Digital Gaps: Bridging Multiple Gaps to Run Cohesive Digital Business

By Pearl Zhu

“Digital Gaps -Bridging Multiple Gaps to Run Cohesive Business” is a guide book to help digital leaders and professionals today identify, analyze, and mind multiple gaps with multidisciplinary insight and holistic understanding. Today’s digital organization simply just can’t stand still. Bridging the 'gap of opportunity' between where you are and want to become is a welcomed challenge and a step-wise approach to make a leap of digital transformation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Mar 15, 2017
• ISBN: 9781365824791

Book preview

Digital Gaps: Bridging Multiple Gaps to Run Cohesive Digital Business

Digital Gaps

Bridging Multiple Gaps to Run

Cohesive Digital Business

Pearl Zhu

Copyright @2017 Pearl Zhu

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted by any means –whether auditory, graphic, mechanical, or electronic –without written permission of both publisher and author, except in the case of brief excerpts used in critical articles and reviews. Unauthorized reproduction of any part of this work is illegal and is punished by law.

ISBN: 978-1-365-82479-1

Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1 Cognitive Gaps

Chapter 2 Digital Leadership Gaps

Chapter 3 Digital Management Gaps

Chapter 4 Digital Capability Gaps

Chapter 5 Digital Professional Gaps

Conclusion

Acknowledgement

About the Author

Introduction: Closing Multiple Gaps to Run Cohesive Digital Businesses

Today’s digital organizations simply just can’t stand still. Bridging the 'gap of opportunity' between where you are and want to become is a welcomed challenge.

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Figure 1 The Multitude of Digital Gaps

We are at the age of digital dawn; hyper-connectivity is one of the most critical digital characteristics which make the business holistic and the world smaller. Digitalization implies the full-scale changes in the way business is conducted so that simply adopting a new digital technology is insufficient. You have to transform the company's underlying functions and organization as a whole with adjusted digital speed. Otherwise, companies may begin a decline from its previous good performance. However, many business managers today still apply old silo management mindsets to new ways of leading changes, create the multitude of gaps blocking the way of the radical digital transformation. Being divided by so many chasms across leadership, management, and innovation, etc., organizations lose their collaborative advantage as they are being over managed and under led, remain disconnected, hoard knowledge, decrease effectiveness, and do not have the competence to collaborate in the long term.

"Digital Gaps -Bridging Multiple Gaps to Run Cohesive Business" is a guide book to help digital leaders and professionals today identify, analyze, and mind multiple gaps with multidisciplinary insight and holistic understanding. Today’s digital organization simply just can’t stand still. Bridging the 'gap of opportunity' between where you are and want to become is a welcomed challenge and a step-wise approach to make a leap of digital transformation.

Chapter 1: Cognitive gaps: Cognition is the mental process of acquiring knowledge through thought, experience, and senses. The mind represents our consciousness and awareness. Cognition is a perception, sensation, and insight. People are different, not because we look differently, but because we think differently. Bridging cognitive gaps is about minding creativity gap, problem-solving gap, and insight gap.

Chapter 2: Leadership gaps: There are many multinational companies around, but very few global companies; and there are many multinational business executives, but very few truly global leaders. Digital leadership gaps are a reality, not fiction. Competition at the leading edge of business is fierce at the age of digitalization and globalization. if you are not taking steps now to shrink that leadership gaps, you will not be prepared to lead the digital business in the future. Successful companies need to grow and innovate, investing in, and developing the next generation of leadership is one of the best ways to do that.

Chapter 3: Management gaps: Traditional management is about applying the reductionistic methodology to achieve business efficiency, and holistic digital management is about leveraging Systems Thinking to ensure the overall health of the business ecosystem. Most organizations at the industrial era operate in the functional silos and digital management focuses on broader collaboration. Hence, it is a strategic imperative to close the gaps between traditional management and digital management in order to enforce cross-functional collaboration and improve business effectiveness and maturity.

