The Intelligent Ecosystem

Happy shareholders

How successful is a business if despite its impressive financial performance:

• It pollutes the environment

• Its state-of-the-art headquarters backs onto an impoverished community

• It exploits its relationship with public institutions

• It engineers addiction, or worse, in its consumers

• It creates wealth for a few whilst leaving many behind.

Financially, and thus by all traditional measures, such a business would be considered highly successful. But can an organisation truly be regarded as successful if it degrades the very ecosystem on which its long-term prosperity depends?

The bigger picture

Businesses do not exist in isolation. They are just one actor within a much broader societal ecosystem. Every day they interact with, depend upon and influence a diverse network of organised human systems, for example:

• Families

• Communities

• Businesses

• Schools

• Universities

• Hospitals

• Local authorities

• Criminal / terrorist organisations

• National governments

• Charities

• Religious organisations

• Professional bodies

• Trade unions.

  
  

Each of these systems often focus primarily on their survival and wellbeing. To varying degrees these systems can adapt:

• To their environment because they sense what is happening around them and act accordingly.

• To their environment.

Too clever

Businesses use marketing to create an environment that enhances sales. In fact all human systems have this capacity. In some cases, it requires a collaborative approach.

Intelligent systems are those that adapt and so remain viable. But if they do so at the cost of the ecosystem on which their existence depends, then at best that can be considered, ‘post-intelligent’, a variation on stupid. Truly intelligent systems contribute to the health, vitality and resilience of the wider ecosystem. Conversely, a focus on self-optimisation will likely weaken the ecosystem.

So we need to look beyond business and think in terms of the intelligent ecosystem.

Just as an intelligent organisation is more than the sum of its departments, an intelligent ecosystem is more than the sum of its constituent organisations. Intelligence emerges through interaction. It is created by relationships, feedback, trust and the continuous exchange of information.

Back to our roots

I am not envisioning a Shangri-La, Utopia, Arcadia or Elysium. Like the jungle or the savannah, the conditions are harsh. All actors live by their wits. However, despite the competition, conflict and brutality the ecosystem prevails, as do the most adaptive of its constituents. The African savannah is one of the most intelligent ecosystems on Earth; it created us. Unlike modern society, safety, comfort and security do not come as standard. It is a tough but successful immersive training environment.

But it is not all ‘jackal eat jackal’. Symbiotic relationships emerge. Much like our own bodies, each organ, each cell cooperates and collaborates in a manner that promotes collective health. Human ecosystems work in much the same way.

Outsourcing our intelligence

Hollywood has ingrained the notion of the hero or saviour. An individual or organisation who will take care of the ‘nasty business’ so that we can enjoy the predictability, comfort and security that many of us have taken for granted throughout our lives. This might be called ‘abdicating upwards’ or worse still ‘outsourcing our intelligence’.

You had better have a plan b, when for example:

• Your pension provider becomes insolvent.

• Your employer walks you to the car park.

• Your government discovers the nuclear umbrella was conditional.

Personally, I am ill-prepared for the possibility that my government may be over-reliant on a small number of third parties to come to its rescue in a crisis. What I can do, however, is use the democratic process to encourage greater resilience. If enough people reach the same conclusion, the ecosystem itself becomes more resilient.

Perhaps the most intelligent ecosystems not only have a brain in the form of institutions, but also a nervous system in the form of citizens who can sense, decide and act at the point of opportunity or threat.

Nobody's in charge

That changes the role of every participant. Businesses are no longer simply economic actors. Governments are no longer expected to solve every problem. Citizens are no longer passive consumers of services. Each has a responsibility to strengthen the ecosystem on which they depend.

The measure of intelligence therefore changes. It is no longer enough for an organisation to maximise shareholder value if, in doing so, it weakens the society that sustains it. Nor is it enough for individuals to assume that someone else is responsible for societal resilience. Intelligence is demonstrated by contributing to the long-term viability of the wider ecosystem.

Collective intelligence

We are entering an era in which the health of organisations and the health of society are becoming inseparable. Businesses, governments, communities and citizens will either learn to strengthen one another or they will weaken together.

The intelligent ecosystem is not a destination. It is a continual process of sensing, deciding and acting, by millions of interconnected participants, so that the whole remains viable, vital and valuable.