The Digital Mindset: What It Really Takes to Thrive in the Age of Data, Algorithms, and AI

In both ways, ambiguity captures people’s attention and focuses it exactly where digitally minded strategic communicators want them to: on them.

Sometimes, a digital mindset can mean knowing when to integrate low-tech with high-tech.

For this reason leaders can model the behavior they would like to see.

Thus, managing presence and building social lubrication is about making sure that you are making yourself more or less noticeable to others depending on the nature of your relationship and learning about them in ways that can help you to ask the right questions and get the information that you need.

In the absence of collocation, developing a digital mindset means learning to employ new practices to successfully achieve virtual presence with both your immediate coworkers and, if possible, the larger organization.

the difficulty with this approach is that it is not always obvious what features are most useful for determining one particular face.

A digital mindset means recognizing that teams relying heavily on digital technologies to collaborate will inevitably face the mutual knowledge problem, make wild attributions about each other’s behavior and, eventually become out of sync.

When organizations attempt to go digital, they often reach straight for the technology and then try to figure out how it can fit into their organization. Michael Kanaan, director of AI and machine learning for the US Air Force, calls this thinking “techno-solutionism.”

What’s more, they could fully appreciate the work that team members were putting in. Everyone had learned to work in sync.

But if your goal is simply to be present, ambiguity—as opposed to clarity—has virtues that can be integral to relating to others with a digital mindset.