Early Warning Signals

In a series of papers exploring EWS, we’ll take a different approach, and create a conversation, asking for and integrating feedback from readers from each paper into the next one, all the while building our understanding of EWS – The roles they play, how to create them, apply them, recognize them, acquire them – How to integrate them not just for threat warning, but for opportunity as well.

In Part 1 of the exploration, let’s start the conversation by asking some basic questions about the why of early warning, and use some ideas of basic human processes as a way to think about EWS, and propose a working model to think about EWS Types, Recognition and Acquisition.

If these needs are posed as questions, we come to a concept very familiar to Competitive Intelligence (CI) professionals: The need to understand what their internal customers want to know about, need to know about and should know about and why, when they need to know it and who needs to know it. CI professionals have a formal process they use to answer these questions - identifying Key Intelligence Needs. But we all do this formally or informally with varying degrees of depth, breadth and success, regardless of our training or business function,

When we look at different functional groups in our organization, many things that each group needs to know are unique to that group. On the other hand, many needs are the same for every group, except that they are looked at from a different angle, for different reasons.

States of Order – Cause Doesn’t Always Lead to Effect

Dave Snowden, of the Cynefin Center, in a keynote address at KM World in October, 2004, presented a sense making model with four domains and suggested management type and practices that are a “best fit” for each:

参考文献