orgintelligence

Karl Albrecht on Organizational Intelligence

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Karl Albrecht has defined seven characteristic features of an
intelligent organization, and has designed a self-assessment
questionnaire for creating a profile of the intelligence of an
organization.

1. Strategic Vision: do we know where we’re going?
2. Shared Fate: are we all in the same boat?
3. Appetite for Change: can we face the unexpected challenges?
4. Heart: do we have the spirit and energy to succeed?
5. Alignment and Congruence: do the organization’s “rules and tools”
help us succeed?
6. Knowledge Deployment: do we share our information, knowledge, and
wisdom?
7. Performance Pressure: are we serious about getting things done?

Some of his questions are useful, but I don’t think they provide a
rounded view of the intelligence of an organization.

1. By strategic vision, Albrecht is referring to the capacity to
create, evolve, and express the purpose of the enterprise. This is
certainly an important aspect of sense-making, but overlooks an
equally important aspect of sense-making, which is to understand the
evolving demands of the environment and to align vision and purpose
to these demands. In Albrecht’s model of organizational
intelligence, there is no explicit connection between vision and
reality, and no mention of the extent to which organizations (and
their leaders) understand and anticipate the present and future.

2. A stupid organization can still have a sense of community, and a
strong collective affiliation to an outdated or unrealistic vision,
leading to a collective refusal to face facts.

3. An appetite for change is important, but profound change also
requires a degree of patience and a willingness to tolerate
uncertainty and inconsistency. Albrecht talks about discomfort, but
many organizations try to avoid discomfort by rushing through
changes as quickly as possible, often resulting in a series of
failed initiatives.

4.  Heart. This may well be a consequence of organizational
intelligence – an organization that values and engages the
intelligence and creativity of its employees should end up with more
satisfied and engaged and committed employees. But this is also strongly connected to trust.

5. Alignment and congruence. This is to do with the architecture of
collaboration, which is perhaps the most difficult aspect of
organizational intelligence. The most intelligent organizations
typically don’t display complete congruence, but manage with a degree of
creative tension and conflict between different functions or positions.

6. Knowledge deployment. Albrecht concentrates on generating and sharing
knowledge (flow of knowledge, conservation of sensitive information,
the availability of information at key points of need) but I see the key
capability for organizational intelligence in terms of linking
knowledge to action. How has this knowledge helped us do things better,
or to do better things?

7. Performance pressure – a preoccupation with the performance of the enterprise, in terms of the achievement of identified strategic objectives and tactical outcomes. This preoccupation is found
in many bureaucratic organizations, especially those dominated by the
so-called target culture which often militates against organizational
intelligence. I therefore cannot see any necessary correlation between
performance pressure and organizational intelligence.

A company like Enron would probably have scored fairly high on
Albrecht’s questionnaire, but it also provided a spectacular illustration of
Albrecht’s Law, namely that “intelligent people, when assembled into
an organization, will tend toward collective stupidity”.

Albrecht identifies two kinds of stupidity, which he calls the
learned kind and the designed-in kind.

  • The learned kind prevails when people are not authorized to
    think, or don’t believe they are.
  • The designed-in kind prevails when the rules and systems make
    it difficult or impossible for people to think creatively,
    constructively, or independently.

I believe there is a third kind of stupidity, which I call the
disconnected kind. This is where there are many talented people, but
they don’t talk to each other; where the feedback and learning loops are
broken; and where management fails to connect the dots. This is the
Enron model of organizational stupidity, and in my view it is the most
powerful explanation for the kind of organizational stupidity that
Albrecht identifies in his eponymous
law. But Albrecht’s questionnaire is not designed to detect this
kind of stupidity.

Karl Albrecht, The Power of Minds at Work: Organizational
Intelligence in Action (2002)

Karl Albrecht, Organizational
Intelligence & Knowledge Management: Thinking Outside the
Silos. The Executive Perspective (pdf)

Karl Albrecht, Organizational
Intelligence Profile: Preliminary Assessment Questionnaire
(pdf 2002)

See also OrgIntelligence in Iran

Daoism and Rocket Science

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Who is to say whether a scientific or technical discovery is accidental or planned? Historians of science often point out that there was some luck involved in Fleming’s “accidental” discovery of penicillin. But Fleming and his assistants were already a…

Daoism and Rocket Science

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Who is to say whether a scientific or technical discovery is accidental or planned? Historians of science often point out that there was some luck involved in Fleming’s “accidental” discovery of penicillin. But Fleming and his assistants were already actively searching for anti-bacterial agents, and the discovery of penicillin followed a similar path to his earlier discovery of the anti-bacterial properties of egg-white (lysozyme), so it is misleading to describe the discovery of penicillin as a complete accident.

