Organizational Intelligence - Does Size Matter?

On a Linked-In group discussion (CBDI Forum), Richard Gilyead asked some excellent questions about organizational intelligence, and I'm going to post an edited and expanded version of the discussion here.

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Richard started by asking

Does size matter? Do organisations with "thin skin" have a better ability to sense and respond? Is it inevitable that organisations will develop "thicker skins" as they grow?

Of course it has long been a popular idea that large organizations should behave like small organizations, while small organizations have problems of their own. I believe we can use organizational intelligence as a "lens" to attain a more precise understanding of some of the things that get lost as an organization gets larger, and use this lens to try and preserve and restore these elements. Meanwhile, a small organization is more dependent than a larger one on the knowledge and intelligence of its business partners and other members of its ecosystem, and it is useful to pay explicit attention to these aspects of its external relationships.

Richard then asked a follow-up question

What aspects of cohesion should be emphasised to preserve small organisation benefits as they grow? 

I think this should be a vital question for enterprise architecture (even though enterprise architects mostly work in large organizations, it's surely never to late to ask it), and I don't think there is a one-size-fits-all answer.

An organization makes a strategic choice (whether consciously or unconsciously) about the kind of "structural coupling" that matters. For example, a high-tech start-up company may be physically located near a university campus, and the founders have good personal relationships with researchers at the university. This will help the organization remain close to technological trends, but possibly at the expense of developing a broader understanding of market opportunities. At some stage the venture capitalists may persuade them to move their head office closer to the customers and/or to bring in new executives whose personal network faces in a different direction. Meanwhile, a different company might be dominated by supply chain and distribution issues, and for that company it will be these relationships that are most strategically significant.

The point is that this "structural coupling" affects many aspects of organizational intelligence: the events and trends that the organization can respond to, knowledge flows, innovation and organizational change. Which brings us back to the question of stability - where are the fixed points around which organizational systems (including formal information systems and services) can be built, and where are the points where flexibility is required. This is not a new question, but the organizational intelligence "lens" provides a new way of thinking strategically about the implications here.

Model-Driven Architecture?

@greblhad suggests building Lego models as a technique for enterprise architecture: "If your #entarch can not be illustrated in 3D using LEGO then you have a problem".

The reason Lego cannot reliably express architecture is because just looking at the model doesn't tell us which elements are architecturally significant. For example, if a particular Lego model has a row of small bricks over the window instead of larger ones, and uses green bricks for the base, how can we know whether the architect actually specified this detail, or whether the architect left these details unspecified and the person building the model simply used the bricks that were available? In other words, the same physical model could have been produced by two different architectures: one including the instruction "Use small bricks over the window and green bricks for the base", and one including the instruction "Don't buy more bricks if you don't have to". (The latter being derived from one of the popular architectural principles that supposedly drive architectural practice.) Note that in this example, the two possible instructions are at two different logical levels, and the illustration may mislead us about the architect's real intentions. For a different example, see my post What if architects designed our communities?

At its best, LEGO (even with people figures, as suggested by @tetradian) shows a momentary instantiation of an architecture, and is therefore at the wrong level of abstraction.

I accept that we are not talking about using Lego models as a specification tool. But illustration only works if you know what is being illustrated, as Wittgenstein pointed out (Philosophical Investigations). Furthermore, the representational nature of the model may be problematic. If Lego only has a limited palette of colours, do we interpret green to mean any shade of green, or that particular shade? Does the use of green bricks in the model indicate the use of green bricks in the planned structure, or does it have some other meaning, for example indicating the need for specially treated bricks? And so on.

@greblhad was inspired by LEGO's new "product", called LEGO® Serious Play®. Perhaps enterprise architecture needs creative play as well as rigorous specification, but it would be surprising if the same tools and methods supported both.

Organizational Intelligence - The Report

I have just sent off a version of my report on Organizational Intelligence to the publishers, having spent most of yesterday stripping out loads of material that was (a) a distraction from the main argument (b) underdeveloped and or (c) probably irrelevant. Two people thought that examples from Afghanistan weren't very helpful, and I've also reduced the amount of anecdotal material taken from Malcolm Gladwell's latest book.

As it happens, Gladwell draws heavily on Harold Wilensky's 1967 book on Organizational Intelligence, which I only managed to get a library copy of recently. Wilensky is okay, but my framework for OI derives from some Japanese work from the late 1980s, which was presented at a conference I attended in Paris in 1990. I presented a version of this framework in my 2001 book on the Component-Based Business, and I've been using it more recently as an architectural framework for a whole load of business and technology initiatives, including Enterprise 2.0.

There are several more recent books with the phrase "organizational intelligence" in the title. I haven't read all of them yet, and I'm not promising I ever will, but I've just requested another batch of them from the library. Guessing from the titles and subtitles, some of them appear to regard organizational intelligence as little more than Knowledge Management 2.0, but I'm hoping to find some useful material and ideas anyway.