IllustrateNonlinearity ~ Future of CIO

Practicing lateral, nonlinear disciplines could be evolutionary for understanding ever-changing circumstances or things from different angles and being inclusive to run a high-performance organization.

The rate of change has accelerated, business leaders couldn’t predict the future with a certain degree of accuracy. Business leaders must learn how to strike a balance between managing complex issues today and predicting the uncertain issues of tomorrow. Understand nonlinear complexity of the organization and business ecosystem, make the radical shift from a silo based classic management style to holistic, nonlinear business management discipline.

It’s crucial to focus on nonlinear rather than just linear cause-effect in business paradigm shifts: The traditional management based on linear logic and reductionist management disciplines often cause silo, frictions, and stifle innovation. Organizational leaders and professionals should continue expanding thinking boxes and knowledge boundaries, develop creative perceptions, and reimagine what is possible. Business problems today are often complex, the cause-effect may be seen as yet another cause. It’s not so effective to use linear logic to understand highly complex, nonlinear cause-effect scenarios to solve complex business problems.

Business leaders and professionals should leverage nonlinear logic to have a better and more accurate understanding of the overall situation and problems, better define the problems and subsequently how you should go about solving them and in what sequence. In management practice, integral logic is often nonlinear and synthetic in nature, with a high degree of interdependence, combining the modular capabilities exposed in a platform to create new experiences and expand its impact, embedding agility in processes and focusing on building long-term advantage.

It’s important to break down silos and be intentional about developing nonlinear processes that encourage cross-functional collaboration and develop creativity: Innovative people in the team or across the teams are actively collaborating, clarifying, building on each other’s ideas, discovering nonlinear growth opportunities, etc. 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 walk through the innovation path smoothly.

To catalyze people-centric innovation, deep understanding of customers through empathy. take a logical scenario and scientific methodologies to work through business changes. Whenever people start applying the scientific method of observing, creating hypotheses and taking retrosynthesis procedures to approve or disprove those hypotheses, eliminating outdated knowledge, they are on the right track of thinking differently, designing innovative products or services, taking alternative ways to do things, and driving higher-than-expected results.

Nonlinear management dynamics enabling the business to achieve the desired impact can sometimes be the result of a very small initiative: Interdisciplinary science can be applied to management by integrating multidisciplinary methodologies to create business synergy. This is the magic of non-linear management dynamics. The purpose of managing change by leveraging nonlinear management discipline is to amplify the change effect and ensure that the business as a whole is superior to the sum of its parts.

Organizational leaders should apply nonlinear lenses, take a holistic view, frame bigger thinking boxes, experiment with better ways to lead, and apply interdisciplinary management approaches to business planning and actions. Businesses need to fine-tune the variety of organizational structures and systems such as cultural system, moral system, social system, material system, functional system and the ecological digital ecosystem to create abundant energy, amplify change effects, and build a high-mature organization.

From linear to nonlinear management discipline could be evolutionary for bridging the silo based industrial age and hyper connected digital business reality. Practicing lateral, nonlinear disciplines could be evolutionary for understanding ever-changing circumstances or things from different angles and being inclusive to run a high-performance organization.