The future belongs to intelligent organisations. It is intelligence that gives organisations their capacity to adapt to the ever changing business environment. But how do you make an organisation more intelligent?

Intelligence is the ability to acquire and apply knowledge. Intelligent organisations use acquired knowledge to adapt to changing and unpredictable environments.

An organisation may employ intelligent people but this does not necessarily make it an intelligent organisation because an organisation’s intelligence is not the sum of individuals intelligence but the way an organisation behaves- in particular its management culture and leadership style.

Does the board/senior management team suffer from the , ” Not Invented Here syndrome” that is the rejection of new ideas or ways of doing things from elsewhere in the belief it won’t work here because we are different, our circumstances, history, population/customers ,  relationship with Unions, make us unique.

Is the organisation happy to coast, suffering from complacency, thinking they are better than they are and in denial when confronted with evidence that contradicts this belief, such as customer  feedback, disgruntled employees or critical audits/ inspection reports. Is best practice shared across the organisation or is it a case of isolated island of excellence. Is the organisation over dependent on a few key individuals?

An organisation can buy in knowledge by appointing individuals who have it. But if the organisation is not receptive, if it is risk adverse, if it has a blame culture which stifles initiative and innovation, if it fails to empower managers then the knowledge will not be applied.

Organisation routinely collects data and information through customer feedback and employee surveys but how often does it lead to changes? Many organisations capture data on recruitment, which allows them to provide an ethnic and gender profile of their workforce but then struggle to know what to do with the knowledge.

In large complex organisations examples of good practice are often found but these are isolated examples of excellence, other teams within the same directorate let alone the wider organisation are often unaware of this best practice because the organisation is not good at disseminating  it.

Making an organisation more intelligent and thus better able to adapt to a fast changing business environment is about changing the leadership and management culture to be more receptive to new ideas/different ways of doing things, better at learning from other organisations, better at using feedback, better at spreading best practice, better at empowering managers and better at developing trust.