Leading and collaborating in the digital transformation – What skills do individuals need to build the future?

Digital transformation of economies and organizations sounds like a technical process. But that barely scratches the surface. As we learned at our workshop Managing and Leading in the Digital Economy, it has much more to do with enabling effective collaboration and structures for innovation than with updating or replacing some old software or technology. ?Digital means not less human“, one of our participants summarized succinctly after two days of talks and trainings at the University of Zurich’s Faculty of Business, Economics and Informatics. Qualified knowledge workers of the future need a range of skills that take time and experience to build.

To master the change in work and life settings that has been ongoing for the past decade and has now taken up speed, our keynote speaker on the first workshop day, Joana Breidenbach, highlighted three trends in her inspiration talk that we need to prepare for: Decentralization, Collaboration / Sharing, and Fluidity.

Decentralization of processes and knowledge generation requires us to be able to take a systems perspective. This was a topic that our trainer for Scenario Thinking, Vera Calenbuhr, and our keynote speaker for the second day, Katherin Kirschenmann, both underlined: In order to generate good solutions for complex problems, we need to map a system’s landscape – what are the driving factors (leverage points) that determine the problem we want to solve, and what are the parameters and processes that determine to which degree these levers can exert their influence?

  “Fall in love with the problem,

not the solution”

Being able to map a system requires a second skill that both keynote speakers pointed out: holding multiple perspectives on a problem in mind for analysis in parallel, without jumping to conclusions. “Fall in love with the problem, not the solution”, reminded Katherin Kirschenmann. Identifying what gives us most leverage for solving a problem should go before executing an attempt to solve it. Often solutions that were discovered without systematic analysis are implemented because they seem attractive or close to the skillset of the entrepreneur. However, that doesn’t always lead to effectively solving the underlying problem.

The second trend Joana Breidenbach pointed out was collaboration and sharing: This requires us to be open and skilled for co-creation of solutions. It also calls for open innovation that allows others to use and build on good solutions we came up with. This trend also brings new opportunities through crowdfunding.

While co-creation sounds fun, in reality it is often one of the harder things to achieve with consistent high-quality results in a team. As Joana Breidenbach pointed out, it requires a lot of self-reflection and also reflecting together as a team the prerequisites and structures that are needed for good execution of all tasks that help the organization achieve its goals. Solutions not only need to be dreamed up, but also implemented in a reliable fashion. Some form of ownership for important processes and also taking care of the housekeeping tasks that are not intrinsically motivating still needs to be organized. We followed up on that need with another training in Radical Collaboration? with Arne Reis that reinforced the importance of self-awareness and awareness of others, a collaborative intention, openness, self-accountability and negotiating and problem solving.

Balancing the need for structures that provide safety and the need for freedom to grow

The third trend Joana Breidenbach highlighted for us was fluidity: This encompasses skills to deal with flexible careers that ask us to change - be it organizations, places of living, or even the profession. It also applies to organizations that have to adapt to flexible markets. But even in a given job, nowadays this encompasses the skill to be able to change roles from leader to expert contributor as needed.

The big challenge Joana Breidenbach identified when introducing a radical self-governing model at the Betterplace Lab was to strike the balance for the need of the organization’s members to achieve a sense of safety and belonging while at the same time giving the individuals the freedom to develop and grow.

Safety here translates as knowing what to expect and what one subscribes to. Hierarchies convey such an expectation, as do clear role descriptions. Radically abolishing hierarchies takes away parts of that safety and provides lots of freedom, but this may not be what originally members of the organization would have chosen for themselves when they joined.

This was an observation that consistently appeared in many of the talks that described transformation of organizations also on the second day of our workshop: A change in how to organize work and collaboration in an established organization often led to a part of the organization’s members not wanting to be part of that change.

One insight from the Betterplace Lab’s change journey is their constitution, in which the members define their principles of self-organization. This constitution contains mechanisms to assure ownership of tasks that are the backbone of the organization and assure accountability, such as finance, team development / hiring, strategy, IT, and public relations. Clear role descriptions for the owners of these tasks as well as expectations to the other members of the organization are written down so that everyone can hold their colleagues accountable. Even though their sociocratic approach to organization ideally means that everyone’s sharing responsibility, in the end one person needs to care about the process (based on competence).

Individuals also have to figure out for themselves on which end of the scale between safety and freedom they would like to live. A greater need for freedom comes with the requirement to define for oneself what roles one might want to take, what one can contribute to an organization, in which regards one would like to grow and which values and purpose one would like to pursue in order to realize a need for belonging. Organizations set the level which of these needs they foster more and consequently which individuals they attract and keep by meeting their needs.

Among the many individual skills that help to co-create valuable solutions, we learned about two more in depth that are worth taking into the toolbox: techniques of design thinking, brought to us in a workshop by Iana Kouris, and a situationally adaptive leadership style that Anna Luca Heimann highlighted in her talk. Resilience was brought up twice, in the talks by Michael Hengartner on leadership in academia, and Paul Jokiel introduced us to Hilti’s 9-week training program that highlights the importance of relaxation techniques, sleep, nutrition and figuring out one’s own optimal work schedule to the employees.

The talk of Paul Jokiel highlighted another aspect of fluidity for organizations: Ideally, leadership in a given task is trust- and strengths-based. But that still requires members of a team to find the best mode of working together now that hybrid settings of on-site and off-site work gain hold. Being able to work "anywhere, anytime" forces teams to answer questions such as how to best use precious face time together. The need to identify tasks that are best solved together at the office, and other tasks that can be equally well or even better tackled during remote work.

Many of these skills need time to build. Yet they are worth investing in, because they enable us to master solving increasingly complex questions in our jobs, and navigating the flexible collaboration structures of the present and future.

*** To continue our learning journey, we also explored the transformation of organizational structures that enable successful collaboration and innovation: Our report on the organizational perspective ***

To build and hone your individual skills, below are some useful resources and links to our speakers’ work: 

Self-development for collaborative work settings

Joana Breidenbach: “New Work Needs Inner Work”

Arne Reis: Radical Collaboration (Interview part 1) (Interview part 2)

Scenario Thinking

Vera Calenbuhr: Resources for Systems Analysis and Identifying Leverage Points

Getting your idea on the road

Katherin Kirschenmann: The DO School

Iana Kouris: Transformation by Design