Tag Archives: Mindset

Having the Right Digital Mindset: Social

11 Monday Feb 2019

Posted by in 21st Century Human, Digital, Mindset

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SocialI 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: Social

The social area covers how you interact with the rest of the world, including your work and family life. Being social is not just around how you use the tools and what you communicate, but also what you don’t say and being Social Media Savvy on your communications.

There are many different social channels available today. The latest We Are Social 2019 figures reports 3.48 Billion social media users. That’s a lot of posts, selfies, tweets and a lot of data.  With all of this going on searching through Social Media is literally “drinking from the fire hose”. There is no right or wrong mix of channels to use, however when deciding which channel to use, you should consider who and where your audience is.

The graph below illustrates the number of users (in millions) in the top used social channels. Source: Statista2019 No Social Users Per Channel

Choosing and focusing on the social channels that are right for you and your business, then refining your following and search results can bring a wealth of knowledge on what is happening around your area of interest.

Building a Personal Knowledge Management System is one way of keeping in touch with what is happening and trending on topics that you are interested in on Social Media.

Personal Knowledge Management System

One of the most important things to remember is that when you post its online and visible to the world even if its a private group. That might sound scary and put you off using social media, but it shouldn’t. It means think about what you say on Social Media because once its online anyone could re-post your comments from what you think is a private group to an open group.

Setting yourself a series of Social Media Rules will help define when and what you should put in the public domain and when not to.

For this reason, I keep my social channels separate from work and family/friends as different channels appreciate different topics. This also means you can set different security settings on family/friends channels to that of being open.

The news is often reporting on bad things said on a social channel or trawling up something that someone posted many years ago.

Here are my top 5 Social Media Rules

  • Choose your Social Channels
  • Listen, Research, Listen Again
  • Be Authentic And True
  • Keep It Regular and Relevant
  • Think Security

 

Further Reading

Blog Posts and Articles:

Having the Right Digital Mindset: Technology

24 Thursday Jan 2019

Posted by in 21st Century Human, Digital, Mindset

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digital technologyI 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: Technology

Technology plays a part in any Digital Transformation, however its not the full answer, building your Digital Mindset is key. That said, it is important to keep up to date with the latest innovations, road maps and trends for the industry/sector you work in.

Technology should be seen as an enabler to help a business meeting its Business Outcomes and Goals rather than a dictator on the direction you should mould your business around. It is important to invest in  the right digital technology capabilities to drive this.

The abundance of services that provide “Cloud” and “As a Service” capabilities are allowing businesses to adpot new ways of working and look at meeting business outcomes using a different approach in an agile manner to the traditional types of technologies and waterfall implementations. Building a partner eco system from many different suppliers provides the best of breed solutions without the need to rely on a single partner.

Further Reading

Blog Posts and Articles:

Having the Right Digital Mindset: Business (Change, Agility and a Growth Mindset)

03 Thursday Jan 2019

Posted by in 21st Century Human, Digital, DigitalFit, Mindset

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Growth MindsetI 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:

Carol-Dweck-Two-Mindsets

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:

Digital Mindset – Millennial Mentor

22 Friday Dec 2017

Posted by in 21st Century Human, Digital, Mindset, Productivity, Tools

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Mentor

As we head towards the New Year and think about our New Years resolutions try setting one to have a Millennial Mentor.

Mentoring is traditionally thought of as top-down or older-younger mentoring, but this barrier is being regularly being broken now with mentoring working as an equal arrangement and skills learning.

Millennials coming into businesses are growing up with the latest trends and technology, and it is second nature to them. For those who are of an older generation, its often a learning path to get up to speed with the latest trends and technologies.

For some people their mentors are at home in the form of a family member, for others this could be a Millennial who is in your business.

A conversation on twitter I was having around Digital Mindset   Replying to @Max_Hemingway – Talk to a millennial – my son said last night ‘gosh mom, you had to learn this stuff…I don’t even think about cuz I grew up with it in my hands ‘

This can be a two way mentoring setup with you learning about the latest trends and technologies from today’s young people, whilst they learn business skills and how a business could adapt and use the trends and technologies.

You may already be mentoring and your mentee could become your next mentor.

 

Having the Right Digital Mindset

04 Monday Dec 2017

Posted by in 21st Century Human, Digital, Innovation, Mindset, Productivity, Social Media

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Digital BrainDigital 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.

There area many areas that could be included to help shape your Digital Mindset, however for me these fit into six main areas:

The Digital Era is enabling “A Growth Mindset in the Age of Abundance”.

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.

There may be a number of business processes that are in place that have been there for a while and are expensive to change constrained by a number of factors. This has meant that the processes haven’t grown. The changes that the digital era is bringing helps to remove these constraints and costs, allowing business to rethink how they achieve these processes. With the constraints being removed through innovation and advancements, with costs coming down, how can you change/transform these processes to meet the market challenges of today. What can you change/transform/automate?

Technology

The technology area covers existing, new and emerging technologies in your life. What you use in everyday life and what you could use or imagine that would help you complete tasks and achieve goals quickly and efficiently. Defining which technologies you should be using and learning will depend partly on what your job role is and the road maps and trends for the industry/sector. The aaS (as a Service)  economy is providing the ability to consume technology at a faster easier route with an abundance of choice of service to go with. The need for a growth mindset is key to navigating a direction and path through this and making decisions on which technologies best meet your needs. The key is to understand and keep up with the trends and technologies.

Social

The social area covers how you interact with the rest of the world, including your work and family life. Reading everything that is going on Social Media is literally “drinking from the fire hose” – so much happening you can get easily swamped with noise.  Building a Personal Knowledge Management System is one way of keeping in touch with what is happening and trending on topics that you are interested in on Social Media. Setting yourself a series of Social Media Rules will help define when and what you should put in the public domain and when not to.

Personal

The personal area covers yourself. Ensuring that your health is good and you are living life to the full or best you can helps. Eating well and keeping fit help keep the mind fresh and positive.

Understanding that change is happening everyday and we need to embrace this with a positive attitude and work through the ambiguity that it presents. A blog post by Richard Branson recently wraps this up nicely “You can’t control what happens to you but you can control how you react”

Fear of failure is another area that often lets us down and stops us from trying things, however we can learn from our mistakes so it is important to experiment and innovate. Doing small things and trying them – Theory of small bets – allows you to fail fast if things don’t work and keep any cost/consequences small. “Successful entrepreneurs don’t begin with brilliant ideas — they discover them.” ~ Peter Sims

Application

The application area covers how you apply these mindset areas into your everyday life using method that are well documented such as Agile and Design Thinking. The key is choosing the right method for the situation you are in. Using aids to help you may be one way of doing this – Playing a game with innovation and thinking.

Learning

One of the biggest areas is learning. Keeping your skills up to date with the latest advancements in all the areas above. You should be looking to do 50 to 60 hours learning a year as a minimum (some professions require higher number of hours). Learning is easier with the internet through online courses, videos and podcasts allowing it to be undertaken at anytime. Re-enforcing your learning through explaining it to someone else or blogging about it is part of  The Nature and Cycle of CPD.

There are arguments for and against learning to code, however having an understanding of what is going on in the coding world helps with today’s advancing technology.

 

Further Reading

Twenty First Century Digital

Having the Right Digital Mindset: Business (Change, Agility and a Growth Mindset)

** (Blog post updated with links to latest series of blogs on Having the Right Digital Mindset)