Often swamped with data and operating on a global 24-hour business clock, businesses can find it a challenge keeping their strategic plans current. This is largely due to the influences of changing markets, customers’ demands, regulations, technology, and business intelligence. More than ever, the survival of a business, not just its growth, is at risk. Strategic plans will quickly become outdated unless a business develops the culture and the skills that support the adaptive and creative planning necessary to meet these new forces.

Knowledge is the lifeblood of an enterprise

What we previously knew as the tactical planning horizon is the new strategic planning horizon. The speed and complexity of information used for planning doubles every two years. And the people and knowledge a business needs for planning are more widely spread, both organisationally and geographically, than ever before. As a result, all parts of a business face restructuring. Executives and planners must expand their ability to anticipate business changes and respond instantly.

These skills are the domain of people not technology

Strategic planners need to think at an enterprise level to view the scope of a business. But the skills and breadth of knowledge a business needs are rarely concentrated in a few people. In truth, businesses need to harness the strengths of many people so the results are effective, timely and coherent.

Collective intelligence can bring about improvements in team performance

Collective intelligence is the combined cognitive capacity of an organisation – the imagination, experience and knowledge that exist in its individual members. Two core principles govern access to this capacity.

The first principle is that just as individual thinking is based on individual questions, team thinking bases itself on collective questioning about the project at hand. These team-generated questions allow diverse information to come together as organisational intelligence.

The second principle is a communication environment that invites broad participation. Such an environment goes beyond linking nodes in a network because it needs to integrate value based rules that build increased insight and creativity into the way business shares information.

Using collective intelligence increases team alignment and coherence

Knowing how to work with shared questions brings people into closer alignment with a team’s common purpose and goals. Organisations using questions in this way display the ability to create rapidly the foundations necessary to develop strategic plans. Using shared questions improves the clarity and speed of communications, thus providing better ideas, faster.

Engaging collective intelligence creates a shared responsibility to oversee the business. Eventual success is shared throughout the business: it is no longer the scope of a few individuals. It also promotes much needed buy-in to a plan because everyone contributes to developing it.

Collective intelligence makes possible a new model of strategic planning

The intelligence needed for planning exists across the organisation. Smart organisations know where that intelligence sits both geographically and organisationally. Identifying this knowledge and creating the communications networks to link it up is critical to success. By integrating social networking principles, an internal private planning network (IPPN) can provide immediate access to all this expertise.

To be effective, planning, like thinking in general, must be question driven. Questions are effective tools for organising and coordinating strategic planning and help build a map of the enterprise architecture behind the plan. Combined with the IPPN, areas of the plan needing work are instantly visible to the planners.

Immediate steps an organisation can take using collective intelligence include:

• adopting a question-driven approach to planning
• identifying and communicating the questions that need answering
• employing a communications protocol which allows for many and varied contributions
• using a value based approach to coordinate the ideas that inevitably emerge

Any strategic plan can fail if the motives and aims of the organisation’s members are not mutually understood and aligned. This understanding and alignment is achievable by drawing on your organisation’s collective intelligence and putting it to work.