Leadership and Organizational Intelligence

Chief Knowledge Officer

Joseph Goedert, Expert says it’s time for Health Care to create ‘Chief Knowledge Officer’ position. Health Data Management, Oct 2011

Chief Learning Officer

CLO Magazine

Josh Bersin, Today’s Chief Learning Officer (November 2010)

“A few years ago I wrote an article about how the CLO is really three people:  A Chief Culture Officer (driving engagement, learning, and collaboration), A Chief Performance Officer (driving employee performance, alignment, and skills);  and a Chief Change Officer
(vigilantly driving change, seeing the future, and helping the CEO and
other leaders transform the workforce as the business and workforce
changes).  Today, more than ever, the CLO must be all three.”

Chief Sensemaking Officer

Peter Flemming Teunissen Sjoelin, Making Sense: One of the Components of Achieving Holistic Management (Jan 2011); Holistic Management in a Context of Enterprise IT Management and Organizational Leadership (May 2011)

Chief Collaboration Officer

Morten T. Hansen, Scott Tapp, Who Should be Your Chief Collaboration Officer? HBR Oct 2010

Lydia Dishman, Why Your Company Needs A Chief Collaboration Officer. Fast Company, May 2012


Is this several different (but overlapping) positions, or several labels for the same position?  I believe these are all aspects of Organizational Intelligence, and call for coordinated leadership. That doesn’t necessarily mean a single position, but certainly not a set of disconnected or rival initiatives.


And who will take such positions? Hansen and Tapp suggest that the responsibilities should be added to one of the existing C-level roles – probably one of the following five.

  • The current CIO. 
  • The current HR head. 
  • The current COO. 
  • The current CFO.
  • The current head of strategy.

I agree that organizational intelligence might reasonably be added to any of these disciplines, but it would undoubtedly represent a radical shift for the traditional disciplines that dominate these functions. Leadership indeed.

Knowledge, process, people, and enterprise-architecture

Reading KCore‘s excellent blog-post ‘High quality, High Impact KM: Start with the right questions‘, this early section of the article caught my eye: I’ve set out my stall when it comes to KM and by now it should be pretty clear that I believe that successful KM outputs are reliant on people.  I also strongly believe […]

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