Deployment of Strategic Intelligence Devices
An Intelligence process is a strategic tool for a company. It’s a different process from market research, collection of structured information, or production of analysis reports.
ADVS has deployed intelligence processes that are based on networks of people, collective intelligence and interpretation of weak signals. The interpretation of the environment through weak signals and anticipatory signs allows us to anticipate. Processes based on intensive data collection allow only the projection of the past through historical data and construction of trend curves.
Structure and Creativity
Through a structured process that encourages creativity, the ADVS methodology has been used successfully in several companies to understand strategic movements of competitors, customers, government, suppliers and to anticipate technological changes and their impacts.
Monitoring the environment and treating the gathered information requires discipline, constancy, creativity, collective effort and this can only be achieved through a structured and organized process towards this goal.
L.E.SCAnning Method™
The L.E.SCAnning™ Method guarantees the effectiveness of the intelligence process through the implementation of an Anticipatory and Collective Strategic Intelligence device – VAS-IC™, as it allows:
- Introduce in a short time a simple device that allows to anticipate movements in the competitive environment and that can evolve.
- To go from an information gathering activity carried out individually, informally and casuistically to a collective and organized monitoring device.
- Give life to an existing Intelligence device.
Ensure the effectiveness of the monitoring of the competitive environment through the implementation of an Anticipatory and Collective Strategic Intelligence device - VAS-IC™.
Cases
The VAS-IC™ Concept (Strategic and Anticipatory Strategic Intelligence Device)
Monitoring – In our method, monitoring means being in a constant state of alertness – listening – ready to detect signals of strategic movements (current or long term) of players in the competitive environment.
Strategic Decision – The ADVS method is aimed at anticipating movements in the environment in order to support the strategic decision:
- not repetitive, so the decision-maker will be relatively unprepared;
- can not rely on proven models;
- can have important consequences (good or bad);
- the decision is made in a situation of uncertainty.
Anticipative – By definition the VAS-IC™ is forward-looking and the anticipation is based on the interpretation of certain information and certain signs, weak signals. Do not confuse anticipation with prediction. Prediction is mostly the calculation of trends over databases collected over a past period.
Weak Signals – Signs of changes, of movements that are about to happen. They allow to anticipate in the short and long term. They are fragments of information, uncertain, ambiguous, of unclear meaning. The further away the event in future, the more difficult to interpret the weak signal, harbinger of change and identification of the anticipatory meaning.
Collective Intelligence – The word intelligence is in the L.E.SCAnning™ method applied to a group of people who agree to share (collectively) their ability to detect events, comment on them, interpret them as a group, and draw from them useful lessons for action. Interpretation, as well as capture of weak signals, requires collective interpretation.
Method
The method, presented in a cyclical way, proposes that the process start from any of the steps:
