What are “intelligent behaviors”? Depends on the situation, of course. Intelligent behaviors align to the kind of situation you find yourself in. Known Knowns yield to behaviors that control and influence. Unknown Unknowns demand careful navigation and adaptation.
Three kinds of situations, three kinds of intelligent behaviors
The three types of situations demand different kinds of intelligent behaviors.
- Known Knowns are handled with foreknowledge and systematic precision. Your experts already know the best way they deal with these everyday situations. Add evaluation and adaptation (like A/B compare) and you’re on the path of continuous improvement. Such process-adherence makes it easy for you to implement systems, and the systems rapidly pay for themselves by driving improvements. This nice ROI behavior leads to silo system proliferation, because you can design a system that works with focus on a limited scope to generate ROI, often fast and easily, because limited-scope systems are easier to implement, integrate, and use. The management style used here is to control and influence in a plan-execute-learn loop. These loops or virtuous cycles exist in many forms. The nature of the do/learn cycle is such that we can consider them as two nested workflows. Playbooks to handle the “do” cycles, and Evolvers to handle the learn cycles. The evolver runs a set of playbooks, and the combination is called a Decision Cycle. They underpin Procedural Intelligence, which includes diagnostics, predictive, prescriptive, execution-automation, and adaptive algorithms.
- Known Unknowns are the anticipated or foreseeable problems that your experts can tell you to watch out for. Build surveillance systems to funnel in data from the the usual sources that drive procedural intelligence. Add data-flows and procedures to watch for the known-unknown problems. The military calls these systems “C3I” which stands for Command, Control, Communications, and Intelligence. C3I encompasses the systems and processes used to collect, process, and disseminate information to enable effective command and control of military operations. C3I enables situation awareness and, from that, commanders are taught to improve their ability to prepare and react intelligently: we can label this as Situation Intelligence. The situation awareness is holistic and cross-silo, so it requires an enterprise data warehouse. The reverse is not true: a bunch of reports coming from an enterprise data warehouse need not, and usually do not, provide holistic situation awareness and C3I.
- Unknown Unknowns is where we deal with the unanticipated. This is the realm of fears, hopes, and noise; dragons, unicorns, and bullshit. A lot of management effort deals with the unknown-unknown situation, more so because most managers do not have access to the situation intelligence capabilities to handle known-unknowns. Sense-making, navigating and adapting effectively requires generating intelligence on-the-fly. Intelligence is generated from musing on reports, conversations, and discussions. We can call it Emergent Intelligence. It often emerges from conversations and collaborations. The effects of the unanticipated, if it’s relevant, will show up as inexplicable shifts in operations metrics. But shifts can take time to occur, and we often celebrate the great leaders who “see around corners” and anticipate events before they happen. This creates an incentive to act on hunches, ahead of the data. The emergent intelligence system harnesses tools of decision-making under uncertainty to help improve your chances.
To summarize: use Procedural Intelligence for Known Known situations, Situation Intelligence for Known Unknowns, and Emergent Intelligence to handle the Unknown Unknowns. Each kind of intelligence plays a role in each of the three kinds of situations, but their role-weightage varies.
Three kinds of situations, three types of intelligent systems
In the mind-map of Decision Intelligence we had introduced these three types of systems: Playbooks, Situation Awareness, and Conversational Intelligence. Each of the three types of systems are individually aligned for the three kinds of situations. The system design and functionality is different, but they work together to provide the palette of intelligent behaviors that organizations need. The enterprise data warehouse provides the data required for the intelligent systems.
Three types of systems intelligence
When organizations use these systems for decision intelligence the organization behaves with greater intelligence. The decision intelligence system becomes ever more capable. And the people who use and improve the decision intelligence system also display higher situation awareness, leadership, and intelligence. The intelligence of today’s organization lies mainly in its people’s minds. With intelligent systems, it becomes a hybrid of systems and people’s intelligence, able to continually improve and win. Expect that the way organizations work will also transform.
