A well-defined set of digital rules are not for limiting innovation, but for setting the frame of relevance, and guide through changes and digital transformation.
Digital businesses today are facing fierce competitions, unprecedented uncertainty, and velocity. There is a classic fable about a lion and a gazelle to analogize such a "surviving and thriving cycles." The lion wakes up and starts running, otherwise it will not catch lunch. The gazelle does the same but, in this case, to avoid becoming lunch. Either way, you have to move to survive, and accelerate to thrive.
Digital organizations are organic, alive, holistic, vibrant, energetic, responsive, fluid, and innovative, in a relationship with its environment dynamically, and above all enhances and supports the dignity of the creative human spirit. The challenge is to prioritize what you know about and keep an eye open for signs of things you don't know about. Therefore, it is important to develop your own company tailored rules to inspire change mentality, motivate positive attitude and good behaviors, and generate winning concepts for digital transformation on the consistent basis.
Digital rules are not some outdated cliches or overly rigid policies to stifle innovation. Generally speaking, a business rule is a statement to set the policy or procedure. Enterprise policies provide a basis for decision-making throughout an enterprise and inform how the organization sets about fulfilling its mission. A business rule is simply a rule that is under business jurisdiction. It means that the business can enact, revise, and discontinue their business rules as they see fit.
The purpose of “100 Digital Rules: Setting Guidelines to Explore Digital New Normal “ is to establish digital principles and update business policies that can be applied holistically and guide the digital transformation systematically. Digital rules are based on a set of fundamental beliefs behind the methodologies and they help to shape mindsets behind behaviors. Digital rules encourage mindfulness, authenticity, creativity, inclusiveness, and discourage static thinking, silo, and bureaucracy, help to accelerate collective human progress.
Chapter 1 Digital Thinking Rules: Mindset is the most valuable thing to shape every progress, but also the root cause of all mankind problems. It’s time to set digital thinking rules, shift mindset - from fixed to accelerated; closed to open; linear to circular; exclusive to inclusive; silo to holistic; and reawaken limitless human potential.
Chapter 2 Digital Change Rules: Change Management is a complex management discipline due to the "VUCA" nature of digital organizations. It is critical to set digital rules to improve Change Management effectiveness, capture the right timing for changes, make people at the center of change, and take a logical scenario to make change more nature, and less painful.
Chapter 3 Digital Innovation Rules: It is important to set digital rules, define the most compelling and unique innovation approach or a mix of different approaches to addressing the needs; analyze the benefits per costs of that approach, to ensure that innovation can be managed more systematically and develop it as a distinguished business capability.
Chapter 4 Problem-Solving Rules: We all develop reputations for being problem creators, problem definers or problem solvers. Problem-solving has a very wide scope, it takes well-defined rules and interdisciplinary approaches. The problem-solving mindset has synthetic nature with multi-level thinking processes involved.
Chapter 5 Digital Transformation Rules: The digital organization should set guidelines and rules to empower employees at all levels within an organization to unlock their creativity, understand and develop their creative capacity to solve problems and exploit opportunities in new and innovative ways.
Change is costly. Digital transformation is full of uncertainty, velocity, complexity, and ambiguity. The very characteristics of digital new normal are nonlinearity, unrepeatability, unpredictability, and denial of control. Therefore, it is important to set digital rules to improve the success rate of changes and digital transformation in the organization. The journey is far more important than destination. Digital organizations have to adapt to the continuous changes and are able to follow digital principles, revise business rules, reconfigure organizational structures and change their own behaviors for its adaptation to environmental changes and business dynamic.
