I have previously written about “Having the Right Digital Mindset” where I covered six topic areas to help shape your Digital Mindset.
In this series of blog posts I will expand on each of these topics.
Having the Right Digital Mindset: Business
The business area covers the skills and thinking that are needed in your workplace and what you need to succeed. Businesses are being constantly challenged in the way that they operate today and look forward to tomorrow against what their customers demand, the market wants and competition are doing.
Mastering Change
One of the major key components in having the Right Digital Mindset is Mastering Change. Change happens all the time and is a constant thing that occurs in our daily lives. We are guided by our experiences, what we know and our habits.
Have you every heard yourself or anyone say any of these?
- “We’ve always done it that way”
- “X set the the process years ago and no one has taken responsibility to change it”
- “Costs to much to make changes”
Learning to understand and cope with change yourself helps enable any business/organisational changes that are happening. This can also be helped by also learning to work with and deal with ambiguity and help us to cope with the unknown, and act with out knowing what the overall looks like, whilst also breaking our habits to form new ones that allow us to accept and work with change.
Useful pointers on change and ambiguity. Click on the links for the full articles.
Gartner – Four-Step Plan to Instigate Mindset Change
1. Vision
2. Define
3. Implement
4. Measure, Monitor and Wait
Source: Gartner Says Digital Business Requires Growth Mindset and Not Just Technology
Letsgrowleaders.com – 7 Ways to Help Your Team Deal With Ambiguity
1. Understand your Own Tolerance and Reactions
2. Be Crystal Clear on What is Clear
3. Know What You Collectively Know and What You Don’t
4. Don’t Waffle
5. Encourage Risk Taking
6. Envision Alternative Scenarios
7. Engage Other People and Perspectives
Source: 7 Ways to Help Your Team Deal with Ambiguity
Agility
Agility is a word that is used in business every day and is an important facet of Digital Transformation and Mindset. The principle frameworks for being agile comes from the areas such as DevOps, Agile Software Development and Scrum.
However being Agile with a Digital Mindset is more than just these. You need the ability to:
- Keep up with what is going on in your organisation and industry
- Remain relevant – invest in yourself
- Adopt and be comfortable with new ways of working
- Experiment and learn from failure (fail fast and theory of small bets)
- Apply the 80/20 Rule
Useful pointers on agility. Click on the links for the full articles.
Agile software development principles
1. Customer satisfaction by early and continuous delivery of valuable software.
2. Welcome changing requirements, even in late development.
3. Deliver working software frequently (weeks rather than months)
4. Close, daily cooperation between business people and developers
5. Projects are built around motivated individuals, who should be trusted
6. Face-to-face conversation is the best form of communication (co-location)
7. Working software is the primary measure of progress
8. Sustainable development, able to maintain a constant pace
9. Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design
10. Simplicity—the art of maximizing the amount of work not done—is essential
11. Best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams
12. Regularly, the team reflects on how to become more effective, and adjusts accordingly
Source: Agile Software Development
Growth Mindset
The next major component is having a Growth Mindset in which you are comfortable with the amount of change and the rapidly changing business landscape.
The term Growth Mindset comes from the study and theory of Dr Carol Dweck that intelligence can be developed. This can be applied to every person young and old to reach higher levels of achievement.
Adopting a Growth Mindset by taking every opportunity to experiment, embrace failure, learn, change and seek challenges will enable yourself and business to realise potential and success.
Below is an info-graphic from Dr Carol Dwecks work and theory:
Infographic of Dr Carol Dwecks thoery. Credit Carol S. Dweck Ph.D and Nigel Holmes
Useful pointers to help grow your mindset. Click on the links for the full articles.
CIO.com – Change your thinking
1. They thrive in the face of uncertainty
2. Select your digital-era strength
3. They focus on ideas that leapfrog ahead
4. Start, experiment, learn, repeat
5. Innovate fast
Source: 5 mindset traits to become a digital disruptor
Digital Insider Blog – How to Develop a Growth Mindset
1. Make Learning a Habit
2. Journal
3. Embrace Failure
4. Ask for Feedback
5. Seek Challenge
6. Add the Word “Yet” to Your Vocabulary
7. Be Positive
Source: How to Develop a Growth Mindset
Questions to ask yourself
- What will I learn today
- What habit can I forget
- What can I make a habit
- How can I be more Agile
- What did I do that failed that I can learn from
- What is my next challenge
- With the constraints being removed through innovation and advancements, with costs coming down, how can you change/transform your business processes to meet the market challenges of today?
- What tasks and processes can you automate?
Further Reading
Books:
Blog Posts and Articles:
Ted Talk:
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The end of the year is almost upon us and as I start to plan my next set of Digitally Fit posts for 2019, here is a roundup of the Digitally Fit posts from 2018.