Climbing the Pyramid of Cognitive Maturity

The digital fit starts with the mind fit. 

Cognition is a perception, sensation, and insight. The most important capability of the cognitive mind is the willingness and ability to seek out knowledge, address ignorances and the assumptions we make to minimize it. When we explore the mental process of acquiring new knowledge through thoughts, experiences, and senses, the cognition involves exploring varieties of meanings, absorbing and digesting information from varying sources, and improving the cognitive maturity step by step. To survive and thrive in today’s “VUCA” digital new normal, it’s imperative for digital leaders and professionals to climb the pyramid of cognitive maturity in order to make sound judgments and effective decisions.

The level of perception: Perception is the way that your eyes see the world and your mind interpret it. Your perception is an interpretation based on your own conditioning, insight, surroundings, experiences, leading you to make the judgment. No two person’s realities will be totally identical at the giving time. One’s perception matters because it affects how you are going to respond to “what happened,” and which influence you would make to the surroundings. You can only know what you know, but there are more dimensions which you don’t know. Outdated perception is like time glue that keeps you still. People’s perceptions reflect their thinking capacity (the breadth and depth of the cognitive mind) and mentality traits (positive vs. negative; egoless vs. egotism, etc). Thus, it’s important to understand people deep in the mindset level in order to get truly understand “who they are,” as well as the level of perception they can reach. When the collective perception is closer to the perception of the mastermind with a high level of cognitive maturity, human society can accelerate collective progress.

The level of perspective: Perspective is looking at either heads or tails. A coin is an interesting metaphor as your focus is on heads you cannot see tails and while looking at tails you cannot see heads. Just like the perception, perspective is a personal “truth.” The secret lies in "imagining" a perspective of the whole coin as you aspire towards truth. To spark creativity and encourage critical thinking, it’s important to embrace different perspectives. For example, an architect must consider the whole, and their purpose is to achieve the goals for the thing being architected. An engineer, on the other hand, should also think about the goals, but their first concern should be meeting the narrower requirements that their aspect of the overall design must meet. You don’t need to agree completely with the other side of viewpoint, but you can always gain empathy, insight, and new perspective to see things from the other angle and be creative to figure out alternative solutions. An argument opens a new perspective; changing perspective will change your mind. The long-term perspective, creative perspective or multidimensional perspectives often come from the mind with the high level of cognitive maturity.

The level of understanding: Understanding requires a person's ability to grasp or comprehend information. How deep your understanding is based on the mindset, logic, knowledge, lenses, and the methodology you leverage to interpret things. Often people follow conventional wisdom or others' opinion and get stuck only at the level of content understanding, explain things based on the linguistic meaning or make an observation on the surface level. They are constrained by the little box with which they are familiar with or just follow other people’s explanation without thinking further or digging deeper. In this regard, they lack true understanding. Thus, too often, assumptions and prejudices get in the way of in-depth understanding. To deepen the level of understanding, it’s important to analyze and synthesize information, dig deeper to gain contextual understanding by sensing the tones and embracing the holism. It’s important to practice independent thinking to form your own opinion, examine your thought processes and make sure they are open to true understanding and reach a high level of cognitive maturity.

The digital fit starts with the mind fit. The most important capability of the cognitive mind is the willingness and ability to seek out knowledge, practice independent thinking, gain an in-depth understanding, and fill out cognitive blind spots. There is no magic “thinking sauce” to make one’s mind profound, individuals simply have to cultivate a healthy thinking habit, keep practicing and climbing the pyramid of cognitive maturity at their own pace, learning, relearning, thinking, practicing, and exploring all the time.

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The CIO as “Chief Improvement Officer”: How to Drive Evolutionary Change for Running Digital-Ready IT

Leading evolutionary change and driving business growth is the never-ended journey. 

Technology becomes pervasive in the modern enterprise, IT continues to grow in importance to organizations, both operationally and as a competitive advantage. Nowadays, regardless of whether they like it or not, CIOs have to play multiple roles and often get obsessed with many things. One of the most pertinent roles for CIO is to become the “Chief Improvement Officer,” to drive evolutionary change and run digital ready IT organization.

Communicating, promoting, and educating: Digital means the rapid change, the high level of unrepeatability and unpredictability. The CIO as a change agent not only touches his/her own function but also needs to make an influence on an entire organization and business ecosystem. To reinvent IT as the strategic business partner, they should keep communicating, promoting, and educating. CIOs will be welcomed to the executive table if executives hear the business language they understand; the language which is the most beneficial to the company’s future - financial results, not just for the short-term result, but for the long-term perspective. Digital CIOs should have critical thinking skills, the high level of versatility, communication and engagement skills. IT-driven digital transformation can enforce business benefit by mixing diverse organizational ingredients to create products and processes which generate differentiated value, improve employee engagement and increase customer satisfaction. The business executive teams will accept CIOs as an ally only if they act as the trustful business partner and perform proactive contribution to acquiring goals.

Responsiveness, adaptability, and visibility: The continuous disruptions are often driven by the technologies, running a high-responsive IT organization needs to have the flexibility to take the different approach with the adaptability to meet the business’s expectation. The level of IT responsiveness also depends on how well CIOs can balance real technology needs against the risk tolerance of the enterprise. Running a highly responsive IT needs to get support from front desks to boardrooms. IT has to drive the changes and plays a pivotal role in digital transformation, focusing on the fastest speed available - because that is where the main threat to competitiveness. Digital CIOs should play a highly visible leadership role in conveying the technological vision and interacting with internal business executives or board of directors. They should practice expert power and share the unique business insight because they have the privilege to take an unbiased view of multiple issues across business and IT boundaries. IT needs to play an important role in building up digital enterprises which can succeed in combining two distinct but interconnected elements— strategic responsiveness and organizational flexibility, with the combination of an innovative culture that promotes responsiveness throughout the company.

Enabling, enhancing, and catalyzing: CIOs are accountable for the critical part of the business that is constantly changing and evolving. They should be capable of evolving leadership skills to not only match the pace with the changes in technology and the pace at which the organization can effectively manage these changes but also proactively enhance and catalyze changes in business transformation. The modern IT needs to provide highly integrated information lifecycle management solutions to conquer information management challenges, to provide information accessibility and availability, ensure transparency and visibility, and enable trust and reliability. IT maturity depends on where the organization perceives IT and the direction that the organization needs to head toward. Running IT as a business enabler and enhancer is about planning, funding, designing, building, operating, securing, optimizing, and maturing.

