Innoativeportfoliomanagement

Strengthen links to business strategy alignment, scenario planning, program cycles, requirements management, risk management, talent management, to improve the overall strategy management effectiveness and organizational maturity.

Contemporary organizations are organic systems which keep evolving. Every business should spend sufficient time on developing their own unique set of strengths and capabilities. The objective of building a health portfolio with potentiality theme is to provide visibility of the overall portfolio that is to explore a new path for the business growth, support the company's strategic objectives and assess opportunities to realign resources and investments as appropriate. 

Portfolio management is a part of strategy management and organizational transformation. Organizational management needs to gain contextualized understanding of corporate strength and weakness, optimize processes, and improve the overall corporate portfolio management effectiveness and maturity.

It’s important to define portfolio strategies to make a smart investment: Business capabilities underpin strategy management. The goal of portfolio management is to make strategic alignment and value leverage; build a balanced set of business capabilities including both capability necessities and capability differentiators; strategic capability and operational capability, a mix of short, mid, and long-term business initiatives that need to make up a business initiative pipeline. Organizational development is limited by its resource, capital, capacity, or talent pool. If the business portfolio overly focuses on short-term value too much, this might not support long-term vision and strategy in the end. If it puts too much focus on long-term value, there may be a loss of momentum and engagement.

For the “transforming the business” category of portfolio, it’s important to make wise investment and use of new technology, craft business processes, cultivate innovative business partners, reinvent business models, harness joint product development, supplier integration, and use real-time, accurate, predictive information. It’s also important to show the clear business goals of the investment with critical elements such as financial returns, return timeline, and risk assessment. The goal is to achieve portfolio agility by anticipating and responding to changing market conditions.

It’s crucial to move ideas through their life cycle to achieve first to market: In order to enhance a business growth cycle, it is important to build scalable idea management which means for sharing and managing ideas throughout the enterprise, across silos and geographies. The original germ of a creative idea is often, if not always arrived through the interaction of ideas from different domains of thought and experience, or information without boundary. Idea flow can be streamlined via fostering cross-functional communication, using common business language for harnessing understanding, taking incentives to encourage sharing and setting prioritization.

In business reality, the main barriers to innovation are silos, rigidity, inflexibility, static mindset, or bureaucracy, etc. The stewards of idea management are ‘corporate intrapreneurs’ who can recognize innovative ideas, fight for resources and political cover, and connect ideas and teams together, transform problems and opportunities into value-creating ideas to build solid business values. The implementation of the idea has to follow a logical path to the solution of most types of problems since contemporary society tends to follow logically rather than lateral kinds of structures. Companies should improve idea management and orchestrate a balanced innovation portfolio with the right mix of incremental innovation and breakthrough innovation.

It’s imperative to establish intended objectives, financials, and risk profiles in the portfolio: The blurring line of business borders and the uncharted frontier of an organization provide both abundant opportunities and emergent risks. There are strategic risks and systemic risks, there are financial risks, operational risks, or regulation risks, etc, in portfolio management. The primary focus of the risk management process would be to identify and manage those risks that can be addressed; also try to understand uncertainty, take scientific scenario planning to deal with “VUCA” reality smoothly.

Team and leadership "buy-in" is extremely important for any risk strategy to get off the ground and to maintain effectiveness and efficiency. The risk management needs to do the pre-work before risk assessment in the correct manner, such as financing, market understanding, competitor analysis, identifying the space of opportunity, defining the scalability of the products/services, what timescale to allow before making a go/no-go decision. The effective risk culture in the organization is the primary key to resolving and preventing many of the challenges, leading to effective implementation and embedding of risk initiatives at lowest levels.

It’s trendy to leverage new or variations of existing processes and methods, such as agile: Portfolio management is both a management discipline and a governance discipline. Overly rigid processes are seen as a block to progress rather than a facilitator of it. Agile is not only a methodology, but also a philosophy with a set of principles. Many organizations are doing Agile - applying Agile methodologies and practices to development, but very few organizations are being agile - following Agile principles and philosophy to run an agile organization.

Agile is a means to improve organizational business value output /cost performance; it’s both philosophy and methodology; mindset and framework, etc. The organizations and teams need to experiment and learn; run and adjust; interact and improve; with the end business goals in mind, to achieve premium results with customer satisfaction and value creation. Agility is a means to an end; To what end in your case? Work out what you want agility for – improvement, innovativeness, sustainability and competitive advantage, etc.

It’s strategic to attract talent with entrepreneurial talent, technical skills, and business savvy: Without talented people, businesses simply cannot function smoothly. Trustworthy relationships are important to shape a strong team and hold managers or staff to their accountability. Digital businesses harness autonomy and improve people-centricity. Intrapreneurs can think out of the box, bend some rules in order to discover the new path of growth. They have the ability to engage in meaningful digital dialogues, embrace the emerging business properties, advocate self-management, take strategic planning and execution as a continuous cycle to accelerate business performance.

Building a solid portfolio management to enable strategy execution is difficult, there are many roadblocks on the way. However, it can be managed well. From effective leadership to execution culture; from proactive planning to rigorous processes; from measures to balanced scorecards, a self-organizing and high-performance team is usually a cohesive group of people with the cognitive differences, complementary skills, having the full authority on business practices, processes, tools, or engineering methods they would like to use to make the continuous delivery.

From an overall portfolio perspective, there are nested relationships and close linkage between strategy and tactics: There are nested relationships under organizational hierarchy and it’s important to close the linkage between strategy and tactics. Strengthen links to business strategy alignment, scenario planning, program cycles, requirements management, risk management, talent management, to improve the overall strategy management effectiveness and organizational maturity.

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Inneraccountability

It is important to run a high-performance business with shared accountability or collective accountability that involves shared ownership, empathetic communication, and continuous improvement.

Organizations are different as they have different cultures, different structures and they compete in different markets, they have a different strength and scale. To achieve higher than expected business results, shared accountability or collective accountability involves shared ownership, empathetic communication. 

The true measure of accountability is about resilience. You will be held accountable" is on the face of it; you have the freedom to do whatever needs to be done, and the responsibility to ensure you do your best to bring about a good outcome.

Accountability in self-management and teamwork: Digital organizations are flatter, to close the accountability gap by improving cross-functional collaboration, accountability is conducted inward, in that the team respects and supports all team members while successfully completing the work. If one is accountable for a certain result, the individual has to be empowered. Of course, that does not happen all the time, so the onus is on the individual to come up with resources and tools required. Accountability chains can be enforced by agreement of management and employees at the different layers of organizational hierarchy. Usually, the vision would be set by the top management team, and that vision can lead to transformations in different business units for which the heads of the business units will be accountable, and perhaps also responsible depending on the culture and structure of the organization.

