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Thinking Organizations:
Answer this simple question. Do you want your workers to think?
If you chose answers 2, 3, or 4, stop reading. This section will only aggravate you. You’ll find it vexing and you’ll rail against its conclusions. Too many companies rely on strength of effort rather than powerful thinking to generate winning outcomes. It is as if you think that your people should know everything before they get started and that taking time to think on the job is a luxury that the company can’t afford. This tendency comes from the “good old days,” when change came slowly and customers would be happy with whatever you produced. Henry Ford was once supposed to have said that, “Customers could have any color Model T they wanted, as long as it was black.” In those days, the less thinking the workers did the better. Those times are gone. The Case For A Thinking Organization: If you go back to the model of the organization as a living entity (link), you can use this perspective to do an informal assessment of its IQ.
Intelligence can’t be seen. It isn’t tangible. It’s invisible. It can only be inferred. You can’t take it out and weigh it. You can’t hold it in our hands. You have to find indirect indicators that it’s present. People draw inferences from watching how someone performs when dealing with a variety of problems or tasks. The more difficult or complex the problems they can successfully solve, the more intelligent you say they are. Because we can only infer intelligence there are times when people wind up being wrong in their assessments of others. They may sound intelligent. They may hold degrees from colleges or universities. They may present themselves as highly effective problem solvers, but then woefully under-deliver when it gets down to brass tacks. IQ tests have been developed to evaluate intelligence, but even there, high scores do not always translate into effective action in real life situations. The same statements can be made about the thinking skills of an organization. They have to be inferred from the quality of the intellectual effort it uses, not only to solve its problems, but also to thrive in its environment. There are a number of operations that we can include in the concept of organizational intelligence. Consider the several indicators of organizational intelligence listed here. This list is not exhaustive. It is simply an attempt to create an overview of the thinking skills most directly tied to the organization’s ability to cope in its environment. For this discussion, look at the following capabilities:
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