Ouch!

It would not be unreasonable to argue that paying attention is key to survival. Trekking across the Serengeti listening to electronic dance music whilst doomscrolling social media is unlikely to end well. Realising that you are in a dangerous situation only after a hyena has taken ownership of one of your calf muscles leaves you with little room for manoeuvre.

Living systems sense in order to stay in the game long enough to reproduce and in some cases rear their young. The ability to sense what is happening in your environment, decide what to do based on the incoming data and then act promptly is how I would describe being intelligent.

Nonsense

Great decision making or a disposition towards action count for nothing if you do not understand what is happening in your environment or market. Sensing is our most critical survival mechanism. Organisations should similarly get their sensing act together if they hope to navigate an increasingly hostile and unknowable world. Adaptation is key to survival, and sensing is a precursor to adapting.

Here are ten ways your organisation can improve its ability to sense and thus its ability to remain a viable enterprise:

1. Customer feedback loops

Customers behaviour is a strong indicator of whether your product or service no longer meets their needs. Tools like NPS (Net Promoter Score), post-interaction surveys, product reviews, and customer service transcripts offer a rich stream of data—if organisations are prepared to listen and act in real time.

2. Social listening and sentiment analysis

Social media platforms are vast sensing environments. With the right tools, emerging issues, shifting sentiments, and societal undercurrents are trackable. Social media provides the means to monitor brand perception and competitor behaviour in real-time.

Internally, employee engagement tools enable organisations to sense early signs of system / cultural problems.

3. Frontline intelligence

Too often, the most valuable insights go unnoticed because they reside with the employees closest to the action—customer service agents, sales reps, field engineers. Creating a culture and system where these signals can flow inwards is critical to building a responsive organisation. Otherwise product development is flying blind.

Front line staff, particularly those involved in sales, tend to hoard their intelligence and actively avoid institutionalising it, ie adding it to the CRM system. Creating incentives to share valuable market intelligence is a win for everyone.

4. Competitive intelligence

Tracking competitor activity, including job postings, press releases, patents, product launches, and M&A activity, can reveal emerging trends and shifts in the strategic landscape. ‘Google alerts’ simplifies this process.

5. Ecosystem and supply chain sensing

Suppliers, partners, and distributors are often exposed to disruption or innovation before it affects your organisation directly. Smart organisations develop sensing relationships across the value chain and beyond.

Smart ecosystems will pool will seek to protect all stakeholders. So developing a real-time worldview for the ecosystem has advantages over simply developing a worldview just for your organisation.

6. Regulatory and policy monitoring

New legislation and shifts in public policy can radically alter operating conditions. Organisations must maintain an active watch on global, national, and sector-specific policy landscapes—often via expert networks or AI-enabled regulatory tech platforms.

Sector-specific conferences and trade press are sensing tools. Trade associations typically identify early warning signals of such changes to its members. Thus giving you more time to decide and respond.

7. Electronic sensors and IoT

In physical environments, factories, buildings, cities and vehicles, the rise of electronic sensors and Internet of Things (IoT) devices is revolutionising environmental sensing. In smart buildings, sensors detect occupancy, air quality, and energy use to optimise conditions and flag anomalies. In the automotive sector, embedded sensors monitor everything from tyre pressure to driver fatigue, feeding data back to the manufacturer for predictive maintenance, R&D and safety enhancements.

So if sensor technology can improve your offerings, you would be wise to embrace it. Such data will give you a keen sense of what features your customers value.

8. AI and anomaly detection

AI can scan vast internal and external data sets to detect subtle changes in behaviour or performance, from employee engagement, customer churn signals through to supply chain bottlenecks. The ability to process weak signals, before they become loud problems, is a hallmark of intelligent systems.

And of course, weak signals may be indicative of emerging game changing opportunities and thus enable first mover advantage. But it requires your organisation to get its data management act together. AI that drinks from a data cesspit rather than a pristine data lake is like having a malicious confidante.

9. Talent market signals

Changes in hiring trends, employee engagement and attrition often signal deeper structural shifts. Observing these patterns internally and across the sector can highlight strategic misalignments or new opportunities.

10. The headlines

Disruptions come in all shapes and sizes, ranging from geopolitical through to environmental. In an increasingly connected world, if they make the mainstream news headlines, then there is a fair chance that the tsunami is coming your way.

A nearby war or a pandemic will present both opportunities and threats. Whilst it might be a shame to miss out on opportunities, failure to spot threats might have existential consequences. When your strategic intentions start to deviate from reality, it is best to pay attention to the latter.

Sensing isn’t knowing

Being aware of your environment is not in itself enough to guarantee survival. A threat is not a threat until you decide that it is. Simply noticing this rapidly approaching large object is not enough. Again, it is the associated decisions and actions you take in the light of how your environment is changing that will determine whether you stay in play.

Nonetheless, effective sensing is job number one for all organisations. And for all living systems, including you.

This article first appeared in my LinkedIn Intelligent Organisation newsletter.