Three main issues drive business complexity today

Sooner or later, they will all make their presence felt and that is when you will need a clear and effective solution.

We believe the following three main issues drive business complexity today. At this point in time you may find one of these to be more pressing than the others. However, sooner or later, they will all make their presence felt and that is when you will need a clear and effective solution.

Overriding social drivers and streams:

There is an urgent need for a more profound understanding of a changed and constantly changing human psyche, in order to -

1. effectively and meaningfully engage people, and to
2. accommodate individuality and diversity more effectively in our offerings to and contacts with people.

The burden of knowledge management:

We are in an age of data/information overload. We therefore need to find ways of turning this overload into knowledge that can be assimilated by people, and most importantly, that is actionable.

Many companies have invested hundreds of thousands or even millions of rands on knowledge management projects. These projects however focus largely on IT, on software, and on systems and processes. A belief that order, i.e. organising information and data into categories, will directly result in useful and applied knowledge is wrong, at the very least a half-truth.

With knowledge management being largely technology focussed, knowledge workers are merely provided with the same unassimilated volume in a different form. In fact, information and knowledge cannot be the new currency of competitive differentiation as many postulate, since it is essentially available to all and in oversupply. True competitive differentiation lies in two interrelated areas, namely

1. the unique human ability to make associations out of information bits and bytes, i.e. a Skill, and
2. Innovative Spirit, namely having it and being able to optimise knowledge due to the availability of a skill.

Skill and Innovation therefore are intertwined competitive levers.

All things are interrelated:

Business and marketing perspectives and approaches need to consider the fundamental connectedness of things as well as the fact that companies and the markets they operate in are all living systems that are mutable. Silos exist in all organisations, and thinking within silos is to be expected. It is however only when people are galvanised to look upward and outward, instead of down and inwards that they begin to understand how individual actions affect others in a causal fashion.