By taking a framework approach, balance seems effortless, to improve flexibility, adaptability, ability of interaction, and resilience, etc, for running a people-centric, high mature organization.
The digital normality-volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity makes it challenging for making effective decisions, solving problems smoothly, and running a successful organization. Balance is not a stillness or stagnation that people or things get stuck by misunderstanding the means and end. Balance is not about putting random or mismatched things in the same box and expecting natural harmony. Balance is an important ability to optimize management, harmonize business relationships, or make adjustments of business speed.
Centralization vs. decentralization: Increasing pace of changes and dynamic marketing conditions brings huge pressures for organizations across vertical sectors to keep reinventing themselves structurally and innovatively. They need to be centralized to keep crucial issues under control; but decentralized to encourage autonomy and creativity. Too much centralization causes inflexibility and even stifles business changes and growth. Too much decentralization and too little oversight leads to lack of any “system” which can coordinate to create business synergy. Ideally, there must be enough central control to achieve coordination toward the strategic goals of the organization and enough autonomy to keep all subsystems functioning and flourish.
Every large corporation has tension in it, between the forces for centralization and those for decentralization. By taking a balance management framework, the management is able to keep the big picture in mind, while coordinating the disparate silos of development where possibly providing achievable enterprise-wide solutions. Traditional hierarchical lines start phasing out, a collective of business partners is emerging and working collaboratively to set and achieve strategic business goals synergistically.
Standardization vs. Personalization: Organizations can standardize certain working processes or procedures to ensure efficiency, safety or reliability, etc. Standards are a form of embodied technical knowledge accessible to all types of business that enable more effective product and process development; provide benefits through reuse that accelerates solution implementation, reduce expenses and risks. However, over-standardization decreases innovation, disengages employees or dissatisfies customers because there is no choice for them to do things in their own way, fitting their personality and styles. The digital era upon us is about options, empathy, personalization, and sharing. Personalization is a strong pillar for building a customer-centric organization, to create value perceived by customers.
Usually, companies need standardization via the capitalization of previous experiences, cost control, convenience, etc. They need to provide customized solutions to tailor customers’ needs as they become much more selective than before. By taking a balance management approach, standardization bridges silos arise with difficulty in collaborating when different parts of the organization adapt to changes at different speed; improves information fluidity by sharing of information across the organization freely. Truly people-centric organizations equip new digital minds to incorporate personalization efforts at both strategic and design level to present great business value. People are the focal point from a cross-functional perspective, customer delight moves from customer service to customer experience and customer success
Transaction vs. transformation: Transaction seeks continuity, transformation seeks opportunity and change. Transactions happen on a daily basis; transformative activities can build differentiated business competency and make a leap of digital transformation. There is interconnectivity between transaction and transformation. “Being transformational” means redesigning existing transactions to something new, being innovative and creative; it also introduces completely new transactions with a strategy that serves the organization smoothly. Organizations must strike the right balance of transaction vs. transformation for reaping some quick wins and focusing on long term prosperity at the same time.
In practice, where transactional or operational capability usually takes manual instruction, it takes the linear step for tuning the enterprise machine and ensures it keeps spinning. Digital transformation needs the bold playbook with updated principles to guide through changes; developing the next practices to scale up effects. By taking a balance management framework approach, the multidimensional digital effects provide impressive advantages in terms of, the abundance of information, the quality of the knowledge workforce, the speed of transaction and the influence of transformation.
For quite a while, the majority of us will work in an organization that is somewhere between old and new; at both industrial speed and digital speed; in the physical building and remote environment; Framework is not the gospel of business and it needs to continue to update. By taking a framework approach, balance seems effortless, to improve flexibility, adaptability, ability of interaction, and resilience, etc, for running a people-centric, high mature organization.
