Intelligence Advantage Summary Table of Content Excerpts Preface Introduction Bibliography Background Conceptual background Praises Review

Conceptual background of The Intelligence Advantage "There is no corporation large enough for the expression of one human soul." David Whyte at the Complexity and Strategy Conference, London, 1995 For at least forty years the pursuit of corporate transformation has been attempting to match the needs, desires and possibilities of the human spirit to the design of human activity coordinated for productive purposes. There have been some few successes but little learning which has been available for the majority of humankind. Eastern philosophies have seemed to provide answers to the human side but have not integrated into Western productive life. Humanistic psychology and its derivatives have also failed to find an expression that matches the needs of the productive enterprise. The predominant guiding metaphor of the West has not provided a home for the human side of enterprise. The iron cage of capitalism, as the British socialists liked to call it, is prison of thinking and ideas more than of any commercial needs. Trends in thinking, which can be traced to early Greek times but which have not been accepted in the Western tradition, have emerged in the last century and we are seeing the convergence of this thinking in ways which promise a new freedom. The transformation of philosophy, the sciences, and technologies resulting from these two are converging to produce a new guiding metaphor that will release productive energy in ways that match the human spirit. The science of emergent evolution, which began its development over 100 years ago, and the more modern version which is generally referred to as that field of complexity which refers to adaptive systems - systems that survive by learning or adapting provide an understanding, theory and principles which are appropriate to the design of organisations. Philosophy has developed "interpretive approaches" based in the idea that we live in language systems which are more or less effective in supporting our existence in the world. These are interpretations which give meaning and action but which are not descriptions of the world. As our language becomes more complex, an increasingly complex world emerges for our actions. The technology of computers, information processing and communication which have emerged from this thinking have also contributed to the possibility of exploring and expanding these approaches. What is emerging at an increasing rate is an intelligence that is greater than our individual intelligence and that enhances and enables that intelligence. What we are pursuing here is the possibility of design and implementation of organisational intelligence for our corporations and human institutions. Organisational Intelligence develops the sciences of emergent phenomena and complexity as an interpretive approach to organisational design and management practices. It begins with the assumption of an organisation as having its own intelligence already which is distinct from the intelligence of the individuals who are its agents. The intelligence of an organisation is a distributed phenomenon similar to the intelligence of a brain/nervous system. That is, the intelligence is in the structure, organisation, design and not the individual cells. The possibility for organisational intelligence is not, then, to create it where it doesn't exist but to work with what does exist to enhance it by design. To do this, there needs to be some pattern language or design support. The basic elements of this pattern language are: Relationships, Theory, Possibility, Structure. It is what emerges from the interplay of the four that is being designed for. That is, we are developing a design FOR emergence. The book, and the conversation at this table, are intended to explore the possibilities of design for organisational intelligence based in emergence, complexity and interpretive approaches. This conversation is a design conversation for possibility distinct from a conversation for fixing pathologies. It is my contention that the pathologies of organisations are the result of thwarting the natural expression of human intelligence that should be supported and uplifted by participation in organisational life.