IT is the means to the end. Leading evolutionary change and driving business growth is the never-ended journey. In today’s information-driven dynamic business environment, there’s no shortage of problems to tackle, it’s all about to be able to get all the way around the task, to see it from all interests. Exceptional IT leadership is key to re-imagine IT and reinvent IT to achieve the art of possible.

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The Monthly “Digital Hybridity” Book Tuning: The “Digital Hybridity” Book Summary Aug. 2018

The purpose of the book “Digital Hybridity: How to Strike the Right Balance for Digital Paradigm Shift” is to shed some light on how to strike the right balance of stability and changes; being transactional to keep spinning and being transformational to leap forward for making a seamless digital paradigm shift. Digital organizations should apply the hybrid management approach, focus on building a diverse, networked, and extended modern working environment in which the powerful digital platforms and computing technologies enable seamless conversations, delayer overly rigid organizational hierarchy, inspire idea sharing and brainstorming, and engage employees and partners to achieve the high-performance result.

     

The “Digital Hybridity” Book Summary   

The New Book "Digital Hybridity: How to Strike the Right Balance for Digital Paradigm Shift" Introduction We are experiencing the major societal transformation from the industrial machine age with information scarcity to the digital era with information/knowledge/innovation abundance. The digital paradigm shift is reshaping our thinking and recasting the way we view ourselves, the systems of which we are the part, the environments in which we live, and the way how we perceive the multipolar digital world.

The New Book “Digital Hybridity” Introduction Chapter 1 The Hybrid Digital Organization? With the fast pace of changes, fierce competitions, and emerging digital technologies, companies large or small are brainstorming the next generation of organizational design, the next wave of digital changes, and the next step of business movement. The challenge facing business management will continue to be: “How to achieve the balance between “virtual worlds” and “human connection,” the “old way” and “new way” to do things; and how to shape a harmonized vision about business competency and build a customized business structure to enforce open communication and collaboration and run a hybrid digital organization.

The New Book “Digital Hybridity” Chapter 2: The Portmanteau Words to Reflect Digital Reality: Digital organizations are the complex ecosystem with the blurring line between functions, organizations and geographic locations. Digitalization doesn’t mean to just tear down all the old things in the previous era. In reality, it means how to strike the right balance between the new way and the old way; the best and the next practices. Here is a set of portmanteau hybrid words to convey the digital management principles and practices in running a high mature digital organization.

The New Book “Digital Hybridity” Chapter 3 The Hybrid Thinking Introduction The digital business is perceived as the future of the organization within the hybrid, networked, and extended modern working environment to empower workforce communication, sharing thoughts and ideas, engaging customers and partners to voice their concerns and feedback, and encouraging broader conversations and interactions with the business ecosystem. Therefore, digital leaders and professionals should learn how to leverage hybrid thinking which is a set of interdisciplinary and integrative thinking processes to manage a smooth digital paradigm shift by solving many of today’s complex problems that require strategic consideration, system intelligence, innovative approaches, and interdisciplinary understanding.

The New Book “Digital Hybridity” Chapter IV Introduction: The Hybrid Digital Management? The digital paradigm has many dimensional, it is like to solve a jigsaw puzzle with thousands of pieces, easy to get lost when trying to capture the big picture. Digital Management is a hybrid and holistic discipline with mixed management styles for managing everything that is necessary to get people to adopt new ways of working and running a high performance and high mature digital organization.


The New Book Chapter 5: The Hybrid Workforce Management Introduction Today the company workforce spans three or even four generations. Each with different leadership, communication, working or learning styles. Each generation is defined by a set of stereotypes, and in fact, that different ages and worldviews learn differently and through different media and methodologies. So, how can digital professionals belonging to different generations learn from each other to advocate the most advanced thinking, ideas, and viewpoint from different perspectives in order to lead their organizations, and fundamentally our society to the next level of the progression?

The New Book “Digital Hybridity” Conclusion: The Multitude of Digital Hybridity The digitalization flattens the organizational hierarchy and blurs the functional, organizational and geographical borders in the business ecosystem. It is like the gigantic puzzle with many misplaced pieces, you have to put them all in the right places to discover the real meaning and unleash its full potential. You cannot make a true digital paradigm shift without an in-depth understanding of the digital interconnectivity and embracing the multitude of digital hybridity.

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 2.5 million page views with about #4900+ blog posting in 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. blog posting. The content richness is not for its own sake, but to convey the vision and share the wisdom, to inspire critical thinking and spur healthy debates. Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking and innovating the 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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The CIO as “Chief Information Officer”: The Synchronicity of the Information Management Cycle

Compared to the physical asset, Information Management should be managed more holistically as a corporate asset.

The abundance of information brings both unprecedented opportunities and risks to businesses today. Information is useless if it is not being used to achieve the business purpose. The aim of modern Information Management has often been described as getting the right information to the right person in the right format and medium, at the right time, to make the right decisions. The synchronicity of the information management cycle builds the foundation to run a highly responsive, hyperconnected, and high-performance digital organizations.

Information intensity: Information is the lifeblood of the digital business, and its lifecycle is complex. With the fast pace of changes, the challenges will only intensify. If not properly managed, it’s the underutilized organizational assets or even a business liability in the worst case scenario. Thus, IT leaders should make an objective assessment: What kind of information do you have, in what format, in which location, and method it’s held. The synchronicity of the information management cycle enables real-time information access and analysis by breaking down the silos so the information value will become readily apparent and quantifiable by association. The organizations who proactively invest in strategic information management solutions today will be able to competitively going forward by handling information intensity effectively and capturing business foresight and customer insight timely.

Information fluidity: Information and technology catalyze today's digital powerhouses with the power to respond to change quickly and innovate relentlessly. Information does not stand still, it flows into the company, it gets stored, processed, refined, and hopefully flows to the customers of the company in terms of products and service delivery. Information does not live alone but permeates to everywhere in the businesses, thus, the value of information is not isolated. Think of information collection, cross-functional coordination, strategy alignment, service categorization, goal mapping that are all derived from modern IT organizations. Information flow can streamline idea flow, catalyze innovation, and build the business competency. The synchronicity of the information management cycle enables the organization to improve the speed of the business transaction, idea-generation, decision-making, innovation, impacts the velocity of capital flow, and thus the business responsiveness. The real-time business insight and foresight enable organizations to capture business opportunities and prevent risks accordingly to improve the strategic management success rate.

