The future of the digital organization is complex enough to act intelligently and nimble enough to adapt to changes promptly.
A new paradigm arises out of new knowledge, such as the age of enlightenment and customer-centricity. Organizations “become complex,” as an evolutionary trend, not for their own amusement, but do it to respond to environments proactively. It is sensitive to the emergent factors; it generates a variety of options to deal with environmental complexity, velocity, ambiguity, and uncertainty.
Self-organizing behavior: Digital organization advocates self-management; in order to self- organize adequately, you need all the skills and knowledge needed to do the work. It would take effort to make the team self-organized and self-managed. Agility is not just an engineering discipline, but also a set of management philosophy and practices to not only adapt to change, but also create momentum for changes. So the leadership skills are needed by the self-management to coach the team towards self-organization, deal with uncertainty, encourage self-discovery and self-actualization, to unleash collective potential.
The digital world is dynamic, nonlinear, uncertain, and volatile. The self-organizing and adaptive organization is a system that is able to re-configure its own structure and change its own behavior during the execution of its adaptation to environmental changes. Emergence becomes apparent, the concept of nonlinear behavior as a concept is representative of what we term emergent properties, meaning the decisions and actions made at the local level under conditions of uncertainty might have unintended consequences for the larger system. Therefore, it’s important to experiment with the agile way of thinking, deciding, and working. Collectively, it needs to be choosy in the selection of the team members who have the agile mindset to prove its success and set as an example to demonstrate its working for the subsequent teams, build the capability to adapt to the change and make conscious business choices seamlessly.
Path dependence: Digital organizations are hyper-connected and interdependent, information and knowledge are path-dependent, Information is often available in data; knowledge is often inside the minds of employees/experts. It means that to discover an opportunity, you should have previous knowledge in the field to be able to get recognized. You need to not only assimilate the existing knowledge, more importantly, but you also have to keep updating knowledge, and create the new knowledge and become the knowledge value creator to benefit your organization and our society.
Decision management is path-dependent, meaning the sequential process of making decisions based on prior decisions, without regard to their efficacy or rationality. Thus, systematic decision-making methodologies and practices are important to improve decision coherence across the organizational hierarchy. The business capability development is path-dependent as well. A firm’s capabilities today are the result of its history and this history constrains what capabilities the organization can perform in the future. Thus, business capabilities cannot be bought in the marketplace completely. The in-depth understanding of path-dependence enables the business management to clarify business logic and improve the overall organizational maturity.
Cause-effect: Running business is an iterative problem-solving continuum. The cause-effect of the problem is not always linear, a small effect in one place can cause a cascade of events that produce a nonlinear big impact. To deal with “VUCA” reality, unlock organizational performance and achieve business purpose, the information-based cause-effect analysis does have to rely on different levels of abstraction models, provide partial fact, but even critically, follow a more humanistic approach.
To deal with unprecedented uncertainty and complexity, organizations plan, act, observe the consequences of their business initiatives, make inferences about those consequences, and draw implications for future actions. Organizational management needs to have objectivity and discernment, incorporates the multi-faceted aspects of disciplines, applying information-driven judgment skills to deal with assumptions & unconscious bias, and practicing inferential consequences to lead business transformation in a structural way.
Given “VUCA” digital new normal, today’s business is often operational in crisis and conflict environments. Thus, from an organizational structural perspective, the overly rigid organizational hierarchy will stifle changes and decelerate business flow. The variety of organizational complexity needs to be handled scientifically, so the future of the digital organization is complex enough to act intelligently and nimble enough to adapt to changes promptly.
