Are you looking for a smart company? Only if people are able to interpret emotions

How can people help transform organizations to be smarter, even without technology? Will human intelligence suffice for this? Recent research conducted by MIT began by addressing this topic, measuring individuals' intelligence through IQ tests and some statistical techniques to measure the collective intelligence of groups of people.

Researchers uncovered that, akin to individual cases, there exists a distinct factor that predicts the group's proficiency across various tasks. They labeled this factor "collective intellect" and substantiated that it is only moderately associated with the individual intellect (IQ) of all members within that assembly.

The central question uncovered in this study is that there are three other factors that are strongly correlated with the degree of collective intelligence.

The first factor is social acumen or social intelligence of each participant in the assembly, evaluated through a test that seeks to gauge the ability to decipher thoughts via eye expressions (termed "reading the mind in the eyes"), where participants view images of others' eyes and endeavor to discern the emotion conveyed. When a diverse array of individuals excels at this, the group collectively exhibits greater intellect.

The second factor discovered is how equally people in the group participate in the topics discussed by the group. When only one or two people dominated the discussion, on average, the group was collectively less intelligent than in a group where everyone participated more evenly.

Finally, the third factor of collective intelligence refers to the strong correlation with the proportion of women in the group. More women are correlated with smarter groups. It's interesting to note that this last result was statistically explained by the result of social perception (factor 1), or in other words, women on average have a higher result in social perception than men.

Conversely, another supplementary experiment conducted by researchers entailed subjecting the collective intellect test to two distinct subgroups: individuals collaborating in face-to-face settings and those interacting online, with the latter communicating solely via written text.

What was discovered was that the degree of social perception of the group was equally predictive of the group's intelligence in both subgroups. Stated differently, even among participants in the online cohort, where visual cues were absent, those with heightened individual social perception or intelligence managed to assemble a group exhibiting greater collective intellect.

Hence, the "reading the mind in the eyes" test does not solely evaluate the specific ability to discern emotions from eye expressions but rather assesses a spectrum of interpersonal proficiencies collectively termed social intelligence. These proficiencies empower individuals to anticipate others' thoughts based solely on written communication, foreseeing potential reactions, ultimately constituting a skill set conducive to effective collaboration.

These experiments conducted by MIT demonstrate that there are at least two elements that are necessary to achieve an intelligent organization. Firstly, and perhaps not surprisingly, intelligent individuals are needed, and these individuals together must have the skills to execute whatever task. But secondly, and perhaps not so obvious, these individuals must be able to work well together.

For people, this means they need to have interpersonal skills, which are even more important than we realize in today's electronically connected world, and even more so in the future. For computers, it means they must be designed in a way that enables them to work well with people, which will be critical in creating intelligent organizations.