A professional is responsible for his/her actions. He/she should be accountable to his/her company, to himself/herself or his/her conscience. Accountability is teamwork, people are accountable for their own words, and their own commitments. They should be accountable to themselves. However, sometimes they forget or get distracted or overbooked. In the end, one should be accountable for their words with no external impetus. But that is not always the case. The accountability refrain is then: "you said you could get this done, and I depended on you doing it, and you haven't done it." The manager serves as a reminder or 'nagger' about their commitments to help hold people accountable.

Performance management system that enforces accountability: At its core, performance management is about creating a work environment that helps your company meet its business goals by enhancing disciplines and accountability. It's more than just a collection of tools and processes, although there are many that can help you meet your goals. The digital mind behind “the hyper performance magic” is holism, encouragement, empathy, appreciation, accountability or people-centricity, etc. Performance management is no longer just the static tool for assessing the past performance of employees, it can be used as a means to develop the digital-ready workforce. It should be sustained and monitored at constant intervals to ensure robustness. It should strongly encourage employees to self-evaluate performance, encourage autonomy, discovery, and continuous improvement.

Performance management needs to be transparent and objective, understood by the entire organization. It should promote teamwork, rather than micro-management. The digital organization is hyper-connected and interdependent, business managers need to shift their mindset from developing performance management processes or implementation to developing holistic performance management solutions. It is important to have leaders own the problem, and thus, be accountable for figuring out the premium solution. They need to fully understand the issue and decide how to remedy it. The measure of accountability implies resilience which is determined not by whether an individual or a team makes a mistake or not, but on how quickly they can recover so that customers, teammates, and others aren't negatively affected by the breakdown. So accountability further improves organizational effectiveness, resilience and performance.

Accountability needs to be well embedded in the organizational culture: Culture is collective mindset, attitude, and behavior. Consistency fosters accountability. To build a high performance workforce, behaving accountable is the result of a culture of authenticity with values that need to be organized and nurtured. Knowing who you are and how you react and respond in different situations can help you understand and improve cognitive, relational and assertive actions you take on a day to day basis and enforce accountability.

The leaders and managers should be more interested in finding "causes," not interested in assigning blame, in order to build a culture of accountability. True accountability focuses on learning to do things differently, rather than punishment. Accepting responsibility is when we prove our values and build our trust. Shared accountability or collective accountability involves shared ownership because most breakdowns stem from silo behavior where people aren't coordinating, communicating, solving problems or making decisions in a way that considers consequences to others.

Organizations inspire learning and encourage autonomy. It is important to run a high-performance business with shared accountability or collective accountability that involves shared ownership, empathetic communication, and continuous improvement.

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Innovativenessv

Innovation is complex, having enriched knowledge or versatile talent is foundational to create more fresh ideas in today’s complex digital world.

Innovation is all about how to disrupt the outdated thinking and the old way to do things. Being innovative is a state of mind. Some individuals demonstrate more innovative traits than others.

 There are multiple thought processes such as divergent thinking, critical thinking, or generative thinking in shaping a state of innovativeness and there are different stages of creative development from preparation to illumination; from imagination to implementation.



Imagination is the fuel for the “Creativity Engine”: The term imagination infers free thought with a lower regard for the constraints of what is practical/possible. Imagination can entertain the seemingly impossible, spark creativity given the right resources of knowledge, experience, and talent. No imagination, the innovation engine will not run, and human society would get stuck without any evolutionary movement. Imagine what can be accomplished by increasing knowledge and applying it to what one has imagined. Imagination inspires your learning attitude and intellectual curiosity.

Innovators enjoy experimenting and discovering; there’s no rule to limit their imagination. Knowledge boosts imagination, imagination challenges the limitation of knowledge. Imagination lets you dream of where you could go, knowledge helps you understand how and what forces you are dealing with on the journey of innovation. Knowledge is fundamental for making imagination into reality. But without the imagination to "believe in the possible," innovation may not happen. Knowledge shouldn’t confine imagination. Rather, it’s the very clue to evoke imaginative thoughts and nurture an innovative mindset. Logically, an open mind leads to imagination, imagination leads to discovery, discovery leads to innovation, and innovation leads to technology advancement and societal progression.

Illumination: A creative mind has such an “AHA” moment, just like the very moment when the lightbulb switch is on - the transcendence from darkness to brightness. Creativity is the process of "clicking or switching," giving rise to "glowing," bringing the innovation lights that generate values. Creative people are not waiting for such magic moments, they proactively participate in creative activities, advocate novelty-seeking attitudes and behaviors. Through the processes of imagining, dot-connecting, testing the hypothesis, failing, entreating, improving, new knowledge is developed and the new concept is illuminated and verified. If we do all these things well, then people and the organizations we inhabit adapt to the ever-changing environment and evolve in an ideal world to improve levels of innovation and prosperity.

Innovation is more often a collaborative effort. Innovation ecosystem or the environment should cover the whole innovation scenario, from processes in managing ideas or idea handling systems to idea implementation and promotion. Technically, the purposeful manipulation of the stages from preparation to illumination is a widespread protocol for creative output among professionals. That's why it is a set of means including methods that cover the process from problem's choices till commercialization.

Iteration: Creativity usually needs to connect cross boundary dots and spur fresh ideas. Non-linear thinking is less constrictive, letting the creative side of your mind run rampant because of its inherent lack of structure. Creativity has been called out of box thinking as it is an iterative process of reasoning, comparison, contrasting, and dots connecting. Human thoughts are characterized by expansion in multiple directions, rather than in one direction, and based on the concept that there are multiple starting points from which one can apply creative logic to design or problem-solving.

Being innovative implies unconventional ways to do things; steps out of the routine transactional activities for a while, and reimagine the new possibilities of design or personalized products or services to delight customers. People-centric innovation starts with a need of a customer and tests the solutions with experimentation by enhancing a full lifecycle of research - defining - designing - prototyping - iterating- testing, with the characteristics of nonlinearity and iteration. It is a sort of creative scenario to design and make products from functioning to delights.