Information Management Integration: The biggest misnomer regarding IT is that it is "just technology." This is the pigeon-hole that most digital professionals try to paint IT people into. The matter of fact is that a huge percentage of IT is about the identification and advancement of information and knowledge for the enterprise and its people. Information is a key enabler to help you achieve strategic business objectives – having the right information to make informed management decisions to develop the right products for serving the right customers. Thus, information management strategy needs to be integrated into the organizational strategy to allow the organization to serve, deliver, innovate and ultimately excel in business returns. The synchronicity of the information management cycle is about processing data, synchronizing information, and capturing business insight to guide the company forward by determining the strategic objective, identifying and assessing risks and adjusting the business speed. With IT consumerization trends coming along, organizations shouldn’t be led and handled with ignorance of what IT is fully concerned such as integration, governance, or risk management.

Compared to the physical asset, Information Management should be managed more holistically as a corporate asset. The synchronicity of the information management cycle accelerates the digital speed. An organization can approach such a flow zone when people are ready for moving to a fluid structure, and digital leaders are eager to set stages to drive a frictionless, immersive, and relentless digital transformation.

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The Monthly “Digital Fit” Book Tuning: How to Assess the Digital Fit of the Organization Aug. 2018

Digital Fit doesn't mean that everyone needs to have the same thought processes, the same personalities, the same preferences, or the same experiences.

Digital makes a significant impact on every aspect of the business from people, process to technology, both horizontally and vertically. Digital becomes the very fabric of high performing business, being outside-in and customer-centric is the new mantra for forward-looking and high mature digital organizations today. But what are digital organizational traits, how to define digital Dt and take a structural approach for digitalization?

            

How to Assess the Digital Fit of the Organization

How Do you Define Organizational Digital Fitness? Organizations today are hyperconnected and over-complex, with well-mixed physical workplace and virtual team setting; multicultural, multigenerational and multi-devicing workforce, what're your team building principles? How do you define organizational fit, in order to build innovative and high-performing teams and transform the whole organization into the digital master?

The New Book Preview "Digital Fit -Manifest Future of Business with Multidimensional Fit" The multidimensional digital transformation provides impressive advantages in terms of the speed of delivering business solutions and ability to adapt to changes. Either be a disrupter or being disrupted, the effects of an increasingly digitalized world are now reaching into every corner of the organization and making significant impacts on every aspect of the business from people, processes, to technology and capability both horizontally and vertically. Digital Fit doesn't mean that everyone needs to have the same thought processes, the same personalities, the same preferences, or the same experiences. What is digital fit, and how do you define digital fit?

The Organization’s Digital Fit The multidimensional digital transformation provides impressive advantages in terms of the speed of delivering business solutions and capability to adapt to changes. Either be a disrupter or being disrupted, the digitalization makes significant impacts on every aspect of the business from people, processes, to technology and capability both horizontally and vertically. The effects of an increasingly digitalized world are now reaching into every corner of businesses and every aspect of organizations. So, how can organizations keep digital fit and highly-responsive because nowadays digital businesses need to be fast, always “on,” highly connected, interdependent, and ultra-competitive?

Three Fitting Characteristics to Make the Business Stand out as a Digital Master: With rapid changes and exponential growth of information, companies large or small are brainstorming the digital ways to think and experiment the better way to solve either old business issues or emergent problems, delight customers, improve employees’ engagement, increase productivity, and inspire creativity across the enterprise ecosystem. Organizations have to stretch out in every business dimension for driving the full-fledged digital transformation. So, what are fitting characteristics to make the business stand out as a digital leader and reach the high level of business maturity?

Three “P” Factors for Assessing Digital Fitness Digital fit starts with people fit. People are always the weakest link in organizations. So, part of the digital transformation journey is to prepare people for the new paradigm shift and to recognize this is a crucial step. The point is that how you know for sure that people being called “talent,” are really fit, how do you know you are putting the right people in the right position to solve the right problems? Here are three “P” factors for evaluating digital fitness.

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 2.5+million page views with about #4800+ blog posting in 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. blog posting. The content richness is not for its own sake, but to convey the vision and share the wisdom, to inspire critical thinking and spur healthy debates. Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking and innovating the 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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Monitor the Pulse of Digital Innovation

There’s "no one size fit all" innovation practice, that makes innovation still be serendipity for many organizations.

As businesses get more cut-throat in the hyper-connected digital environment, innovation has to become part of DNA in an organization for delivering unique products or services, improving employee engagement and customer satisfaction. Innovation can occur anywhere in the organization, and frankly, it has to occur in every aspect of the organization. On the other hand, innovation is a means, not an end. If you don't know where you want to go, you are unlikely to get there. Monitoring the innovation pulse of your organization is to help the leadership team make an objective assessment of the business’s innovation capability, as well as how to make the proper adjustment for improving the success rate of innovation management.

Monitor the pulse of idea generation and management: The digital business has the open nature, it means that the business has access to the maximum number of potentially good ideas for building the innovative products, services, business models, and solutions. This means having a very good internal program and it also means sourcing a lot of ideas from external partners as well. As matter of fact, most organizations have too many ideas, but more is not always better. Thus, monitoring the pulse of idea generation and management is important because organizations can leverage the limited resources, and set the right criteria for selecting the best ideas and prioritizing accordingly to implement them and achieve the premium business value. Most good ideas emerge from interactions, not single individuals. Good ideas and expertise are correlated. There is nothing most wasteful than ignorance in action. Monitor where people who are contributing receive updates on the status of their ideas, enable the management to communicate their thoughts & guide the people. It helps to achieve the maximum visibility of ideators & contributors and showcase success stories to help keep up the motivation level. It’s also important to open up those ideas for collaboration and bring valuable inputs to help new idea development. Facilitate ease of idea evaluation, manage and monitor the performance of creative activities for ensuring idea flow as well as idea management effectiveness.

