In Part III of this Advisor series on VR applications in healthcare and medicine, we examine developments involving digital humans.

AI that can help firms measure their environmental footprint or optimize their energy consumption and carbon footprint are a recent green IT addition. Because AI is a disruptive technology based on to its ability to learn, it’s expected to bring impactful sustainability transformation. However, achieving such transformation will require a significant change in the system surrounding AI.

The Making SMARTER Decisions with Data framework is a collaborative data-informed decision-making approach that incorporates tangible business value, unknown and unknowable data, intuition, human emotions, actionable insights, and meaning-making. It is particularly useful in uncertain, fast-changing, turbulent times — our business climate for the foreseeable future.

In this Advisor, we explore some of the tech innovations transforming World Cup 2022, including: semiautomated offside/goal line technology, a new high-tech ball, and AI/big data applications that are changing the sport. We also briefly examine some of the failures and threats these technologies can introduce.

Decision making in complexity is not difficult, just different. Old tools based on searching for certainty and finding the best answer must give way to a new set of tools based around iteration, experimentation, and adaption. Leaders need to expand their decision-making toolbox. They need tools that allow for a rapid situation assessment so they can make a decision (right or wrong), then adapt that decision as it plays out in the real world.

This Advisor explores how bridging the divide between circular and degrowth systems can lead to strong sustainability and resilience.

This Advisor series looks at the use of VR in healthcare and medicine. Here in Part II, we examine developments involving the use of VR for treatment, therapy, and rehabilitation such as to help patients manage diseases and injuries, and reduce patient anxiety before and after surgery.

Complex times require leaders with more than just knowledge, insight, and skills; they need the temperament to remain calm and collected as they apply analysis and judgment to high-stakes decisions. This Advisor reviews the ingredients of good decisions and explores how decision making can go wrong.

Winning in the complex risk ecology of the maturing EV market will require automakers to survive the flood tide of EV introductions over the next three years and stay alive until the market becomes more predictable.

This Advisor explains how security technology solutions can be used to address the continuing threat of cyberattacks.

If we think about hierarchies, we will see their effects and try to improve them. If we instead think about value streams, we will see the effects of value streams and try to improve them. Hierarchies are a structure we use to organize our people; value streams represent the actual work we’re doing. Let’s explore the difference that shifting our focus creates.

Blockchain-based IoT's ability to provide end-to-end supply chain information in real time supports the circular economy paradigm. It allows businesses and consumers to shift from a linear take-make-dispose model (which relies on large quantities of easily accessible resources) toward an industrial model where effective flows of materials, energy, labor, and detailed information interact with each other in a restorative, regenerative, more sustainable system.

October is “Cybersecurity Awareness Month.” To create better cybersecurity awareness, this Advisor series examines the evolving cybersecurity landscape. Here in Part I we explore why cybersecurity remains a perpetual concern and challenge and what we can do about it.

One of the most important knowledge graph (KG) functions is creating linkages across multiple data sets. By providing a visual representation of the underlying connections between data nodes, KGs help leaders advance their understanding of their environment so they can make intelligent business choices.

If we want to incorporate sustainability into process improvement, we must develop a toolkit and integrate it with existing Lean processes and methods, such that they work together to produce the results we’re seeking. Importantly, many practitioners believe muri is the true root cause of many other forms of waste. If we follow that line of logic, we should find a great deal of oppor­tunity for improvement by actively controlling it.

In Part I of this Advisor series on virtual reality (VR) in healthcare and medicine, we examine how companies are using VR technologies to develop applications for healthcare educational and training purposes.

This Advisor reviews the book Future Ready, which should be in every leader's library because it lays forth the issues and risks of each path forward for successful digital transformation.

This Advisor looks at two traditional approaches to corporate inno­vation (the stage-gate model and design thinking) and where they went wrong. 

Biases in AI models can crop up due to data bias, and biases in algorithms can result from a developer’s viewpoints. Natural intelligence (NI) provides a countermeasure to these biases, challenging the data and algorithm biases with its understanding of the context in which decisions are made.

Innovative Leadership originates from the idea that we must regularly innovate how we lead as our organizations change in a continually more complex and faster-paced world. As with contin­uous improvement, leaders who follow Innovative Leadership regularly elevate their leadership to meet current and anticipated conditions, challenges, and opportunities. 

Businesses are being forced to respond simultaneously to climate change at the macro (external) level and the micro (internal) level. This Advisor looks at four main lenses through which businesses should view their macro and micro climate-related goals: climate science, climate governance, business stakeholders, and community stakeholders.

AI art generators combine machine learning (ML) and natural language processing to generate images from natural language text prompts input by users. These tools offer exciting possibilities for novices and professionals to create incredible art for many uses. They also raise several issues for business and society as their use becomes more mainstream.

This Advisor offers two “mini-starters” to explore the DEI issue in more depth: (1) a critique of leadership programs for Black executives with suggestions for improvement and (2) the threat that “me over we” poses to both DEI programs and the business sector at large.

This Advisor presents two examples that illustrate how a new breed of business organizations is pushing beyond traditional boundaries by explicitly incorporating their understanding of nature into their strategies. These stories also demonstrate that a large-scale, system-level change toward more ecologically sustainable produc­tion systems is an evolutionary process, one that requires organizations to access as many sources of ecological knowledge as possible.

Companies can’t choose between growth and sustainability — they must have both. But what kind of technology-led business model transformations will ensure “sweet spots” between the pursuit of growth and sustainability?