ABC NET

Confuse means with ends: With high velocity and unprecedented level of uncertainty, the business management today needs to see the whole picture, determine what the future needs to look like and what digital transformation must look like. The wrong end can lead to catastrophic business setback. More often than not, organizations have to adjust their directions accordingly in order to adapt to frequent changes promptly. In reality, many companies focus on transactional level of activities, keep the business spinning but going nowhere. The stagnation will further make the business irrelevant gradually and lose its competitive advantage. If some companies thought they are playing with fancy technology gadgets, thus, they are riding the tide of digitalization, perhaps they also confuse means with ends. Keep in mind, information technology is the means to an end, not the end. Information is the gold when it has been used to make an informed management decision to develop the right products, services, or business models, enter a new market, or explore a new digital channel, etc. Technology is the savior if it can improve customer satisfaction, empower employees to change or catalyze innovation. When the organizations can focus on problem-solving, they are able to dig into underlying business processes and pain areas, bring out customer-tailored and technology-driven solutions, and devote more attention to what organizations really care about. Digital transformation is not just about technology, it has to expand into every direction of the business for unlocking business performance and improving the organizational maturity.

Put the wrong people in the position to solve wrong problems: As always, people are the most invaluable business asset and capital, but often the weakest link for business transformation. Putting the right people with the right capability to solve the right problem is simply the biggest challenge facing businesses and our society today. And it’s much easier to say than doing because it involves multiple intelligence judgment and assessment processes to evaluate people and problems in an objective way. In today’s VUCA new normal, complex problem solving takes interdisciplinary understanding or integral professional competencies to both frame the right problems and solve them in the right way. When organizations make talent assessments only based on linear logic or conventional talent management methodology, more often or not, they miss the point and put the wrong people to solve wrong problems or even create more problems. Cognitively, often people are both the cause and the center of the problem. Diagnosing the problem from the mindset level is a critical step for digging into the root causes of many problems today. Thus, the assessment should start at the mindset level, quality counts, dynamic counts, and learning agility counts. Select the right people who possess the advanced mind with multidimensional intelligence, proficient knowledge, nonlinear skills and unique problem-solving competencies to move the business forward and accelerate digital transformation.

Ignore measuring something important or measure the wrong things: You can only manage what you measure, mis-measurement and ineffective performance management cause the business mighty fall. From a strategic management perspective, one of the most dangerous pitfalls of performance measurement is when performance system is connected with the motivation system on an operational level, but disconnected from the strategy management. Sometimes, metrics motivate people to game the data, rather than make real achievement; encourage mediocrity, rather than creativity; or the metrics only tell part of the story but ignore the full pictures, etc. Keep in mind, the right metrics are requested in the right context; it’s important to explain to the upper management of why they are requested, to ensure the management buy-in. To avoid varying performance measurement pitfalls, the management needs to clarify which culture you would like to shape and what kind of behavior you should encourage. It’s critical to ensure that digital performance measures are both qualitative and quantitative, correlate to build differentiated business competency and achieve better business outcomes. The effective performance management directly impacts on day-to-day decision-making, business adaptability, and overall organizational maturity.

There is no one size fits all formula to build strategy competency and run a high performance digital business. Digital leaders must ensure the business having a clear vision, well-defined business goals and gain the contextual understanding of the inter-connectivity of both visible and invisible business success factors. Each organization just has to "walk the talk," avoid hidden trap or fatal mistakes and explore their unique way to enforce inter-organizational linkage, and take step-wise actions to improve digital management maturity.

Digital makes a significant impact on how we think, live, and work. There is a 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

                 Overcoming the Variety of Business Inertia 

How to Overcome Three Digital Inertia We have moved into the deep, deep digital age when information is abundant and where creativity becomes a baseline competence. The race of information against the machine is ongoing, and the knowledge life cycle is significantly shortened. Many organizations are also at a crossroad facing unprecedented change and uncertainty, the significant business transformations are needed to digitalization, globalization, and radical innovation management. However, statistically, more than two-thirds of Change Management effort fails to achieve the expected result, so what are the digital inertia you need to deal with, in order to manage a successful digital transformation journey frictionlessly and ultimately build a Digital Master?