Nowadays, innovation is complex, having enriched knowledge or versatile talent is foundational to create more fresh ideas in today’s complex digital world. It requires a much deeper whole system, an emergent, generative, iterative and integrative approach. The differentiation between a good innovation and bad innovation is the innovation leaders’ attitude toward risks as well as the aptitude to manage innovations. You have to be determined to get better results somehow and it will help to try unconventional thinking, practices, with a better result or breakthrough progress.

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ItInitiatives

IT plays a significant role in managing information-knowledge-insight cycle and fostering innovation by leveraging disruptive technologies and enriched information flow.

Within abundant information and emergent digital technologies, IT is a key component of holistic business mindset to re-imagine “what is possible” - unleashing business potentials and improving business efficiency, effectiveness, agility, and maturity. 

The “art of possible” to reinvent IT in the digital age is to deliver the value of information in helping businesses grow, delight customers and do more with innovation.

IT Initiatives 

Initiatives on Change, Innovation, and Digital Transformation The magic “I” in the CIO’s titles implies so many things: “Chief Information Officer,” “Chief Innovation Officer,” “Chief Improvement Officer,” “Chief Influence Officer,” "Chief Insight Officer," etc. In practice, the CIO role should transform from a reactive IT manager to a proactive digital leader; from a controller to a change agent Thus, the CIO as “Chief Initiative Officer” has become necessary or even imperative to manage strategic digital alignment and orchestration from concept to post-implementation of all initiatives from the C-level to the front lines, focus on changes and innovation. CIOs are also quite eager and enthusiastic to drive challenging transformation initiatives, to reinvent IT as the information hub and the business growth engine.

Initiativeinquiries Every business initiative is to achieve certain goals. Any business initiatives, especially change should be viewed as an "opportunity" for solving business problems, improving employee productivity/engagement, or customer satisfaction, cutting costs or optimizing products/ services/processes. There are two reasons to pursue change initiatives: Become better at what you do or be able to do something different. The management needs to manage business initiatives, navigate management blocks and improve the success rate by asking deep questions, clarifying the logic, optimizing processes and improving business competencies.

Initiative & Improvement Contemporary businesses are overwhelmingly inundated by exponential growth of information and too many different types of business change management initiatives. Generally speaking, change is usually required when an organization is expanding its business, its mission, instilling a fresh culture, or installing/implementing some new technology. so there is no one size fits all approach to successfully managing change.

Innovatingviastraegicapplications Organizations are nowadays complex, inundated with exponential growth of information and overloaded assignment. They have limited resources, budget, and talent, any business initiatives should be viewed as an "opportunity" for solving business problems.

Characteristics of Initiatives Digital enterprises are inherently complicated nowadays, with rapid changes and fierce competitions, organizations have to continue to build new business capabilities and “keep the lights on” by taking business initiatives and making solid deliveries consistently.

The blog is a dynamic book flowing with your thoughts; growing through your dedication; sharing your knowledge; conveying your wisdom, and making an influence through touching the hearts and connecting minds across the globe. The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 5 million page views with 8300+ blog postings. Among 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking and innovating new ideas; it’s not just about WHAT to say, but about WHY to say, and HOW to say it. It reflects the color and shade of your thought patterns, and it indicates the peaks and curves of your thinking waves. Unlike pure entertainment, quality and professional content takes time for digesting, contemplation and engaging, and therefore, it takes time to attract the "hungry minds" and the "deep souls." It’s the journey to amplify diverse voices and deepen digital footprints, and it's the way to harness your innovative spirit.

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Initiateinquiries

A new paradigm arises out of fresh mindset, new knowledge, deep insight, and personalized products or services.

With the high velocity and unprecedented uncertainty, in many circumstances, business leaders couldn’t predict the future with a certain degree of accuracy, they have to understand the hidden paradoxes, do in-depth cause-effect analysis, optimize complicated things or processes, and deal with the “VUCA” dynamic skillfully. 

Good questions spark imagination, provoke comprehensive answers; great answers stimulate more thought-provoking questions and advocate innovation. Business leaders and professionals today need to ask themselves what their strategies are and which practices they need to take to change with the “tide,” as well as how to drive progressive changes and lead innovation successfully?

Open-ended questions such as “what if” reimagine and clarify multipath strategy management scenario: Corporate strategy is about diagnosing the critical issues, making choices and taking actions to solve them smoothly. . Which school of scenario planning are you most fond of? Usually, strategy planning management is a cross-functional effort and multidisciplinary and multidimensional planning. When developing a strategy, you should always plan the execution of the strategy, and prepare for the “What If” scenario which shows potential scale of business benefit to be driven from the portfolio based on different mixes of programs and projects. It provides an “executive” view including impact analysis, reporting and alignment to strategy. All of the above should be supported by a robust, flexible and comprehensive set of tools to report and provide performance metrics, which allow the portfolio to be fine-tuned over time so that it delivers maximum strategic advantage to the organization.

Strategic planning depends on the context-internal and external dimensions you and your organization want to focus on and how you go about it. Strategic scenario planning is to navigate through the digital dynamic, discover the path via unconventional thinking, believing in yourself and most importantly in your team to achieve the high performing result. Scenario planning would be a key feature to strategic problem-solving. Which philosophy do you apply? The deductive school, the inductive one or "La Prospective" school? The underlying assumptions from different schools imply different methodologies and approaches. Besides digging into “why,” ask open questions such “why not,” “what if, “how about”? Believe in your plan and convince everyone else to believe in it as well. With all employees aligned behind a plan execution. Strategic plan is an interactive and iterative continuum, for leading organizations toward the next level of business growth and maturity.

Insightful questions open people’s minds to spur creativity in change management: Change is the new normal with increasing paces. Organizations need to take systematic steps in evolutionary change management. It means to make a radical shift from a silo and linear classic change management practices to holistic and nonlinear management discipline. To build a highly adaptive organization, it’s important to make sure that your company is open minded to embrace diverse perspectives, prepare for multiple change scenarios. It starts by asking open questions such as “What If,” “Why Not,” connecting dots which are usually seemingly unrelated because they are scattered in transdisciplinary domains. It takes interdisciplinary knowledge and cross-functional communication and collaboration to manage large scale changes.

Change is continuously happening in the environment of a company. The desires of stakeholders, clients, and employees are evolving naturally. Organizations need to make sure they have a robust and shared view about Why? Why they are here and what is their real intention, ask "what if” questions as well. Applying creative thinking to ask open-ended questions in Change Management would make changes often more effective, fun and desirable, motivates people riding above the learning curve, stimulates their intellectual curiosity and becomes the true change agent and creative problem-solver. Apply creative thinking to Change Management by leveraging systematic methodologies, employing and applying the criteria deemed appropriate by the thinkers involved, to arrive at tangible and reproducible business results.

