Just as the letters Alpha and Omega bookended the Greek alphabet in Classical Antiquity, so too are the transition movements of social ethics and digital transformation offering an excellent frame for the deep socioeconomic, technological, and environmental changes that we have been experiencing for some years now - and that will be even more intense in the next ten or twenty years.
The social ethics transition - from the old paradigm “duty” to the new paradigm “pleasure” - revolutionizes the social standard in favor of the exacerbated focus on the satisfaction of one’s own needs, individual expectations and aspirations, obviously in detriment to the moral obligations to third parties and the obedience to the structures of family, religious, political and institutional strength. In the wake of this phenomenon, the work environment and consumer behavior are restructured in the search for experience, expression and impact. The psychological contract between individuals and organizations therefore needs to be rewritten based on this new psychosocial reality.
The impact of the increasing hegemony of the ethics of pleasure is brutal on the enterprise bastions constructed around premises developed around the old paradigm of duty to organizational culture and design. The perceived nexus between command-control corporative structures and the rigid family-religious-political-institutional context starts to be challenged in favor of lighter, fragmented, fleeting, fluid, and collaborative structures. It is precisely this new social order that makes a head-on challenge to the organizational cultures and dominant leaderships of companies constructed and consolidated within the old paradigm.
In parallel, digital transformation is not limited to a new technological application. Its revolutionary strength occurs only in the convergence between certain technologies - in the present context I mention the encounter led by Artificial Intelligence with the Industrial Internet, Robotics, X Reality, Insideables and Genomics, supported by Data Analytics, Cloud Computing, Blockchain technologies and Social Networks.
This cataclysmic convergence has the capacity to destroy and to create wealth in every economic sector, anywhere in the world. It is a structural transition - from the old "waterfall” paradigm to the new “agile” paradigm. The digital transformation cannot, therefore, be ignored by the organizations constructed under the old paradigm. It is a question of renewed life or announced death.
We are facing a revolution here. Incremental improvements will not be enough.
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Daniel Augusto Motta, PhD, MSc
Founder & CEO BMI Blue Management Institute
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