Your business is a brain
And digitising knowledge can make it smarter, say expertsHere’s an often overlooked truth: understanding the individual knowledge of your employees and experiences and connecting these across your organisation can supercharge your organisational brain.
Benefits include everything from increased sales performance, improved customer satisfaction and greater employee engagement.
As with the human brain, the connections in the organisational brain can be unclear, underused and often inhibited. Nick Petrie at the Centre for Creative Leadership takes this further by arguing that the more the VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguity) an environment, the more it requires higher levels of complex adaptive thinking – ie “ a bigger brain” – capable of handling this more chaotic world.
The human brain can rewire itself to echo the positive behaviours seen in others. The jargon for this is ‘neuroplasticity’. And like the human brain, the organisational brain is constantly moving connections around, reassigning their roles and altering their purpose. A healthy organisation should excel at this level of plasticity.
However, in organisations we often miss this opportunity and further confuse it by only knowing a fraction of what each person can do and where they will be most effective when we move them.
No wonder McKinsey and Harvard have independently concluded that collaboration (thinking together and/or deciding together) could drive 20-25% productivity gains. Mobilising this may be the central challenge of today’s organisations.
Brain gain
So how can we optimise the organisational brain? In this instance, simply ‘drinking more water’ probably won’t be enough.
Our suggestion is to start with the three Cs: collect, connect and create.
To produce shared wisdom, one must first collect the wisdom (not just ‘facts’ but insight, expertise, experience, practice, innovations, motivation, engagement) from across the organisation.
Connect the wisdom holders to each other, and from that create the unique and powerful solutions that can only arise from combined wisdom.
This is best accomplished via a process of digitisation. But such digitisation happens only sporadically in most organisations.
Some data is captured during hire, but most is left on the cutting room floor. Information is split almost from the moment a candidate is contacted, splitting external sources (such as LinkedIn and social media) and internal record keeping (such as CVs and interview notes).
Performance management discussions, development plans, timesheets, payroll, calendars and even email are all rich sources of information. But they’re rarely catalogued and indexed, so there are few easy ways of accessing this information.
Suggested solutions
Are there technological solutions? Perhaps. ProFinda.com is one tool that codifies knowledge so it can enable an expertise exchange to match talent in real time.
Other interesting tools and systems that begin to address this challenge are emerging: WhoKnows, for example, gathers insight from your staff’s web browser and Everwise gathers insight to match up mentors and mentees.
If as Petrie and others argue, the future of leadership will be defined by the capacity to learn, then for these expanders of organisational wisdom the timing couldn’t be better.
About the authors
