behavioural intelligence

Changing People's Behaviour and Company Culture - The Executive's Dilemma

Every Executive knows the importance of driving Corporate change and that rapidly driving sustainable change can be hard work.

Ask any Executive "what's your company's most precious asset?" and their response will be "our people". Ask the same Executive "what's the primary source of your competitive advantage?" and the response will be "our unique corporate culture".

Probe a little deeper and it becomes clear that Executives have very few tools at their disposal to enable them to directly shape human behaviour and company culture.

As a result, most organisations find the majority of their most valued asset (their people) less than "engaged".

This dynamic is illustrated through research from the Gallup Group conducted in a 2007 Gallup Survey on US worker attitudes, performance and productivity. The research drew from over 1 million surveys covering 3 Decades of actionable insight, 4.51 million employees, 422,522 workgroups, 332 organizations, 12 major industries, 7 major world regions and 112 countries.

The results showed that only 26% of employees were engaged in their work with the remainder either not-engaged or worse still, actively disengaged.¹



What is clear from the research is more can be done to find smarter ways of engaging employees in their work.

Intilecta believe Behavioural Intelligence represents one of the new ways in driving and sustaining corporate change.

The Learning Process

At the heart of Behavioural Intelligence is a deep understanding of the way humans learn and apply that learning to drive action. Over time, our understanding of the way the human brain works has evolved and many models and frameworks exist to describe our cognitive faculties.

Intilecta's abstraction of this body of knowledge is described in simple terms by the "human learning process". This process forms the basis for the way employees and managers work and behave in organisations. It describes how today’s information workers behave in their work through their ability to transform insight into action. It is one's ability to efficiently step through the learning process stages, gain knowledge and learning and then reapply that learning through every process iteration, that results in the learning organisation.

Learning organizations are those that become smarter and smarter as they grow and apply their body of learned knowledge and translate it into competitive advantage.

Intilecta's abstraction of the human learning process consists of five key stages

• Search: Specifying subsets of data sources from a larger set of data sources
• Analyse: Manipulating, slicing, dicing, massaging data and adding context to make sense to transform the data into information
• Interpret: Viewing the information in context to develop options and recommendations for a decision
• Decide: Making a decision based on interpreted information and context
• Action: Undertaking activities to execute a decision

Understanding how organizations support their employees in each stage of the learning cycle provides a unique view of employee efficiency.

With an myriad of data to choose from and a complex array of systems holding different versions of the truth, employees in large organisations spend the majority of their time on the first three stages of the learning process. Sifting through various versions of spreadsheets and reports, authored by different people has created a culture of mistrust. We have all been in situations where key meetings have broken down because attendees cannot agree on the data.

This mistrust generates a cotton industry inside organizations of employees going 'back to source', to satisfy their own curiosity as to the authenticity of the data. Only then can they step through the remaining stages of the learning cycle to drive business value.

Further, recent changes to corporate governance, compliance and documentation have resulted in further inefficiencies in the learning cycle. Key information workers such as the sales force are today 'bogged down' in bureaucracy and red tape (whilst improved corporate governance is critical in organisations today, compliance processes can be implemented to actually enhance the learning process rather than detract from it).

Intilecta believe in minimising the time people spend on the first three stages of the learning process and improving the quality of decision making by putting the collective knowledge of the organisation's structured information assets into the hands of every employee in a smart, simple and integrated way.

Behavioural Intelligence changes an employee's learning cycle time profile.