How to build a better group

A great podcast from YANSS that covers research on collective intelligence, or what makes some groups smarter than others.

Since many of you don’t have the time to listen, here’s the tl;dr:

Better groups have:

• More Women
• Less hierarchy / people trying to lead
• Better communication skills
• High emotional intelligence (EQ) people

Note what’s not in there:

• Great leaders
• Super smarties
• “Rock stars”

The most meaty bullet up there is clearly the women part. Apparently this result scaled up to groups of all women. It’s not clear apparently how much of this is due to the higher average EQ that women display. It could just as easily be that men are more likely to compete destructively with each other.

The other meaty part for me is the bias against hierarchy. I think we tend to fetishize leaders in our society, but it seems common for leaders to hurt more than they help. I’m a huge fan of distributed system in humans and machines, and I count this as another point in their favor.

This is also encouraging to me as I build Campfire. I hope that effective support groups could be even better when they have as little leadership as possible. Perhaps less of a ‘head’ will encourage peers to step up and contribute more, and better.