Innovation starts with open-ended questions: When a new stage emerges in the progression of society, the continued use of the old paradigm, the old-world-view-lens, creates ever-increasing problems. The essence of innovation is made of trying new combinations of known things. It's the essence of progress. Inquisitive leaders and professionals have to be open-minded, refuse to be bound by constraints and limitations, show flexibility, break down outdated rules, and present resilience. Not only ask deep “WHY” s to diagnose the root cause of problems but also ask open-ended questions such as “WHY NOT” or “What If” to spur creativity, having a steady flow of fresh ideas floating in the innovation pipeline and create synergy.

Environment either encourages or discourages innovation, the ease or difficulties inherent in surviving. Innovation requires thinking beyond, altering or changing the frame of reference to create previously unconsidered solutions. Inquisitive professionals deploy new ideas, new processes, new adventures to adapt to change. What elements did past civilizations possess that added to innovation? It takes courage to step out of the conventional thinking box and practice creativity. In a business enterprise context, the mantra of "there are no bad ideas" is often used as a catalyst to encourage a flow of ideas, but it’s also crucial to use business resources effectively. Innovation for the sake of innovating is exhaustive because what would be the purpose? The goal is to amplify innovation impact and solve the most crucial problems effectively.

A new paradigm arises out of fresh mindset, new knowledge, deep insight, and personalized products or services. The organization has to ask logical questions, forecast upcoming change with a certain degree of precision, explore digital in all directions and change to the fundamental business model, culture, or other critical business factors for reaching the next level of organizational growth and maturity.

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Innerprevention

Risks are simply potential problems. Preventing the problem is more superior to fixing issues. It is supposed to be one of the main principles for problem management.

From one generation to the next, the substance of leadership does not change, it’s about the future, change, and influence. 

However, digital leadership trends will continue to emerge. Here is a set of featured blogs to dig into the “keywords” of the 21st century to brainstorm the future of digital leadership and business transformation.

     Prevention

Interdisciplinary Problem Prevention A "problem" is an opportunity waiting to happen. There are criteria that characterize good and bad statements of problems and opportunities. Any progressive change is technically a sort of opportunity management and problem-solving scenario. The prediction of the future is based on the analysis of the past. In today’s digital dynamic, every situation has choices, every situation has known unknown and unknown unknowns. Defining a problem is a half way to solve it, preventing a serious problem from happening is superior to fixing it. Good problem solvers fix, great problem solvers prevent. Multidimensional thinking, interdisciplinary knowledge, and multifaceted approach are all critical components for premium problem management scenarios.

Initiativestopredictplanprevent We live in an era full of uncertainty, velocity, complexity, and ambiguity. In business, every day is a risk, there are downward risks (loss of value) or upward risks (opportunity to create value); there are internal risks or external risks; some risks can be quantifiable; some can only be approximated. To predict and prevent, deal with threats or disruptions that organizations face, it’s important to look for something “hidden,” which is not always so obvious, and leverage quality information for making better assumptions and improving forecast precision.

InnerAspects of Preventing problems Due to fast-paced change, the exponential growth of information and continuous digital disruptions, opportunities and risks co-exist. Forward-looking organizations should manage them well and adapt to digital new normal for creating a winning digital dynamic. Risks are simply potential problems. Preventing the problem is more superior to fixing issues. It is supposed to be one of the main principles for problem management.

Uncoverfutureviaprediction Nowadays the perspective of rapid change and abundant knowledge unfolds into a wider multi-dimensionally systemic business continuum. The goal of the business forecast is about predicting what will happen and taking steps further, what shall you do upon it. To predict and respond to the emergent business properties and make information more “visible” for shareholders decisions, promotions, and even chart of accounts will create a richer value return from the enterprise data asset and improve the overall business decision effectiveness.

Interdictive With high velocity and frequent disruptions, you may not be able to foresee specific instances of futures, but you can imagine general classes and positions to define the landscape with its risks and opportunities, take a broad range of perspectives, shape or mitigate what could be occurring. The goal of the business foresight and forecast is about predicting what will happen and step further - what shall you do upon it; the interdictive analytics keeps you alert about what you should avoid doing. Prevention is superior to fixing.

The blog is a dynamic book flowing with your thoughts; growing through your dedication; sharing your knowledge; conveying your wisdom, and making an influence through touching the hearts and connecting minds across the globe. The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 5 million page views with about #8300 blog postings. Among 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking and innovating new ideas; it’s not just about WHAT to say, but about WHY to say, and HOW to say it. It reflects the color and shade of your thought patterns, and it indicates the peaks and curves of your thinking waves. Unlike pure entertainment, quality and professional content takes time for digesting, contemplation and engaging, and therefore, it takes time to attract the "hungry minds" and the "deep souls." It’s the journey to amplify diverse voices and deepen digital footprints, and it's the way to harness your innovative spirit.

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Innatearchitectrualaspectofcapability

With overwhelming growth of information and frequent disruptions, what matters is capability dynamism and maturity.

Business Capabilities are the abilities to produce specific goods or services for serving customers, gaining market shares, and building business competency. Business management needs to ask insightful questions, and make an objective assessment of corporate capability adequacy, coherence, complexity. 

Capability maturity evaluation includes analyzing capability gaps in the context of future need, capability dependency or business capability reliance on technology capability, investment calculation, etc.

Are you getting the right architectural oversight for business capabilities? Generally speaking, there are strategic capability and tactical capability; differentiated capability and necessary capability. Tactical capability necessities keep the lights on; strategic capability differentiators build unique business competencies. To improve business competency, it is important to have a good understanding of current and future capabilities as well as their impact on implementing the strategic business goals, identify the key business capability and make an objective assessment of capability maturity. Capability enabled strategy has higher success rate.

There is a requirement of architectural oversight of business capability to see at which level of maturity you have arrived, the interdependence of capabilities and what level of transitions are required in future based on business strategic priorities. An objective assessment of capability includes the importance of each capability to the enterprise; different weighting may be applied to the capabilities of shaping organizational competency. When building the future state of the business, make sure that you break it down into looking at the ideal future first, followed by the practical capability view via knowledge, resource, schedule, and talent assessment. An architectural view bridges the “as is” and” to be” state of the business, so it can evaluate capability via a long term expansive lenses.

