifies its efforts to realize critical success factors, and thus implement successful strategies. Successful strategies and a successful culture are interdependent. This might be a function of an emphasis on one aspect of Confucianism. It should also be noted that Confucianism does put a high premium on learning. And this can form the foundation of science, invention and ultimately innovation. Sometimes strategy makers spend more time designing the content of strategies than thinking how to implement them successfully. In other words, lack of accountabilities, lack of decision rights and inter & intra-divisional tensions are also culture aspects.

In all the conversations about culture, keep in mind that it is the policies, procedures, rewards and retributions that drive behavior and it is the employee behavior that expresses "culture." Change the culture is the mindset, although you can’t impose the desired culture to your organization, surely you can follow the principles and mechanism to transform your culture, and make continuous improvement as the right attitude and your brand, and more critically, make it as a catalyzer to execute strategy seamlessly.

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The Conditions and States of Being Human...

The condition of being human is the endless search for the conditions that allow the human to maximize human potential.

Being human is both a condition and a state. A condition - if you consider just the physical plane. A state if you consider it from the mental and emotional plane of being. One can assume a human state of mind, depending on one's beliefs, values, and character. What are the conditions and states of being human?

The condition and state of being human are to respect other human beings. Nobody is perfect, however, we do have the choice to condition ourselves to act with respect towards one another. The condition of being human is to possess and practice the noble virtues of life. The main virtues being non-hatred, kindness, universal love, compassion, empathy or friendliness, are toward all beings and humility. These will help in developing other virtues like non-egoism, self-control, forgiveness, patience, tolerance, self-sufficiency, and self-reliance, uprightness, gratitude, etc. We are all individuals with different grades of humanness. Some are more human who has universal love and natural humility. Others are less human and are striving to become better humans.

The condition of being human is being who you are via self-reflection and self-realization. The condition of being human is the endless search for the conditions that allow the human to maximize the human potential and bring the humans dreams alive in the shared reality we call life. In other words, the condition of being human is to first find our true identity through self-reflection and self-realization and thereby avoid being a victim of situations and circumstances. Often today’s still immature society has to condition people to play by the rules, not do what they were born wired to do. The condition of being human is to enjoy your own unique life journey, to refine the meaning of life and learn something from it.

The condition of being human is the state of mind: either being unconscious, subconscious, conscious, or one can elevate oneself to a ‘superconscious’ state of mind which will be able to think not only of what exists (subconscious), how they exist in this world, being in the world (conscious), but also how could one possibly apply self in this world to change it, willing to act on how you see things as they could be (superconscious). What is one state of mind to one person need not necessarily mean the same thing to another? And that's where the conflict comes in. What we project gets reflected back us. All conflict only exists within, and the Law of Reflection states we will project that conflict to find the external reflection of what we look like and in asserting we will never act like them again, we reprogram our behavior and end the internal conflict with our representation of self and are able to love ourselves, and love others as well.

Everything is energy and the human condition is the conditional form of our energy signature and it moves from one conditional state to another. The condition of being human is the energy pattern that allows us to take this form and live as humans. Every state of energy is conditional and must meet certain conditions in order to take that form.

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