The intelligent organisation is the AEI’s hypothesis as to how organisations need to evolve to navigate an increasingly uncertain future. Repeated rounds of cost cutting, squeezing the staff or sprinkling anachronistic business models with ‘tech pixie dust’ is not going to cut it. 

Intelligent organisations behave like living systems. Intelligent means the ability to stay alive / stay in the game. Fundamentally this means continually adapting to the environment. Intelligent organisations thus sense, decide and act in real-time.

 

This hypothesis has evolved from Ade McCormack’s work on exploring how living systems adapt to their, typically harsh, environments.

 

This matters because today most organisations are far from intelligent. Many are driven by industrial era principles resulting in inert and unresponsive ‘process factories’. For the industrial model to function effectively it requires a steady state environment, ie a predictable world. Unfortunately, this is no longer the case and so a new approach is required.