Can you do quality capability mapping from architect perspective: Enterprise Architecture aids in the transformation from strategy to plan and acts as an assurance of the quality of the capability based business strategy, contributes to improved quality of the strategic planning and capability development. What are current investment and acquisition strategies and how they are related to business capabilities of an organization? Enterprise architecture and its mapping with business capabilities should be determined by some of the stakeholders like client, technical architect, business architect etc. Capability mapping can be an enormous help in understanding and prioritizing strategic problem-solving; allowing you to prioritize and focus on the “bigger picture,” also helping other architects to figure out capability wise figures.

Unusually quality measure is based on a determinable outcome. And capability quality is assessed through consideration of completeness, consistency of levels, consideration of value chain /value stream /lifecycle /other reference model. The value of capability maps is to provide the useful tool to visualize the enterprise. With the increasing pace of changes, opportunities and risks keep emerging, dynamic capabilities are the strategic routines by which businesses achieve new resource configurations as markets emerge, collide, split, evolve, etc. Organizations should leverage an effective enterprise architecture to enhance various management disciplines, deliberately make the close alignment among the company’s strategic direction, its most distinctive capabilities, to achieve strategic goals in a stepwise manner.

Can you build a capability architecture as a subcomponent of enterprise architecture, design, model, and build a strong business capability portfolio? Capability Architecture as a subcomponent of enterprise capability articulates business capability requirements and development for the company to transform from “as-is” to future state. There are varying ingredients in business capability - Process, Knowledge, Technology, Talent, Measurement. There are both hard and soft components in capability development; the successful capability integration and quality management will depend on the underlying business relationships between all of these points and how they influence each other. The capability architecture enhances the process of right use of standards, policies, and industry reference models and how new capabilities are developed and existing capabilities are getting enhanced using Architecture Development.

There are gaps existing in capability development because there are no mechanisms to handle risks or uncertain situations, the unrealistic designs that could not be implemented in the organizational system. By applying capability architecture perspectives and practices, capability modeling and models can be a driver for designing and developing capability, especially when done in collaboration. The quality capability model allows business leaders to establish important business goals relevant to the capability and identify goal dependencies to establish a high mature enterprise. Oftentimes, the enterprise capability design and configuration is uniquely challenging because of resource limitations or other business constraints. Enterprise capability architecture is a useful tool to integrate ingredients into business capability, recombine multiple capabilities into new capabilities, improve effectiveness of business capability development and management.

With overwhelming growth of information and frequent disruptions, what matters is capability dynamism and maturity. The dynamic capabilities accelerate business speed to change; the high-mature set of business capabilities can make organizations highly adaptable to fulfill their strategy, as the key business differentiator, and build the long term business advantage.

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Innovatebusinessbyharmonizingtensions

It’s important to understand that digital management is multifaceted and holistic. Balance, growth, and harmony are not fixed, they are flowing.

The exponential growth of information and the probability of surprising emergent properties bring both unprecedented opportunities and risks to organizations across industrial sectors today. There is a poor fit between the new business and the old system. Dysfunction, silo, too much complication, etc, are often caused by overly rigid organizational structures, incoherent processes, dysfunctional systems. 

The trick to thrive is to discover how the business evolves to create new value, and, ultimately, succeed in the long-term. The corporate management needs to unshackle the old organizational hierarchical chain, deal with conflicts and handle tensions thoughtfully.

Intra-divisional tensions: It is no surprise that there is a tension between “old and new,” from the mindset, business model, process or practice perspectives. It is the reality that there are functional silos existing, so the organizational progress and harmony often get hampered by the team or functional level “He said, she said,” intra-divisional tension scenario. Most businesses also face resource or schedule constraints. As nowadays, there are so many things on the business executives’ plate, they have to spin them all very well in order to keep the right balance. To take care of interdivisional tensions and harmonize cross-functional relationships, all executives need to play as true business leaders, not as functional managers, aligning resources with strategic goals scientifically.

It takes exceptionally strong and visionary leadership to see varying forces working against the better path of the business as a whole and work together to bring about that significant change in behavior. If business is too stifle or slow, corporate divisions need to take fair share of responsibility, share the reward and shame together. If one division such as information technology fails, it's also business's failure, "blame game" should be replaced by solution focus. The bottom line is, for any company to succeed, it’s essential for the entire company to be pulling in the right direction, break down silos, soothe tensions, lubricate relationship hierarchy, and overcome constraints, to accelerate performance and unlock business potential.

Operational tensions: Operational tensions are tensions related to the decisions or actions of roles, it is clear already who has to do what, you just need them to do it. This type of tension is resolved in a tactical meeting or directly from role to role. Processing of a tension that results in a request of business initiatives from another role happens in a tactical (operational) meeting, or directly to the person filling that role. As to how circles can create work for roles outside of their circle: the whole organization is linked via double links. Tactical tensions are brought to higher circles by the rep links and down to lower circles by the lead links. Using these double links, a role can have tension resolved anywhere in the organization.

To improve adaptability and harmony, organizations today cannot be organized using the outdated or mechanistic paradigm that resulted in bureaucracies. Optimizing processes and flexing structure are all critical for allowing the organization to morph into living conditions and organizational capacities change to allow a better fit for the purpose. An organization can only achieve high performance by taking the collaboration road.

Governance tensions: Corporate governance indicates a relationship with the board, shareholders, management and stakeholders. If all these parties would perform to the vision and mission of the organization, it would increase the performance significantly. Governance sometimes may not serve the goal of creating good art, but deploying services or components to the enterprise without governance is the trap to failures. In practice, governance tensions are tensions related to the clarity of the roles and policies of the circle. it's the tension you have when it is not clear who has to do what or how things are supposed to be done.

Governance as a discipline is a living breathing entity that continually requires stroking and attention, otherwise, it will stagnate and lose its ability to be one of the prime enablers. Governance tensions should be dealt with smoothly via harnessing shareholders’ communication & collaboration, enhancing mature alignment; organizations with higher and stronger maturity outperform organizations with lower maturity.

It’s important to understand that digital management is multifaceted and holistic. Balance, growth, and harmony are not fixed, they are flowing. The journey of digital transformation is all about weighing the main business elements impacting change -people, process, and technology and balancing the timing, tempo, to the harmony of digitalization.

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Innovationbyanalytics

It's an interesting personalized world emerging ahead of us, analytics becoming a decision discipline and innovation engine to pursue high performance in high mature intelligent enterprises.

