A recurring recent phrase has been whether or not particular organisations appear to be ‘intelligent organisations’. By this people seem to mean that such organisations tend to:

• see various activities as facets of the same overall drive for change (cf: seeing themselves as taking part in a number of separate, disconnected initiatives)
  
  
• selectively choose, from a range of opportunities, those things that will really move things forward (cf: uncritically scrabble for every possible bit of activity)
  
  
• do more than their clear core business – but only a bit more, and in ways that add to securing planned outcomes (cf: trying to do lots of new activity and failing at what they are primarily there to do)
  
  
• drill down into what they do in order to strip out insights, and pass this repackaged learning round as transferable ‘knowledge’ (cf: passing around lots of undigested and self-promoting non-transferable ‘information’)
  
  
• creatively ‘stitch together’ fresh understandings from a variety of people, drawing both on experience and on new thinking (cf: repeated linear thinking that what needs to be done is whatever has usually been done)
  
  
• focus on outcomes, then flexibly deploy activities and resources to make most progress (cf: focus on setting processes running and not think too much about impact)
  
  
• think flexibly about ‘function’ and ‘tasks’ and not ‘organisation’ (cf: putting all the energy into ‘restructuring’, ‘control’ and ‘ownership’)