Is Fear Holding Your Business Hostage?

When I started to explore the deeper issues of business intelligence one resounding element keep making its presence – logic. How do we define logic, and how do we manage logic as individuals or as part of a group?

This lead to a quest for understanding how organizations will evolve over the next 10 to 20 years as more advanced technology pervades the corporate realm.

If we look at the consumer market, it's intelligence has escalated rapidly through instant access to product information and through collaborative thinking. Whilst there have been those companies who have seized on this change to market their products through placement and viral marketing campaigns – the consumer is unforgiving when attempts are made to ‘fool’ them.

Yet in the business world we are likely fooling ourselves everyday by pretending we are innovative and adaptive. Yet the very element organizations today seek – is being strangled from within by their own structure and culture. Insight.

Insight demands an open, collaborative culture unbounded by bias and self preservation. Yet the very foundation upon which most long established companies operate today stifle insight at both the highest and lowest levels.

At the upper most level – the executive suite, personal agendas override the strategic imperative in egotistic power-plays. This is preventing the organization as a whole from understanding exactly what they are trying to achieve and gain insight into how operational level activities are either supporting the strategic imperative or preventing it.

At lower levels – employee ‘imagination’ and innovation are often not welcomed – even when apparently sought. Managers are often not sufficiently knowledgeable at how to reject new ideas without stifling further suggestions. Other managers take a more narcissist approach and deny the upward penetration of creativity in fear that their own intellect be challenged in attempting to explain or rationalize it. Time constraints are also a stop gate. Most higher level managers today are overworked and overburdened with new information. Any new ideas demand investigation and that further escalates the problem. Eventually employees just give up – they lose trust that the corporate value of innovation is nothing but empty words.

Many of these management blockades are fear-driven. Fear of failure, fear of not coping with the job, fear of being redundant, fear of not understanding new concepts. What has driven this fear is widely varying between individuals. But one common element is shared by all. Remove the fear from an organization and it will prosper. Removing the barriers to new concepts leads to new insight and new opportunities. For many, business intelligence helps organizations conquer fear, but providing a platform that can both stimulate creativity through its inductive logic, as well as validate scenarios using more deductive logic.

Sadly, most managers and gatekeepers of corporate intelligence do not sufficiently understand how business intelligence can be used.

©Gail La Grouw. To learn more about how you can challenge the current logic of your organization to reveal insight into how you can liberate the collective intelligence of all those associated with the organization, and channel it into predictive goldmines, get a copy of The Logical Organization here.

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