With relevant organizational intelligence comes great potential value for companies and organizations to figure out where their strengths and weaknesses lie in responding to change and complexity.
Organizational intelligence embraces both knowledge management and organizational learning, as it is the application of knowledge management concepts to a business environment, additionally including learning mechanisms, comprehension models, and business value network models, such as the balanced scorecard concept.
It also includes the ability to develop, share and use knowledge relevant to its business purpose as well as the ability to reflect and learn from experience While organizations in the past have been viewed as compilations of tasks, products, employees, profit centers, and processes, today they are seen as intelligent systems that are designed to manage knowledge.
Scholars have shown that organizations engage in learning processes using tacit forms of intuitive knowledge, hard data stored in computer networks and information gleaned from the environment, all of which are used to make sensible decisions.
Operational intelligence differs from BI in being primarily activity-centric, whereas BI is primarily data-centric and relies on a database (or Hadoop cluster) as well as after-the-fact and report-based approaches to identifying patterns in data.
Organizational intelligence helps companies understand the relationships that drive their business—by identifying communities as well as employee workflow and collaborative communications patterns across geographies, divisions, and internal and external organizations.
They must consider the possible environmental changes alter the informational value and determine all the relevant connections and patterns.
To exemplify, a company may be uncertain in a competitive landscape because it does not have enough information to see how the competitors will act.
However even with the lack of clarity, uncertainty assumes that the context of the problem is clear and well understood.
For instance, uninformed and novices must deal with each elements and relationships one by one but experts can perceive the situation better and find familiar patterns more easily.
Equivocality result not only because everyone's experiences and values are unique but also from unreliable or conflicting preferences and goals, different interests or vague roles and responsibilities.
Organizational culture is important because it can be used as a successful leadership tool to shape and improve the organization.
Moreover, if the leader deeply understands the organizational culture, he/she can also use it to predict a future outcome in certain situations.
Combination of these factors result in six different leadership styles: Coercive/Commanding, Authoritative/Visionary, Affiliative, Democratic, Coaching and Pacesetting.
[4] In King Arthur's Round Table, Harvard professor David Perkins uses the metaphor of the Round Table to discuss how collaborative conversations create smarter organizations.
[5] The Round Table is one of the most familiar stories of Arthurian legend since it's meant to signal the shift in power from a king who normally sat at the head of a long table and made long pronouncements while everyone else listened.
By reducing hierarchy and making collaboration easier, Arthur discovered an important source of power—organizational intelligence—that allowed him to unite medieval England.
"[5] Harold Wilensky argued that organizational intelligence benefited from healthy argument and constructive rivalry.