Innovation is to "make meaningful connections," and it can be delivered in many different ways. Organizations define what innovation means to them and how they choose or need to deliver. Business leaders today should learn how to walk the innovation talk and manage innovation in a structural way. 

We live in the era with information abundance, there are some critical pieces of information needed for accelerating idea validation such as facts about business ideas, benefits and shortcomings, applications, etc. The effective information management enables the business to build dynamic innovation capability for idea creation, selection, prioritization and improve the success rate of innovation management.

Innovation & Predictive Analytics: Information is the power, running a real-time digital organization starts with providing real-time information management solutions to unpuzzle innovation. There are many areas within a company where the innovation process can be applied to create value, information is the very clue that provides insight upon innovation hot spots. Information based analytics helps the business management grasp growth opportunities and prevent risks, and improve the success rate of idea implementation. To predict and respond to the emergent business properties and make information more “visible” for shareholders, linking data management to multiple business domains within the enterprise and their business partners for decisions, connect wider dots across the management disciplines to spur information intensive innovations for conquering digital management challenges.

In the hyperconnected and interdependent world, collaborating and information sharing are what spurs innovation. In a business scope, there are some of the important bits and bytes of information needed to forecast emerging technology trends or the business growth opportunities. Predictive analytics enables the business to develop the future perspective, shape futuristic viewpoint, bring people together in a common and committed effort, move people in the right direction, inspire people to innovate and achieve innovation excellence.

Innovation & Talent Analytics: People are the center of innovation. Now with information-based analytical intelligence capabilities combined with social pulse and technical methodologies, the organization has more visibility of people's sentiments and can work to make a motivating environment to unleash creative potential of their people, increase employee values and improve organizational innovation and performance. This is very critical for the individual as well as the firm to maximize the growth of the employee at the same time improving the profitability of the firm.

It is very important to build a culture of growth and innovation. The information based talent analytics has a great role to play in talent retention and growth, enhancing a healthy cycle of feedback-feedforward, as well as how to build an innovative workforce. Innovative organizations are using people analytics tools to spot and grow varying innovation personas, source and manage ideas and refine current products or services, to manage different types of innovation in a systematic way.

Innovation & Customer Sentimental Analytics: In face of fierce competitions and rapidly changing marketing conditions, businesses become more interconnected and interdependent with its macro-environment by engaging in conversation with employees, partners, customers, community group, and industry expertise. Without customers, businesses can barely survive. Technically, how to gain customer empathy through data-based analytics and customer sentiment analytics? Innovative organizations are using sentimental analysis to explore what’s in customers’ minds, gain customer empathy, how to delight them, to nurture new ideas and refine current products or services, to manage innovation and take actions for building a more customer-centric business.

Advanced social analytics allows the organization to collect feedback, analyze context and quickly draw an inference from unstructured social media or enterprise data and convert them into actionable customer insight. There are a number of technical solutions out there that are specifically devoted to customer feedback, sentiment categorization and keyword analysis, providing inputs on customer preference, predicting the future trend, and capturing collective wisdom. It makes the most sense to have customer sentiment analytics integrated entirely within a wider customer experience management solution.

It's an interesting personalized world emerging ahead of us, analytics becoming a decision discipline and innovation engine to pursue high performance in high mature intelligent enterprises. Still, analytics is meant to the end, forethoughtful business leaders show enthusiasm and confidence about the information potential for shaping the future of the business by improving decision effectiveness, strategic agility, risk intelligence, innovation and overall business competency.

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Problem-solving is about seeing a problem and actually finding a solution to that problem, not just the band-aid approach to fix the symptom.

The purpose of “Problem-Solving Master - Frame Problems Systematically and Solve Problems Creatively“ is to throw some light on how to understand, frame, and solve today’s multilayer, interdependent, and over-complex business problems effortlessly.

 Digital leaders and professionals should be self-aware of their role in problems, show professional maturity, and develop a good reputation as the problem-solver.

   Inner Cause Effect

innercausationcorrelationofproblemsolving Generally speaking, a problem is a difference between an expectation and the current reality. The world we live in becomes more complex, with information exponentiality and unprecedented uncertainty so the emerging problems are also becoming over-complex and interdependent. Trying to fix the wrong cause of a problem will waste talent, resources or time, increase anxiety and reward mediocrity. Thus, it’s important to make extensive observations, do deep analysis, gain comprehensive understanding of causation, correlation, and figure out the exact cause and effect of problems in order to solve them smoothly without causing more issues later on.

Innercauseeffect Problem-solving today becomes over complex nowadays due to high velocity and uncertainty. In many circumstances, people fix the issues, but the symptoms continue to get back, so they stop the effort. But their ignorance perhaps causes more serious issues later. The problems usually have many causes and can be very complex, you can't figure out the exact cause and effect so the solutions are vague. What are the best techniques to diagnose the causes and solve problems effectively?

Ignorance In Problem-Solving Fundamentally every work is the problem-solving continuum. Any problem is the right problem if there is an attempt to find a solution for making progressive changes. It becomes about addressing the correct need and perhaps the problem becomes how to identify the need at the right level. Good problem-solvers take a proven approach to fix the issue efficiently; great problem-solvers dig through the root and take care of a series of issues effectively; wise problem-solving masters can prevent or dissolve the problem effortlessly.

Insightofassumption Digital is dynamic and uncertain, the challenges that organizations face today include the high velocity of changes, complexity, or uncertainties which could blur our vision and make the future unpredictable. The wrong direction will no doubt lead to the wrong destination. When trying to determine the macro environment and how the various factors influence business strategic planning and execution one way or another, it is difficult to move away entirely from assumptions. But it’s important to clear logic, update knowledge, do deep analysis, integrate the parts into the whole, in order to steer the business in the right direction and make leapfrog changes.

InnerCauses of Getting Stuck at the State of Problem-Solving Impasse Generally speaking, a problem is a difference between an expectation (vision or intention) and the actual situation (current reality) coupled with a negative feeling. Problem-solving is about seeing a problem and actually finding a solution to that problem, not just the band-aid approach to fix the symptom. In today’s hyper-connected and ever-changing business environment, business problems become over-complex and interdependent. Even though you have a good intention to solve problems, perhaps you lack of the right talent and capabilities to define and resolve the real problems. Here are three causes of getting stuck at the state of problem-solving impasse.

