Adjacent Possible and other ways of thinking

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Ask Digital transformation is removing silos that have long been functionally separated within organizations. To succeed, adapt and innovate at the pace of modern business, different departments often need to be involved in the same project from the start to ensure their needs are met without delaying the launch of new initiatives. As MIT Sloan Management Review and Deloitte explore in "The Coming of the Digital Age," effective leaders must enable people to collaborate across boundaries more than ever before. This is a difficult task. How do you manage a team when only some employees report to you? How do multiple managers share responsibilities and challenges? If there is a dispute, who has the final say? Cross-functional projects often fail. McKinsey reports that in many companies, ownership of processes and information is fragmented and tightly guarded.

Roles are designed around narrow requirements, and the resulting internal complexity hinders much-needed cross-business collaboration. But when organizations address this issue, they can see a profound impact on the bottom line. A survey of executives conducted by MIT and Deloitte found that the most digitally advanced companies are those that Job Function Email List successfully deploy digital technologies and capabilities to improve processes, attract talent across the organization, and drive new value-creating business models. Cross-functional collaboration possible. For the past two years, I have been the leader of a large cross-functional project focused on improving our customer relationship management system. It requires engaging teams across the organization to change and scale critical parts of our infrastructure.



We bring together people from operations, risk, revenue, technology, product, finance, international, legal and compliance. I discovered early on that successfully co-leading this project meant focusing on three central tasks, all of which revolved around communication. Leverage Common Pain Points to Persuade In order to make any cross-functional project work, you must first build broad consensus around the core problem you want to solve. This can be trickier than it sounds. People who have been in silos for years may not be used to hearing about the challenges faced by other departments, or may not have enough space to think about them even if they have good intentions.