Monitor the pulse of inclusiveness and diversity: Many think there is no innovation without inclusiveness. The most advanced societies are diverse mixtures of peoples that can spark creativity and amplify innovation effect. Thus, to stimulate creativity, it’s important to monitor the pulse of inclusiveness and diversity, especially focus on cognitive diversity. Whether a group of people has an amplified creative ability depends on varying factors such as different intent, different talent traits, different working styles, and different outcomes. Digital organizations are flatter and information-abundant, with an “every individual as a stakeholder” culture, people are encouraged to think differently and do things differently. Thus, monitoring the pulse of inclusiveness and diversity help to foster integrity, trust, transparency, encourage candor, establish clear and shared goals, and nurture the culture of creativity. Make people feel more comfortable with the digital new normal - chaos, uncertainty, and ambiguity and create an environment that allows time for play and exploring. The latest digital technologies make collaboration and sharing possible at a large scale, those who acquire the culture of sharing and collaborating will simply outperform those who don’t.

Monitor the pulse of innovation risk management: Digital brings both unprecedented opportunities and risks to the businesses today. Every innovation pursuing has the risk in it. Therefore, it is important to set guidelines for monitoring innovation pulse and handling risk in a structural way. The primary focus of the risk monitoring and management would be to identify and control those risks that can be addressed through 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 decisions. Part of innovation is not knowing how and for what you will use the budget; and some innovation needs to be fed with resources while others get better by 'starving' them. From finance management perspective, consider what capital you are prepared to risk in making the innovation- never let this be so much that losing it will cripple your business if it cannot obtain the funding to continue to move towards fulfilling its core mission.

Nowadays, with the speed of changes in the digital era, innovation is no longer a “nice to have,” but a “must have” factor in business success. There’s "no one size fit all" innovation practice, that makes innovation still be serendipity for many organizations. Businesses just have to learn from experimenting, check the pulse of digital innovation, amplify the best practices, cultivate the culture of creativity, ride above the learning curve, and achieve the great business results.

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The Weekly Insight of the “Future of CIO” 8/23/2018

Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking, brainstorming, innovating and sharing.

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 2.5 million page views with 48800+ blog 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. Here is the weekly insight of digital leadership, IT Management, and Talent Management.

Rebooting IT to get Digital Ready Digital is about change. IT is in a unique position because they can oversee the whole organizational processes and they should have the program skills to implement digital transformation successfully. Thus, in forward-looking organizations, IT has become synonymous with the change department. Change Management needs to be the mechanism embedded in the multitude of IT management disciplines, in order to run IT as a change agent.

Five Practices to Enforce Enterprise Innovation and Change? In the rapidly evolving businesses and economic systems, the creation of new innovations is very complex but critical for firms' survival and thriving. The essence of innovation is made of trying the new combination of known things to create new stuff and figure out the better way to do things. Organizations should develop a healthy working environment to encourage idea sharing, enable cross-functional communication, and take a scientific approach to crack innovation serendipity code for achieving digital innovation premium. Here are five digital practices to enforce enterprise innovation and change.

The Hybrid Digital Boardroom With increasing pace of changes, overwhelming growth of information, and continuous digital disruptions, businesses today need to ride the change waves and catch the rising digital tide timely. Digital organizations today have the hybrid reality with both physical structures and virtual presence, the old way and the new way of doing things. They need to figure out all sorts of hybrid solutions as well. From a management perspective, digital hybridity means how to strike the right balance of change and stability; innovation and standardization; transaction and transformation. From the governance perspective, the digital board needs to adopt a hybrid model and take the holistic discipline with mixed leadership styles for steering the business in the right direction.

Three Pitfalls in Measuring Digital Performance Digital transformation represents a break from the past, with a high level of impact and complexity. The change efforts need to be undertaken as the means of getting to a differentiated capability to accomplish a defined goal. Otherwise, they cannot have a clear focus and business rationale that is essential to gaining any traction in changing. Keep in mind, you can only manage what you measure. It’s important to avoid varying performance measurement pitfalls, to ensure that digital performance measurement is both qualitative and quantitative and tell the data-based compelling story of the digitalization.

The Monthly Communication Brief: The Art and Science of Digital Communication Aug. 2018 The great communicators are the high-quality leaders or professionals who can communicate objectively with strong logic, clarity, and understanding; the great communicators are the great artists who are fluent in creative expression or metaphorical description. Communication is both art and science.

Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking and innovating the 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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Planning is the Earliest Stage of Change Management

 It’s critical to discover the strategic and predictive pathway to change, increase confidence, leverage resources, and engage people, to drive change continually and effortlessly.

Embracing digital is inevitable as that is now part of the reality. In order to lead change and drive digital transformation, organizations should ride above the change curve by making the dynamic and comprehensive planning. Planning is the earliest stage of Change Management. Planning work is about stakeholder engagement and about working to achieve stakeholder ownership of the emerging strategic plan and roadmap. Engaging those who will be impacted by the change and enabling them to be part of shaping their future. That is one of the best ways of tackling change and improve its success rate.

The top leadership sponsorship: Change starts with a “sense of urgency” which can only come from the top management. The top leadership sponsorship is critical to driving strategic change and adoption. A great sponsor can overcome organizational change frictions, particularly early in the maturity. The visible and active change sponsorship is also important to focus on resource assignment, people adoption, besides communication and training. Because you can have an amazing presentation with the right stakeholders, but if the person delivering the message isn’t your sponsor or key influencer in the room, people won’t care. But where are the key influencers in the organization? They are not necessarily the formal managers with the title, but those who have strong relationships, and they can create and maintain cross-functional trust, transparency, actions, and results. It cannot be effective if arbitrary changes are being dictated from above without anyone listening to those being affected. You need to listen to their feedback and make them feel like their inputs are being listened to. If you involve them in the decision-making process, they will feel like they have some ownership of the changes and will be more cooperative and feel they have a stake in the changes succeeding. The strong sponsor is more important than the correct functional alignment. If they happen to be senior leaders regardless of the functional leadership role even better. Trust is a key determinant of success.