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 5 million page views with about 8300+ blogs posting in 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. The content richness is not for its own sake, but to convey the vision and share the wisdom. Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking; it’s not just about what to say, but about why to say, and how to say it. It reflects the color and shade of your thought patterns, and it indicates the peaks and curves of your thinking waves. Unlike pure entertainment, quality and professional content takes time for digesting, contemplation and engaging, and therefore, it takes time to attract the "hungry minds" and the "deep souls." It’s the journey to amplify your voice, deepen your digital footprints, and match your way for human progression.

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Innovateleadershipchain

It’s important to strengthen the leadership chain as well as the chains of professional attitudes and behaviors, to make a direct influence on corporate/societal culture, talent management, and business strategy for improving organizational competency.

Upon a rapidly changing environment, there are both opportunities and risks in uncertainty. Somehow, it is affecting the short-term business goals and is often forcing the companies to act differently to adapt to the emerging property and varying circumstances. 

Trends, business models, marketplace, etc, all start to influence the actual adoption and the degree of direct leadership due to circumstances. Leaders today should have a certain level of ambiguity tolerance to inspire a culture of innovation and risk-taking; a truly great leader acts professionally in all aspects of their role and beyond. appreciate different perspectives, fresh knowledge, and different ways to frame a set of issues, and take different paths for experimenting, exploring, and solving problems innovatively.

Create a strong thought chain with no weak links: Leadership is about change and direction. There’s time to break down the old chains of outdated thoughts, and there’s time to strengthen new established chains of fitting mindsets, starting at the mindset level. Corporate leader’s professionalism starts with being professional with a positive and forward-thinking mindset. Are you open-minded, creative and critical; are you insightful, passionate and mature? Corporate leaders should set a good example to create strong thought chains, impact collective mindset or corporate cultures and make transformative changes seamlessly. In fact, breaking down those old thought chains can free people and the organization as a whole from the past and leap them toward the next level of business growth cycle.

Fixed or rigid mindset, the overly controlling mindset, the mindset of resisting or rejecting anything that affects cozy familiarity, the mindset of the “unconscious biases, blame game, fear of consequences, inflexible,” etc, are sorts of old thinking that simply cannot move fast enough in the sea of changes and fierce competitions. They all make the thought chain fragile and cause the business entity to fail. Thus, change agents and experts are needed to challenge convention and break down peoples' natural resistance to change or to new ideas. Organizational leaders need to encourage their employees to step up and propose bold transformational change initiatives and then ask management to follow through. Openness, transparency, collaboration, empowerment, respect for the value of people and adding value to the enterprises, is best for everyone.

Enhance the employee behavior value chain and customer satisfaction chain: Besides strong thought chains, it’s also crucial to build a solid “behavioral value chain” between the inputs - intermediate steps - outcomes. Ask employees to define business value in terms of outcomes they're helping the organization & customers to achieve, unpack the employee inputs - product quality - customer satisfaction chain to determine what constitutes each of the parts and the strength, and direction of the various links in the chain. The value chain is staffed by people that can do their jobs really well because of training and experience in those roles.

Value streams can break into stages; each stage decomposes into routing maps or can map to a business process which underpin corporate capabilities to deliver products/services and enable value stream stages. The value chain process is the flow of activities, which include what managers, employees and applications do for producing goods and services and delivering them to the customers. Successful business initiatives are about creating really good value chains, getting the right people in the right positions, to make right decisions at the right times to solve the right problems smoothly.

Strengthen the leadership chain that promotes continuous improvement and build a talent chain to improve business competency: Continuous improvement is the way organizations should improve themselves, learn, develop and follow through as the top priority. It is much more likely to turn into a smooth and successful collaborative transition. From top down and bottom up, paint an excellent picture of the interaction and interdependence between the leadership team. Put the right people in the right positions, and develop people via personalized training. Having the senior people in operations and technical services incorporate the inputs or outlooks into in-house training programs so that the business knowledge is shared with others who can then try them out and hopefully improve them.

Progressive leaders help people adapt to new things in their work environment. The forms of informal learning take place in some of the most progressive organizations that support talent development. Shift the focus from formal learning and look more to placing structure around informal learning. If an employee feels that enterprise invests in the people, both for their personal development and the enterprise interests, they would fully be grateful. The focus should be on trust, being patient, understanding the person's strengths/weaknesses and developing the tailored training solution in the most effective and efficient way to match the needs and demand.

Leadership is a journey. Despite your well-intended objective, strategic and proactive efforts, be cognizant of the sequences and consequences. It’s important to strengthen the leadership chain as well as the chains of professional attitudes and behaviors, to make a direct influence on corporate/societal culture, talent management, and business strategy for improving organizational competency.

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Unprofessionalnegativity

Negative intentions or misjudgment needs to be discouraged or even penalized in order to build a healthy working environment and create a culture of learning and innovation.

Digital makes a significant impact on how we think, live, and work. There is the mix of old and new, physical and virtual, order and chaos. We are in a time of tremendous change, the dawn of the digital age, the path to the next level of digital maturity, also in the era of confusion and information overload. Therefore, it’s critical to identify, understand, and avoid pitfalls, discover strategic and predictive pathways to change, increase confidence, position a brand and leverage resources to make the digital paradigm shift effortlessly. Slideshare Presentation

         Unprofessional Negativity

Unprofessioalismcharacteristics The business environment is full of uncertainty, velocity, complexity, and ambiguity, high professionalism is an important quality for today’s multigenerational, multicultural and multi-devicing workforce, and it is a foundation to shape growth mindsets, cultivate open-minded leadership, nurture culture of learning and positive atmosphere with intellectual stimulation, to both unleash employees’ potential and drive organizational maturity seamlessly.

Is Negative Feedback Constructive or Destructive The quality of feedback is dependent on the QUALITY of feedback giver. Nobody is perfect, we should always be self-aware, including our flaws and shortcomings. We need always to welcome constructive feedback which helps improve our professional growth and personal maturity. However, how can you discern which feedback is constructive, and which one is destructive? And what can you learn from it? Accept feedback that is truthful and accurate,...

unpuzzleprofessionalism Due to an unprecedented level of uncertainty, velocity, and complexity, misunderstanding, misinterpretation, or miscommunication are the big causes of many human problems. Often cognitive differences, knowledge gaps, or lack of contextual understanding cause misinterpretation. Misinterpretation or miscommunication further cause misguidance that perhaps means making poor judgments or steering the business in the wrong direction and leads business stagnation.