Chapter 4: Capability Gaps: A capability is an ability that a person, an organization, or a system possesses to perform and achieve a certain result. The corporate capability is the collective ability to implement strategy, innovation and make changes. The organization’s capabilities can be categorized into both competitive necessity and competitive uniqueness. Forward-looking organizations craft capability-based strategies to ensure the smooth implementation. Therefore, it is critical to identify and close business capability gaps and build organizational competency for reaching the long-term business vision and achieving strategic business goals.

Chapter 5: Professional Gaps: Generally speaking, a professional is an individual with the expertise of some specific area, who earns his or her livings from that expertise. Being professional also means that the individual not only has the skill but also presents the high-quality professionalism such as positive mentality and attitude, fair judgment and good behaviors. A professional is an individual who strives to represent skill and delivers quality. Being a digital professional means consistency. Lack of professional maturity causes a digital professional gap. Being a digital professional inherently and inextricably links with high levels of professionalism.

Digitalization does make the world more hyperconnected and interdependent than ever. When things get connected in this way, any entity wishing to negotiate a successful journey has to understand what the implications of this degree of connectivity mean to them. They have to understand what it means within their organization and the business ecosystem. Transformation is a journey rather than a destination. Make the digital transformation journey worth the effort.

Chapter 1 Cognitive Gaps

We still live the era in which information is rich and insight is poor.

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Figure 2 Cognitive Gaps

Cognition is the mental process of acquiring knowledge through thoughts, experiences, and senses. In short, cognition is a perception, sensation, and insight. The mind represents our consciousness and awareness. It is the software that promotes and regulates each function and each action of our body, from the reproduction and reconstruction of our cells to the food process and distribution, to our voluntary and involuntary movements, and to all our behaviors, etc. However, the brain activities function for survival instincts are still primitive, what are the further aspect of human sophistication in regards to vision, communication, and innovation for problem-solving or overcoming challenges? And what are further problems caused by cognitive gaps and how to bridge them effectively?

●       Cognitive gaps enlarge problem-solving gaps: It is a simplification to call cognition thinking, which means people acquire knowledge through thinking and sensing. The mind is something more personal. It is a label that individuals create for that collective sensation or awareness that is on their own. People are different, not because we look differently, but because we think differently. The cognitive gap is one of the serious problems for both problem-solving and innovation. Because cognitive gaps will cause the blind spots for either defining the real problem or solving it. And if you don’t have a sound solution to each newly created problem, you’ll have very little chances to succeed solving the main problem, because all is connected. And if you can’t connect the dots, you also cannot switch on creativity and inspire innovation. If you only fix the symptom, not the root cause, then it perhaps causes more problems later. And that is why our world today contains, in reality, more problems creators than true problems solvers because trying to solve a problem, by nature will create others. To overcome the common challenges and advance the human race, we have to really dig beneath the superficial layer, see around the corner and transcend the interdisciplinary knowledge, to get to the heart of the matter via bridging cognitive gaps and enforcing multidimensional thinking. Thus, it is important to building heterogeneous teams with the cognitive difference and complementary skills/capabilities/background/experiences, to broaden the vision, and deepen understanding.

●       Cognitive gaps cause innovation gaps: When we explore the mental process of acquiring new knowledge through thought, experience, and senses, the cognition involves exploring varieties of meanings/thoughts and abandoning old and establishing new relations. The cognitive gap disconnects many things which are supposed to be interconnected, it becomes the barrier for connecting the dots to stimulate creativity, or capture the insight. Hence, the heterogeneous team with cognitive differences is more innovative than the homogeneous group setting, as good ideas are multidimensional, they take root in unsuspected places and they evolve with time and by unexpected connections. From talent management perspective, to bridge cognitive gaps, as well as innovation gaps, the management needs to pay more attention to those shining spots: Who can bring unique viewpoint, who can explore an alternative way to solve old or emergent problems, who can take extra miles to delight customers; who has the courage to provide constructive feedback with good intentions; who is just unconventionally different and who is positive influencers for building a culture of innovation? People also need permission to push ideas around an organization without the fear of failure and once people see things being implemented and making a difference, the confidence increases and they will become even more innovative.

