Strategic Intelligence for the Future 1

8 Organizational Intelligence

“More than technical contagion, it is the access to organizational knowledge that becomes a factor of progress.” [ETT 14]

In 1994, Henri Martre, honorary president of Aérospatiale, now the Airbus Group, put organizational intelligence at the heart of the competitive intelligence approach when he wrote:

“What makes the exercise of the conduct of the company and thus the decision more and more difficult is that its scope has changed dimensions: globalization of the markets, multiplication and diversity of the number of actors, multiplication of the constraints, whose speed of events and the required reactivity are unprecedented. The scale is such that their evolution can no longer be mastered in traditional organizations.” [MAR 94a]

He concluded by decreeing the innovative “urgency” and need for a profound revision of our modes of reflection, our methods of approaching situations, our methods of understanding situations, our behaviors and our organizations.

In the contemporary era of multiple disruptive breaks, our organizations are called upon to design the methods and tools of an organizational intelligence whose purpose is to respond to the unprecedented challenges created by the metamorphosis of the growth model through the digital revolution. More than ever, it is necessary to acquire the collective intelligence capacity of the new dynamics or else to “fade into the background” [TEN 09].

At the heart of complex organizations and markets, the ...