How to Be Agile in Making Digital Leadership Decisions

I read a paper from my classmate Amanda the other day, and I couldn't agree with her more about what she said about being agile. Being an agile organization and leader is a key to digital leadership and digital transformation. 

An organization's ability to adapt, adjust, and overcome (which I think are aspects of being agile) are all incredibly important and I think that the COVID pandemic experience has only highlighted this necessity for agility in organizational mindset both toward innovation and for developing their workforce. What I really liked about that 4 dimension framework was that it included all of the different aspects that might be affected by digital transformation, just like you looked at being agile from different lenses. 

First, you focused on human development and how organizations can be sure they are keeping their employees but also attracting others. This is an area where my own organization is not yet on the cutting edge. Remote work is seen as anathema to quality production. In some ways, this is because we deliver training onsite and have only recently looked at areas of providing training remotely. Maybe our approach to this will change as the product changes. But I like what you wrote about how if we aren't agile, we could risk losing talent. 

I liked your second aspect most of all, communication. I believe so much of effective business processes and work are centered around communication. Bad, ineffective, or confusing communication can doom even the best projects. Remote teams and hybrid work environments will slow the pace of work, by necessity, in order to keep good lines of communication open. I look forward to all of the tools that will be coming online shortly (I feel sure) to support effective business communications via Zoom or Teams etc. I hope we are as agile in accepting those as we were in moving toward more zoom meetings to support work and teams. 

Finally, implementation of technology. My own organization does this quite well. We have broken away from our brick-and-mortar processes and opened up more remote training capabilities. This is a huge disruptor for our industry and the future is still very much in flux. But like I said, this might be a change agent for other remote capabilities for our organization and for our industry. Again, being agile is key to this.