●       Cognitive gaps also cause leadership effectiveness gaps: Leadership is more about future but starts at today. People also have different experience and personality, therefore, they may have the different way to do things or provide feedback, as a leader, to bridge leadership effectiveness gap, you need to not just listen to what’s being said, more importantly, what’s not being said. One of the significant tasks for leaders and managers is to make either strategic or operational decision. Decision effectiveness is often compromised by group thinking (group polarization means that a group of people can make a more extreme decision than an individual.) which is often caused by the homogeneous team setting with cognitive gaps. The digital leadership is crucial to encourage Thinking Differently. It is important to be able to be objective and gain a different view in order to develop and have a better understanding of certain topics or problems that may occur. Understanding cognitive intelligence also helps improve leadership and management effectiveness. One of the most influencing aspects of people's psychology is how they perceive the world around and how they relate to it. This is a function of things like cognitive intelligence, and the collective psychology shapes the culture of organization, how people think and do things in the organization, by understanding the proving psychological concept and practicing them, businesses can instill the positive psychology to their workforce, close the gaps created by outdated mentality, build the culture of learning and innovation, and ultimately achieve high performance result for the long term.

In short, cognition is a perception, sensation, and insight. Cognition reorganizes parts of one’s belief system, and thoughts navigate within one’s present belief system as it is. There is no magic thinking sauce to make one’s mind profound, or leadership effective, it has to keep learning agile for updating knowledge and close cognitive gaps via brainstorming and innovating. 

1 Critical Thinking Gaps

The real critical thinking has creativity embedded deeply in the thought processes, and it has the ability to catch the trends and discover hidden connections.

Critical Thinking is the mental process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and evaluating information to reach an answer or conclusion. There are very few real critical thinkers because it is a complex type of thinking with the multitude of thought processes, at the deeper level, critical thinking has creativity embedded in it. The Critical Thinking technique can be taught, but Critical Thinking skills can only be developed via practicing independent thinking, insightful observation, conscious and even superconscious reasoning. There are critical thinking gaps existing which cause leadership blind spots and poor decision making, how to identify and fill them to improve leadership maturity and digital professionalism?

●       The gap between proactive thinking and passive thinking: Passive thinking is taking things as they come and not really asking questions or analyzing the information presented for its value. Critical thinking is analyzing, looking beyond the surface, not just accepting things at face value but asking questions and being active in your thought processes. We all have a cognitive bias, whether individually or collectively, it is no surprise to create the thinking gaps by imperfect people using imperfect processes via the narrow lenses. By practicing critical thinking, it implies some systematic methodology, employing and applying the criteria deemed appropriate by the thinkers involved, to arrive at the tangible and reproducible truth for minding the gaps and enforcing understanding.

●       The gaps between impoverished thinking and resourceful/ imaginable thinking: Critical thinking doesn't always cross over to include imaginative or resourceful thinking. Because the opposite of critical thinking would be unimaginative, evidence-driven, limited, and impoverished thinking often leads to the same old expected solutions. The real critical thinking far outweighs than the conventional critical thinking techniques, such as reason, logic, calculation, and conscious weighing of expected outcomes, etc. It has the ability to catch the trends and discovery of hidden connections. It involves significant critical thinking elements relying heavily on the judgment in evaluating ideas, and planning implementations and evaluating results. Also, when the environment is fast, we have to employ good thinking fast. It is to set a Critical Thinking Trigger, before deciding on a course of action.

●       The gaps between convenience thinking and mindful thinking: Many people still get stuck in the think less mentality - thinker of convenience, or avoid thinking deeply, just believe what being told blindly. In this age of information overload, it's hard to find the truth, to filter all the noises and get the real signals.  While the form of science-based mindful thinking incorporates being mindful; being present, noticing new things; with critical thinking. Hence, education needs to fill the critical thinking gaps, and organizations today are tasked with making information and knowledge more accessible and convenient. On the other hand, they need to find and develop people for whom convenience is no motivation. They should look for and promote mental agility and curiosity, thinkers of consequence, not thinkers of convenience. They want intellectually engaged people motivated by hard