7-Strategic Imperatives for Accelerating Organizational Performance

We live in a new world with new rules of competition. Successful companies today utilize digital platforms at their core and build horizontal capabilities and alliances that accelerate growth while creating experiences that anticipate the future of work. In this newsletter, we look at seven strategic imperatives that are essential for accelerating organizational performance as the Fourth Industrial Revolution takes flight.

1. Lead with purpose

Leading with purpose provides the north star to organizational transformation by creating relationships between individual purpose, the changing nature and purpose of human work, and organizational purpose. From a business perspective, this means influencing, inspiring, and guiding the workforce with clarity, focus, and the confidence to act, regardless of circumstance.

Effective leaders clarify their individual purpose and put it to work in a way that inspires everyone within the organization to find meaning in their daily tasks. Business purpose begins with good intentions but is revealed by how the company operates and the decisions it makes. Perhaps George Bernard Shaw put it best when he said, “The true joy in life is being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one.”

2. Align people, culture, and new work design as the new "social engine"

The second strategic imperative involves using people, culture, new ways of working, and new work design to form a powerful social engine. By this we mean that work is redesigned to maximize technology by eliminating routine tasks, using algorithms to automate decisions, and providing metrics and learnings to guide decision-making. Through culture and awareness of environmental, social, and governmental prerogatives, a company can drive continuous innovation, superior customer service, human-centered design, and business models that are in synch with ESG priorities. Putting the right people in place means combining highly diverse values, behaviors, talents, and skills.

We find that in digital organizations, structure only goes so far and then success ultimately depends on the quality of people and teams. Social engines make work and insights transparent to all workers. New ways of working are instantiated as reliable work practices and behaviors, and innovation and execution are personalized for all customers.

3. Create a human hub

Thirdly, the Digital Workplace must become the strategic “Human Hub” in the business-digital ecosystem. In other words, a personalized ‘front door’ to the people, places, and things that workers need the most. This embraces all digital capabilities and emerging technologies, including productivity tools, autonomous systems, user data, dashboards and analytical tools, case management capabilities, and personalized self-service assets.

A seamless digital workplace not only empowers dynamic teams to share, collaborate and connect from anywhere, on any device for improved worker engagement, but such a hub is ideal for surfacing content from multiple sources in a cohesive, human whole.

4. Build horizontal capabilities and alliances

The fourth strategic imperative involves building horizontal capabilities and alliances that align with organizational strategy, purpose, and values. Here, we are looking at a future of work experience by building a digital workplace platform that reinforces a culture of inclusion and inspires innovation. The building blocks of this experience include transformational and purpose-driven initiatives, such as peer-to-peer marketplaces, the engagement of leaders as coaches and advocates, and the adoption of common work practices.

This includes fostering the adoption of common work practices and a remote work model, engaging leaders as coaches and advocates, establishing a peer-to-peer marketplace (with learnings as a byproduct), and promoting a personalized experience for each worker. This, in turn, facilitates worker and team productivity, inspires individual career journeys and learning interests, supports the social engine, and maximizes participation.

5. Mobilize information, data, and algorithms as essential worker tools

The fifth strategic imperative focuses on the mobilization of data and algorithms as essential worker tools. This involves learning on fast-acting computerized timescales, which leverages these assets in combination with slower-acting human learning to create a scalable organizational model that reorganizes tasks and roles to maximize the productivity of humans and machines working together. While repetition, memorization, storage, retrieval, analysis, processing, forecasting, calculation, and pattern-matching become the domain of fast-acting machines, humans leverage assets like innate empathy, open-mindedness, complex problem-solving, cultural awareness, critical thinking, and adaptability in order to provide the perfect match to their machine counterparts.

This entails redesigning processes to embrace innovative work on different timescales, promoting more agility for 'working on the edges' of human-computer interaction, building new durable skills, motivation, and mindset for human-computer collaboration and nurturing a company-wide culture of meaningful human work and engagement.

6. Design business-digital Ecosystems

The sixth strategic imperative involves the design of business-digital ecosystems that emanate from a digital workplace whose core attributes include content management, targeting and variability, intelligent dashboards, attention management, experience content, and sophisticated search capabilities. The surrounding ecosystem includes learning, case management, workforce data management, time management, and extensive collaboration facilities, coupled with knowledge bases, ESS and MSS transactions and data, and other systematically enabled sources that facilitate a high-value working environment.

7. Create the future of work experience

The final strategic imperative for success in the 4IR centers on the creation of a future of work experience that accelerates transformation for workers through an operating model that is fundamentally driven by business purpose, culture, and growth mindsets. This embraces both employee and worker experiences through approaches in cross-disciplinary teaming and personalization, situational awareness, and new management approaches driven by hybrid working environments.

In concert, these seven strategic imperatives form the nucleus of accelerating human performance and advancing human capability in the Fourth Industrial Revolution. They are the key to enabling workers to create new value through a combination of ingenuity and adaptation.

Download our white paper, Accelerating Organizational Performance by Advancing Human Capability , to learn more about the necessity for business leaders to adapt to new rules of competition while simultaneously pursuing meaningful organizational and cultural systems.

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Logical Design Solutions (LDS) is a digital strategy and design consultancy for global enterprises. We create experiences that transform business and help people work successfully in the new digital organization. Clients come to LDS because of our reputation for intellectual rigor, our foundation in visionary experience strategy, and our commitment to enabling digital transformation inside the enterprise.?Learn More ?about how LDS has dramatically improved the way that some of the largest corporations in the world do business.