What Makes The Collective Intelligent?

Intelligence is the capacity to make connections between ideas.

Collective intelligence has become a buzz, referring alternatively to a process using the collective to gather information and form a decision (like co-development, six thinking hats, forum, or world cafe), or the intelligence of the collective seen as the wisdom of the system. I refer to the latter. A group of people, a collective, can be intelligent or not, depending on certain conditions. What we observe expands, so let's dive deeper into what makes the collective intelligent.

What Intelligent means?

First, let's agree on a definition of intelligence. The Oxford Dictionary describes intelligence as "the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills." Merriam-Webster offers another meaning: "the ability to apply knowledge to manipulate one's environment." I understand this last definition as the capacity to observe the environment and to respond to it using elements stored in the brain, such as experience, knowledge, perception, and creativity. It is the capacity to connect the resources to the environment's challenges through a specific, adapted action.

Intelligence is applied understanding - Albert Einstein.

Knowing without action is disconnected from reality like a scholar would ramble on a topic in a vacuum. Doing without knowing is running like a headless hen without any purpose. When we apply to a situation what we know, our actions gain value and intelligence. It means we must listen, observe, and perceive the environment to understand what is required to act accordingly. In other words, we let information in through different angles to collect as much data as possible.

We allow connections between our senses, mind, intuition, experiences, thoughts, and emotions to shape an informed and adapted response. Once the system is informed, it can connect old and new elements until the fitted action emerges. This is an iterative, ongoing process, as each time a shift is made in a system, it influences the whole and changes the context to a point where it requires new information to adapt appropriately.

Can A Collective Be Intelligent?

At Carnegie Mellon, with the help of MIT, they decided to measure a group's intelligence quotient. As we face more complex challenges (climate change, technologies, science), researchers rely on collective intelligence, or, as the paper presents it, on "the ability of a group to work together and solve a range of problems that vary in complexity."

The study found that not only can they quantify collective intelligence, they can even predict it. Like any system, the whole is greater than its parts. In other words, collective IQ does not rely on the degree of individual intelligence.

What Makes A Collective Intelligent

This study follows previous research unraveling three main predictors of collective intelligence:

1. Collaboration processes: The capacity to cooperate and share information is highly correlated with quantitative collective intelligence.
2. Social perceptiveness: The ability to read people, relate, listen, and share empathy is a significant predictor.
3. The number of women in the group: Women show more ease in cooperating, feeling compassion, and tuning in others' perspectives. We already knew that companies led by a minimum of 30% of women perform better. The study shows that collective intelligence directly correlates to the number of women in the group.

The Role Of A Team Coach

As a team coach, my role is equivalent to a synapse, connecting neurons to let information flow within the group. Improving connections within the team enables it to use its natural capacity to solve problems, innovate, and adapt. How?

1. Enabling collaborative processes: Teams and organizations call me when they face high turnover, spin around from fire to fire, get stuck or chaotic, resist change, communicate through conflicts, etc. The leading underlying cause is individuals sticking to their positions: the hero, the victim, or the blamer. People think and act as individuals disconnected from the system. My role is to reconnect them to the system's wisdom.
2. Increasing social perceptiveness: By revealing the system to itself, I help grow Relationship System Intelligence (TM). Not only do individuals learn about the existence of what holds them together, but they become more aware of what is happening between them, between them and a task or a client. Perceiving the system's signals through disagreement, turbulences, or miscommunication provides valuable information or intel the team can use to solve their problems.
3. Working with differences, diversity, and genders: Differences offer a healthy tension within the team, creating a space for ideas to emerge. The natural tendency of any system is to maintain its balance, to welcome what is known. Hence, differences are often rejected or discarded. My role is to shift the mindset to perceive differences as assets and learn how to work with them.

When Do You Need A Team Coach

Four situations call for the guidance of a team coach (source: Human System Dynamics):

1. Being stuck: The team can't manage current challenges, performance is slow, and the same stories pop up as the reason for a recurring problem.
2. Being siloed: The team lacks connection between sub-groups, coherence among team members, and the vision is unclear or not shared.
3. Spinning: The team responds too much to too many things; it cannot settle into a decision or a strategy.
4. Being chaotic: The team is disorganized, missing structure or processes to hold it together; it is mismanaged or disrupted.

These patterns influence each other: the lack of structure due to chaos reinforces the spinning, leading to being stuck. The silo can drive chaos and grip the way the team work (stuck).

If you happen to know one or more patterns living in your team, please get in touch with me for a diagnosis.

Sara Bigwood

Team Coach, enabling connections within teams to accept change, adapt and innovate.