Situational Intelligence

. Share the most important insights you have gathered exploring the concepts of situational intelligence and habit.

Situational Intelligence

Situational intelligence can be defined differently in different contexts. In the military, it relates to the understanding of various conditions related to a mission or an event. In businesses, it pertains to helping business users discover problem situations and respond to them as quickly and accurately as possible. It typically involves alerting business to problems and the root cause and informs decision makers the best way to resolve them.

In the context of leadership and coaching, situational intelligence is about knowing what to do and how to coach someone in various situations in complex organizations. It starts off in analyzing the situations by understanding how people think and are motivated in different situations. With that, appropriate actions can be taken to achieve certain objectives, i.e. resolving a problem, improving business KPIs. This approach provides a framework to help leaders identify the different strategic choices, identify intangible risks and enable them to forecast the full implications in alternative paths to action.

In order to apply situational intelligence, there has to be an understanding of the principles on which it is based upon. Firstly, the situation is all there is. Basically this means, organization life is a series of connected stories. Each story starts as a situation, evolves and ends as a situation. Strategy is a form of situational development. The dynamics of each situation is based on human motivation.

Each situation consists of a group of affiliated people in and around an organization, each motivated towards some personal better future. The group usually has common goals (but not necessary), and each member performing different tasks to achieve them. Each member has different styles of working and perceptions of the world.

Policy defines group...