How to Handle Change Inertia with Empathy Change is the new normal, but it also becomes fundamentally difficult in most organizations due to the change inertia, also because it is treated as something distinct from running the business, evolving performance and increasing results over time. Statistically, more than 70% of the change management effort fails to achieve the expected result. So, which principles should you follow to communicate changes and transformation is dimensionally bigger, and much more pervasive/ invasive, how to weave all important elements in Change Management more seamlessly to orchestrate a harmonized digital transformation symphony?

How to Overcome Learning Inertia Digital means the abundance of information and a shortened knowledge cycle. As companies around the world transform themselves into the digital business that is based on ‎information, their ability to explore intangible assets such as information and knowledge has become far more decisive to build competitive business advantages. Both at the individual and organizational level, if you fail to climb the learning curve, you will get static and lag behind. Business leaders should be aware of learning curves or learning inertia, make an objective assessment of their organization’s learning competency.

How to Overcome the Inertia in Decision Making One of the most important tasks for management is to make decisions, however, across the sectors, many management teams are happy to "put off making decisions till tomorrow, that is needed today." This is nothing new; in many organizations, indecision is masked as patience. So what’re the root causes in deferring making a decision? And how to overcome such inertia in decision making?

Change Management Sum Up: How to Overcome Change Inertia II Change is inevitable, and organizational change becomes a common practice within an organization, but more than two-thirds of change efforts fail to achieve the expected results. What are the barriers to cause change failures, how to overcome change inertia, how to make Change Management tangible rather than fluffy, and manage change life cycle effectively?

The blog is a dynamic book flowing with your thought; growing through your dedication; sharing your knowledge; conveying your wisdom, and making influence through touching the hearts and connecting minds across the globe. The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 3 million page views with about #6000 blog posting. 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.

1 There’s knowing unknown, and here’s unknowing unknown, so it's not a new topic about “Blind Spots. The blind spots are perhaps inevitable, the point is how business leaders or managers should learn to deal with them seamlessly.

2 The root causes of blinds port are often the people’s mentality such as ego or bias, thought processes such as lack of “whole brain” thinking, or lack of knowledge or insight.

3 It’s important to build high-performance teams with the heterogeneous group setting, complementary skills, and distinctive capabilities in order to fill blind spots, clear business vision, and spur creativity

4 To close blind spots, you have to be humble to realize there are many things you know you don’t know and perhaps even more which you don't know what you don't know. Until that happens, you will continue in the lives of blindness

5 Continue to see the importance of dealing with blind spots by learning how to be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to anger.

6 Many teams operate with an incomplete and relative small view of the business and take linear management discipline. It’s no surprise that such silo mentalities will create numerous blind spots in talent, resource, process, capacity, and capability management, and further cause failures in strategy execution.

7 To close blind spots, be humble to learn; be hungry for the insight, be skillful to frame the right questions and behold to the metrics.

8 You need to listen, accept, and act on the blind spot, whatever it is and check the "mirrors" that you appreciate the huge favor and gift they have provided you.

9 The company's reputation and success today are founded on innovation and to a very large extent, innovation closes blind spots. The productivity is higher in an innovative organization, and an innovative organization has less blind spots because people do not fear to provide feedback.

1 Silo thinking builds the wall in people’s minds and sets barriers in the human's hearts.

2 At their heart, silos are not a structural issue, they are the result of poor thinking; or lack of holistic thinking, systems thinking, and strategic thinking.

3 Silo mentality is fundamentally about keeping the mind static and keeping the people separate rather than keeping work separate.

4 It is critical to break down silo mentality and apply a holistic management discipline which can break through the industrial constraints and limitations in pursuit of possibilities rather than impossibilities.

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

6 Silos happen when the "Why?" in business is not properly communicated from the senior level management down through business units.

7 Silo sets the barriers to real problem-solving because people are not comfortable to go across the territories for digging into the root causes, they just get stuck at “we always do things like that” mentality.

8 Many think silo happens when the business operates from a fear standpoint - fear of rejection, fear of invisibility, fear that other peoples' accomplishments will somehow diminish your own, etc. Silos are based on a culture of self-protection and judgment

9 The solution to breaking down silos is to apply bigger thinking -to implement an effective cross-silo strategy, better integral process, and collaborative communication.

