Discovered this delightful article by Paul Bromford
Source: We need to encourage organisations to seek risk - and forgive failure| Paul Taylor, 2015
“Most policies don’t prevent your company’s downfall – they just stop colleagues from doing the right thing for the customer.”
Innovation only thrives in a forgiving organisation. And if failure is the engine for innovation , our challenge is to make our organisations more forgiving.
This graphic from a recent HBR study shows auditors are simply looking in the wrong places.
Risk factors
Strategically culture is a massive risk factor
Policies don’t bring organisations down. Toxic cultures do.
But cultures are rarely audited. It’s easier to tick boxes.
How does your organisation actively seek out risk? Only 20% of strategy officers describe their organisation as risk seeking. We need to transform risk management from being about “stopping doing things” to being about “starting doing different things” within a well managed framework [you know like a digital governance framework or something].
As many have said you want to have a safe-fail rather than fail-safe environment. Even the language is tricky. Failure is learning. Walking is falling over then gaining your balance many times and that is what you want.
Lots of small volatile learning experiences or failures. This leads to resilience and hopefully an anti-fragile environment. Nassim Taleb has covered this well.
An example in the IT world would be the Netflix chaos monkey which encourages responses to network and infrastructure failures which increases redundancy and the ability of the interlinked system to handle failures.
Another risk which really needs to be considered is the risk of not doing anything.
Governance for digital transformation
Source: @rossdawson Feb 26 2015
MT @AICDirectors @ZA1967: We need a sense of risk & framework to enable transformation @rossdawson #governance
So basically if you don't do any digital strategy you risk reduced competitiveness, will find it harder to attract talented staff, find information fragmented, and users resorting to unauthorised use of technology. Hello Hillary (Hillary Clinton used a commercial email system rather than the State Departments.:-)
See:
We demand consumer grade usability at the office! | Stupid system! | Jonas Söderström, March 2015
Who SUNCS (Secretly Uses Non Corporate Systems) at your office probably everyone | Stupid system! | Jonas Söderström, 2013
Leadership using digital
In our headlong rush to tech for solutions we risk ignoring the root of our problems.
People. Poor service design. Leadership.
The breakthrough digital has given us is the opportunity to listen to our organisations and our customers in real time. Never before have we had the opportunity to share ourselves and our thoughts. We’ve never been able to work out loud before.
Source: Five questions for prospective digital leaders | Paul Taylor, 2015