The Collective Mind Newsletter Digest
Illumine Knowledge Resources
Illumine is a purpose-driven Knowledge Lab, based in Mumbai, India.
Earlier this year, Illumine Knowledge Resources launched The Collective Mind Newsletter to present to the world Illumine’s Collective Mind approach to building new enabling systems and models for human society.
Collective Mind is a framework where we look at the human collective that makes up various entities in society – workplaces, organisations, communities, citizen groups, cities, etc. By understanding what is the shared mindset and cognitive capacities of the collective, we are able to perceive the key levers of change that can transform the collective.
In this newsletter, from various projects and engagements done by Illumine over the years, various organizational situations and outcomes were studied and new solutions proposed based on this approach.
Here is a summary of the articles we have published this year. We look forward to your comments, observations, insights and remarks on them. Which ones did you find most insightful and helpful? Which ones did you not find useful? Do share
In this edition of the newsletter, we looked at why we should measure the Collective Mind of communities.
“It’s a critical step to unlock the collective potential of the organization, especially when there is a desire to go towards a new end state.”
Case: Large Consumer Goods company with an extended sales force including dealers, associates, contract sales people, and other people in the ecosystem
Tacit knowledge is the unseen, cognitive expertise and wisdom sitting in the minds of people working together. We worked with the large extended sales force of a consumer goods company. Their feet on street people working out of dealerships, branded outlets, local stores, etc, engage with customers, contractors, distributors and dealers as they work towards achieving their sales and business targets. In the process their experiences are rich with insight, heuristics, solutions, and practices which, if mined and stored, can raise the level of excellence in the entire sales force. It enables young new hires to quickly move up the learning curve.
As a byproduct of this, salespeople become knowledge workers – they generate knowledge for others and they use the knowledge of others to continuously evolve and improve themselves.
Case: Large integrated metals and mining company with many different functions and business units
A large Indian organisation found that there were many challenges in cross-functional teams working on large organizational projects. There was need to build new cognitive capacities regarding teaming and collaboration. The key levers inside a team is alignment to the purpose, ownership of team outcomes, trust amongst team members and accountability. To help build these capacities, Illumine developed a solution using the Collective Mind approach.
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Case: Large oil marketing company with thousands of retail outlets staffed by service delivery people
The last mile is made up of thousands of people who perform delivery services in large businesses. They are often ignored or overlooked in the larger strategic thinking of the business. Even they see themselves as unimportant or invisible. However, they are the face of the retail organisation as they do the final service delivery to customers everyday. We did an ethnographic study of these people working in a large oil marketing company and the key lever was their lack of self-esteem. The Collective Mind solution looked at empowering them by helping build their self-esteem and bringing them into the business conversations.
Case: Large integrated metals and mining company with a huge town-sized work premises
Safety at the workplace is very important and getting the collective to own and participate in preventing accidents and reducing harm is the key principle in the Collective Mind approach. In this case study, to support the collective, a predictive algorithm was built which helped people quickly learn potential hazards and threats to safety and prevent them from happening.
Building an Innovator Collective
Case: Large Engineering MNC with an R&D Hub in India
In a GCC (R&D Hub in India) of a large multinational engineering company, the innovation outcomes of the India centre were still low in comparison with the rest of the world. Using the Collective Mind approach, we analysed the current challenges and what major change was needed. The key shift was to discard their current funnel mode of innovation where ideas are eliminated and filtered and only the best survive. What was needed was a fountain based approach where everyone was encouraged to participate and all ideas are valid. This gave opportunities to everyone who had an innovative idea or solution and wanted to develop it into something big.
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We will be sharing more such insights from our work of over 30 years. We value your comments, observations and remarks on these articles.