Grandma, Grandpa, and Intelligence Thinking Patterns

 

Reality is changing in front of us. What was odd a year ago is now the new normal. Personal and group behavior has changed so is, the behavior of families and communities.

In this article, I intend to discuss the connection between Grandma, Grandpa, Intelligence Thinking Patterns, and all in between.

First, let me start with a non-fiction story:

There is this young normative family. Mother and father are both working on building their careers. Their two young children are in kinder-garden and elementary school, and life is smiling at them regardless of these Corona-Times. One day, one of the children woke up with a sore throat and a little fever. Mother, as she has done in the last two years, called her mother and asked her to keep an eye on her grandson while she and the father are at work. She expected Grandma would say “sure, bring him over.” But that day she said “well, I don’t know. can’t you find another arrangement?.” Mother stayed at home that day.

Reality is changing, and so is the family’s behavior. What used to be almost obvious turned out to be in question. The potential threat of a grandson to his grandma and grandpa has become tangible.

One might ask about the connection between this gloomy lovely story and Intelligence Thinking Patterns. I would remind that person that Intelligence is all about scouting our surroundings, identifying changes, analyzing them, and deciding on operational actions to engage them. It is the circle of gathering, analyzing, and producing insights.

Anyone can look at this family’s situation differently. From the alders’ perspective, the parents’ perspective, etc.

But, when managers with intelligence skills analyze this situation, they immediately think of three blank data-sheets. At this point starts the process of converting the situation into intelligence patterns.

The first data-sheet is titled business intelligence insights, the second titled competitive intelligence insights, and the third market intelligence insights.

What are Intelligence Thinking Patterns (ITP)? It acts as an automatic navigator of our mind towards the algorithm of the intelligence thinking process. In some ways, it is the mechanism of directing our thoughts and attention to specific channels.

Managers with high ITP skills, as does the Intelligence professional team in the organization, see the above situation as an opportunity to learn new things and transform it into insights to strengthen the organization’s competitive edge and fast-forward the accomplishment of the CEO’s vision.

Each data-sheet must start with the Questions section. We need to ask questions about the situation, thus define information gaps, thus decide on gathering methods and sources. The next section is Insights and Thoughts, and the last section is Operational actions and Ideas.

Why three data-sheets? A skilled ITP manager must adopt a wide spectrum view. A major change in family-behavior has a wide impact on the organization’s resilience. Hence, the BI data-sheet. It also impacts our competitors. Hence, CI data-sheet. And it might change many markets or create new markets. Hence, the MI data-sheet.

In the rest of this article, I would like to demonstrate how to fill in the content of each section. It is not the full list but, it can help you understand the main idea.

Business Intelligence (BI) Data-Sheet

Questions

1. What is the ratio of young parents we, as a company, support and employ?
2. What are the company’s sources and abilities to manage with employees working from home?
3. What are the extra personal and social welfare services we could offer our employees?

Insights and Thoughts

1. Define the dependency measure of the company, in the employees who are young parents.
2. We might have to make sure that missions and positions in the company are backed-up. That is, try to avoid relying on experts that hold all the knowledge, and without them present, the ongoing operations will be damaged.
3. We have to consider the rising tension between the workplace and home. This tension might effect out young employees, thus their performances.

Operational actions and Ideas

1. It might be the right time to adopt a flexible working hours policy.
2. It might be cost-effective for the company to allow and support working from home policy, or even hire a close-to-home facility and let the young employees work from distance. We can even consider supporting local child-care services in the company’s property, or a nearby facility.
3. Maybe we have to change our HR policy and rethink the employee-mix in our company.

Competitive Intelligence (CI) Data-Sheet

Questions

The questions here are the mirror questions we asked about our own company.

Insights and Thoughts

1. We have to compare our internal-data and resilience-measures, with those of our direct competitors. It results in a ranked list of comparable criteria and a grade for us and our competitors.
2. It might be that the change harmed our competitors’ competitive edge. It might even damage its reputation, financial performances, etc.

Operational actions and Ideas

1. It might be the right time to launch a new branding campaign.
2. It might be the right time to launch a new price and a PR campaign.
3. It might be wise and recommended to stay put and do nothing until the whole market changes again for our benefits.

Market Intelligence (MI) Data-Sheet

Questions

1. Which markets influenced by the change? Eather had suffered damages or have the potential to get damaged.
2. What changes made in the priorities of buyers who are young parents? How does it affect us?
3. Can we identify a new market? A new market is simply when there is a new need that hadn’t been answered by a tangible product or a service.

Insights and Thoughts

1. There is a change in buyers’ flavors.
2. It might be the right time for a new segmentation process, thus identify new buyers and those who left.
3. We might have identified new needs and have the opportunity to develop a new market.

Operational actions and Ideas

1. It might be the right time to make some adjustments in our product-line, portfolio, prices, and quality.
2. We might decide on halts of certain investments or initiating new ones.
3. We might understand that there is a new market out there, and our sources and capabilities allow us to develop and enter this market.

To sum up, I would like to say that when dealing with Intelligence, the theory must meet reality. Plans must meet actions, and insights must be applied to operations.

Intelligence Thinking Patterns (ITP) are an essential tool for all managers to survive in troubled times. We have to look for changes around us and transform them into actionable items. We have to look far and 360% when we try to analyze the effects of a change. We operate in an ecosystem, we are not alone, and we have to remember it in any of our actions.

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