Bill Veltrop:

I'd like for us to focus a bit on what questions would be the juiciest for us to explore. Which questions would both stretch the two of us to new places and also best serve those who will be joining us as our process unfolds?
But before going down that path, I would like for you to elaborate a bit on one point you brought forward.
You referred to "the latest field to contribute to my thinking in this area I discovered at the Santa Fe Institute. Would you say more?
I found your last five paragraphs particularly powerful and evocative and would like to use them as a starting point for exploring what questions to explore. I am especially stimulated by your last sentence:
"That is the path I am focussed on: the exploration of how we can design our organisations so 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."

SOME PRE-DAWN QUESTIONS:
Do you distinguish between intelligence and wisdom, and if so, how?
What might be the highest purpose of focusing attention and intention on organizational intelligence? What might the highest forms of OI look like?
Is intelligence only mental or is it a mind/body phenomenen? I know that for me, the greatest gains I've made in my intelligence/wisdom over the last several years have involved my physical body in concert with my mind.
How strongly analogous is organizational intelligence to individual intelligence?
What conditions best support the growing of intelligence for individuals and for organizationa?
What would be the most useful way to distinguish organizational consciousness?
What role does organizational consciousness play in organizational intelligence?
What things does Mike McMaster do to grow his intelligence? Is it primarily a cognitive exercise or is it more than that?
AN INVITATION
Mike, I invite you to bring forward questions that you would find particularly generative to explore. Let's diverge a bit before deciding on which questions to focus on.

Mike McMaster:

One of the questions you ask I want to answer now and we may get into it more deeply later.  That is, do I refer to "mind/body" when I refer to intelligence?  

I refer to the whole organism and its capacity to sense its environment, to generate and interpret information, and to make decisions and act on those decision.  

I felt that this was too important a distinction to leave.  We have almost lost the effective use of "intelligence" because of IQ test and other nonsense that has ignored intelligence as a capacity.

B. V.:

I'd like to continue the process of generating questions for possible exploration. A few more that have come to mind for me:
What might be the characteristics that distinguish organizational "genius?" Is winning in the marketplace an adequate measure of organizational genius? Or are there more profound, more useful, and/or more subtle indicators that we can watch/measure?
In your description of intelligence above, you refer to "capacity to generate and interpret information, and to make decisions and act on those decisions." What might be our most generative way to describe genius? Might it have something to do with a capacity to sustain, grow and evolve organizational intelligence on-goingly?
We usually manage to what we measure. Are there ways that we can notice and distinguish what adds to or subtracts from an organization's capability to grow its intelligence?
Do you imagine that there may be upper limits to organizational intelligence? On a scale of 1-10, where do today's large organizations fall relative to what may become possible?
If you were made CEO of a sizeable corporation, and a part of your charter was to grow this organizaion's intelligence, what are the kinds of things you would consider doing in your first 100 days?
How about you, Mike? What questions do you have that would be both stretching and rewarding to inquire into?

M. M.:

I'm very engaged by almost all of the questions you've asked.  

Here are a few additional questions that would interest and stretch me:  

In emergent phenomena, there are "levels" which is a term that distinguishes the characteristics of entities which have emerged and which are new to the universe.  These characteristics are not shared by the elements from which the emergence occurred.  What is the distinct nature of a corporation compared to an individual and what is the significance of these for relationships and interactions between them?  

When is a whole corporation emergent (to a new level) and when is corporate growth just evolutionary?  

Does growth matter to a corporation or is "living intelligently" sufficient?  What is growth to a corporation in an organic sense?  

What is the distinction between "genius" and "wisdom" at the organisational level?

M. M.:

In reviewing all of the above dialogue and questions, I am more impatient to get started into the questions than in generating more.  They seem a very compelling set.  They also seem to be at about the right level.  Not too abstract and yet not too operational before we get some background conversation in place.  

The three areas that strike me, any one of which as a good starting point, are:
- What is the relationship between individual and organisation in the area of intelligence?
- What is organisational intelligence and what is its value?
- What would I do in my first 100 days as a new CEO?  

Any one of these cuts will probably get quickly into the whole but each from quite different orientations.  

Offer more questions, choose which way to go and I'm ready to begin.