Talking about the "digital revolution" and the danger of "uberization" is an agreed leitmotif of the current business cycle.
And yet, managers are still largely blind to what the profound movement of computerization, which has been going on for decades, really implies for their businesses. Blinded, they continue to dissociate, in their immense majority:
- The human from the technical (and in underlying, the subject from the object)
- The job carried out from the computer "tool" conceived as a means (and in underlying the end from the means)
This classical model of thought, although rudimentary, is perceived until now as satisfactory with regard to the operations to be carried out. It is also consistent with a self-centered conception of power. However, this model of thought has historically generated, and is currently rooted in, the separation between two major technical approaches to the computerization of jobs within traditional organizations: the supposedly agile "digital" approach and the supposedly cumbersome "IS backbone" approach. This separation is dangerous because it maintains the situation of blindness. These two approaches need to be linked and articulated because they are complementary and in deep synergy.
The mobilization of this synergy requires the recognition of the common cognitive underlying of the two approaches and its formal, conscious and meaningful explicitation in the form of a model of the profession shared by the actors of the collective. This recognition today comes up against the classical thought model of leaders that permeates the way of organizing governance, organization and, consequently, the segmentation of technical offers: the separation between "digital" and "backbone" is symptomatic of the classical thought model that moulds leaders.
This model of thought constitutes the main danger with regard to the threats posed to traditional organizations by a competition that has been able to make a transition from its model. It is all the more difficult to guard against this danger because it is internal rather than external.
How to do it?
In order to truly seize the opportunities of a profound computerization and to face the threats in a lucid way, it is necessary to:
- Recognize the intimate and singular hybridization between man and machine, which has become a "cognitive companion"
- Recognize the hybridization between professions.
- Adopt a model of design and action which, far from separating, distinguishes, articulates and connects.
The approach which enables a business collective to recognize these hybridizations, to explain its shared business model, to catalyze the appropriation of these regenerated ways of thinking and acting exists, it is called cognitive business process management (C-BPM). Such an approach allows this collective to connect, to articulate itself, to elucidate its stakes, to build a path and to take in hand its collective project. We invite you to discover it and to deploy it with us.
