DC94: From Organisational Data to Organisational Intelligence
Updated: Sep 10
This article from my new book: Hyphoria: Organisational Intelligence and was first published in full here: https://deeperchange.substack.com/p/dc94-from-organisational-data-to
An error is the more dangerous in proportion to the degree of truth which it contains. - Henri-Frédéric Amiel
It opens with a composite story. The events and organisational dynamics are real, but details from several organisations have been combined and altered to protect the people involved.
The signal everyone possessed
The customer, Sophie, did not begin with a complaint. She began by trying to solve a problem.
For three weeks, she had been attempting to make a relatively simple change to a service her business depended upon. The website told her the change could be completed online. The online process failed at the final step. The contact centre told her it belonged with the account team. The account team believed it was an operations issue. Operations could see that something was wrong, but the case had arrived without the history they needed to understand it.
Each interaction made sense from the perspective of the person handling it. Each person followed the process available to them. Nobody was careless. Nobody set out to make the customer’s life difficult.
Yet Sophie experienced one organisation.
By the time she reached someone who understood the whole story, she was no longer asking for a small change to the account. She was questioning whether she could trust the company with the rest of her business.
The person who finally spoke to her, let us call her Maya, recognised the pattern immediately. She had heard versions of it before. Customers entered through different channels, but the underlying experience was always consistent: a problem crossed a functional boundary, its context fell away, and every team treated the fragment that arrived as a complete representation of the problem.
Maya raised it with her manager. Her manager agreed it mattered and included it in the weekly service report. But a story about trust, fragmentation and accumulating frustration had to be translated into something the reporting system could hold. It became a case category. The customer’s three weeks became an ageing measure. The repeated transfers became a handling failure. The threat to the wider relationship became one line in a comment field.
Sound familiar? The organisation translates information into structures it can understand.
Nothing in the report was false. Yet the meaning had already begun to disappear.
Elsewhere, the digital team were seeing an unusual drop-off at the final stage of the online journey. The contact centre was seeing repeat calls. Operations were seeing incomplete requests arriving through the wrong queue. Account managers were seeing that a small number of important customers had become harder to engage, and Finance were seeing a gradual increase in the cost to serve this customer group.
The organisation possessed the evidence. It simply did not possess it together.
At the same time, a decision was travelling in the opposite direction.
Senior leaders were under pressure to reduce operating costs. The initial intention was sensible: remove avoidable work, simplify the customer journey and release capacity for higher-value service. As the decision moved down through budgets, targets and local plans, its meaning changed. A strategic intention to eliminate waste became a requirement for reducing headcount. A desire to simplify the service became a target to shorten calls. A commitment to improve digital access became pressure to move more customers out of human channels, including those whose problems the digital service could not yet resolve.
I have seen this time and time again.
The customer’s experience moved upwards and lost its meaning. The leadership decision moved downwards and lost its intent.
The two forms of distortion met in Operations.
Teams were asked to handle calls faster just as customers needed more help navigating the broken journey. Experienced staff had less time to investigate cases just as the connections between cases became more important. The indicators remained reassuring for a while: average handling time improved, digital adoption increased, and staffing costs fell. The measures selected to represent success were moving in the expected direction.
The customer relationship was moving in the other direction.
Months later, several customers reduced their business. The loss appeared in a commercial report as a retention problem. A new initiative was launched to improve account management. The earlier service evidence, the assumptions behind the cost decision and the later commercial consequence were never brought back together. The organisation responded to the outcome as though it were a new event.
This is what an organisation can look like when it is full of information but short of intelligence.
Information is not intelligence
Most large organisations are not suffering from a simple shortage of data. They have dashboards, surveys, customer research, engagement results, operational reports, financial models, risk systems, project updates, chat channels, documents, meeting recordings and an expanding residue of digital work. I’ve spent a good deal of time building some of these over the years.
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