In short

The Intelligent Organisation is a pragmatic think tank exploring how organisations built for more 'innocent times' can develop the intelligence required to remain viable in an increasingly unknowable world.

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The world organisations were built for no longer exists

For much of the modern era, organisations were designed for a relatively stable world.

Change was episodic. The future was uncertain, but predictable enough to plan for. In that context, it made sense to optimise for efficiency, centralise decision-making, and treat leadership as a role held by a small number of individuals.

 

That organisational logic worked for a long time.
 

Until it didn’t.

 

Disruption is now the operating condition

Technological acceleration, geopolitical instability, social change, and tightly coupled global systems have pushed organisations into unprecedented levels of uncertainty.

 

However, most organisations still operate as if the future is predictable. They forecast, and plan accordingly, treating management as an exercise in controlling inputs and processes to deliver predefined outputs.

 

As continuous disruption becomes the backdrop to both business and society, this inert, linear thinking leads organisations to act in ways that increasingly diverge from reality.

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Why familiar approaches are failing

As uncertainty rises, three patterns consistently appear.

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First, individual cognition is overwhelmed. Leaders and experts are expected to make sense of complexity that no individual can fully absorb. Decision bottlenecks form, but not because of poor leadership, but because the system relies on individual sense-making that no longer scales.

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Second, optimisation creates brittleness. Efficiency removes slack, and tightly coupled processes improve short-term performance, but they also reduce the organisation’s ability to absorb shocks or respond quickly when conditions change.

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Third, organisations designed as machines struggle when outcomes can’t be predicted in advance. Plan–execute models assume stability. When that assumption fails, execution becomes a liability rather than a strength.

 

What often appears as leadership failure, staff challenges, execution issues, or innovation problems is, in reality, a design mismatch. The organisation is no longer fit for the environment it is operating in.

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From certain to adaptive

In conditions of sustained uncertainty, organisational viability depends less on prediction and more on real-time sensing, decision-making, acting, and, over time,  adaptation.

 

These capabilities cannot sit in a single role, a central team, or a static plan. They must be embedded in the organisation itself in respect of how:

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• Information flows

• Decisions are made

• Action is coordinated across the system.

 

This represents a fundamental shift in how organisations must be understood and designed.

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The Intelligent Organisation

The Intelligent Organisation describes organisations designed to sense what matters, decide coherently and act effectively in real-time under conditions of increasing uncertainty.

 

It is not a model to adopt or a framework to implement. It is a way of describing how organisations are having to function in order to remain viable in an increasingly unknowable world.

 

This site exists to explore that shift, in particular what it means for leadership, cognition (people and technology), innovation, and value creation.

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Origins

The Intelligent Organisation is based on the work of Ade McCormack, a former technologist, FT columnist and independent advisor with over four decades of experience working in over forty countries at the intersection of technology, leadership, and organisational change.

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Prior to evolving into the Intelligent Organisation, this think tank was initially known as the Intelligent Leadership Hub and then the Adaptive Edge Initiative. This reflects our exploratory journey in respect of how do we develop organisations fit for an unknowable world.

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More broadly, the Intelligent Organisation exists as a space to explore this independently, free from the constraints of programmes, products or fashionable interventions.​​

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Read the Intelligent Organisation Manifesto to deepen your understanding of how we define an Intelligent Organisation.