Bill Veltrop:

It's a privilege to be participating with you in pioneering these Fireside Conversations. I'd like to lead off with a couple of personal questions:  
1) What benefits would you ideally like to realize for yourself and/or others out of your commitment to this interview?  
2) How do you imagine that I might best contribute to the realization of those benefits?

Mike McMaster:

What I'd like to realise from this interview is to be able to access and express something about the area of organisational intelligence than is deeper - more at the core - than anything I've been able to express so far.

What I'd also like for myself and others is that the interview provide the most elegantly simple introduction to the field that has so far been done. It is too easy, for me at least, to get carried away with those aspects that interest me or that are most poetic but which don't necessarily communicate well.

I think you might best contribute to the realisation of those ideals by simply asking the questions that are closest to your heart and which elicit the simplicity that lies there.

I am very much looking forward to the process. ð

B.V.:

This seems like it will be a juicy exploration. I like the challenge you are putting before us.
However, before we dive into that pool I'd enjoy learning a bit more about you and your journey. Tell me about what brought you to this conversation. Why this focus? What led you here?

M. M.:

The journey began almost 30 years ago.  As controller of a company and responsible for staff, I wondered why people didn't love working.  Deciding that it had something to do with communication - and that my own was the place to start - I started exploring communication and relationship with various psychologists.  This led me to leading workshops, writing books and consulting.  But as I worked with companies, I began to see that even when everyone in the company really improved their communication, the whole did not improve dramatically.  This led me to begin to consider that there was something at a level larger than individual that also had to be addressed.  

Not finding anything in the field of management, I explored other fields - science, philosophy, linguistics, economics and others - to see what they might contribute to understanding organisation.  Each contributed to greater understanding and more effective transformation efforts.  

The latest field to contribute to my thinking in this area I discovered at the Santa Fe Institute.  More than anything, they provided a language and a logic that matched the challenges that I'd been confronting and trying to communicate to the business world about.  This began about seven years ago and was more or less at the same time as I heard of Senge's "The Learning Organisation".  

While there was obviously some very good stuff in that idea, there were things that didn't quite do the job.  One was that, although the talk was of organisational learning - a better term for what interested me than "The Learning Organisation" - what I observed was more of what I'd pursued in communication.  That is, individual learning was seen as the key to corporate change.  

The other was that I thought that organisational learning was the wrong place to focus initially.  What seemed to need to come first was a view of organisation that allowed for learning as a natural phenomenon.  I thought the first question to explore was "What is the nature of something that exists by learning?"  This was the way that SFI and organisational came together for me.  

My choice of "organisational intelligence" as a focus arose from this idea. I mean to designate by "intelligence" a capacity to learn, to understand, to know, to interpret, to make choices and to act on all of that.  My assumption is that an organisation IS intelligent independent of the individuals who are part of it.  The corporate organisation is intelligent in its own right.  (The Royal Mail knows how to deliver mail to the vast city of London but nobody in the Royal Mail knows how nor can it be mapped in a way that will get the mail delivered.  The Royal Mail is intelligent.)  

My beginning point is that intelligence describes a "match to the universe" and that any individual intelligence is inside of or co-emergent with a greater intelligence.  I am intelligent largely to the extent that the society that I grew into is intelligent.  

The particular intelligence of a corporation is unique in that we have access to the design of the structure of intelligence.  

That is the path I am focussed on:  the exploration of how we can design our organisations to that they realise the maximum in intelligence of the larger whole and of each and every person within those organisations and the societies that they are part of.

M. M.:

The Santa Fe Institute provided a Western, scientific language which is consistent with much of what has gone before.  They provide models, metaphors, examples of mechanisms and various other useful conceptual tools to begin to tackle the challenges of intelligent organisation.  

The importance of this is hard to understand.  It isn't in the models themselves so much as in providing a language and a structure in which they can be talked about in business culture.  Various earlier native and Eastern disciplines may have provided many useful ways of thinking about the same issues but the language and metaphor is not generally accepted in the boardrooms of the West - even though they are accepted in some.  (And accepted by individuals in those capacities far beyond what is generally known.)  

The Santa Fe Institute is doing research into the common features of "systems that survive by adaptation" and particularly into those that create models, strategies or schemata to accomplish that survival.  A special case of these is human beings who have language.  A special case is also corporations and human institutions created for productive purposes.

B. V.:

Your response on the role of the Santa Fe Institute in your work evoked a deep resonance in me. I am becoming ever-more respectful of the responsibility we have to discover, create and evolve language, lenses, framesworks and models that enable us to expand the conversations that are possible among executives and thought leaders in business. Einstein's quote, "The significant problems we face in life can not be solved at the level of thinking that created those problems," surely applies to language as well as to thinking.