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How Can You Develop Organisational Intelligence?

To be keep up with challenges, organisations need to be innovative and adaptable to changes. While there have been much talks and thoughts on leadership as key to organisational success, it is important that we recognised majority of organisational success to their ability to respond to change and complexity intelligently.

“Organisational intelligence is the capacity of an organisation to create knowledge and use it to strategically adapt to its environment or marketplace.”

Traditionally, organisations were viewed as a centre of tasks, products, employees, profit centers and operations, today, scholars and management experts see them as intelligent systems designed to manage knowledge in the form of data and information. Organisational intelligence is more than the intelligence of the members of the organisation, but intelligence of the organisation as a larger system.

“Leaders must build deep organisational intelligence rather than persist with outdated command and control structures that have insulated them from changing market requirements” – Steve Lennon in The CEO Magazine

According to Steve Lennon, there are three pillars of organisational intelligence: –

  • Customers’ expectations

Through understanding customers’ expectations, organisation can work towards product and processes improvement, also, new technologies can be developed or adapted to increase value proposition and operational capability. This can be achieve via research and data collection to understand the customers better.

  • Collective intelligence of people

People perform better in the environment where they are given the freedom to act, rather than pure compliance. Leaders and organisations should liberate their employees to work intelligently for each other and their customers – giving people the freedom to be curious, to ask questions from new perspectives. Leaders also need to manage people and teams against business outcomes and not merely tasks and deliverables.

For instance, Google has an Objectives and Key Results approach that was adopted by Intel and AirBnB, that combine focus and freedom so that people can perform.

  • Investing in sense and respond capability

Strategies are no longer sufficient to meet the challenges brought upon by an era of digital transformation. Organisations can leverage on technology to create ‘sense and respond’ capability from organisation management to the operational system and executive round table.

Companies like Toll, DHL and Qantas are using such technologies to magnify the ‘intelligence’ of their employees. These companies are supported by smart systems that create situational awareness, tracking and predictive capabilities that aid them in dealing with volatile and uncertain market situations.

Building an Intelligent Capability for Emergency Management is a 2-day course that integrates theory, practical exercises, group discussions and case studies for course participants to learn and apply intelligence concepts in practice. Participants will also recognise that adopting an intelligent approach to data collection will help organisations deal with their inability to analyse, coordinate, forecast and share critical information before, during and after crisis. For more information, please visit us at http://www.opuskinetic.com/training or contact us at info@opuskinetic.com.

Opus Kinetic believes that people are why organisations are successful, and giving people the knowledge to perform well at their job is integral for success. We pride ourselves as the premier provider of knowledge, offering acclaimed in-house training, leadership training courses, oil and gas training courses, courses that target health safety and environment, etc. Our training courses are well researched and updated with the latest industry trends. For more information on our professional training programs, you can visit us at http://www.opuskinetic.com/training.