Organizational Intelligence
Organizational intelligence is the measure of an organization’s ability to comprehend and conclude knowledge relevant to its purpose. In simple terms it is the performance of a group or organization measured as a whole. For example, Basketball and Hockey require a high-degree of organizational intelligence in order for a team to win. The success of the team depends greatly on the team’s ability to work together, rather than based only on individual performance.
For software development, and most business organizations, the goal of an organization is to function at the highest levels of competency across all individuals. Unfortunately, a low organizational intelligence means that an organization is only as smart as the combined incompetence of all individuals. The net effect is that simple problems are harder for the organization to solve than they would be for a single individual.
Consider the following overly simplified skill summary:
In this situation, there are three developers and a single project manager. Of the three developers, one is a database developer, one an application developer and the other a WEB/UI developer. This represents a fairly standard cross-functional team, though greatly simplified.
In order to achieve the goal this group must perform at their combined strengths. This creates a positive emergent behavior where the group dynamic is able to achieve something that no one individual on the team could perform. This is a case of positive emergence and assumes a well-functioning team with a high degree of organizational intelligence:
On the other hand, the team could be functioning in an overly competitive or chaotic manner leading to a negative emergent behavior where the group dynamic is only as competent as the combined incompetence of all individuals:
This type of scenario is fairly common in software development and engineering. Concepts such as Analysis Paralysis, Design by Committee, and Feature Creep usually result in a low organization intelligence with a negative emergent behavior.
Emergent Behavior is the result of simple entities forming more complex behaviors as a collective. The complex behavior of the group is not a property of any single entity. Group/Organization behavior is often emergent, not the fault or credit of any one individual but the dynamic formed by the group itself.
Typically smaller teams like the one in the charts perform more on the positive side than the negative. However, as teams scale the challenges quickly become less about specific skill sets but instead more about understanding and exploiting the emergent behavior of the organization in order to achieve the desired business goals.
Consider the overly simplified version:
The individuals possess the correct skills necessary to achieve the goals of the organization and ideally will surpass those goals through a positive emergent behavior of team. On the other hand, the areas of incompetence are drastic enough that given a negative emergent behavior the team will surely fail despite individual efforts to the contrary.