Close the Feedback Gaps Nobody is perfect, we should always be self-aware, strengthen our strength and improve our weakness. We need always to welcome constructive feedback which helps improve our professional growth and personal maturity. However, how can you discern which feedback is constructive, and how can you bridge the feedback gaps in order to shape the growth mindset and achieve professional advancement effortlessly?

Unlocking Performance via Overcoming Barriers We live in the digital era with exponential growth of information, the speed of change is significantly increasing. The business system is complex and the organization is multifaceted. Decentralization, globalization, and diversification can all be practical reasons for communicating barriers or changing pitfalls. Most organizations are grossly dysfunctional, despite often noble attempts at change by the leadership team. How can forward-looking organizations overcome varying challenges and build high mature people-centric organizations?

The blog is a dynamic book flowing with your thoughts; growing through your dedication; sharing your knowledge; conveying your wisdom, and making influence through touching the hearts and connecting the minds across the globe. The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 5 million page views with about #8300 blog postings. Among 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking and innovating new ideas; it’s not just about WHAT to say, but about WHY to say, and HOW to say it. It reflects the color and shade of your thought patterns, and it indicates the peaks and curves of your thinking waves. Unlike pure entertainment, quality and professional content takes time for digesting, contemplation and engaging, and therefore, it takes the time to attract the "hungry minds" and the "deep souls." It’s the journey to amplify diverse voices and deepen digital footprints, and it's the way to harness your innovative spirit.

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Innovatefuturebylearningfrompast

 Science, technology, various interdisciplinary techniques and methodology enable us to learn from the past and accelerate movement toward the future smoothly.

Consider digital organizations as self-organized but interlaced systems which have their own purpose, and the processes are determined by the intrinsic nature of the whole. They are not just a set of interconnected components, but a set of interwoven threads to shape a future of the business.

 On the temporal plane, think of business entities as nodes along a timeline, a change in each node will have some effects internally on that node but also with other nodes along the same and even other timelines. The past is always present, where you are, where you want to be, it has value; identify gaps, and take alternate approaches to anticipate and provide solutions. Should organizations work backwards? The positive and forward-looking view of organization is more about thinking ahead, to prepare and face the challenges and uncertainty on the way to the future steadfastly.

Analytics is historically backward-looking, and decisions are forward-looking: Forethoughtful companies work on an opportunity and then figure out what is the lesson learned from the past existing out there. Analysis is to understand something that already "exists," defined as the procedure by which you break down an intellectual or substantial whole into parts or components (loosen, untie, set apart). During this process, business management can understand the pieces and parts of their company, their strength and weakness; capability and capacity, so they come with principles, best practices; repository establishment, standards formulation, governance establishment. Then proactive decision making across the organizational hierarchy enables the business to adapt to changes by taking step-wise actions, and improve organizational competency and profitability.

Now at the dawn of the digital era, the abundance of information flow, click-away knowledge, and the more advanced technologies make it possible to gain real-time insight and business foresight if organizations can embed analysis in varying management disciplines. They are truly being digitized underneath, at the process level. An intelligent company intends to predict the emerging events and manage uncertainty by gaining a deep understanding of the past and making better forecasts based on historical data. The management sets the smart goals by shaping the questions such as: Do you want to maximize the probability of making your goals? Do you want to minimize regret? Which lessons did you learn via analysis based backward-looking? Can you maximize the mean expected results? Etc. The frictionless information flow helps decision-makers at a different level of the organization to proactively leverage information, relevant & interdisciplinary knowledge and collective insight for making effective decisions consistently in order to solve problems effectively.

Theories are backward looking, abstracted from practices in the collective past; practices are forward-looking, but rooted in the theory of some kind: Either making changes or doing innovation, if the theory is sound, then it can help the practice achieve repeatability of the outcome. When looking for results, it is not a question of knowing what the best answer is based on theory, but which practices and what actions will lead to desired outcomes that matter in the future. If the theory is sound, then it can help the practice achieve repeatability of the outcome. As theories are based on historical data or practices, some of them could be outdated due to circumstances changes. Thus, the "theory" of phenomena should always be open to interpretation and understanding of the theory should rightly be questioned, when it fails to account for what actually happens.

The management needs to know how to balance the theories, best practice and lessons learned. The theory is designed from actual contexts by backward reviews, practice is governed by theory to drive futuristic results. When looking for results, it is not a question of knowing what the best answer is based on theory, but what actions will lead to desired outcomes that matter. In the sense that human behavior is predicated on some kind of cause and effect model that resides somewhere inside people’s mindset. If the theory is sound, then it can help the change or innovation practice achieve repeatability of outcome

Retrospection simulates backward problem-solving scenarios; proactive synthesis focuses on shaping long term solutions: Many of today’s problems are complex and interdependent; some of them are actually caused by previous solutions to other historical problems; others are symptoms of uncovered issues or concerns. Retrospective scenario in problem-framing is about taking “the backward” approach to dig into the root cause. Proactive-synthesis in problem-solving is about binding up, and reimagining the “art of possible.” When solving problems to achieve certain results. Learning from the past and digging through the historical root of problems are critical steps in shaping structural solutions. a retrospective scenario starts with what you want to see or have, imagine the future statement of “problems being solved” then, think backward from there to what the next simpler step is; make the similar backward logic until you dig into the root cause of issues, in order to figure out the premium solutions cost-effectively.

Problem-solving is about seeing a problem and actually finding a solution to that problem. During the retrospective problem-solving scenario, the teams reflect on what happened in the iteration, identify gaps and take actions to fill them for moving forward. It is the process started at the “ideal state” - the unified perspective of “the problem gets solved thoroughly” based on clarified vision and diverse viewpoints. During the synthetic problem-solving process, it’s important to be more future-oriented, make the combination of components or elements to form a connected whole, perceive “what could be,” rather than sticking to the traditional ways of fixing issues, focusing on long term perspective. For complex problem-solving, work through problems forward and backward iteratively to make sure there are no errors or gaps, to analyze the root conditions & causes that apply, to investigate the various solution options, to decide, to act, and then to cycle around fluently.

Variety, complexity, diversification, hyper-connectivity, and interdependence, are the characteristics of the business ecosystem. From a management perspective, the business is complex and the organization is contextual today, the blind spots, gaps, and change pitfalls are inevitable in leading change. We shouldn't forget our past, but we should learn from it. Science, technology, various interdisciplinary techniques and methodology enable us to learn from the past and accelerate movement toward the future smoothly by “looking forward,” “looking around,” “looking behind,” and “looking beyond” accordingly.

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