Peter Drucker’s famous words “culture eats strategy for breakfast” is never truer than when applied in the new digital context. Digital strategy involves a major shift from intuition based decision making to evidence based decision making. It involves tiny incremental changes on an ongoing basis, as against a fairly fixed and stable plans and processes. A fast paced dynamic digital operation is quite disruptive for most organizations, and requires sustained cultural conditioning. How do we change the organizational culture? There is only one way: Ingest the organization with a new environment of continuous learning and knowledge sharing.

As digital inventions and innovations accelerate, long-term forecasting and steady plans are of not much value, nor are they going to be reliable. A friction-free organization with zero inertia and extreme agility will be focused on continuous learning, experimenting, and iterating. The organization needs to be not only acquiring the latest skills, but also applying them for market driven innovations on a consistent basis. Perpetual hiring and resource augmentation by contract and M&A are all part of the game, but cultivating proven employees to grow and mature helps retain the important factor of business domain expertise. Domain specific tacit knowledge is the hardest to develop, capture, and share.

Many companies think a few tools and consultants can create digital wonders from the data the company has. Analysts don’t seem to succeed with data, unless supported by people who are intimate with the data and understand the context of how the given piece of data was generated. Involve the entire organization, forming multiple cross-disciplinary R&D teams that foster a culture of knowledge-sharing, to capture the minutiae of the operational chain.

The four keys to true success of a digitization strategy are; (a) consistent executive sponsorship and commitment, (b) ability to acquire and access quality data, (c) competence to analyze, interpret, standardize and automate cognition algorithms, and (d) companywide confidence in evidence-based decision making. All these involve a continuous upgradation of the organization’s digital competency all the way from the shop floor to the executive office.

For people to get motivated and excited to learn and explore, they should first understand and believe in the transformational positive change that digitization brings. How can you win companywide confidence when the concept of digital is predominantly about obsoleting many tasks and processes, manual or not? Can you automate yourself out of the job? Even though that is theoretically possible, it is practically not feasible; 1. Perfection is a never ending process, 2. Efficiency in one task leads to requirement to tweak another task, and 3. Overall efficiency leads to company growth which will generate more, even though newer, tasks.

That leads to the need for learning, relearning, and a lot of, unlearning. What is most difficult is the unlearning process, overcoming the curse of knowledge. Learning Continuum involves continual coaching too. Each employee should be a learner and a teacher. Encourage integrative thinking, knowledge sharing, and cross training. Acquire an online learning platform that can facilitate personalized and collaborative knowledge proliferation of timely, contextual, and relevant skills.

We are fast moving into the new digital age where we will overcome the limits of human minds, very similar to how we unshackled the limits of human muscles during the industrial revolution. New Technologies; New Competencies; New Processes; and New People. Continue to evolve and innovate, because obsolescence is quick. Stay up-to-date with Learning Continuum.

Dijo Alexander is a digitization and cognitive analytics enthusiast. He is a Practitioner Scholar Fellow of Design and Innovation at Weatherhead School of Management in Case Western Reserve University, where he researches big data and digitization strategies for organizations.