Abstract
The paper describes how Harvard Business School's Knowledge and Library Services (KLS) leveraged the collective knowledge of its employees in formulating, implementing, and evaluating strategy. The organisation was faced with major, disruptive changes in its environment and needed the diverse knowledge and full engagement of all employees to make a series of strategic shifts. The shifts included integrating KLS products and services with the Harvard Business School research and course development process, developing global scope in information resources and expertise, and trading its role as the guardian of books and buildings for the organiser of the School's priority information assets. In order to achieve that, KLS launched the Environmental Scan Program, relying on employees' insights aggregated through social tagging, trend analysis and internal prediction markets tracking emerging trends. KLS also created processes for the collective assessment of strategy and a faster way of turning ideas into new products and services. The paper concludes with an assessment of the approach, pointing to a difficult balance between emergent and collective dimensions of strategy process with its formal, structured facets.
Highlights
The following paper describes how an organization, Harvard Business School’s Knowledge and Library Services (KLS), employed “collective intelligence,” that is, the aggregate knowledge formed from diverse individual judgments, insights, opinions, and experiences in formulating, implementing, and evaluating strategy
The new approach required the development of a collective intelligence process and an opportunity management process
If resources are required from more than two units, change requests can be presented any week to the Senior Management Team as part of the Opportunity Management process
Summary
The following paper describes how an organization, Harvard Business School’s Knowledge and Library Services (KLS), employed “collective intelligence,” that is, the aggregate knowledge formed from diverse individual judgments, insights, opinions, and experiences in formulating, implementing, and evaluating strategy. The approach builds on the work on Future Mapping, the theoretical foundation of Sense Making as first proposed by Karl Weick, the application of it to knowledge management as published by Chun Wei Choo and David Snowden, a review of strategy practice identified in the literature, and project work previously conducted by the authors in federal governments, high technology companies, think tanks, international organizations, and public service organizations. The paper concludes with an assessment of the approach’s successes and proposed improvements
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