Workshop: Accelerating Decisions and Innovation

UPDATE: Unfortunately, this workshop has been cancelled. Stay tuned for future dates.

Richard Marrs and I will present a half-day workshop, "Accelerating Decisions and Innovation through Sense-Making" at the Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals' 2007 International Annual Conference and Exhibition. The meeting will be in New York City April 30-May 3.

Supporting better, faster decision-making is a major imperative for CI practice. Organizations in many industries and markets face more dynamic and complex environments than ever before, driven by accelerated change, globalized competition, unexpected technologies, complicated sociopolitical influences and disruptive business models.

Executives stress better, faster decision-making as the critical differentiator for competitive advantage and strategic impact through early identification of opportunities and threats, more effective learning and innovation, and less vulnerability to uncertainty. This workshop draws on insights from cognitive psychology and complexity science to reconsider how knowledge workers individually and collectively interact with their information environments and share their perceptions and opinions, with important implications for how to support CI customers.

Objectives

• Understand the cognitive and cultural dynamics of sense- and decision-making, and how to increase the bandwidth of organizational awareness
• Discover how to improve the flow of actionable intelligence by using existing characteristics and behaviors in your organization and networks
• Explore structures, practices and tools that support sense-making and leverage intellectual and information resources for better business outcomes

This workshop draws on insights from cognitive psychology and complexity science to reconsider how knowledge workers individually and collectively interact with their information environments and share their perceptions and opinions, with important implications for how to support CI customers. Research suggests that in real-time, real-world settings, neither executives nor experts really depend on the kinds of rational, deliberate analysis supported by disciplines such as competitive intelligence and market research or by technologies such as data mining and predictive modeling.

Because of these mistaken assumptions, many current technologies and business processes actually suppress rather than support evolved human mechanisms for real-time sensing and responding. Structured hierarchies prevent the social construction of organizational knowledge. Technologies and techniques designed to manage bandwidth instead constrict perception. Information overload, paralysis-by-analysis, costly mistakes and bad judgment are the inevitable result.

Instead, executives and experts rely on high-bandwidth sense-making, and internalized knowledge that often manifest as intuition or gut feelings. Such skills become increasingly important in emergent and uncertain conditions and need to be supported accordingly by cultivating, networking and leveraging all of your intellectual and information resources.

Sense-making happens at the levels of individuals, teams, organizations and communities. Knowledge, information and data are everywhere in business ecosystems, but the challenge of synthesizing fragmentary signals into actionable intelligence is really more about human cognition and organizational culture than business technologies and organizational structures. We’ll look at structures, practices and tools that support sense-making and lead to better business outcomes.