What's Organizational Intellectricity & Why Does It Matter?

What’s going to make the difference for an organization? These days, it’s about two things: optimal execution and continual innovation. And I think about those in particular ways: to achieve optimal execution you can’t just run training and provide performance support, you need to blend those two into a coherent whole. Which I’ve talked about before . The latter I think about as sparking an organization’s ‘intellectricity’.  So what does that mean?

Organizations need to learn!  Now, that hasn’t been news since Senge’s The Learning Organization. Yet, there are a lot of necessary steps that aren’t being seen. And, let’s be clear, innovation is learning. When you’re coming up with new ideas you don’t know the answer in advance. Thus, you’re learning the answer through the process. It’s not like instruction, but it is learning.