Things are changing so fast today there are three worlds in simultaneous transition:

1. Your organization's world
Market conditions shift constantly and sometimes dramatically. Revenue streams and profit margins sometimes require compensation and adjustment in real time. Greater speed and responsiveness to opportunity is a significant asset. Talent acquisition and development is becoming critical due to technology advances.

2. The world of your customers, members, and partners
The people you depend upon are themselves struggling with market pressures. This means they are constantly reevaluating expenditures, shopping for new value, vigilant for a better proposition, innovation, or seeking a more advantageous relationship.

3. Your Industry's world
New technologies are upending stalwarts. Take a look at the newspaper industry. Once it had the corner on daily doorstep delivery of information. Today daily has become 24/7, doorsteps have been replaced by pocket delivery, and information dissemination has forever left paper behind as a sole channel. The same thing is happening to space exploration, services including education and customer management, manufacturing, agriculture, and even intelligence. Hardly a sector is untouched.

Until recent years, at least one of these worlds provided stability when the other two shifted, and the fluctuations were episodic - heading toward eventual equilibrium. But today all three are in motion simultaneously and all signs point to continuous change. Game changing is becoming the norm. (See my Fast Co piece, 10 Patterns in our Continuously Disruptive World.) You have to become proficient at innovation, transition, and transformation to stay in the market.

One tool quickly becoming indispensable is competitive intelligence. Every leader should be conducting a systematic effort for the early identification of risks and opportunities in the market before these developments become plain to see.

This includes the examination of market statistics, financial reports, and news with the goal of yielding a competitive edge.

There is (a) strategic intelligence - looking at long-term growth strategies - and (b) tactical intelligence - driving revenue in the short term. This is a non-negotiable in my mind, for success in our rapidly changing world. Yet recent studies indicate that intelligence is at the bottom of the priority list when it comes to safeguard expenses.

Although big companies have been using competitive intelligence since the early part of the 20th century, it is a relatively new field with the first major work on the subject published by Michael Porter in 1980, Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors.

Where do you go for this kind of service? On the one hand, it takes a professional with some experience to make the best effort while minding the letter of the law. On the other, sources are often right under your nose including your staff members, customers, other stakeholders, thought leaders in the field, news aggregators, and the Internet. I have been able to gather a good deal of useful information for my clients for years simply by tapping these sources with a systematic approach and a bent toward establishing a competitive edge.

Two common misconceptions about Competitive Intelligence:

1. It's all about competitors.
While understanding the competition is important, it's only one piece of the puzzle that also includes understanding industry trends, market responses, and even the field of innovation: the white space yet to be occupied.

2. It's illegal.
There are clear boundaries and they have to be observed, but competitive intelligence is far from illegal. Unlawful practice goes by a different name, industrial espionage. There is a great deal that can be done within the bounds of the law and savvy leaders make use of it. The whole idea is that you are gathering publicly available information and extracting trends and opportunities before they become clear to the masses.

A great example of Competitive Intelligence is published every day in periodicals like the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg Business Week, the Financial Times, and Fortune. These organs collect specialized knowledge that is publicly available and deliver it to a select audience that scrutinizes the stories and data for marketplace advantage.

But, when you pick up a copy of one of these business publications, you are getting news that is formatted for a couple of million readers, very generalized. Imagine what it would be like if you could identify, collect, analyze, and leverage intelligence about the specific services, products, customers, members, partners, and market spaces that are available to you. That's competitive intelligence.