Have managers do a “SWOT analysis” for their business area for making an objective organizational assessment: Change is never for its own sake, it’s for making the improvement. Make a comprehensive “Strength, Weakness, Opportunity, and Threat” analysis of the business, and then transform “SWOT” analysis into a multidimensional change framework with risk-adjusted measurement in order to manage change in a structural way. People evolving in changes should be able to influence the process, and then, they are more likely to own the process and the outcome and then be part of the team that realizes the proposed changes to establish the intended new operational model. Depending on how competitive they are, publish a process performance dashboard so everyone can see how their business unit is performing compared to others, as well as how to change for achieving the best business results. Besides SWOT, some organizations add “Trends” as part of the analysis. It helps the organization take a look at what’s happening now as well as what’s coming down the pike so they can be proactive in preparing for it. Opportunities and threats cannot exist without a context of interactions, which constitutes an implicit system. So any analysis of these is at least to some degree an analysis of their contextual system and, therefore, pertinent to Systems Thinking. Through all the comprehensive analysis and in-depth understanding of the business, change can be managed effectively to achieve the expected business results.

Manage change systematically by taking the framework approach: The successful businesses are the ones that have learned WHEN change is called for and how to decide WHAT to change. It’s a systematic effort. Change cannot be just another thing that needs to be accomplished. It has to be woven into communication, process, and action of the organization, to navigate through the Change Management framework. Some small change is 'manual'- as there's command-control leadership style to push behavior adjustment, but the transformational change is the natural evolution as it needs to engage mindset shift and culture re-invention. Change Management is all about balancing the main elements impacting change such as people (the most important one), strategies, processes/procedures and IT. It’s important to have the team own a process by bringing them in early and getting their involvement in creating the big “how” process. You have to maintain and fix any imbalance in those elements by establishing a committee to change. A fine-tuned Change Management framework with clear-defined stages, decision-making parameters, performance thresholds, metrics selections, combined with an iterative learning & change process and flexible organizational structure improve Change Management effectiveness and efficiency, and thus, improve the success rate of Change Management.

Keep in mind, planning is important, but be flexible as well. A change will always involve failures as well as success. Change should be viewed as an opportunity, and Change Management needs to be people-centric. The effective Change Management effort should help to cultivate the culture of change and encourage the risk-taking attitude. It’s critical to discover the strategic and predictive pathway to change, increase confidence, leverage resources, and engage people, to drive change continually and effortlessly.

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The Monthly “Digital Master” Book Tuning: Sketch a Vivid Picture of the Digital Organization Aug. 2018

Digital makes a significant impact on every aspect of the business from people, process to technology, both horizontally and vertically. Digital becomes the very fabric of high performing business, being outside-in and customer-centric is the new mantra for forward-looking and high mature digital organizations today. Digital Master refers to those high-performing, highly innovative and high-mature (less than 15%) digital organizations; they have both clear digital vision and well-crafted digital strategy; they are courageous to be in the vanguard of digital transformation with a quantum lead. Digital leaders must realize that you cannot wait until there is an immediate pressing task, continuous adaptability is necessary in an ever-changing world, in order to run a future-driven digital organization.

       Sketch a Vivid Picture of the Digital Organization

How to Drive a Frictionless, Immersive, and Relentless Digital Transformation Due to the abundance of information growth and disruptive nature of technologies, forward-looking organizations empower their IT to drive changes and lead the digital transformation. The thing needs to be clarified is that digital is not just about applying a few fancy technology gadgets or designing a cool website, it is much broader and deeper than that. Digital transformation is also not just about using the latest technologies as a single dimensional enhancement, but a multidimensional evolution based on sociocultural, sociotechnical, socioeconomic, organizational, scientific, philosophical, psychological, and artistic, etc., lens. These dimensions interact and mutually influence each other. It is the digital paradigm shift. The visionary digital CIOs must continually ask themselves: How to run IT as a change agent, and how to drive a frictionless, immersive, and relentless digital transformation?

The Tide, Wave, and Ripple Effect of an evolving digital organization? Change is the new normal. The speed of change is increasing, to put simply, change itself changes. Change Management also turns out to be more complex. Digitalization is all about the exponential growth of information, rapid speed of changes, hyperconnectivity and interdependence. The emergence of potential opportunities for exploiting digitization is likely to follow a nonlinear pattern as the pervasiveness of an organization's digitization journey increases. The digital ecosystem has also become more complex and dynamic. Therefore, today’s digital leaders need to understand the tide, wave, and the ripple effect of an evolving digital organization in order to manage changes seamlessly.

What would an Amazing Digital Breakthrough Look, Smell, Sound, Feel and Taste? The emerging digital era upon us is full of uncertainty, velocity, complexity, and ambiguity. Digital transformation is not about leveraging the latest technologies as a one-dimensional enhancement, it evolves production, adoption, assimilation, exploitation, and exploring of value-added novelty in the business. Digital organizations are like the living things which need to keep growing and expanding. From business innovation and evolution perspective, what would an amazing digital breakthrough look, smell, sound, feel, and taste, how to prioritize what you know about and keep eyes open for signs of things you don’t know about, for driving change and making a digital paradigm shift effortlessly?

The Digital Kaleidoscope: What are Emerging Digital Management Views and Hybrid Patterns? The emergence of potential opportunities for exploiting digitization is likely to follow a nonlinear pattern as the pervasiveness of an organization's digitization journey increases. The digital ecosystem expands when the business community broadens its scope and consumes all sorts of resources. The digital paradigm shift has many dimensions such as socio-cultural, socio-technical, socio-economic, organizational, scientific, and philosophical lenses, just to name a few. So, when looking at a digital kaleidoscope: What are emerging digital management views and hybrid patterns?

Is your Organization in the Progress, Plateau or Stagnation of Digital Transformation? Digital makes a significant impact on every aspect of the business from people, process to technology both horizontally and vertically. However, businesses evolve changes at a different speed because they are at the different stage of the business life cycle, as well as they are in the different level of business maturity. Hence, in order to lead change effectively, business leaders should do the check-up continuously: Is your organization in the progress, plateau or stagnation of digital transformation? And how to create the momentum and lead change more effortlessly?

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 1.8 million page views with about 4800+ blog 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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The Hybrid Digital Boardroom

The hybrid digital boards are diversified, cognitive, proactive, and instrumental, bring different opinions and viewpoints and orchestrate change and digital transformation seamlessly.

With the increasing pace of changes, overwhelming growth of information, and continuous digital disruptions, businesses today need to ride the change waves and catch the rising digital tide timely. Digital organizations today have the hybrid reality with both physical structures and virtual presence, the old way and the new way of doing things. They need to figure out all sorts of hybrid solutions as well. From a management perspective, digital hybridity means how to strike the right balance of change and stability; innovation and standardization; transaction and transformation. From the governance perspective, the digital board needs to adopt a hybrid model and take the holistic discipline with mixed leadership styles for steering the business in the right direction.

The Hybrid Thinking: The challenge facing organizations these days is related to increasing complexity, unprecedented uncertainty & ambiguity, and accelerating rate of change. Thus, the board of directors as senior leaders need to leverage hybrid thinking which is a set of interdisciplinary and integrative thought processes for either making sound judgments or effective decisions. Collectively, the board as a team should embrace cognitive differences, leverage systems intelligence, complement each others’ experience & skills, be diverse by industry background, mindsets and perspective, be able to capture the diversified insight into complex business circumstances, see things from different angles and come out multifaceted perspectives and balanced viewpoints. It is the difference in thinking and perspectives, and the hybrid thinking styles enable the board to avoid groupthink syndrome, improve its decision effectiveness and reach high leadership maturity. The directors having deep knowledge of the business will allow them to be real "thought partners" with senior management as they consider the longer term goals.

The Hybrid leadership style: Now, we are slowly but steadily moving to the digital economy with an abundance of knowledge and continuous disruptions. Digital transformation is the journey for solving problems caused by "out of balance," “lack of logic,” and “full of uncertainty.” The leadership challenge in the boardroom is about how to fill blindspots, bridge insight gaps and make a leap of digitalization. To lead today’s technology-savvy knowledge workforce, command & control management style is simply not fit in and will run out of steam soon. Because you can set rules to control people’s behaviors, but you can’t manipulate how they think and what they learn from the varying resources in today's hyperconnected knowledge economy. The leaders must leverage the hybrid leadership style - “push & pull,” “listening & telling,” “asking & answering,” etc., focus on understanding, convincing, persuasion, and collaboration, set the digital principles to enforce inclusiveness, flexibility, innovativeness, and empathy in order to win the mind and touch the heart, to make change happening effortlessly.

The hybrid business view: The board as senior leadership team needs to steer their organization toward the uncharted water or blurred territories with unprecedented uncertainty and complexity. To lead effectively, they should share both the futuristic perspective of the business and historical lesson learned. Driving the business forward is extremely difficult. They have to look into an unknown future and attempt to define the landscape with its risks and opportunities and provide guidance about what core to preserve and what future to stimulate the business progress toward. To avoid risks, the seasoned board of directors with decades of experiences should share invaluable lessons in the past from time to time. Without taking a breath to look back, plowing on to the next big thing before completely pulling all resources or running multiple simultaneous changes can be risky. Keep in mind though, your windshield is larger than your rearview mirror for a reason. Sometimes looking at the past too long or too much inhibits looking forward and make the progress. This is particularly important for the senior leadership team such as BoDs. The digital board directors’ views of the business should be both broad and deep, insightful and foresightful, in order to navigate the better pathway for the business to reach its vision and the destination.

Under today’s “VUCA” business dynamic, practicing digital leadership is challenging. Evaluation, analysis, and strategic or long-term planning should top the list in the digital board’s agenda. The hybrid digital boards are diversified, cognitive, proactive, and instrumental, bring different opinions and viewpoints to orchestrate change and digital transformation seamlessly.

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Three Obstacles to Overcome Change Inertia for Building a Collaborative IT Organization

 Running a highly collaborative IT organization means how to leverage information and technology for providing tailored business solutions that will improve performance, responsiveness, and maturity.

Many IT organizations are on the crossroad, either riding the learning curve to get digital ready or becoming irrelevant gradually. The role of the CIO continues to evolve rapidly in the midst of the information or digitalization and accelerating changes in technology. They should make an objective assessment of IT: Does IT stretch, challenge, or interrupt the status quo? Does IT expand the zone of possible change and development? Is IT in a high-involvement process? What are the obstacles to building a collaborative IT organization?

The issue being raised regarding obstacles is that IT is viewed as an inhibitor, rather than an enabler or driver of change: Driving digital paradigm shift is not a passive activity, it is a proactive pursuit. To improve the change success rate, understanding the learning curve needs to be the prerequisite that comes before change can actually take place. Having a collaborative understanding environment is essential. Too often IT is not involved at a goal level but instead at a task level. To make effective large-scale organizational scope changes and run a collaborative IT organization, CIOs need to be able to understand the struggles of companies, you need to maintain and fix any imbalance in key business elements such as people, process, and technology. Usually, the symptom of IT slow to change comes from gaps created between IT and the rest of the company. It’s important to establish a cross-functional change team to involve the management of different business functions, space and time are made to scope, plan, and execute, but not through ad-hoc activities. It is also critical to take multi-step iterative processes for change management. To adapt to the increasing speed of change and manage a smooth IT change continuum, organizations have to be more nimble about updating technology and make continuous change deliveries.

The old school of silo thinking is the very obstacle to running a highly collaborative IT organization: Silo enforces the wall between organizational functions, stifles information flow, and decelerates the speed of changes, and makes those business divisions which are supposed to work collaboratively for solving common business problems, compete for the limited resources and budget to achieve functional performance or short-term benefit, but sometimes with the cost of the organizational level business achievement and long-term win. Because the ways of doing business and meeting customer expectations both tend to be more flexible than the siloed industrial age, IT can drive the digital transformation but it should be in conjunction with the business. IT and business are not separate departments. the business will not just use IT as a digital extension, but leverage IT across their organization to attain the enterprise-wide business competency. It means having IT and business collaborate as equal partners so that strategies, portfolios, structures, and people, etc, work in harmony. It requires a seamless IT-business integration through a serious amount of positive communication whilst continuously looking for a cost-efficient replacement of unstable or "old" processes, tighten coordination and collaboration with business partners. It’s critical to build a trustful business relationship and exemplify how IT can directly impact productivity and catalyze business change and innovation.

The internal focus is the barrier to run a collaborative IT organization: When traditional IT organizations are inside-out, and focus on the performance indicators that only IT is interested in, the gap between IT and business is enlarged. To run a collaborative IT organization, IT management needs to shift from inside-out operation-oriented to outside-in business driven. The role of modern CIO is to identify and blend the ways that information and technology can assist and shape the business by linking all digital aspects together to create business synergy for solving complex problems today. Thinking creatively about a problem requires being close to the problem, understanding context, and intangible variables. It requires IT leaders and staff to work closely with the business and take a systematic view of framing the right problems and solving them effectively. With continuous disruptions often caused by technologies, the businesses are looking to IT for leadership around the competitive application of information & technology in a rapidly changing market. Thus, running a highly collaborative IT organization means how to leverage information and the latest technology tools for providing tailored business solutions that will improve business responsiveness, performance, and overall maturity.

