A high Organizational IQ is analogous to a high individual IQ. It increases the organization’s ability to capture relevant information, make quick and effective decisions, and act on them.
Below is a brief description of the principles of Organizational IQ. By itself, none of the principles is revolutionary, or even new for that matter. However, what is revolutionary is the ability to quantitatively measure the degree to which those principles are being implemented in organizations. Based on this, Synesis works with clients to identify what needs to change in the culture, IT systems, structures and processes in order to achieve world-class performance.
- External Information Awareness - Ensuring that each part of the organization quickly and accurately captures the external information it needs: customer data, regulatory requirements, technology opportunities, and competitive threats. External Information Awareness is the degree to which a company or business unit has developed a deep and consistent understanding of its environment. This awareness is essential in creating a sense of urgency that helps increase the clock speed of core business processes.
- Internal Knowledge Dissemination - Ensuring that each part of the organization knows what it needs to know when it needs to know it. This includes metrics across three axes: horizontal (cross-functional, cross-project), vertical (across hierarchies), and time (internal feedback, reviews and external benchmarking of key processes). The words of one CEO: "I wish we knew what we know..." are much too real to many senior managers, especially in the supercharged competitive environments that most firms find themselves operating in today.
- Effective Decision Architecture - Ensuring that decisions are made at the right level, by the people with the best knowledge and perspective. An effective decision architecture frees key decision-makers to make critical strategic decisions, without overwhelming them with tactical decisions that can and should be made by contributors at a different level with a perspective more appropriate for those decisions.
- Organizational Focus - Fighting information overload and organizational complexity as well as aligning organizations along their strategy. No information system, from the human brain to the PC, functions at high levels of effectiveness in an environment of information overload. Too much information on marginal subjects or overly complex systems of communication reduce the system's ability to effectively focus on the key information and rapidly execute on it. Therefore the development of a focused strategy, its communication, and the alignment of incentives with the strategic goals are key to organizational performance.
- Continuous Innovation - Reinventing products and services as well as processes is a key strength of leading organizations. They generate break-through ideas that turn into market successes by promoting creativity and instilling entrepreneurial ownership across all functions, hierarchies and boundaries of an organization. They also have strong practices that allow them to learn from and improve existing processes. With shrinking product life cycles, perpetual innovation is a key factor not only of success, but of survival.
- Internal Knowledge Dissemination - Ensuring that each part of the organization knows what it needs to know when it needs to know it. This includes metrics across three axes: horizontal (cross-functional, cross-project), vertical (across hierarchies), and time (internal feedback, reviews and external benchmarking of key processes). The words of one CEO: "I wish we knew what we know..." are much too real to many senior managers, especially in the supercharged competitive environments that most firms find themselves operating in today.
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