Three Causes to Organizational Fragile

 The digital organizations that are able to strengthen those weakest links and overcome business fragility can better survive and thrive in volatility and uncertainty of digital dynamic.

The world is constantly changing, and digital is all about flow- information flow, idea flow, and business flow. The organization has different functions, structures, layers, and systems. When the company seems to get stalled, workplace is stale, and the organization turns to be fragile, business management must ask the big "WHY" question, dig into the root causes, and ponder how to fix critical issues to run a dynamic digital organization with the steadfast speed.

Dysfunctional system: When productivity is low and the organizational speed is slow, business management needs to do further analysis for understanding the causes - whether it is due to the broken system, change curves, or inefficient business processes or practices. When systems control the circumstances, not people, it doesn’t mean that the system is great, but possibly it’s broken. When service professionals want to help customers, but they complain: The system doesn’t allow me to do so.” It is a sign that something is wrong. When systems are bad, silos or bureaucracy is propagating, the functional walls are built up, and divisional gaps are enlarged. The matter of fact is that dysfunction, complication, inefficiency, or rigidity are not always so easy to uncover. It’s important for management to leverage system understanding for identifying the early signs of a dysfunctional system such as process in-adaptability or process rigidity. The organization gets stagnated because the business systems are no longer able to accommodate changing needs or too fragile to run at a solid speed. It’s also critical to keep monitoring the overall health of the business, fine-tune the business processes and systems to ensure both system effectiveness and efficiency in order to achieve operational excellence.

Misalignment: When different shareholders push the business to different directions, change gets stuck and digital transformation is stalled. Role conflict or differing priority is often the cause of misalignment. More specifically, misalignment is caused by silo thinking, miscommunication, lack of cross-functional understanding, dysfunctional management behavior, outdated practices, the failure to translate the high-level language of business strategic goals into the tactical functional goals, and then into the various staff specialism or the specific working tasks, or mis-assignment -the wrong people put in the wrong position to solve the wrong problems, etc. An organization can make a smooth alignment and approach a flow zone by leveraging emerging technologies and tools to lubricate process, flatter organizational hierarchies, and allow people across the business ecosystem to share knowledge for solving common business problems. To run a highly responsive and adaptive organization, the democratic processes will overtake hierarchical control, and that flexible digital culture will become a fundamental organizational asset. The physical organizational structure, relationships, virtual platforms and social connections wrap around each other to ensure clear responsibility, smooth information flow, seamless alignment, and engaged workforce to drive changes proactively.

Change inertia: Change is the new normal. There is disruptive change and incremental change. Change you want and change that is forced upon you. There are changes as a response to dynamic external conditions and changes that are initiated because of external factors. When organizational change is stuck, the business becomes fragile. Because much more dangerous thing is the disengaged workforce to continue doing things in the old way even the circumstances have changed significantly. Change is inevitable and the only differences are the reasons and goals behind the change and its scope and depth and breadth of changes. In practice, change makes a lot of people nervous because it means they have to move out of their comfort zone, which causes change inertia. There are both personal resistance and structural resistance. The golden key is to acknowledge the resistance and deal with it properly. Look at resistance as a source of energy and where there is energy, there is still passion and potential. To achieve desired change, an organization must create an environment that enables effective collaboration, share and promote ideas, and provide the necessary incentives for employees to make proactive changes.

Companies across sectors ultimately respond to the external environment as geopolitics, rapid innovation, and social expectations change the business landscape and blur the digital territories. Ad hoc business change is doomed to fail. The digital organizations that are able to strengthen those weakest links and overcome business fragility can better survive and thrive in volatility and uncertainty of digital dynamic and make the seamless digital transformation.

Posted in: Change Management,Digital Pitfalls,Lessons from Failures