Misinformation: IT takes charge of one of the most valuable business assets - information. Information does not live alone but permeates into everywhere in the businesses. Thus, the value of information is not isolated. Misinformation can cause business fail at any moment. If information is unavailable, inaccurate, lost, stolen, or compromised, it will hinder the achievement of business goals, disappoint customers, and even misled the business in the wrong direction. Information is critical, not every piece of information is created equal though. In a business scope, there are some of the important bits and bytes of information needed when evaluating a new market or any emerging business growth opportunity. Information Management is the structural process of aligning the usage of information through the multidisciplinary management discipline. Thus, to strengthen information management link, IT should first work to identify how information is associated with the tangible value of businesses; products and resources. It’s also critical to ensure information quality, accessibility, reliability, and refine information to fully support the business goals and objectives collaboratively.

Miscommunication: The gap between IT and business is reality, and often miscommunication is the root cause. Communication is complicated because there are differences in goals and contexts. There are different business dialects, communication styles, and these contexts can shift frequently. The business system is complex and the organization is multifaceted. Without the contextual understanding of people, process, technology, or system, the blind spots are inevitable and cause miscommunication across functional or geographical borders. Miscommunication enlarges business gaps and decelerates the organizational speed. Communication is the key to improve leadership effectiveness and reinvent IT reputation as a trustworthy business partner. CIOs can lift their role as the strategic business leader and skillful communicator via their unique perspective and insightful abstract. They can communicate effectively with all levels of the organization by interpreting both business and IT issues back and forth accurately without “lost in translation.” The great communicators can communicate objectively with strong logic, clarity, and understanding. Communication is not just the soft discipline, it’s both an art and science.

Misinterpretation: A well-established organization has different dialects, every organizational functions or division has its own focus and dialect. Misinterpretation is perhaps caused by pre-conceptual judgment, random assumptions, or simply lack of deeper understanding. Without using common business language or enforcing mutual understanding, misinterpretation will further cause dysfunctional business management. In fact, the “lost in translation” is the common pitfalls of strategy management. In the digital working environment, context intelligence is about understanding the whole meaning of functional dialects and business cultures or subcultures via connection, discernment, penetration, and perception, etc. Business leaders today need to know how to read between the lines and understand the inter-connectivity between parts and the whole without getting lost in interpretation. They can overcome those communication obstacles, master different business dialects and convey the right message in the right format to tailor different audiences for strengthening business relationship links and improving leadership effectiveness.

Mistrust: Mistrust is often caused by miscommunication, lack of transparency, or micromanagement. Mistrust further causes damages of business relationship and enlarges gaps of involving parties. The deeper the trust, the more valuable the relationship would be. Without a trustful business relationship, every decision becomes an argument and change get stuck. IT leaders have to be able to demonstrate in very tangible ways that IT understands business and builds trustful business-IT relationship via in-depth observation, communication, and empathetic understanding, etc. Transparency is critical to develop a trusting relationship between the business and IT. To keep IT and business on the same page, IT leaders have to reach out horizontally to their business peers. IT, marketing, finance, HR, etc. IT leaders can manage multi-layer relationships such as business peer/shareholder relationship, customer relationship, vendor relationship., etc. Trust = Communication +Transparency + Delegation + Reciprocity + Verification.

Misjudgment: Nothing is certain with the rapid digital flow, business executives, including CIOs have to make assumptions or “forecast” all the time. You have to make them, but you will never have complete information, Forecast precision will help the company prepare the journey for either capturing the rising business opportunities timely or preventing potential risks effortlessly. From decision management perspective, many leaders make poor judgment, due to the lack of comprehensive knowledge, lack of critical thinking, independent thinking, and Systems Thinking abilities, cognitive bias, or preconceived notions. Ego leads to misjudgment as well. Do not fall into linear thought traps, you need to listen, accept, and act on the blind spot. When you intend to understand, interpret and judge something, you need to form a critical opinion of it based on facts, discerned data, common understanding, and clarified notions to ensure the pieces of the puzzle can be integrated into a clear picture.

To identify and strengthen these missing links, business management, especially at the senior management level, needs to gain the contextual understanding of the inter-connectivity of both visible and invisible business success factors, apply interdisciplinary approaches to planning, managing, collaborating, enforce inter-organizational linkage, and take step-wise actions to improve digital management maturity.