Intelligence analysis takes place at multiple levels within an organization. The three most common are strategic, tactical, and operational. These match the decision location and decision-maker components. Strategic Intelligence Analysis…
The first questions any analyst must answer are “Who are my analysis customers?” and “What are their critical needs?” These can sometimes be difficult to answer, especially if the customers…
competitive intelligence-driven organizations and members of the analytical community face many fresh challenges. Success will be determined, at least in part, by how well these individuals and functions manage their…
Excellent analysis is the key to successful insights and/or intelligence and can provide high-value strategic decision support capability in contemporary enterprises. Intelligence about customers, competitors, potential partners, suppliers, and other…
Observation, imagination, and configuration are the key tools of business design . The first of the three is observation—deep, careful, open-minded observation. Since design thinkers are looking for new insights…
Discovering mysteries starts within universities, government-funded labs, and other not-for-profit entities. Research professors spend their entire careers staring into the mysteries of their particular field. Most of their work is…
Research In Motion (RIM) makers of the ubiquitous BlackBerry is a company with a market value of as much as $84 billion on the design, manufacture, and marketing of wireless communications…
Both reliability and validity are important for an organization. Without validity, an organization has little chance of moving knowledge across the funnel. Without reliability, an organization will struggle to exploit…
A reliable system can generate tremendous time savings; once designed, it eliminates the need for subjective and thoughtful analysis by an expensive and time-pressed manager or professional. Hence the appeal…
In corporations, to prove something means to look at the past and apply one of two forms of logic—inductive or deductive—to produce a declaration that something is or is not…
Bigger, more complex companies demand new tools to run and manage them. Indeed, improved technology and statistical-control tools have given rise to new management approaches that make even mega-institutions viable.…
Stephen Scherer, from Toronto’s world-renowned Hospital for Sick Children. Dr. Scherer, it turns out, is one of world’s leading researchers into autism, or to be more precise, into autism spectrum…
But what if you are not a CEO? Worse, what if the CEO you work for doesn’t have the first clue about the importance of design thinking and the need…
Without committed leadership, no business can realize the structural, process, and cultural adjustments needed to become a design-thinking organization. Given the enticing short-term financial rewards of reliability, most organizations will…
Very few companies balance exploration and exploitation by continuously looking back up the knowledge funnel to the next salient mystery (or back to the original mystery) and driving across the…
The business that remains at one stage in the knowledge funnel fails to capitalize on the option created when knowledge is advanced quickly through the funnel. It misses the opportunity…
Organization that creates value across the knowledge funnel—requires two very different activities: moving across the knowledge stages of the funnel from mystery to heuristic and heuristic to algorithm and operating…
The McDonald’s story illustrates important elements of the dynamics of the march of knowledge from mystery to heuristic to algorithm: the paring away of information and the simplification of the…
Over the course of time, phenomena enter our collective consciousness as mysteries—things in our environment that excite our curiosity but elude our understanding. The mystery of what we now know…
The model for value creation requires a balance—or more accurately a reconciliation—between two prevailing points of view on business today. One school of thought, put forward by some of the…