Gaining an interdisciplinary understanding of nonlinearity and a dynamic business ecosystem could be at the tipping point in making business paradigm shifts.
The world is complex; it becomes complex if things do interact, particularly in the case of nonlinear processes and interactions. Logically, it’s important to break down silos and develop nonlinear business processes that encourage cross-functional communication and collaboration.
The business nonlinearity comes through different characteristics such as hyper-diversity, interdependence, ambiguity, unpredictability. It means the radical shift from a silo, linear classic management style to holistic and innovation management discipline.
Nonlinear logic to understand dynamic processes and interconnectivity between problems in a managerial context: Nowadays, functional, industrial or geographical territories are blurred, organizations become more hyper-connected and interdependent. Knowledge professionals today need to be more open to capturing interdisciplinary understanding of complex problems; discovering nonlinear logic underneath helps to take on a broad open perspective, see interdependence between different issues, predict emerging events, to take care of a series of issues without causing too many new problems.
In reality, the “disconnect” part is the bigger issue that causes miscommunication, decision blind spots, dysfunctional performance, and slows down the speed of business change. Sometimes people have a tendency to look for the information that confirms the decision they already want to make and disregard what speaks against it. That causes misjudgment and leads to business fragility. Other times, people make decisions based on their gut feeling only, lack of quality information; that makes business vulnerable, stifling changes. The predictive “cause and effect” in system dynamics perhaps include nonlinear cause and effect models. Nonlinearity based on information fluency and interdisciplinary perspectives enables people to uncover patterns and understand the interconnectivity underneath the surface, to unpuzzle the myth behind problems in order to solve them smoothly.
Nonlinearity to enforce innovation comes through different characteristics such as mixed structure, diversity, and increased flux: Innovation is not a serendipity, but often a cross-functional process that can be managed effectively. Innovation management is complex nowadays due to hyper-connectivity, interdependence, and nonlinearity of digital new normal. The degree of business innovativeness depends on how business systems interact with each other, and those interactions can be nonlinear, technical, informational, or human. Exploring the business innovation should fully cover wide enough directions and ultimately discover the nonlinear path to demystify innovation and walk through the innovation path smoothly.
There are both tangible and intangible elements such as process, technology, culture, which need to be knitted through nonlinear logic as the very clue into the unique innovation competency. Organizations need to awaken the ecosystem consciousness, start thinking about better ways to innovate, influence, and cultivate a dynamic innovation ecosystem, and support all sorts of innovation efforts to maximize business potential.
Nonlinear logic to integrate interdependencies and ensure the business as a whole is superior to the sum of pieces: Many organizations get stuck at the low level of maturity, businesses are divided by silos and struggles with functional frictions. As business transformation involves internalization of the defined values, culture, and conceptual model, the newly established behaviors will be in harmony with the internalized values. Seamless alignment and integration will help to determine the appropriate dynamic aspects and enable the architect to simplify the elements appropriately to build cohesive business capabilities.
Do not underestimate the perfect wave of business integration of all of the exponential growth curves.The concept of “integral” often refers to mixing or synthesizing a few nonlinear capabilities to build dynamic competency. In fact, integration is an important practice in a variety of management disciplines such as strategy management, change management, information technology management, process management, or talent management, etc. It’s crucial to develop a strong management capacity for integration which has to be done with a “big picture.” The more integration between varying functions, the more level of agility for both will be achieved.
Gaining an interdisciplinary understanding of nonlinearity and a dynamic business ecosystem could be at the tipping point in making business paradigm shifts. In the information-fluent digital era, capabilities move from fixed to dynamic, transactional to transformational, linear to nonlinear. and business professionals are more confident to keep improving their skill sets and build differentiated professional competency.
