Collective intelligence could be the most important science of the 21st century
Our conviction at SCIAM is that collective intelligence is the most important science of the 21st century.
France is experiencing a real buzz around collective intelligence, but a clear idea of what it is and how to achieve it is lacking.
The first thing you should know about collective intelligence is that it’s not about putting people in a conference room and giving them post-its. Collective intelligence is a natural phenomenon that has driven the evolution of the human species (and not only) by bringing us to work and solve complex problems together.
But just as collective intelligence is natural to human beings, so is collective stupidity. Evolution has also given us cognitive biases; motivated reasoning (we agree with people who we like), availability bias (we remember what is shocking or unusual), and many other features of our psychology that reduce our ability to work together.
We at SCIAM define collective intelligence as:
- A natural phenomenon in which a group can solve a complex problem or conduct a complex task more effectively than any individual or subset of individuals within that group
- The science which studies and seeks to reinforce this natural phenomenon through new experiments, methods, and tools
We can not afford to waste all the collective intelligence that is around us
Like all new sciences, collective intelligence is responding to an urgent social need. Most of the political institutions that govern our lives were designed over two hundred years ago. Most of the companies that we work in follow a model that is over a century old. Today’s problems are too complex, fast moving, and interdependent for the institutions that we inherited.
Collective intelligence works on two dimensions of this problem. The first is technical. Problems like climate change and economic inequality are the type of “wicked problems” in which many pairs of eyes, ears, and hands can find better solutions than politicians and bureaucrats working alone. This is the technical dimension of CI — the ability to find better solutions to our most urgent problems.
But this is not the whole story. Both in our democracies and our workplaces, relationships of trust have broken down. In order to restore the ties which make a company or a society function, people need to feel included and heard. This is the relational dimension of CI — the power to restore trust through participation and inclusion.
CI isn’t a fun activity with post-its
So how do we do this? We at SCIAM are dedicated to reinforcing the collective intelligence of teams, companies, and society at large. We do this through methods that reinforce the six capacities of collective intelligence within any group, as described by NESTA founder Geoff Mulgan in his book “Big Mind: How collective intelligence can change the world”. The six capacities of collective intelligence are observation, interpretation/prediction, ideation, deliberation, action and memory.
Imagine a concrete example: an industrial company has noticed that its employees are increasingly disengaged. What do we do? First, we observe collectively to understand the problem at stake and its context. Our cognitive scientists will lead qualitative focus group methods to uncover the psychological factors most important to motivation in this company. Why? Because maybe our assumptions about what is creating the problem are wrong.
Next, we lead a collective brainstorm on approaches to re-motivate teams using a prediction platform and test which ideas are most likely to work. Thus drawing on our second and third capacities — the capacity to interpret and ideate.
Then we will come to a collective decision. Many companies make the mistake of motivating their employees by announcing the company’s values. At SCIAM we will create a deliberative process where management and employees work together to find consensus and take ownership over the challenge. We create a narrative structure to accompany the implementation of these new strategies, as well as a feedback system to improve the strategy in the long run.
Lastly, we focus on the best way to preserve and transmit the new collective knowledge we create. To do so we use cutting-edge knowledge processes and a dedicated internal training program. This is what keeps collective intelligence alive and dynamic.
Collective intelligence, though all around us, is not easy to capture and sustain. It requires sincerity and persistence from the leadership teams to make it work.
What our clients have discovered, is that real leaders create their power by sharing it.
With the problems we face today, we cannot afford to waste the intelligence that is all around us.
We at SCIAM are dedicated to the very best methods and tools to make collective intelligence a reality.
