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as they occur in and affect organizations and
other social complexes.
Intelligence and knowledge
It is sometimes worth differentiating between
the intelligence phase of knowledge and the end
state of knowledge, as when things are more
completely known (things are never known in
full!). This is the case when looking at sources
of intelligence (e.g. as in competitive intelligence),
and how they are exploited and managed,
and how they contribute to forming
knowledge. In practical terms much intelligence
gathering activity has to be accomplished
in order to locate, acquire and create
knowledge, therefore we need to be aware
and explicit about its contribution to knowledge.
An equation might be of the form:
Intelligence + knowledge (things already
known) = More valuable Knowledge
(note the distinction between the sense of
large K and small k). Or
Intelligence (potential knowledge)
+ knowledge (existing and known)
= More valuable Knowledge (large ‘K’)
Returning to the example of the spreadsheet,
we can say that intelligence is embedded in
the data plus information in the cells and the
matrix as a whole. But crucially it is only
realized as intelligence when an external perception
is brought to bear on it. The natural
intelligence of the perceiver’s mind is brought
to bear on it within their experience and
learning. It is similar to the case of the two
people reading the text above and drawing
different conclusions from it.
They draw different conclusions by virtue
of who they are, what they do, what they
already know, their past experience, their
future expectations, capacity to learn and so
on. It is all relativistic, probabilistic and fuzzy;
you may be more right or you may be less
wrong – it all depends. You may only know a
partial answer to this set, when some decisive
event occurs to assist interpretation.
A company’s failure to gain market share or
the misfortune to go bankrupt is severe
indeed, but absolute blame can or cannot be
laid on the state of knowledge possessed
before the damaging event. Lessons can be
learned from this; many businesspeople have
become more skilled entrepreneurs and managers
after a disaster, from which they have
found powers of recovery. On the other hand
there are many who do not experience this
learning: better knowledge management is
clearly what they might require. This rather
depressing example is not so gloomy as it
seems. It shows that knowledge is also positively
correlated with a capacity to learn.
Many knowledge management specialists
have come to talk about the ‘learning organization’;
a knowledge organization is (amongst
other things) a learning organization, which
manages to apply what it knows and learns
and which thus understands how to persistently
avoid catastrophes and to capitalize on
what it knows.
At the point of an act of reading by two
individuals, it would be fair to say that both
intelligent readings of the text might have
equal potential value. But we come close to a
definition of intelligence drawn from the text,
as well as acted upon, when the future
demonstrates that one reader put the perception
to better use than the other. A positive
outcome might be regarded as confirming the
value of the intelligence gained from a reading
of the text.
© 2004 Sandra Oliver for editorial matter and selection;
individual chapters, the contributors