Some historians of science now suggest that the Chinese invention of rockets was an accident. They argue that Daoist thinkers would have understood explosion as a violent response to the combination of Yin and Yang, and that they would therefore have been unable to think systematically about a reaction involving three ingredients instead of two. In other words, a given mental model or frame constrains investigation. (Unlike the Fleming example.)

Of course we must be cautious about interpreting historical Daoist thought against either a modern understanding of the chemistry of gunpowder, or even against a modern interpretation of Daoist thought. Perhaps the ancient Chinese did not see any contradiction between a three-way chemical reaction and Daoism, and that this apparent contradiction is merely a modern projection. (In other words, the modern historians perceive the past using their own mental models or frames. None of us can escape this.)

However, it is still true that mental models can constrain what we perceive, as well as how we make sense of our perceptions and act upon them, and this has important implications for innovation and organizational intelligence.

Frank H. Winter, Michael J. Neufeld, Kerrie Dougherty, Was the rocket invented or accidentally discovered? Some new observations on its origins (Acta Astronautica, Volume 77, August–September 2012, Pages 131–137) http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.actaastro.2012.03.014

Corrinne Burns, Oops, I invented the rocket! The explosive history of serendipity (Guardian, 4 May 2012)

Questions on OrgIntelligence

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A student from the Middle East emailed me as part of his research into organizational intelligence in universities, and I sent him some brief answers.

1)   Is organizational intelligent a mental ability in the organization?

I would avoid …

Questions on OrgIntelligence

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A student from the Middle East emailed me as part of his research into organizational intelligence in universities, and I sent him some brief answers.

1)   Is organizational intelligent a mental ability in the organization?

I would avoid …

The Science of Retail

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#orgintelligence Liz McShane of @PortlandDesign tells @pollycurtis why Tesco’s star has waned.

“Tesco has taken its eye off the ball for some time now, focusing more on the science of retail rather than the emotion of it. By that we mean the priorit…

The Science of Retail

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#orgintelligence Liz McShane of @PortlandDesign tells @pollycurtis why Tesco’s star has waned.

“Tesco has taken its eye off the ball for some time now, focusing more on the science of retail rather than the emotion of it. By that we mean the priorit…

Does Organizational Cognition Make Sense?

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#orgintelligence @carlhaggerty argues that ‘Social’ is Key to Improving Performance, discussing my presentation on Modelling Intelligence in Complex Organizations.

Carl quotes the statement that “Cognition only makes sense for individuals” (Slide 5). This is a reductionist view that I don’t myself share. I prefer the holistic view presented in my following slide: that cognition makes sense for socially-embedded systems – not just people but also communities. I personally don’t have any problem talking about how an organization perceives and decides and remembers and learns – not just as a metaphor but as a literal account of what is going on. However, I have had many arguments about this with people who are uncomfortable with applying any notion of cognition to artificial or social entities.

In practice, reductionists are usually willing to talk about non-human cognition, but they think this is only properly meaningful if it can ultimately be defined in terms of human cognition. Now there may well be a mapping between non-human cognition and human cognition, but it is probably very complicated and it’s not something I’m particularly interested to work out.

Interestingly, some people who object to the notion of an organization having a collective memory don’t seem bothered by the notion of an organization making a collective decision. Perhaps that has to do with the fact that collective decisions can often be understood as the result of a semi-democratic process in which individuals have a weighted voice/vote depending on their status in the organization. (Although in practice, collective decisions never quite work like that, and it is perfectly possible for an organization to arrive at a collective decision that nobody is happy with.)

This then links to the point Carl picks up from my slide 7 – the illusion of individual performance. In my book on Organizational Intelligence (now available on LeanPub, thanks for asking), I talk about the Talent Myth that was one of the things that did for Enron – the idea that all you have to do to build a brilliant company is recruit a bunch of brilliant individuals. Thinking about organizational intelligence doesn’t diminish the talents and efforts of individuals, but we have to understand how these individuals can collaborate intelligently and learn collectively, using a wide range of sociotechnical mechanisms, to achieve greater results.

Carl thinks this is highly relevant in a public sector context. “An individual local government officer has a complex system environment, which could include Peers, Press and Media, local demographic, local political influence, national political influence, training, policy framework etc. Essentially an individual’s performance is the result of the ‘systems’ own restrictions and ability to achieve and facilitate outcomes.”

As I understand it, Carl’s own work focused on building social knowledge systems to support local government intelligence. As local government (like everyone else these days) is constrained to do more with less, good organizational intelligence is surely a critical success factor.

http://leanpub.com/orgintelligence