Finding new management solutions starts with asking the right questions

Companies today operate within an unprecedented level of uncertainty and speed of change, with effects that are rarely linear. The scientific term for this is “complexity”. Meeting the dynamics of complexity requires an enhanced, system-wide ability to generate value for the market, and traditional management logic, built for a more predictable world, is no longer enough.
For over 30 years, Intelligent Management has been helping industrial and technology businesses take their performance to a new level to operate within complexity and scale. We work alongside leadership to design their flow of activities around a strategically chosen constraint. The organization begins to think and interact as a focused, synchronized system that scales sustainably. This enhances the ability to make strategic decisions for the market, choose and deploy competencies, and accelerates the generation of cash.

Finding management solutions starts with asking the right questions

Intelligent Management was founded by a physicist. True to those origins, our journey began with asking fundamental questions about the nature of organizations and the purpose of management. Nothing was taken for granted. We began with a clean slate and sought out the most powerful thinking available on how to design, manage and operate an organization for success in a world of complexity.
Among the general noise of mediocre management thinking and various fads, two major bodies of work clearly stood out: Deming and Goldratt. Dr. W. Edwards Deming was an American physicist and the father of Quality. Deming was the first person to depict an organization not as a top-down hierarchy with its inevitable silos but as a system, “a network of interdependencies that work together to achieve the goal.” Deming’s 14 points and their evolution, the System of Profound Knowledge, provide the basis for transforming an organization into a fear-free network that enhances collaboration and involvement while reducing variation to improve performance. The success of post-war Japanese industry was largely due to Deming’s direct input.
While Deming’s work is inspiring, it is not easy to apply. To help companies adopt Deming’s systemic thinking, we began to integrate the practical applications from the Theory of Constraints developed by Israeli physicist, Dr. Eliyahu Goldratt.

Years of rigorous testing

It became clear that we were developing something well beyond a “consulting practice”. We built a team of physicists, mathematicians, engineers and philosophers to further refine the approach, drawing on Complexity Science and Systems Science. We called the method that emerged ‘The Decalogue’ as it had ten main steps.

The team carried out implementations of The Decalogue method in a variety of industries, corporate and otherwise, across Europe and North America: from private enterprise to publicly traded companies, from heavy industry to high-tech, through Wall Street, healthcare, steel mills, software engineering, fashion, precision mechanics, industrial services, supply chain, SaaS startups and community projects. We were helping companies move from management based on intuition and trial and error to a reliable and epistemologically founded method, a “new kind of science” of management.

A new organizational model

Over the years of working day-in-day-out with organizations to help them adopt a systemic way working, we developed an organizational design model that we call the Network of Projects. This design brings out the inherently network-like nature and systemic aspects of organizations, freeing them from fragmentation, artificial barriers and silos.
The emphasis is on quality, synchronization and involvement of resources towards a common goal, with attention to the speed of flow of Throughput this refers to the speed at which an organization achieves units of its goal (in for-profit companies, essentially cash). Where conventional thinking looks first to cut costs, our approach looks first to increase flow of Throughput.

A new way of thinking

To thrive in complexity, organizations need a new kind of pact with their customers, suppliers and the wider value network they belong to. That starts with a real cognitive shift: learning to think in terms of increasing throughput rather than simply reducing costs.
To help make that shift, we guide organizations in using a linguistic framework (Thinking Processes) that guides them to surface limiting beliefs, channel emotions productively, and continuously develop actionable innovation. It is a practical discipline as much as an intellectual one, built to change how decisions actually get made, not just how they get discussed.

What this means for you

Most consultancies leave you with a set of recommendations. Our work is designed to create the opposite outcome: a leadership team that has genuinely absorbed a new way of designing, managing and operating its organization to increase throughput and scale sustainably.

If you're a CEO, founder or owner of an SME scale-up looking for a way to manage complexity and with the courage to embrace a new way of thinking, that is the work we do.