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 WaitSource: 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
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 accordinglySource: 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
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 PositiveSource: 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:
- Mindset: How You Can Fulfil Your Potential
- The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do, and How to Change
- Changing Habits: Successfully Developing Habits With The Right Mindset
- The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
- Seeing Digital: A Visual Guide to the Industries, Organizations, and Careers of the 2020s
- Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and Devops: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations
- The Agility Mindset: How reframing flexible working delivers competitive advantage
Blog Posts and Articles:
- Having the Right Digital Mindset
- Digitally Fit 2018 Roundup of posts
- Gartner Says Digital Business Requires Growth Mindset and Not Just Technology
- 5 mindset traits to become a digital disruptor
- 7 Ways to Help Your Team Deal with Ambiguity
- Culture & Digital Transformation: How a Growth Mindset Is Powering The Culture Evolution At Microsoft
- Manual tasks of today should be the Automated tasks of tomorrow
- I lost my Job to a Robot
- Agility Is The Key To Accelerating Digital Transformation
- How do you drive business agility with digital process transformation?
- Agile Software Development
- The five trademarks of agile organizations
Ted Talk:
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.
Having been involved with code clubs, STEM and learning in the workplace over many years, I have interacted with different types of learning. Each style has its place and different styles, suit different people.
When you mention personal data at the moment, most people think straight away of the recent Facebook/Cambridge Analytica new story and how your personal data is being used. However when you take a step back from this story and look across your own digital ecosystem you are generating a lot of data across a lot of systems. Are you really secure and do you help yourself over data security?
Listening is one of the key skills in life and it is also the same across the various information streams, however you can get flooded with “noise” that you need to filter out to get to the messages and content that you want to hear about.
If you have been following this series of blog posts, you should now have a blog and a set of social channels. That’s a great start, however how do you get noticed? How to you get a readership? How can you increase your Digital Profile? These are questions that I was asked yesterday following my last post. Here are my thoughts on this topic.
Following on my series on Digital Fit in 2018, being social is an important part of building your Digital Profile. There are two main things which spring to mind when you mention the word social. Going out with family and friends, and using tools such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat etc.
This is the first in a series of posts I will be doing in 2018 about getting Digital Fit. By this I mean achieving the right 
Digital is used as a title to cover the current business and computing era. Being Digital is about having the right mindset. There is no magic course or exam that you can take that will pronounce you as being “Digital”. Its how you apply yourself against the changing landscape of business and technology.