08/15/2018

Does Your Organization Leverage Its Combined Intelligence?

Too often, we ignore the knowledge staring us in the face

“Perhaps the only sustainable competitive advantage is increasing your ability to learn faster than your competition.”
 - Arie de Geus, former head of Strategic Planning, Shell Oil Company

Are you getting the best results from the people–the embedded collective intelligence–in your organization? Do you feel that there is something missing in overall performance, or your team and/or enterprise could achieve even more? Most senior leaders with whom I have worked would answer, “We can achieve more and be better if only we could work smarter and more effectively together.” The name of the game today is figuring out how to multiply the Effective Intelligence (E.I.) of your organization. Here is where you can gain a great competitive edge that is sustainable and also leads to more innovative and effective ways of getting things done.

Research and experience demonstrate that the only difference between so-so organizations and high performing ones is the quality of the teamwork and the collaborative networks that exist within an organization. This makes sense if you understand brain physiology. It is not the absolute number of neurons that determines intelligence; it is the number of dendritic connections between neurons that determines overall processing power and intelligence. The greater the number of connections, the higher the level of collaborative networking, which equals greater intellectual capacity to problem-solve and create solutions. The term I have coined to describe this capacity for teams and organizations is “Effective Intelligence.” What great leadership does is to use presence (demeanor an modeling), practices and processes to multiply E.I., thereby increasing the performance and capabilities of a team, a department or an entire organization.

Please select this link to read the complete blog post from Great Leadership.