The importance of collective intelligence

I was recently asked by the The Learning Development Accelerator to take part in a Meet the author session to discuss my forthcoming book, The Great Reset: Unlocking the Power of Organizational Learning. I want to share some one of the fundamental ideas of the book that came up in our discussions and that is collective intelligence . . .

Collective intelligence isn't about everybody knowing everything, it's about people contributing to the collective view. And when people begin to share and put pieces of the jigsaw together the picture is always richer, deeper and larger than it ever can be coming from just one highly talented individual.

The idea of celebrating collective intelligence, not just individual intelligence, is very important. I use the metaphor of the organizational brain, which is slightly pushing the envelope, but what I'm saying is that we've got about 80 billion neurons in our brains and they give us the potential to be smart. What makes us smart are the connections between those neurons – the synapses. The synapses connect neurons and transmit information and from this comes our cognitive ability.

The people in organizations are the neurons, but it is the connections between people that enable information and ideas to flow, and this helps organizations become more resilient and plastic, just as a brain that maximizes the connections is, by definition, more plastic.

This is an incredibly important idea and one you need to consider if you are involved in the development of an organization.

And when people trust each other, work together and share ideas openly things you get insights faster and you start to see things accelerate. But if you don't have those insights because of a lack of trust or a lack of respect, you end up in serious difficulty.

I'm asking for a more organic view of organizations, rather than a mechanistic one. We once had business process reengineering, where we thought organizations were Meccano sets, so that if we took all the bits apart, polished them a little bit, trimmed a few pieces and put them back together again, that the organization would work better.

Business process reengineering was first developed by Michael Hammer, a former MIT professor, in the 1990s. He argued that a "radical redesign" of business processes was needed to keep up with the fast-paced changes in markets and technology occurring during that decade.

It was an unmitigated disaster because you remove some of the collective knowledge, and break links across the organization and imagine that those links just reform automatically. But they don’t.

Collective intelligence is about being able to access other people's thoughts and ideas at scale and at speed, and you can't do that without trust. You can't do that without knowing people, and you can't do that without knowing where to go to get hold of those ideas. But they must be common ideas, and that's part of the culture - the sharing of common beliefs and the sense of purpose in an organization.

There is a richness in organizations that comes from people with different backgrounds and different contexts and it's that coming together around a bigger picture that allows huge amounts of sharing which in turn raises the level of understanding. And the only way you will make organizations smarter is to focus on both individual and collective understanding and have respect. In diverse communities where there's free debate a common understanding emerges. The context is changed because individual contexts come together to share a new context.

The idea that organizations are complex and more organic, and that we only understand by coming together and sharing is fundamentally important. So, it is important to respect other people's context and to come together to understand different perspectives. You want to encourage dissent, you want to encourage debate, you want to encourage challenge and that should come from the top down. But you need psychological safety to do this. A healthy organization is built out of debate.

Access the meet the author recording here: https://members.ldaccelerator.com/c/meet-the-author-space/meet-the-author-nigel-paine-d115a380-c21b-4142-a180-6a35c883a736

Pre-order the book here: https://ldaccelerator.com/great-reset

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