Running a highly collaborative IT organization needs both mind shift (from the controller to enabler) and management shift (from “T” technology focus to I-information based). IT should help the organization harness and understand the information to capture the real-time business insight, provide ways to better recognize and act on that information for gaining competitive advantage. This requires a holistic look at the entire knowledge environment and identifies how the information management initiative aligns with the company or business unit objectives, to improve communication, collaboration, and overall organizational maturity.

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The Monthly Organizational Structure Tuning Fine-Tune Organizational Structure to Get Digital ReadyAug. 2018

Tuning the organizational design and structure to achieve a high level of autonomy is the symbol of digital maturity. 

Digital makes a significant impact on every aspect of the business from people, process to technology, both horizontally and vertically. Digital becomes the very fabric of high performing business, being outside-in and customer-centric is the new mantra for forward-looking and high mature digital organizations today. From an organizational structure perspective, how can you fine-tune the digital dimensions of your organizational development?

 

Fine-Tune Organizational Structure to Get Digital Ready

How to Fine Tune the Digital Organizational Structure? Tuning the organizational design and structure to achieve a high level of autonomy is the symbol of digital maturity. Majority of organizations are designed to improve functional efficiency in the industrial era. But digital masters move a few steps ahead, focus on shaping changeability, innovation, and people-centricity. However, the digital transformation won’t happen overnight, organizations need to have an in-depth understanding of gains and pains of organizational design and development, follow the digital principles to plan, experiment and scale up for improving strategic responsiveness and structural flexibility of their business.

Tuning Organizational Structure to Improve Digital Ready-ness Organizations across the vertical sectors and geographical boundaries are on the journey of digital transformation. New generations of digital technologies such as digital collaboration platforms and tools are enabling not only the structured processes of the past but also the unstructured processes of the digital enterprise. The future of digital organizations would be complex enough to act intelligently and nimble enough to adapt to the change promptly.

The New Book "Digital Maturity" Introduction Chapter 3 Fine-Tune Organization Structures to Get Digital Ready? Due to the “VUCA” nature of digitalization, organizations that are skilled at managing complexity can gain advantages by pushing the boundaries of a more complicated business mix that provides opportunities to create inter-business value. From an organizational change management perspective, how to fine tune the digital dimensions of your organizational structure development to get digital ready?

Fine-Tune Organization Structure to Get Digital Ready Due to the “VUCA” nature of digitalization, the business complexity is unavoidable. Organizations that are skilled at managing complexity can gain advantages by pushing the boundaries of a more complicated business mix that provides opportunities to create inter-business value. From an organizational structure perspective, how to fine tune the digital dimensions of your organizational structure development to get digital ready?

Organizational Structure and Digital Transformation Majority of organizations are designed to improve functional efficiency in the industrial era; and many traditional organizations today are running at two speeds, with the industrial speed, it can continue to keep the business light on; and with the digital speed, it will adapt to the more frequent digital disruptions, wired to change and designed for better innovation and long-term digital transformation. More specifically, how much influence does organizational structure or management hierarchy have on efficiency and innovation? How do you analyze your company's organizational structure for efficiency/innovation and radical digital transformation?

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 2.5+million page views with about #4800+ blog posting in 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. blog posting. The content richness is not for its own sake, but to convey the vision and share the wisdom, to inspire critical thinking and spur healthy debates. Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking and innovating the 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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The Book “Digital Hybridity” Quote Collection IV

You cannot make true digital paradigm shift without truly understanding of the hyperconnectivity and overcomplexity of modern business and embracing the multitude of digital hybridity.

The purpose of the book “Digital Hybridity: How to Strike the Right Balance for Digital Paradigm Shift” is to shed some light on how to strike the right balance of stability and changes; being transactional to keep spinning and being transformational to leap forward for making a seamless digital paradigm shift. Digital organizations should apply the hybrid management approach, focus on building a diverse, networked, and extended modern working environment in which the powerful digital platforms and computing technologies enable seamless conversations, delayer overly rigid organizational hierarchy, inspire idea sharing and brainstorming, and engage employees and partners to achieve the high-performance result.

36 Leaders focus on effectiveness, and managers focus on efficiency.

37 Innovation is not serendipity; it’s a mindset, a process, and the strategic business capability.

38 The primary role of leadership is about creating change while the primary objective of management is creating order.

39 Persuasion with good intention helps problem-solving; manipulation often serves the ego.

40 You are motivated to keep moving forward by a necessary “push,” and inspiration is the “pull” factor for the continuum of motivation.

41 The true leadership may be achieved only if you have a listening and telling organization.

42 Businesses have to address collective thinking, attitude, and behavior, balance both hard and soft elements for moving to an outcome-focused and outside-in digital organization.

43 All generations need to realize they can learn from each other, to run a successful business and an advanced society.

44 People must first become “integrated with themselves,” only then, will they become effective leaders.

45 Performance keeps the business running, and potential moves the business to the next level of the growth cycle.

46 Raw talent is precious, and well-crafted talent is a good combination of willpower + brain power + knowledge power.

47 It takes both complementary actions and competitive actions in a constructive and professional way to build trust in teams.

48 Do not limit to your personality, but develop it to mature you as a great human being and an effective leader.

49 We live in an information and knowledge economy, learning is not the things you are “done” only in your youth; it has to become the digital lifestyle and develop it as a healthy daily habit.

50 You must be clear about balancing the hybrid style of “Thinking and Doing,” to improve quality, creativity, and productivity, etc.

51 It is in the best interest of the talent management to improve employee performance by striking the right balance of ends and means.

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Three Perspectives of IT Creativity

To unleash the full digital potential, organizations need to understand that IT is not just technical or scientific, but also artistic and delightful.

