How do you get your CEO’s backing for a more collective approach to creativity and innovation in your organisation? How do you get your CEO’s backing for a more collective approach to creativity and innovation in your organisation? CEO sponsorship is so important – it’s like a snowball gathering mass on a downhill run – the higher up the hill it begins, the bigger the impact at the bottom.

In an excellent webinar this week, held ahead of the forthcoming Merit Summit in Vienna (dedicated to the topic of “Co-creating Learning Organisations”), Professor Carlo Giardinetti set out his vision of the challenges of tapping into the collective intelligence of organisations.

Check out: Co-XL in 2019: Co-create Learning Organisations at MERIT Summit

Few leaders doubt that collaborative approaches are a “good thing”, yet Giardinetti rightly notes that many stop short of supporting initiatives they see as unwieldy or unworkable. Understandably, they put a heavy premium on simple, pragmatic, and results-driven models for better collaboration.

The rest of us see the gains from applying collective intelligence but need help to sell it “upwards”. So we need to put ourselves firmly in the CEO’s shoes. Is our vision as clear as it can be? Is it simple to administer? Is it robust against the everyday challenges of corporate reality? And how will its results shine through - for all to see?

Answer these questions and we can give this snowball a massive shove – from the top of the hill.

How to Tap into the Collective Intelligence of your Organisation

We work in organisations where 58% of employees would trust a stranger more than they trust their boss and only 14% of companies believe their internal processes for collaboration and decision-making are working well. These two distinct problems point to one solution: we want people in our workforce to engage, learn, trust, and co-create. A culture of feedback in an organisation is paramount to the psychological safety needed for achieving and maintaining collective intelligence in the workplace.

Webinar takeaways:

• Explores approaches to implement psychological safety in the organisation, leading to a culture of feedback
• Highlights ways to tap into, organise, and foster collective intelligence of your organisation  
• Features Organisation Network Analysis as a tool that helps capture and leverage organisational relations and dynamics  

During the webinar, hosted by the MERIT Summit in October 2018, Carlo Giardinetti looked at the psychological safety of the workforce as the primary lever for trust and engagement. He explored how we can better use feedback processes to foster learning. Finally, he described how Organisational Network Analysis (ONA) helps capture important truths that traditional organisational charts and hierarchical thinking tend to ignore.  

Carlo suggested that the organisations of the future will develop and succeed through collaborative leadership and by fine-tuning the needs for safety and coordination (hierarchy) as well as learning, responsiveness, and innovation (self-management).

Webinar presenter

Carlo Giardinetti is an expert practitioner of self-organisation principles and a certified Holacracy Facilitator. He specialises in the field of executive learning as Dean of Executive Education and Global Outreach at Franklin University Switzerland and Instructor at Harvard Division of Continuing Education. Carlo was a speaker at our 2018 MERIT Summit in Lisbon, where he shared his expertise on “How Are Principles of Self-Management Gaining Traction in More Traditional and Hierarchical Organisations – An Update from Business and Business Education.”

This article was kindly provided by Trevor Merriden, Managing Director, Merriborn – Content, Communities and Collaboration in Action.