Copyright © 2004-06 Adaptive Metrics Center A Division of Center For The Open Enterprise
The Adaptive Metrics Center
Why Adaptive Metrics?
Organizational metrics telling us how we're doing in relation to bottom line outcomes are, of course, very important. But they don't tell us much about the future. They're lagging indicators, not leading indicators, and we already have a surfeit of such measures.
What seem to be lacking, however, are metrics that can tell us how well we learn and solve our problems and also how well we are doing in increasing our capacity to do these things. Such adaptive metrics are our best way of telling how likely we are to continue to perform well, or to improve how well we're doing.
Adaptive metrics measure organizational attributes related to individual, group, and organizational problem solving, knowledge making, and innovation. Adaptive Metrics are important because they tell us how well we are responding to the challenges presented to us by our environments. They measure how well we're learning to change in response to our competitors, to changes in our social environment, to changes in Government regulations and requirements, to shortfalls in resources we and our organizations need, and to any other changes that present us with either risks or opportunities.
The Adaptive Metrics Center
The Adaptive Metrics Center creates adaptive metrics and the measurement models that produce them. We also communicate and apply the results of our activities through industry reports, other publications, training and consulting.
We've organized our program on adaptive metrics into two categories: adaptive scorecard metrics; and risk intelligence metrics.
Have you ever wondered what measures are involved in the learning and growth perspective of the balanced scorecard? That's the perspective that supposed to supply the leading indicators relative to the other perspectives. But what exactly ought to go in there? From our point of view it's one of the mysteries of the balanced scorecard. This segment of our adaptive metrics program is about solving that mystery.
An adaptive scorecard is one that includes a comprehensive set of adaptive metrics under the learning and growth perspective of a revised balanced scorecard framework. We refer to these adaptive metrics as adaptive scorecard metrics because of their context within a revised balanced scorecard.
As the work of the Center goes on we'll be presenting such metrics in our industry reports and in our Certificate programs. The metrics will be concentrated in six major categories: quality of knowledge processing; quality of knowledge management processing; quality of an organization's distributed organizational knowledge base; quality of decision processing and outcomes; quality of executive processing and outcomes; and quality of governance processing and outcomes.
For us 'risk intelligence' doesn't refer to information that is higher in quality than ordinary information, but lower in quality than knowledge. It is, instead, about 'intelligence' in the sense of ability to learn and solve problems. It is about tests and metrics measuring the relative ability to solve problems and reduce the risk of error in one's decision models.
The idea of Relative Risk Intelligence (RRI) can be applied in many areas. We can ask about RRI in comparing competing organizations, or knowledge workers, or job candidates, or prospective partners, or prospective strategic allies, or competing nations. In short, RRI is a relevant idea any time we want to compare alternative agents in an effort to estimate who is likely to be more successful in coping with problems they may run into in working or acting in a particular domain.
From time-to-time, the Adaptive Metrics Center will issue reports on such risk intelligence metrics, and will also offer training and consulting in the area of measuring and enhancing risk intelligence. We expect this area to be of increasing importance because risk assessment and risk management are more important now than they have ever been.
AMC is proud to announce the release of its first report and first risk intelligence report: Risk Intelligence Metrics: An Adaptive Metrics Center Industry Report.
Information about the report and other components of the Report Bundle is available here.