With the overwhelming growth of information and often technology-led digital disruptions, Information & Technology becomes the most time-intense piece for solving innovation puzzles. Innovation happens at the intersection of business and IT, you have to manage it strategically and systematically in order to achieve a consistent business result. IT is no longer just the mechanical or monolithic hardware pieces to keep the business spinning or the mechanism for realizing a vision described by other C-level executives; it’s the innovation engine to run a digital organization. Here are three perspectives of IT creativity.

Develop innovative IT leadership: Being innovative is truly a state of mind. To reinvent IT for digital ready, CIOs must be open-minded and creative. Creative leadership is essentially anchored on the leader’s overall multifaceted resourcefulness. They can view the holistic business pictures and apply creativity in areas not explored yet. Every business is different, every industry is different, and the enterprise culture is unique. Thus, the innovation management practices come to mind first is a dedication to the time slot to pitch questions to their team. That also means to have the willingness to try something new, to test, to learn what you knew again, to listen and remain balanced. Being a creative CIO means learning fast, being inclusive, embracing candid and multi-viewpoints, and taking calculated risks. The digital era is the age of options, it provides opportunities for IT leaders to get really creative on how to delight customers and solve problems alternatively. That is, the multi-dimensional competencies to formulate creative or unconventional solutions to resolve problems, to show versatility and flexibility in response to unpredictable or unanticipated circumstances. Exceptional IT leadership is key to re-imagine IT and reinvent IT as an innovation hub to achieve the art of possible.

Explore the creative side of IT: The available digital technology just makes innovation easier to do now than in the past-less costly, more easily accessible. Businesses are looking for IT to add new innovative methods for management of complexity and investigating innovative business solutions. Creativity is the core of what makes IT strategic in any company, it is critical that creativity is focused not on the technology, but on how it can be used to advance the business objectives. IT shouldn’t just provide the cool gadgets and expect the new ideas will start flowing in automatically, creativity without a direction or purpose is building technology for the technology’s sake. IT is mainly an engineering discipline, engineering is not only about science, but is also the art because it involves personalized observation, judgment, design thinking, intuition, and innovation. Thus, digital IT leaders shouldn’t classify creativity and logic in two completely different disciplines, they are interconnected and multidisciplinary. IT needs to become an innovation engine of the business and a business enabler to catalyze business growth. CIOs must realize that stifling the creative side of the IT will set back business, and IT organizations would continue to be perceived as a cost center. Unfortunately, it seems that creativity is not encouraged in most organizations, it is imperative to build a healthy culture - the collective mindset to encourage learning and creativity. Innovative IT leaders need to discover creative ways to tackle innovation potential lying in an enterprise and to provide the necessary tools to unleash the creative force of IT.

Build an IT innovation framework: The art of innovation is that it involves new ways of bringing together ideas and resources to create something novel. The science of innovation is to take a structural approach to innovation management. Put briefly, to get the best business results, you need to structure the creative process to do innovation. Innovation often has a lot to do with external circumstances. A systematic innovation approach is to depict innovation as a system and build an innovation framework for aligning the various business components (people, process, resources, partnership, actions, controls, measurement, etc., to intensify innovation with focus and manage innovation in a structural way. It’s also critical for businesses to have objectivity and humility to realize that their systems or processes are outdated, it needs to keep updating the innovation framework, processes, and technology to speed up innovation management lifecycle. Because the robust systems and tools that enable the business to generate a winning concept on the consistent base is the prerequisite for sustainable business advantage and growth.

Understanding the element of art in digital IT is for achieving the art of possible and make a seamless digital transformation. To unleash the full digital potential, organizations need to understand that IT is not just technical or scientific, but also artistic and delightful. IT plays a crucial role in scaling up innovation practices, amplifying innovation effect, and gluing up the innovation framework which enables the business to manage innovation in a structural way.

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The Monthly “Digital Maturity” Book Tuning: Riding Learning Curves to Achieve Digital Maturity Aug. 2018

Digitalization is a journey, not just a one-time business initiate, riding ahead of the change wave takes both strategy and methodology.

Digital makes a significant impact on every aspect of the business from people, process to technology, both horizontally and vertically. Digital becomes the very fabric of high performing business, being outside-in and customer-centric is the new mantra for forward-looking and high mature digital organizations today. At the heart of digital, it is people and how to build a customer-centric organization. Here is the new book “The digital Maturity” summary.

     

 Riding Learning Curves to Achieve Digital Maturity

Riding Learning Curves to Accelerate Changes Change becomes the new normal, and even the speed of change is accelerating. Too often changes are made as a reaction to outer impulses, crisis. How do you make changes to anything without knowing all the parts and how they are related? The goal of Change Management is to manage changes in a systematic way, either for making continuous improvement or innovation. Most of the changes are complex processes, how to ride learning curves to accelerate changes?

How to Build a CHANGEABLE Organization Riding Above the Learning Curve Change is inevitable, and the speed of change is increasing. However, organizational change is always difficult. How can you ride above the learning curve, is there any ideal path to change, how to improve the success rate of change management and build change as an ongoing capability of the organization?

Take the Logical Scenario to Beat Digital Change Curves Now with the uncertainty around the volatile market situations, extreme competitions, continuous disruptions, and unprecedented business complexity, digital organizations today must be responsive to the increasing speed of changes. Digitalization is a journey, not just a one-time business initiate, riding ahead of the change wave takes both strategy and methodology. How to take the logical scenario to beat digital curves, improve business performance, and achieve business maturity.

CIOs as “Digital Master”: How to Ride Three Learning Curves to Improve IT Digital Maturity? Due to the disruptive nature of technologies and the exponential growth of information, the CIO role also becomes more dynamic and multifaceted. Compare to the other executive positions, the CIO role continues to be shaken up, refined, reinvented to get digital ready. A digital CIO has to focus on guiding the company through the digital transformation. At the very least, IT must be a business partner within the organization. Regardless of which industry sectors or the nature of organization you are in, being a digital CIO will need to ride the multitude of learning curves promptly and lead digital transformation effortlessly.

How to Get Ahead of the Change Curve The change curve is a model of the states that people who are to change will go through because going through the downs of the change curve has a negative impact on productivity, leadership is required to guide people through the different phases in order to flatten the curve and to minimize the impact on productivity. ?

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 2+million page views with about #4800+ blog posting in 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. blog posting. The content richness is not for its own sake, but to convey the vision and share the wisdom, to inspire critical thinking and spur healthy debates. Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking and innovating the 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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