How ‘collective intelligence’ can help the Government address complex problems

This article is the opinion of the author and does not represent Capgemini.

Much has been written and spoken about collective intelligence and its potential benefits for decision-making and insight. Among the most popular and influential concepts are harnessing the ‘wisdom of crowds’ and exploring ‘swarm intelligence’ – essentially how the diversity of the many can outwit the few. But Government has been too slow to tap into these tools, connect people and data, and use them to improve its decisions, services, and efficiency.

Why should Governments use collective intelligence approaches?

One critique of Government is groupthink: that a small number of not-very-diverse individuals take decisions on behalf of the rest of us. That is the essence of democracy as it has been practiced for the past 200 years. But small, privileged, closed groups can be prone to cognitive bias which can lead to suboptimal and blinkered decision-making. In this day and age, technology makes it possible to have more information than ever before, so a forward-thinking Government should adopt data-led and broad evidence-gathering approaches which promote and welcome a diversity of viewpoints and different insights.

As this blog notes, the?vTaiwan ?online discussion platform is a good example of how a government has used collective intelligence tools to resolve emerging policy issues. Policy Lab has worked with the?National Security Secretariat ?and the think-tank?Demos ?using collective insights to develop policy inputs into the?Integrated Review . The?Declaration on Government Reform sets out aspirations to strengthen policymaking by diversifying who participates; using co-design to restore and enhance civic space, especially on contentious issues; and modernising and opening the operation of government. Nesta have also set out examples where Collective Intelligence can help Government work better.

The benefits make a compelling case for more use of collective intelligence:

1. Better understanding and ideas including identifying novel solutions, solving problems in new ways and cross-pollination of ideas and insights between the government and the public, improving networks;
2. Better use of data sets from multiple sources, exploring the root causes of complex problems and introducing more real-time intelligence and richer inputs than from traditional methods such as polling;
3. More inclusive decision-making, drawing out?consensus and divergence?on complex, contentious issues, increasing participation and generating community support, increasing the likelihood for success by strengthening the legitimacy of decisions;
4. Providing challenge and oversight and stress-testing current policies and thinking, increasing accountability and transparency.

Overall, collective intelligence improves team performance and - as an added bonus - empirically demonstrates the bottom-line value of having more women on your team .

How can Government use collective intelligence?

The use of collective intelligence tools to join up information, participation, technology and policy making to generate economic, social and environmental innovation can be transformative, as this EU Briefing sets out in this diagram:

This blog by Policy Lab UK sets out an approach to exploring collective intelligence using the Pol.Is tool, an open source online platform that invites participants to enrich a debate by adding their viewpoints to a small number of initial seed statements, by submitting their own statements and voting on each others’ perspectives. ?The Nesta Playbook sets out many helpful tools and techniques to design collective intelligence projects.

So why don’t Government make more use of these tools and techniques? Research suggests that many efforts are often short lived . Attempts to generate insights or solutions using collective intelligence can fail to achieve impact or are unable to scale up because they do not create the mechanisms for sustained engagement: they are one-off pilots without clear metrics for what success would look like, and lack of early ‘success’ in whatever form stakeholders would like to see it leads to loss of confidence and funding. Many civil servants want wider participation in solving problems, but don’t know how do so effectively, how to tap into the right communities and groups or to make the most of the insights generated. There is a wariness of attracting lobbying groups or people who may be very vocal in pushing their particular perspectives at policy makers (even leading to reputational damage) – strangely enough these are precisely the sorts of things that effective collective intelligence can prevent.

Nesta suggests that are key success factors including design, using the right tools, finding the right problem, having sufficient resource, and getting the right support as this Nesta report explains:

Collective intelligence approaches can be difficult, disruptive and even quite threatening for Government: nevertheless embracing them will lead to better and healthier democracy. So far there are pockets of good practice and expertise but they are still fighting for legitimacy and sustained funding. Government need to create a collective intelligence capability at a scale and level of ambition which can fully realize the transformative value of these approaches to public services and solving big complex problems, together.