How to Take a Structural Approach to Handle Unstructural Digital Disruptions

Digital disruption is frequent and unstructured, businesses just have to get use to them and learn how to deal with them proactively. Obviously there is no one size fits all solution, and "boil the ocean" approaches seldom deliver expected results. So how to take a structural approach to deal with digital disruptions, and what’s the logical scenario to manage digital transformation seamlessly?

Manage digital strategy execution continuum: Digital strategy executions are not linear steps, but an iterative continuum due to the emergent trends and adaptation to the potential disruptions. A strategy is a shareware, not a shelfware, managers must be in the room building the strategy through collaboration and consensus building, they should facilitate ideation session that uncovers the big and innovative ideas that disrupt complacent and conventional thinking. The challenge is to prioritize what you know about and keep an eye open for signs of things you don't know about. Every company needs a structural strategic planning process and a healthy management cycle to benchmark that plans to monthly operations, even weekly when done well. It’s important to build an effective business system that creates a high-performance culture with proper disciplines.
Change Management as an ongoing capability: How successful the organization can handle digital disruption depends on how fast and capable they can adapt to changes. One issue is that organizations and people in them expect the change and the transformation to someday "be over"- it never is. If it was, the organization would simply stand still, never innovate and never make progress. The organizational journey is where the juice is in the organization, not just the destination. Destinations are for those checking in at arrivals and checking out at departures without enjoying the challenge and delight of the bit in between. Thus, organizations need to take a structural approach to building change management as an ongoing capability, improving agility and individuals’ changeability. If digitization does not succeed in changing the mindset, beliefs, and behaviors of management, the change efforts will be deemed to fail.
Take a structural approach to integrate talent management/performance management/culture management/knowledge management as a holistic people management solution: With increasing speed of changes and continuous disruptions, organizations must focus on building people-centric business via leveraging the emergent digital pipelines for recruiting, and applying enterprise social platform to enforcing cross-functional communication and collaboration. There seems to be so much uncertainty in digital working environment today, there are different recruitment methods, greater transparency, more engagement and retention initiatives, training and development at every level, the integration of cross-training and knowledge sharing opportunities, having a plan for succession, and keeping up with technological advances, those that are value-added to business success, are major factors of the new business norm. So a structural people management approach needs to play an important role to 1) Involve, 2) Engage, 3) Emerge and Evolve 4) Evaluate and 5) Embrace the change.
Digital disruptions are inevitable, and digital transformation is unstoppable. Organizations shouldn’t just response to them in reactive way. The forward-thinking organizations have to take a structural approach in building organizational level changeability and implement strategy iteratively, and most importantly, they have to build a “Change culture,” and get their people ready for change, encourage innovation and improve overall business agility and maturity.Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu