Why we need organisational sensing
The world is changing rapidly. Massive technological change is now accompanied by huge changes in climate and the natural environment leading to an unpredictable business and organisational context. This in turn means that organisations must be able to respond rapidly to new threats and opportunities if they are to remain effective and viable.
This is where organisational sensing is essential.
Organisational sensing is the use of sociotechnical inputs (software, digital sensors, human groups, and “weak signals”) to provide rich awareness of the internal and external business environment.
A bat using echolocation sensing to catch prey
In much the same way as many animals use senses to navigate, catch food, or avoid predators, we can design and evolve organisations to be able to sense their environment to respond more quickly and safely to external and internal events and changing dynamics.
I was fortunate to study Cybernetics at the University of Reading between 1996 and 1999. Cybernetics is the study of systems in every form, from computer systems to insect vision and motor control to planetary systems and organisations; I therefore tend to see the world in terms of systems-within-systems and the interplay of their dynamics.
During research for my book Team Topologies, I was thrilled to discover the work of people such as Dr Naomi Stanford, author of many leading books on organisation design. Naomi Stanford speaks about the need for “environmental scanning” as part of a healthy organisation’s modern capabilities, the act of sensing the environment around and within the organisation with an explicit expectation that the organisation will adjust to the new situation discovered by “scanning” (sensing).
With rich modern digital telemetry from IoT, Edge, and Cloud devices & services, organisations can arrange to have very rapid sensory input at the digital and analog-to-digital levels: soil moisture levels, stock prices, customer sentiments on social media, and live runtime performance of their software applications. Combining this digital sensing with human sensing around employee engagement, customer satisfaction, support desk calls, and so on can lead to a rich situational awareness that looks like magic to organisations stuck with assumptions that “things remain mostly the same”.
This intersection of human and digital sensory input provides organisations that want it with organisational sensing.
What’s next? Join us at SenseConf (senseconf.com) for insights into organisational sensing from organisations practising and succeeding in this space.
